We think you will find both sensitivity and texture in these three short stories — a moving and perceptive quality, rich in detail, that has the pulse and bitterness and impact of realism. And you will find all three stories intensely American — yet the people are as universal as the sun and the earth. In the first story, for example, you will observe the daily mosaic, piece by piece, of the work and chores of an American farm woman — but couldn’t Marcy Bayliss be any farm woman in any land, or for that matter, in any time?
I: The Day of the Fair
Marcy was putting on her pink gingham best dress when she heard the truck start. Her fingers hurried with the row of white pearl buttons down the front of the dress. It was like Joe to try to scare her like that. She shouted, “I’m coming!” Thrusting her bare feet into her good black shoes and snatching up her purse and her hairbrush she ran through the kitchen and out onto the front porch.
The truck was already moving. She ran after it, despairing and then crying. She could see the back of Joe’s fat red neck through the rear cab window. The kids were looking back at her, their faces pale and frightened.
The truck picked up speed. Through a cloud of dust it roared down the lane, up the long hill on the other side of the draw, and then disappeared from sight among the scrub pine and chaparral.
Marcy dropped to the dry grass beside the road. She was sobbing breathlessly. He didn’t have to leave her, she wouldn’t have been any trouble to him. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair. She had wanted to go so badly. She and the kids had planned this day for weeks. It had to be a Saturday so they would be out of school and it had to be a day when Joe was home so he could take them. Marcy could drive the truck, but the red Ford was Joe’s proudest possession and he would sooner Marcy and the kids walked all the way to the city than let her touch it.
She had managed to get him to promise to take them by being mighty nice to him and fixing all the things he liked to eat and never saying a mean word back to him no matter what he said or did. Keeping a cage on her tongue hadn’t been easy. He wasn’t an easy man to be married to, Joe Bayliss wasn’t. Lazy and mean he was. Gone off most of the time with his friends, leaving the farm work to her and the kids.
Gary was twelve, big for his age, and near as much help as a man. Kathy was nine and blonde and cute and she helped out a lot too, mostly with the housework. She was getting to be a real good cook. Danny was only six, but he could hoe weeds and pick up apples and gather eggs and dry dishes. They were wonderful kids, and that was why she had wanted to go to the County Fair so much. Just to see them enjoy themselves without a worry but to have a good time...
Marcy Bayliss stood up and brushed the dust and grass from her best dress. She took off her shoes and walked back to their weathered cabin, her feet scuffing in the soft red dust. She stood on the porch and felt the cool of the roof shade on her back and the splintery boards under her feet. She listened a long minute; maybe Joe might come back after her. He might have been teasing her. Just like him to joke so mean.
A jaybird scolded in the orchard and the hens were singing busily around the yard. It was the first week of October. The sun still burned with summer’s heat but the sky had a soft haze and the distant back-country peaks were a deep violet-blue. Near at hand the willows in the creekbeds were starting to change from silver-green to pale gold. The fields and hillsides wore tawny lion-colored pelts of dry grass. The air hung hot and still, and the red truck had vanished as though she had only dreamed of it.
Marcy sighed. She went into the silent house. “Busy, busy, busy,” her mother used to say, buzzing her swift tongue with the sound of bees. “Git busy if you’re hankerin’ fer the time to git by.” Marcy went into the bedroom and took off her good clothes. She put on a pair of clean but much mended Levis and an old shirt and hung up her dress carefully. She brushed her shoes and put them away on a shelf.
In the kitchen she put two small sticks of wood in the firebox of the old black range and put the dishwater on to heat She started to clear the breakfast table. There in the middle of the table, hidden behind the syrup jug, was her money can. She snatched it up. Empty. Joe had taken her money. It had taken her a whole summer’s careful scrimping to save that $20. She had saved it for a special treat for the kids. Together they had decided it was to be one big wonderful day at the County Fair.
Marcy stared at the empty can. She had told Joe about the money when he had growled that he was broke and couldn’t afford to take them. Joe was using the money for the things they had planned. What if she wasn’t there? Pretty soon the kids would be home full of excited talk and she could listen and imagine that she had been along to share their fun. Joe would surely be good to them — he sometimes was. Sometimes, when he had been lucky in a card game, he would come home with armloads of expensive gifts for the kids.
Marcy did the dishes. Then she made the beds, swept the house, filled the woodbox beside the range, and carried water from the spring for the washing. She filled the copper boiler on its fireplace in the back yard and started a pine fire under it. She filled the rinse tubs on the back porch beside the old gasoline-motor washing machine. She was proud of the old machine. It beat hand-scrubbing all hollow and it was a present to her from Gary. The boy had worked all last summer piling brush for a logging crew to make money enough to buy it for her. He was a fine boy and not one little bit lazy or mean like his Pa.
While the water heated, Marcy carried the soiled clothing out to the back porch and sorted it and went through the pockets. Once she had found a live frog in one of Danny’s pants pockets. Today he had two marbles and a dead beetle. In Joe’s clothes she found a woman’s lace handkerchief. It smelled of cheap perfume and was stained with lipstick. Tight-lipped, Marcy threw it into the fire. In the first years of their marriage she would have fought with Joe about it, been hurt and bitter. Now it didn’t matter. Except for an inexpressible disgust.
By noon she had the washing done and hung out on the fine. She ate a slice of bread and drank a glass of milk, went out to the hillside pasture, and caught the horses. She hitched them to the disk plow and worked the orchard and the garden plot below the spring. She loved to work with the big, slow-moving team. There was something so good, so satisfying about the powerful way they moved. She liked their smell and the way they whickered at her and the way their great, shining eyes watched her.
She liked the feel of the cool ground against her feet and the clean smell of the fresh-turned earth. She had been raised on a farm on Stony Ridge and had shared the outside work with her brothers. Her Pa used to say, “Marcy’s as good a man as any of you fellers.” She’d been proud even if she wasn’t as pretty as her sisters. Maybe that was why Joe Bayliss had come courting her. He was so all-fired lazy he’d figured on getting his farm worked without having to pay a hired man’s wages.
The sun was nearing the top of Deadwood Mountain when Marcy finished the disking. She turned the team out to pasture and started the chores.
The farm was hidden in cool shadow when she finished tending the chickens, milking the cows, and feeding the stock. She strained the milk into big shallow pans and set it to cool in the cellar. She sorted the bucket of eggs and packed them into cartons. She gathered in the dry, sun-smelling clothes. The house, still warm from the afternoon’s heat, was lonesome-feeling in the dark.
Marcy shivered. She lighted both kerosene lamps but the dim, golden lampglow only made the house seem more empty, more forsaken. Listening, Marcy peered out into the dusk. In the west the sky was still pale and in the east a full moon was rising like a great, round yellow eye. There was no sound of Joe’s truck. The paper down at the store had said there would be fireworks on Saturday and Sunday evenings. The Fair people wouldn’t be firing them off until it got good and dark. Maybe Joe and the kids decided to stay and watch.