“I had given up ever seeing you again,” I said. “Oh, I thought of it, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to break in on you. I told myself you had forgotten.
I told myself you wouldn’t care to see me. You’d be polite, of course, and we’d exchange some silly, stilted talk, and then it would be the end, and I didn’t want to end it that way. I wanted the memories to stay, you see. I had heard ten years or so ago that you’d gone into some sort of import-export business, then I lost all track of you….”
She tightened her arms around me and lifted her
face to be kissed, and I kissed her, perhaps not with the excitement I might once have felt, but with deep thankfulness that we were together once again.
“I am still in business,” she said. “Import-export business, if you want to call it that; but shortly, I think, I will be getting out of it.”
“It’s a little silly, standing here,” I said. “Let’s sit down underneath the tree. It’s a pleasant place. I spend a lot of evenings here. If you’d like, I could rustle up some drinks.”
“Later on,” she said. “It’s so peaceful here.”
“Quiet,” I said. “Restful. The campus, I suppose, could be called peaceful, too, but this is a different kind of peace. I’ve had almost a year of it.”
“You resigned your university post?”
“No, I’m on sabbatical. I’m supposed to be writing a book. I’ve not written a line, never intended to.
Once the sabbatical is over, it’s possible I’ll resign.”
“This place? Is this Willow Bend?”
“Willow Bend is the little town just up the road, the one you drove through getting here. I lived there once. My father ran a farm-implement business at the edge of town. This farm, this forty acres, was once owned by a family named Streeter. When I was a boy, I roamed the woods, hunting, fishing, exploring. This farm was one place that I roamed, usually with friends of mine. Streeter never minded. He had a son about my age — Hugh, I think his name was — and he was one of the gang.”
“Your parents?”
“My lather retired a number of years ago. Moved out to California. My father had a brother out there and my mother a couple of sisters up the coast. Five years or so ago, I came back and bought this farm.
I’m not returning, as you may think, to my roots, although this place, Willow Bend and the country hereabout, has some happy associations.”
“But if you’re not returning to your roots, why Willow Bend and why this farm?”
“There was something here I had to come back and find. I’ll tell you about it later, if you’re interested.
But about yourself — in business, you say.”
“You’ll be amused,” she told me. “I went into the artifact and fossil business. Started small and grew.
Mostly artifacts and fossils, although there was some gem material and some other stuff. If I couldn’t be an archaeologist or a paleontologist, at least I could turn my training to some use. The items that sold best were small dinosaur skulls, good trilobites and slabs of rock with fish imprints. You’d be surprised what you can get for really good material — and even some that is not so good. Couple of years ago, a breakfast cereal company came up with the idea that it would be good promotion to enclose little cubes of dinosaur bone in their packages as premiums. They came to me about it. Do you know how we got the dinosaur bone? There was a bed out in Arizona and we mined it with bulldozers and front-end loaders. Hundreds of tons of bones to be sawed up into little cubes. I don’t mind telling you I’m a bit ashamed of that. Not that it wasn’t legal. It was. We owned the land and we broke no laws, but no one can ever guess how many priceless fossils we may have ruined in the process.”
“That may be true,” I said, “but I gather you have little use for archaeologists or paleontologists.”
“On the contrary,” she said, “I have high regard for them. I would like to be one of them, but I never had a chance. I could have gone on for years, the way you and I went out into that godforsaken dig in Turkey. I could have spent all summer digging and classifying and cataloging, and when the dig closed down, I could have spent more months in classifying and cataloging. And in between times, I could have taught moronic sophomores. But did I ever get my name on a paper? You bet your life I didn’t. To amount to anything in that racket, you had to be at Yale or Harvard or Chicago or some such place as that and even then, you could spend years before anyone took any notice of you. There’s no room at the top, no matter how hard you work, or how you scratch and fight.
A few fat cats and glory-grabbers have it all nailed down and they hang on forever.”
“It worked out pretty much that way for me as well,” I told her. “Teaching in a small university.
Never a chance to do any research. No funds for even small-time digs. Now and then, a chance to get in on a big one if you applied early and were willing to do the donkey work of digging. Although I’m not really complaining. For a time, I didn’t really care too much. The campus was safe and comfortable and I felt secure. After Alice left me — you knew about Alice?”
“Yes,” she said, “I knew.”
“I don’t think I even minded that much,” I said.
“Her leaving me, I mean. But my pride was hurt and, for a time, I felt I had to hide away. Not here, I don’t mean that, and now I’m over it.”
“You had a son.”
“Yes, Robert. With his mother in Vienna, I believe.
At least, somewhere in Europe. The man she left me for is a diplomat — a professional diplomat, not a political appointee.”
“But the boy, Robert.”
“At first, he was with me. Then he wanted to be with his mother, so I let him go.”
“I never married,” she said. “At first, I was too busy, then, later, it didn’t seem important.”
We sat silently for a moment as the dusk crept across the land. There was the scent of lilacs from the misshapen, twisted clump of trees that sprawled in one corner of the yard. A self-important robin hopped sedately about, stopping every now and then to regard us fixedly with one beady eye.
I don’t know why I said it. I hadn’t meant to say it.
It just came out of me.
“Rila,” I said, “we were a pair of fools. We had something long ago and we didn’t know we had it.”
“That is why I’m here,” she said.
“You’ll stay a while? We have a lot to talk about.
I can phone the motel. It’s not a very good one, but…”
“No,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’m staying here with you.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I can sleep on the davenport.”
“Asa,” she said, “quit being a gentleman. I don’t want you to be a gentleman. I said stay with you, remember.”
THREE
Bowser lay quietly in his corner, regarding us with accusing, doleful eyes as we sat at the breakfast table.
“He seems to have recovered,” said Rila.
“Oh, he’ll be all right,” I told her. “He’ll heal up fast.”
“How long have you had him?”
“Bowser has been with me for years. A sedate city dog to start with, very correct and pontifical. Chased a bird sedately every now and then when we went out for a walk. But once we came here, he changed. He became a roustabout and developed a mania for woodchucks. Tries to dig them out. Almost every evening, I have to go hunting him and haul him out of the hole he’s dug, with the woodchuck chittering and daring him from deep inside his burrow. That’s what I thought Bowser was doing last night.”
“And see what happened when you didn’t go to find him.”
“Well, I had more important things to do, and I thought it might do him good to leave him out all night.”