“Yes, sir, it will only take a minute.”
But when the officer went back to his patrol car to get his ticket book, her father simply put the truck into gear and drove on.
“Papa,” she said. She looked through the rear window at the policeman, who was standing there beside his vehicle looking after them as if someone had just asked him a question he had no idea how to answer.
Her father said nothing. Dropped her off. She kissed him on the cheek and said good night. He looked over at her then. His features had drawn themselves down into what looked like a permanent sadness, as if he no longer had the will or strength to pull them up into any expression but the forlorn. She wanted to say, Papa, how bad could it be? You still have the farm, the land. Others have it worse, for sure. But she knew what pride he took in having made something out of nothing, only to see it threatened by hard times. She supposed she could apply that thinking to not just the farm but his whole life. There now living alone with a woman who must seem a hostile stranger to him, and him a hollow one to her.
“Night, daughter,” he said, and drove on.
She watched his truck slowly gearing up the hill and away. Right in the middle of the road, but steady. The shadowed shape of his hat and head there in the truck’s cab, visible in the gaps between the oak boards of the cattle guard. She felt the ghost of an apprehension. He still looked strong but in many ways ten years older than he was. She had a sudden irrational fear that this would be the last time she ever saw him. But she fought that down, knew it was foolish, superstitious in some way.
Later, Grace would tell her that the story of the foiled traffic ticket had got around town. Apparently their father was quite the local character, and the young policeman suffered much derisive joking for having tried to give a ticket to Mr. Sylvester Chisolm.
THAT WAS HER LIFE there, in town. She stayed so busy and tired that it seemed like time didn’t matter anymore. Didn’t so much pass as disappear, like memories neglected and forgotten. Years can slip away in such manner, in such a life.
Somehow, even as the thirties wore on and things worsened, Grace held on to her business by cutting costs, undercutting competitors’ prices, shamelessly complimenting the women who came in, whether they were beautiful, plain, or just plain ugly, flirting furtively with the men (and sometimes more than flirting, Jane strongly suspected — from long lunch hours when Grace made her tend the counter, or sent her off to lunch at the house and when Jane came back she would see Grace turning the door sign to Open again).
Jane had wanted to put in a vegetable garden, and after first saying no, Grace changed her mind and practically ordered her to do it. At least she helped a bit with the canning. They pretty much gave up meat aside from a small cut of pot roast on Sundays. That was fine with Jane, who’d never eaten much meat, anyway. It made certain odors stronger.
She learned how to get along with Grace by holding her own in an argument and by getting out every now and then on a Saturday, for the whole day, wandering town, window-shopping, and having a modest meal such as a Chik Steak at the Triangle, only a nickel in those days — they used breaded pork loin but it tasted so good she couldn’t resist — and then going home. She would practice the fasting and dehydrating before an outing, as she had when she was a girl, so generally she was back home at Grace’s before the possibility of an accident, and well before the possibility of a “serious” one. She wrote home every week, and received in return the occasional postcard from her mother: the blank manila ones with nothing printed on them, not even a vertical line on the side where you wrote the address, the back side filled with her mother’s scrawl that read like a diary she might have written for herself or posterity: There’s no ice because the iceman’s truck broke down. One of the breeding cows died and your father does not yet know why it happened. Had rain most of last week, couldn’t dry a stitch of clothing on the line. Mister Chisolm (as she had always formally called her husband) had to shoot a fox that was getting into the henhouse, gave it to the Harrises for the skin although for all I know they ate it too. Your father is not up to hog killing anymore and had to hire Harris and his boys to do it, he knew it needed done but he didn’t really care one way or other, gave them half the hog for the job, a sunny winter day, thank the Lord. He is not exactly behaving himself, she would occasionally say, which Jane took to mean he was drinking too much more often.
They were just hanging on through these times, she wrote.
One ended with the odd mentioning, Crows flocking into the pines at dusk. I find it frightening, hard to sleep.
At least once a month, when the weather was good, she badgered Grace into driving them up to their parents’ place for Sunday dinner. When Grace tired enough of that, she taught Jane to drive her automobile in a flat field on the south side of town and after that Jane would visit her mother and father by herself when she could. Sometimes she went up early enough to stop for coffee with Dr. Thompson before going on to the home place. She always drove back to town before dark. Her father seemed to be in decline. She would come upon him standing at the edge of the pasture, looking at his cows as if he hardly knew what they were. Or he would sit on the front porch by himself, smoking. He drank before breakfast, and then periodically throughout the day.
“Papa?” she’d say.
“Yes.”
And sometimes they would say no more than that, as if that were enough, or all there was, a generic reply to her all-but-unspoken query into his condition. She sat and looked at his lean, hard profile, now bearing the wire-rimmed spectacles, and wondered what he was seeing as he stared straight ahead into the yard beyond the porch, seeming deep in thought but saying nothing.
Suitors
Sometimes when one of Grace’s gentleman friends came over Jane crept out and walked the mostly empty evening sidewalks downtown. She liked the evening air, the slow and scarce traffic that rolled or clopped through town at that hour. The smells of the bakery baking on the night shift. The coal smoke from the trains. But she was lonelier than ever, and many a night such as this she longed just to be back on the farm, alone in that way. It seemed to her to be the place she belonged.
Occasionally one of the “friends” came over for supper, and sometimes he stayed later, when Jane had already gone up to her room, and she could hear him and Grace partly from the stairwell, their murmuring talk, and partly from the outside, where their voices drifted from the windows and into the air and back into Jane’s windows above them. On some of those nights, though they kept the radio on to cover their sounds, she heard the faint whine of the bad hinge on Grace’s bedroom door, the light metallic click of the door closing. And she might drift over to that side of the house, to the little sitting room she had arranged across from her bedroom, and sit beside the open window looking out over downtown below and listen to the sounds of their lovemaking, so carefully quietened they were, like the whispers of a lover in Jane’s own ears, burning with the shame of her eavesdropping.
One of Grace’s suitors was a man named Louis Fontleroy. He was a shoe salesman for one of the two ladies’ shoe stores downtown. He dressed as if he were more than that, and was handsome, although somewhat in the way of a handsome housecat, and younger than Grace. He wore engraved tie clasps on his silk ties, and ankle boots that to Jane seemed oddly effeminate, and smoked cigarettes he kept in a silver case. He was infinitely polite to Jane, even bending to kiss the top of her hand sometimes when she entered the room. Jane felt he was patronizing, yet she was polite in return. When they dined, he would make pleasant small talk, making sure to address questions to Jane as well as Grace. Once, when Grace had left the room for a moment, Jane was fairly certain that after remarking what a good cook she was, how excellent was the pot roast, he had winked at her. She blushed but when she looked back at Mr. Fontleroy he seemed to be examining his manicured fingernails as if to search for some flaw he might attend to when he returned home. She thought him a dandy.