All the same she was startled, when she thought about it, to find herself climbing into his stubby, high-roofed vehicle on the way to the (for God’s sake!) sheep pastures with him; and it occurred to her that she hadn’t really decided to do that, either.
But she was doing it.
Since she was actually doing it, there was no reason to worry about it. Maybe at some later time, MacDonald informed herself, she would have to think harder about what all this was getting her into. Not now. Now she was quite content to enjoy this interesting new experience with this interesting new man.
The word that was important here was “new.”
MacDonald had had quite a reasonable number of lovers before, at one time or another, but it had been most of her life since any one of them could have been called “new.” New to share her bed, maybe, but for decades now any new body that showed up in her bed had been simply an old, familiar body in a somewhat altered relationship.
But now there was this Blundy man squat, sometimes sulky, quite married but, oh, so very, so excitingly and completely new.
She laughed out loud, surprising herself. When Blundy turned to give her a puzzled look, she just shook her head. She was as silly as silly little Betsy arap Dee, she thought. Or as lucky. Or as yes as young. All of a sudden, without any physical change, she was seeing the world through the eyes of a teenager again.
It was all fascinating, even this silly, blocky car they were riding in. She had never been in a vehicle quite like it before; it was obviously designed for just two people, and her big traveling bag had barely squeezed into the space behind the seats wouldn’t have made it at all if Blundy’s own bag hadn’t been quite small. As she studied the way he drove the thing she concluded she could easily learn how to do it herself. There was a wheel that steered it, and on the wheel a selector lever that seemed to shift gears; and on the floor a pedal that controlled the speed and another that controlled a brake. All that was simple enough. Once you started it up and put your foot on the right pedal the high-pitched, sputtering hydrogen motor pushed the little car along at a satisfying rate of speed.
There were other vehicles on the road big tractor-trailers going empty out to the farms and coming back laden with crates of vegetables and fruits and bins of grain; flatbeds with farm workers who dangled their feet over the sides and waved to them as they passed; smaller trucks with machinery and beams and slabs of construction materials. The important part about driving, she decided, was knowing how to avoid hitting any of the other vehicles. Blundy seemed to manage it well enough, snaking around and past them.
If Blundy could do it so could Mercy MacDonald.
Then they were climbing up through a pass and the basin that held the summertown was behind them.
The number of vehicles dropped sharply. The character of the landscape changed. The farmland that had been all around them was now gone. The road they were on bugged a cliff, high above a gorge. Far below a good-sized river ran, sculptured by rapids and boulders.
“I thought we were taking the sheep out to pasture,” she offered.
“The flock had to leave at daybreak. By now they’re thirty or forty kilometers down the pike, almost to the graze. I got a friend of mine to start them off for us. We’ll take over when we catch them.”
She nodded, looking around. Once through the hills the landscape had flattened out again, but there were no farms here, nothing but meadow and scrub as far as she could see.
When she commented on that to Blundy he explained, “It’s the river, Mercy. The first thing that freezes in the winter is Sometimes River, and then the ice blocks its channel. So the whole basin behind the ice dam fills up, fifty or sixty meters deep, and then that freezes, too. So all the silt comes out and makes the soil better there. On this side of the hills, not as good.
Good enough for pasturing sheep, though see?”
And ahead of them she did see, a long, plodding line of stone-colored animals, with a dozen dogs loping back and forth along them to keep them in order. At the head of the line a tractor-trailer was leading the way, its pace creeping no faster than the sheep. Blundy pressed a button on the steering wheel and a horn blared; a moment later an arm stretched out from the cab of the tractor and waved. “She sees us,”
he said. “We’ll catch up in just a minute “
And in not more than a minute they had. The tractor had pulled a few dozen meters ahead of the flock; Blundy and Mercy MacDonald were out of their car and Blundy was heaving their bags into the tractor cab at once.
That part was all right. The part that wasn’t all right was that the driver of the cab turned out to be the skinny little teenaged girl who was named Petoyne.
“I thought we were going to be alone,” MacDonald couldn’t help saying, but Blundy didn’t hear; he was already climbing into the cab himself, sliding behind the wheel.
“Come on, Mercy,” he ordered. And then, leaning out of the cab, he waved to the girl, who was standing with one hand on the door of the little car they had chased her in, looking at the two of them with a hard stare. “Thanks, Petoyne,” he called. “See you in a month or so.” And, the leaders of the flock already beginning to catch up with them, he started the tractor crawling forward again as soon as Mercy MacDonald’s feet left the ground.
So it was just as well he hadn’t heard, MacDonald thought as she settled herself in, although what she also thought was that the way Petoyne looked at her suggested something Blundy hadn’t seen fit to mention. How many lovers could this man handle, she wondered.
It was not a serious question, though. For the next few weeks, anyway, the answer would surely be: one.
For there wasn’t going to be anyone else around.
Never once before in all of her life had Mercy MacDonald been so remote from the society of others.
In this place there was simply no one at all. Outside the shell of the tent they lived in (imagine living in a tent!) there was not a single living creature she could see for many miles in any direction, except for the herd of snuffling, grunting ewes and the dogs that watched over them….
And except, of course, for Arakaho Blundy Spenotex.
It was almost dark before she realized that she didn’t feel lonely at all, and that the reason was Blundy.
He seemed to take up a great deal of space in her life, enough for multitudes. He was inescapably, but not at all oppressively, there.
When they had reached the grazing grounds, bumping slowly over open ground for several hours till they reached the stream he had been looking for, Blundy turned off the radio beacon, hauled great bulky packages out of the back of the trailer and began setting up their quarters. He waved at the sun, still high in the sky but beginning to lower. “We want to get all set up before dark,” he said, “so let’s get on with it.”
Within the first hour he had made them a home no, they had made it; she did as much as Blundy did.
He showed her how to set the first tent peg in at the proper angle, then left her to drive the others in, in the pattern he marked out for her, while he unrolled the fabric itself. They put it up together, sweating and grunting. Blundy lugged in the stuff too heavy for her to carry, or too awkward, but her bag, his own, the cooking utensils, the one airbed, the folding furniture all that he left for her to sort out and shift into position. While he dug the sanitary pit and moved the trailer down to the stream she opened cartons and tried to figure out where everything went.
That wasn’t easy. Tents didn’t seem to have built-in lockers. MacDonald had never even seen a tent before, much less lived in one. The only time she’d come across the word was in books, where the things seemed mostly associated with armies. She spent a long time, that first long afternoon, wondering what she had got herself into.