Theodora looked up and saw the small white-haired woman, very white, floury white, who looked out of the house against which she was sitting. This woman had the young face of an old bright child. She had the appearance of looking for something at which to complain, but not in anger, for company. Then she saw Theodora Goodman and was so surprised she withdrew.
Recovering from her surprise, she soon came out again. The woman could not resist. She had a lot to tell. She would not ask much, but she would tell. And Theodora was glad of this, as she could not have answered. She did say that she had come by train. But the woman could not pause. She had to tell about her younger daughter Frances, who was multiplying on the coast, and her elder daughter, Myra, at Topeka, who had the hand for cheese cake. Then the woman remembered, and brought Theodora a cup of milk and a piece of sweet, fluffy bread. The bread was not real, but there was a blue shadow round the rim of milk, that she knew from childhood. She sank her mouth in the cool milk, and it became warm from her suddenly hot, protesting mouth.
‘Are you sick?’ the woman asked.
Theodora said that she was not.
Then it occurred to the small woman that she should start to arrange this stranger’s life, who had come by train, and did not know much.
‘Because you gotta go somewhere,’ the woman replied, when Theodora said she had not thought.
‘I do not particularly want to go anywhere,’ Theodora said. ‘Though I have money in my bag.’
There was not, fortunately, a great deal the woman wanted to know. So long as she could arrange a life she was content.
So she said there was a guest house farther up that was fine, with individual cabins, where people went, and artists, where Theodora should go, and there was a canyon, and an Indian pueblo, and an Indian that was petrified, from falling down a cliff and lying upside down in the right kind of water for many years. This is where Theodora should go. To rest. The woman’s son was going that way with a load of apples, presently, and Jake would run her up.
‘Jake!’ the small woman called. ‘Jake!’
The son raised his head from a dark window. He laughed, because he was still half-asleep, and because he did not know what else to do. Jake’s neck was muscular and golden. He rose, and he was a statue, but he would not reflect much, Theodora saw.
So it was arranged, while Jake threw water at his body.
Theodora sat in Jake’s truck. She waved good-bye to the small old child. She saw that by the middle of the day the fierce sunflowers would be oozing dust. Already the bronze cock brooded and drooped.
Then they went. The stiff road began to move. It became more sinuous. It swerved and dipped. The wind was quite serpentine at each curve of road, and before the hollows of white, flumping dust. They dived. Theodora Goodman and Jake sat high. It was grave, and dignified, and beautiful to fly like this through the empty landscape, but an emptiness that did not matter. The emptiness of this landscape was a fullness, of pink earth, and chalk-blue for sky. And the rim of the world was white. It burned.
Jake held the wheel. Driving, Jake was good. But they stopped too, and he was the same statue of hard, golden wax, that conveyed one or two ideas. From the back of the truck there was a smell of hot apples, the apples that they stopped for Jake to deliver, beside the road, or just off. Then Theodora sat in the smell of hot apples and dust. Once there was a bus pulled in at a gas station, and a dwarf was singing of eternity, as if he knew, and meant it.
They went on. Jake did not speak much. He laughed. They went on across the world, which Jake took for granted. Or they stopped. And Jake got down to juggle apples. Finally, Theodora was tired of Jake. She looked back once to see, but Jake did not, before she took the road that opened.
Theodora walked up the small side road, which went up the mountain, steep enough, and full of rocks. The sandy, rocky road wound up the mountain, for no set purpose, you would have imagined, except there was evidence occasionally that this must exist. The sand in softer parts between the rocks was bruised by tyres. Theodora was determined to follow this road. She was rigid with determination and purpose as she walked. Sometimes she bent to the greater incline of the road. Sometimes her dry mouth gulped. Sometimes the brown leathery flaps of her nostrils fastened with desperation on the air. She was walking between pines, or firs, anyway some kind of small coniferous tree, stunted and dark, which possessed that part of the earth. Animal life was moving in the undergrowth of dark, dead twigs and needles, and stiff, thistly things, and yellow grass. Small clearings were covered wholly with dead grass, which made a queer stiff sound of moving when there was wind. Theodora could smell the dust. She could smell the expanding odour of her own body, which was no longer the sour, mean smell of the human body in enclosed spaces, but the unashamed flesh on which dust and sun have lain. She walked. She smiled for this discovery of freedom.
In her hand she still held, she realized, the practical handbag, that last link with the external Theodora Goodman. Out of the undergrowth a small furred animal raised its head to examine her surprise. She stood, tall and black, making a shadow, at the bend in the road. She rummaged in the handbag, amongst the startling objects that people carry in such receptacles, and found aspirin and eau-de-Cologne, the snapshot of children in a row, nickels and bills and a sticky lozenge. There were also, she saw, the strips and sheaves of tickets, railroad and steamship, which Theodora Goodman had bought in New York for the purpose of prolonging herself through many fresh phases of what was accepted as Theodora Goodman. Now she took these and tore them into small pieces which fell frivolously at the side of the road. The shock of this disturbed the furred thing in the undergrowth. It ran. She heard it over sticks. Even the undergrowth, she reflected, rejects the acts of honesty. But she personally was gladder. After dawdling away quite a lot of what was now afternoon, she continued with longer strides up the rough road.
Presently this eased out. Soon we shall come to something, she knew. In a rut there was an empty can that had not yet filled with dust and stones, the wrapper still pink with an unnatural formation of Vienna sausages. Later she began to smell cool sand, soaked apparently by the trickle from a hidden spring. She noticed initials carved in the scaly bark of a tree, an uneven AJ, from which resin oozed. This last clue made her debate whether she was prepared. She touched the face which soon other faces would perhaps attempt fumblingly to read, but after hesitating a moment with her feet in the consoling sand, she went on towards the words and silences of human intercourse.
Trees thinned out in front of her, leaving an open space, a patch of ragged, ripened corn, a house that had been built purposely for living, the clutter of sheds, hutches, corral, cans, hessian tatters, and broken toys that such houses accumulate. Theodora was glad of all this. The prospect warmed many past failures. She gathered her humility and approached the wood gate, beyond which a scruffy red dog bristled and barked. At what point after she had lifted the latch the dog stopped tearing at her skirt she was not sensibly aware. Only that she looked down into his red eye, and found that he was regretting anything that might have occurred. He ran, whined, quivered, and slobbered at her hand with a large tongue.
‘Hi, Red! Down Red!’ a woman called from the house.
Although there was no need, although the dog was now abject in his puzzled friendliness, the woman called and protested until she could see her way closer to contact with the stranger.
‘You darned idiot dog!’ the woman shouted in a kind of pleasant and confused exasperation.