She was sandy as her own mountain road. Her skin was rough, freckled, unequivocal stuff.
‘It is all right,’ Theodora said. ‘We are friends.’
Children had come now. They were grouped about the mother, waiting for something to happen, to which they themselves would not immediately contribute. The children stood in the silences of expectation.
‘Come far?’ the mother asked.
‘Yes,’ said Theodora. ‘Very far.’
She hoped the woman would not make any awkwardness. She hoped this very much. The great awkwardness of questions that people ask, though they content themselves with half-answers.
‘What can we do for you?’ the woman asked.
She had screwed up her eyes in their sandy skin, but not in hostility. The children had turned to look, not at the stranger, but at their mother, as if the clue would come from her.
‘Well,’ said Theodora, ‘I don’t know that there is anything in particular.’
She could not ask to be allowed to stand, unpersecuted, there in the yard, or to sit on the edge of the porch and look at her own hands, or the children’s faces, and back to her own hands.
‘You’re miles from anywhere, you know,’ the sandy woman said. ‘Are you lost?’
‘No,’ Theodora said.
The woman quickly brushed back her sandy hair away from her eyes. She turned her face sideways and said to the corner of the porch, ‘Guess you’d better eat. Joe’ll be back soon. Then we’ll see. Eunice, quit picking your nose.’
She slapped the hand of a thin child, who put the hand behind her back and frowned.
‘Our name’s Johnson,’ the mother said.
She waited for some such contribution from Theodora, who did not make the move. So the woman immediately shifted away into deliberate activity.
‘Better come and get that dust off of you,’ she said. ‘You look a sight. It hasn’t rained here in months. We’re lucky to have our spring.’
Theodora followed Mrs Johnson into the dark confusion of the house. She avoided a celluloid doll, upturned on boards. She knocked against a sewing machine. There was a smell of boiled potatoes.
‘You must be happy to live in this house,’ Theodora said.
‘Are you crazy?’ said Mrs Johnson.
‘I mean,’ said Theodora, ‘everything is so clear. I mean …’
But she could not explain the rightness of objects to someone who already knew those objects by heart.
‘We’re well enough,’ Mrs Johnson said. ‘Though we’ll die poor. Joe ain’t got the touch.’
She pushed through into what appeared to be a wash-house, and Theodora followed behind. Then Mrs Johnson kicked some shape into chaos. The children stood around.
‘You won’t mind this,’ Mrs Johnson said, indicating with her shoulders the haphazard nature of the wash-house, its old frayed baskets, sticks, bottles, and faded cretonne.
‘You won’t mind,’ she said.
But it did not matter whether Theodora did.
While Mrs Johnson went for water, which she said was on the boil, Theodora was left to withstand the impact of the glances of children, not so much boys and girls as inquiring silences. There were four of these. Three were sandy, but one was dark. His lips were full, and red, and dark. There was a great space between the dark one and the shadowless, sandy three, the difference between depths and surface. Mrs Johnson would accept the depths, and love the depths fearfully, but she would not understand. At the moment of his birth, or moments in the arms of her husband, she had come closer to her rich dark child. But she preferred to sun her sandy self, to cover doubt with humorous exasperation. She preferred life to be unequivocal and freckled. Eunice was her mother’s child.
‘Why do you wear a hat?’ Eunice asked finally.
‘I got into the habit,’ Theodora said. ‘Like most other people, I suppose.’
‘Mother don’t wear a hat,’ Eunice said. ‘None of us don’t wear hats.’
‘Don’t you listen to her, ma’am,’ said a long boy. ‘She’s fresh.’
Theodora removed her large and shameful hat.
‘I ain’t,’ Eunice said. ‘You quit pushin’ me around, Arty. I’ll tell Mom.’
‘I like you,’ said a girl whose voice touched.
She fingered Theodora’s garnet ring.
‘What’s your name?’ the child asked.
‘Theodora.’
‘Theerdora? I never heard that before.’
‘What sort of name is that?’ Eunice said. ‘Hi, quit, Arty, Lily!’
Because there was a need to express shame, and they had begun to push, kick, cuff. And Eunice screamed, more out of convention than from pain.
‘Don’t you listen to her,’ they all cried.
All except the dark boy, who said nothing. He picked with a knife at the wicker of an old basket and smiled.
‘Eh, you kids, what’s all this?’ said Mrs Johnson, returning with a black kettle. ‘Kids are a pest,’ she said.
The water fell with a warm hiss into an old enamel bowl.
‘There’s soap an’ all,’ she said. ‘Now come on, you kids. Leave the lady alone.’
Theodora began in the agreeable silence of the wash-house to wash her hands. She folded them one over the other. She folded them over the smooth and comfortable yellow soap. Her heart was steady. If all this were touchable, she sighed, bowing her head beneath the balm of silence contained in the deserted iron room.
Then she heard the pick, pick. She turned and saw the serene closed lips of the silent boy.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought you had all gone.’
He compressed his lips and picked.
‘And your name is what?’ she asked.
‘Zack,’ he said firmly, as if it could not have been anything else.
She could not read him, but she knew him.
‘Are you visiting with us?’ he asked.
Because she was a blank, he added, ‘Are you going to be here some?’
‘No,’ she said.
She shook her head, but it was the finality of sadness.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘You will know in time,’ she said, ‘that it is not possible to stay.’
He looked at her queerly, with his mouth as much as his eyes, as she cupped her hands and spread her face with water from the enamel bowl.
‘What is that?’ he asked, touching the flattened gauze rose on her discarded hat.
She turned to see what, so that he saw her face, soft and shiny with water.
‘That,’ she said, ‘is supposed to be a rose.’
‘A rose?’ he said. ‘A black rose?’
Then he went quietly, and she watched him through the window walking alone through the stunted pines at the bottom of the dirt yard.
Although Zack had gone, Theodora continued to experience all the triumph of the rare alliances. And because the wash-house had contained the mystery of their pact, its darkness glowed. There was no form, whether of abandoned furniture or discarded clothing, that had not grown. Theodora wiped the water from her face. The rough, scorched towel was all virtue. She was touched by the touching shapes of the hugger-mugger room, but while admitted into their world, it was with no sense of permanence. She noticed from a distance an old distorted pair of women’s shoes that had sunk in mud once when there had been rain. To live with these, she knew, required a greater degree of indifference or else humility.
Outside, the sound, the sound of a car had begun to increase. Then the car itself drove through a scattering of speckled pullets into the yard. It creaked, the old Ford, steaming with distance, and white with dust. The man got down from out of the old car.
This, Theodora supposed, would be Joe.
He walked across the yard with the nonchalance of ownership. There was the banging of a wire door. Then a silence, as if something great and extraordinary were being explained.