“I’m throwing something together. I think it would be a good thing if we went ahead and sat down to supper before long.” She thought it would break her heart, seeing the fear in his old face. Once they were inside, he rambled on, scared.
“You see, my grandfather met Theodore Roosevelt at Mingusville, Montana. Roosevelt got him a position running the public stockyards for the Northern Pacific Railroad at Forsythe. Mingusville was changed to Wibaux. He come up the trail and I own his spurs, and the axle holding the cloverleaf rowels has run out the hole to an egg shape and they make a noise like a little Christmas bell, little tinkly kind of a deal just pretty as can be. Went to Wyoming, worked on the Spectacle for Hard Winter Davis, then come here, stoled a horse and got caught in Big Timber, didn’t have no jail. So they lowered Dad down a well for three days and it sure enough made him into a solid citizen. Got out and put this ranch together.”
Evelyn moved food onto the table. She had taken special pains for this meal, and was noticing, as if for the first time, the faded nasturtium wallpaper. There were certain things that emerged in winter when a house went from shelter to the whole world. It wasn’t long before Bill gave in to his need to talk. “Another time, Dad cut off his toe and would have bled to death but he dissolved black powder in his mouth and it stopped the bleeding, he said. When he was a kid he’d have strangled from diphtheria, but his ma put her finger down his throat and cleared the phlegm. Must’ve been tough, worked for everybody, Briggs and Ellis, the 22, the 79, the Two Dot. Also a outfit name of Jones.”
It wasn’t until Evelyn was carrying half of a store pie to the table that she had a burst of courage and said, without preamble, “When can we talk about this?”
Bill took a deep breath and exhaled. “We’ll get to it,” he said.
Then Natalie drove up, and rushed inside pounding her hands together. Once she’d hung up her coat and poured a cup of coffee, she sat down in a deep, upholstered chair, dropping her arms onto its sides to commence a new discussion.
“He says he’ll talk,” said Evelyn.
In the full heat of August, Bill stood with the smoke tank in his hand, the net over his face and watched the dust cloud of an approaching car. He knew how he must look to its driver, and he wondered who the driver was. He lifted the bottom of the hive and held the spigot underneath and waited until the smoke sped heavily through the sides. The day was cloudy, hot and still as he looked within at the gold and varnished chambers of this myriad larval world, a city whose oozing districts he could slice into or break off, sweet and heavy, with his hands. Bees swarmed around his head, their indignant movement swooning piecemeal into the smoke. It was the young merchant paying him a visit, Sunny Jim Whitelaw, the man who never smiled. He was so handsome it was terrifying.
Alice always got up at five and turned on the kitchen light. If no light showed by five, the neighbors would get wind of it and pass it all over the valley. Sleeping in was a bounty rarely enjoyed, especially in those early days when, short-handed, they fenced alone and hayed alone and a night calver was an unimaginable luxury and in the end they almost starved. But this day, Alice turned the kitchen light on at five and didn’t come back to bed. Bill had kept it in mind all day. He had it in mind now. The idea was to sleep till seven. They had two baby girls, Evelyn and Natalie; and Alice, who had rolled with everything that came their way on the ranch, was now consumed by fear that the impoverished family that had forced her out would be obliged to take her back.
This year his hives were out of the flood plain, a supposedly hundred-year flood plain that flooded every three years. The man from soil conservation told him it was a convulsive river, prone to lateral migrations. So Bill moved the hives. It was fine with him if the river had plans for the house, sooner or later. Being master of his own fate was wearing him out.
He was not going to finish this job in time. He couldn’t centrifuge this honey and get up to the house before Sunny Jim Whitelaw in his Buick. He set aside the smoking canister and rearranged the broken combs, then abruptly lifted the bee helmet from his head and tossed it aside.
The road took a wide curve around the hill between him and the house, and the hill was too steep to climb swiftly. Bill was a young man who had so much to do on this place, and not enough of it on horseback to suit him, that he no longer felt young. After he came home from the war, he lived and ranched alone and remained for some years a convinced bachelor. The service had not made him a glamorous stranger the way it did a man with money, and he’d married a poor girl from a mile up a dirt road who desperately needed to get out of her house. When the Buick didn’t slow down, Bill felt denied a common courtesy.
He would go straight to the house despite that the very distance seemed to be pushing him back, making him aware of his own cloddish footfalls and the glacial emergence of his house from the hillside. The car was parked right in the center of the gate, with two big lilacs above either fender in the summer heat. Parked as though no one else might use the walk, it was a smart, late-model Buick with rear fender skirts and whitewalls, “Treasure State” on its license plate.
Whitelaw, with a cup of fresh coffee in his hand, shifted his shoulder to look back toward the door as Bill entered. Alice stood next to the stove. Whitelaw had coal black hair and an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The paleness of his eyes gave him a remote quality that Bill thought made him seem here and not here.
Alice looked so small just then in her cotton dress, a nice one she rarely wore, and she pressed the fingertips of both hands against each other before weighing her words. She removed one hand from this contact and used it to indicate their guest. “Bill, this is Jim Whitelaw. He is going to start a bottling plant.”
“There’s a big need,” Whitelaw said emphatically.
Bill nodded nervously as Alice ran down all the things they were doing on the ranch until Whitelaw raised a hand to quiet her. “Hey,” he said, “I completely understand. It’s a hard job, even if it doesn’t pay.”
Alice Champion never mentioned the two little girls in the next room, not even that they existed. The main thing seemed to be how beautiful she looked: auburn curls pinned behind her ears, the cotton belt of the dress soft across her stomach.
“Do you live in town?” asked Bill.
“Have to.” He flicked the rim of his coffee cup, making it ring. Alice refilled it, the black stream pouring slowly.
When the cup was filled, Alice raised her eyes to Bill’s for the first time. He was aware that his mouth was not quite closed. He was about to ask for a cup of coffee for himself.
“I’m going to leave with Jim,” she said.
“Oh?” Bill had put all this together, yet he hadn’t.
Whitelaw stared down at his hands, trying to seem to share Bill’s pain. As yet, no pain accompanied this information.
“You only live once,” Whitelaw said with unusual force.
Bill supposed that this was meant to explain their recklessness and considered how this differed from “You’re only young once,” a phrase he found disturbing, as though youth was something you tried to flag down as it shot past.
“Have you already been unfaithful to me?” he asked Alice.
“Yes,” she said. Her mixture of contrition and pride was not quite working, but even Bill understood that this was not the time to choose one over the other. His time for wishful thinking had come to an end. The thought of some carnal turmoil overwhelmed him. He may have still loved her, but he certainly hated her. He couldn’t understand how this could be happening to them. She had loved the land absolutely when he hadn’t cared. Maybe that changed with the babies. She was the one always discovering eternal values in their lives, and now she was going off with this merchant. Her mouth had become an ugly slash. It would be years before she was more than an effigy, and Bill and Whitelaw would be partners in ranching before that ever happened.