And she went off quickly.
At the lower end of the San Joaquin Valley sprawl the cotton ranches, drab, dusty, broken only by stands of haggard eucalyptus trees. In the fall, mechanical harvesters whir and clank along the untidy white rows like invaders from Mars, leaving behind broken stalks and shriveled foliage. Now the fields will be deserted, and during the late fall and winter months they present the dreariest of landscapes.
After the winter rains, when the old plants rot and the soil is damp, caterpillar tractors pull gang plows and harrows across the fields. It is the blithest time of the year. The air flows crisp and cool and smells of overturned earth. Crows flap back and forth; far to the east rises the snow-capped Sierra Nevada.
On a particularly fine morning in this season, a car came careening along one of the back roads and lurched to a stop. A girl jumped out and ran to the roadside fence.
The driver of the approaching tractor, intent on his plows, did not see her until he made his turn. Then he gaped in disbelief. He cut off his motor, leaped to the ground and came sprinting awkwardly across the furrows.
The girl held out her hands and he hugged her across the low barbed wire. And he kissed her, and she kissed him. And after a while Mervyn said, “What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“Finding you,” said Susie. “And I’ve had one devil of a time doing it.” She laughed. There were things in her face Mervyn had never seen before — little adjustments of shadow, quirks of line, a certain fixing of the flesh. She’s grown up, Mervyn thought. And she is perfectly beautiful. “I started looking, oh, months ago. As soon as I heard how idiotic you’d been about that grant.”
Mervyn climbed the fence and tore his pants and did not even know it. “I can’t explain exactly why I turned it down, Susie. I just knew I had to. Maybe I felt the need of sweating the mucky guck out of my system. There’s nothing like field labor to set things straight. I haven’t regretted this.”
Susie rested her head on his sweat-soaked shoulder. “I have. Being spiritless and negative.”
“You spiritless and negative.”
She laughed again, squeezed him. “So I came to tell you I was a fool. Mr. Gray, I’m at your disposal. In every way. The south of France, or Berkeley or” — she glanced at the tractor and then out across the endless field — “or agriculture, if it comes to that, which I shamelessly hope it won’t.”
“It won’t,” Mervyn said. “I’m quitting.”
“Mervyn!”
“As of this second. Drive me over to ranch headquarters. I’ll collect my check, and we’ll go over to the bank in Delano—”
“And then?”
“Once I asked you to marry me.”
“In a joke. That’s one subject females have no sense of humor about.”
“No, I think I meant it even then. In a perverted sort of way. Of course I knew you’d say no.”
“I almost said yes. Even though I hated you.”
“You almost said yes?” Mervyn cried.
“I’ll have to ream some of that soil out of your ears,” Susie said tenderly, stroking his sweaty hair.
“You don’t hate me now?”
“Does this feel like hate?”
“We can make Las Vegas by four this afternoon.”
“Mervyn.”
“What?”
“When I found out where you’d hidden yourself—”
“I wasn’t hiding.”
“Well, I went to see Professor Burton, and I asked if that grant was still open. He growled and grumbled and finally said the manuscripts had waited eight hundred years, so they could probably hang on for another month or two. In case you were still interested. Are you?”
Mervyn nuzzled her. “Pottering around a mess of moldering manuscripts... I don’t know, Susie. It doesn’t seem important any more.”
“But it’s fun, isn’t it?”
“Fun?” Mervyn seemed startled. “I guess it is at that. I never thought of it just that way...”
“You never thought, period,” Susie said firmly. “Also, it’s the way to get your Ph.D. and a professorship.”
“Teaching,” Mervyn said, shaking his head. “Who wants to be a teacher?”
“You do,” she said. “And if you find you really don’t, why, there’s always a tractor and a cotton field.”
So they went over to Susie’s car and drove back up the road, leaving simmering silence behind them.
In the field, the tractor stood dejectedly.
The crows swooped with relief and settled to the freshly turned earth and began scouting for worms.
And only a long time later did it occur to Mervyn, recalling that extraordinary reunion with Susie Hazelwood Gray in the cotton field, that not once had either of them mentioned — or thought of — poor Mary.