“Maybe someone down there will write to us, if we send them a letter first!” Abby’s eyes were bright. “Then, when you pass this way again, on your way back to Idaho, you could give us the letters they send, and maybe do another play-act for us like tonight, and we’ll have so much beer and pie for you you’ll bust!” She hopped a little on the edge of the bed. “By then I’ll be able to read better, I promise!”
Gordon shook his head and smiled. It was beyond his right to dash such dreams. “Maybe so, Abby. Maybe so. But you know, you may get to learn to read easier than that. Mrs. Thompson’s offered to put it up for a vote to let me stay on here for a while. I guess officially I’d be schoolteacher, though I’d have to prove myself as good a hunter and farmer as anybody. I could give archery lessons…”
He stopped. Abby’s expression was open-mouthed in surprise. She shook her head vigorously. “But you haven’t heard! They voted on it after you went to take your bath. Mrs. Thompson should be ashamed of trying to bribe a man like you that way, with your important work having to be done!”
He sat forward, not believing his ears. “What did you say?” He had formed hopes of staying in Pine View for at least the cold season, maybe a year or more. Who could tell? Perhaps the wanderlust would leave him, and he could finally find a home.
His sated stupor dissipated. Gordon fought to hold back his anger. To have the chance revoked on the basis of the crowd’s childish fantasies!
Abby noticed his agitation and hurried on. “That wasn’t the only reason, of course. There was the problem of there being no woman for you. And then…” Her voice lowered perceptibly. “And then Mrs. Hewlett thought you’d be perfect for helping me and Michael finally have a baby… …”
Gordon blinked. “Um,” he said, expressing the sudden and complete contents of his mind.
“We’ve been trying for five years,” she explained. “We really want children. But Mr. Horton thinks Michael can’t ‘cause he had the mumps really bad when he was twelve. You remember the real bad mumps, don’t you?”
Gordon nodded, recalling friends who had died. The resultant sterility had made for unusual social arrangements everywhere he had traveled.
Still …
Abby went on quickly. “Well, it would cause problems if we asked any of the other men here to … to be the body father. I mean, when you live close to people, like this, you have to look on the men who aren’t your husband as not being really ‘men’… at least not that way. I — I don’t think I’d like it, and it might cause trouble.”
She blushed. “Besides, I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep a secret. I don’t think any of the other men would be able to give Michael the kind of son he deserves. He’s really very smart, you know. He’s the only one of us youngers who can really read…”
The flow of strange logic was coming on too fast for Gordon to follow completely. Part of him dispassionately noted that this was all really an intricate and subtle tribal adaptation to a difficult social problem. That part of him though — the last Twentieth-Century intellectual — was still a bit drunk, and meanwhile the rest was starting to realize what Abby was driving at.
“You’re different.” She smiled at him. “I mean, even Michael saw that right from the start. He’s not too happy, but he figures you’ll only be through once a year or so, and he could stand that. He’d rather that than never have any kids.”
Gordon cleared his throat. “You’re sure he feels this way?”
“Oh, yes. Why do you think Mrs. Hewlett introduced us in that funny way? It was to make it clear without really saying it out loud. Mrs. Thompson doesn’t like it much, but I think that’s because she wanted you to stay.”
Gordon’s mouth felt dry. “How do you feel about all this?”
Her expression was enough of an answer. She looked at him as if he were some sort of visiting prophet, or at least a hero out of a story book. “I’d be honored if you’d say yes,” she said, quietly, and lowered her eyes.
“And you’d be able to think of me as a man, ‘that way’?”
Abby grinned. She answered by crawling up on top of him and planting her mouth intensely upon his.
There was a momentary pause as she shimmied out of her clothes and Gordon turned to snuff out the candles on the bed stand. Beside them lay the letterman’s gray uniform cap, its brass badge casting multiple reflections of the dancing flames. The figure of a rider, hunched forward on horseback before bulging saddle bags, seemed to move at a flickering gallop.
This is another one I owe you, Mr. Postman.
Abby’s smooth skin slid along his side. Her hand slipped into his as he took a deep breath and blew the candles out.
6
For ten days, Gordon’s life followed a new pattern. As if to catch up on six months’ road weariness, he slept late each morning and awoke to find Abby gone, like the night’s dreams.
Yet her warmth and scent lingered on the sheets when he stretched and opened his eyes. The sunshine streaming through his eastward-facing window was like something new, a springtime in his heart, and not really early autumn at all.
He rarely saw her during the day as he washed and helped with chores until noon — chopping and stacking wood for the community supply and digging a deep pit for a new outhouse. When most of the village gathered for the main meal of the day, Abby returned from tending the flocks. But she spent lunchtime with the younger children, relieving old one-legged Mr. Lothes, their work supervisor. The little ones laughed as she kidded them, plucking the wool that coated their clothes from a morning spent carding skeins for the winter spinning, helping them keep the gray strands out of their food.
She barely glanced at Gordon, but that brief smile was enough. He knew he had no rights beyond these few days, and yet a shared look in the daylight made him feel that it was all real, and not just a dream.
Afternoons he conferred with Mrs. Thompson and the other village leaders, helping them inventory books and other long-neglected salvage. At intervals, he gave reading and archery lessons.
One day he and Mrs. Thompson traded methods in the art of field medicine while treating a man clawed by a “tiger,” what the locals called that new strain of mountain lion which had bred with leopards escaped from zoos in the postwar chaos. The trapper had surprised the beast with its kill, but fortunately, it had only batted him into the brush and let him run away. Gordon and the village matriarch felt sure the wound would heal.
In the evenings all of Pine View gathered in the big garage and Gordon recited stories by Twain and Sayles and Keillor. He led them in singing old folk songs and lovingly remembered commercial jingles, and in playing “Remember When.” Then it was time for drama.
Dressed in scrap and foil, he was John Paul Jones, shouting defiance from the deck of the Bonne Homme Richard. He was Anton Perceveral, exploring the dangers of a faraway world and the depths of his own potential with a mad robot companion. And he was Doctor Hudson, wading through the horror of the Kenyan Conflict to treat the victims of biological war.
At first Gordon always felt uneasy, putting on a flimsy costume and stomping across the makeshift stage waving his arms, shouting lines only vaguely recalled or made up on the spot. He had never really admired play-acting as a profession, even before the great war.
But it had got him halfway across a continent, and he was good at it. He felt the rapt gaze of the audience, their hunger for wonder and something of the world beyond their narrow valley, and their eagerness warmed him to the task. Pox-scarred and wounded — bent from year after year of back-breaking labor merely to survive — they looked up, the need greatest in eyes clouded with age, a yearning for help doing what they could no longer accomplish alone — remembering.