'I don't know.'
'Are they crying?'
'I don't think so.'
'Well. I would've gone upstairs,' he said. 'You know.'
'I know.'
'Did you think I wouldn't?'
'No.' She sighed suddenly, looking back toward the stairs. ‘I don't know how to comfort people,' she said.
'Well.'
They went out the front door, across the porch, and down the wooden steps. It was beginning to get cool outside. Joan could hear tree frogs piping far away, and the wind had died down enough so that the sound of cars on the east highway reached her ears. She clasped her hands behind her back and followed Simon, cutting across the road and through the field toward town.
'Remember I've got heels on,' she called.
'I remember.'
'Remember that makes it hard walking.'
He slowed down and waited for her, walking backwards. Behind him and all around him the field stretched wide and golden, with bits of tall yellow flowers stirring and glimmering like spangles in the sunlight. And when Joan came up even with him, so that he turned and walked forward again by her side, she could look down and see how his hair, bleached lighter on top, took on a varnished look out here and the little line of fuzz down the back of his neck had turned shiny and golden like the field he was walking in. 'Right about here… 'he said, but the wind started up just then and blew his words away.
'What?' she asked.
'Right about here is where I lost that ball. Will you keep a lookout for it?'
'I will.'
'Do you reckon I'll ever find it?'
'No.'
'I don't either,' Simon said.
But they walked slowly anyway, keeping their eyes on the ground, kicking at clumps of wild wheat to see what might turn up.
3
'Hold still,' James said.
He bent over and peered through the camera; No one was holding still. Line upon line of Hammonds, from every corner of the state, littered the Hammonds' front lawn, sitting, kneeling, and standing, letting arms and legs and bits of dresses trail outside the frame of his camera. Whole babies were being omitted; they had crawled to other patches of grass. Yet the grown-ups stood there with their dusty blue, look-alike eyes smiling happily, certain that they and their children were being saved intact for future generations. James straightened up and shook his head.
'Nope,' he said. 'You've moved every which-away again. Close in tighter, now.'
He waited patiently, with his hands on his hips. For five years he had been going through this. Every year there was a picture of the Hammond family reunion to be put in the Larksville paper, and another two or three for the Hammonds themselves to choose for their albums. By now he was resigned to it; he had even started enjoying himself. He smiled, watching all those hordes of Hammonds close in obligingly with sideways steps while their eyes stayed fixed on the camera. Moving like that made them look like chains of paper dolls, bright and shimmering in the heat. Eyelet dresses and seersucker suits blurred together; their whiteness was blinding. James shaded his eyes with one hand, and then he said, 'Okay,' and bent down over his camera again. But someone else was moving. It was Great-Aunt Hattie in the front row; she had started coughing. She was sitting in a cane-bottom chair, with children and animals tangled at her feet and the grown-ups forming a protective wall behind her. When she began her coughing fit, they closed in still tighter in a semicircle and the oldest nephew leaned down with his head next to hers. The coughs grew farther apart. After a minute the nephew raised his head and said, 'She's sorry, she says.' The others murmured behind him, saying it didn't matter. 'Swallowed down the wrong throat,' said the nephew.
Someone called out, 'Give her brown bread.' And someone else said, 'No, rock candy will do it.' But the aunt spread her old hands out in front of her, palms down and fingers stretched apart, signifying she was better now and wanted to hear no more about it. 'Back in your places,' James said, and the twenty or thirty Hammonds closest to him drifted back to their original positions and made their faces stern again. Mothers looked anxiously down the rows, gripping their neighbours' arms and peering around them to make sure their children were at their best, and fathers hooked their thumbs into their belts and glared into the lens. 'Hold it,' James said. When he snapped the picture there was a little stirring through the group, and everyone relaxed. 'That's the second,' he called to the hostess. 'You want another?'
'One more, James.'
While he was fiddling with the camera people began talking again, still standing in their set places, and some lit cigarettes. He peered through the view-finder at them. If this were any other picture he would snap it now, catching them at their ease, but family pictures were different. He liked the way they stood so straight in jumbled, self-conscious rows, and molded themselves to make a block of tensed-up faces. Tm ready,' he warned them, and they did it again – closed their mouths and narrowed their eyes and set their shoulders. He snapped the picture that way. Then he said, 'That's all,' and watched the children as they shook themselves and scattered off to play.
The hostess walked up to him, trailing white lace, sinking into the ground at every step in her high-heeled pumps. 'There's one more I want, James,' she said, and then stopped and let her eyes wander after her youngest child. 'Joey, you know not to ride that dog,' she called.
'Yes, ma'am.'
'I want you to photograph Great-Aunt Hattie alone,' she told James. 'She's getting old. Can you do that?'
'If she's willing,' said James.
'She's not.'
'Then maybe we should -'
'Now, don't you worry, 'said Mrs Hammond. _I_ll talk her around. They're serving up the ice cream over there. You go and get you some, and when you're through I'll have Aunt Hattie ready. Hear?'
'Well, okay,' James said. 'But Mrs Hammond hadn't stayed to hear his answer.
He folded his equipment up and put it on the porch, out of the way of the children. Then he went across the yard to the driveway, where the others were standing in line for ice cream. They looked different now, quick-moving and flexible, with the paper-doll stiffness gone. In a way James was sorry. Some of the best pictures he had were these poker-straight rows of families, Hammonds and Ballews and Burnetts; he kept copies of them filed away in his darkroom, and sometimes on long lonesome days he pulled them out and looked at them a while, with a sort of faraway sadness coming up in him if he looked too long. He might have seen any one of those families only that morning in the hardware store, but when he looked at their faces in pictures they seemed lost and long ago. ('I just wish once you'd take a giggly picture,' Ansel said. 'You make me so sorrowful.') Thinking about that made James smile, and the girl in front of him turned around and looked up at him.
'I'm thinking,' he told her.
"That's what it looked like,' she said. Her name was Maisie Hammond, and she lived across town from here and sometimes came visiting Ansel. She thought Ansel was wonderful. James was just considering this when she said, 'How's that brother of yours?' and he smiled at her.
'Just fine,' he said. 'He's home reading magazines.'
'Well, say hello to him.' She moved up a space in line, still facing in James's direction and walking backwards. Standing out in the sunlight like this she was pretty, with her towhead shining and her white skin nearly transparent, but Ansel had always said she was homely and only out to catch a good husband (it was rumoured James and Ansel came from an old family). Whenever she came visiting, Ansel turned his face to the wall and played sicker than he was. That was how he planned to scare her off, but Maisie only stayed longer then and fussed around his couch. She liked taking care of people. She would fetch pillows and ice-water, and Ansel would wave them away. When she was gone, James would say, 'Ansel, what you want to treat her like that for?' But by that time Ansel had fooled even himself, and only tossed his head on the pillow and worried about how faint he felt. To make it up to Maisie now (although she wasn't aware there was anything to be made up), James stepped closer to her in the line and said, 'Maisie, it's been a good two weeks since you've been by.'