Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (57 page)

Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana … Oh, those enormous territories! That green vastness, in which anything is possible.

No. It wasn’t like that! Not in the least like that.

He put out his hand and touched her wet hair. He was giddy.

And they thought, then, that they should kill themselves, together now, before they did it; they remembered tumbling together in infancy, how their mother laughed to see their kisses, their embraces, when they were too young to know they should not do it, yet even in their loneliness on the enormous plain they knew they must not do it …do what? How did they know what to do? From watching the cows with the bull, the bitch with the dog, the hen with the cock. They were country children. Turning from the mirror, each saw the other’s face as if it were their own.

It is the boy—or young man, rather—who is the most mysterious to me. The eagerness with which he embraces his fate. I imagine him mute or well-nigh mute; he is the silent type, his voice creaks with disuse. He turns the soil, he breaks the wills of the beautiful horses, he milks the cows, he works the land, he toils and sweats. His work consists of the vague, undistinguished “work” of such folks in the movies. No cowboy, he, roaming the plains. Where the father took root, so has the son, in the soil that was never before broken until now.

And I imagine him with an intelligence nourished only by the black book of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet dense with allusion, seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable Eve, the unique companion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he remains in doubt.

For surely it cannot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss!

Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in it? “Look after your sister.” But it was she who looked after him as soon as she knew how and pleasured him in the same spirit as she fed him.

Lost in the green wastes, where the pioneers were lost. Death with his high cheek-bones and his braided hair helped Annie-Belle take off her clothes. She closed her eyes so that she could not see her own nakedness. Death showed her how to touch him and him her. There is more to it than farmyard ways.

The rancher knew nothing. He worked. He kept the iron core of grief within him rustless. He looked forward to his solitary, once-monthly drink, alone on the porch, and on those nights they took a chance and slept together in the log cabin under the patchwork quilt made in the “log cabin” pattern by their mother. Each time they lay down there together, as if she obeyed a voice that came out of the quilt telling her to put the light out, she would extinguish the candle flame between her finger-tips. All around them, the tactility of the dark.

She pondered the irreversibility of defloration. According to what the Minister’s wife said, she had lost everything and was a lost girl. And yet this change did not seem to have changed her. She turned to the only one she loved, and the desolating space around them diminished to that of the soft grave their bodies dented in the long grass by the creek. When winter came, they made quick, dangerous love among the lowing beasts in the barn. The snow melted and all was green enough to blind you and there was a vinegarish smell from the rising of the sharp juices of spring. The birds came back.

A dusk bird went chink-chink-chink like a single blow on the stone xylophone of the Chinese classical orchestra.

The dusk bird went chink-chink-chink with the sound of a chisel on a gravestone.

He wanted to run away with her, west, further west, to Utah, to California where they could live as man and wife, but she said: “What about Father? He’s lost enough already.” When she said that, she put on, not his face, but that of their mother, and he knew in his bones the child inside her would part them.

The Minister’s son, in his Sunday coat, came courting Annie-Belle. He is the second lead, you know in advance, from his tentative manner and mild eyes; he cannot long survive in this prairie scenario. He came courting Annie-Belle although his mother wanted him to go to college. “What will you do at college with a young wife?” said his mother. But he put away his books; he took the buggy to go out and visit her. She was hanging washing out on the line.

Sound of the wind buffeting the sheets, the very sound of loneliness.

She lowered her head and drew her foot back and forth in the dust. Her breasts hurt, she felt queasy.

The light, the unexhausted light of North America that, filtered through celluloid, will become the light by which we see America looking at itself.

Correction: will become the light by which we see
North
America looking at itself.

And, perhaps, had it been possible, she would have learned to love the Minister’s gentle son before she married him, but, not only was it impossible, she also carried within her the child that meant she must be married quickly.

Silence swallowed up the music of the fiddle and the banjo; Death with his hair in braids spread out the sheets on the marriage bed.

In the morning, her new mother-in-law heard her vomiting into the chamber-pot and, in spite of her son’s protests, stripped Annie-Belle and subjected her to a midwife’s inspection. She judged her three months gone, or more. She dragged the girl round the room by the hair, slapped her, punched her, kicked her, but Annie-Belle would not tell the father’s name, only promised, swore on the grave of her dead mother, that she would be a good girl in future. The young bridegroom was too bewildered by this turn of events to have an opinion about it; only, to his vague surprise, he knew he still loved the girl although she carried another man’s child.

“Bitch! Whore!” said the Minister’s wife and struck Annie-Belle a blow across the mouth that started her nose bleeding.

“Now, stop that, Mother,” said the gentle son. “Can’t you see she ain’t well?”

The terrible day drew to its end. The mother-in-law would have thrown Annie-Bell out on the street, but the boy pleaded for her, and the Minister, praying for guidance, found himself opening the Bible at the parable of the woman taken in adultery and meditated well upon it.

“Only tell me the name of the father,” her young husband said to Annie-Belle.

“Better you don’t know it,” she said. Then she lied: “He’s gone, now; gone out west.”

“Was it—?” naming one or two.

“You never knew him. He came by the ranch on his way out west.”

Then she burst out crying again, and he took her in his arms.

“It will be all over town,” said the mother-in-law. “That girl made a fool of you!”

She slammed the dishes on the table and would have made the girl eat out the back door, but the young husband laid her a place at table with his own hand and led her in and sat her down in spite of his mother’s black looks. They bowed their heads for grace. Surely, the Minister thought, seeing his boy cut bread for Annie-Belle and lay it on her plate, my son is a saint. He began to fear for him.

“I won’t do anything unless you want,” her husband said in the dark after the candle went out.

The straw with which the mattress was stuffed rustled beneath her as she turned away from him.

For she did not consider her brother in this new category of “young men”; he was herself. So she and her husband slept in one another’s arms, that night, although they did nothing else for she was scared it might harm the baby and he was so full of pain and glory it was scarcely to be borne, it was already enough, or too much, holding her tight, in his terrible innocence.