At first Nola said no. She wanted no part of Tormey Leary, who’d swept in and out of town at drunken intervals, then swept out for the last time to “settle,” he said, in the North. But Nola’s father, still in Carolina, was even meaner than Tormey Leary. So Maggie and Darren were family now for Nola, Keeley, and Liz. Maggie begged, and Nola went.
“You’re looking peaked,” Maggie said and thrust out a hand to help Nola up. Holy Mother, but she could hardly stand up, she might’s well be as old as Maggie’s granny, who’d followed along to Vermont with her pet pig.
Nola shrugged a shoulder. She was cheerful enough by nature; it was Ritchie dragging her out of hospital and down country that had kept her down. Ritchie wasn’t a man to argue with. Not that he’d ever broken her bones the way some men beat their women. Nola’s dad would give her mother a regular clout each morning before he left for his day’s scam, and hadn’t her mother asked for another the way she’d stayed with him, though Nola and her sisters begged her to leave? And not just for the mother but for Nola, whose curse it was to be born with a pretty face and a body that a dad, whose wife was always pregnant, couldn’t resist. She was working hard to forget all that.
“I want you should stay with me when Ritchie goes back to the farm,” Maggie said, putting an arm around her cousin. “He’s not good for you, Nola. He’s not like his brother. Darren would never of dragged
me
outa that hospital! And you with your poor brain still addled. Why, you mighta kilt yourself coming all that long way and no wheels.”
“We’ll have them soon, wheels,” Nola said, “Ritchie promised. He’ll beg some money from Tormey and buy a secondhand pickup.”
“Tell me another,” Maggie said. “Uncle’s truck all broke down in some dinky garage where you left it and he’s gonna give Ritchie money?”
She laughed and hugged Nola, and it felt good. Nola could do with a little hugging. Though what she really needed this minute was a warm bath. She hadn’t had a good cleansing since hospital—how she’d loved those backrubs! That sweet-smelling lotion the nurse rubbed on after the alcohol. She’d felt clean, really clean for practically the first time in her life. And she had a bed all to herself. No one to share it with, not little sisters or Ritchie. For a time she’d blessed even the brain tumor that brought her to that hospital, and the kind Scottish doctor who’d wormed the truth out of her about the old injuries. Like the time her dad had run after her, and she’d jumped on a horse standing in a nearby field, and when it reared, she fell off, hit her head on a stump, and he’d whacked her some more till she lay unconscious. Or the ugly scar he inflicted one night when he came home drunk, and swung a butcher knife around her body, and it slipped. . . .
He’d felt bad then, he cried when she came to, and he was all sugar for a time—till the next time he came home drunk, and then it was the old story repeating itself and no place to get clean of him. Except to leave home and go to New York State with Maggie and Darren.
Darren was coming out of the trailer, looking a young god with his hairy chest all bare and his fresh ruddy face—he was younger than Maggie by four years. Nola had seen him looking at herself, too, though he’d never tried anything. He knew Maggie and Nola were not just cousins but close friends. They’d got even closer at the farm the brothers brought them to—their way of staying out of the uncle’s path. Darren waved at the two women and then disappeared around the side of the trailer. The sun was struggling to rise over the mountaintop, the whole sky was pink with its climb. Nola wished she could run up that mountain and dive into the warm core of it.
“I could do with a hot bath,” she told Maggie, and Mag laughed and stubbed out her cigarette and said, “In this heat?” Then Mag said, “They got a downstairs one in the big house there. Ruth Willmarth lets us use it, once a day, sure and she’d let you, too, Nola. You see, her boyfriend’s some kind of cousin to our men and she has to let us into her house. We got bacon and milk in her fridge, too—our old GE’s broke down half the time. I mean, she seems a good woman—she just lost it a little last night, that’s all, and maybe we were kinda loud.”
Now Darren was calling for Maggie and didn’t Mag race into his hairy arms like he was some magnet she couldn’t keep away from? Off by the big house Nola saw the farmwoman emerging from a doorway, slim and windblown in a green robe and sandals, like she was some Venus rising out of the sea. Nola had always loved those goddess tales, wanted to believe in them, though she was raised Roman Catholic. That religion hadn’t helped against her dad, had it? Yet she told her rosary beads over and over, to ward off the bad things there in the shadows. She couldn’t be without her rosary.
The thought of Venus rising from the sea made her long more than ever for that warm bath. She ran back to the tent for a change of clothing, grabbed panties, jeans, and shirt. She started toward the house, though keeping a separate distance from The Willmarth. When the farmwoman was out of sight, she went on into the house and through the kitchen—grabbing a doughnut, for she was suddenly hungry. She tried two doors before she found the right one and then she turned on the tub faucet full blast, knocking a hairbrush off the edge, but no matter. Flung off the nightgown she’d slept in for six days and nights—she never could bear to sleep in her day clothes—and slipped gratefully in.
She’d got the water too hot but it was all right, the hotter the better to clean the filth off her, all the long travelling miles from North Carolina to Tonawanda, New York; Tonawanda to Toronto, Canada; Toronto to Branbury, Vermont. She pulled the shower curtain across the tub, laid her head back against the white enamel. It felt soothing, cleansing, healing. She stretched her arms, yawned luxuriously.
She was wholly relaxed and half asleep when she heard the footsteps tromping into the kitchen, the banging on the bathroom door.
“It’s occupied,” she hollered. “I’ll be out in a minute.” But the door cracked open and footsteps pounded the bathroom tile. She could hear the breathing, heavy, like the intruder had been running. Then brawny arms yanked her up out of the tub and a hand clapped over her mouth to keep her from crying out.
* * * *
There was no sign of a tent at six that morning when Ruth went down in her green cotton robe to inspect first the corn, which was only ankle high and already scorched from the hot sun, and then, with even more trepidation, the scene of last night’s “orgy.” There was nothing among the seedling trees but the yellow trailer and Darren’s pickup with its trailer hitch like a dropped anchor on a struggling pine. Darren stood bare-chested and cheerful, his long legs planted sturdily on the grass as though rooted there.
“And good morning to you, ma’am. By golly, I had the best night’s sleep in the world. I’m ready to face them cows. Though a cuppa coffee would help, it surely would, it’s the caffeine that moves my muscles, so to speak. You wouldn’t happen to have the pot on, would you, before we hit the barn?”
Ruth nodded absently, she was a bit off balance this morning. “Sleep deprived” was the phrase—the worse because Colm, who was the partial cause of her lack of sleep, was still sweetly snoring; his real estate office didn’t open till nine. The whole world, it seemed, was slumbering, not a car on Cow Hill Road at this hour. The mountains that rimmed her green valley were a pale lavender in the rosy dawn light. She hadn’t yet put on the coffee, she wanted to see to the sick woman, have the woman’s partner—or husband, or whoever he was—take her to the local hospital, have her tested for that disease. Then pronounce the disease negative, of course. In short, give Ruth a new lease on life, a future to work toward.
“Where is she?” she asked. “The sick woman?”
Darren smiled blandly, as though there had been no intruders, no fainting woman, no brother—what was his name?—carrying the woman back to the pup tent, his horse tethered on her land, his truck—or was it someone else’s truck and horse? For there had been a dozen people here, at least, last night, mowing down her seedlings. She squinted, and sure enough, there were several rows listing sideways as though already stricken with this Mad Cow.
“Oh, my poor trees!” she cried.
“Hell, we’ll set them right. Plants are tough. I’ll tend to them after milking. Sorry about last night, ma’am, they were just a few acquaintances, you know, friends Maggie picked up here and there.” He waved at his wife, who was walking briskly among the older evergreens, a sheaf of what appeared to be music in her hands. “I told them not to drive up on the grass, but you know how careless folks can be.” He shook his head woefully as though he himself would never dream of driving on anyone’s property, much less defiling it.
“But you said you’d put on the pot, hey? A bit of caffeine and I’m Mohammad Ali.” He flexed his muscles, bulging them out like a prizefighter, and she had to laugh. It was hard to stay cross with Darren.
She led the way back to her kitchen; she was faint with the lack of caffeine herself. She’d give him his fix and then send him on to bring in the cows. No more questions asked about that woman. Let bygones be bygones. Tens of thousands exposed, Colm had said, and how could you track them all down? Why, her cows were healthy! She seldom had to call the vet; their milk was organic, pure—no BST or other additives. Organic milk came from cows that grazed out of doors, that ate corn and forage raised without synthetic fertilizer, herbicides, or pesticides. This was Vermont, land of milk and honey, and if there was occasional malice, well, it usually happened on other folks’ farms, not hers.
“Just stop the music after ten and we’ll all live together in peace,” she instructed, and filled his mug with strong, fragrant Green Mountain coffee. “And bring in the cows, I’ll meet you in the barn.” She ran upstairs to pull on jeans and a sleeveless shirt. It would be another hot dry day; the sun was rising blood-red, the mountains fading to palest mauve with the increasing humidity. Downstairs she heard Darren singing something lusty, something with a woman’s name, Mag or Nola. Wasn’t Nola the name of the ill woman? Yes, she recalled hearing the brother call her that, and then Barren’s voice afterward, saying, “Nola had brain surgery.”
My God!
Ruth thought, and there the poor woman was in a tent, spread out no doubt on the hard ground, or at best on a thin mat.
She rebuked herself for ignoring the sick woman, threw her robe on the bed where Colm was still sleeping sweetly on his side, his nose squashed into the pillow; she pulled on jeans and a blue cotton shirt. She should have brought the woman into the house, put her up in Emily’s old room. How could she have been so thoughtless! A woman on her own premises, in need of a little kindness. Where’s the old law of hospitality now, Ruth? she asked herself. If the pair returned she would sit the woman down, talk to her, make her see for her own sake that she must report to the authorities. What were Ruth’s cows in relation to a woman’s well-being?
But the farm is everything now, she thought: my life, my income—though with milk prices so low these days it was more outgo than income. County farms were failing, one by one. Vic was growing daily out of his clothes; Emily needed help for college books—the scholarship didn’t pay for those. She had to think first of her own family.
Sitting down to pull on her socks, she relaxed. What chance anyway that the woman carried the disease? Probably one in a thousand. Ten thousand! “Quit worrying, Ruth,” she said aloud. “Quit it, I said! Smile.”
“Just what I been telling you, Ruthie.” Sitting up with a sonorous yawn, Colm reached for her, pulled her back down to him, stroked her back, shoulders, arms, hair. It was comforting. Maybe she
should
let him move in. There was only Vic now in the house most of the year; the boy liked Colm; he needed a surrogate father.
“Colm, love,” she said.
“I’m here, Ruthie.”
“Don’t go to work. Not today. I think I might need you.”
“That woman, you mean? You went out there? I thought I heard you get out of bed.” He was still holding her, making her relax in his arms. They were comforting arms, warmly muscled and smooth as satin; salvaging arms, holding her close. To hell with independence, she thought. Give me co-dependence—was that the word? Co-something anyway, like in her yoga class where she couldn’t stand on one foot for more than a few seconds but when six women in a circle barely touched one another on the shoulders she could stand one-footed with ease.
She told him about the tent’s disappearance and he laughed. “See? Nothing to worry about. Just an ordinary day coming up. I got an appointment at nine-fifteen with some retired couple wanting land to build on. You’d think a couple in their sixties would want a condo, everything done for them. And here they plan to start building, like they’re just beginning life.”
She smiled. She liked that idea. She hoped she’d keep on building in her sixties. That wouldn’t be long now, she was already fifty-two. She hugged him, then wriggled out of his arms. She had to brush her teeth after the coffee; already the singing had ceased downstairs. She heard the kitchen door slam; Darren would be heading for the pasture, herding in the first group of cows. She had to prep them, get the milking machine going, the day moving before it got so hot she was all sweat. There was something to be said for getting up early in the summer, working in the cool. It was a kind of low-key limbo before the sun was all the way up. And the summer already so bizarre—not just the early heat but the odd travelling folk out in the pasture, and now this sick woman who’d come—and seemingly already gone.
Colm let her go. He fell back on the pillow—he’d sleep another hour or two, lucky fellow. She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, her hair. She’d cut it short this summer to simplify her life. Simplify, simplify—she wanted to be one with Thoreau and his nine bean rows. She didn’t want any traveller woman carrying some kind of plague. Bubonic, Black Death, typhoid, smallpox, AIDS, anthrax, West Nile, now SARS and Avian—so many plagues through the ages and never once touching
her
life.
Until now. She gasped when she went back downstairs and opened the door to the bathroom where she’d left her hairbrush last night. Hot steam and water curled out onto the kitchen floor; inside a small flood, her hairbrush floating in it, the bottle of liquid soap, a hunk of soggy doughnut. The old footed tub was still trickling—someone hadn’t turned the faucet completely off. Water everywhere—who had taken a bath and left it running? One of the travellers, she supposed, though she’d seen them all, hadn’t she, when she went down to inspect the trees? Darren’s women were sitting on the trailer steps when Darren came out.