“I don't like them. Any of them!”
“You'll pay particular attention to the Cartwrights, if you
have any sense.”
“Grandmama!” Mary protested but found herself propelled out
the side entrance onto the lawn, where she lingered a while in the shadows with her
hands clasped. She drifted along to the fence to gaze out at the road and dream of being
somewhere else. She didn't “do well” at parties, and her grandmother
was nearly wild with embarrassment and frustration. She would hear the old woman
complaining to her father after dinner as they sat on the dark forecourt and her father
smoked his pipe.
“She's the prettiest one at every party,” she said one
night. “I don't know what's wrong with her. Or with you. You encourage
her, I think.”
“Mother, you always force her to those wretched over-populated
things. She does better with smaller groups. Or hadn't you noticed?”
“There are much better chances at garden parties, more young people,
better families. She stands a better chance.”
“Not if she clams up, she doesn't.”
“Well, you're no help at all. Even if she didn't say a
word, it might work out in the end. I wonder if she isn't wilfully unpleasant to
those boys. Sometimes the look on her face would etch glass. Just like you.”
“Me?” her father laughed.
“She treats boys the way she'd treat a filthy dog â no,
she treats dogs better â and I know where she got that.”
“You must admit, there is a similarity.”
“I do not agree. And neither would you if you'd had a son. Her
mother wasn't nearly as pretty as Mary is now. And her mother married well
enough.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, it'll be a curse on me if I let her become an old maid
and ruin her own life! Why can't she smile and be a delight like the other
girls?”
“She will, when she sees the point.”
“She's eighteen already. The point will become all too clear
if she waits much longer.”
It went on like that. Mary became the subject of discussion, the project
of the moment. She grew accustomed to hearing herself discussed in the most candid
terms, and gradually, it had the effect of making her think of herself as a story, a
tale still in the telling, and she became curious about what would happen to this
misanthropic girl. The idea of a life of spin-sterhood seemed to fill her grandmother
with an elemental terror, and gradually this fear became contagious. Her father, too,
lost his equanimity. That year they had hired a maid who was marrying age, and the
little brooches and posies her “beau” gave her began to irritate
everyone.
“Who is that supposed to be?” her father had asked the girl,
staring closely at a pendant she wore round her neck. A goat-faced figure in the oval,
its hand raised in benediction.
“Saint Anthony, sir.”
Her father had guffawed. “Wonderful! Would that be Anthony the saint
of barren women or Anthony the hermit?”
The machinations of courtship seemed to annoy him as much as they bored
his daughter.
So, broochless and miserable, Mary had allowed herself to be dragged to
another party, where she had been scolded like a child and sent out to make nice. In
this sullen mood, she had hung over the fence like a tomboy to stare at the fields
beyond, where horses wandered together slowly and cropped
grasses
and pawed at unseen things. Girls shrieked and giggled behind her and she pressed
against the fence as if driven away by the noise. And that was when the light-suited man
had walked up the road toward her. When he came level with her, she saw that he was
tall, well dressed in suit and summer hat, and his face was solemn and handsome. There
was a slightly reddish hue to his hair. He stopped in the road, pale dust drifting past
his shoes in a memory of walking, and he took his hat off and bowed deeply. It was an
exaggerated, theatrical gesture, almost sassy, and she didn't know how to take
it.
“Ma'am,” he said.
She nodded, a half-scowl on her face.
“John Boulton,” he said and replaced his hat.
Mary's scowl abated somewhat. “Pleased to meet you,” she
said automatically.
“You haven't told me your name.”
“My mother wouldn't like it if she knew I was talking to
you.” She startled herself with the fib. Why had she said that? John
Boulton's eyes went past her and scanned the wide lawn, all the girls and all the
boys. He seemed to inventory them and, when he came back to her, seemed happier to know
her than before. As if he, too, preferred open space and was himself a straggler at
heart.
Later, she would wonder how much her solitary stance had attracted him. In
fact she suspected it had played a part. Here was a girl who could stand the quiet and
isolation, a girl who didn't need a social life, didn't want it. How much
better she would be in a lonely log cabin than would these happy, playful girls who ran
about the lawn holding hands,
or stood in clutches whispering
gossip, or ran to their mothers crying with overexcitement.
In time, the widow knew, as surely as she knew her husband, that he might
well have made the decision at that moment, settled on her as his best and only choice.
Like all gamblers, and to his peril, he trusted such moments of intuition. It may have
been his only reason for being at church the next day, seated ahead and to the left of
Mary and her grandmother. He was beautifully dressed, his face was tanned from outdoor
work, and a gold watch fob of high quality hung at his waist. Later, on the steps
outside, he approached and smiled knowingly at Mary before introducing himself to her
grandmother as a businessman and landowner. His father was a magistrate and had staked
him a large claim, and he was on his way out to see it. Her grandmother had nearly
staggered with surprise at her good luck.
And so the courtship began. For Mary, it was like slipping into water and
letting the current carry her, faster and faster, toward an unseen, roaring drop, out
and away from her father, her childhood home, everything she had ever known. When John
asked her if she would marry him, she said she would think about it, but they both knew
what her answer would be. If she left, she might be free to change, to be something and
someone else. Often, at night, she would press her face into her blankets and cry
wildly, but she could not have explained why she was crying, for there was a delight in
it also, an unaccustomed passion.
She continued to “think about it” and John's impatience
with the wait quickly became palpable. Maids advised her, in roundabout and polite ways,
to stop fooling around and
accept. When she expressed her doubts,
saying there were things she disliked about him, her grandmother had said,
“You'll grow to love your husband, don't worry, just as I did mine,
and as your mother did. Nothing starts off right.”
The next time they walked together, when John pressed her again, she said
yes. He clapped his hands together heartily and said, “Good girl!” Then he
kissed her, and the memory of that contact tingled on her lips for a long, stunned
moment. The wedding was held in her father's former church, performed by another
minister, her father sitting small and inconspicuous near the aisle, watching his
usurper do an efficient job â a quick, simple ceremony attended by anyone
interested enough to come, and no reception afterwards. There would be no more dawdling.
John was in a hurry to get on.
Later in the day, as the train idled by the platform, Mary hugged her
father and grandmother. She cried as they stood among her many trunks and leather bags
and wooden boxes and crates. The expression on her father's face was uneasy,
almost guilty. Perhaps it said that he was not ready for the change, or that
she
was not ready. She was nineteen, her husband thirty-five. But there was
no stopping it now.
“Will there be room for it all?” she asked, looking at her
life as it was slung up into the baggage car.
“Where we're going, there's nothing but room,”
John had said. “Wait till you see it.”
As the train pulled away, Mary was unaccountably blissful, as if drunk
with the promise of transformation. This stranger, this landowner whose confidence was
infectious, was now her husband. He was hers. She alone was allowed to kiss him, to
touch his hair with her hand. Other girls
had sat in the pews
during the wedding with acid expressions, and they all flirted with him afterwards,
wasting their charms in an effort to diminish hers. Or so she suspected. All her
grandmother's mysterious womanly advice about sex, nearly inscrutable in its
refusal to be direct, had worked its magic, so that every time she looked at her
husband, she found it hard to breathe. Eagerness or terror, it didn't matter.
On her honeymoon night, the bride lay in her clothes on the bunk while the
train rocked gently from side to side, and she waited for him. The groom never came to
her. He spent the entire night at cards, and lost fifty dollars and his watch.
HENRY APPEARED
before nightfall, leading his horse by
one hand and hefting a second saddle again his opposite hip. Helen seized the
widow's hand and said, “You will remember what I said about the Reverend
Bonnycastle, won't you? Stick to that man like glue.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
Helen went to her husband and they stood close and spoke for a few
moments. Then she turned without a goodbye and headed back toward the village.
Henry said nothing to the widow but merely nodded. The mare let him
approach, and it craned round to watch, walleyed, as he laid over its back first a thin
blanket, then the saddle with rough stirrups dangling off twisted rawhide thongs. He
thumped the animal's neck and the mare nodded and blew its lips.
Henry and the widow mounted and rode along a path by the river for an
hour, two hours, until that path faded out to nothing, and then they cut laterally
through the trees, brushes of pine and hemlock stroking them as they passed. Almost
immediately there was the smell of smoke in the air, and the horses began to walk alert,
their ears scissoring with curiosity.
The widow heard the first whiz. And then, without warning, a whistling
rain of arrows fell around them. One small, singing thing went past, then many, the air
hissing with them. So alien was this event to the widow that she imagined birds had
begun to fall from the sky, embedding themselves like tiny suicides in the ground, in
the trunks of trees. Henry was bent low, cocking his rifle, as the widow's horse
wheeled in confusion. It stood sideways to the assault, stamping its forelegs in terror.
The widow screamed and hid her head behind the neck of her mare. There was silence, then
a thud, and the widow felt something slap her calf just below the knee. A frigid twang
went down clear to her foot.
When she looked down, she saw something pale protruding from her calf. The
little mare sidestepped and swung around as the crack of the rifle racketed and swung
off the hills. Mary reached down for the object sunk into her leg, but it began to bend
and shimmer, and then she was slumped in a half-faint, flopping loosely as the mare,
finally choosing flight, trotted aimlessly toward the river.
A minute later, Henry came back, trotting his huge bay horse and leading a
second, saddleless young stallion. It bucked and reared away from his mollifying hand.
He spoke softly to it, but it would not take the offer. It must have been a newly broken
animal, for there was a thin strap of hide that hung from its lower jaw, looped into a
hackamore, and the stallion pulled and tore at it in a panic until Henry let go, and the
animal trotted away into the trees. He sighed as he watched it go. Then, wearily, he
dismounted and came to look at the widow's injured leg.
He folded back the black fabric and inspected the place where the arrow
had gone in. The widow leaned vertiginously
out so she could see
too. A short, vaneless shaft protruded from a pucker of skin that was growing bluish.
There was no blood on one side of her calf, but the metal arrowhead had passed through
the far side and stood out scarlet. At the point's edges were little shreds of
matter like wet wool. Her head bounced once on its neck as consciousness flickered. He
seized her by the upper arm and dragged her from the mare, ignoring her shriek of pain.
She sat panting, glaring at him, her pupils dilated so her eyes appeared to be nearly
black.
“Don't touch me!” she hissed.
“I won't,” he said.
“They tried to kill us!”
“No. They want us to take another route, that's all. So
that's what we're going to do.”
He sat down facing her and looked closely at the shaft of the arrow, blew
on it where the wood had snapped.
“This hit something and broke before it hit you, bounced off a tree
maybe,” he said, and there was something like relief in his voice. He leaned way
down and peered at the underside of her calf. He sat up and fixed her with a look she
couldn't translate, a slightly dim-witted look, as if he was clowning with
her.
“You want to know why you're lucky?” he said. She was
about to open her mouth and say “why,” but before she could, he grabbed the
arrowhead and swiftly drew the length of the shaft through her calf and out. The slender
tube came out with a squeak, like a finger on glass. She began to scream, but there was
a rushing sound in her ears and suddenly the world swam away. She slumped into a faint,
chin on her chest, and then drifted sideways to the ground.
SHE WOKE TO PAIN
. Henry was pulling her by the front of
her collar, hauling her back into a sitting position. Her head lolled a little, and then
she was awake again, looking around in confusion.