I don’t impress easily, but Vince Skully blew me away.
“Listen to this guy,” I said to Lydia.
“I liked you better when you read two books at a time.”
“Tell Caspar to forget carbon paper, I’m going on the radio. This guy is a genius.”
“You want facts, read the encyclopedia. Saying this clown is a genius because he knows facts is like saying the phone book is a great novel because it has a lot of characters.”
I tried to explain to her how baseball is the metaphor for life, but she said life isn’t even a metaphor for life.
“Snow is the metaphor for life,” Lydia said. “You fall, you freeze, you melt, you disappear.”
I wouldn’t have bet on the snow-disappearing part. The days grew warmer, we never went below zero at night anymore, but the gray-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see deal seemed the same. Maurey told me spring was on the way, and I said, “How can you tell?”
She said, “Open your eyes and look.”
So I made an effort, I started paying attention to what I was looking at, and, sure enough, the never-ending drabness was moving. One day I couldn’t see the bottom of Soapley’s windows and the next day I could. A rake handle popped up next to the driveway. The highway seemed to widen an inch or so. The snow layer was contracting into itself.
Back in late November, I stood on the back porch one night and wrote my name in the snow in pee—San. Ran out of power halfway through the
“Hey, Lydia.”
Lydia wasn’t impressed. “If my proudest accomplishment of the year was misspelling my name in pee, I’d hang myself right now.”
“You can’t write your name in the snow.”
“A fact that I thank God for each and every day.”
I told Maurey I would give all my future prospects to see dirt.
“What’s the big deal about dirt?” We were standing in front of the White Deck, trying to decide between going in or walking up to the Tastee Freeze. Neither one of us was hungry, so it didn’t much matter. It was one of those Sunday afternoons when nothing you do or don’t do much matters.
“I was used to seeing the ground in Greensboro. By now all the dogwoods and pear trees and magnolias are blooming. The grass is green.”
“You want grass or you want dirt?”
“I don’t care so long as I touch something that isn’t snow.”
Maurey seemed to be considering the situation as Ft. Worth and a couple of loggers came out of the White Deck. Ft. Worth faked a right hook in my direction and told me not to do anything he wouldn’t do. I said he’d do anything, which was the correct response. A conversation with Ft. Worth had all the spontaneity of calisthenics. Dot leaned over a booth next to the window and waved. She was gaining weight at the same rate as Maurey. To me— and to any of the group who knew what was what—Maurey was edging into obvious, although, so far anyway, no gossip had reached Dot, and Dot said that if she didn’t hear it, it wasn’t there.
“I don’t see the big deal, but you want dirt, I’ll show you dirt,” Maurey said.
“Hank says if we lose contact with the Mother Earth our souls will wither like the chokecherry in autumn.”
“Hank talks that way because he thinks he has to. The man couldn’t survive without TV dinners.”
Maurey led me over to the Forest Service headquarters, which had a big scenic deck on the back. You could see all the way to Yellowstone. We slid under the deck and onto real, honest-to-God dirt—or mud, depending on where you sat. I went into king-hell hog heaven—dug my fingernails into the cool earth, touched it with my cheek.
Maurey sat with her legs out and her back leaning against a support beam. “There’ll be mud all over the valley in a few weeks. You better not embarrass me with this discovery-of-dirt stuff in the schoolyard.”
“Can I touch your tummy?”
“Sam, you’re so damn predictable.”
“I just want to touch our baby.” Light came through between the slats of the deck, causing a venetian-blind effect. Maurey’s eyes were in the dark, but her mouth and forehead were lit yellow.
She said, “I think Farlow kicked yesterday.”
“We’re naming him Farlow?”
“That’s what I call him when I talk to him at night. Stub Farlow is the name of the guy on the horse on our license plates, but I can’t see calling him Stub.”
“You talk to Farlow at night?”
“I read him horse stories.”
She unzipped her Wranglers and lifted her shirt. In the cross-shadows, her stomach bloated out some, enough to hold up the jeans without help from zippers or buttons, but not much more, only her belly button had turned out where it used to be in. I held out my right hand and touched her with my fingertips.
What I wanted, badly, was a sense of someone real in there, someone that Maurey and I had created out of nothing. But I just couldn’t make the leap from runny mayonnaise on a sock to a human person who could sing and play baseball and watch TV. The deal wasn’t real yet, and I was afraid it never would be.
Maurey gazed down at her belly. “Mom won’t say a word, but I can tell she’s going nuts to find out if I’ve still got it. She sneaks in my room when she thinks I’m asleep and stands there staring at me for hours. It’s spooky.”
“You guys never talked about Rock Springs?”
Maurey put her hand next to mine. “I haven’t talked to Mom about anything since then. She cries constantly, like a wet rag. Gets on my nerves. Feel over here, I think this might be his head.”
I felt, but not very hard for fear of squashing his temple. “What does your dad say?”
“What can he do? He knows something weird is up with Mom and me, but he’s too cowboy to pry.”
“Even if his own family is going nuts?”
“He figures we’ll come to him when we’re ready. Besides, the mares will be foaling soon. Dad doesn’t have time to referee a war.”
“He’s not curious why his daughter and wife won’t talk to each other?”
Maurey guided my fingertips across her stomach. “I guess he’s curious, but he won’t invade our personal problems.”
“You’re his family.”
I thought I felt something, but I wasn’t sure. Her skin was harder than it used to be, like a softball, and I was afraid to touch her belly button.
“At least I’m not sick all day and night anymore,” Maurey said. “Mrs. Hinchman’s perfume about gagged me to death last month.”
“Has Dothan figured it out?”
Maurey lowered her shirt but left her jeans unzipped. She brushed the dirt off her fingers onto my knee. ‘‘Dothan doesn’t know where babies come from. He’s as stupid as you are when it comes to that stuff.”
“Are you training him?”
Maurey slipped by that one. “The secret won’t last forever, so the day after school ends I’m going public. You and Lydia might want to head back to North Carolina about then.”
“I’m not heading anywhere. Farlow’s as much my baby as he is yours.”
“We may have to talk about that some, Sam.”
She moved so the light shaft was on her eyes. They looked dark blue and sad. I reached over and took her hand. “Some shit will hit if this baby’s not half mine after it’s born.”
She pulled her hand away a second, then came back. “Lydia’s been whining for months to go back home. What happens when your grandfather says okay?”
“I’ll stay here with you.”
“Be real, Sam.”
