fit so well. She dared not close her eyes but left them open and saw, very close, the dark curls on his neck. She thought it a distinct pleasure to be the shorter of the two and have that joy. There was nothing soft about her body as he held her. It was firm, with the suppleness of healthy youth. Even her breasts, where they rested against his chest, were solid. He didn't crush her against him because he didn't need to. The places where their bodies brushed together were alive.
He said just one thing, his breath warm near her ear. 'You're beautiful tonight, Mary girl.' And suddenly his using of her pet name took on a new meaning. 'Thank you, Aaron,' came her breathless reply.
The song came to an end. He turned her by the elbow to- ward the edge of the floor where Jonathan stood, and gave her to her husband. For Jonathan there was no escaping the last dance of the evening, no matter how little he liked to dance. But once on the floor it wasn't so bad. She followed him smoothly, and he thought to himself how pretty she looked and that he should've told her so earlier. 'You sure look fine tonight, Mary,' he said.
But he was right. He ought to have told her earlier.
7
Sunday turned cloudy and cool, and the heat from the kit- chen range felt good. Jonathan, Aaron, and Mary sat around the kitchen table with paring knives and bowls, quartering potatoes from the gunnysack on the tabletop into bowls on their laps, then dumping the filled bowls into sacks on the floor.
Jonathan was wishing it would rain if it meant to, and clear by morning. They'd need to start planting the spuds tomorrow if they were to get most of it done by the next Sunday. He hated to leave too much of the planting unfin- ished. Not knowing how many days he'd be gone, he couldn't risk leaving too many unplanted acres.
Aaron was considering his brother's leaving and wondering how he could escape the house next Sunday afternoon and evening. If they took Jonathan to the noon train, he and Mary would have the rest of the long, idle day together. He couldn't go down to Volences' like he used to. Pris had snuffed that idea clear out of his head. There wasn't anyplace else where it'd seem natural for him to show up on a Sunday. Sunday was pretty much a family day. But considering what had passed between himself and Mary the night before, he knew it'd be best if they weren't in the house together with too much time on their hands. Come Monday, they'd have plenty of work to keep them busy, but what would they do during long, idle Sunday?
Aw, hell, he was getting sick and tired of worrying about it. He'd been troubling himself with it all day long, and his head felt ready to burst. There was only so much a man could do before something fouled up his good intentions, anyway. Just like yesterday-'friends' he'd said to Mary, like some asinine schoolboy. Christ! How dumb could a man get? Dumb enough to be sucked in by Jonathan's innocent plans to go off and leave them alone like it didn't mean a damn thing. And how about the other things that happened, which he couldn't control? Priscilla's standoffishness, and that fool who'd pushed Mary into his 'equally good hands.' All Aaron could think of now was that he didn't want to think anymore. He wanted to sink himself down in a feather tick upstairs and not wake up till Jonathan came home with his damn bull.
In the gray light of Sunday, Mary was calling herself a thousand kinds of fool. Her hair was parted in the center and drawn back to the nape again. Her face was washed clean. But in spite of the return to her everyday looks, she felt like a harlot. Dressing up like a painted doll had been her undoing. Oh, why had she had such an idea in the first place? She should have known that Jonathan wouldn't be warmed by it. Now that it was done, she was ashamed, for she thought Jon
1athan had misjudged the reason for her finery. He might've thought she'd got all gussied up to turn Aaron's head. Why hadn't she thought of that to begin with? But no matter how hard she wished she hadn't done it, she had, and now she had to live with what followed. The best way to do that was just to go on as if she were the same person as always, but tread lightly around Aaron-her 'friend.' All she needed was to keep her hair parted down the middle and act as if nothing had happened. In two weeks this would all be forgotten and she'd wonder why she'd ever worried so.
Monday morning, the sun shone clear. The rains of Sunday night had left the earth soft and receptive. Jonathan and Aaron walked down the rows with sacks of seeder spuds on their shoulders. All of Aaron's old resentment for his brother was back again in full force. Even Jonathan's unbreaking rhythm as he planted potatoes riled Aaron. Dropping a piece of potato into the long cylinder on the planter, he'd move a pace up the row and pierce the soil, pushing on the planter with his foot. When he jerked the lever up, the potato was released, and he moved forward again, stepping on the newly interred seed behind him. He never broke the rhythm, but kept it up in four repeating, steady beats.
What does he think about while he works like a machine? Aaron thought. You'd think he had some kind of music playing in his head the way he whistles and keeps beat with those damn potatoes! He's probably thinking of his precious bull…among other things.
Aaron's syncopated movements were not lost on Jonathan, who couldn't pretend to fathom the way Aaron ran hot and cold these days. Saturday, on the way home from town, he'd been like always. Today, the way he stomped on the planter, Jonathan could tell he was riled about something.
Potatoes were their biggest cash crop, so the plantings covered many acres. They worked on into the week, refilling their sacks at the ends of the rows, while Mary quartered whenever she found time between her own chores and household duties.
Aaron's hands were healing, for the hardest work now was done by foot. Jonathan worked insatiably. No amount of labor seemed to affect him. His hands were like leather and his shoulders like stone.
As the warm May days lengthened and the first blossoms appeared on the wild plums, there was a blossoming of some intangible thing between Mary and Aaron. They found themselves caught by new awarenesses and a realization of the ties that bound them.
Bending over the laundry tubs, sloshing Aaron's clothes on Monday morning, she felt that she ought to withdraw her hands from the wash-board, as if washing the clothes were suddenly as personal as washing the man.
Aaron took note, as he never had before, of all the wifely things she did for him as well as for her husband. He had the urge to thank her. At dinner time, when the washer was still filled with water and the heavy tubs still on the benches, he said, 'Leave the water until afternoon, and we'll help you bale and dump it.'
When he opened his bureau drawers, he found freshly laundered clothing. When he stretched out between the sheets at night, he knew she'd washed them, too. When he came to the table at mealtime, she had food hot and ready. Looking around his house, he found it clean and fresh, and he couldn't strike the thought of her being there, keeping it that way for him.
At the same time, their unusual triangular tie, Jonathan's and theirs, was brought to them again and again, underlining how they were bound together and to this place in such a peculiar fashion.
He came upon her one day at the well in the yard, leaning over a pail of water, studying three goose eggs floating in it. 'See them bob, Aaron? They're fertile,' she said. 'Yes, I know,' he answered, then watched her take them carefully back to set under the cluck hens to brood, recalling again how she'd talked about babies that night on the step. 'The potatoes are loaded with eyes this year,' he said. 'We should have a good crop, then,' she answered as he went out to plant them on his brother's land, her husband's land. 'I'll need extra wood,' she said. 'I'm baking bread in the morning.'
'I'll fill the woodbox for you,' he said, and did, using wood from Jonathan's land to stoke his own fire. 'I finished seeding the vegetable garden,' she said. She planted the vegetables on Jonathan's land to serve at Aaron's table. 'Good night,' he said at the top of the stairs. 'Good night,' Mary and Jonathan said together, and they went into the front bedroom of Aaron's house-the bedroom that had once been his parents'-while he walked down the landing and entered his own room, the one he'd shared with Jonathan when they were boys.
As the day of Jonathan's departure drew near, Aaron re- membered the stifling closeness of the factory where huge, belching machines stretched and steamed cotton materials, feeling again that forced suffocation. He found that he hadn't valued the farm until he was gone from it, and thinking he might have to leave it again, he
