On his left wrist was a complicated-looking watch with a brown, sweat-stained leather band. A silver bracelet with some intricate scrollwork clung to his right wrist. It needed a good rubbing with silver polish, she thought, then chastised herself for being caught up in the trivia of small-town life she had silently rebelled against through the years.
Robert Kincaid pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one halfway out, and offered it to her. For the second time in five minutes, she surprised herself and took the cigarette. What am I doing? she thought. She had smoked years ago but gave it up under the steady thump of criticism from Richard. He shook out another one, put it between his lips, and flicked a gold Zippo lighter into flame, holding it toward her while he kept his eyes on the road.
She cupped her hands around the lighter to hold the wind in abeyance and touched his hand to steady it against the bouncing of the truck. It took only an instant for her to light the cigarette, but that was long enough to feel the warmth of his hand and the tiny hairs along the back of it. She leaned back and he swung the lighter toward his own cigarette, expertly forming his wind cup, taking his hands off the steering wheel for no more than a second.
Francesca Johnson, farmer’s wife, rested against the dusty truck seat, smoked the cigarette, and pointed. “There it is, just around the curve.” The old bridge, peeling red in color, tilting slightly from all the years, sat across a small stream.
Robert Kincaid had smiled then. He quickly looked at her and said, “It’s great. A sunrise shot.” He stopped a hundred feet from the bridge and got out, taking the open knapsack with him. “I’m going to do a little reconnaissance for a few minutes, do you mind?” She shook her head and smiled back.
Francesca watched him walk up the country road, taking a camera from the knapsack and then slinging the bag over his left shoulder. He had done that thousands of times, that exact movement. She could tell by the fluidity of it. As he walked, his head never stopped moving, looking from side to side, then at the bridge, then at the trees behind the bridge. Once he turned and looked back at her, his face serious.
In contrast with the local folks, who fed on gravy and potatoes and red meat, three times a day for some of them, Robert Kincaid looked as if he ate nothing but fruit and nuts and vegetables. Hard, she thought. He looks hard, physically. She noticed how small his rear was in his tight jeans—she could see the outlines of his billfold in the left pocket and the bandanna in the right one— and how he seemed to move over the ground with unwasted motion.
It was quiet. A redwing blackbird sat on fence wire and looked in at her. A meadowlark called from the roadside grass. Nothing else moved in the white sun of August.
Just short of the bridge, Robert Kincaid stopped. He stood there for a moment, then squatted down, looking through the camera. He walked to the other side of the road and did the same thing. Then he moved into the cover of the bridge and studied the beams and floor planks, looked at the stream below through a hole in the side.
Francesca snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray, swung open the door, and put her boots on the gravel. She glanced around to make sure none of her neighbors’ cars were coming and walked toward the bridge. The sun was a hammer in late afternoon, and it looked cooler inside the bridge. She could see his silhouette at the other end until he disappeared down the incline toward the stream.
Inside, she could hear pigeons burbling softly in their nests under the eves and put the palm of her hand on the side planking, feeling the warmth. Graffiti was scrawled on some of the planks: “Jimbo–Denison, Iowa.” “Sherry + Dubby.” “Go Hawks!” The pigeons kept on burbling softly.
Francesca peeked through a crack between two of the side planks, down toward the stream where Robert Kincaid had gone. He was standing on a rock in the middle of the little river, looking toward the bridge, and she was startled to see him wave. He jumped back to the bank and moved easily up the steep grade. She kept watching the water until she sensed his boots on the bridge flooring.
“It’s real nice, real pretty here,” he said, his voice reverberating inside the covered bridge.
Francesca nodded. “Yes, it is. We take these old bridges for granted around here and don’t think much about them.”
He walked to her and held out a small bouquet of wildflowers, black-eyed Susans. “Thanks for the guided tour.” He smiled softly. “I’ll come back at dawn one of these days and get my shots.” She felt something inside of her again. Flowers. Nobody gave her flowers, even on special occasions.
“I don’t know your name,” he said. She realized then that she had not told him and felt dumb about that. When she did, he nodded and said, “I caught the smallest trace of an accent. Italian?”
“Yes. A long time ago.”
The green truck again. Along the gravel roads with the sun lowering itself. Twice they met cars, but it was nobody Francesca knew. In the four minutes it took to reach the farm, she drifted, feeling unraveled and strange. More of Robert Kincaid, writer-photographer, that’s what she wanted. She wanted to know more and clutched the flowers on her lap, held them straight up, like a schoolgirl coming back from an outing.
The blood was in her face. She could feel it. She hadn’t done anything or said anything, but she felt as if she had. The truck radio, indistinguishable almost in the roar of road and wind, carried a steel guitar song, followed by the five o’clock news.
He turned the truck up the lane. “Richard is your husband?” He had seen the mailbox.
“Yes,” said Francesca, slightly short of breath. Once her words started, they kept on coming. “It’s pretty hot. Would you like an ice tea?”
He looked over at her. “If it’s all right, I sure would.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
She directed him—casually, she hoped—to park the pickup around behind the house. What she didn’t need was for Richard to come home and have one of the neighbor men say, “Hey, Dick; havin’ some work done at the place? Saw a green pickup there last week. Knew Frannie was home so I did’n bother to check on it.”
Up broken cement steps to the back porch door. He held the door for her, carrying his camera knapsacks. “Awful hot to leave the equipment in the truck,” he had said when he pulled them out.
A little cooler in the kitchen, but still hot. The collie snuffled around Kincaid’s boots, then went out on the back porch and flopped down while Francesca removed ice from metal trays and poured sun tea from a half-gallon glass jug. She knew he was watching her as he sat at the kitchen table, long legs stretched in front of him, brushing his hair with both hands.
“Lemon?”
“Yes, please.”
“Sugar?”
“No, thanks.”
The lemon juice dribbled slowly down the side of a glass, and he saw that, too. Robert Kincaid missed little.
Francesca set the glass before him. Put her own on the other side of the Formica-topped table and her bouquet in water, in an old jelly glass with renderings of Donald Duck on it. Leaning against the counter, she balanced on one leg, bent over, and took off a boot. Stood on her bare foot and reversed the process for the other boot.
He took a small drink of tea and watched her. She was about five feet six, fortyish or a little older, pretty face, and a fine, warm body. But there were pretty women everywhere he traveled. Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. That’s why he found most young women unattractive, regardless of their exterior beauty. They had not lived long enough or hard enough to possess those qualities that interested him.
But there was something in Francesca Johnson that did interest him. There was intelligence; he could sense that. And there was passion, though he couldn’t quite grasp what that passion was directed toward or if it was directed at all.
Later, he would tell her that in ways undefinable, watching her take off her boots that day was one of the most sensual moments he could remember. Why was not important. That was not the way he approached his life. “Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.” That’s what he had said.
She sat at the table, one leg curled under her, and pulled back strands of hair that had fallen over her face, refastening them with the tortoiseshell comb. Then, remembering, she rose and went to the end cupboard, took
