Morning Glory

'Anything you want to tell. Where did you meet him?'

Studying the dim circle of light on the ceiling, she launched into her recollection. 'Glendon delivered ice to our house when I was a little girl. We lived in town then, my mother and my grandparents and me. Grandpa was a preacher man, used to go out on circuit for weeks at a time.' She peered at Will from the corner of her eye, gave a quirk of a smile. 'Fire and brimstone, you know. Voice like a cyclone throwing dirt against the house.' She told him what she chose, winnowing out any hints of her painfully lonely youth, the truth about her family, the bad memories from school. Of Glendon she spoke more frankly, telling about their meetings in the woods when she was still a girl, and of their shared respect for wild creatures. 'The first present he ever brought me was a sack of corn for the birds, and from then on we were friends. I married him when I was nineteen and I been livin’ here ever since,' she finished.

At the end of her recital, Will felt disappointed. He’d learned nothing of the house in town nor why she had been locked in it, none of the secrets of Eleanor Dinsmore Parker. The truth seemed strange: she was his wife, yet he knew less about her than he knew of some of the whores he’d frequented in his day. Above all, he wanted to know about that house so that he could assure her it made no difference to him. Given time, she might tell him more, but for now he respected her right to privacy. He, too, had secret hurts too painful to reveal yet.

'Now your turn,' she said.

'My turn?'

'Tell me about you. Where you lived when you were a boy, how you ended up here.'

He began with sterile facts. 'I lived mostly in Texas but there were so many towns I couldn’t name ’em all. Sometimes in orphanages, sometimes people would take me in. I was born down around Austin, they tell me, but I don’t remember it till I grew up and went back there one time when I was doing some rodeoing.'

'What do you remember?'

'First memories, you mean?'

'Yes.'

Will thought carefully. It came back slowly, painfully. 'Spilling a bowl of food, breakfast cereal, I think, and getting whupped so hard I forgot about being hungry.'

'Oh, Will…'

'I got whupped a lot. All except for one place. I lived there for a half a year, maybe… it’s hard to remember exactly. And I’ve never been able to remember their names, but the woman used to read me books. She had this one with a real sad story I just loved called A Dog of Flanders, and there were drawings of a boy and this dog of his, and I used to think, Wow, it must be something to have a dog of your own. A dog would always be there, you know?' Will mused a moment, then cleared his throat and went on. 'Well, anyway, this woman, the thing I remember about her most is she had green eyes, the prettiest green eyes this side of the Pecos, and you know what?'

'What?' Elly turned her face up to him.

Smiling down, he told her, 'The first time I walked into this house that was what I liked best about you. Your green eyes. They reminded me of hers, and she was always kind. And she was the only one who made me think books were okay.'

For a moment they gazed at each other until their feelings came close to surfacing, then Elly said, 'Tell me more.'

'The last place I lived was with a family named Tryce on a ranch down near a dump called Cistern. The old man’s watch came up missing and I figured soon as I heard what was up that they’d pin the blame on me, so I lit out before he could whup me. I was fourteen and I made up my mind as long as I stayed on the move they couldn’t stick me in any more schools where all the kids with ma’s and pa’s looked at me like I was a four-day-old pork chop left in somebody’s pocket. I caught a freight and headed for Arizona and I been on the road ever since. Except for prison and here.'

'Fourteen. But that’s so young.'

'Not when you start out like I did.'

She studied his profile, the dark eyes riveted on the ceiling, the crisp, straight nose, the unsmiling lips. Softly, she asked, 'Were you lonely?' His Adam’s apple slid up, then down. For a moment he didn’t answer, but when he did, he turned to face her.

'Yeah. Were you?'

Nobody had ever asked her before. Had he been anyone from town, she could not have admitted it, but it felt remarkably good to answer, 'Yeah.'

Their gazes held as both recognized a first fallen barrier.

'But you had a family.'

'A family, but no friends. I’ll bet you had friends.'

'Friends? Naww.' Then, after thoughtful consideration, 'Well, one maybe.'

'Who?'

He tipped an eyebrow her way. 'You sure you wanna hear this?'

'I’m sure. Who?'

He never talked about Josh. Not to anyone. And the story would lead to a conclusion that might make Eleanor Parker rethink her decision to invite him into her bed. But for the first time, Will found he wanted it off his chest.

'His name was Josh,' he began. 'Josh Sanderson. We worked together on a ranch down near a place called Dime Box, Texas. Near Austin.' Will chuckled. 'Dime Box was somethin’. It was like… well, maybe like watchin’the black and white movie after seeing the previews in color. A sorry little dump. Everything kind of dead, or waitin’ to die. The people, the cattle, the sagebrush. And nothing to do there on your night off. Nothing.' Will paused, his brow smooth while his thoughts ranged back in time.

'So what’d you do?'

He shot her one quick glance. 'This ain’t much of a subject for a wedding night, Eleanor.'

'Most wives already know this kind of stuff about their husbands by their wedding night. Tell me-what’d you do?'

As if settling in for a long talk, he rolled his pillow into a ball, crooked his head against it, lifted one knee and linked his fingers over his belly. 'All right, you asked, I’ll tell you. We used to go down to La Grange to the whorehouse there. Saturday nights. Take a bath and get all duded up and take our money into town and blow damn near all of it on booze and floozies. Me, I wasn’t fussy. Take anyone that was free. But Josh got to liking this one named Honey Rossiter.' He shook his head disbelievingly. 'Honey-can you believe that? She swore it was her given name but I never believed her. Josh did, though. Hell, Josh’d believe anything that woman told him. And he wouldn’t hear anything bad about Honey. Got real pissed off if I said a word against her. He had it bad for her, that’s a fact.

'She was tall-eighteen hands, we used to joke-and had this head full of hair the color of a palomino, hung clear down to her rump. It was some hair all right, curly but coarse as a horse’s mane, the kind a man could really sink his hands into. Josh used to talk about it, laying in his bunk at night-Honey and her honey hair. Then pretty soon he started talking about marrying her. Josh, I says, she’s a whore. Why would you want to marry a whore? Josh, he got real upset when I said that. He was so crazy over her he couldn’t tell truth from lies.

'She was like…' He rested a wrist on the updrawn knee, absently toying with a piece of green yarn on the quilt. '… well, like an actress in a picture show-played at being whatever a man needed. She’d change herself to suit the man, and when she was with Josh she acted like he was the only man for her. Trouble is, Josh started believing it.

'Then one night we came there and when Josh asked for Honey the old harlot who ran the place says Honey’s been spoken for for the next two hours. Who else would he like?

'Well, Josh never wanted anybody else, not after Honey. He waited. But by the time she come back down he was so steamed his lid was rattlin’ and he was ready to blow. She comes saunterin’ into the Leisure Room-that’s what they called the bar where the men waited on the women-and Lord a-mighty, you never heard such a squall as when Josh jumped her about who she was spendin’ two hours with while he was left downstairs coolin’ his heels.

'She says to him, You don’t own me, Josh Sanderson, and he says, Yeah, well, I’d like to. Then he pulls a ring out of his pocket and says he’d come there that night intendin’ to ask her to marry him.'