be yourself anymore. If a woman ordered a straight double-shot with a beer chaser in a place like this, they'd probably throw her out. Ditto, if she asked for a hamburger with raw onions.
You just couldn't march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn't even hear it.. – She could no longer hear it. It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be. Lost along with the big, bluff man, the joking introspective man, who had taught her how to listen for it.
Her drink came, and she took a quick sip of it. Then, with a touch of desperation, she half-emptied the glass. That helped. She could think of Cole without wanting to break up.
She and The Farmer had lived together for ten years, ten of the most wonderful years of her life. It had been a kind of camping-out- living, the kind that most people would turn up their noses at, but it was that way by choice not necessity. With Cole, it seemed the only possible way to live.
They always traveled by chair-car in those days. They wore whatever they felt like wearing, usually overalls or khakis for him and gingham for her. When it was possible to obtain, Cole would have a two-quart jar of corn whiskey in a paper sack. Instead of eating in diners, they carried a huge lunch wrapped in newspapers. And every time the train stopped, Cole would hop off and buy gobs of candy and cold drinks and cookies and everything else he could lay hands on.
They couldn't begin to eat so much themselves, naturally. Cole gloried in abundance, but he was a rather finicky eater and a very light drinker. The food and the booze were to pass around, and the way he did it no one ever refused. He knew just the right thing to say to each person-a line of scripture, a quote from Shakespeare, a homely joke. Before they'd been in the car an hour, everyone was eating and drinking and warming up to everyone else. And Cole would be beaming on them as though they were a bunch of kids and he was a doting father.
Women didn't hate her in those days.
Men didn't look at her the way they did now.
Friendliness, the ability to make friends, was The Farmer's stock in trade, of course. Something eventually to be cashed in on through small-town banks via a series of simple-seeming but bewildering maneuvers. But he insisted on regarding the payoffs as no more than a fair exchange. For mere money, a thing useless and meaningless in itself, he traded great hopes anda new perspective on life. And nothing was ever managed so that the frammis would show through for what it was. Always the people were left with hope and belief.
What more could they want, anyway? What could be more important in life than having something to hope for and something to believe in?
For more than a year, they lived on a rundown farm in Missouri, a rocky clay-soiled sixty acres with a completely unmodernized house and an outdoor privy. That was their best time together.
It was a two-hole privy, and sometimes they'd sit together in it for hours. Peering out at the occasional passersby on the rutted red- clay road. Watching the birds hop about in the yard. Talking quietly or reading from the stack of old newspapers and magazines that cluttered one corner of the building.
'Now, look at this, Moira,' he would say, pointing to an advertisement. 'While the price of steak has gone up twenty-three cents a pound in the last decade, the price of coal has only advanced one and one-half cents per pound. It looks like the coal dealers are giving us quite a break, doesn't it?'
'Well…' She didn't always know how to respond to him; whether he was just making an idle comment or telling her something.
'Or maybe they aren't either,' he'd say, 'when you consider that meat is normally sold by the pound and coal by the ton.'
Now and then, she'd come up with just the right answer, like the time he'd pointed out that 'four out of five doctors' took aspirin, and what did she think about that, anyway?
'I'd say the fifth doctor was a lucky guy,' she said. 'He's the only one who doesn't have headaches.' And Cole had been very pleased with her.
They got a lot of fun out of the advertisements. For years afterward, she could look at some nominally straightforward pronouncement and break into laughter.
Even now she laughed over them. But wryly, with sardonic bitterness. Not as she and Cole Langley had laughed.
One day, when he was trying to dig down to the bottom of the magazine pile, it toppled over, uncovering a small box-like structure with a hole cut in the top. A kid's toilet.
Moira had made some comment about its being cute. But Cole went on staring at it, the laughter dying in his eyes, his mouth loosening sickishly. Then he turned and whispered to her:
'I'll bet they killed the kid. I'll bet it's buried down there under us…'
She was stunned, speechless. She sat staring at him, unable to move or speak, and Cole seemed to take her silence for agreement. He went on talking, lowvoiced, even more impellingly persuasive than he normally was. And after a time, there was no reality but the hideousness he created, and she found herself nodding to what he said.
No, no child should be allowed to live. Yes, all children should be killed at birth or as soon afterward as possible. It was the kindest thing to do. It was the only way to spare them the futile torment, the frustrating and senseless torture, the paradoxically evil mess which represented life on the planet Earth.
Subconsciously, she knew she was seeing him for the first time, and that the laughing, gregarious Cole was only a shadow fleeing its owner's convictions. Subconsciously, she wanted to scream that he was wrong, that there were no absolutes of any kind, and that the real man might well be fleeing the shadow.
But she lacked the vocabulary for such thoughts, the mentality to string them together. They wandered about in her subconscious, unguided and uncohered, while Cole, as always, was utterly convincing. So, in the end, she had been persuaded. She agreed with everything he said.
And suddenly he had started cursing her. So she was a faker, too! A stinking hypocrite! She could do nothing for herself and nothing for anyone else because she believed in nothing.
From that day on The Farmer was on the toboggan. They jumped from the sticks to St. Louis, and when he wasn't dead drunk he was shooting himself full of hop. They had a hefty hunk of loot-rather Moira had it. Secretly, in the way of many wives-although she was not legally his wife-she had been rat-holing money for years. But the substantial sum she had cached wouldn't last a month at the rate he was going, so, as she saw it, there was only one thing to do. She took up hustling.
There was no stigma attached to it in their professional circle. In fact, it was an accepted practice for a woman to prostitute herself when her man was low on his back. But whores
He grew fanatical in his charges that she was a hypocrite and 'unbeliever,' shouting down her pleas that she wished only to help him. Wildly, he declared that she was a whore at heart, that she had always been a whore, that she had been one when he met her.
That was not true. In her early working life, as a photographer's model and cocktail waitress, she had occasionally given herself to men and received gifts in return. But it wasn't the same as whoring. She had liked the men involved. What she gave them was given freely, without bargaining, as were their gifts to her.
So Cole's false charges, insensibly made though they were, began to hurt more and more. Perhaps he didn't know what he was saying, or perhaps he did. But even the innocent blow of a child can be painful, possibly more so than that of an adult since its victim cannot bring himself to strike back. His only recourse, when the pain becomes unbearable, is to put himself beyond the child's reach…
Moira's last memory of Cole 'The Farmer' Langley was that of a wildly weeping man in overalls, shouting 'Whore!' from the curb in front of their swank apartment house as a grinning cab-driver drove her away.
