hopeless. But it didn't stop the longing he felt for her. In his daydreams he fell to reinventing the past, imagining that he had married Clara instead of Elmira. He gave himself a very different marriage. Clara wouldn't sit in the loft with her feet dangling all day. She wouldn't have run off on a whiskey boat. Probably she wouldn't have cared that Jake Spoon shot Benny. He imagined them raising horses and children together.
Of course, they had begun to do just that-raise horses and children together. But the reality was far different from the daydream. They weren't together. He could not go into her room at night and talk to her. He knew that if he could, he probably wouldn't be able to think of much to say, or if he did and said something stupid, Clara would answer sharply. Still he longed for it and lay awake at night in his little shed, thinking of her.
He was doing that when Lorena came to tell him Bob was dead. Hearing the footsteps, he had the hope that it was Clara, and he pictured her face in his mind, not stern and impersonal, as it often was when she was directing some work, but soft and smiling, as it might be if she were playing with Martin at the dinner table.
He opened the door and saw to his surprise that it was Lorena.
'He died,' Lorena said.
'Who?' July asked absently.
'Her husband,' Lorena said.
Then she's free, July thought. He couldn't feel sad.
'Well, I guess it's for the best,' he said. 'The man wasn't getting no better.'
Lorena noticed that he sounded happier than she had heard him sound since she arrived at the ranch. She knew exactly what it meant. She had often seen him looking at Clara with helpless love in his eyes. She herself didn't care one way or the other about July Johnson, but the dumb quality of his love annoyed her. Many men had looked at her that way, and she was not flattered by it. They wanted to pretend, such men, that they were different, that she was different, and that what might happen between them would be different than it would ever be. They wanted to pretend that they wanted pretty dresses and smiles, when what they really wanted was for her to lay down under them. That was the real wish beneath all the pretty wishes men had. And when she was under them, they could look down and pretend something pretty was happening, but she would look up and only see a dumb face above her, strained, dishonest and anything but pretty.
'She wants you to bring the coffin,' she said to July, watching him. Let Clara worry about the man. Watching him only made her long for Gus. He gave things that no one else could give. He wasn't dumb, and he didn't pretend that he wanted smiles when he wanted a poke.
They put the coffin in the front room, and July carried the frail corpse downstairs and put him in the coffin. Then, on Clara's instructions, he rode off to inform the few neighbors and to find a preacher. Clara and Lorena and the girls sat with the body all night, while Cholo dug a grave on the ridge above the barn where the boys were buried. Betsey slept most of the night in Lorena's arms-Clara thought it nice that she had taken to the young woman so.
At dawn Clara went out and took Cholo some coffee. He had finished digging and was sitting on the mound of earth that would soon cover Bob. Walking toward the ridge in the early sunlight, Clara had the momentary sense that they were all watching her, the boys and Bob. The vision lasted a second; it was Cholo who was watching her. It was windy, and the grass waved over the graves of her three boys-four now, she felt. In memory Bob seemed like a boy to her also. He had a boyish innocence and kept it to the end, despite the strains of work and marriage in a rough place. It often irritated her, that innocence of his. She had felt it to be laziness-it left her alone to do the thinking, which she resented. Yet she had loved it, too. He had never been a knowing man in the way that Gus was knowing, or even Jake Spoon. When she decided to marry Bob, Jake, who was a hothead, grew red in the face and proceeded to throw a fit. It disturbed him terribly that she had chosen someone he thought was dumb. Gus had been better behaved, if no less puzzled. She remembered how it pleased her to thwart them-to make them realize that her measure was different from theirs. 'I'll always know where he is,' she told Gus. It was the only explanation she ever offered.
Now, indeed, she would know where he was.
Cholo was watching her to see if she was hurt. He loved Clara completely and tried in small ways to make life easier for her, although he had concluded long before that she wasn't seeking ease. Often in the morning when she came down to the lots she would be somber and would stand by the fence for an hour, not saying a word to anyone. Other times there would be something working in her that scared the horses. He thought of Clara as like the clouds. Sometimes the small black clouds would pour out of the north; they seemed to roll over and over as they swept across the sky, like tumbleweeds. On some mornings things rolled inside Clara, and made her tense and snappish. She could do nothing with the horses on days like that. They became as she was, and Cholo would try gently to persuade her that it was not a good day to do the work. Other days, her spirit was quiet and calm and the horses felt that too. Those were the days they made progress training them.
Clara had brought two cups. She was very glad to be out of the house. She poured Cholo his coffee and then poured some for herself. She sat down on the mound of dirt beside him and looked into the open grave.
'Sometimes it seems like grave-digging is all we do,' she said. 'But that's wrong. I guess if we lived in a big town it wouldn't seem that way. I guess in New York there are so many people you don't notice the dying so much. People come faster than they go. Out here it shows more when people go-especially when it's your people.'
'Mister Bob, he didn't know mares,' Cholo said, remembering that ignorance had been his downfall.
'Nope,' Clara said. 'He didn't know mares.'
They sat quietly for a while, drinking coffee. Watching Clara, Cholo felt sad. He did not believe she had ever been happy. Always her eyes seemed to be looking for something that wasn't there. She might look pleased for a time, watching her daughters or watching some young horse, but then the rolling would start inside her again and the pleased look would give way to one that was sad.
'What do you think happens when you die?' she asked, surprising him. Cholo shrugged. He had seen much death, but had not thought much about it. Time enough to think about it when it happened.
'Not too much,' he said. 'You're just dead.'
'Maybe it ain't as big a change as we think,' Clara said. 'Maybe you just stay around near where you lived. Near your family, or wherever you was happiest. Only you're just a spirit, and you don't have the troubles the living have.'
A minute later she shook her head, and stood up. 'I guess that's silly,' she said, and started back to the house.
That afternoon July came back with a minister. The two nearest neighbors came-German families. Clara had seen more of the men than of the women-the men would come to buy horses and stay for a meal. She almost regretted having notified them. Why should they interrupt their work just to see Bob put in the ground? They sang two hymns, the Germans singing loudly in poor English. Mrs. Jensch, the wife of one of the German farmers, weighed over three hundred pounds. The girls had a hard time not staring at her. The buggy she rode in tilted far to one side under her weight. The minister was invited to stay the night and got rather drunk after supper-he was known to drink too much, when he got the chance. His name was the Reverend Spinnow and he had a large purple birthmark under one ear. A widower, he was easily excited by the presence of women. He was writing a book on prophecy and rattled on about it as they all sat in the living room. Soon both Clara and Lorena felt like choking him.
'Will you be thinking of moving into town now, Mrs. Allen?' the Reverend asked hopefully. It was worth the inconvenience of a funeral way out in the country to sit with two women for a while.
'No, we'll be staying right here,' Clara said.
July and Cholo carried out the mattress Bob had died on-it needed a good airing. Betsey cried a long time that night and Lorena went up to be with her. It was better than listening to a minister go on about prophecy.
The baby was colicky and Clara rocked him while the minister drank. July came in and asked if there was anything else she needed him to do.
'No,' Clara said, but July sat down anyway. He felt he should offer to rock his son, but knew the baby would just cry louder if he took him away from Clara. The minister finally fell asleep on the sofa and then, to their surprise, rolled off on the floor and began to snore loudly.
'Do you want me to carry him out?' July asked, hoping to feel useful. 'He could sleep in a wagon just as well.'
'Let him lie,' Clara said, thinking it had been an odd day. 'I doubt it's the first time he's slept on a floor, and anyway he isn't your lookout.'
