“But don’t tell him. He won’t want to know I took a bath in somebody else’s house.”
Well, Roy never knew that about his wife. And I suppose there were a lot of other things he didn’t know or understand about her, but he did build her a house. He had the first part of it completed by fall. Later there were other rooms added on, a new kitchen and a back porch and also what turned out to be a parlor, but the first square two-story part of the house was raised late that summer. And he was a good rough carpenter, I’ll say that for him.
He had to buy the lumber in town, in Holt, and haul it home in his wagon, and then he had to nail it together himself. Ada helped him to lift the wall frames into place and steady them while he tacked them down, but for the most part he did all the work himself, since he had picked a place to live where there wasn’t another full-grown male anywhere near, and anyway he wouldn’t have asked for help if there had been. They bought a few sticks of furniture to go along with Ada’s sewing machine and moved into the house sometime before time to pick corn.
Roy’s dryland corn didn’t do very well that first year. There wasn’t much to pick. There was too much sagebrush and soapweed and too many grass roots to contend with, and even in his hurry the corn had still been planted late; the corn seed was still in the bags when most of what rain we get here falls in the spring. So his corn didn’t do very well, and I don’t suppose Ada was doing very well, either. By corn harvest I believe she was good and sick, because sometime in August of that summer Roy had found enough sap and energy and time too to get her pregnant, so that on the night of April twenty-first in the following spring, after she had managed somehow to get through that first long High Plains winter, Ada gave birth to a girl she named Edith.
Roy was going to do that by himself, too, of course. He was going to boil the sheets, rotate the head, slap some breath into the baby, and sew Ada up afterwards with needle and thread—without help from anyone. I don’t know, maybe he had read some flyers and government brochures about that too, but things in this case didn’t happen the way he expected them to, either. Because sometime that night, after Ada had been in labor for two or three days with her thin brown hair sweat-stuck to her face and her white thighs gone as rigid as sticks, Roy caught one of his workhorses and galloped that dark half mile west to the other house and woke the half-Indian woman. When her face appeared in one of the upstairs opened windows he yelled up at her:
“Goddamn it, I can do it. But she wants you. She wants you to come over there.”
He was sitting down there on that bareback excited Belgium, yelling up into the dark towards a dark face he could barely see.
“I could do it myself, but now she says she has to have you there. But I’ll make that right too, goddamn it. You wait and see.”
The woman in the upstairs window watched him on his horse in her front yard.
“Don’t you hear me?” he yelled. “Don’t you understand a goddamn thing I’m telling you? She wants you over there.”