He’d thought it all out, they’re saying now.”
Neva was leaning against the wall. She stared at her fist. Her father’s voice, in the next room, was low, like at church.
“He’d dug a big trench and shot the mules so one fell into it and the other one half did. I guess he meant to cover them up but he didn’t. He’d gone out to hunt rabbits so no one took notice. Then he went straight into the barn. Mrs. Tanner saw him go in, but didn’t think anything about it for almost an hour and then she suddenly wondered where his mules were and why it was so quiet so she sent Yauncy out.” A second or two passed. “I guess she feels almost worse about that than the other. Sending Yauncy out.”
Quiet. Then her mother’s voice. “He knew the Bible. He knew that it was a . . .”
Neva held one box elder bug in her closed hand. Before, she could feel it scrabbling in there but it was resting now. She didn’t really want to listen to her mother and father but if she made noise now they would know she had been.
“Mrs. Tanner said he hadn’t wanted dinner. He sat with them, though, while they had soup and bread. She said he looked funny at them. Like he was thinking . . . And here afterward she wondered what all had gone on in his mind, sitting there looking at them, how maybe it would be better if they went all together to the sweet hereafter.”
Her parents were done talking but they didn’t move. Neither did Neva. She opened her hand and looked at the box elder bug. She blew on it but it didn’t move. She knew what had happened. Charlotte had told her. Mr. Tanner had an accident in the barn, a bad accident, and had fallen from the hayloft and even though Yauncy tried to save him it was too late.
24
On Sundays, Clare could almost pretend he was courting Aldine, that he’d brought her home to spend the evening with his family, and she was sitting apart from him, knitting on the sofa, only for propriety’s sake. Usually his father liked to read aloud after supper on that one day a week he wasn’t in the barn or on the tractor. He had read David Copperfield the previous winter, followed by Rudyard Kipling’s poems and stories, and he had then decided they should try Shakespeare. Too bad they had not done Lord By-run, Clare thought, because then he would not have embarrassed himself.
As his father paged through the Riverside Shakespeare, Neva lay on the floor and drew long-nosed horses that she colored pink and purple. Clare, trying not to stare at Aldine, raked his fingernails across the denim of his pants as if to file them. Charlotte read her own book. His mother sewed under light from the Tiffany lamp. From his place on the wall, Opa Hoffman looked down on all of them like a judge.
His mother still wore her apron, the one embroidered with the outline of a dish-washing bear, and from the way that she kept glancing frequently up at the clock, Clare knew she was wondering if whatever his father chose to read would be over before the start of her radio program.
People told Clare he looked like his mother. It was true they were colored alike: light brown hair, light brown eyes, unfreckled skin that darkened in summer like a jar of tea. They had identical slim noses, too, with a nostril flare that Clare thought made him look effeminate. He thought it was probably his nose that had made Aldine call him “Byronic” a few days after his classroom recitation of Lord Byron. What Lord Byron looked like, Clare would’ve liked to know.
Clare’s father could do accents: English, German, French, or Negro, though he’d stopped doing Irish and Scotch lately because he said Miss McKenna would know him for a charlatan. Finally his father looked up and said they might all take parts in King Richard III.
“Oh, please, Dad, not that!” Charlotte said. “Let me pick something a little more fun for the rest of us. Come on.”
The book was handed over, and his father slipped off his glasses, laid them aside, and rubbed his eyes.
“What about Venus and Adonis?” Charlotte asked. Her father had been moving page by page through the front of the book; she had flipped to the back. “We studied that myth at school. In the Mythology Club.”
“What is it, Lottie?” his father asked. “Is it a play? I don’t remember it.”
Charlotte didn’t answer, probably because he’d called her Lottie. She said it made her sound like a big dumb farm girl with pretzel braids. Everyone had called her that until she went away to high school, and now sometimes his father said “Lottie” without thinking. Clare himself employed it whenever he wanted to get her goat, which was fairly often.
“Venus and Adonis,” Charlotte began, tucking a loose spiral of hair behind her ear. If not for Aldine’s presence, Clare would have gone to bed. He was tired, and with Charlotte reading, there wouldn’t be any funny parts or accents.
“Who’s Venus?” Neva asked from her place on the rug, close to Aldine’s feet like an adoring dog. Aldine was knitting a hat just like her own for Neva—a hat she’d told Neva was called a bud-ay—and she looked up with a pleasant smile but didn’t stop moving her needles.
“The goddess of love,” Charlotte said, using her thumb to keep her place. “She fell in love with a handsome mortal but he was killed by a discus.”
“That’s some oo-ther handsome mortal. I think Adonis is killed by a boar,” Aldine said, and Clare took silent pleasure in the way that her pronunciation sounded both correct and poetic.
Neva colored a goggle-eyed pony. “A boar?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s very common,” Charlotte said, not looking up. “People are bored to death all the time. Especially on farms.”
Clare’s mother pulled a thread taut and looked reproachfully at Charlotte. “I believe Aldine means a wild pig.”
“Hogs,” Charlotte said. “Pigs. Boars. Boring people. Anyway, let’s just read the story. “Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face,” she began, “Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn.”
Neva’s pencil lead shushed across the paper, Clare peered at Aldine’s ankles, and Charlotte read on. It was just harmonious sound at first, something he listened to as he would listen to classical music on one of his mother’s radio shows, but then something about the way his father’s expression changed and the way his mother lifted her head made him try to change the archaic grammar into meaning.
“The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens—O, How quick is love!—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove:
Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust
And govern’d him in strength, though not in lust.”
It was about horses, yet it wasn’t about horses. He wished he’d been paying better attention to the verses that came before.
“So soon was she along as he was down,
Each leaning on their elbows and their hips:
Now doth she stroke his cheek, now doth he frown,