She swung her legs about so there was room for him to sit on the bed.
He raised his hands and held on to the doorjamb as if holding against something pushing from behind. “No,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “Not here.” The wind shivered the window glass, slid through the wall cracks. His skin felt different. It seemed as if some crusty everyday part of him suddenly dissolved, or was suddenly shed, and what was left was a new skin meant not to repel but receive. He closed and opened his eyes in a slow blink. “Put on your coat,” he whispered, and hearing how gruff it sounded, he tried again. “Please put on your coat and come with me.”
45
Clare didn’t know what awakened him. The wind, he supposed. The moon had risen outside his window, and he could see the long horizontal crack in the plaster of his wall and the nail that had once held his photo of Tom Mix and his horse Tony Jr. Clare removed his hand from the warmth of the blanket to look at his Tom Mix Straight Shooter signature ring. He’d had a wooden Tom Mix gun, too, with a revolving cartridge, but he’d traded it for Neva’s goldfish, gone now to Opal. The ring had looked like copper and silver in the ads, but it was just painted tin. He’d found the ring and the diagram of Tom Mix’s injuries among some clothes while packing and slipped the ring on his pinkie, unwilling to throw it away. He remembered how similar his hand was to Aldine’s in size if not smoothness and a sudden impulse came to him and took hold: he would give the ring to Aldine as a pledge that he would send for her once he had enough money. She should have someone to count on, and why shouldn’t he be that someone? Clare pulled his pants over his long underwear and crept up the stairs.
The door to Aldine’s room was not quite closed, and when he pushed it open, he saw the flat mattress and blanket. Aldine was gone.
He hurried down the one flight of stairs to his parents’ room. He would tell his father that she had run away. They would go after her, bring her back, make her safe. “Dad,” he whispered, and whispered again, louder, but he was looking at an empty bed.
He nearly yelled. He felt like yelling. Where was everyone? He had the sudden fleeting fearful sensation he remembered from fairy tales when parents sent their children off, or abandoned them in the woods somewhere. He listened to the house and heard nothing but wind. He eased down the stairs slowly and still listening.
From the doorway of the kitchen, he could see his mother and Neva curled up together on the narrow bed. He didn’t speak or move. He held his breath. But his mother shifted in the bed and looked up, as if she had felt someone in the room.
“What is it?” she asked. “Can’t you sleep?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I have to go out and relieve myself.” That was the way she had taught him to speak of bodily functions, the only phrase they could use.
“All right,” she said, and returned her head to the pillow.
He was quiet when he left the house and quiet as he approached the lit barn. He knew a place where he could look into the barn without opening the door, a wide enough crack between planks. Why he went to that crack instead of opening the door was a question he would ask himself later. He wondered whether the car was there, and this was the quickest way to find out. If it was gone, it was simple. His father had taken Aldine to the station already and he would not get to say good-bye to her.
When he brought his eye to the space between two boards, he saw at once that the car was there. Then he saw Aldine’s back. She was wearing her gray wool coat, and her hair was pressed down under her beret. She sat on a bale of straw. His father had lit a lantern and was talking quietly to her, partly obscured by more bales. He heard him tell Aldine, “You’ll like working there. Lots of people your age.”
He could hear Aldine crying, but she didn’t answer.
“Here,” her father said, extending his hand, “this will get you started.” And when she wouldn’t take it, he said, “It’s okay. I got more than I hoped for the cows.”
She didn’t touch the money his father set on her knee.
“Take it please,” his father said, but she didn’t.
“I should never, ever have come here,” she said in a small, bitter voice.
“Oh, don’t say that.”
“But what I don’t understand is why. Why did you do it then?” Aldine asked.
Clare watched and waited. He would forgive Aldine anything, but it wasn’t fair of her to blame his father. His father hadn’t been the one to fire her. His father hadn’t been the one to withhold her pay.
Aldine brought her hands up to her face, then leaned forward at the waist. Clare couldn’t see her head when she did that, and his father had drawn back out of sight.
“Writing me that note. Why did you do that?”
There was a scraping sound, like a boot on the floor. “I just thought we could do better with an outsider,” his father said. “Someone who knew poems and played music. And my pal Terence Tidball told me I could run a classified ad for free so . . .”
She raised her head and looked up at him. “No! I didn’t mean that. I meant, Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses,” she said, enunciating each word. “And being set I’ll smother thee with kisses.”
Clare recognized the lines, and the poem they came from.
“What?” his father asked.
Aldine didn’t answer. She was sitting up straight again. She was no longer crying. “Someone in the house gave me a note with those lines on it. I saw that you had the Shakespeare book out here that day when you fixed my boot, and I thought—”
Aldine stopped talking for a few seconds.
“I thought you meant . . . ,” she said, her voice almost strangled.
“Oh, Aldine,” Clare heard his father say softly, “I couldn’t write a note like that.”
Aldine was staring at his father. She stared and stared. Finally she said, “I guess it was only Clare then.”
She fell silent and Clare felt the cold in his nostrils and fingertips, in the knuckles he held against the rough wood of the barn.
“Aldine,” his father said again.
“I know. I should’ve known you’d ne’er think of me that way.”
“But that isn’t true,” his father said, and Aldine kept her face down and Clare watched his father reach for her hand.
It was a clumsy gesture—even Clare knew that much—but like something released from gravity she rose up into his arms, and he began to kiss Aldine in a way that Clare had never imagined one person might kiss another. It was shocking and alarming and dreadful. They looked ravenous for one another, and Clare stepped back, weakened in the legs, his body beginning to shiver violently.
Clare turned and walked toward the house. His legs felt heavy, like he was wearing boots of ice. Somehow he opened the yard gate, then the door to the mud porch, then the front door. He made no attempt at quietness.
“Clare?” his mother said in a calling whisper. “Clare?”
Clare said nothing and took himself upstairs.