“Did better today, didn’t we?” Clare said as he approached.
Ansel nodded. He felt the cough coming on, held his breath waiting for it to subside.
“I mean, not good exactly, but better.”
“That’s right,” Ansel said. He was able to breathe now. “We did better.” The boy was indomitable. They were picking the last of the navels, going grove to grove, hauling ladders tree to tree, pulling down the fruit one by one until the canvas bag slung over your shoulder seemed to pancake the plates in your spine, and then you picked a dozen more for good measure before humping the fruit down to the bin that was yours and Clare’s, and stood barely more than half as full as any other pair of pickers. That was just how it was. It was tree-climbing work, and they’d never worked in trees, but Clare wasn’t giving up. He would barely set his ladder before racing up, reaching far out to one side, then another.
“You ought to be more careful,” Ansel said one day while they sat at the edge of a grove eating their sandwiches and drinking their coffee.
Clare said, “Well, we get paid by the box.”
Ansel gave him that. “But you go and kill yourself and your mother will be disappointed in us both.” He was going for humor, but he meant it, too.
“I just do it the way they do,” Clare said, and glanced toward the other men. They squatted now, eating tamales they’d warmed over coals.
The Mexicans brought little rugs to spread in the shade of a tree for a nap after lunch. Ansel missed the occasion that Kansans had always made of a dinner. He encouraged Clare to bring a cloth for a nap, but Clare always wanted to get back to picking. Ansel didn’t mind the picking—he liked the look and the feel of the fruit in his hand—but the pace of it, the insistence on quickness, deprived him of the time to think and daydream that tractor work afforded. And he found now that having time to think and dream was as vital to him as food or water, though—and he knew this as a regrettable truth—any space he had now for thinking and dreaming always got filled up with Aldine, which shamed him. So they went back to picking even while the men from Mexico took their siestas, but it didn’t matter—he and Clare always picked less, and he had the feeling that the Mexicans resented the fact that he and Clare were picking these trees alongside them instead of their brothers and cousins. He didn’t blame them. They knew what he knew: that without Hurd’s help they wouldn’t have the work.
As they walked up the lane toward Ida and Hurd’s house, a car from the opposite direction wheeled into view, a black Packard he recognized at once as McNamara’s, except Charlotte was sitting beside him, her head thrown back in laughter.
Ansel turned slightly so as to speak to McNamara when he slowed, but he didn’t slow. The black Packard kept speed and passed by.
They watched them go. Charlotte glanced back from the Packard’s front seat.
“I don’t think he saw us,” Clare said. When his father remained grimly silent, he added, “I don’t think Mr. McNamara recognized us.”
When they got to the house, Ansel didn’t go inside. “If you see your mother, could you tell her I’m out by the bottle tree?”
He’d found a relic of a chair on the road one day and had brought it home. He sat in it now. The dog came and laid her head on his knee for a second or two before settling at his feet. He’d rolled and smoked one cigarette and started another before he heard footsteps behind him. He didn’t turn but when he felt her close by, he said, “I saw Charlotte with that man today. Do you know where they were going?”
“If you mean Mr. McNamara, he’s taking her to see the place where she will be the domestic arts teacher.” Ansel flicked a glance at her and she said, “Mr. McNamara has offered her a job.”
Ansel stared down through the trees. “That’s good for her. Still, it makes me worry that we’ll be beholden.”
She didn’t respond for a few moments, and he could feel it, the distance he had put between them and the way she had started, already, to build a wall around herself.
“We already are beholden, in a way. How do you think I got my job?”
He swung his gaze to her. “Through Ida and Hurd.”
“Who went to Mr. McNamara.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She seemed to soften a bit. “It’s not a bad thing, Ansel. With my money and what Charlotte will soon be making, which is good money, by the way, real good money for a girl her age, and with every little bit you and Clare make we’ll soon be able to rent a place of our own.”
Ansel said nothing. There was nothing to say. He didn’t know if it was worse to hear her say it or to realize she was right. Every little bit you and Clare make. He looked off, saying nothing until she went away. He lit another cigarette and drew deeply of the smoke and slowly exhaled. He brought his hand up as if to rub his nose but it wasn’t to rub his nose. It was to smell the tobacco on his fingers. That night with Aldine he’d brought her hand to his face and smelled the tobacco on her fingertips and then, in a kind of ecstasy he’d never imagined let alone experienced, he’d sucked the taste of it from her fingers, one after another.
58
Disparaging Ansel was something Glynis never grew tired of. Did he forget he was married? Did you forget he was married? What kind of man, and on and on.
“Glynis,” Aldine said, “we must agree to speak no further of this. I do not speak to him. I do not write to him. What more is there to do?”
Glynis didn’t answer, but made it clear that she wouldn’t desist until Aldine’s degree of disapproval matched her own. To accomplish that, her tight-lipped expression said, more talking was certainly required.
More than once Aldine had thought about Mrs. Odekirk. She had encountered her on Neosho Street one summer afternoon when the temperature was 104. Mrs. Odekirk, her skeletal frame perched on slender legs like a white heron, had hugged and kissed Aldine so affectionately that Aldine might have been her own daughter. “Let me look at you,” she kept saying, the heat pulsing through everything, turning Aldine’s black pocketbook into a patent leather stove.
“The Josephsons said you were here!” Mrs. Odekirk said, the lines in her face symmetrical and handsome, like the comb marks in her tightly bound gray hair. “Loam County is all but deserted now. I can’t drive anymore, so I sold my car, and I’ve come to live in my mother’s old house here in Emporia.” One hardened hand curled into itself with arthritis. With the other hand, she touched a handkerchief now and then to her narrow, bony nose.
Aldine smiled and moved farther into the shade of the bank building.