It had gotten her Henry—that’s what she had to remind herself of whenever she started thinking about the mistakes of the past. At that moment, as she hung the laundry on the line, Henry was scattering chicken feed from a bucket half as tall as he was. He had dragged the bucket from the barn with great effort, but not once had he asked for help. The first sentence out of his toddler mouth had been I do it, and at five, he thought himself no less capable of running the whole farm, if need be. She could credit or blame Tom for that. Tom was a capable man and never one to ask for help, either. Not for the first time, she tried to imagine Henry’s life without Tom. Would it have been worse for him to grow up with his own father or with no father at all?
Alice should have known better, but what was the use of piling up all of the things that she should have seen, should have known, should have done? Jimmy had been a few years ahead of her in school, one of those boys who from a distance seemed to move through life with an easy grace. She saw that ease and wanted to wrap herself in it, to drown in it. She wasn’t a layabout; far from it. She balanced the farm and schoolwork and cooking and cleaning, and when graduation came, her life was the farm and the house entirely—that’s what life had in store for the only child of a dairyman, a girl whose mother had passed when she was only thirteen. But nothing seemed to weigh heavily on Jimmy’s shoulders. When the mood struck him, he fixed cars at his uncle’s shop outside Poughkeepsie. And when another mood blew in, he would spend the day fishing Wappinger Creek. His life was carefree and Alice let herself believe that once they were joined together, she would learn the secret of this free-and-easy style.
Only up close did Jimmy’s ease reveal itself to be laziness, a weakness that permeated his bones. She should have guessed at it, should have wondered why all the girls who were his own age passed on him when they began pairing up with boys, choosing ones who were more solid, more ambitious, or more willing to be pushed by the women in their lives. Instead, Alice thrilled at her good fortune when Jimmy’s eye alighted on her, as if he had been waiting for her all along, as if life had kept him out of the clutches of those girls who cut their eyes at Alice when she first appeared in the passenger seat of the Model A or shared a Coca-Cola with him at the counter of the Taghkanic Diner, Jimmy’s jacket draped over her shoulders. Later she would wonder if that look from the other girls wasn’t jealousy but pity. They knew what was coming, but Alice was a farm girl, not a town girl, and so, not being one of them, she was left to care for herself.
Her father had seen it in Jimmy and warned Alice, but was there any girl who listened to her father about love? That’s what she believed she felt: love. And love doesn’t think about making a living, doesn’t ask if your dear one is ready for a life of rising before dawn and mucking out the barn and trudging through the pasture in the pouring-down rain when one of the cows doesn’t return at nightfall. Love doesn’t care about any of that, but life sure does. Jimmy kept telling her that life would be against them until they could sell the farm and make a go of things in town. An automobile shop, that was one of his ideas. A gasoline pump out front, a garage where he could fix cars, and a small café where she would serve coffee and sandwiches for city folks out for a drive in the country. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and that’s how they would make ends meet. He made it sound like a real adventure, people coming from far and wide to fill up their tanks and sample a slice of Alice’s famous apple pie, but it troubled Alice that his dream depended on—required, even—the dispossession or death of her father before it could be launched. In the meantime he made no effort to prepare for any kind of future. He saved no money, did nothing but grumble about living in the house of his father-in-law, and called himself a slave on the old man’s plantation. That the plantation was no more than a hundred acres of grass and rock and woods in a remote corner of Dutchess County never seemed to dampen his sense that they could someday sell it for a small fortune and really start living.
Until then, living was precisely what they weren’t doing. Alice and Jimmy seemed trapped in a half-life where little by little they stopped talking to each other, stopped going on picnics by the river, stopped going for drives to Rhinebeck or Millbrook or Pine Plains, stopped doing all of the things they had done before they were husband and wife. Alice had held out against Jimmy’s pleas throughout their courtship and saved herself until the wedding night, and for a while after the big day they’d had a real honeymoon of it. He couldn’t keep his hands off her and she was happy to have his hands wherever they wanted to roam, now that she was Mrs. James Swain. But as he grew more surly, more cramped in the second-floor bedroom, he turned away from her at night. How could he be expected to be in the mood, he protested, when his wife’s father was downstairs, in the room below theirs? It was unnatural. But without steady work for Jimmy, that was life.
After a year of this not-living, and then another year of it, he announced that he needed to go on the road to see if prospects were better in some other place. Christmas had just passed and during the holidays Jimmy had run into some old high-school pals back in town to visit their folks. One day he told Alice that a buddy of his had work for him in Worcester, and the next day he said that he might try his luck with one of his pals on the docks in New London. He was tired of waiting for life to come to him—by which Alice figured he meant that he was tired of waiting for her father to die—so he was going to go out and make a life for them. Except it wouldn’t be them, not yet. It made no sense to take Alice with him until he could get settled (never mind that she could outwork him any day of the week). In the meantime, he would send back money and sock away the rest for their future. That was the plan, and the glow it cast filled him with an energy he hadn’t shown in a long time. His was the nervous twitch of the horse who has been loaded into the starting gate and who awaits the bell that will release him into a sprint.