Leaving Cheyenne Read online

  After I had cried enough, and thought about things enough, I finally did go to sleep. It wasn’t good sleeping—I felt like I had fever, but I guess I would have slept all morning if Gid hadn’t been good enough to come by and see about me. First thing I knew someone was banging on the cellar door. Down where I was it was still pitch dark.

  “I’m down here,” I said. “You can open the door.”

  Bright sunlight fell on the steps and across the foot of the cot, and I seen Gid’s old boots on the top step and knew it was him.

  “Well, thank goodness,” he said. “Can I come on down? I was scared you’d blown plumb away.” He took another step, so I could see about to his knees.

  I sat up and pushed the hair back out of my face. “My lord,” I said, “I’ve overslept. What time is it, Gid? I bet the milk cow thinks she’s forgot.”

  “Oh, it’s not too late,” he said. “About seven. I can get them chores for you. Can I come down?”

  “Please come on down here,” I said, pulling the quilts up around my middle. “Did the house blow away?” He came on down the steps, I seen his legs and his belly—he was getting a little bulge—and then all of him, standing there kinda grinning at me but looking like he had been worried. Gid was always my favorite; sometimes when I seen him the delight would shoot right through me, as sharp sometimes as a sting.

  “Well, Molly, I sure was worried about you,” he said. “I heard on the five o’clock weather report there was two tornadoes sighted out this way.”

  “Oh, sit down here,” I said. “I’m all right.” And when he sat down on the cot I couldn’t keep from hugging him. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and I felt the bristles on his face against my neck and his arms squeezing my sides; it made me feel good clear to the bottom. He was tense and tight as a drum. Gid always came to me tense. I held him and rubbed my hand on his neck and down his back, and in about two minutes he kind of sighed and let things loosen inside him.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if you was to blow away,” he said.

  “Hush,” I said. “I won’t.” I made enough room on the cot that he could lay down by me; it wasn’t comfortable, but for a few minutes it was okay; I felt like myself agin. Then Gid got embarrassed that I would think he came for bedroom stuff—as many times as he had come for that he still got embarrassed if he thought I knew it—and he sat up.

  “Well, I never meant to come out here and go back to bed,” he said, picking his hat up off the floor.

  “I guess you’re the silliest man alive,” I said. “Maybe that’s why I love you so much. When you were young I didn’t think you were silly at all.”

  I got up too and slipped my bathrobe on and we went up the steps and outside. The yard grass was wet and cool against my bare feet, but it was a clear day, and the sun was drying things up fast. I guess it was the latest I’d slept in two or three years. There were a lot of broken limbs and leaves and tumbleweeds in the yard, and it had blown a few shingles off the roof, but I didn’t see any serious damage. Gid went around the house, inspecting everything, but I felt too good to worry about wind damage; I stood by the cellar, yawning and stretching the kinks out of myself, soaking up the sun. Gid went in the house and got the milk bucket and came and stood by me a minute. He had a look on his face that meant he really wanted to spend the day with me but wanted to do fifty other things too.

  “‘I’ll go milk,” he said. “I never ate breakfast in town, I could eat with you. I got a million things to do today.”

  I rubbed my head against his neck; it embarrassed him a little.

  “Go on and milk,” I said. “I’ll get breakfast. But you needn’t be planning on rushing off.”

  “I got to, Molly,” he said. “I just wish I didn’t.”

  I went in and cooked a big breakfast, eggs and bacon and biscuits and gravy, and pretty soon he came in with the milk. We sat down and ate.

  “What do you hear from Jimmy?” he said, while we were drinking coffee.

  “Nothing.” And that was all he said during breakfast. I knew he was getting up his nerve to leave.

  “Well, that was a good breakfast,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I hate to eat and run, but I guess I better. I got many a mile to make today.”

  “Don’t leave this morning, Gid,” I said. “Just stay around here.”

  When I came right out and asked him, flat like that, he had to at least look at me. He was too honest just to dodge behind his hat.

  “You need me to help you do something?” he said.

  I could have slapped him for saying that. I needed him to help me live. “No,” I said. “I just like to be around you.”

  It was like I had run a needle into his quick. He shoved his hands in his pocket and shook his head. He didn’t say anything, and I sipped my coffee.

  “I’m glad you do,” he said, finally. “I’d like to stay a month. But you know what I’m up against. I’ve got a few more obligations than you have.”

  I felt miserable for being so hard on him, but I got harder in spite of it.

  “Okay,” I said. “Come back next time there’s a storm.”

  “Aw, now be fair,” he said, and I could tell he was trembling. “I got things I have to do; I’m a husband. Can’t you understand that?”

  “I understand you ain’t going to stay,” I said. “It’s pretty plain what you don’t want to do.” Before I could finish saying it he had stepped over and yanked me out of the chair so quick I didn’t even see his hand, grabbed my hair and yanked my head back so tears sprang out of my eyes, and my face was about two inches from his. But after he held me that way a minute his hands began to tremble.

  “I’m sorry, Gid,” I said, and we walked outside together and stood in the yard.

  “I’m the most worthless white man alive,” he said. “I’ll stay a week.”

  “No, honey, go on and work,” I said.

  “You got some gloves? We might as well patch up them old corrals of yours.”

  We went down to the barn and he got out the tools, and we spent the whole morning patching on the lots, putting a new board in here and there and resting with one another and doing odds and ends and talking. We just piddled, and enjoyed it. Then I fixed him a big dinner and about two o’clock hugged him and sent him on. He was thinking about taking me in the bedroom but I didn’t encourage him; if he had that day, he would have been down on himself for a month and wouldn’t have come to see me all that time. If we held off, he’d be back in a day or two, when he felt easier, and and it would be better for him. Gid was a complicated person, but I had been studying him a long time, and I knew his twists. We had given one another a lot of good times, of one kind or another, since that summer I got pregnant with Jimmy. That seemed an awful long time ago. I guess the times we spent together, the good ones, not the bad ones—there were enough of them, too—were the best times either one of us ever had.

  Three days later, about the middle of the afternoon, Gid came back over. I had been working in the henhouse all day and was sweated down, but I was still glad to see him. I wiped off my face and took him right in the house.

  three

  One day about the middle of June a man from up around Vernon came by and wanted to sell me some alfalfa hay. I hadn’t bought any alfalfa in three years and it sounded cheap enough, so I told him to go ahead and bring me ten ton; he said he’d be there with it the next day.

  That afternoon about three o’clock I put on my overalls and got the hull fork and climbed up to see what I could do about cleaning out the loft. I didn’t want the men to have to do it when they got there with the hay. It was a pretty hot day for that time of the year. I turned on the faucet at the water trough and washed my face and got a big drink before I climbed up. Working in the loft was like working in an oven.

  I opened the loft doors at both ends, so there would be a little ventilation. There was plenty to do, I seen that. The loft probably hadn’t been cleaned out since Dad built the barn. The wastage and ch
aff from all the hay we’d put up was about shin deep, all over the loft, and it was full of all kinds of mess that Dad had left around and I never had bothered: baling wire and hay hooks and buckets and whatnot. I got to poking around, and there was every kind of nest you could imagine in the old loose, dry hay. Rats’ nests and mice nests and cats’ nests and barn owls’ nests and possum nests and probably even a skunk nest or two, if skunks can climb. Many a time, in the winter, I would go up in the loft and find a big old momma possum curled up in the hay, snoozing where it was warm.

  There were fifteen or twenty rotten bales of leftover hay that wasn’t good enough to feed, so the first thing I did was get a hay hook and drag those over and shove them out the north loft door; that way the milk cows could find them and eat what they wanted of them. I left one bale, to sit on.

  Moving the bales was work itself, and when I got done I could feel the sweat dripping down my legs and down my sides. I drug my sitting bale over by the south door where I could get some breeze, and rested awhile. From the loft I could see way off south, to where Gid’s fence line ran across Idiot Ridge. I wisht I could see more of Gid. I missed him when I didn’t get to see him regular; but I guess he came over ever time his conscience would let him. I never had been able to talk Gid out of his conscience, or love him out of it, either; I had tried both ways. Me and Gid were in a situation where neither one of us could completely win, and I used to wonder why we let ourselves get that way. Maybe we didn’t—I don’t know that there are situations where you can completely win. Not where you can completely win something important.

  A lot of medium-sized thunderheads were blowing around in the sky, so that patches of shadow would come over the pastures and sometimes right up to the barn. Then the clouds would go on north, and it would be bright and sunny till another bunch came along. When I had rested enough I got up and took the hull fork and went to raking the wastage out the loft door. The old stuff was so matted down that it made hard raking. I was always scaring out rats; most of them run along the rafters till they found a hole and went down into the saddlehouse or the oatbin. When Jimmy and Joe were little boys they used to take their rat terrier up in the loft and let him kill rats; it was how we lost that dog, actually. One day he ran a big rat out the loft door and went right out after it. The dog broke his neck and the rat got away. Joe come running up to the house, screaming; he was just heartbroken. It was the first time anything he loved had died. I picked Joe up and ran down to the barn and Jimmy had already carried the dog over by the post pile and was digging a hole to bury him. He was crying, but he wasn’t hysterical. He had had one dog die of a rattlesnake bite. Joe couldn’t understand why he was putting Scooter in the ground.

  “We don’t want the buzzards to eat him,” Jimmy said, but Joe didn’t know what a buzzard was. He had crying fits for three weeks after that.

  I had raked out the east side pretty thorough and was trying to make a start in the northwest corner when my fork struck something that made a glassy sound, and, of all things, I fished up one of Dad’s old whiskey jugs. It surprised the daylights out of me. No telling how long it had been back in that corner. It was still corked, and had whiskey sloshing around in it. Nobody had touched it since the day Dad set it in the corner.

  I laid my hull fork down and picked up the jug and went back to my sitting bale. I felt real strange. Picking up the jug brought Dad back to me, and it gave me the weak trembles. Dad’s beard and his hat pulled down over his eyes. When I pulled out the stopper and put my nose to the mouth of the jug, the strong whiskey fumes went right up my nostrils and made my eyes water. His eyes and his eyebrows and skinned-up hands and yellow fingernails and two broken-off teeth and the gray hair under his hat, around his ears. The whiskey smell was Dad’s smell: I never got close to him in my life that I didn’t smell it. The night Eddie and Wart brought him in out of the smokehouse they didn’t even pull off his boots; Gid had to do it after he came.

  For a while I sat by the bale, just holding the jug. It was brown, that thick glass kind. The outside was dusty, but the dust hadn’t got through the stopper; it hadn’t even rotted much. If I had drunk the whiskey, it would have made my tongue numb in a second. Twice in my life Dad had made me drink whiskey, and it scalded my throat both times. The first time I was just a little girl, three or four years old, and Johnny and his dad came over. The men were drinking. I don’t know why they did it, but they caught us kids and made us each take a swallow of whiskey out of a tin cup. We cried and then ran off down to the pigpen together, me and Johnny; that was the day we got to be friends. That night Dad got me on his lap and teased me. “How’d you like that likker?” he said. “You want a little more? You can have some if you want it.” Momma had done gone to bed. I hugged his neck big so he wouldn’t make me drink any more.

  The other time was years later, three or four years before he died. I had slipped off somewhere with Eddie while Dad was gone to Henrietta. Dad got back first, and when Eddie and me seen the wagon we knew he’d be mad. Eddie wouldn’t come in with me; he let me off at the barn.

  “Hell, he’s your dad,” he said. “You can handle him better than I can.”

  But I couldn’t, really. When I went in the kitchen and told Dad where I’d been, he grabbed me and like to whipped the pants off me with his razor strap.

  “When I leave you at home,” he said, “I want to find you here when I come back.”

  My feelings were hurt and I hurt from the whipping too and wanted to go to bed, but Dad felt lonesome and sorry for himself and he made me sit up till midnight, keeping him company. We sat at the kitchen table and he poured me a big glass of straight whiskey and told me not to drink it too fast and not to leave till I drank every drop of it. I vomited half the night.

  There was only one time in my life when I ever drank whiskey of my own accord, and that was the afternoon Eddie told me he wanted me to miscarry Jimmy. He didn’t know I was pregnant by Gid, either; he thought it was by him. I cried and argued and argued with him about it.

  “Shut up arguing,” he said. “I told you before we started all this I never intended to have no kids. All the time I was growing up I had them little brothers and sisters of mine under my feet constantly, and I don’t intend to fiddle with no more kids. They’re just trouble. You should never have let it happen. If you don’t get rid of it yourself, I’ll take you to a man who’ll get rid of it for you.”

  “What kind of a man is that?” I said. “And how do you know about him?”

  “I done rung the bell a time or two before, in my life,” he said. “It cost me fifty dollars, both times, but that’s a damn sight cheaper than raising a goddamn kid. If you’re smart though, you can save us that fifty dollars. Go horseback riding a lot.”

  “No, I want to have him, Eddie,” I said. “I won’t have any more, but I want to have this one.” I was crazy about Gid in those days; he was all I could think about.

  “I told you what you better do,” he said, finishing his beans. “And you better do it, if you don’t want no operation. Because I’ll take you if I have to drag you, you can believe that, can’t you?”

  I could believe it. Eddie was just like Dad when it came to doing what he made his mind up to do. The only way to stop either one of them was to be stronger than they were, and I never was that strong, at least not physically. Once in a while I could stop them another way.

  That afternoon I cried and cried. I could already feel Jimmy kick against my belly. Then I got one of Eddie’s whiskey bottles and kept mixing it with water and drinking it till I guess I got drunk. My head felt like it had smoke in it, and everything in the house looked funny. I decided I would try to get Gid to run away with me, and if he wouldn’t, I’d run away myself. I had fourteen dollars of Dad’s money that Eddie had never found. I figured I would catch a train to Amarillo; that was where Gid and Johnny went when they ran away. I guess I was crazy. I changed clothes three or four times that afternoon, trying to decide what to wear to go see Gid. And I
never had that many clothes; I changed into some twice. When Eddie came in I just had on an old cotton slip and was down on my hands and knees fishing under the sink trying to find a tow sack or something to use for a suitcase. I must have been drunk; I never knew Eddie was in the house till I felt his hips jammed against my behind and his hand around my middle. But I knew it was his hand; nobody’s hand behaved like Eddie’s.

  “I’m glad I got me a wife that goes around half-naked,” he said. “That’s the most exciting kind.”

  I was crazy, I didn’t even know what he was saying. “Eddie, have you seen a sack?” I said. “I need a good big sack.” For a while he wouldn’t even let me back out from under the sink; I couldn’t even raise my head.

  “Sack, my eye,” he said. “You don’t need no sack, sugar-doll,” and his hand gave me fits and he got to wanting to kiss me; then he let me out. I couldn’t get it out of my head that I was leaving; I wouldn’t even know he was kissing me till he would quit for a minute. I had to vomit a lot that day too. When Eddie woke up he told me I could have the baby.

  “I learned something today,” he said. “It’s more fun wallowing around with you when you’re pregnant. I never knew that before. I wonder why it is?”

  I was feeling so bad the news didn’t penetrate to me till later.

  “I guess it must be the tilt,” he said. “The tilt’s a lot better this way. I hope it keeps on improving, I like to have something to look forward to.”

  I guess it did, because it was him wallowing that made me start with Jimmy, when the time came. I never even tried to get him to quit; that wouldn’t have worked with Eddie. The day the baby was born he left and didn’t come home for three months, and that meant that Gid could come every day or two. I was happy. And Eddie liking the tilt so good made things a lot easier when Johnny got me pregnant agin, three years later. Otherwise Eddie would have either beat me to death or left me, then and there. Or both. If there was one thing Eddie never had much of, it was patience with me.