I swallowed.
“Most men would’ve.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You could’ve. I was helpless.”
“You look like you’ve got some spunk left. You let out a pretty good scream when you saw me, for example.”
She shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. You could’ve taken me. A man can have a woman if he wants her.”
“You mean he can rape her.”
She nodded.
“Where I come from,” I said, “that’s not an acceptable way of getting to know a girl.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Back East.”
“Is that why you’re such a gentleman?”
I smiled. “That’s another first for me — being called a gentleman.”
“I think that’s what I’ll call you. Gentleman Jim. A real gentleman in a lousy world.”
“Let’s just leave it at ‘Jimmy.’”
“No — I like ‘Gentleman Jim’ better.” She beamed at me; she was trying a little too hard to be cheerful, but I was glad she was making the effort.
“Whatever you say,” I said.
She grabbed me by the hand and yanked me off the bed.
“Come on, Gentleman Jim... this old farm girl’s going to show you around a farm. You got some learning to do.”
I told her I had to go the bathroom, but she said that would be no problem.
I could stop at the outhouse on our way.
34
When we cut across the backyard, a dozen chickens were dancing around, scrounging for food. One with yellow legs and another with bluish-green legs were dancing in place, pecking at something that looked like an old beat-up leather glove.
Louise caught my curious expression and said, “That’s a rat skin. That’s about all the cat leaves behind, when she’s done with it.”
“Hens aren’t real particular about their breakfast, are they?”
Deadpan, she said, “Those aren’t hens. Not yet. They don’t start laying eggs till they’re seven months.”
She led me by the hand beyond the barn and silo, down a dew-wet path, at the end of which half a dozen cows, black, brown, stood gazing at us with bored expressions. Then we cut over by a shocked field, each shock looking like a small rustic wigwam.
“Velvet barley,” Louise explained. She pulled a stalk out of one of the shocks, crushed the head against her palm, lifted her palm to her lips and blew away the chaff. She held out her palm for me to see the seeds there. “You like beer?”
“Sure.”
“That’s the malting barley.” She dropped the seeds to the earth and moved on. “Mr. Gillis has fifteen acres of barley. They plant this stuff quick, soon as the ground’s fit.”
“How many acres does Gillis have here?”
“Eighty.”
“Is that big?”
“Not really. Not small, though.”
Birds were singing. I wasn’t used to seeing this much sky; in Chicago, in the Loop, you have to raise your head to see any sky. And the last bird I heard sing in the city was Anna Sage’s parakeet.
I asked, “Can he make a living at it?”
“He could if the prices were right. The livestock’ll get that barley. He can’t afford to sell it for what it’s going.”
“You ought to be able to make a living with land like this. Crops like these.”
She shrugged, walking ahead of me now. Not holding my hand — leading the way.
“Mr. Gillis does all right with his sideline,” she said.
“You mean taking in house guests.”
She nodded.
“You ever stay here before?” I asked her.
She nodded again. “A few times.”
We were at the edge of the barley field, now. Some stones were scattered about, some of them nearly boulders, big cold seeds not worth planting. She pointed.
“That grass is Mr. Gillis’ hay. He’s got about six acres in grass. For the cows and horses.”
We walked along, skirting a patch given to more stones and nettles. “Always a patch or two a farmer can’t tame,” she explained. “There’s the corn.”
I walked behind her, like an Indian, down green rows of corn only a few feet high. Silo corn, she said; planted late to keep it green. It would go eight feet. Up ahead, she said, was some corn Gillis had planted around the end of May.
I followed her down these rows, too, but they were damn near as tall as I was. The air here smelled sweet; up ahead Louise was breathing it in, smiling. At home.
We passed a field of yellow sweet clover, on our way to a field of (she said) alfalfa. She picked off a few tiny purple flowers, saying, “Relish for the cows.” Gillis only had a couple acres of alfalfa, not enough by her way of thinking. We walked past another field (oats, she said) cut and shocked, which she dismissed as pig feed.
“Because of the price?” I asked.
“The price,” she nodded. “My daddy got two dollars for an eighty-pound tin of milk, few years back. Now it’s less than a dollar.”
“That’s rough.”
“It’s the banks. That’s why I don’t think it’s so bad, what Candy and the others do.”
“Rob banks, you mean.”
She glanced at me, brown eyes wide. “Sure. All the banks ever do is foreclose on farmers.”
We were to a big white-flowered field, riffling in the slight morning breeze. Buckwheat, she said.
“Just an acre,” she went on. “Used for chicken and hog feed. You know what he could get selling it? Penny a pound.” She shook her head. “Farmer’s life.”
“But you miss it, don’t you?”
She was looking at the ground, watching her feet as she walked. “Maybe. A little.”
I followed her down into a hollow and we sat under some trees. Another bird was singing. I asked her what kind it was.
“Robin,” she said. “He doesn’t know from the Depression.”
“Why don’t you go back home, Louise?”
“Home?”
“The farm.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
She was sitting with her knees bunched up, clutching her legs with clasped arms; she had nice legs, by the way. White. Smooth.
“I was married. Still am, really.”
“I see.”
“He was bad to me. Worse than my daddy, even. He was a lot like my daddy, really. Maybe that’s why I took up with him.”
That seemed a pretty fair insight for a girl who was part farm girl, part moll. Louise was somebody who had the promise of being her own person, if she could just break away from the sordid world Candy Walker had introduced her to.
“Couldn’t you go back to your daddy?” I asked.
“Would he take me back?”
A rhetorical question, but I thought about answering it, anyway.
Before I could, she answered it herself: “He wouldn’t want me back. I’m a sinner. A fallen woman. And as for Seth, he’d probably shoot me. He said as much.”
“He did?”
She hugged her legs, as if chilled. And it wasn’t chilly.
“He said if I ever took up with another man, he’d see me dead.”
I thought about telling her what her father had told me — that her husband Seth had already taken up with another woman (or two), and could care less about getting her back, at this point; it had been a year, after all.
“And even if Seth wasn’t a problem, I don’t know if I’d want to go back to my daddy even if he’d have me. Go back to some stupid little farm after the life I’ve seen?”
I didn’t point out that we seemed to be on a stupid little farm at the moment, and that the life she’d seen with Candy Walker was a squalid nightmare.
But I did say, “Maybe you should start over. Just go to a big city and find a job.”
She released her legs and stretched them out in front of her; the pink dress was up around her knees. Nice calves, as we say down on the farm.