San Antone. V. J. Banis
on her back and waited.
A listening pause; why did he linger, what did he expect?
He belched, the sound sending the stillness fluttering like startled birds. Joanna turned her head away.
His hands felt foreign, and impatient; she could feel their tension, her skin soaked it up, and gave it back, magnified.
“Did you want him to?”
The question, the sound of his voice, startled her. They had been performing a mime; his question made it real.
“Want...who? What?”
“Montgomery. Was that the only time?”
She felt a growing stiffness against her thigh. The question’s significance angered her more than its impertinence.
She slapped him, not very hard; the position made it difficult. “Get off me,” she said, pushing.
“I’m your husband,” he said, struggling to achieve his goal.
“Was that what you wanted? Was that why you were never here?” she demanded, still struggling against him. “You thought he’d tame your wife for you? You thought that was what I needed?”
“What do you need, Joannie?” he asked. “What is it that I can’t give you?”
She stopped struggling all at once. “A man,” she said. “You were half right anyway, Lewis. I do need a man. Not the way you thought, unfortunately.”
His efforts continued a moment longer, but it was obvious they were doomed. Finally, he let out a long sigh and rolled off her.
The silence came back, descending heavily upon them. She felt ashamed of her cruelty, and angry with him for making her ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The bed moved. She heard him retrieving his clothes. “So am I,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew that before I came in.”
“Then why...?”
“I felt I owed you.”
Owed me? She had to stifle the retort that rose to her lips.
“You saved my life.” He hesitated; when he went on, his voice was bitter. “I came out a laughingstock, you know. A man, couldn’t protect his wife’s honor. Falling down, you had to rescue me. I could see people’s faces there in the courtroom, see it in their eyes. Snickering. Embarrassed for me, some of them. I don’t know which was worse. I don’t know how I’ll ever forgive you for that, Joannie.”
“Would you rather I’d let him kill you?”
“Maybe. Then you’d never have forgiven yourself for that, either, would you?”
“Probably not.”
“’Cause you’ve wanted me dead so bad yourself, sometimes?”
She felt suddenly tired; not just tired, but wearied. “Yes, sometimes. God forgive me, but that’s the truth.”
She was afraid she’d angered him again; he was a long time in replying.
“I can understand that,” he said at last. “Sometimes I’ve felt the same way. About you. About myself. Maybe I did know, maybe I saw, when he looked at you, and wanted to give him an excuse to kill me. I am a coward.”
She sat up; she could barely see him in the gloom. “Not completely,” she said. “It took courage to bring us here, after all, to leave everything behind....”
He chuckled softly. “I didn’t come to here, I came from there. I should have left you behind, Joannie. You’re what I was running from, now I think of it.”
“Me? Or yourself?”
He didn’t answer. She was surprised when the hall door opened a moment later; she hadn’t heard him cross the room.
“I won’t bother you like this again,” he said from the doorway. “It’s no fun for either of us.”
He went out, closing the door softly.
She lay for a long time, thinking of what had just happened, and of the things he had said.
Was it me? she asked some lingering essence of her husband, the ghost-husband that was never really gone from her side, that owned her, in a way her real husband could not. Did I do this to you? Did I make you what you have become?
She thought of Lewis lying in the mud and the rain, sobbing, waiting for a man to kill him, and she felt a pang inside her breast, a wrenching as if she was giving birth to a new—what? Not love for her husband, surely. Empathy, perhaps. How odd it was. For a time, not long after their marriage, she had come to hate the man she had wedded. Yet it seemed the lower he sank into his dissolution, the harder it became to hate him.
Or was that only the power of the weak over the strong?
Chapter Eight
Jay Jay could not help thinking his father was a fool. He would never nave said so, or course, to anyone else. Like his brother and sister—it was one of the few things they had in common—he was intensely loyal to his family where other people were concerned. But in private he saw no reason for kidding himself.
He watched his father rushing up and down between the wagons, pointing out this crate and this barrel, bawling orders directing where this was to go, and that, and then shouting entirely contradictory commands the next moment.
Gregory stood in patient silence, his gaze following the pointing fingers, the waving hands, nodding from time to time to show that, yes, he did understand, yes, he had it exactly right; the contradictions seemed not to perturb him at all. When his father had gone on, Gregory went right back, Jay Jay observed, to following the same self-absorbed system he had been following before—just as incomprehensible to Jay Jay as their father’s scheme had been, though apparently clear enough to his brother.
He supposed that Gregory was a fool, too, in his own way. To some extent Jay Jay found his brother more maddening than their father was. At least their father was drunk, and the same drunkenness that muddled his thinking or sent him sometimes into rages, or clumsily falling all over himself, could just as easily turn into hilarity, or even—though this was infrequent now to the point of rarity—a maudlin sort of affection.
Foolish or not, it was possible to love his father in a way that he could not love his brother or his mother. Their very competence set them apart—you felt as if you had to reach up to them. Somehow Jay Jay never felt tall enough when he was with them.
Gregory was plodding. To see father and son together, you would have thought he was the old man and Lewis his barely adolescent child.
Most boys as they neared young manhood entered a period of rebellion against their fathers. Jay Jay felt a secret kinship with the man who had sired him, but he sometimes couldn’t stop himself from waging war on his brother. There was the time, for instance, when their father had given them rifles for Christmas. It was Jay Jay who had managed that, who had badgered and hinted and finally, with no pretense of subtlety, begged. He’d come very close to admitting that he could already shoot, had for the better part of a year been surreptitiously taking the guns from the cabinet in his father’s den and practicing in the distant fields at Eaton. Luckily his father gave in and bought guns for the boys before Jay Jay had to confess.
Of course, he’d known he would have to suffer instruction from his father, who could not even hold a gun properly, let alone hit anything. He had even practiced shooting astray to conceal his expertise. What he hadn’t counted on was that Gregory would be given a gun as well. The mere thought of his older brother, who couldn’t hit a tree throwing a rock, getting a rifle presented to him gratis, after Jay Jay had spent weeks and weeks coaxing for one, had very nearly spoiled the occasion for him.
In compensation, he had stolen into the den the night before their first promised shooting lesson and, with a hammer wrapped in one of his brother’s socks—Gregory