Wood And Water – Part 2
{- Continuing from Part 1” {Here} -}{-there are 4 parts-}
{- prosodic short story stone riley creative commons 2020 the creds are at bottom -}{-a short story of beginnings-}
[:: The lady reveals to us.. “I gazed up in his eyes and felt as though he looked into my inmost soul like I was that rippling pool in those obnoxious Renoir lily pictures. Shivers absolutely everywhere. You know, everywhere.” ::]
I definitely understood that I could tell him absolutely everything. And the peculiar thing, looking at it now, is really that I could. By some odd coincidence, he was a very fine man.
I knew that about him the moment when he pulled a chair out at the table just near ours, firing jealousy in my secret heart. He sat there and began speaking quietly with someone else. It was a poor woman with a baby.
I didn’t listen to the conversation – in fact, I couldn’t stand to at first for jealousy, and then would have been embarrassed to be listening – but it was obvious enough that she was very poor indeed and had been weeping.
He touched the baby’s cheek and everything. Whatever had been said, he got a little trembling smile from her at least. And then, to everyone’s surprise, certainly to mine, the fellow fetched a violin and removed his apron with a bit of ceremony, so to speak, and sat himself in a nearby corner and began to play a quite beautiful melody. I’m actually quite sure that it was Debussey.
Tears welled from eyes, you may be sure. I think they must have run down from my chin. I was not the only one who simply sobbed.
That tune and another one and a third. And he lifted up the mood with each one right to the last – perhaps one of those Appalachian fiddle things – many were smiling and clapping to the time, myself as much as others.
It was as fine a piece of magic as you would ever wish. Another tune like that last and someone might have cleared away some of the furniture to dance. I might have tried a turn with Mr. Updyke.
But then the fellow laid the violin down in his lap and – he was seated close by, you see – looked about and announced there were some chores out back which “needed doing” as he said, then looked at me directly. Perhaps I might lend a hand, he asked quietly, if I had a mind to.
In fact, he rather smiled and nodded to indicate he wished I would accept the invitation. Being such a twit, of course I gasped and glanced about to see if any others saw the possibilities that leapt to mind for me, or saw the blush that rose into my face. A private assignation! But somehow no one paid the least attention.
Just right out back, he reassured me; wood and water for the kitchen.
In fact I would have leapt into his gentlemanly arms except that there was not the slightest hint of Eros in his manner. Or perhaps more so because of that. Not that I would have minded in the least a blanket in the woodshed (a sort of thing which had occurred before a time or two with fine enough results) but let’s be practical.
Contraceptive practices were awkward at the time and I had brought along none of the requisites. This romance was going nowhere, or not at least today. Romance? What sort? Some different kind than I had known perhaps, a thing which needed time and space and exploration before one paid respects to Mother Nature.
And anyway, there was a definite responsibility to get those pilgrims to Des Moines and that responsibility was mine. There was a job to do, a hard one, a task I did not relish in the least, but a job that suited my capacities and to which my word was given. But with this man perhaps there could be pillow talk before – or else without – the fuss and bother of the rest.
In short, I fairly leapt up to my feet and followed through the dining room, out through the steaming kitchen – there were others there with whom he spoke – and to the woodpile and the pump in the yard out back.
It was all melting snow and forest mountains, a distant view of fog shrouding the forest valleys you see, and a brilliant sky with a breeze and birdsong and birds at wing. The place fairly pierced one to the heart with every glance. The place was breathtakingly beautiful in fact. There is no art or poetry on earth to make a finer scene than that was.
Me stopped there like a post, gazing rapturously round, he said, “Pretty, ain’t it?” But his voice to me was so much of the place that I could scarcely recognize the words and had to shake myself awake to answer “Yes!”
But he had brought along a wheelbarrow with an ax and several buckets and, all the more keen to impress him now, I snatched up the ax when he had scarcely set the barrow down. There was the woodpile and the block.
With a manner of expertise I asked, “They want it stove size?” and he answered yes.
He did take out the buckets and hang one on the pump but really then just stood by to watch how well I’d do. That made me angry but happy too; his care for my safety, you see. What right did he have to care?
And the first chop went very properly – we smiled at one another because of that – but by the third or fourth I could scarcely get the billet balanced up on end because my arms were sore again. Damn Packard.
My swing went wild and actually knocked the billet flying out among the trees. That was embarrassing but so spectacular we both laughed.
“Where have you come from?” the fellow asked.
So I leaned on the ax. I laughed again and nodded and answered, “Boston.”
“Could it be you are a mite worn out?”
“I’ll do the buckets.”
That was better anyway. One of those things you don’t remember until you find yourself there again: the way those old large water pumps seem like a human being when you operate them. Of course the parts are misarranged – the arm sticking out behind the person’s head and so forth – and one can’t decide if they are vomiting, urinating or perhaps lactating – but the gush sounds so much like stomach noises and that squeaky sigh when you pump the handle up and down is unmistakably a human voice.
It occurs to me now that it must have seemed unmistakably erotic at the moment. It must have done. Here I was working to make it squirt, and doing so repeatedly, you see, in a professional manner. I certainly did feel as though my husband had made me out to be a whore. With a whore a man can choose yes or no without owing any explanation.
In any case, I know that is when I finally broached the topic.
I remember that I’d just pumped a very vigorous gush that overflowed a bucket and splashed around my feet. I was throwing my whole heart and soul into the job actually. So I lifted that one from the hook and swung it over to the barrow and there I was facing this new man, just as he had swung and then was pulling out the ax.
There may have been an unpleasant tone in my voice perhaps. “I suppose you’re a minister of some sort?” I asked. “You act like one.”
Perhaps in fact my tone was dripping sarcasm.
But he laughed again; that gentle comely laugh. He was apparently quite used to people’s tumultuous emotions. He shook his head and said, “Me? I get called a preacher now and then but it never stuck. Most people, if they like me well enough, just call me Cousin Jack.”
“And people tell you things about their lives and you give them answers?” I know that came out of me as nothing short of a snarl or a demand.
He shook his head again and said, “Generally the best thing I can say is just the same thing Joe Louis says. You know Joe Louis?”
That was a bit of shock. Yes, of course I’d heard of him but I was of the same stupid opinions which my class held on race. Still, I must have heard someone at some time voice a thought that the great Negro sportsman was being cheated. So there was some inkling that the case might be in some way pertinent.
I said I knew of him. What did Joe Louis say?
And this fellow did a kind of dancer’s slow boxing move, dodging from a punch, that was so full of grace it seemed to linger in the air and I couldn’t breathe to see it. He said, “Roll with the punches. Just roll with the punches.”
But I had to cast my eyes around the sky and distant hills. I cried, “Impossible!” He was silent for a moment so I looked at him again and then went on, “There are some things one simply must try to understand. You cannot let them slip away.”
Yet still he stood there silent, looking straight in my eyes and waiting.
“All right, Cousin Jack!” I cried. “How’s this one: My husband blew half of his head off with a shotgun just because he’d lost a job. Damn it all! My family is still rich! And he did it where I would go find him. What kind of man would do that?”
Looking level in my eyes, he answered with a little nod, with his lips pursed and “hmm”, really just acknowledging that he had heard and seen what was described and understood.
Then I must put my hand before my mouth to say the rest but my head felt clear – quite like I stood up with my head up above the fog I had been wandering in – and I pronounced it very clearly. “And he did that instead of coming into bed with me! What kind of man would do that? To me!”
.. .. .. .. (continued in Part 3 {Here} ) .. .. .. ..
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{-there are 4 parts-}
{-Creds.. This is from my book.. “Tales Of Men And Women”
.. .. Its overview page .. {-Here-} -}
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