Chapter 15
The happier she grew, the more there was to lose. Samantha had never been allowed to forget that what she had could be lost.
Once, the secret had been armor. In the loft, on the train, on the platform in the white Texas sun, it had been the one thing that kept her upright. Nobody knew. That was the wall she stood behind. So long as nobody knew, nobody could take the wall down.
Now it was not armor. It was a stone.
She carried it up the stairs to the blue room at night, and it weighed on her all the way. In the morning she carried it down again. She set it on the kitchen table between herself and the man in the doorway. Every day it was heavier.
Every day there was one more truth she had not told him. One more evening on the porch step. One more look across the yard that she had let him see and had not earned. She was building a whole life on top of the stone, and the stone did not get smaller for having a life on it.
Love was what it was coming to. She said it to herself now without flinching, because there was no longer any use in flinching. And every hour she loved him more, she lied to him more, simply by standing in his kitchen and saying nothing.
It wore on her. She had thought she could bear any weight. She found she could not easily bear that.
And she showed it. She had never shown a feeling she did not mean to. She showed it now, in the yard, in front of the boy. Eleanor saw.
It was over the wood.
Harry had split it wrong. It was green oak, which does not split easy. He had gone at it across the grain, which Ramsay had told him not to do. Half the pile was splinters. Eleanor came out onto the porch and looked at it. She looked at the boy. Her mouth went thin.
“That is a morning’s wood ruined.”
Harry stood with the ax hanging from his hand and said nothing.
“Do you know what oak costs on this place? Do you know what it is to haul it? No. You do not know anything. You cannot be told, and I begin to think you cannot be taught.” Eleanor came down one step.
Her voice did not rise. It never rose. “It is in you. I said so on the platform. Bad blood will out, and there it is, all over my yard in splinters. Bad blood. Bad seed. I was a fool to think a Society brat could learn to do anything but ruin what it touches.”
The boy’s face shut like a door. Samantha saw it shut. She was on the porch behind Eleanor with a basin in her hands.
Down went the basin on the rail with a crack.
“He is not bad blood.”
Eleanor turned.
Samantha had not known she was going to speak. She had not decided to. It came up out of her from somewhere below deciding, hot and fast. She heard her own voice go on before she could catch it.
“He is ten years old and he has never split oak in his life. Nobody showed him. He has been in this yard a month and worked every hour of it. Never been thanked. And you stand there and call him bad seed because a log went wrong. There is nothing in his blood. There is nothing in anybody’s blood.
It is a lie, ma’am. It has always been a lie, and I know it because I... ”
She stopped.
It was so hard a stop her teeth came together on it.
The next word was there, on her tongue, whole.
Because I came off a train too. Because I stood on a platform with a paper tag and heard exactly that said over my head.
Because I am what you are calling him. I have been what you are calling him for twelve years, and it is a lie.
She caught it. At the very edge of her teeth she caught it, and swallowed it. Then she stood there on the porch with her mouth shut and her heart going like a hammer.
Eleanor looked at her.
It was a long look. It went over Samantha as it had on the first day.
From the crown of her head to her boots, without haste, missing nothing.
On her face it rested longest. And Samantha, who had held her face still under that look all these weeks, could not for the life of her hold it still now.
She did not know what was on it. Fury, she supposed.
And under the fury something else. Something that had leaked out of her with the words, that had no business on the face of a respectable stranger.
Fellow feeling. That was what was on her face. She could feel it there, and could not get it off.
Eleanor saw it. Samantha watched her see it.
The old woman said nothing. She did not answer the fury. She did not defend the words bad seed. She only stood on the porch step with her hands folded at her waist and looked at her son’s bride. Then, slowly, she smiled.
It was a small smile, and cool. It went no further than the corners of her mouth. It did not reach the gray eyes.
“Indeed, Miss Bree,” she said. “You feel very strongly for the boy.”
Then she turned and went into the house. She shut the door quietly behind her, and left the two of them in the yard.
Samantha stood with her hands on the porch rail. Below her, Harry had not moved. He was looking up at her with those old wary eyes. There was a new look in them, one she could not read. She could not stop to read it. She was shaking. She was shaking so hard she had to hold the rail.
Too much had shown. She knew it as she knew her own name. Eight weeks of care, of steadiness, of a still face and folded hands. She had thrown it away in the yard over a pile of splintered oak, because a boy’s face had shut like a door.
And she could not take it back. It was seen, and it sat in Eleanor’s ledger with all the rest.
At last she went in, picked up the basin, and finished the morning’s work with hands that would not stop trembling.
That night, she came to the brink.
It was late. Eleanor had gone up. The house was quiet, and Samantha had gone out onto the porch because she could not stay in the blue room with the stone. Ramsay was there. He was sitting on the top step in the dark, with his back against the post, looking out at the valley.
She sat down beside him. She had never done that before. He turned his head and looked at her. He said nothing. He moved over an inch to make room.
The night was warm and still. There was no moon.
The valley lay black below them, with the creek showing here and there where a star caught it.
Far off, the hills stood against a sky full of more stars than she had ever seen in Iowa.
A whippoorwill was calling somewhere down by the water.
The roses on the posts smelled sweet in the dark.
“You gave my mother a turn this morning,” Ramsay said at last. “Over the boy.”
“I know it.”
“She won’t forget it.”
“I know that too.”
He was quiet a while. Then, slowly, as if working it out: “You were right, though. About the oak. Nobody showed him. I should have.”
She looked at him in the dark. She could just make out his profile against the stars, the hard jaw, the set of the head. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the valley, as he always did, as if an answer were out there in it.
And she wanted to tell him.
It came over her in a rush, sitting there in the warm dark with the whippoorwill calling. She wanted it more than she had wanted anything since the ticket. She wanted to say it plainly, in his own flat way.
I came off a train. I stood on a platform at eight years old with a paper tag on my coat.
I was the girl at the West farm, the one off the train, the one everybody looked at sidelong.
That is what I am. That is what I have always been.
And I am tired past bearing of being looked at by you as somebody I am not.
To be known. Just once. By the man she was going to marry. To have him look at her and see the whole of her: the loft, the tag, the corner of the table. To have him not look away.
She opened her mouth.
And she looked at him, and saw the good-blood certainties sitting on him as easy as his coat.
They were always there. Blood tells. You cannot trust bad stock. He had begun to look at the boy in the corral and not see it. But he had not stopped believing it. He did not know yet that a man could stop.
If she told him, what would he see?
Not the boy on the pony. Not the woman on the porch step. He would see what his father had taught him to see. All these weeks would go out of his face like a lamp blown out. In their place would be the look he gave a rattlesnake in a coat.
And Harry. If she was bad stock, then she was proof that bad stock could get into a house and hide there. Eleanor would have every reason she had ever wanted. The boy would go back on the next train. Samantha would go after him. There would be nothing left of the summer.
Harry’s home she could not gamble on Ramsay’s mercy. Nor her own. There was nothing else in the world she had to stake, and she could not put it down.
So she shut her mouth.
“It’s late,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “I should go up.”
He looked at her then. She saw him look. She saw him know that she had been going to speak, and had not. He did not ask what. Asking was not his way. Slowly he nodded, and looked back at the valley.
“Goodnight, Samantha,” he said. He had never used her name before.
She went up. She climbed the stairs to the blue room with the stone in her arms, heavier than it had ever been. She shut the door and stood against it in the dark.
She hated herself for the swallowing. That was new.
She had hidden what she was for twelve years and never hated herself for it, because it had been the only way to live.
It was not the only way now. There was a man on the porch step who had said her name in the dark.
She could have told him. She had chosen not to.
She lay down on top of the stone. She did not sleep. She listened to the whippoorwill call until it stopped.