Annie Proulx - Postcards

‘Three and a half hours of milkin’. I done the milkin’. Dub lugged the goddamn milk, and it adds up to seven hours a day on milkin’ alone, add in grainin’ and hayin’ ’em, clean out the barn, got to spread some of that manure before the snow comes, tomorrow we got to get the cream down to the road by seven, plus the rest of life’s little chores like diggin’ the potatoes we got to get dug, we ain’t got the wood hauled down yet. The butcherin’s got to be did this week if we stay up all night doin’ it. If I was to make a list of the things that got to be did right now it would take every piece of paper in the house. I don’t know if I could hold a pencil, don’t know if I can get my hands around anything but cow teats. You and Mernelle will have to take care of them chickens and get in what apples you can, dig the potatoes. Mernelle will have to stay out of school for a week or so until we get on top of it. There ain’t no way we can do it unless we give up sleepin’.’ What he said was true. But the set of his furious mouth got Jewell’s back up.

‘You’ll put up with scratch suppers if we got to do outside work. I can’t kill and pluck chickens and lug potatoes and apples and then come in and make a big dinner. Can’t you get one of your brother’s boys there, Ernest or Norman, to help?’ She knew he could not.

‘Be nice if I could slack off on the milkin’ just because I got to haul wood. Goddamn it, I need a good dinner and I expect you to fix it for me.’ Now he was shouting. ‘And no, I can’t get Ott’s boys to help. First place, Norman’s only eleven and got about as much strength as wet hay. Ernie’s already helpin’ Ott and Ott says he puts about as much into it as he would into takin’ poison.’

She’d like to see him take poison, he knew it.

There was the threshing sound of a car coming up the lane. Jewell went to the window.

‘Might of known she’d be along; it’s old Mrs. Nipple and Ronnie.’

‘Be out in the barn,’ said Mink, hitching at his overalls. The argument had brought up his color, and Jewell had a flash of how he’d been when he was young, the milky skin under the shirt, the blue flashing eyes and the fine hair. The vigor of him, the swaggering way he walked and hitched at his overalls to free his private parts from the chafing cloth.

He and Dub went out the door to the woodshed, moving like a matched team. The porch door hissed. Mrs. Nipple’s heavy fingers crooked around the door edge.

‘Don’t just stand there, Mrs. Nipple, come on in and Ronnie too,’ shouted Jewell, putting on water for tea. The old lady had burned her mouth with hot coffee as a baby and never touched it again, let her tea stand until it went tepid. ‘Thought we might be seein’ you pretty soon.’ Mrs. Nipple had an instinct for discovering trouble as keen as the wild goose’s need to take flight in the shortening days. She was sensitive to the faintest janglings of discord from miles away.

‘After what she had been through,’ Jewell once told Mernelle in a dark tone, ‘she probably knows what ain’t right in Cuba.’

‘What’s she been through, then?’ asked Mernelle.

‘Nothin’ I can tell you until you’re a grown woman. You wouldn’t understand it.’

‘I’ll understand it,’ whined Mernelle, ‘so tell me.’

‘Not likely,’ said Jewell.

‘Ronnie’s gone out to the barn to talk to Loyal and them,’ said Mrs. Nipple sidling through the door, taking in the broken window, the potato peelings in the sink, the woodshed door half open, Jewell’s twisted smile. She smelled the rage, the smoke, sensed some departure. In Mink’s chair she felt the warmth of the seat even through her heavy brown skirt. Nobody had to tell her something had happened. She knew Mink had gone out to the barn when he saw her coming.

The old lady had the look of a hen who had laid a thousand eggs, from her frizzled white hair permed at Corinne Claunch’s Home Beauty Parlor, to her bright moist eye, plump breast, thrusting rear end that no corset could ever bend in and the bowed legs set so far out on her pelvis that when she walked it was like a rocking chair rocking. Dub had snickered to Loyal once that the space between her thighs had to be three hands across, that she could sit on the back of a Clydesdale like a slotted clothes-pin on the line.

She sighed, touched a needle of glass on the oilcloth. ‘Seems like there’s trouble everywhere,’ she said, building up a platform for the news Jewell must tell. ‘It’s a nuisance you have to bring your own paper bags to the stores, and just last month Ronnie got a letter from the milk truck, said they are consolidating the route. Can’t come up to the farm no more. If we want to sell them cream we got to lug it down to the roadside. He’s been doing it, but it’s pretty irksome work, takes a good deal of time. I suppose he’ll lose heavy on it. Don’t know how they expect us to manage. Then my niece Ida’s sister-in-law, you remember Ida, she stayed with us when Toot was still alive, helped me in the garden all one summer, picked berries, apples, I don’t know what, helped Toot and Ronnie with the hay. She was the one got stung by yellow jackets had a nest under a pumpkin. Well, now she’s livin’ over in Shoreham, I hear from her that her sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles Renfrew, runs the U-Auta lunchroom in Barton, her husband’s at the War in the Air Force, and she been arrested. I have never ate there and I don’t believe I ever will. She shot this feller, Jim somebody, worked for the electric light over there, with his own shotgun. Seems he come sneakin’ around, peepin’ in the windows to see what she was doin’ and he saw plenty. She got this cook in to help her run the lunchroom, a colored fellow from South America, she didn’t say what his name was, but Mrs. Charles Renfrew was seen by the electric company man kissin’ the cook, and in he comes with the shotgun. See, he was sweet on her himself. She’s a good-lookin’ woman, they say. She gets the shotgun away from him and shoots him. And he died. When they arrested her she admitted it all, but said everything was an accident. Got six children, the youngest one isn’t but four. Them poor little children. It was all in the paper. Terrible, ain’t it.’ She waited for Jewell to begin. Few things could be worse than Mrs. Charles Renfrew’s multiple crimes laid out in public view, and she’d told the story to give Jewell a chance to whittle her own troubles down to size. She leaned forward.

Jewell slid the cup of tea over to her, the string dangling over the edge of the cup. ‘We had a little surprise here last night. Loyal comes in for supper, stands up in the middle of it and says that Billy and him is goin’ out west. They left last night. Kind of took us by surprise, but that’s the way the kids are these days.’

‘Is that right,’ said Mrs. Nipple. ‘Takes my breath away. Ronnie will be upset. Him and Loyal was tight as ticks.’ There was something awry, she thought, told straight out like that, no details of who had said what. She knew there was something deeper. Mink must have been crazy mad. The way Jewell told it now it didn’t seem like the kind of story that would gather with time, but instead would retract, condense, turn into one of those things that nobody talked about, and in a year or so it would all be forgotten. There were plenty of those stories. She knew one or two herself. It was all serious business. She never understood why Ronnie liked Loyal, no standout, even in the crowd of Bloods with their knack for doing the wrong thing, except for his strength and his sinewy hunger for work. But one man couldn’t bring that farm up again, it had too much against it. Look how it had gone down since the grandfather’s time when it was tight-fenced for the convenience of trotting horses and fine merinos, only three cows then for family butter and cheese on the place. She liked Jewell well enough, but the woman was a dirty housekeeper, letting the men in with their barn clothes on, letting the dust and spiders take over, and too proud for milk room work.