A Beauty (39 page)

She leaned back against the hard ribs of her chair and saw Ruth’s face again, as it had looked when they’d talked about their fathers.
At least your father came looking for you
. A childish thing to say, really, the kind of thing the girl, Ruthie, would have said. She could see her on the main street of Gilroy, she could see her clearly, without even trying, as if that little town would always exist and Ruthie would always be there. She was holding her glasses – they had fallen off – and she was staring from the middle of the street, with one intent eye. The other eye, meanwhile, gazed off in its own direction until she put the glasses on and came forward with her scraped hand out.

“Ruthie,” she said out loud. She sat very still, trying to sort out her thinking.

“Ruthie,” her father said, a tenderness in his voice. He was speaking of a child. “She writes to me once in a while. Since that summer.”

“Oh,” she said. “All that time. All those years.” She spoke automatically, not really paying attention to him because she was thinking and because the girl was still in front of her, walking towards her with her hand held out. She was seeing that saucy face and those impudent eyes behind the thick lenses. She was seeing expectation in those eyes. All the kid wanted was a little sympathy. But she was so certain she’d get it, that was the thing.
She was so sure that was the way the world worked. It was natural to want to deny her, and it wouldn’t have hurt her a bit. But then something else, something more, had presented itself, something she’d found irresistible, a love affair that struck her now as a disturbing, unintentional kind of revenge. She hadn’t thought it out at the time, she hadn’t let herself think about it at all, certainly not the way she was thinking about it now. Why hurt a child the way you’ve been hurt? It made no sense, but she did it.

And how useless it is to be sorry, she thought, how utterly, unforgivably useless.

Her father was patting her hand. She looked down. Why was he doing that? Pat, pat, over and over, like an old man. She wondered if he knew he was doing it, and which of them he was trying to console. He was staring at the stove again. Tears were running down the long creases of his cheeks. And all the time he was patting her hand. There, there. There, there. She saw that she would have to do something, say something, and as soon as possible. They couldn’t go on like this.

“Isä,” she said, turning to him.

Bill didn’t knock again. He didn’t try to peer through the screen. After a while, he sat down on the wooden stoop, settled his seat on the warm boards and stretched his legs out into the powdery dirt. The morning sunshine was playing across the driveway, driven into patterns by some shifting clouds. The patterns were meaningless, he figured, just like the movement of clouds was meaningless. Except for their effect on the weather. He supposed you’d have to consider that; he supposed rain, hail, sleet, and snow might just contradict that idle thought. So not exactly meaningless. He
stirred some of the dust at his feet with his pant leg, and it rose as he’d predicted it would into its own small cloud, and he smiled as he brushed the fabric off. It was helpful to have this feeling of things being connected when you were a bit at loose ends.

He couldn’t remember being here the night he’d brought Elena to pick up her things; he tried to picture it and failed. He wondered where the swing had been. He placed it improbably far out in the field by the road, and imagined her walking towards it in her bare feet, wearing the faded brown dress she’d worn when he first set eyes on her. Why bare feet? He didn’t know. Maybe he was just being nostalgic, trying to make the past sweeter, softer, than it had been. She’d been a starving kid, and would have bolted with anyone who’d take her away from here. But it hadn’t been anyone; it had been him. And what was she thinking, now? She must be wondering what to do about him, and maybe changing her mind a few times. Maybe just by sitting here, waiting for her, he was showing her something she didn’t know. Daring her to find out.

A whole lot of maybes going on, he thought. Maybe that ruler-straight road beyond the driveway – running parallel with the horizon as far as he could see in either direction – spanned the entire country, maybe he’d find that out, maybe he’d drive that road as far as it would take him. But he wasn’t in any hurry. He could sit here all day. Till the sun went down. Nothing like the sun’s warm touch, he thought; it could be his wife’s hands on his shoulders.

He looked up at the house behind him, at the blind pulled down to the windowsill. She doesn’t know I had a life all the time she was gone, he thought. She’s afraid of making the same mistakes she made before. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure he was right. There were times in a life that mistakes could start to seem like crimes. Well, he was guessing. But it could be why she’d come home.
No more we’ll go a roving
. He’d read
that in a novel, a character had thought it, a woman who barely noticed what she was thinking; one of those fragments of a poem, it had slipped like a breeze through her mind.
So we’ll go no more a roving. By the light of the moon
. He wanted to tell Elena he understood, give her something to lean against, even if it was only for ten minutes on the doorstep. She might not need anyone; she might be better off on her own. We’re not all alike, he thought.

In the quiet of the farmyard, he heard a soft shushing sound he hadn’t heard before, that might have been the earth sighing. Or maybe he’d sighed, himself, he couldn’t tell. If so, it wasn’t because he was getting melancholy; it was a sigh of contentment, and why not? He had time, he had plenty to spare, and Elena would have to come out, sooner or later. She’d have to come out if only to deal with that rental car, but she’d come out, anyway, because she wasn’t a house kind of person. And then they were going to talk. He wasn’t at the end of this, and she wasn’t either. No, she was no house kind of person; she was a woman who belonged outdoors and preferably in a car, a big, fast, luxury convertible with the top down, open to the sky. He’d ask her where she wanted to go, and she’d say anywhere. He laughed. The old fellow would be on his side, he could tell.

Later, he began to whistle, an airy tune that sounded lonely to those inside the house.

While I was researching and writing this novel, I often consulted my father about life on the prairies during the thirties, and I would like to thank him for his help. My mother’s letters also guided me. I found the local histories compiled by various communities to be as valuable as the history texts I read, and a wide range of material available on the Internet was useful. A special thanks to historian Joan Champ whose blog,
Railway & Main
, provided an intriguing amount of detail on small-town hotels.

I would like to acknowledge a grant from the Saskatchewan Arts Board during the writing of this book and an award from the City of Regina at its inception.

Many thanks to my editor and publisher, Ellen Seligman, and to my agent, Dean Cooke, and to my first readers: Joanne Lyons, Marlis Wesseler, Joan Givner, and Dianne Warren. And a special thank you to Chris Hatley for driving me around Finland.

And to Gordon Gault, for all the years of support and encouragement, my lasting gratitude.