The Bridges Of Madison County (3 page)

Francesca snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray, swung open the door, and put her boots on the gravel. She glanced around to make sure none of her neighbors’ cars were coming and walked toward the bridge. The sun was a hammer in late afternoon, and it looked cooler inside the bridge. She could see his silhouette at the other end until he disappeared down the incline toward the stream.

Inside, she could hear pigeons burbling softly in their nests under the eves and put the palm of her hand on the side planking, feeling the warmth. Graffiti was scrawled on some of the planks: “Jimbo–Denison, Iowa.” “Sherry + Dubby.” “Go Hawks!” The pigeons kept on burbling softly.

Francesca peeked through a crack between two of the side planks, down toward the stream where Robert Kincaid had gone. He was standing on a rock in the middle of the little river, looking toward the bridge, and she was startled to see him wave. He jumped back to the bank and moved easily up the steep grade. She kept watching the water until she sensed his boots on the bridge flooring.

“It’s real nice, real pretty here,” he said, his voice reverberating inside the covered bridge.

Francesca nodded. “Yes, it is. We take these old bridges for granted around here and don’t think much about them.”

He walked to her and held out a small bouquet of wildflowers, black-eyed Susans. “Thanks for the guided tour.” He smiled softly. “I’ll come back at dawn one of these days and get my shots.” She felt something inside of her again. Flowers. Nobody gave her flowers, even on special occasions.

“I don’t know your name,” he said. She realized then that she had not told him and felt dumb about that. When she did, he nodded and said, “I caught the smallest trace of an accent. Italian?”

“Yes. A long time ago.”

The green truck again. Along the gravel roads with the sun lowering itself. Twice they met cars, but it was nobody Francesca knew. In the four minutes it took to reach the farm, she drifted, feeling unraveled and strange. More of Robert Kincaid, writer-photographer, that’s what she wanted. She wanted to know more and clutched the flowers on her lap, held them straight up, like a schoolgirl coming back from an outing.

The blood was in her face. She could feel it. She hadn’t done anything or said anything, but she felt as if she had. The truck radio, indistinguishable almost in the roar of road and wind, carried a steel guitar song, followed by the five o’clock news.

He turned the truck up the lane. “Richard is your husband?” He had seen the mailbox.

“Yes,” said Francesca, slightly short of breath. Once her words started, they kept on coming. “It’s pretty hot. Would you like an ice tea?”

He looked over at her. “If it’s all right, I sure would.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

She directed him– casually, she hoped– to park the pickup around behind the house. What she didn’t need was for Richard to come home and have one of the neighbor men say, “Hey, Dick; havin’ some work done at the place? Saw a green pickup there last week. Knew Frannie was home so I did’n bother to check on it.”

Up broken cement steps to the back porch door. He held the door for her, carrying his camera knapsacks. “Awful hot to leave the equipment in the truck,” he had said when he pulled them out.

A little cooler in the kitchen, but still hot. The collie snuffled around Kincaid’s boots, then went out on the back porch and flopped down while Francesca removed ice from metal trays and poured sun tea from a half-gallon glass jug. She knew he was watching her as he sat at the kitchen table, long legs stretched in front of him, brushing his hair with both hands.

“Lemon?”

“Yes, please.”

“Sugar?”

“No, thanks.”

The lemon juice dribbled slowly down the side of a glass, and he saw that, too. Robert Kincaid missed little.

Francesca set the glass before him. Put her own on the other side of the Formica-topped table and her bouquet in water, in an old jelly glass with renderings of Donald Duck on it. Leaning against the counter, she balanced on one leg, bent over, and took off a boot. Stood on her bare foot and reversed the process for the other boot.

He took a small drink of tea and watched her. She was about five feet six, fortyish or a little older, pretty face, and a fine, warm body. But there were pretty women everywhere he traveled. Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. That’s why he found most young women unattractive, regardless of their exterior beauty. They had not lived long enough or hard enough to possess those qualities that interested him.

But there was something in Francesca Johnson that did interest him. There was intelligence; he could sense that. And there was passion, though he couldn’t quite grasp what that passion was directed toward or if it was directed at all.

Later, he would tell her that in ways undefinable, watching her take off her boots that day was one of the most sensual moments he could remember. Why was not important. That was not the way he approached his life. “Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.” That’s what he had said.

She sat at the table, one leg curled under her, and pulled back strands of hair that had fallen over her face, refastening them with the tortoiseshell comb. Then, remembering, she rose and went to the end cupboard, took down an ashtray, and set it on the table where he could reach it.

With that tacit permission, he pulled out a pack of Camels and held it toward her. She took one and noticed it was slightly wet from his heavy perspiring. Same routine. He held the gold Zippo, she touched his hand to steady it, felt his skin with her fingertips, and sat back. The cigarette tasted wonderful, and she smiled.

“What is it you do, exactly– I mean with the photography?”

He looked at his cigarette and spoke quietly. “I’m a contract shooter– uh, photographer– for National Geographic, part of the time. I get ideas, sell them to the magazine, and do the shoot. Or they have something they want done and contact me. Not a lot of room for artistic expression; it’s a pretty conservative publication. But the pay is decent. Not great, but decent, and steady. The rest of the time I write and photograph on my own hook and send pieces to other magazines. If things get tough, I do corporate work, though I find that awfully confining.

“Sometimes I write poetry, just for myself. Now and then I try to write a little fiction, but I don’t seem to have a feeling for it. I live north of Seattle and work around that area quite a bit. I like shooting the fishing boats and Indian settlements and landscapes.

“The Geographic work often keeps me at a location for a couple of months, particularly for a major piece on something like part of the Amazon or the North African desert. Ordinarily I fly to an assignment like this and rent a car. But I felt like driving through some places and scouting them out for future reference. I came down along Lake Superior; I’ll go back through the Black Hills. How about you?”

Francesca hadn’t expected him to ask. She stammered for a moment. “Oh, gosh, nothing like you do. I got my degree in comparative literature. Winterset was having trouble finding teachers when I arrived here in 1946, and the fact that I was married to a local man who was a veteran made me acceptable. So I picked up a teaching certificate and taught high school English for a few years. But Richard didn’t like the idea of me working. He said he could support us, and there was no need for it, particularly when our two children were growing. So I stopped and became a farm wife full-time. That’s it.”

She noticed his iced tea was almost gone and poured him some more from the jug.

“Thanks. How do you like it here in Iowa?”

There was a moment of truth in this. She knew it. The standard reply was, “Just fine. It’s quiet. The people are real nice.”

She didn’t answer immediately. “Could I have another cigarette?” Again the pack of Camels, again the lighter, again touching his hand, lightly. Sunlight walked across the back porch floor and onto the dog, who got up and moved out of sight. Francesca, for the first time, looked into the eyes of Robert Kincaid.

“I’m supposed to say, ‘Just fine. It’s quiet. The people are real nice.’ All of that’s true, mostly. It is quiet. And the people are nice, in certain ways. We all help each other out. If someone gets sick or hurt, the neighbors pitch in and pick corn or harvest oats or do whatever needs to be done. In town, you can leave your car unlocked and let your children run without worrying about them. There are a lot of good things about the people here, and I respect them for those qualities.

“But” –she hesitated, smoked, looked across the table at Robert Kincaid– “it’s not what I dreamed about as a girl.” The confession, at last. The words had been there for years, and she had never said them. She had said them now to a man with a green pickup truck from Bellingham, Washington.

He said nothing for a moment. Then: “I scribbled something in my notebook the other day for future use, just had the idea while driving along; that happens a lot. It goes like this: ‘The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out, but I’m glad I had them.’ I’m not sure what that means, but I’ll use it somewhere. So I think I kind of know how you feel.”

Francesca smiled at him then. For the first time, she smiled warm and deep. And the gambler’s instincts took over. “Would you like to stay for supper? My family’s away, so I don’t have too much on hand, but I can figure out something.”

“Well, I get pretty tired of grocery stores and restaurants. That’s for sure. So if it’s not too much bother, I’d like that.”

“You like pork chops? I could fix that with some vegetables from the garden.”

“Just the vegetables would be fine for me. I don’t eat meat. Haven’t for years. No big deal, I just feel better that way.”

Francesca smiled again. “Around here that point of view would not be popular. Richard and his friends would say you’re trying to destroy their livelihood. I don’t eat much meat myself; I’m not sure why, I just don’t care for it. But every time I try a meatless supper on the family, there are howls of rebellion. So I’ve pretty much given up trying. It’ll be fun figuring out something different for a change.”

“Okay, but don’t go to a lot of trouble on my account. Listen, I’ve got a bunch of film in my cooler. I need to dump out the melted ice water and organize things a bit. It’ll take me a little while.” He stood up and drank the last of his tea.

She watched him go through the kitchen doorway, across the porch, and into the yard. He didn’t let the screen door bang like everyone else did but instead shut it gently. Just before he went out, he squatted down to pet the collie, who acknowledged the attention with several sloppy licks along his arms.

Upstairs, Francesca ran a quick bath and, while drying off, peered over the top of the cafe curtain toward the farmyard. His suitcase was open, and he was washing himself, using the old hand pump. She should have told him he could shower in the house if he wanted. She had meant to, balked for a moment at the level of familiarity that implied to her, and then, floating around in her own confusion, forgot to say anything.

But Robert Kincaid had washed up under worse conditions. Out of buckets of rancid water in tiger country, out of his canteen in the desert. In her farmyard, he had stripped to the waist and was using his dirty shirt as a combination washcloth and towel. “A towel,” she scolded herself. “At least a towel; I could have done that for him.”

His razor caught the sunlight, where it lay on cement beside the pump, and she watched him soap his face and shave. He was– there’s the word again, she thought– hard. He wasn’t big-bodied, a little over six feet, a little toward thin. But he had large shoulder muscles for his size, and his belly was flat as a knife blade. He didn’t look however old he was, and he didn’t look like the local men with too much gravy over biscuits in the morning.

During the last shopping trip to Des Moines, she had bought new perfume– Wind Song– and she used it now, sparingly. What to put on? It didn’t seem right for her to dress up too much, since he was still in his working clothes. Long-sleeved white shirt, sleeves rolled to just below the elbows, a clean pair of jeans, sandals. The gold hoop earrings Richard said made her look like a hussy and a gold bracelet. Hair pulled back with a clip, hanging down her back. That felt right.

When she came into the kitchen, he was sitting there with his knapsacks and cooler, wearing a clean khaki shirt, with the orange suspenders running over it. On the table were three cameras and five lenses, and a fresh package of Camels. The cameras all said “Nikon” on them. So did the black lenses, short ones and middling ones and a longer one. The equipment was scratched, dented in places. But he handled it carefully, yet casually, wiping and brushing and blowing.

He looked up at her, serious face again, shy face. “I have some beer in the cooler. Like one?”

“Yes, that would be nice.”

He took out two bottles of Budweiser. When he lifted the lid, she could see clear plastic boxes with film stacked like cordwood in them. There were four more bottles of beer besides the two he removed.

Francesca slid open a drawer to look for an opener. But he said, “I’ve got it.” He took the Swiss Army knife from its case on his belt and flicked out the bottle opener on it, using it expertly.

He handed her a bottle and raised his in a half salute: “To covered bridges in the late afternoon or, better yet, on warm, red mornings.” He grinned.

Francesca said nothing but smiled softly and raised her bottle a little, hesitantly, awkwardly. A strange stranger, flowers, perfume, beer, and a toast on a hot Monday in late summer. It was almost more than she could deal with.

“There was somebody a long time ago who was thirsty on an August afternoon. Whoever it was studied their thirst, rigged up some stuff, and invented beer. That’s where it came from, and a problem was solved.” He was working on a camera, almost talking to it as he tightened a screw on its top with a jewelers screwdriver.