Oh well, Brenda was busy sewing, in addition to her own
wedding dress, those for her mother, her bridesmaid, and the bridesmaid’s
sister.
Some evenings she would take a break and we would drive out old
Highway 70 along Hill’s Lake, find a quiet spot, open a bottle of Boone’s Farm
Wine, and talk about the future. We would lean our heads together and count our
blessings until the sun went down or the mosquitoes overtook us. Here I was, fulfilling
a dream. I had a sports car convertible and a lover with long flowing red hair
to ride next to me in it. I had come a long way.
At the office, the partners had asked if I wanted something
called “a bachelor’s party.” I had no idea what that was. They didn’t have
those in the old United States Navy. They explained that it was a party for men
only where they got the husband-to-be drunk, acted silly, and talked dirty.
“Talk dirty?”
“Yeah, you know … filthy jokes and all.”
“That’s all you do?”
“Well, we get you drunk. It’s like one last super-blast
before you get married.”
“You just get drunk, talk dirty, and make insulting jokes
about being married?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Sounds like fun to me.”
I didn’t mention it to Brenda on any of our evening rides.
Once though, I parked at the edge of a large field of soybeans stretching far
into the horizon, with a band of clouds and thunderheads at its end.
“Isn’t this land wonderful?” she said.
I studied the soft curve of her back contrasted against the
long straight furrows. The silence unnerved me and I said, “It’s okay here.”
She didn’t respond so I added. “I guess next to the sea, I like the mountains
best.”
She turned
and looked at me the way a teacher would look at a student who had failed to
solve the easiest problem of the day. “That’s just it,” she announced as if
announcing the solution.
“What?” I said.
She smiled and the smile completely unmanned me, a trick of
hers I had learned to dread.
“You see, here you create your own mountains.”
“Your own mountains?”
“Yes,” she said and her eagerness and certitude kept me
unbalanced. “That way, you don’t suffer constraint.”
“Constraint?”
“Yes, constraint. Your mountains can be as big as you want
or as small. They can be covered with snow or even have a giant cherry on top
like that one there.” She pointed to a thunderhead on the horizon, topped by a
round black cloud that did indeed seem to radiate a red hue in the late
afternoon sky.
I held her hand. We studied the field, spread out before us like
a chart drawn to illustrate perspective.
“How do they plow them so straight, the rows?” I asked.
“They have a marker on an arm of the tractor that they use
to measure from the last row plowed,” she said. “Like this land itself―each
generation is built upon the values of the last.” She paused and then added,
“Daddy’s been doing it so long, though, he really doesn’t need a marker.”
I looked back at the fields and felt a breeze that swept me
forward for a fraction of a second—not really long enough to register fully— and
I saw the tedium of, year after year, coaxing life from this fecund land. Her
voice jerked me back the way a young calf is jerked as he comes to the end of
the roper’s lariat.
“It would be truly sad, wouldn’t it?”
I focused on her and processed what I thought I heard her
say.
“Sad?” I said.
“It would be so sad to know that you had actually to be
where the mountains were in order to have them. That you couldn’t just do it
whenever or wherever you chose.”
I failed to find a response. Instead, I looked at the distant
clouds as they transformed themselves into snow-clad mountains of heart-piercing
peace and beauty.
Was I about to marry a sorceress?
 |
| Maybe Keats had it right. |
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