"My father? I don't know," Clara said, laughing edgily, "what about him? I ran away to leave him."

"Why?"

"Why'd anybody run away? He was. .h.i.tting me."

"Did he hurt you, Clara?"

"Naw." For suddenly an idea opened at the back of her mind: she hadn't run away from her family because Pa was. .h.i.tting her but because it had been time. Like stealing the flag, it had been time for that. Like falling onto her knees in that church and praying her heart out for Rosalie, the first and last time. That was why she was sitting here in Revere's car this afternoon on an August Sunday years later. Defensively she said, "My pa had some bad luck. He got cheated lots of times. He used to get drunk and hit us kids and I had a chance to leave and ..."

"You sound regretful, Clara. Did you love your parents?"

"Sure."

"Even your father, who hit you?"

"Sure."

"But why?"

Clara shrugged. This close questioning was getting to her.

"Why did you love your father if he hit you?" Revere persisted.

"He was my father. I said."

"But-is that enough?"

"He was my father." Clara spoke sullenly now. She was beginning to understand this man's power: he pretended to be gentle with you, even humble; it was his way of making you think he was no different from you. But of course he was different. There was some picking, precise look in his eyes, a tension in his face, that reminded her of Lowry when Lowry wasn't his teasing self but somebody older and more serious who scared her.

"You don't stop loving somebody just 'cause they hit you," Clara said contemptuously, as if the thought was childish, silly. As if you'd have to be G.o.dd.a.m.ned weak to give in to such.

Revere thought this over. Clara half-closed her eyes and tried to think of her father but her mind shrank from the memory; it was a memory that came unbidden at night, and not in daylight. Instead she smiled thinking of her and Rosalie tramping along the street, two pickers' kids in town, and there was that house, that flag. Oh, that flag! Clara smiled remembering running up boldly to s.n.a.t.c.h it and could see herself, as if all the action had been done by another person. Then in the next instant everything fell away, years vanished, and she was sitting here with this strange man. What had her father to do with it, then? But she could not explain this to Revere.

"Are you going to be married soon?" he said.

She looked at him. "How come you say that?"

"Are you?"

"I don't know. I guess not."

"But you might?"

She laughed shyly. "I don't think so."

"Is there somebody in mind?"

"Mister, can we go back now? Please?"

He looked at her the way he had looked at the photograph. "All right," he said. "We can go back."

[image]

She sat up straight, with the docile alertness of a child who may have done something wrong. The land back into Tintern moved unhurriedly to them, and Clara measured with her eyes the distance they had yet to go. And Lowry was on the way to her and would be with her in a few hours. She felt slow and peaceful, as if warmed by the sun. Revere was even more of a stranger to this town than she was herself, she thought. She stood between him and the ugly little clump of buildings and the clearings that were only halfway cleared and the dusty lanes with weeds growing in their centers; he might have owned some of it or all of it but he was more a stranger than she was.

When he let her out he looked tired. She thought he must be almost forty; it was the first clear thought she had had about him. "Take care of yourself," he said, echoing Lowry's words. Clara was a little shocked at that echo. She shook her head yes, smiled yes, with her hand on the doork.n.o.b just waiting for its freedom, waiting for his sad, heavy gaze to release her. Why his resentment, why that bullying set of his mouth? Clara wanted to tell him that she was free and belonged to no one at all. And if she ever did, it would be to another man. But she did not know what he wanted. She had never met anyone like him, she did not know how to talk to him. All she felt when she left was a sense of relief at being away from the pressure of his gaze.

When she climbed the stairs to her room she felt that relief ebb out of her. Revere's look stayed with her, the look her father should have given years ago if he'd known how-but of course he hadn't- and that would have kept her home, kept her from running. From Lowry too. And from this new, stunning knowledge-she let her hand fall against her stomach. Yes, it was true. Was it true? How could she know for certain? She stood at the top of the stairs breathing heavily.

She opened the door, half-expecting Lowry to be inside, but the room was empty. The air was very hot. A few flies buzzed about when she entered, annoyed at being disturbed, then they quieted down. Clara sat on her bed and stared at the opposite wall for a few minutes, thinking of nothing. Then Revere's face returned to her, and then the knowledge about her life she'd had in the car: what had brought her all this way to Lowry and to what she believed she might be carrying inside her had just been an accident. Was that it? Life was a sequence of accidents and nothing more?

She lay on her bed and lit a cigarette and waited. Trying to think what she was going to tell him, which words to use. "I'm afraid I got some trouble, Lowry," or "There's something wrong you need to know," or "I feel bad about ..." It might have been the ease with which she mouthed this that made her know she would never get to say it, that things did not go that easily.

When Lowry finally came it was late. Clara had taken off her dress but still lay on top of her bed, waiting. In the darkness she could see objects without bothering to figure them out; she knew where everything was. She lay with her feet curled up under her, half-sitting, propped up by a pillow, with an ashtray tilted on the bed. She was just lighting her sixth cigarette when she heard the unmistakable sound of Lowry's car outside; she hadn't known that she had known what his car sounded like.

He knocked and came inside. Clara had stood. "No, don't turn on the light," he said. He closed the door and she could hear him breathing hard.

"What's wrong?"

He seized her and pulled her over against him. "I can't stay, I'm in a hurry. I did something," he said. Though his voice was rushed, he was not frightened. "I'm on my way through. I can't stay. Are you all right, Clara?"

"What's wrong?"

"For Christ's sake don't cry-stop that," he said. He embraced her and lifted her off the floor. There was something reckless and joyful about him that terrified her. "Little Clara, it's all right, I'm not hurt or anything-just in a hurry- How the h.e.l.l are you, kid? How's everything here? I missed you-"

He pushed her back toward the bed and sat her down. "Look, I can't stay. Maybe I could write you a letter or something-O.K.? O.K., sweetheart?"

"Did you do something?"

"Christ, yes, it's about time," he said. "I was fed up with this twobit business, this two-bit G.o.dd.a.m.n junk I've been doing. Next time you see me I'll be different. I'm sick to death of myself the way I am-what the h.e.l.l am I?" He sat down heavily beside her. His released joy made his body heavy. "I'm going to Mexico, sweetheart."

"I'll go with you-"

"What? You stay here. You grow up. Do you need some money?"

"Why are you going away?" Clara said wildly. "What's wrong? Did you kill somebody?"

"I've never been down to Mexico, that's why I'm going there. I'm going to do lots of things- Look, do you need some money? How the h.e.l.l are you?" He took her jaw in his hand and looked at her, this new, loud, strange Lowry. She could feel his anxious breath on her face and was paralyzed. No words came to her. "You're a sweet little girl but look, look, I never fooled you, did I? I never lied to you. I told you all along how it was. O.K.? Are you O.K.?"

He lay back with her on the bed and held her in his arms. But she had already retreated from him, grown small. She felt small, and her body was numb and dead in his arms, something foreign to both of them. Lowry kissed her and kept on talking in that low, explosive way, his energy threatening to damage her with the very innocence of its joy, and she could not understand it. She had shrunken far inside her body and could not control its trembling and could not understand what was happening. Lowry said, getting up, "Clara, I've got to get going. I'm in a big rush. If somebody comes looking for me, tell them to go to h.e.l.l-right? I'm only taking what's my own. If he follows me I'll smash his head in. Tell him that. Here, Clara, I'll try to see you sometime again-remember me, all right? Here's something for you. Remember me-I took good care of you, didn't I?"

Then he was gone. Clara lay still. When she finally turned on the light she saw money on the table, bills scattered carelessly as if the wind of Lowry's pa.s.sing had blown them there by accident. It was some time before she could make herself get up to put them away. She moved slowly, woodenly. She wondered how she would live out the rest of her life.

7.

The day Clara took her life into control was an ordinary day. She did not know up until the last moment exactly how she would bring all those accidents into control, like a driver swerving aside to let a rabbit live or tearing into it and not even bothering to glance back: he might do one or the other and not know a moment before what it would be.

She was sixteen now, and by the time the baby was born she would be seventeen. Every morning after Lowry had left she woke up to the clear, unmistakable knowledge of what had happened to her and what it meant. The dreaminess of the past two weeks had vanished. She stared long and hard at things. It might have been that she didn't trust them-that she wanted to make sure they stayed still, kept their shapes, ident.i.ties. She thought about the baby obsessively and of Lowry who would be kept alive in this way even when-in Mexico, or anywhere-he really did die. Lowry would remain alive through his baby and its eyes might resemble his, its mouth or way of speaking-and it would answer her when she called it, a baby boy maybe who would come running breathless and laughing when she called him, to her.

To people in Tintern she must have looked very like their own girls, the kind who'd grown up too quickly and were anxious to grow up even more. She knew people were talking about her. When Lowry came to Tintern they talked and now that he failed to come to Tintern they talked even more. She felt their eyes, following her.

She cried, and cursed herself for her weakness! It was those dry, exhausted hours when she had no more tears or curses left that hurt her most. Lowry had been cruel to her, a selfish b.a.s.t.a.r.d-she knew. Yet, so long as Lowry himself did not know, she supposed he was innocent of harming her. And he did love her, in his way. She would always believe this.

One afternoon when Clara was out walking by herself along a back lane a mile or so from her room, thinking these thoughts, murmuring and laughing softly to herself, she saw: Revere's automobile, parked. And in that instant she understood what she was going to do and what she'd been planning to do for nearly four weeks.

It had been that long: four weeks. She thought it could have been four years. Clara had never paid much attention to the workings of her body, but after that trip with Lowry her attention had turned inward so violently and resentfully that she would never be able to think of her body any other way. Lowry had changed her. But she was healthy despite this. The trouble was that her body's health had nothing to do with her personally, with Clara; its workings and demands were not hers. She sometimes dreamed that Lowry was making love to her and her mind did not want this at all-it was disgusted and angry. She would press both hands against her stomach when she was alone, or even sometimes in the store, and think of how her body had continued in its way while her mind had tried hard to go in another; but in the end there was no choice. Time kept on pa.s.sing, she kept on growing into it, drifting into it. There was no choice.

When she had nothing else to do she went out walking by herself. In Tintern there were always people walking, kids or old people or anyone at all, maybe attended by dogs that ran barking and sniffing everywhere. Some of the old men carried heavy branches to use as canes, some of the kids carried branches that were supposed to be weapons. Clara walked back on the dusty lanes that led past closed-up storage barns and frame houses and fields that had never been cleared. She avoided walking by the creek because so many people hung around there, and she never went past the Tintern "hotel," where mill hands rented rooms or just hung out. One day she saw Revere's car parked up on the shoulder of the road; back a distance was a new building, a small office that had something to do with the lumberyard. It looked as if it had been built out of new raw lumber just the other day. The lumberyard itself was large and not very busy. The sawmill, some distance away and facing another road, was noisy and crowded with men; Clara was afraid of it.

This was the very end of August. The air was motionless. Clara was used to perspiration on her forehead, her neck, her body, but she did not like it because it made her feel dirty. Lowry disliked dirt. So she wiped her forehead with the backs of her hands and stood at the side of the road and waited. If she stared straight ahead, she could see the tall ungainly buildings of Tintern, one of them the building she'd lived in now for over two years. Seen from the back, they looked hollowed-out and strange; women had clothes hanging up to dry, drooping from line to line, on the back porches. Two girls came from the turnoff of Main Street, riding bicycles, heading down toward her. They were about twelve or thirteen and lived somewhere on the other side of the town, in those neat identical white frame houses bought by men who had managed to save money for twenty years or so in the sawmill or at the gypsum plant, doing steady work, therefore different from Clara and her people. She felt this difference now more and more often. When she had been with Lowry-no matter where his imagination had been- she had never noticed such things. She must have lived in a daze. But now she did notice, now her eyes had taken on the characteristic of narrowing shrewdly when she met someone, as if sizing up an enemy. The girls were laughing shrilly together and as they approached Clara they fell silent. Clara stared at their sweaty, smeared faces, their little mouths and eyes shaped for secret wonder and laughter about this strange blond girl Clara, whom everyone knew and talked about, who didn't have any family, who lived by herself in that dump-!

The first girl pedaled faster and shot by Clara, saying nothing, then the other was by too. Once they were past, they giggled again. Clara watched them ride away-the second one had a boy's bike, old and battered-and wondered what they had been saying about her. She did not feel any bitterness. She did not feel anything toward them at all. She watched them ride down the lane and wondered why she had never had a bicycle, why she hadn't trained her legs to go up and down like that in tight controlled circles, so that the muscles of the calf showed, even on those skinny girls. They wore blue jeans that were baggy and faded, they stood up on the pedals in a breathless rigidity that waited to see where it would be taken to, the girls calm and unalarmed by b.u.mps and rocks in the lane. They zigzagged back and forth, calling out to each other, their words flattened now by the distance. The soft pale dust of the lane was marked by their tire prints, a vague blurred confusion of lines that no one but Clara could understand. Clara looked after them and felt how old she was, how far she had come while never having ridden down back lanes like this with a friend, on bicycles, before supper.... Then she heard some men talking and looked over to the office, where Revere and two other men stood. Revere was backing off from them.

He must have seen her because he backed away, still talking, and then turned and headed to her. She was serious when he approached her. She watched him come and saw how his eyes emerged out of the distance, fixed upon her. She had not quite remembered them. He said h.e.l.lo, but she hesitated, unwilling to say anything across that s.p.a.ce of dirt, when here she had been standing and waiting for him so obviously-anyone could tell that.

"Is anything wrong?" Revere said. He brought a sweet, fresh smell of new lumber with him on his clothes. But it began to fade at once in the afternoon heat. "Did you want to-see me?"

Clara almost shivered, but she had felt it coming and controlled it. She must have been looking at him with a small, fixed, strange smile. Revere wore no suit coat today and no tie, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up. But he still did not look like a man from this country. Just as Clara, dressed up, looked like every other girl for miles, so Revere looked like no one else even when dressed like them.

"I was out walking and saw your car," Clara said flatly. She kept staring at him as if to force him into saying something, doing something. Revere was slowly folding up a slip of yellow paper, then he seemed to forget about it and held it between his fingers absently. "It's hot, it's awful hot. I feel all heavy and sick with this summer," Clara said. Her voice had gone breathless, amorous in a tired way, and her eyelids drooped as she spoke, not knowing at all what she was going to say. But she did not think she had to say much of anything. She was so aware of him standing there that her throat kept wanting to close up, to swallow in terror; his movements too were stiff. They might have gone through this before, many times. Clara did indeed feel that she had said something of this nature to him before, and that he had looked at her as he was looking now. Clara glanced down at herself, as if to guide Revere's eyes, at her bare tanned arms and bare tanned legs, at her black ballerina slippers that had cost $2.98 new and were already run over and smudged and looked like h.e.l.l. Everything she had, Clara thought, looked like h.e.l.l sooner or later. She said, tossing her hair back out of her eyes, "Do you own this place here-this lumberyard?"

"Not all of it," he said. He tried to smile.

She still had not smiled and so she felt ahead of him. "You own lots of things in town, though," she said flatly.

"In Tintern? Yes, something. It isn't important."

"How do you get to own things?"

"What?"

"How do you get that way?-How would a baby end up like that? A baby that was just born and had nothing?"

"You look a little tired, Clara," he said. He came to her. Clara watched his hand approaching and thought, This can't be happening. He touched her arm. It was the first time he had touched her but it too seemed familiar. "Is something wrong? Have you been ill?"

"I must be ugly in all this heat," she said, turning away. She felt real revulsion. She brought one hand up to hide her face from him and he stepped around to look at her, the way a child or dog will press after someone who has retreated. He looked so strange, so uneasy and nervous, that she was afraid she would do something crazy just to end what they were going through.

"No, you're not ugly," he said.

"I'm tired-"

"You're not ugly."

He said it sadly. She did not want to meet his eyes. Her heart had begun to pound heavily. Revere pressed his hand against her forehead, just for an instant, a light, casual gesture that was meant to calm her but instead made them both nervous. Clara thought, Somebody is watching from the lumberyard. She thought, The whole town is watching. But when she swung her eyes around, as if trying for freedom, she saw no one at all. Nothing.

"I can drive you back," he said.

He waited for her to acquiesce. It took a moment or two. Then he pushed her gently toward the car. This was the way Lowry had pushed her-not a real push, but just a nudge, something to get her started and guide her a little, but really just an excuse for touching her. "You work too hard in that store. You shouldn't have to work at all," Revere said.

"Yes," Clara said, thinking of how she had worked all her life and had never known any better, while other people owned the farms she and her family had worked on, and still other people owned the trucks that drove up to buy the vegetables and fruit, and others owned banks and sawmills and lumberyards and factories and grocery stores in town that sold the things she and her family had picked, and the children of all these people were free to ride bicycles up and down quiet dusty lanes throughout their whole childhoods, never growing old.

She got into the car and let her head droop down toward her chest, just for an instant. It was all she allowed herself. In the next moment she would know, she thought: it depended on which way he turned the car. If he drove back into town (the car was headed in that direction) she would have to start thinking about getting out of this place, but if he turned around and went the other way, she had a chance. Revere started the car and drove it a little jerkily up onto the lane, then backed up into the lumberyard driveway so he could turn the car around.

She knew they were talking to each other, even though they had nothing to say out loud. All she had were questions, questions. She was fearful of being injured, broken, dirtied beyond anything Lowry could ever fix up. But she had trained herself to think, "That b.a.s.t.a.r.d," whenever Lowry's name came to mind, and the blood pulsing from her anger for him gave her courage. In a few minutes they had overtaken and pa.s.sed the girls on the bicycles. The girls were standing and resting, their legs on either side of the old bikes, and Clara let her eyes brush past them with something like a forlorn, wistful affection-but they were just brats anyway, girls with fathers and mothers and families who dawdled around the dime store handling things and who stared a little too often at Clara and Sonya. In the instant Revere drove by them Clara wanted to catch their eyes and toss out to them a look of contempt, but when she turned, her look changed into one of confusion, of clumsy affection, as if she would have liked somehow to be nothing more than a third girl with them, on another bike, and not in this car heading out toward the country and whatever was going to happen to her out there.

He was saying, "I didn't know if you'd want to see me again. I don't want to get you in any trouble."

"Yes," Clara said.

"I mean with people in town."

"Yes."

"I stopped by the picnic to see you. But you belonged with those young people you were with."

Clara said nothing.

"It's strange," Revere said. His voice was not warm. "I didn't think I would see you again."

Clara looked out the window. The hot sun, facing them, gave her a vague reflection in the side window so that she could see herself. She rolled down the window and the wind poured in, whipping her hair back. She closed her eyes. After a moment Revere said, "There's a house I own out here. I bought some land and a house came with it...." Clara opened her eyes and waited for the house to come into sight. She expected it to materialize out of nowhere. "I own this land here," Revere said. "There are two hundred acres to this. But the land's no good."

"No good," Clara echoed, not quite questioning him. She wondered why anyone would buy farmland he couldn't farm on, but she was too nervous, too oddly tired, to ask.

When they reached the house her face and body were damp with sweat that had turned cold. She did not bother wiping her forehead. Revere, helping her out of the car, touched her with a hand that was cold with perspiration too. She wondered what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all. They were some distance from the road, parked in the overgrown driveway. The farmhouse was probably a hundred years old. Clara saw feverishly that its roof was rotted in one part and that some of its windows were broken. Tall thistled gra.s.s grew everywhere. There were sharp weeds that brushed against her legs but she was too nervous to avoid them. Revere was indicating something, very seriously, and she turned and saw a few old barns, washed by the rain to no color at all. They went on toward the house. Clara was watching her feet. She did not want to stumble on the back steps, which looked wobbly. She thought that if she stumbled she would fall apart, everything would crack into pieces. Revere helped her up. Since he had first touched her back on that lane she had grown weak, as if she did indeed need help getting in and out of cars and walking up three or four steps. Revere pushed the door open and it moved away from his hand, opening by itself. Clara swallowed hard. In her body everything was pounding with heat and fear and heaviness.

Just inside the house she turned to him miserably, sobbing. He took her hands and tried to comfort her. She felt his pity, his own uneasiness, and that hard strength behind him that she had to count on now. She was giving herself over to him and it would be done the way Lowry would do something, thinking it through, calculating on it, and then going ahead. All her life she would be able to say: Today she changed the way her life was going and it was no accident. No accident.

"I'm afraid-I don't want-" she began. But Revere pressed her face against him, hiding her face. He was trembling. Clara shut her eyes tight and thought that she would never go through this again, not anything like this. She would never be this terrified again.

"No, don't be afraid. Clara. Don't be afraid," he said.

Her teeth had begun to chatter. She thought of Lowry, that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Lowry, and of how he was making her do this, making her heart swell and pound furiously in her chest like something about to go wild. It was of Lowry she thought when Revere made love to her. They were in what must have been a parlor, surrounded by drifting bunches of dust and the corpses of insects and odd pieces of furniture hunched beneath soiled sheets. The ceiling was covered with cobwebs that swayed a little though there was no breeze at all.

8.

By the time the first cooling thunderstorms came in late September, that house had been fixed up-the roof mended, the steps and porch strengthened, the inside painted and even papered with a special wallpaper Clara herself had picked out of a big book, pale pink with tiny rosebuds. When she was alone in the morning she would sit out on the porch as if waiting for someone to come, or she would stare off across the land that had come with this house, un-tended and belonging to no one really, since Curt Revere did not bother to put anything into it. She would try to think what she was doing and how this had come about: she tried to imagine the old people who had lived out their lives here, a couple who had built everything and worked the land and who had died and lost it so that Clara could sit on their porch and stare out with a stillness that she must have sucked in with the air of the old house, the intimate breaths of that old couple.