CHAPTER 9

 

"You shoulda seen Frank Walker's face!" Py laughed so as he told the story that he spat when he talked. "I thought he was gonna have a conniption."

"What did Miller say about all this?" Pete asked, eager to hear all about what had transpired at the Sheriff's office.

"He did real good his self," Py said. "I don't know how it might have been if he hadn't stood up to Walker like he did."

Joanne looked from her father to Py. "Well, there's no reason to let Frank Walker push you around. Jake had better watch himself though. He's had enough trouble with that guy."

"Sounds to me like Jake can take care of himself," Pete said. He held a picket up to the fence. "Drive a nail right in there, will you Py?"

After Jake and Py returned from town with the new fence stretcher, Joanne sent Jake to the field by himself and recruited Py to help her and her father repair the fence around the yard. It was work Py was happy to accept because it gave him a chance to tell the two about Jake's heroics in town. Py's estimation of Jake's manly authenticity had quadrupled. By association, so had his, for he'd seen that it was possible to take Frank Walker on straight up and come out with all your parts intact. Not yet aware of Walker's

retreat on the manslaughter charges, Py was worried over the expected encounter and he was hungry for encouragement.

"Those six pennies are a little more nail than we really need," Pete said. "We might have to knock 'em back flat on the back side." "You got it where you want it?" Py asked, aiming with the hammer. "Hit it," Pete said, and Py took five good whacks to drive the head of the nail flush against the board.

"You know, I grew up with Frank Walker," Pete said, while sizing up the positioning of the wood. "He was a squirt of a kid. Didn't have nothin'. My family didn't have nothin' either, but I remember passin' down some denim pants to Frank and his brother Tom."

"I didn't know he had no brother," Py said.

"Well, he doesn't now," Pete said. "Tom died a long while back -real young. He got thrown from a horse and killed."

Joanne gasped. "How horrible ..."

"Oh yeah -you don't remember that?" Pete asked. "You were around then, though you'd a been a kid yourself."

"Frank Walker has sure had a lot of tragedy in his life," Joanne said. "What with his son, his wife -and now I'm hearing about his brother ..."

"It's all gone in to makin' him who he is today," Pete said. "That's why I always kind of temper my judgments again' him -'cause I know what he's been through -but, still, he's gotten bad tempered. I think he's a little crazy. I feel sorry for anybody whose got anything to do with him."

"That daughter of his -she's got a lot to handle," Py said sincerely, which made Joanne look at him and smile. "Of course, she's kinda crazy herself."

"What do you mean?" Joanne asked.

"Well, she's different every time you see her," Py said. "One day she's all stuck- up on herself and won't even speak to you, and the next day she's all friendly, like you're her favorite person. Then the next day she treats you like a slave ..."

"That's just women," Pete said. Joanne slapped him across his shoulder with the back of her hand. "They're all like that. They ain't like men, same way every day. It's a lot more complicated with them."

"Well, that's Lily," Py said. "She sure is pretty, though."

"You like her, huh?" Joanne asked.

"I like the way she looks," Py said. "If she was half as sweet as she is good-

lookin'. .." "Have you ever had a girlfriend?" Joanne asked, as Py lined up another picket. Py shook his head. "Well, I known some, but I ain't never had a real girlfriend."

He got quiet for a moment, then said to Joanne, "I guess you've probably had some boyfriends, huh?" "Oh yeah," Joanne said, smiling widely. "I think you could say I've had one or two.'' "You ever been married?" Py asked. "No," Joanne said. "I've never been married." "Would you like to be?" Py asked.

With that, Pete had heard enough. "If you two are gonna be talkin' mush I'm gonna go have a little soak," he said, getting up from where they were working and walking off toward the cattle tank. "Let me know if either one of you falls in love."

"Well?" urged Py, once Pete was gone. "Would you like to?"

"Yeah, sure I would," Joanne said. "What woman wouldn't want to be married? I'd like to be a wife and a mother -make a home, raise a family. Sure, who wouldn't want that, as long as it was with the right man?"

Py looked interested. "What kind of a man would that be?" he asked.

Joanne thought for a moment. "Well, he'd have to be solid. You know. He'd have to be able to hold down a job and be a good provider." She stared off into space, allowing her thoughts a wider range. "I'd have to be in love with him, and him with me. Mostly, though, I think he'd have to be warn and caring, funny -and handsome. And he'd have to be able to protect me, you know? I think I'd like knowing that I was with someone who could take care of me if ...I don't know, if something happened."

"You think Jake could do all that?" Py asked.

The question seemed to knock Joanne a bit off her guard. "I don't know, Py," she said. "Maybe he could. Jake's got some good qualities."

"Do you love him?" Py asked.

"Py!" Joanne said, a little flustered. "Where are you getting these questions?"

"I don't know," Py said, a little embarrassed by himself. "I just wondered. I don't ever get a chance to talk with girls -er, women, excuse me -about how they see things."

"I don't know Jake that well yet, that's all," Joanne said. "You embarrass me."

"I'm sorry," Py said apologetically. "I just wondered."

"Besides," Joanne said, "I don't think Jake's that easy to get to know. He's like a Chinese box. You open up the first and there's another inside, and you don't know what's in it. Then you open that one to find another, and you still don't know. I think you can fall in love with the mystery, sort of become hypnotized, you know? What I do know about Jake is that his heart is good. I think he's been a lot of places and done a lot of things. It may be why he's so distant in some ways. But in others he's so ...right there, you know? He's so unshakable." Joanne watched as Py knocked another nail into the fence. "I can tell you one thing -he's a great lover."

Py took the news mid-swing and missed his nail entirely, striking his thumb instead. "Damn!" he yelled.

Joanne giggled despite herself. "I'm sorry, Py. Are you okay?"

"Yeah -I just whacked myself with the hammer. I'm fine," he said.

"I didn't mean to upset you," Joanne said, grinning.

"I guess I just ain't used to talking to girls," Py said. "Er -I mean, women."

"So, did you do everything you wanted to do in town today?"

Frank couldn't even ask his daughter a standard question without sounding just a little bit gruff. It was his voice -gravel and dust, the stuff of his working days. He rasped his words from his throat in a dull monotone that made him sound like the voice of death. It was a misrepresentation to be sure, though few in number were those who knew. His little girl, Lily, was among them.

She sat across the table from him in awkward loneliness, not frightened by her father but dwarfed in his surroundings. Frank's stuff. It was all heavy post furniture, cut western style, all male and all shades of brown. The dining room table was butcher block with square post legs, its chairs huge wooden thrones with padded leather tacked strategically on seat and back. There was a wagon wheel chandelier suspended from the ceiling. The dining room was paneled in blond wood. In the adjoining living room there was a huge stone fireplace, large enough for a person to walk into. In that room too the furniture was over-sized, giving visitors the impression that here lived a family of giants. It wasn't a cold environment -not by a long shot. But it was overwhelming, and it was Frank. And a lot of Frank was overwhelming.

"Herb Leeber said he saw you and Betty Wilkerson over getting sodas," Frank said, as he buttered a roll and went about preparing his dinner plate.

Lily picked at her peas with her fork. Even the food was Frank. Her father had swept their lives clean of any memory of her mother -and that included all the feminine touches that she had worked so hard to add. Her mother Viola's life's work had been to soften her father's edge, but when she passed he felt haunted by piano shawls and doilies, so they all went. Into the environment came gun racks and men's magazines. And now even the food was Frank -meat and potatoes and bland vegetables. Lily moved a chunk of roast beef around on her plate, making tracks in her gravy. Her father didn't seem to like anything that wasn't a strain to lift. The mashed potatoes weren't even creamy.

Frank stopped his buttering and cutting for a second and trained a stem eye on Lily. "I saw Verle Dent in town. He said he brought his wife in to get school clothes for...what's his girl's name?" "Julie," Lily said. "For Julie," Frank said. "How are you doing on clothes? Do we need to get you something for school?"

Lily raised an eyebrow. "I could use some clothes," she said.

"Well, maybe on Saturday we can get you something," Frank said.

"You don't need to go with me, daddy," Lily said, abhorrent at the thought. "I can go shopping by myself."

Frank closed one eye and squinted questioningly with his other. "You go to Harold Evans' place then," he said. "He carries a good line."

"Maybe for men. It's not important that my clothes wear well at the knees," Lily said. She looked at a wad of mashed potatoes she'd augured onto her fork then tossed it onto her plate. It landed like brick mortar.

"Is something wrong with your food?" Frank asked impatiently.

"If I'm going to get something to wear to school then Town and Country is where I ought to go," Lily said. "They cany things a person my age and gender would wear."

Frank thought about it for a moment, then returned to pushing food around his plate. He took a big bite of beef then said, "Well, fine then. I'll give you money. Get something that's gonna last. I won't be wasting money on poor quality."

"I'm sure I'll know quality," Lily said.

"I don't want you getting anything cheap," Frank said. "You know what I mean. I want you dressing respectful."

"I know how to dress," Lily said. Her father could be such a bore, as if he knew anything about how a young woman should dress. She didn't read Harper's Bazarre and Vanity Fair every month to dress like her old man. Longmont may have been the center of his universe, but it sure wasn't that for her. In fact, she had made a vow never to wear practical clothing ever again -a campaign that she would launch just as soon as she became fully in charge of her own person.

Frank took time to masticate some roast beef. It was violence, the way he ate. He chewed food as if it were part of his work day, going at it with a steely determination that was both efficient and humorless. He no sooner swallowed one piece of meat before he stabbed another and poked that into his mouth. Lily could hardly watch, convinced that one day he would put that fork right through his cheek, jabbing with it the way he did.

"You looking forward to your senior year?" Frank asked, turning his attention away from supper for a moment. "This is a big year for you."

"Yeah, I guess so," Lily said.

"You need to be making some grades this year," Frank said. "If we're going to get you into Loretta Heights ..."

"I don't want to go to Loretta Heights!" Lily said, suddenly strident.

"Well that's what your mother wanted," Frank said. There was an implication that the late Viola's wishes were inviolable, beaming in from the hereafter, and that to not heed them would be to blaspheme.

Lily caught the full weight of her father's edict and she was beside herself over how to respond. She did not want to go against her mother's wishes, especially knowing how important Loretta Heights had been to her, and how much she had made of it in conversations with others. She'd gone there and considered it the finest educational experience a young woman could have. But Loretta Heights was a woman's college. Lily didn't want to go to an all-girl school! She wasn't even sure she wanted any schooling at all beyond high school, but there was no talking to her father on this one. The argument only brought her mother's ghost back to Frank's table and that unnerved them both. It was the one subject that could make Frank furious every time. To go against his lost Viola's Loretta Heights plan seemed to him like a final disrespect, and he felt he owed better than that to the woman whose bed he'd shared for so long. She had breathed what good there was into life at Walker Ranch. Now Frank lived on lingering ethers that permeated every aching crevasse of his heart and his mind.

After Viola's death, he had tried to transfer his affections to his children, and particularly to his son, Frank Jr. The boy was easier for him to understand than was his young daughter. Lily had been put in the care of Rosa Villaman, a Mexican lady whom Frank had hired as the family retainer. She was a kind woman whose bonhomie had gone a long way toward helping young Lily cope with the loss of her mother. Rosa had been there when Lily had her first period and helped the girl understand this change in her life. She serviced the girl's need for feminine direction and served as general surrogate for her mother, and it had worked well -Lily loved Rosa and treated her with respect. Still, the girl remained untethered on some soul level. She yearned for the attention and affection of her father and Frank, nervous and uncertain with the girl, had remained &stant. Lily's was a sad and lonely sufferance.

Frank had seen this in his daughter and had felt the weight of his own responsibility for her well-being. Lily was still young and fresh, her attitude still devoid of meanness and loss. But for how long? He could think of nothing other than what Lily's mother had planned -the girls school in Denver, where she would come under the direction of professionals who could guide her, steer her toward a happy, productive life. But love her? There was no other person to whom Frank could entrust the emotional support that was needed. That was his alone to offer. First, he had to find it within himself, for his emotional wounds were slow to scar and heal. Frank Jr.'s death had tom his insides open to the point where he could hardly give himself again. Loving someone, wishing good things for them, hurting when they fell ... Frank had become frightened of happiness, paralyzed with fear over its fleeting nature. And Lily seemed like an uncertain vessel in which to place his raw emotions. Still he knew he had to find the courage. His little girl needed him. And he needed her.

 

END OF CHAPTER NINE