“I guess you wouldn’t even know the difference.”
“I would too. I wish you would talk out. You’re like riddles in the Bulletin.”
Abra continued in her concentrated imperturbability, “Do you want to have a mother?”
“That’s crazy,” said Aron. “ ’Course I do. Everybody does. You aren’t trying to hurt my feelings, are you? Cal tries that sometimes and then he laughs.”
Abra looked away from the setting sun. She had difficulty seeing past the purple spots the light had left on her eyes. “You said a little while ago you could keep secrets.”
“I can.”
“Well, do you have a double-poison-and-cut-my-throat secret?”
“Sure I have.”
Abra said softly, “Tell me what it is, Aron.” She put a caress in his name.
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me the deepest down hell-and-goddam secret you know.”
Aron reared back from her in alarm. “Why, I will not,” he said. “What right you got to ask me? I wouldn’t tell anybody.”
“Come on, my baby—tell Mother,” she crooned.
There were tears crowding up in his eyes again, but this time they were tears of anger. “I don’t know as I want to marry you,” he said. “I think I’m going home now.”
Abra put her hand on his wrist and hung on. Her voice lost its coquetry. “I wanted to see. I guess you can keep secrets all right.”
“Why did you go for to do it? I’m mad now. I feel sick.”
“I think I’m going to tell you a secret,” she said.
“Ho!” he jeered at her. “Who can’t keep a secret now?”
“I was trying to decide,” she said. “I think I’m going to tell you this secret because it might be good for you. It might make you glad.”
“Who told you not to tell?”
“Nobody,” she said. “I only told myself.”
“Well, I guess that’s a little different. What’s your old secret?”
The red sun leaned its rim on the rooftree of Tollot’s house on the Blanco Road, and Tollot’s chimney stuck up like a black thumb against it.
Abra said softly, “Listen, you remember when we came to your place that time?”
“Sure!”
“Well, in the buggy I went to sleep, and when I woke up my father and mother didn’t know I was awake. They said your mother wasn’t dead. They said she went away. They said something bad must have happened to her, and she went away.”
Aron said hoarsely, “She’s dead.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if she wasn’t?”
“My father says she’s dead. He’s not a liar.”
“Maybe he thinks she’s dead.
He said, “I think he’d know.” But there was uncertainty in his tone.
Abra said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find her? ’Spose she lost her memory or something. I’ve read about that. And we could find her and that would make her remember.” The glory of the romance caught her like a rip tide and carried her away.
Aron said, “I’ll ask my father.”
“Aron,” she said sternly, “what I told you is a secret.”
“Who says?”
“I say. Now you just say after me—‘I’ll take double poison and cut my throat if I tell.’ ”
For a moment he hesitated and then he repeated, “I’ll take double poison and cut my throat if I tell.”
She said, “Now spit in your palm—like this—that’s right. Now you give me your hand—see?—squidge the spit all together. Now rub it dry on your hair.” The two followed the formula, and then Abra said solemnly, “Now, I’d just like to see you tell that one. I knew one girl that told a secret after that oath and she burned up in a barn fire.”
The sun was gone behind Toiler’s house and the gold light with it. The evening star shimmered over Mount Toro.
Abra said, “They’ll skin me alive. Come on. Hurry! I bet my father’s got the dog whistle out for me. I’ll get whipped.”
Aron looked at her in disbelief. “Whipped! They don’t whip you?”
“That’s what you think!”
Aron said passionately, “You just let them try. If they go for to whip you, you tell them I’ll kill them.” His wide-set blue eyes were slitted and glinting. “Nobody’s going to whip my wife,” he said.
Abra put her arms around his neck in the dusk under the willow tree. She kissed him on his open mouth. “I love you, husband,” she said, and then she turned and bolted, holding up her skirts above her knees, her lace-edged white drawers flashing as she ran toward home.
3
Aron went back to the trunk of the willow tree and sat on the ground and leaned back against the bark. His mind was a grayness and there were churnings of pain in his stomach. He tried to sort out the feeling into thoughts and pictures so the pain would go away. It was hard. His slow deliberate mind could not accept so many thoughts and emotions at once. The door was shut against everything except physical pain. After a while the door opened a little and let in one thing to be scrutinized and then another and another, until all had been absorbed, one at a time. Outside his closed mind a huge thing was clamoring to get in. Aron held it back until last.
First he let Abra in and went over her dress, her face, the feel of her hand on his cheek, the odor that came from her, like milk a little and like cut grass a little. He saw and felt and heard and smelled her all over again. He thought how clean she was, her hands and fingernails, and how straightforward and unlike the gigglers in the schoolyard.
Then, in order, he thought of her holding his head and his baby crying, crying with longing, wanting something and in a way feeling that he was getting it. Perhaps the getting it was what had made him cry.
Next he thought of her trick—her testing of him. He wondered what she would have done if he had told her a secret. What secret could he have told her if he had wished? Right now- he didn’t recall any secret except the one that was beating on the door to get into his mind.
The sharpest question she had asked, “How does it feel not to have a mother?” slipped into his mind. And how did it feel? It didn’t feel like anything. Ah, but in the schoolroom, at Christmas and graduation, when the mothers of other children came to the parties—then was the silent cry and the wordless longing. That’s what it was like.
Salinas was surrounded and penetrated with swamps, with tule-filled ponds, and every pond spawned thousands of frogs. With the evening the air was so full of their song that it was a kind of roaring silence. It was a veil, a background, and its sudden disappearance, as after a clap of thunder, was a shocking thing. It is possible that if in the night the frog sound should have stopped, everyone in Salinas would have awakened, feeling that there was a great noise. In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears’ function to do this just as it is the eyes’ business to make stars twinkle.
It was quite dark under the willow tree now. Aron wondered whether he was ready for the big thing, and while he wondered it slipped through and was in.
His mother was alive. Often he had pictured her lying underground, still and cool and unrotted. But this was not so. Somewhere she moved about and spoke, and her hands moved and her eyes were open. And in the midst of his flood of pleasure a sorrow came down on him and a sense of loss, of dreadful loss. Aron was puzzled. He inspected the cloud of sadness. If his mother was alive, his father was a liar. If one was alive, the other was dead. Aron said aloud under the tree, “My mother is dead. She’s buried some place in the East.”
In the darkness he saw Lee’s face and heard Lee’s soft speech. Lee had built very well. Having a respect that amounted to reverence for the truth, he had also its natural opposite, a loathing of a lie. He had made it very clear to the boys exactly what he meant. If something was untrue and you didn’t know it, that was error. But if you knew a true thing and changed it to a false thing, both you and it were loathsome.
Lee’s voice said, “I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That’s a running sore.” And Lee had worked patiently and slowly and he had succeeded in building Adam as the center, the foundation, the essence of truth.