The next day I finished off her manure pile, and while I was forking manure that morning, I got to worrying. She hadn’t aged for more’n twenty years, while I’d gone from a bitty little boy to six-foot-one, and two-twenty-four on the creamery scales with my clothes on. In twenty more years, I’d be forty-six and she’d still be twenty. And in forty years . . . Folks already talked; some were even a little scared of her. That was one reason she didn’t go into town any more than she needed to. First Will and then ma had done most of Varia’s shopping in recent years. They even went to the library to get books she wanted.
No doubt about it, being married with her would be somewhat more than just thrashing around on the bed together. And by the light of day, riding behind a team of Belgians spreading cow manure, it seemed to me we needed to talk about that. So when I heard the eleven-forty train whistle, I left my pitchfork there and went up to her house and knocked. She let me in, then cranked up Ma on the phone. Asked if I could stay for lunch and help her eat leftovers before she had to throw them out.
Ma didn’t answer right away; there was half a minute there I couldn’t hear her voice. Maybe she wondered if I’d started doing more at Varia’s than just work. But she said that’d be fine. Anyway I sat down at the table, and we began talking while Varia rustled up a meal. I told her what was bothering me, and she just smiled. “We won’t stay here,” she said.
“Where—Where would we go?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer to that. Because suddenly I wanted to be with Varia the rest of my life, and was scared her answer would be something I couldn’t live with.
“Where would you like?”
I thought for a minute. “Since the Depression hit last fall,” I reminded her, “lots of folks are out of work. It’s hard to get a job nowadays.”
“We’ll get a farm,” she said, reasonable as could be. “Somewhere well away from here; maybe some black land in Illinois.”
I shook my head. “That’d cost a lot of money. Especially that Illinois black land.”
“Land prices are way down. I talked to them at the bank before I sold out to your father. And my grandmother’s got money that belongs to me.”
Her grandmother. I supposed I’d meet her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“She looks a lot like me,” Varia said without my asking.
“Just as young?” I was a little scared of what the answer might be.
Varia laughed. “A little older. Maybe twenty-one.” Light danced in her eyes when she said it. She was so bright and lively, I couldn’t help thinking she’d be a wife like no one ever had before, except Will. But still—
“How about when I’m fifty,” I said, “and you still look twenty?”
She looked at me a long time before she answered. “You won’t need to look fifty, if you don’t want to. Not you. You can look just as young then as you do today.”
The first thing that hit me was, I’d have to sell my soul to the devil. I’ve never actually believed in the devil, but that’s the thought that came to me. I set it aside. “Will aged,” I reminded her.
“Will never had the choice. I tried. He was a nice man, a gentle man, and he had some unusual genes we need. But not the talent; not enough. I planned to stay with him till the situation here got dangerous—from my not aging, I mean—have sixty or seventy children by him, then disappear. I’d leave a note that I was afraid to stay, because I wasn’t aging. That I was going somewhere where people thought I was twenty.”
I guess I must have looked troubled, because she put her hand on my cheek again, soft as goose down, and said: “I never actually loved Will, as fond of him as I came to be. It’s you I’ve loved. For a dozen or more years now, since I realized what you might be. Or who.”