He looked questioningly at his son. “You are going to stay, aren’t you? This place can be yours when I can’t keep up with it anymore. Maybe sooner, if you want.”
Initially Curtis had planned to stay, farm with his father, but the closer he’d gotten to home, the less real it had seemed. After where he’d been, and the life he’d lived there, it likely wouldn’t work out. If nothing else, there’d be too many questions without answers-and sooner or later the question of age. Best to start new, someplace where he wasn’t known.
“I’ll stay till the spring work is done,” he replied. “Harvest at the latest. Then I’ll need to move on.”
Charley nodded, looking at the ground, then brightened a little. “A few weeks ago, some folks stopped by and asked after you,” he said. “A woman and two men. Moneyed folks; drove up in a big Packard. The woman did the talking. Seemed real disappointed you weren’t here; thought you might have come back. Said they had a job for you. Didn’t say what.”
He paused, noting his son’s frown. “She called herself Louise,” he went on. “Kin to Varia, all three of them; I’d bet on it. Same eyes, same build. Hair not so red though. You know them?”
Louise? Not hardly, Curtis thought. No Christian name like that. Idri maybe, with her long, unforgiving memory. “I’m not sure,” he answered. “Varia’s Et lots of kin, but I never knew a Louise. Most that I did know, I didn’t greatly care for.”
Both of his parents needed to hear something that made sense to them, which meant lying. He’d foreseen the problem and knew what he had to say, but didn’t like it.
He’d been out of the country, he told them at supper. Varia’s family was foreigners; he didn’t say where from. She’d gone back to the old country with them; they’d insisted. He’d followed, had farmed there and even done some soldiering. Then Varia had drowned, he went on, had fallen through the ice on horseback, and the current had carried her beneath it. He’d recovered her body at a rapids downstream.
He lied, of course-wrong wife-but Charley and Edna believed him. They felt bad about it, but at least he hadn’t abandoned her.
As the weeks passed, Curtis became more comfortable with the idea of leaving. Ferris Gibbs, the hired man, was a good hand-a self-starter who noticed things and knew what to do about them. He’d had a farm of his own, but lost it to the bank in ’31, when he couldn’t make the mortgage payments. “A casualty of the Hard Times,” Ferris called himself, without apparent rancor. On Saturdays he left right after supper, and came back late Sunday. As Charley saw it, Ferris would leave when times got better-he’d want a place of his own againbut Frank’s boy already liked to work with his Grampa Macurdy on the farm, when school let out in Salem. Said he wanted to be a farmer.
The first Sunday, Curtis went to church with his parents. He’d have preferred not to, but he knew it would please his mother. Folks looked askingly at him, but after the service they simply shook his hand, commenting on how good he looked. Pastor Fleming asked how old he was now, and told him he looked as young and strong as he ever had. The young part was ridiculous, Curtis told himself, considering the reverend had known him since he was fourteen.
As young as ever. A foretaste of problems to come.
Max and Julie and their kids came for dinner after church that day, and Julie, being Julie, asked questions his parents never would have, like “what country was it?”, meaning where Varia came from. He thought of answering “Hungary”-that would do it-but he was tired of lying. “Yuulith,” he told her instead, adding “that’s their name for it.” She’d look it up when she got home, he knew, and not finding it, would probably let be. Macurdies, even Julie, were pretty good at letting be.
He got more and more settled in, and stayed longer than he’d thought he might until one day Bob Hammond, who farmed Will’s old place on shares, decided to sell his sheep. Said he “couldn’t face another week of Baaaah! Baaaah! twentyfour hours a day.” He hired Curtis to help him haul them to the railroad in Salem, unfinished lambs and all, and load them onto a car. It took all day-three trips-and when they’d finished, Hammond took his wallet out of his overalls to pay him. Curtis knew the man couldn’t afford the two dollars he’d promised, so he said he’d just take one, and eat supper with them that evening: likely boiled potatoes and stuff from the cellar-home-canned beef, green beans, maybe fruit pie–a good twenty-five-cent meal.