The horses snorted loudly and swung to one side of the road, for a dark figure stood in front of them. Juanito walked quickly beside the wagon to talk to Joseph.
“Are you going home, señor? I was waiting.”
“No, Juanito, not for some time.”
“I’ll wait again, señor. Benjy is drunk.”
Joseph twisted nervously in his seat. “I guess I knew he would be.”
“He is out on this road, señor. I heard him sing a little while ago. Willie Romas is drunk too. Willie is happy. Willie will kill someone tonight, maybe.”
Joseph’s hands were white in the starlight, holding the lines taut, jerking forward a little when the horses flung their heads against the bits.
“Find Benjy,” Joseph said bitterly. “I’ll be ready to go in a couple of hours.” The horses leaped forward and Juanito sank away into the darkness.
Now that her wall was down, Elizabeth could feel that Joseph was unhappy. “He will tell me, and then I will help him.”
Joseph sat rigid, and the horses, feeling the uncompromising weight of his clenched hands on the lines, slowed their trot to a careful, picking walk. They were nearing the ragged black barrier of the river trees when suddenly the voice of Benjy sounded from the cover of the brush.
“Estando bebiendo de vino,
“Pedro, Rodarte y Simon—”
Joseph tore the whip from its socket and lashed the horses ferociously, and then he had to put all his force on the lines to check their leaping. Elizabeth was crying miserably because of the voice of Benjy. Joseph pulled up the horses until the crashing of their hoofs on the hard road subsided to the intricate rhythm of a trot.
“I have not told you my brother is a drunkard. You’ll have to know the kind of family I have. My brother is a drunkard. I do not mean he goes out and gets drunk now and then the way any man will. Benjy has the disease in his body. Now you know.” He stared ahead of him. “That was my brother singing there.” He felt her body jerking against his side as she wept. “Do you want me to take you home now?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to stay away?” When she made no reply, he turned the horses sharply and started them back. “Do you want me to stay away from you?” he demanded.
“No,” she said, “I’m being silly. I want to go home and go to bed. I want to try to know what it is I’m feeling. That is an honesty.”
Joseph felt an exultance rising again in his throat. He leaned toward her and kissed her on the cheek and then touched up the horses again. At the gate he helped her down and walked to the door with her.
“I will go now to try to find my brother. In a few days I will come back. Good-night.”
Elizabeth didn’t wait to see him go. She was in bed almost before the sound of the wheels died out. Her heart pounded so that it shook her head against the pillow. It was hard to listen over the pounding of her heart, but at last she made out the sound she was waiting for. It came slowly toward her house, the drunken beautiful voice. Elizabeth gathered her spirit to resist the flaming pain that was coming with the voice.
She whispered to herself, “He is useless, I know! A drunken, useless fool. I have something to do, almost a magic thing.” She waited until the voice came in front of the house. “Now I must do this. It is the only chance.” She put her head under her pillow and whispered, “I love this singing man, useless as he is, I love him. I have never seen his face and I love him more than anything. Lord Jesus help me to my desire. Help me to have this man.”
Then she lay quietly, listening for the response, for the answer to her magic. It came after a last splash of pain. A hatred for Benjy drove out the pain, a hatred so powerful that her jaws tightened and her lips drew snarlingly back from her teeth. She could feel how her skin tingled with the hatred and how her nails ached to attack him. And then the hatred floated off and away. She heard without interest the voice of Benjy growing fainter in the distance. Elizabeth lay on her back and rested her head on crossed wrists.
“Now I will be married soon,” she said quietly.
9
THE year had darkened to winter and the spring had come, and another fall, before the marriage took place. There was term-end to think of, and after that, in the heat of the summer, when the white oaks sagged under the sun and the river shrank to a stream, Elizabeth had dealings with dressmakers. The hills were rich with heavy-seeded grain; the cattle came out of the brush at night to eat, and when the sun was up, retired into the sage-scented shade to chew sleepily through the day. In the barn the men were piling the sweet wild hay higher than the rafters.
Once a week during the year Joseph went in to Nuestra Señora and sat in the parlor with Elizabeth or took her driving in the buckboard. And he asked, “When will we be married, Elizabeth?”
“Why, I must serve out my year,” she said; “there are a thousand things that must be done. I should go home to Monterey for a little. Of course my father will want to see me once before I am married.”
“That is true,” said Joseph soberly. “You might be changed afterwards.”
“I know.” She clasped her hands around his wrist and regarded her clasped fingers. “Look, Joseph, how hard it is to move the finger you want to move. You lose track of which is which.” He smiled at the way her mind caught at things to escape thinking. “I am afraid to change,” she said. “I want to, and I am afraid. Will I get stout, do you think? All in a moment will I be another person, remembering Elizabeth as an acquaintance who’s dead?”
“I don’t know,” he said, edging his finger into a pleat at the shoulder of her shirtwaist. “Perhaps there isn’t any change, ever, in anything. Perhaps unchangeable things only pass.”
One day she went to the ranch and he led her about, boasting a little by implication. “Here is the house. I built it first. And at first there wasn’t a building within miles, just the house under the oak tree.”
Elizabeth leaned against the tree and stroked its trunk. “There could be a seat up in the tree, you see, Joseph, where those limbs start out from the trunk. Will you mind if I climb the tree, Joseph?” She looked up into his face and found that he was staring at her with a strange intensity. His hair had blown forward over his eyes. Elizabeth thought suddenly, “If only he had the body of a horse I might love him more.”
Joseph moved quickly toward her and held out his hand. “You must climb the tree, Elizabeth. I want you to. Here, I’ll help you.” He cupped his hands for her foot and steadied her until she sat in the crotch from which the great limbs grew. And when he saw how she fitted in the hollow and how the grey arms guarded her, “I’m glad, Elizabeth,” he cried.
“Glad, Joseph? You look glad! Your eyes are shining. Why are you so glad?”
He lowered his eyes and laughed to himself. “Strange things one is glad of. I am glad that you are sitting in my tree. A moment back I thought I saw that my tree loved you.’
“Stand away a little,” she called. “I’m going up to the next limb so I can see beyond the barn.” He moved aside because her skirts were full. “Joseph, I wonder why I hadn’t noticed the pines on the ridge. Now I can feel at home. I was born among the pines in Monterey. You’ll see them, Joseph, when we go there to be married.”
“They are strange pines; I’ll take you there some time after we are married.”
Elizabeth climbed carefully down from the tree and stood beside him again. She pinned her hair and patted it with dexterous fingers that went inquisitively about searching for loose strands and shaping them to their old course. “When I am homesick, Joseph, I can go up to those pines and it will be like going home.”
10
THE wedding was in Monterey, a somber boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual. Both Joseph and Elizabeth felt the sullenness of the sentence. “You must endure,” said the church; and its music was a sunless prophecy.