The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard Read Online Free Page B

him Jacky, his face turned to murder. He didn't say a word to her, though. Instead he hauled me up by the elbow, marched me to the barn, and stood silently until I mucked out Rufus's stall. I should have done it earlier, I knew. But I hadn't been the one to call him by his baby name.
    Another evening, I sat in the kitchen with the darning while he complained about lumpy socks and ungrateful females until I said, "Whatever happened to those kittens you saved?"
    "What kittens?"
    "The ones you pulled from under the outhouse."
    "Are you joking, Nell? Think about what's under an outhouse."
    "You brought them home, washed them, and gave them to your mother."
    The laugh he produced was all the more ugly because he really was amused. "Who told you that? And when do you imagine I'd take it in my head to wash a cat?"
    "The whole county knows this story."
    "Never happened," he said, the grin a slash through his struggling beard. At least telling him the story was enough to make him stop picking at me. And the kitten rescue had happened, too. I wouldn't have married him without it. He just didn't want to be reminded.
    By then I was learning the signs. We had our happy times, generally in bed when no one was talking, but black moods rolled over him, often after he came back from town, where anyone might have made a comment about his patchy beard, his lanky bride, the time he spent eight dollars on ryegrass seed, thinking it was wheat—no one forgot. After those occasions, he found the need to tell me about my shortcomings, from my stubbornness to my inedible cakes to my big feet. When the bad spirit settled, he'd come in from the fields early, lips moving as he totted up my flaws. Willfulness. Sharp toenails. I learned to walk out to the garden while he was still talking.
    Looking over the uneven posts of my fence, reminding myself that I had improved my life with this marriage, I saw a barn and two wells, the second dug by Jack's father just a year before. Like everybody in Mercer County, he was farming now as well as ranching—putting his eggs, he liked to say, in two baskets. The subject was one of the few that could loosen his tongue. On the day that I walked away from Jack's detailed complaint regarding my bad handwriting, his father met me at the garden fence and spent half an hour telling me about Turkey red winter wheat, first introduced by the Mennonites. Looking politely past him, I squinted at the horizon line. I thought I could make out a gentle slope, the first tiny hill that would lead to the Rockies, and beyond them, the ocean, all invisible. We took them on faith, like we took Jesus.
    "My father resisted it," Mr. Plat said. "He didn't hold with planting a crop in the fall, even though the Menno farms were growing it and shipping all over the country. My mother told him, 'There's more than one way to do things,' but he didn't want to hear."
    "How did you convince him?"
    "Planted it anyway. He was too tight to plow a crop under once it started to green." My father-in-law cracked a smile, a rare thing. "There's room for a lot of different thinking under one roof."
    "Gets to feel crowded, though."
    "You can always come outside." He nodded at the open fields before us, those uninterrupted planes of light brown and washed-out blue. One day I would make a quilt that looked like Kansas. It would need only one seam.
    I knew that my father-in-law was trying to console me, but his explanation left parts out. Folks who stayed out in all that light and grass grew strangely flat, pressed between sky and ground. They lost the sense of things. My father-in-law talked at auctions—not just to the animals, which was normal enough, but to whips and spades and fat sacks of seed. "You? Is it you?" he'd murmur while looking at a slumped burlap measure of Red Label seed. If a person didn't want to become peculiar, he had to come back indoors, where the arguments were still waiting.
    "A little discord isn't a bad thing," Jack's father