Patricia Weil

She was an ordinary wheelwright's daughter.  And if his brother Eugene hadn't been

courting a young woman who lived just over the county line, he may never have seen her at all. 

Eugene had argued and cajoled that week, until Winslow gave in, trading his place at the farm work

to go into town each day, to the ice house.  As a matter of fact, Winslow didn't mind the switch, as

long as it was a temporary thing.  He liked making the drive in, early.  His brother Obie lived in a

single cramped room above the business, which Winslow had no wish to share.  So he hitched and

drove in each morning at a slow pace, his senses absorbed.  Fall was Winslow's favorite season. 

The days were still warm, but cool enough at night by that time that the chill threw up a mist over

the fields.  Cattle peered at him in the morning out of what appeared to be white, empty space.

The ice house was located a short way inside the city limits, and the houses were scattered

at that end of town.  The Kilbourne house stood on a large lot, with the wheel shop to one side of

it.  Piles of broken wheels were stacked on that side.  There were always wagons to be repaired. 

The front, double doors to the shop generally stood open, so that Winslow could see the goings

and comings, which were nothing especially remarkable.  To the other side of the house was a

small pasture.  There was a milk cow, and a little rough-coated, round-bellied pony with untrimmed

hooves.  Winslow never saw anybody go near the pony.

 

But he knew there were women.  Young women.  These he did watch, going and coming. 

And he overheard the laughter.  It was a pretty sound, women laughing together.  Womanhood

delighted Winslow.  And Winslow, at that time in his life, delighted womankind.  A slim young fellow

with dark coloring and a little neat mustache.  His features were so fine and regular, they could

have almost been said to be feminine.  He had a grace about him--he was an excellent dancer. 

He sang well.  And he had gentle, good manners--all of which came easily enough, because

Winslow genuinely liked women.  He charmed his own mother, did little favors for his sister Birdie. 

And in turn, the two of them doted on him.  For a fact, women were among the finer things of life,

by Winslow's lights.  The finest, even.  All of them pleased him.  But not one of them had ever

moved him, in some way that he was waiting to be moved. When he passed by in the wagon, Winslow looked for the three young women,distinguished from one another to him at first only by the color of their clothes. Later he would learn that Clare was the one that often wore the pink blouse--actually, close up, it was red and white striped.  There were four of them, it appeared.  The three oldest seemed to be around the same

age--Mittie, Elvira, and Clare, he would learn.  Then there was Jewel, the much younger one, whom

the older ones spoiled and pampered, generally preoccupying themselves with.  On the day

Winslow first heard the laughter, they had pulled a table and wash basin out into the yard, near the

pump, where they were, all three of them, washing the youngest one's hair.  There was a lot of

splashing and squealing.  It was obvious that all the to-do wasn't necessary.  He had noticed that it was the one with the pink blouse who most often came out to the mailbox.  He had the definite intention of making the acquaintance of all four of them, but he hadn't yet decided just exactly how to go about it.  But Winslow had been hungry on a particular afternoon, and had taken the notion to walk a few blocks to a nearby store for a can of sardines and some crackers.  So he saw her that first time at the mailbox.  Clare had turned around at the sound of somebody walking.  And Winslow didn't remember if he had actually stopped, or if it only felt like he had.  Everything else stopped.  There was no one other thing for that moment in time

but this woman.  Just the look of her.  Her face.  Although it wasn't so much the face in itself, which

was regular enough, even nondescript; Winslow saw mainly her eyes, which seemed to feel their

way deep into his.  Clare's eyebrows were not brown but a sort of dark blond, a color which set off

her eyes.  And the set of the eyebrows was peculiar--they were straight, but tilted upward slightly

toward the bridge of her nose.  It gave her face a questioning--to Winslow, a heartfelt--sort of

expression.  The eyes moved him--the expression in them moved him.  The color was a thing he

had never seen before, not one blue but many, all crushed together like glass.  Winslow had stared

so hard that Clare was for a few moments frozen, like an animal caught in the glare of a light.  Was

it a matter of seconds--or whole minutes?  Winslow didn't know.  He passed on without speaking

to her, a thing which wasn't like him.  He was shaken and pleased in some way that was new.

But he was also, from that instant, determined.  He made it his business each day that first

week to stop at the mailbox, while it was still too early for him to be noticed by anyone in her

household.  Birdie was minding the store, then; and at first Winslow had shamelessly taken some

little things from the stock.  A peppermint.  A scrap of blue ribbon.  He snipped several of his

mother's late roses, perfect buds that would open later on in the day.  Then he had run out of ideas. 

So he gave her a bird's nest, a tiny and round perfect thing, that he had kept for years in his sock

drawer.

 

In the mornings, now, the thought of her was with him the minute he woke.  He dawdled his

way to the wood shed, passing down a sort of lane that ran at that side of the house.  There was

an overhang of leaves, just slightly touched with color.  The change of season, alone, could have

put Winslow into a mild delirium--that much he loved the Fall.  The air had that touch of new Winter

in the mornings.  Even more new and special, now, because of her.  Winslow moved through his

days with all the importance of a man possessed of a secret gladness.  He told no one; it was a

thing of too much significance to tell, this discovery.  He had found her.  Out of all days, on one

particular afternoon, he had found her.  At an everyday spot on the edge of a street.  He tormented

himself to think that he could have just as easily missed her instead of finding her.

 

 

 

 

 

"Your name?"

"I'm Clare."  She looked down.

Clare.  Not something ordinary, like Clara.  But Clare.  A beautiful word.

Neither one of them moved.  Then Winslow had taken a step at the same time that Clare

did, and this little trifle made both of them laugh.

"Beg pardon."

Clare brought her hand to her mouth.  There was a special attractiveness to Winslow in a

shy woman.

He had always been one for joking--as a rule, Winslow jollied around when he flirted.  But

right away he discovered he couldn't do this with Clare.  She made him quiet.  Solemn, almost.

"May I call on you, Clare?"

She had smiled and moved her head--almost ducked it.  A gesture he would come to know

well.

 

He would call on her, then.  Which meant, of course, in a sense, that he would call on all

four of them.  With the others he would do the usual teasing and carrying-on.  But then, the others

seemed to know when to drift away, even the youngest one, Jewel.  He was for Clare.  And with

Clare he was different, because she made him feel things that were new.  It was in nothing

particular that she did--Winslow was aware of that fact, from the first; but he was in no mind to ask

himself questions.  What she made him feel was that hard-to-say thing he had waited for,

imagined, wanted to happen.  A thing very close, he thought with surprise, to some kind of

reverence.  It seemed fitting to Winslow that his courtship should be in the Fall, when all the world

sang, before its lapse into Winter.  The two of them sat together toward the side of the house

where he had heard the girls laughing.  The roses along the trellis in the Kilbourne's back yard were

in their last bloom.  Light lay over the yard like a patina.  All of it touched with this same,

unexpected sort of new feeling.  He liked to sit with her there, near the trellis, as the afternoon

faded into dark.

 

He was a talker.  She wasn't.  And this--he wouldn't admit it until much later--was his first

small disappointment.  He had thought that when he got her away to himself, away from all of the

sisters, or when she had had time to get past her shyness, then she would talk; and he would

listen.  He looked forward to listening to Clare.  Clare sat very still.  She could sit at any length, it

seemed, with her hands lying in her lap, to listen or wait--whatever was required of her.

But Winslow was a talker who, for all his love of it, knew just as well how to listen.  So

Winslow, too, waited.  He couldn't have said, then, exactly for what.  At last it had happened, he

felt, that he, she, could unburden their hearts--although there was nothing in Winslow's heart at that

time but contentment to unburden.  And she would understand him in some way that no one else

had ever been able to.  But it didn't happen that way.  He talked to her instead, about little things. 

And that pleasured him.  Everything pleasured him--he was foolishly, deliriously, in love.  His stories

were for the most part simple or silly stories, and those made her laugh.  When she laughed the

blood came to her face.  He'd talk to her about little nothing sorts of things, some ordinary sight he

had seen.  Sometimes Clare just looked back at him, as though she were waiting for him to get to

the point.  Animals had always amused Winslow; and he blandly assumed at that time that any

amusement of his would appeal to her, too.  Had she ever noticed, he wondered, the expression

on a calf's face when it sucked, little head bobbing up and down so fast.  Grateful-looking--looked

outright grateful, it did.  Then the squint-eyed, patient look of the mother while she stood there,

waiting for it all to be over.  For a fact, animals had a right way about things that human kind didn't

seem to have.  Clare looked at him blankly, then.

 

She could have been interested in gossip.  But Winslow wasn't.  And he didn't understand

the difference, yet, between gossip and talk about people.  People had interested Winslow since

he was a boy.  Had she ever noticed that old Mr. and Mrs. Givens looked about enough alike to be

twins?  She wasn't interested.  And there was that young couple who'd had to take a house right

next to the Mack's store, which was at the end of a block for Colored.  That story seemed to

interest her a little.  Winslow was touched by the little signs of settling in that the young wife made,

the one-piece curtains, the geraniums set out in a lard can.  Something about its being their first

place to themselves--a sad, gray little place, but theirs, all the same.  But Clare had lost interest,

when she realized there was nothing more intriguing to hear.  And Winslow was interested in far

more than just talk.  Her breasts were still of course forbidden him; he could imagine the softness

of them, their creaminess, under his hand.  But he knew he would have to wait.  He would have

liked to take little tastes from a spot on her neck just beneath her ear--which by itself worked its

influence on Winslow.

 

It astonished him, later, that he hadn't required more.  Clare was more predictable than any

child. 

"I declare."  This sentence slid up toward the end.  "Well, I declare."  This comment slid

downwards.  For the most part, these were her replies.  But Winslow found her quietness fitting. 

And so they conversed like this, quietly, back and forth, while the Fall noise of crickets twisted

through the air like the sound of birds twittering.  When Clare did talk to him, it was a little breathily,

as if she were relishing her bit of news or just recovering from the flurry of it--there was always a

flurry, with the sisters.  She spoke of little domestic events.  And her life to Winslow seemed simple

and good, in the way that bread was simple and good.

 

 

But he soon noticed that Clare didn't seem to have special fondnesses--he couldn't imagine

why that was so.  He thought that women were supposed to have small, private likings.  His mother

always had a fondness for the color yellow--a fondness they liked to tease her about.  But all of the

family remembered, just the same.  And one Christmas they'd bought her a string of amber beads,

which she loved above all things but her music box.  Winslow remembered catching his mother at

times on an afternoon wearing the beads around the house.  He'd make a point of noticing that

small fact in such a way that his mother would smile self-consciously and touch the beads.  She

liked a little bit of sunshine, she explained. When he and Clare were first married, he had looked forward to discovering the little mysteries of how she lived.  What her hairbrush looked like, the way she might take down and put up her hair, whatever little trinket it might have been that especially pleased her.  But there were no such things, no little gestures to hang a picture or memory on.  Clare simply did whatever she

thought it was that she should do.  With no complaint about it--he couldn't reproach her for that. 

The fact was that he couldn't reproach her for anything, which was why his anger against her had

at first so confused him.  The thing of it, he figured at last, was that she seemed to have no special

fondness for him, either--beyond that gentle, absent sort of fondness that she had for all the others. 

It had driven him mad.

 

"Do you love me, Clare?"  He remembered.

 

"Why, Winnie--."  She was hemming a blanket for one of the babies.  She stared, with her

hands dropped to her lap.

 

When would that have happened?  Not during the first year--he hadn't realized yet, then.

And it was much later that he understood that Clare had been frightened at his question.  She was

like a hunted thing.  A child who had been caught out of school.

 

"What is it for you, Clare, to love a man?  I do wonder."  The anger leaked out of him then. 

And he remembered that Clare's eyes had dropped, along with the hands in her lap, an instant after

her mouth had formed the "wh--" to repeat her first and only response.  Winslow could see that she

was suffering--her face was all splotched with red.  And for the moment, the sight of her face fed

his anger.  He knew, too, that Clare wouldn't look up again until he was gone, no matter how long

he might sit.  There was no contest with her and her animal patience.

 

Winslow had stayed on at the ice house those first years, sometimes hacking and sawing

inside, with Obie--Winslow let the neighborhood children watch from the door.  More often, it was

Winslow who made the deliveries.  They'd rented a little house around the corner from her family's

place.  There was so much going and coming with all the sisters, and so many meals at the family

house, that he wondered later if they'd been too crowded at first for him to realize.  There were also

Clare's brothers, Jack and Dewitt, who dropped in on Winslow--he was fond of them.  And there

was his own family.  He was still wild then for the nights, when he could have Clare all to himself--

he lost any semblance of thought then.  And Clare wasn't withholding.  She was generous, kind,

because it was her nature to be kind; to have been otherwise would have cost her an effort.  And

the babies had started right away.  He remembered, with the first one, imagining the baby inside

Clare's just slightly distended belly, which he kissed all over, like it was the baby, itself.  This made

the blood come into her face.  He loved the very blood that came up under her skin, her breath,

every bodily thing about her.  Winslow was good with a tune; he sang little foolish love songs, in

those days, to Clare.

 

If I had a nickel, I tell you what I'd do. He was a man made right and whole.

I'd spend it all on candy, and give it all to you.

 

Clare was good with the babies.  As she'd been good with the sisters.  He remembered

being moved by her fondness for her sisters, especially the youngest one, whom she touched

often, on the face or the sleeve.  She was gentle and easy with the children.  Again, he saw that

same touch to a face, a collar or sleeve.  But he could never recall, once he began to notice,

hearing her outright converse with any of them.  She was a presence.  They were a presence.  In

the beginning, her silences had made her seem special--she didn't just give herself away, cheap. 

Or so he had thought.

 

Then there was that night when it came clear to him, when Winslow found himself sitting

alone in the wagon, sitting and wondering.  He was outside the Kilbourne house, waiting to drive

them around the corner to home.  Clare and the children were still inside.  One of them, Roland

maybe--he couldn't remember--had had a birthday.  There'd been a big meal, a lot of fuss about

presents, and laughter and noise.  Winslow remembered that he was cold; he'd started to shiver

a bit, there on the seat.  But his stomach was hot.  He had realized.  And he didn't know what to

do about what he had realized.  He was as good as alone.  That empty place inside him that had

wanted her--she didn't fill it up.  He wasn't comforted; he was wanting.  And she didn't see him. 

It came to Winslow that she didn't actually hear him or see him.  He was just one more human

object that crossed the line of her vision.  He was a fact of life for her.  A circumstance.  She didn't

know him or recognize him.  Another person altogether could have slipped into his skin; she

wouldn't have known the difference.  Just as later, when he had ceased to love her, she didn't know

that difference, either.

 

No.  There was no reproach he could make.  There was nothing in particular that she had

done against him.  To the rest of the world she would have seemed a good and gentle creature. 

She was no doubt spoken of as shy, Winslow once reflected.  Only Winslow knew.  She wasn't shy. 

She was vacant.  He thought he had loved a woman; but there was no woman there, in the way

he had wanted a woman.  It came to him later that there was no fault involved--nobody at fault, that

is, but himself.  For being too stupid in love to have seen her as she was.  Blind fool, he had been,

to have come to her, like he had.  He had come to her, bringing everything that he had.  And for

all that, he was as good as alone.   Right by himself.