I'm ashamed to say it, but the first thing out of my mouth was, "What about our horses?"
And when you hear the circumstances, you'll understand why I say "ashamed." We were in a rental car, on our way to Bucking Hill Cemetery in Bead, Texas. In a procession with our headlights on. Three cars behind the hearse. Said hearse bearing one of Jeet's boyhood chums, Townsend Loving, like Jeet, age thirty-four.
It had pretty much floored Jeet when he'd heard, but now he was saying that Della Loving had cornered him at the funeral parlor and asked him to take over the weekly newspaper Towns had owned and edited until she could find someone else.
It would mean me going back home alone, packing and Fed-exing Jeet's necessities and then hying it on down to Bead myself to live for weeks or months, who knows how long.
This prospect did not exactly incite my glee. Bead was in the middle of nowhere.
"I just can't see how I can tell her no," Jeet was saying. "Especially since she knows I'm on leave."
Jeet's a newsman himself, the food critic for the Austin Daily Progress, but he'd been given a year's leave of absence--at no pay, of course--in order to write a book about the foods he'd grown up with. The publisher's advance had been paltry, but we'd figured we could scrabble by. Then we'd learned we got only half of the money when Jeet signed the contract and the rest when he finished the manuscript.
It had been a helluva two months so far.
"Della says she'll pay me by the week," Jeet said. This was evidently the carrot and a mighty big one it was, too. Still, that was when I'd uttered the remark about our horses.
"We'll take the horses with us," he assured me. "How hard can it be to find someone to take them in?"
"Boarding horses," I told him, "costs an arm and a leg." Keeping horses at home was the economical way to do it. It meant you fed them two times a day and picked up lots of horse poop, but, depending of the price of hay (which, in turn, depended on how much rain had fallen), it could be done by regular people, people without cushy jobs and massive inheritances. People like Jeet and me.
"I'm not talking about some swanky place with an indoor arena, Robin," Jeet answered. "I'm talking about some farmer's field. A what-do-you-call-it?"
Jeet isn't very horsey or, if you want to really get down to it, countrified. This, despite having grown up in Abilene. "Pasture?" I tried.
"Pasture, right. So what do you say?" He glanced over at me, the soon-to-be-uprooted wife, who, like wives of old, was being asked to do the whither-thou-goest thing.
I didn't say anything. I was imagining the kind of pasture there would be in Bead, all rocks and hillocks. Its century-old cedar posts would list perilously, inviting the horses to step to the other side where rattlesnakes and scorpions were, no doubt, lying in wait.
I didn't say that. Instead, I tried, "We'll have to rent a place for ourselves. And make our mortgage payment on the farm besides. I don't see how..." And the thing is, I really didn't. What could Della pay Jeet anyway? It couldn't be enough to support our entire family: Jeet, me, and two horses.
The car jolted to a stop and I looked up to see the widow, Della, being helped out of the long, black Cadillac limo immediately behind the hearse.
Della was younger than I was, but she didn't look it. Right then she could have passed for my mother, and indeed, was dressed pretty much the way my mother would have been dressed--very sleek and stylish in a black linen sheath. Of course, it's hard not to look sleek and stylish in a black linen sheath, particularly when your body is shaped the way Della's was shaped.
Perfectly. We're talking the proverbial hourglass here. But then, Della had been the campus beauty when she'd met and married Towns.
She didn't seem to have changed. Not a speck of flab on her body or a line on her expertly made up face.
Jeet was looking at her, too. He wasn't assessing her charms, though, I could tell. Jeet, if you want to know, is pretty much impervious to such things.
No kidding. One time at a party, a woman was flirting with him, going on and on about her sunburn and pulling the neckline of her dress down farther and farther as she talked so Jeet could see.
Jeet was concentrating on one of the hors d'oeuvres, however. He was frowning, I later learned, because he thought the chef had overdone the anchovy paste.
Anyway, here was this woman, displaying more and more cleavage to no avail. She stopped just short of topless and, I understand, took the whole thing pretty personally, opting for saline implants shortly thereafter (although, if she'd have asked me, I'd have gladly explained my husband's priorities. He is what is known as a "foodie." Thank God.).
But this is beside the point. Because right now Jeet was saying, "Every cent Della and Towns had is invested in that little newspaper. She has to keep it going. She'll start running an ad for a real editor right away, though, so figure two or three months at most."
Two or three months!
But I was watching her and imagining myself in the same boat as a young widow. And also, I was remembering Jeet's face when he'd picked up the telephone and heard about Towns' death. So I forbade the image of my horses shying as tumbleweed rolled toward them--I mean, I hadn't seen any tumbleweed, but wouldn't a place like this have it?--from entering my mind. I swallowed. This felt like a do-or-die moment in a marriage.
"All right, let's do it," I said. I hoped I had managed to put a little oomph in my voice. Something that would sound like enthusiasm.
Jeet looked over at me, took my hand, and squeezed it. I'm not sure he would have if he'd known how much I'd wanted to say no. I mean, I like the life we have. I like our little Primrose Farm and living close to Austin. I like having my best friend, Lola, right next door to ride with and talk to. I like having my horses, Plum and Spier, right outside my door. I like trailering them to lessons at Wanda's and clinics and schooling shows. God, at this point, I even liked the wrangling at our local dressage club over how we're going to spend our accumulated dues.
What did Bead have that could compare to that? Nothing, I was sure. I'd probably be lucky to find a couple of trails to clomp around on, that's what. Two or three months!
I smiled weakly and, I hoped, bravely and then we were getting out of the car.
The air-conditioned car. Which made the air outside feel like a warm, wet washcloth. Bead was about eighty miles from where we live, which is humid enough. This was closer to the Gulf of Mexico, and to use a phrase I picked up when we visited New York, "Oy."
I completely and vividly understood the phrase about one's spirits being dampened.
A man came lumbering up to the car--a big man, tall as well as overweight. He was wearing high-heeled cowboy boots and one of those shirts with Western trim. That, a ten-gallon hat and a holster with a big silver pistol in it. He had a lot of bullets, too, inserted into bullet-holders in a wide belt.
The badge on his shirt pocket said Sheriff.
I thought, Central Casting. And at the very same moment, I realized my sense of humor was not going to be appreciated in Bead.
He walked right up to Jeet and said, "Son, your headlights are still on."
"Oh, thanks," Jeet said, jumping back in and then staring at the instrument panel, obviously not remembering how he'd turned the headlights on in the first place.
"Rental car," I explained. I said the words slowly, as if talking to a foreigner.
"You a friend of the deceased?" the sheriff asked me. Was it my imagination, or had his eyes narrowed when he looked at me?
"No," I said, "but my husband was." I gestured at Jeet, who was now looking exasperated. He'd begun flipping through the little instruction book that comes with rental vehicles.
Jeet's plight softened the sheriff. "Sure was a shame," he said, shaking his big head back and forth. "Cut down in his prime, this poor, young fellow was. Looked like a tractor trailer hit him. He was plumb smooshed. I mean, his head busted open like a pumpkin."
Towns had been the victim of a hit and run. Even though I hadn't known Towns, the sheriff's description was realistic enough to make me catch my breath and try to stop the roll that the sheriff was on. It was worse than watching CSI Miami.
"It was awful," I agreed, way louder than the situation called for. I realized I was really begging for a smidgeon of sensitivity on the part of the sheriff. Jeet didn't need to be hearing words like "smooshed" right now. "Jeet and Towns grew up together," I bellowed.
This was true, though Jeet and Towns hadn't seen each other since they'd graduated from high school. Then Jeet had come to Austin and the University of Texas, where he'd met me, and Towns had gone to some little school in Georgia where he'd met Miss Macon.
I sighed and a smile began to creep across my face. Ah, young love.
"Any progress on the murder?" Jeet asked, rejoining us and interrupting my momentary nostalgia. Even though he'd been in the uncooled car a matter of mere minutes, there were big wet spots on his shirt and a tuft of his hair hung lank across his forehead, which was visibly sweaty.
"Murder?" the sheriff asked. His entire face began to pucker. "Don't know how it was that. In fact, a person driving a big enough car might not have knowed he'd hit a man, I figure."
My mouth flew open. I looked at Jeet and saw him struggling with his composure.
The sheriff watched Jeet's face, too. He looked triumphant as he cleared his throat and spit snuff juice at Jeet's feet.
I knew it was snuff juice because he was holding a snuff box in his hand.
"Yep"--the sheriff said, really rubbing it in now--"we put it down as an accident."
"Oh, right," I said sarcastically, and Jeet shot me one of those cautionary looks. The kind meant to shut me up. "An ac-ci-dent." Unbelievable!
Except that it was true. Granted, Towns had been out jogging in the pre-dawn light, which is pretty much the only time you can jog in coastal Texas in the summer without courting heat prostration, but still. You can't tell me you could hit a person and not realize it. I mean, when you hit anything at all--a curb, say, or even a beer can--you know it. I said exactly that.
"If your rig was big enough," the sheriff argued, "you would not know."
"Give me a break," I said. I drive a truck whose nickname is "Mother," and I pull a horse trailer, too. In other words, I know big. "No way!"
Then Jeet tugged at me and gestured toward Della, who was standing next to the backhoe meant to cover Townsend up once he was in the ground. She looked small and depleted and I felt--I don't know--as if Jeet was right about letting it go. This was an argument I shouldn't be having, especially not now. Because what mattered was that Towns was dead, not how it happened, or whether or not the murdering driver would have been jolted at all during the whole thing.
And then, too, there was the upshot, which would be that we would be moving--bam, just like that--to Bead.
This wasn't just oy, it was double oy.
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