Page 65 of The Giver of Stars
Fred sat while she ate, his feet up in a chair as he read a book of poetry, apparently content to let her be.
She ate almost all the soup, wincing every time she opened her mouth, her tongue occasionally working back towards the two loose teeth. She didn’t speak, because she didn’t know what to say. A strange and unexpected sense of humiliation hung over her, as if she had somehow brought this on herself, as if the bruises on her face were emblematic of her failure. She found herself replaying and replaying the night’s events. Should she have kept quiet? Should she simply have agreed? And yet to do those things would have left her – what? No better than one of those damned dolls.
Fred’s voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘When I found out my wife was carrying on, I reckon every second man from here to Hoffman asked me why I hadn’t given her a good hiding and brought her home again.’
Alice moved her head stiffly to look at him, but he was studying his book, as if he were reading from the words within it.
‘They said I should teach her a lesson. I never got it, not even in the first flush of anger, when I thought she had pretty much stomped all over my heart. You beat a horse and you can break it all right. You can make it submit. But it’ll never forget. And it sure as hell won’t care for you. So if I wouldn’t do it to a horse, I could never work out why I should do it to a human.’
Alice pushed the bowl away slowly as he continued.
‘Selena wasn’t happy with me. I knew it, though I didn’t want to think about it. She wasn’t made for out here, with the dust and the horses and the cold. She was a city girl, and I probably paid that too little mind. I was trying to build the business after my daddy died. Guess I thought she’d be like my ma, happy to forge her own path. Three years of it and no babies, I should have known the first sweet-talking salesman to promise her something different would turn her head. But, no, I never laid a hand on her. Not even when she was standing in front of me, suitcase in hand, telling me all the ways I had failed to be a man to her. And I reckon half this town still thinks I’m less of a man because of it.’
Not me, she wanted to tell him, but the words somehow wouldn’t emerge from her mouth.
They sat in silence a while longer, alone with their thoughts. Finally he stood and poured her some coffee, set it before her and walked to the door with the empty bowl. ‘I’ll be working with Frank Neilsen’s young colt at the near paddock this afternoon. He’s a little unbalanced and prefers the level ground. Anything you’re worried about, you just bang on that window. Okay?’
She didn’t speak.
‘I’ll be right here, Alice.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘She’s my wife. I got a right to talk to her.’
‘You think I give a Sam Hill what you –’
Fred got to him first. She had been dozing in the chair – she felt exhausted to her bones – and woke to the sound of voices.
‘It’s okay, Fred,’ she called out. ‘Let him in.’
She drew back the bolt and opened the door a sliver.
‘Well, then, I’m coming in, too.’ Fred walked in behind Bennett so that the two men stood there for a moment, shaking snow from their boots and patting themselves down.
Bennett flinched when he saw her. She hadn’t dared look at her face, but his expression told her much of what she needed to know. He took a breath and rubbed his palm over the back of his head. ‘You need to come home, Alice,’ he said, adding: ‘He won’t do it again.’
‘Since when did you have any say over what your father does, Bennett?’ she said.
‘He’s promised. He didn’t mean to hit you that hard.’
‘Just the little bit. Oh, that’s fine, then,’ said Fred.
Bennett shot him a look. ‘Tempers were high. Pa just … Well, he’s not used to a woman sassing him.’
‘So what’s he going to do next time Alice opens her mouth?’
Bennett turned and squared up to Fred. ‘Hey, Guisler, you want to butt out of this? Because, far as I can see, this ain’t no business of yours.’
‘It’s my business when I see a defenceless woman get beat to a pulp.’
‘And you’d be the expert on how to manage a wife, huh? Because we all know what happened to your wife –’
‘That’s enough,’ said Alice. She stood slowly – suddenmovements made her head throb – and turned to Fred. ‘Can you leave us a moment, Fred? … Please?’
His gaze darted from her to Bennett and back again. ‘I’ll be right outside,’ he muttered.
They stared at their feet until the door closed. She looked up first, at the man she had married just over a year ago, a man, she now realized, who had symbolized an escape route rather than any genuine meeting of minds or souls. What had they really known about each other, after all? They had been exotic to one another, a suggestion of a different world to two people who were each trapped, in their own way, by the expectations of those around them. And then, slowly, her difference had become repugnant to him.
