took a deep breath. “Besides, I hate playing little mouse to your big cat.” She saw the hurt surprise pass over Dickon’s face before he quickly suppressed it. Damn him, she thought, he won’t quit playing the ever-reasonable, ever-understanding, preacher long enough to argue with me! He always has to be so damn perfect!
“Where would you look for work? There aren’t many jobs here. We already have a bigger income than most of the families in the church. We shouldn’t take work they need to survive.” Vanna’s anger threatened to boil over. She thrust it back; anger would only defeat her purpose. Dickon froze up when she got angry. Before she could reply, Dickon went on.
“The Presbytery has an opening; it’s part-time, in the Presbytery office in Los Albaricoques. If you’re interested, I could mention it to Bobbo Link.” Vanna swallowed an internal retort. The church again, always, with Dickon, the church.
“If you would, dear,” she said, fully intending not to take it if it were offered to her.
“I’ll call Bobbo in the morning,” Dickon promised. Vanna thanked him, and went to her embroidery. She detested any kind of needlework, but, as Dickon’s wife, she was expected to join the Ladies’ Aid Society in preparing fancy things to sell to each other at the church bazaar. As she repeatedly pricked her fingers with the needle, she vowed within herself to make Dickon pay for his sins, and the sins of all the other males she had ever encountered. Later that night, when they had gone to bed, she had a small revenge. She pled weariness to forestall sex. Dickon didn’t seem to mind; it was almost as if he’d offered because he ought to. Vanna lay awake while Dickon slept, her mind probing her memories like a tongue probes a sore tooth.
Hope Chest (from the Book of Bygone Days)
Vanna hated May on the ranch. It came with hot days and nights sucking the rain-soft earth dry, making it almost as hard as ceramic ware. In May ranchers marked lambs. Confused bleating and sheep stink wove a blanket with the heat that smothered the ranch. Vanna met Dickon one May.
Everyone, all the Dees and all the dogs, went to the field to round up the sheep and bring them in. Then they separated the ewes and lambs. This stirred the flock to great bleating. Separating the lambs and ewes in the chutes always raised an acrid dust. Its bitterness arose from powdering the dried sheep dung that littered the chutes. It caught in Vanna’s nostrils and ravaged her lungs despite the kerchief she tied over her mouth and nose to keep out the dust. It hung and swirled in the hot air while they marked the male lambs and docked the tails of all the lambs.
Her father, Perry Dee, firmly believed women had a place in the universe. That place, in his mind, included chores like cooking, washing, cleaning, helping herd sheep, docking lambs, and sewing. He did not allow a woman to put the elastic on a lamb’s scrotum. That was man’s work. Women got to dock the tails by putting similar elastic on the tail. Perry insisted, for the health of his sheep, that the elastic be placed as high on the tail as possible. Since lambs didn’t wipe, this often meant contact with dung-laden wool. Vanna wanted to mark the lambs, and, while she was at it, provide her father and brother with an elastic adornment as well.
Vanna detested her father at most times, but most especially lamb marking and docking time. He drove himself and her brother, Dan, hard. He drove Vanna and her mother just as hard. He and Dan went in at noonday to sit in the kitchen drinking lemonade while she and her mother put the noon dinner on the table, the dinner they had prepared before dawn while the men gathered the tools for working the sheep.
Lambing happened in December and January, months when the cold rains cut through any garment to chill one’s bones and sinews. It came with blood and bad smells. Vanna remembered Christmases as an odor compounded of roast turkey, pine needles, sheep excrement, and sour milk. She hated the holiday season.
Vanna feared she’d go to her grave reeking of lanolin and sheep dung. She saw only one exit, and that was to find a husband who did not work with livestock, who would take her away from this living nightmare. Still under the influence of her father’s religious tutelage, Vanna prayed for such a man. He came one Sunday, during lamb marking and docking time. The Dees, as was their regular habit, had washed off as much of the dust and lanolin as strong soap and hot water could move, dressed in their finest, and gone to church. Dickon Shayne occupied the pulpit.
Dickon Shayne surveyed the congregation in the Sheepshin Valley Presbyterian Church. His green eyes moved restlessly over the pews that held the ordinary run of gnarled farmers and worn women one came to expect in a ranching community. They, and the usual cadre of grey-haired widows, some plump as partridges on a spit and others lean as withered cornstalks, looked up at the redheaded divinity student with resigned expectation. A few young faces were sprinkled among the visages wind and weather had carved with history. Dickon smiled, introduced himself as a seminary student, filling in today for their pastor, who was at a Presbytery-mandated conference, and began intoning the invocation. He bid them rise and sing the first hymn. A young man came in and slipped into a pew with his family.
Dickon watched the lean grace of his movements. His hair was dark, and just a little longer than Sheepshin Valley fashion preferred. His shoulders were broad, and strained the dress shirt he wore. His eyes were dark, either blue or black, and the lashes surrounding them were lush and thick. His thin lips moved enticingly as he sang the words to the third verse of the hymn.
The young man stood next to a girl, probably his younger sister. While Dickon sang the fourth verse of the hymn with the congregation, he studied her. She wore her black hair long, and let it hang loose down her shoulders. Her black eyes glinted fiercely, as if to affirm life must be grappled with and conquered. Dark lashes, very like her brother’s, surrounded her eyes. Her body was well proportioned, and promised an elegant woman would break through the girlish softness.
She’d look good standing beside me on Sunday mornings, Dickon thought. He was starting his senior year at the Seminary, and had already met the prejudice the average congregation held toward the unwed minister. He had watched the faces of several pulpit committees glaze over when they discovered his unmarried status promised no immediate end, since he had no fiancé. The married and almost-married students got the calls.
After church was over, while the student was shaking hands with the parishioners, Vanna drew Yuna back. “Can we ask him to dinner, Mother?” she inquired. Yuna stared at her daughter. Vanna had not demonstrated any great interest in men before this.
“Why, yes, I suppose we could,” Yuna said. She looked for Perry Dee. The back of his balding head was well ahead of her. Uncharacteristically she made a decision without his approval. “We have the lamb roast in the oven, and quite enough vegetables and potatoes. We can always have canned peaches for dessert. Yes, I think we can invite him.”
When she reached the Seminary student, Yuna introduced herself and her daughter, Vanna. She asked him if he had received an invitation to dinner. He said he had not. “Please,” she said, “come dine with us. We’re the third ranch on the left off Gray Fleece Lane. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes,” he said. “I studied the map before I came up from Seminary this morning.”
“We’ll expect you within the hour, then,” Yuna said. She told Perry as he drove them home that she had invited the Seminary student to dinner. Perry said nothing; dinner guests were in Yuna’s bailiwick. Perry applied his mind to thinking up conversational gambits to get himself through his afternoon hosting chores.
Yuna bore just fame for her roast lamb dinners. To begin with, Perry had a genius for slaughtering a lamb at the peak of its flavor. Yuna enhanced the meat with slivers of garlic embedded in the roast, and a fine dusting of ground rosemary, salt, and black pepper (she ground the rosemary and pepper with a mortar and pestle). Commonly, she accompanied the meat with roast potatoes and carrots, and a cruciferous vegetable. On this day she had selected Brussels sprouts dressed with blacken
ed butter. For dessert she served her favorite, canned peaches.
Dickon Shayne ate heartily; the home-cooked meal filled a gnawing emptiness in his psyche as well as his stomach. The after-dinner conversation, prompted by Perry Dee’s carefully rehearsed gambits, ranged over a multitude of topics, political, religious, and economic. Vanna made every effort to attract Dickon’s notice. He seemed pleasant enough, and he had no desire to ranch for a living. After he left, she consulted her mother.
“Mother,” she said, “do you think I made a decent impression on Mr. Shayne?”
Yuna smiled at her. “Yes, dear, I think you did.”
“Do you think he’ll come back to Sheepshin Valley?” Vanna studiously dried the plates Yuna had washed and rinsed.
“Perhaps,” Yuna said. “You can only wait and see.”
On Tuesday Yuna and Perry received a short note of thanks from Dickon. In it he mentioned how charming Vanna’s conversation had been. Yuna pointed out to Vanna that she had made an excellent impression. Two weeks later, when Dickon came just to attend Sunday services at the Sheepshin Valley Presbyterian Church, it was only natural for Yuna to invite him to dinner again (meatloaf, this time, another of