The Painted Table(14)

Saffee quietly opens a drawer of the corner desk and pulls out her cigar box of crayons. She holds up a fat one to catch a glimmer of light. Purple. Her chin trembles and her heart beats wildly as she presses the crayon in a diagonal line from corner to corner across her mother’s gray carpeting.

In the dim light, unaware that the waxy crayon has failed to leave any mark on the carpet, she dashes up the stairs to her bedroom. Under the covers, she waits for the desperate deed to be discovered.

She sleeps.





CHAPTER EIGHT



THE HIGHWAY MAN





1948





A gurgling radiator in the girls’ bedroom struggles to keep January drafts at bay. Joann tucks blankets securely around April as Saffee stands at her sister’s crib, watching. “Mommy, can I stay up later tonight? A second grader shouldn’t hafta go to bed same time as a three-year-old.”

“I suppose, for a while, but put your nightgown on now.”

Joann goes downstairs. Saffee sheds her wool sweater and corduroy overalls and dives into a flannel nightgown, a quilted robe, and a pair of matted slippers.

She scampers out of the bedroom and creeps down the stairway. She loves to lie on the carpet and listen to her mother read, but it isn’t a time of closeness, like those first happy weeks in the San Francisco apartment. Nowadays, when she reads verse, Joann communes only with her own melancholia. Tonight perhaps she will read “The Raven,” Saffee’s favorite, although very scary, poem.

“The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas . . .”

Saffee recognizes “The Highway Man,” a poem that, in Saffee’s opinion, is almost as good as “The Raven.”

Joann sits in the armchair on many lonely winter evenings, wrapped in a blanket, lost in melodramatic rhyme. To her consternation, Nels is only home on weekends now. The dairy is rapidly expanding across the state, much of its success due to Nels, the milkman-become-sales-manager. In this new position, he acquires country dairies, hires distributors, and keeps grocers happy with the dairy’s service.

Nels believes that his work is of more benefit to his family than his presence. The division of labor—he brings home the bacon, Joann raises the girls and runs the house—is taken for granted and never discussed. Nels is quite capable of doing his part, he assumes Joann is likewise. To him, his diligence through winter’s cold and summer’s heat means they will have all they need to live on, plus savings in the bank. To Joann and his girls, it means he is little more than a stranger. Once again, Joann feels empty.





The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding—

Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.





Lying on the floor, her chin cupped in her hands, Saffee listens to the familiar story of tragic Bess, the innkeeper’s black-eyed daughter who pulls the trigger bound to her bosom, sacrificing her own life to signal a warning of danger to her lover.

“The man is a thieving scoundrel,” Joann has explained to Saffee, “but he’s so-o-o handsome that he steals her heart away.”

Saffee doesn’t understand the nuances of the story, but no matter, poetry is, for Saffee, at least, distant communion   with her mother. With increasing passion, Joann continues . . .





Then look for me by moonlight,

Watch for me by moonlight,

I’ll come to thee by moonlight . . .





The poem grows long. Saffee’s head sinks onto the carpet. She can’t stay awake to hear the familiar, gripping climax, when the highwayman rides at a gallop brandishing his rapier high, only to be “shot . . . down like a dog on the highway . . . with the bunch of lace at his throat.”

Several poems later, Joann hears Saffee’s gentle snore and looks her way. “Saffee . . . Saffee,” Joann orders from her chair, “go to bed now; you’ve been up way too long. There’s school tomorrow.” Saffee yawns and climbs the stairs. Joann goes back to her poem and reads so late she’s too sleepy the next morning to ready her daughter for school.

“Get your own cereal, Saffee,” she calls from her bed. “Button your coat and zip your boots. I’m going to sleep ’til April wakes up . . . don’t be late now.”

Saffee doesn’t need the last reminder. She no longer dawdles along the four blocks to school nor plops down in the snow halfway to consider whether to go on at all. Now that she’s learned to read, a skill that makes her feel alive, bordering on important, she finds security sitting in her own desk, part of an orderly row of other desks. At home she has a small collection of children’s books, pages tattered from turning.