Isn't It Romantic?

“My dad was. 1944. Summertime.”

She was pleased by the coincidence. “My mother, she is from Bayeux, in Normandy. We have visited Omaha Beach many times. My grandmother owns a hotel in Port-en-Bessin. On the shore of the English Channel.”

“What was her first name?”

“Sophie.”

“Don’t recall him mentioning a Sophie. But then my dad had his head ducked too much to see a whole lot of the population. Did say your people were real cultured and friendly and happy to see him. He always appreciated that. S’pose your mother wasn’t even born then.”

“No.”

“I wasn’t either.” He stared at her seriously. “In case you’re wondering, I’m fifty-two.” She said nothing. “So I guess that’d make you half my age.”

She smiled. “And so I am a ‘trophy’ for you?”

“Well, no; you’re a pleasant companion.”

The horses wove around cottonwood trees and through shaded green timothy grass and ferns as Dick guided them alongside Frenchman’s Creek. Wild deer feeding on the sapling leaves that they could reach had created a flat browse line on the underside of some young box elders and Dick educated Natalie on it. “Whole terrain hereabouts used to have so much wildlife an Eastern fella once called it ‘the paradise of hunters.’” Admiring it, he said, “Pretty country, isn’t it?”

Natalie was enchanted. “Yes! Like a cigarette ad!”

“Well, I s’pose I would’ve compared it to Eden, but each to her own vista.”

She told him she’d visited America the first time as a junior in high school. She was an exchange student and was sent to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the guest of husband and wife mathematics professors and their two appalling children. She could not believe how boring their lives were. Clavichord music. Algebra problems at the dinner table. Wine only on holidays. And no television—

Dick interrupted, “No television? Sheese. Was there plumbing?”

“We are talking ten years ago. Rules may have changed.”

“No television,” he repeated.

Shep furiously shook his head and horseflies twined in the air.

“And they were strict vegetarians,” Natalie said.

The cattleman reached out and touched her hand in consolation. “You poor child.”

Which was not so bad, but neither the husband nor wife could cook and seemed to subsist only on rice cakes and chunks of tofu.

Dick Tupper gritted his teeth. “The bastards!”

She continued. The household insisted on speaking their gruesome French whenever she was around and so she was forced to become their teacher and each grew to hate her corrections and she spent much of the nine months in the United States upstairs in her attic room, weeping with loneliness and filling thirteen journals with poetry and self-pity. And when she got back to France her teachers claimed she spoke better English before she went to America.

“Well, as far as that goes, your language skills may be ruint if you stay in Seldom too dang long.”

They rode up a slope to a ridgetop of tan prairie that was surrounded by green patches of skunkbush and dog-wood, and then they went down a hillside steep as stairsteps as Dick named the green ash, basswood, and bur oak trees. Natalie pointed to green herbs in the shaded understory and asked, “What’s that?”

And Dick told her, “Wood nettle.”

“And this?” she asked.

“Wild columbine,” he said. “Stops flowering in June.” She shifted in the saddle to look down at a plant near her stirrup and Dick immediately named it, “Jack-in-the-pulpit.”

She smiled. “Are you a botanist?”

“Well, I’ve lived here all my life. You just naturally like to know who your neighbors are.”

She faced forward. “Nature is not so interesting to Pierre.”