“Yes, sir.”
He was smiling now, more like the man for whom I had such great respect. “Now let’s talk about something else,” he said. “Mrs. Lowry told me of your conversation with her.”
I felt my heart slide into the basement. “I’m not much at remembering conversations, Mr. Lowry. Or talking about them.”
“I have a medical condition that has taken its toll regarding my conjugal obligations. My wife has a great love of the world and the people who inhabit it. She made a mistake approaching you and admitted it to me. She respects you, as do I. We hope that respect is mutual.”
“Yes, sir, it is. I don’t even remember what was said. Jo Anne and I hold y’all in high regard.” My batteries were down. I wanted to escape into the sunshine and the coldness of the wind and the blueness of the sky and the smell of snowmelt up in the trees, and most of all, I did not want to talk any longer with Mr. Lowry.
Then he said something I knew I would never forget, like dirt you can’t wash out of your mind. “I want your promise,” he said.
“Sir?”
“I want your promise you will never indulge in gossip a
bout Mrs. Lowry.”
My stomach had a hole in it.
“Did you hear me, Aaron?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“You’re suddenly hard of hearing?”
“My hearing is fine, Mr. Lowry. There are instances when I choose not to hear others. Thank you for inviting me to your home. I wish my father were here. He was something of a historian. He would have enjoyed talking with you about the Puritan artifact on your wall.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“No, sir. I was just talking about my father and history and all that kind of thing. My best to Mrs. Lowry.” I went out the door and down the slope, my head as weightless as a helium balloon.
Cotton and Spud and the Mexicans were waiting on me. They had fixed cowboy coffee in a big tin pot and stuck it in the warm ashes of a driftwood fire and were now sitting around the fire, drinking out of tin cups, all of them smoking roll-your-owns, probably donated by Cotton. But their mouths were turned down at the corners, their eyes avoiding mine.
“Somebody die?” I said.
Spud pulled a telegram out of his back pocket. He had been sitting on a log, and the telegram had been cupped stiffly into the shape of a half-moon. He handed it to me. “Chen Jen brought it up with the mail. I hope it isn’t bad news, Aaron,” he said. “You’ve always been my buddy.”
“I appreciate that, Spud,” I said.
“Last time I got one of those things, I ended up in khaki underwear,” he said.
I worked my finger inside the envelope and tore it along the top, then read the strips of typed words that were glued onto the paper. I read them a second time and refolded the paper and placed it and the envelope in my pants pocket. I tied on my farrier’s apron and pried up a mare’s hind foot between my legs and began rasping her hoof.
“Everything okay?” Cotton said.
“I have a literary agent in New York. He said a publisher just bought my novel.”
“Son. Of. A. Bitch,” Spud said.
“You can say that twice,” Cotton said.
The Mexicans were smiling, too. Spud began to dance around the fire, balancing his tin cup on top of his fedora, whooping like an Indian. “Ain’t that something?” he said. “I always knew you had it. Ain’t it funny how things work out?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
AFTER WORK, I showered and put on slacks and a dress shirt and a sport coat and drove to Jo Anne’s house. It was a grand evening. Indian summer was back, and a song played in my heart. I was going to be a published novelist. When I arrived, the last rays of the sun had filled the clouds in the west with a golden light. I cut the engine on my car and got out with a solitary rose wrapped in green paper that I had bought from a street vendor. Then I saw the school bus parked in the field and heard someone hammering in back of the house. Jo Anne walked out from behind the house, carrying a bottle of Tuborg. She was wearing jeans and beat-up cowboy boots and was not dressed for the place I planned to take her.
“What are you doing with the Tuborg?” I said.