Women and Children

Jimmy was playing out back, making the best of a rusted swing set. Sarah and I watched him through the window. The day was perfect and beginning to heat up.
“He’s a good kid,” I said. “No kicking and screaming over his folks being away.”
You forget how big the sky can be, when you live in the city. I almost never go outside city limits, wherever I’m living. This small farm, covering only five or six acres, wasn’t changing my mind, but it was giving me second thoughts.
Sarah was quiet, watching him play. I knew what she was thinking.
My face was itchy under the bandages. Not as bad as when you’re wearing a cast, but it would do.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said.
“We can’t adopt him, Sarah,” I said. “Not as long as we’re working.”
“ You don’t have to say it every time we look after a kid,” she said.
It had been nearly a year since we’d done it and she always suffered. I wanted to give up kids altogether, but Sarah was always sweet on them. Too sweet. She started crying.
I walked away from her and sat on a box in the middle of the bare room. It was larger than our apartment and the fireplace was enormous.
“It wouldn’t take that much to fix this place up,” I said. “You couldn’t do it overnight, but you could do it.”
“We’re not going to buy a house and we’re not going to have kids,” Sarah said. “So just shut up about it.”
We usually fought when she took that tone, but I was too tired from all the work I’d been doing. Another fight could have pushed me over the edge.
“ ‘Suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto me’ ” she said.
“ ‘ For of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ ’’ I said. “Nobody’s arguing that.”
“You go into town this time, she said. “I’m tired of driving.”
She kept staring out the window without turning around. I didn’t remind her it was her turn to drive into town, seeing she was so upset about saying goodbye to little Jimmy. Truth be told, I was a little sad myself. Kids. There never seems to be enough time to have them and then the time goes by, anyway. You get older but you don’t get children. A place like this, far away from all the dirt and violence of city life, would have been ideal for raising a family.
All the years and effort that go into making money and we all end up in the ground no matter what. It wasn’t like all the work Sarah and I had done together had made us any happier. We couldn’t even buy a little farmhouse. But you’ve heard this kind of thng before or maybe thought something like it yourself.
I lifted up the back of her hair and kissed her on the neck as best I could. Her hair was almost completely covered by a scarf. Once she’d stopped dyeing, it had grown in a shiny silver that actually made her look younger. We’d both been afraid it would grow in iron-gray. I’ve been lucky with mine. I’m gray, but I’m not bald.
I didn’t expect much of a reaction from the kiss, but she turned and put her mouth on mine. Her tears had soaked the bandages under her eyes. I held her shoulders and backed her up a step, toward the other room.
“Not while Jimmy’s here,” she said. “For heaven’s sake.”
“I think I’d feel a little like a mummy, anyway,” I said.
That made her smile, at least. Both of us looked a little like we’d crawled out of an Egyptian tomb.
“I won’t be long,” I said.
I put on my cap and left the house.

Valentine is a small town. I don’t recall the exact population, but it was the kind of place where people know the police chief by his first name. We’d only arrived two days before and already storekeepers acted like we were old friends. I parked and stepped out into the heat of the afternoon. I don’t know why it always feels warmer in a town, even a tiny one, than it does in the country. There was one phone booth on the street, right outside the barber shop. I fed a pocket full of quarters into the slot one at a time and then I called my bank. It wasn’t a long call but closing the door behind me had raised the temperature at least a whole degree.
The barber stepped out of his shop at the same time I came out of the booth, covered in sweat. He was one of the thinnest men I’ve ever met and he was dry as dust.
“I’m going to hate seeing that thing go, but it’s like a Turkish bath in the summer,” he said. “The phone booth, I mean.”
I looked over his shoulder and saw his name on the pane of glass behind him.
“You’re right about the Turkish bath, Henry. Where’s it going?”
“Even here everybody’s got a cellphone,’’ he said. “There’s maybe twenty of us that don’t care for them. Used to be three phone booths just on this street.”
“I won’t use cellphones,” I said. “People have them who don’t need them. Like computers.”
“My two boys don’t even use computers at their jobs. All the way through high school everybody said they’d have to learn to use them. But it isn’t true. I think all they ever used them for was looking at naked girls.”
“If all they were was naked, I wouldn’t have any problem with it, “ I said.
“I hear that,” he said. “Like to come in for a coke?”
I wasn’t in any rush to get back to the house. Sarah was better left alone when she got this way.
There was an overhead fan in the shop, but it didn’t make things any cooler.
“I thought you must have air-conditioning,” I said. “You aren’t sweating a drop.”
“Well, I wasn’t in that phone booth,” he said. He handed me a can of coke. “But I hardly sweat anyway. I don’t know why.”
Sarah never touched soft drinks. Caffeine made her high-strung and we never kept anything at home, not coffee or tea. She didn’t want to drink either one, but temptation was too much if they were there. Like an addiction. It meant I had to go out every morning if I wanted coffee and I did for the first couple of years. Now I only have one on special occasions. I’m not sure what the coke signified – maybe half a celebration? That’d be about right. Champagne would come after every i was dotted and every t crossed.
“What are the chances you’ll buy Hank’s place?” Henry asked.
“How do you know we’re looking?”
“I’m the barber,” he said. “I hear everything. Like what it is you do for a living.”
I put down the can of coke and let my shoulders relax. People tense up whenever there might be trouble, but I let everything relax. You can’t move when you’re tense and it gives your awareness tunnel vision. Not to say I really expected any trouble, but sometimes that’s when you get some.
“Well, sir,” Henry said, “You’re either a travelling preacher or you’re one who’s on vacation.” He beamed at me. When I said nothing, he looked concerned.
“Am I wrong? Roger looked inside your car the last time your wife was here – I mean just looked through the window. That’s an old machine you’ve got there.”
“It’s old, but it runs, I said. “Just like me.”
“I’d say there’s plenty of miles left on you both,” Henry said. “On your back seat there were bibles and all kinds of religious books. I’m a Christian myself, but I don’t travel with a box of books.”
If you read the right book you can talk yourself into anything, but come sunset you still have the same mind. Mine had been giving me trouble, lately. But even if it hadn’t, I take a bible everywhere I go. This time I’d brought about a dozen theology books, stuff I hadn’t read in years. I don’t know where I thought it would get me. The best bet is just to read the Good Book and let the Spirit guide you.
Henry nodded his approval. I had no idea I’d been talking out loud.
“I was going to be a minister but life got in the way,” I said. “I own a bookstore in Topeka.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
Some of the coke trickled down my chin and soaked a corner of the gauze.
“We’re still thinking about Hank’s place,” I said. “What do you think?”
Henry was the kind of man who likes to start everything right from the beginning. I heard about how Hank had been carried off by cancer and his widow didn’t know what to do with the place. Henry was of the opinion that country life had never agreed with her, anyway. She didn’t even live in Valentine. I let him talk for nearly fifteen minutes before I stopped him.
“It’s about time I went down to the drugstore and picked up a few things,” I said. “The wife’s going to bite my head off if I’m much longer.”
I could see he wanted to get the scoop on what had been on his mind from the start, but I waited until he asked.
“Say, listen, I don’t want to be rude, but . . .
“Fire,” I said, touching the bandage. “We lost everything in the world. We lost our child. We both tried . . .”
I stopped and let my head hang. Henry’s arm was around me a second later.
“Holy cow, why can’t I keep my big mouth shut?” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
I shook my head without looking up.
“I don’t know what I’d do without God at times like this,” I said.
Henry nodded an amen.

It doesn’t actually say that God helps those who help themselves anywhere in the bible. Benjamin Franklin said it. The way I understand God is that help is given to those who need it. It’s when you can’t help yourself that God steps in. There are so many exceptions to this that it shouldn’t be a rule at all, but nobody really knows why God acts the way He does. I don’t and Sarah sure doesn’t. She’s wanted kids ever since she was old enough to have them. For some reason, God didn’t want her to have kids.
We were married before we found out and at first we thought it was me. I feel bad about Sarah, but all the same I’m glad it was her and not me. She would have dropped me like a bad habit if I’d been the obstacle between motherhood and herself. So God gave me Sarah, but didn’t give Sarah children. I wasn’t trying to get even on her behalf or anything so stupid as that, but I quit divinity school before I’d even started. I could still believe in God, but that didn’t mean I had to work for Him.
I was a little old for kids even then, but we tried adopting and agencies didn’t like us. No other way of putting it. We turned down what was offered because we wanted a nice baby boy who looked like he was born here, if you understand me. Of course, almost anyone can be born here nowadays, but I think you know what I mean. I don’t know what the qualifications are for adopting a Caucasian, healthy male boy, but we didn’t have them. If I’d become a man of the cloth, things would probably have gone differently for us – or if we’d been rich.
The way things are now, we get to have kids and we pull down a reasonable amount of change. We don’t get to keep any one kid, but it’s better than nothing. I can’t say things have turned out too badly. If God won’t let me know His reasons, then I don’t have to let Him know mine.
I keep Sarah happy and I keep us comfortable. That should be enough.

I saw the police chief’s car up near the house as soon as I pulled into the driveway. I pulled up right behind him and gave his car a puzzled look as I stepped out of mine. The door opened and Sarah said, “You can stop acting. I already killed him.”
She’d pulled the bandages off her face and it was nice to see all of her again. I didn’t know how much I’d missed her face until that very minute.
“Where is he?”
“I shot him as soon as he stepped through the door and left him right there,” she said. By that time I’d already reached her and I could see the body just inside.
“Why didn’t he send the deputy?” I wondered out loud. “I guess he wanted to be a hero.”
“Sooner or later that deputy will show up,” she said. “Everything fine at the bank?”
I nodded. The money had been wired to the account about an hour before I’d called. Right now Jimmy’s parents would be sitting by the phone, probably surrounded by cops.
“If he didn’t tell his deputy, he didn’t tell anybody else,” I said.
Sarah went back inside the house and I waited where I was, keeping an eye on the road. There was a rifle in the trunk of the car if people started arriving. I began taking the bandages off my face.
“You had to go and use glue,” Sarah said, coming outside.
I’d put a smear of airplane glue in a couple of spots near the edge of the bandages. I thought it made my skin look scarred, but now it felt like it was going to leave scars of its own.
“It’s going to take hot water,” Sarah said. “Nobody’s going to notice.”
She had everything in the duffel bag and she was dragging it behind her. I took it from her and threw it over my shoulder.
“What did the kid do when the cop showed up?”
She started crying as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I shouldn’t have even asked. I thought she’d have left the kid to me, but maybe she’d had no choice. I was glad we didn’t have to spend any time searching for him.
“Is he in the house?” I asked her.
“The backyard,” she said, still crying. “No point in hiding him now.”
I threw the bag into the trunk of the car and tossed in the bandages after it. I didn’t have to double-check the house – Sarah never made any mistakes. I wondered whether she’d shot the kid or did what she’d done to the last one. I hoped she’d shot him.
I drove at a moderate speed and Sarah stopped crying long before we reached the parking lot where we’d left the van. She wiped down the car and I quietly transferred everything from one vehicle to the other. There was no reason for anyone to pay us any mind.
“God isn’t going to forgive us,” Sarah said. “Ever.”
She looked good now that I could see her hair. It reminded me to take off the moron’s cap I’d been wearing. I leaned over and kissed her before I started the engine. I could see she needed to hear something from me, anything to change the way she felt.
“We don’t have to forgive God, don’t forget,” I said. “How many kids of ours has he kept to Himself? We’re just getting even. It’s fair.”
“God’s fair, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I told her. “Yes, He is.”
We were on the highway in fifteen minutes. The one thing I’d meant to do was get the radio fixed and I hadn’t done it. I hate driving without music and I could tell Sarah didn’t feel much like talking. She never does after the kids.
I wanted to hear some singing.