Moontrap - Don Berry Read online

  Monday stood. "Thanks for comin' by Beth."

  "All right, " she said, standing at the table. "I'm pokin' my nose where it don't belong. But one thing is my business, Monday. I'm just telling you that Mary is going to be—scared and miserable for a while. You're going to have to remember."

  "I'll remember. "

  "All right. That's all I ask. Be good to her. Don't let her get too upset." She walked to the door and opened it. She stopped in the doorframe and turned back. "And for christ's sake," she said with exasperation, "quit feelin' like the guilt of the world's on your back. You're just a man, Monday you're not Jesus Christ. Everybody makes mistakes."

  She went out, closing the door softly behind her. Monday methodically fed the fire a little, and swung the coffee pot in on its long hook.

  2

  He brought Mary and Little Webb home a few days later, borrowing Swensen's wagon for the trip. It was something new when they came into the cabin, as though it had never happened before. In a way, Monday felt that he would think of his life in the valley as beginning this day. Mary stood in the doorway. holding the tiny figure of the child. Silently she looked all around the room: the fireplace. the bed. the cupboard at the back and the little window beside it. She seemed to Monday more like a bride than a mother, silently considering the house to which her man had led her, where she would live her life from now on.

  There was a clumsily arranged spray of flowers on the bed, gathered hastily just before Monday had left for Oregon City. Mary saw them, and smiled gently. She went over to the bed and carefully put the tiny, bundled baby down. Picking up the flowers, she turned to Monday.

  "Well," he said, embarrassed. "You're home again, Mary."

  "Yes," she said.

  Monday took her shoulders gently in his hands and leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead. "You best sit down," he said. "Don't get too tired."

  She sat at the edge of the bed, and the movement partially wakened Little Webb. He squalled, and Mary picked him up, holding him against her breast and rocking gently. Over the child's head her eyes continued to rove about the room, taking in each detail, as though she had not lived with them all for seven years. She said nothing, and Monday could not tell what was passing through her mind.

  Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he saw her eyes fill with tears, and she bent her head, resting her cheek on Little Webb's downy head.

  "Mary," he said softly. "Mary, what's the matter?"

  "Is nothing," she said. "Just—just happy to be—home again." She gestured to the room.

  Monday sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulder. It was strange, he thought, how a woman would cry when she was happy—

  "Mary," he said, "this is the beginning for us. Right now."

  Mary rocked back and forth with tiny. slow movements, soothing the child.

  "Do you remember what I said, Mary? About having roots now?"

  "Yes," she said. She was humming to the child, a song without melody, like the flight of a bee.

  "I've thought a lot about it," he said. "I've thought about the last years, and all the trouble we'ye had getting—I don't know, getting settled. Being a part of all this. And I know what's wrong, I know what's been wrong."

  Mary lifted her head, her eyes seeming almost luminous in the dusky interior. She waited calmly for her husband to continue, but Monday saw the hope that flickered behind her silent gaze. Her tear-fillled regard disconcerted him, and he looked down at the tiny round head of Little Webb, now silent again. Absently he reached out with his free hand to touch the fuzzy skull of the baby gently with his fingertips.

  "It's been—me. I guess, all the time. I never really put my back into it. I never really tried hard enough."

  She looked at him for a moment in silence. Then the tears welled up again, and she looked back down at the child in her arms. "You work very hard," she said softly.

  "It ain't that so much, it's—I don't know, I just wasn't willing to do a lot of things you got to do to get along. I figured to just work my land, an' let it go at that. But you can't do it that way. A settlement ain't just land, there's people, too. And I guess I never really got it straight that I had to work at getting along with the people, too. I never really tried.

  "But—from now on, Mary, I'm really going to try. From now on we're going to be part of this country, Mary. Not just squatting here on the river, but real part of it. Do you—can you see what it'll mean?"

  "Yes," Mary said. "Yes, I can see."

  "We'll see more people, get out more. I know it's been awful lonely for you here, without anybody to talk to or anything. But we'll change all that. We can do it, Mary. We've just got to try. "

  Monday got up and paced over to the bed, becoming excited with his vision of the future. It was going to be all right, he thought. The business at the courthouse, all the rest of it—it was all part of a pattern, and he was only now coming to see it. It had been his own reluctance to make the changes the new life required that had been at the root of his troubles all the time.

  "I'm going to give Little Webb something to be proud of," he said. "From now on, we're going to be part of this territory. An' if it means doin' a few things I don't feel like—well, that's too damn bad. I'm going to get along here. Mary, do you see what I mean?"

  "Yes," Mary said. "Yes, I see. It will be better for you that way." A tear dropped from her cheek and glistened on the child's head. Tenderly Monday touched it.

  "Better for all of us, Mary," he said gently. "It's going to be all right, from now on." But he couldn't tell if she'd heard him or not.

  ***

  In the next weeks he settled into it, working with a sense of purpose he'd never known before. Enlisting the help of Devaux and Peter Swensen, he got the wheat in in five days, working from first light until it was too dark to see. The two men were, he thought, indifferent workers, but it went all right. Peter had a tendency to drift over to Rainy and engage him in a discussion about the end of the world, but Monday finally put them on opposite sides of the field, and it went faster after that.

  Only Webb would have no part of it, and Monday was obscurely disappointed. The old man had simply snorted contemptuously at the idea of "helpin' some poor bastard dirt-clod," and wandered off into the hills to see how things were there.

  Monday knew where he was going now, and it was a good sensation; it was what had been missing in his life before. He finished each day aching in every muscle, tired with a different fatigue from what he had known, a strained tightness from the constant repetition of the same movements hour after hour. It was not something he liked, but he figured he could get used to it. He could get used to anything, now; he knew where he was going, he knew what he was working toward.

  Mary slept a great deal during these days, almost as much as the baby. Monday had many hours alone, sitting before the fire in the evening, thinking things out. In his mind he noted different jobs to be done, new approaches, plotting out his plan of attack as carefully as though it had been a horse-raid in the mountains.

  He put aside his own feelings bit by bit. What was pleasant, what was enjoyable, ceased to be a matter of importance. He began to test his endurance against the work, against the compromises that had to be made, as he had tested his strength against the purely physical problems of the mountains. Deliberately, he forced himself to go to the Oregon City mill and make arrangements for the grinding of the wheat in the fall. He was polite, refused to take offense at the unfunny comments about mountain men farming. After the percentage had been established he stayed at the mill, leaning back against a rail and talking with the other farmers; weather, the prospect for the crop, the hundred small variations of the same comment.

  At first he was self-conscious about it, feeling as though he were pretending to speak some foreign language and making a fool of himself with his exaggerated casualness. But he found the other farmers took it all for granted, thought nothing of it. It was the way life was. At first they had regarded him
with the suspicion he had grown so used to in seven years, but after the first encounters this too diminished. He found if he shook his head and said, "Looks like a bad year," half a dozen times or so, it was considered conversation.

  In a fashion it was absurd, and he knew it. But he told himself it was part of the big game—one of the rules, and he would learn it as he would learn all the rest of them. He had set himself to play the game, and he would play it to the bottom.

  He made several trips into Oregon City that could have been avoided, simply to talk, to make himself part of the community that centered in the town by the falls. And the strange thing was that he found the game was not as complicated as he had expected. As long as he didn't say what he thought, but contented himself with the ritual repetitions, he got along very well. There was not, after all, much to talk about in this new world he was entering. Weather and crops. That, and trouble. He quickly learned that you didn't talk about what you enjoyed, but only about things that gave you trouble. It was a funny contrast, he thought, with Webb. The old man was constantly telling himself stories about the times he'd had fun. the times he'd loved. Here it was not like that. The well was dry, you thought the lettuce was going to rust (though it hadn't rained now for nearly six weeks). that bastard Brown hadn't returned the hoe he borrowed a year and a half ago. It was serious. It was all serious, and as long as you didn't forget that, you got along line. Life was one long series of problems to be solved, and that was what was important. It was grim. But that was how it was, life.

  He was a little surprised by the ease of it, for he had expected something that ran much deeper. But all you had to do was float along with the surface, say the expected things, and there was no trouble. You could remain your own man inside. As long as you made a gesture for the sake of appearances, they left you alone.

  So he talked the meaningless talk, and listened to the sarcastic gibes at neighbors and friends, and occasionally essayed one or two himself. It didn't matter what they were, as long as they were critical. To himself he shrugged. Another unwritten rule, and as easy to follow as any other. In a sense, all you had to do was detach your mind from reality, and follow the lead of the others.

  Mary continued listless and depressed. Monday was glad now that Dr. Beth had warned him what to expect, or he would have been seriously worried. She was very silent, and very weak. She moved about the house as slowly as when she had been big with child. She spent as much of her waking time as possible outside the cabin. Whenever it could be done, she took her work out to the porch. She often stared out at the hills with her work forgotten in her lap, and at those times she seemed very far away. She seldom smiled these days, and he sometimes caught the glint of tears in her eyes as she looked out over the ridges and hills of the valley.

  Watching her, he was more than ever certain he had made the right decision in trying to make himself a part of the valley community. He could realize how terrible her life must have been before, married to a man that was always somehow apart from the others, always an outcast. The thing that was difficult was that it was so hard to talk to her. She lacked interest in everything.

  "You know," he'd start, "it's a damn shame Peter doesn't work that mountain o' his. Damn good land up there."

  "Yes."

  "It's a waste, t' my thinkin'. If he ain't going to work it, he'd ought to give it up t' somebody that would. It ain't right just to leave it sit there, lyin' idle."

  "Yes."

  "Peter's a hell of a nice ol' hoss, but you know, he's bone-lazy and there's an end to it."

  Mary just looked at him.

  It was either that or the inevitable uninterested "Yes." Sometimes he thought if she said "Yes" just once more he'd go out of his mind. And then he'd have to remind himself that, in a sense, it wasn't Mary at all, but her—strange condition, and he would have to try to ignore it.

  The biggest problem in the future, he knew, would be to work Mary into this new world, too. In small ways he was beginning, trying to interest her in the little things that went on. When he'd been to Oregon City he'd repeat the conversations for her when he got home, telling her the gossip, what people were doing, what they were saying. Her silence made it difficult, and it infuriated him when her gaze absently wandered off over the hills. But he doggedly continued, with the same grim determination he was learning to show in everything.

  Sitting before the fire in the evening, he'd plan the next few steps ahead; perhaps, before too long, they'd get somebody to stay with Little Webb and go into town Saturday night for the dances. Once in a while there was a sort of theater performance got up by the local people, and it wouldn't hurt any to be seen at one of those.

  That was the main thing; to let it be seen, let it be known that they were taking part, both of them, in the life of the valley. He was no longer running wild and alone, separated from the rest of them by some mysterious and unbridgeable chasm. That he was, finally, one of them, and ready to do what was necessary.

  In the last weeks of June he saw it happen, saw that he was in fact beginning to be wholly accepted. When he entered a store in Oregon City, the conversation no longer stopped; he joined in easily and naturally, and thought it was going to be a bad year for wheat and hoped they didn't have another winter like the last. It worked. It was purely mechanical, but it worked. and he had a growing sense of triumph. When he had finally set his mind to it, he had been able to do it. The wasted seven years were behind him now, and how stupid it had all been. All they wanted was for him to play the game, and he could have done it any time, had he understood. had he been willing to commit himself to it. But now he was doing it. and steadily the life he was building began to take shape.

  3

  Beneath his grim satisfaction with the progress he was making, there ran one strong and bitter current of torment. Hovering always at the back of his mind was Mary, and the most basic lack of all, the problem that showed no sign of improving: the physical distance that continued to exist between them. He thought he could understand it; but it was not a thing he could live with, understanding or not. Through the last months of pregnancy he had not made love to her at all, out of fear for the child. And after Little Webb's birth, Doctor Beth's cautioning had made him hesitant.

  But his simple physical longing was becoming intolerable. To feel their bodies twined together again, to feel the sudden soft release when they merged into one, to hear the tiny animal call of pleasure in Mary's throat as he thrust into the warmth of her body, plunging deep and long. The movement of their hips together, the softness of her breasts beneath his hands, the feel of her thighs gripping him, tightening and releasing in the rhythm of joy . . .

  Waiting he could understand; but there was an end to it, there had to be an end to it. It had been weeks now since the birth of Little Webb, and still she did not turn to him in the night, caressing his belly softly until he awoke aroused and moved to feel the hardness of his own flesh in her. He had waited for her to make the first sign that she was ready to receive him again, and perhaps that was the mistake. It was not changing as time went on; she remained distant, unresponsive to his touch.

  Well, hell, he thought. Nothin' changes less'n you make it change. lt was not simply his own desire in question, but in some way the whole problem of Mary's detachment from the world around her, the world in which she would have to take a part, sooner or later.

  He was working to build a place for them here, but he knew that before Mary could take her place in this world she would have to take her place again as his woman. It would have to begin there. He would have to bridge the distance that existed between them, before all else.

  The more he thought of it, the more he was convinced that if they could share the joy of their bodies again it would bring her back from that strange land she lived in now, just out of sight. Back to him, and back to the real world. She had no contact now, she was not moved. But in the joy of physical love, in the sweeping tide that carried them both, she would find herself again. The b
arrier would be broken, one time for all.

  In the end he saw that the choice could not be hers; she was waiting too, without volition. Waiting for him. Her indifference would have to be broken, for both of them. Now she was only a half—wife, sharing his house, but not his body. It was not right for her, and it could not go on. And what she was incapable of doing for herself, he would have to do. He knew that after the physical act of love, she could not remain indifferent, could not remain—apart. They would be together again, and it would be the beginning.

  He was elated when he had worked it out in his mind and seen clearly what was involved. His "kindness" had been an absurdity. No woman wanted to remain without the fullness of her man within her; it was insane, un—normal. What contact could be expected when there was not even the most basic contact of all, the meeting of flesh with flesh? None. It was no wonder her lethargy continued, no wonder the wall remained between them. And if she was at first reluctant—it was the strangeness. And she was, after all, his wife. In the end he knew she would realize the importance.

  He watched her as she bent over Little Webb's cradle, crooning softly to the baby, settling the light blanket around his tiny body. The simple curve of her back was a delight to his eyes, and he realized with a sense of anguish how much he had missed the touch of her body.

  She finally stood straight, silent again, looking down at the cradle. She came back to the table where Monday sat, and as she turned he took his eyes away from her, strangely embarrassed, and looked at the fire.

  "You need nothing?" she said softly.

  "No," Monday said, shaking his head slowly. "Nothing."

  "I am very tired," Mary said. "I go to bed."

  Monday nodded.

  He listened to the rustle of calico as she took off her clothes, the slow, measured whispering of the fabric against her skin. Watching the fire he could see it clearly in his mind, and had no need to turn. The slim triangle of her back, the full breasts and softly curving belly, the gentle swell of her thighs . . . He suddenly realized his fist was clenched tightly on the table in front of him, and deliberately relaxed. He was obscurely annoyed with himself for being so tense; there was nothing so damn strange about a man wanting to make love to his wife.