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It was the only threat she ever had to make. Bob spent the day worrying, looking at the bleak plains and wondering what he would do in such a place without her. He never touched whiskey again. The jug he had been working on sat in the cupboard for years, until Clara finally mixed it with sorghum molasses and used it for cough medicine.
They had few quarrels, most of them about money. Clara was a good wife and worked hard; she never did anything untoward or unrespectable, and yet the fact that she had that Texas money made Bob uneasy. She wouldn't give it up or let him use it, no matter how poor they were. Not that she spent it on herself-Clara spent nothing on herself, except for the books she ordered or the magazines she took. She kept the money for her children, she said-but Bob could never be sure she wasn't keeping it so she could leave if she took a notion. He knew it was foolish-Clara would leave, money or no money, if she decided to go-but he couldn't get the idea out of his mind. She wouldn't even use the money on the house, although she had wanted the house, and they had had to haul the timber two hundred miles. Of course, he had prospered in the horse business, mainly because of the Army trade; he could afford to build her a house. But he still resented her money. She told him it was only for the girls' education-and yet she did things with it that he didn't expect. The winter before she had bought Cholo a buffalo coat, an action which shocked Bob. He had never heard of a married woman buying a Mexican cowboy an expensive coat. Then there was the piano. She had ordered that too, although it cost two hundred dollars and another forty to transport. And yet he had to admit he loved to see his girls sitting at the piano, trying to learn their fingering. And the buffalo coat had saved Cholo's life when he was trapped in an April blizzard up on the Dismal River. Clara got her way, and her way often turned out to make sense-and yet Bob more and more felt that her way skipped him, somehow. She didn't neglect him in any way that he could put his finger on, and the girls loved him, but there were many times when he felt left out of the life of his own family. He would never have said that to Clara-he was not good with words, and seldom spoke unless he was spoken to, unless it was about business. Watching his wife, he often felt lonely. Clara seemed to sense it and would usually come and try to be especially nice to him, or to get him laughing at something the girls had done-and yet he still felt lonely, even in their bed.
Now Bob lay in that bed all day, staring his empty stare. They had moved the bed near the window so that he would get the summer breezes and could look out if he liked and watch his horses grazing on the plain, or the hawks circling, or whatever little sights there might be. But Bob never turned his head, and no one knew if he felt the breezes. Clara had taken to sleeping on a little cot. The house had a small upper porch and she moved the cot out there in good weather. Often she lay awake, listening, half expecting Bob to come back to himself and call her. More often what happened was that he fouled himself; and instead of hearing him she would smell him. Even so, she was glad it happened at night so she could change him without the girls seeing.
It seemed to her, after a month of it, that she was carrying Bob away with those sheets; he had already lost much weight and every morning seemed a little thi
Besides, Bob wasn't really alive, even then-his eyes never flickered. It was only reflex that enabled him to swallow the soup she fed him. That his rod still seemed to live when she bathed him, that, too, was reflex, an obscene joke that life was playing on the two of them. It raised no feelings of tenderness in her, just a feeling of disgust at the cruelties of existence. It seemed to mock her, to make her feel that she was cheating Bob of something, though it was not easy to say what. She had married him, followed him, fed him, worked beside him, borne his children-and yet even as she changed his sheets she felt there was a selfishness in her that she had never mastered. Something had been held back-what it was, considering all that she had done, was hard to say. But she felt it anyway, fair judgment or not, and lay awake on her cot through half the night, tense with selfreproach.
In the mornings she lay wrapped in a quilt until the smell of Cholo's coffee waked her. She had fallen into the habit of letting Cholo make the coffee, mainly because he was better at it than she was. She would lie in her quilt, watching the mists float over the Platte, until one or both of the girls tiptoed out. They always tiptoed, as if they might wake their father, though his eyes were as wide open as ever.
"Ma, ain't you up?" Sally would say. "We been up awhile."
"Wanta gather the eggs?" Betsey asked. It was her favorite chore but she preferred to do it with her mother-some of the hens were irritable with Betsey and would peck her if she tried to slide an egg out from under them, whereas they would never peck Clara.