Daisies Read online

  Gwen could feel everything, the grain of the wood beneath her shoes, every mote of dust she breathed in. Her senses screamed at her, making her aware of everything around her but mostly her vulnerability. She was no longer under the protection of her momma and daddy. She was now at the mercy of Willie, so she stepped toward him. And the sensation of each step was electric. Her heart pounded, and her mouth was inexplicably parched. She knew what she was supposed to do. When she had experienced her first period, Sila had taken that opportunity to explain to her the birds and the bees, believing the more Gwen understood, the less likely she was to be curious with boys. Their conversation had taken place one afternoon as they sat out on the back porch doing needlepoint work. Sila sewed a picture of a cluster of flowers. Gwen worked on a picture of a cardinal on a snow branch. Neither of them seemed to be made anxious by the conversation, and if anything, it had only brought them closer. And it now steered Gwen’s lips to Willie’s.

  Their first kiss exploded inside each of them despite its timidity, its awkwardness. Then Gwen pushed for a second kiss and more after that. Without realizing he had done so, Willie found his arms wrapped around Gwen. And suddenly, he thought he would come right then and there. But there was so much more to explore. His hands moved around to Gwen’s breasts, and she unbuttoned her dress, letting it fall to the ground. Then she dropped the straps of her slip and let it fall, too. There she was, standing in front of Willie in only her silks and her long wool socks and shoes. Willie knew she was cold without her saying a word, and he guided her to the bed, sat her down on it, and wrapped the blue quilt around her. Then he knelt and untied her shoes, setting each of them under the chair where her coat lay. He slipped his fingers into the tops of Gwen’s socks and couldn’t help but kiss her legs as he rolled them down from mid-thigh to knee to calf to ankle to foot and deposited them inside her shoes. Next he stood up and removed his own boots and socks, then his coat and suspenders and his flannel shirt. His fingers fumbled twice with the button on his pants before he had them undone and let them drop to the ground. After removing his T-shirt, he slipped from his boxers, finally standing naked in front of Gwen. She simply held out her hand, and he went to her. They kissed again, falling back onto the bed. Without opening their eyes, without talking, Willie helped Gwen out of the last of her undergarments and pulled back the duvet. In seconds, they were naked together under it, their bodies pressing into each other. They couldn’t get close enough. Their fingers couldn’t touch enough. Their noses couldn’t smell enough. Gwen guided Willie into her, and as she gave herself to him, she opened her eyes and saw the painting of the daisies on the wall. There was no “I love you not,” Gwen thought. It would always be “I love you.” And though she spoke no words, Willie could hear her saying this, and she could hear him saying it right back.

  In the weeks following Gwen and Willie’s marriage, the actual trials of building their lives together began to take their toll. It started with the house. They couldn’t very well live in Gwen’s parents’ place, and Willie’s parents were eager to see Willie make a home of his own. So the Barnetts’ gave Willie and Gwen a piece of land—ten acres—at the back of their property and offered to cosign a loan so the newlyweds could build themselves a stead. It wasn’t going to be anything fancy: a kitchen, sitting room, and bedroom. The construction was Willie’s responsibility. And he drew up the plans along with a couple of his friends who had helped build other houses in the area. He would show the blueprints, drawn on feed sacks and pieces of cardboard, to Gwen, who smiled at her husband, intimidated by his smarts but also annoyed at his lack of common sense regarding certain areas of architectural importance to her. Did he seriously not think she needed more than a six-by-six-foot wide kitchen? And what about a water closet?

  “It’s inevitable!” Sila laughed when Gwen told her of the tribulations she and Willie were experiencing.

  “But, Momma, an outhouse?”

  Sila and Gwen were canning vegetables in Sila’s kitchen.

  “Sounds like he’s trying to be practical, Gwennie. Water closets are expensive.”

  “Everyone has them nowadays except for them poor folks out on Miller’s Road.”

  “We’ve only had ours seven years or have you forgot?”

  “Lansakes! I’ll never forget emptying slop jars, momma. Disgusting.”

  “You sorry you got married?”

  “Momma!”

  “If you’re not, you will be. It’s best not to look for greener pastures that only exist in your mind. You and Willie married. Nothing you can do about it now.”

  Gwen looked down at the okra she was washing. She had never considered that she might regret her decision to marry Willie or even that she could regret it.

  By the end of summer, Willie and Gwen’s house was finished, and it had turned out beautifully. Willie’s patience was seen around every corner through his attention to details. Their house was the physical representation of his love for Gwen—meticulous and sturdy, straight and level. And all of the little expenses Gwen had hoped for but dared not demand were present, from the water closet to the large kitchen to the brass knobs on each of the cabinet doors. The outside was whitewashed. They would buy shutters for the windows later, Willie told Gwen. There was a front porch with a railing, and Willie helped Gwen dig up daisies from her father’s field to transplant along the walkway up to the house and all around it.

  As Willie sawed and sanded, hammered and painted, he expected that there would be that one day that the house would suddenly be done and he would carry Gwen across the threshold to see it all for the first time. But that day never came because each time he finished with some new piece of the house he had to show it to Gwen, not for her approval but to bask in the glow of hopefully having made her proud. The first night they slept in the house was, in fact, an accident. Willie was soldering pipes for the water closet and had lost track of time. At two-thirty in the morning, Gwen appeared. She had woken up in their room back in his parents’ house and found herself unable to fall to sleep again. So she brought Willie a jar of warm milk. He drank it, explaining the intricacies of soldering copper pipes while she listened contently, both of them seated on the bathroom floor. Then he slid over to her and kissed her lips before sliding his mouth down to her breasts and beyond. In the morning, they found themselves lying on the floor, asleep wrapped in each other’s arms.

  Between Willie’s mother, Gwen’s mother, and a little scavenging around, Gwen and Willie were able to furnish the house with a double bed and chest of drawers in the bedroom, a sofa and rocking chair in the sitting room, and a table and chairs in the kitchen. Gwen hung a few needlepoint pictures on the walls in frames built by Willie. And while the whole lot was under construction, she had thought far enough ahead to plant a garden from seeds given to her by her mother. So food was plentiful. It was a life, and it was good by the standards of any young prairie couple.

  When fall came, Gwen would rise with Willie at the break of dawn. They would eat breakfast and feed and care for the animals they had been given for their meager barn: five chickens, a milking cow, and a pig. Then Gwen would head off to school while Willie went to work at a stockyard closer to the city. And each evening they would return to be together in the quiet of their home once again.

  “Thanks for bringing those grouse home today,” Gwen said.

  Willie looked over at Gwen, who was figuring math problems at the kitchen table while he sipped at his coffee and looked over a day-old copy of the newspaper he had retrieved from the wastebin at work. “Looks like they’re wantin’ to bring that interstate highway system right through downtown.”

  “You think it will change much?”

  “Most everybody at work is for it. Boss says it’ll expand the range of business. Says he might even higher some of us as drivers to haul meat around in refrigerated trucks.”

  “Drive it where?”

  “Around. Far as we can, I guess.”

  Gwen went ba
ck to figuring math problems. Then she felt it—a pang in her stomach, bile rising in her throat. She put her pencil down and moved over to the back door, stepped out into the cool air. That felt better. She sat down on the stairs and leaned her head against the railing. After a moment, Willie appeared.

  “You okay?”

  “Sick. Have been all day.”

  Willie sat down next to Gwen and pulled her close to him. “Sick how?”

  Gwen looked at Willie, nervous.

  “Oh.” He understood without her saying a word. “You ask your momma what she thinks?”

  Gwen nodded.

  A slight smile appeared on Willie’s face. “You think it’ll be a boy?”

  “Who knows?”

  Willie smiled even bigger. “Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  Gwen shrugged. She suddenly seemed like the young girl Willie used to walk to school and not his wife. He rubbed her shoulder. “I’ll finish your homework for you. You go to bed.”

  “You don’t even know what we’re studying.”

  “Can’t be all that difficult.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll have to drop out of school anyway,” Gwen sighed. “What are we, fools? Neither of us graduating school, and me having a baby when we hardly have room for the two of us?”

  “Remember what you used to tell me?”

  Gwen shook her head.

  Willie smiled. “All is well, Gwennie.”

  This didn’t seem to yield much relief to Gwen, who still sat there tense and worried. She laid her head on Willie’s shoulder and let the cool prairie breeze ease her churning stomach. Despite the assurance he’d given her, Gwen was right about a baby. It would be tough. Now it was Willie’s turn to be sick and young. He laid his head on hers and pulled her just a little closer to him.

  Baby Barnett came with the usual fanfare of a first—the first baby to Gwen and Willie, the first grandchild of the Barnetts and the Hisels, and the first member of either family with red hair. Gwen and Willie had lain in bed at night coming up with different names they would call their first—Barbara, Candice, or Sue if it was a girl, and Tom, Joe, or Ron if it was a boy. However, when Gwen and Willie first laid eyes on what seemed to be this most inexplicable loaf of female, Sheila was the first name that popped into Willie’s mind. He wasn’t sure where it had come from. Maybe he’d heard it on the radio. Maybe it was on a nurse’s nametag. Whatever the case, it seemed to befit the little wonder in his arms. Gwen agreed. She was simply relieved to have given birth without complication, and any name would have been perfect so long as her baby was healthy.

  Neither Willie nor Gwen could quite believe the presence of Sheila in their life. She was their sole creation, something no one would ever be able to take from them. Gwen would find Willie watching her during her sleep, and Willie would often suspect Gwen of coddling Sheila long after she could be placed back in her bassinet. But it was also exhausting.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Willie picked up a screaming Sheila from her bassinet once again. It was three in the morning.

  Gwen said nothing, dark circles under her eyes staring back more intensely at Willie than her eyes themselves.

  “Maybe you should feed her.”

  Once again, Gwen didn’t answer.

  “Gwennie, I gotta be keen for work, but I can’t if I don’t get some shut-eye.”

  “Damn you.” Gwen’s mouth formed the almost silent words without the aid of thought.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, damn you!”

  Willie stared at Gwen in shock, and she stared at him just the same.

  “Why did you do this to me?” Gwen charged.

  “I haven’t done nothin’ that you ain’t been a part of.”

  “I’m not happy, Willie! You think I chose unhappiness?”

  “For your information, I didn’t sign up for this shit either!”

  A tear rolled down Gwen’s cheek, and suddenly she joined Sheila’s howling cries so that they were now a duet of misery.

  “Oh, geez.” Willie wasn’t angry. He was just perplexed as to what he could do. He circled the room, bouncing Sheila and glancing back at Gwen, who remained on the bed in her pain. “God, if ever I needed You…” He prayed out loud. But that didn’t seem to change anything. Finally Willie moved over to the bed, becoming tearful himself, and pulled Gwen into his chest. For almost an hour, this latest generation of Barnetts cried together until they all seemed to have forgotten what they were crying for and fell asleep.

  Only after a few weeks would Gwen and Willie begin to realize the strange outbreaks of emotion they experienced with the arrival of Sheila were not simply those that come from the exhaustion of rearing a newborn but tears of mourning for a life they once possessed that was now deceased and of fear over the uncertain terrain of the life ahead of them.

  Soon Willie and Gwen rarely thought of themselves or their marriage but more about the day-to-day survival of their meager family, which, a year after the birth of Sheila, grew to include a sturdy little guy they dubbed Butch. Gwen had long since dropped out of school and begun her informal education in the domestic arts. Willie worked long hours driving trucks for Samson Meat Company. Dinner was usually a tag team of Gwen on Butch and Willie with Sheila, both parents trying to get as much food down the youngsters’ gullets as possible. There were no more lazy evenings of reading secondhand newsprint or doing needlepoint. Nighttime was a circus of activity, with the young ones constantly in need of attention from Gwen while Willie worked on a long-overdue addition to the house.

  The way life now laid out before Gwen and Willie might have been infinitely sustainable had Gwen’s mother and father not both passed away, Charles by way of heart attack and Sila a few months later by way of a car accident on the new interstate with Gwen in the seat next to her. Sila shouldn’t have been driving. That’s what she told people every time she showed up someplace in the Hisels’ Ford, but she had no choice now that Charles was gone. The accident, which killed both Sila and the driver of the car she crashed into, also knocked out Gwen’s two front teeth. Then, with too much debt to be paid off, the Hisels’ farm was sold, and Gwen’s sisters were moved south to stay with Sila’s sister on Padre Island, and Gwen was left suddenly alone without anyone with which to spend some portion of her days. Willie’s mother, Faye, had always been friendly enough, but Gwen’s relationship with her wasn’t the same as Gwen’s relationship with Sila, to whom she could dispose of her thoughts and who would dispense wisdom back to her in return. Sila’s death had been graphic, her body pulled from their Ford splintered and crushed, and this was the image that replayed in Gwen’s head each time she saw a vehicle now.

  Gwen chose to stay as far away from the highway as possible, not that she interacted with anyone other than her children anyway, due to her embarrassment over her missing front teeth, which the young Barnetts couldn’t afford to fix. When Gwen did encounter someone, she would cover her mouth as she talked to them, as though saving them from her bad breath, and when Butch and Sheila wanted to play outside, she would watch them from the front window, calling them back inside the moment she heard a car engine approaching, whether real or imagined.

  Gwen fixed dinner, mended clothes, wiped noses, and cleaned house, but there was rigidity in her movements, a lack of ease in her laughter. Willie had always noticed from his dealings with people that what was actually said was hardly ever remembered. What was remembered was the tone of their voice, their body language, the feeling they imbued upon you of friendliness or curtness or nervousness or fear through their simply being. And though Gwen’s words seemed to be casual enough, the underlying feeling she gave off was that of someone who stood on a long-overdue fault line.

  That earth finally gave way one day when Gwen was out in the garden pulling weeds and Sheila and Butch were off to the side chasing the chickens. Gwen had been humming to herself a new hymn she’d heard on the radio and couldn’t seem to ge
t out of her head when suddenly, Faye approached in her mint green Plymouth. It had appeared with its quiet engine, barely alerting Gwen until it was close, too close, and Gwen could think of nothing to do other than scream. Tears rushed to her eyes, and she covered her face with her hands as terror trumpeted out of her. Her children rushed to her, begging for an explanation, tears now falling from their eyes, too. Faye immediately swept over Gwen as well, clutching her, attempting to soothe the banshee she had unleashed.