Light Changes Everything Read online

  “Cut that out,” I said.

  “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid eyes on, Mary Pearl.” He drew me up closer and did it again, smooching like my face was a piece of warm pie just out of the oven.

  “Now, Aubrey Hanna,” I said, “you know my mama doesn’t allow anything but talking before we’re engaged.” I meant my sisters and me, not him and me.

  “Then we are,” he said. “We are engaged. Say you’ll be mine. Marry me. It’ll make me the happiest man alive. And you can learn to go out in society, and live in a fine house. I’m opening a law practice in Tucson. I’ll be sure you wear the best of everything and know how to have the right manners and everything. We’ll have a fine address in Tucson. Plenty of children. You’ll be a governor’s wife before you’re old. Marry me.”

  “Oh, Aubrey, sincerely? You want to marry me?” My heart thundered in my ribs and my throat turned dry as dust. At that second I could see in my mind’s eye my mother and sisters, joyfully holding out armloads of gifts for me, the youngest daughter, well-married to this handsome and wealthy lawyer soon to be governor. I’d be appreciated for my fineness of dress and manners, not just my ability to brand a calf and string a lariat. This was so startling I felt as if I needed a walk, too. I wished I’d brought my horse. First thing when we got home, I was going for a long ride. “I don’t know why you’d want to marry me. You don’t even know me.”

  “I know enough. You come from a fine family, industrious people with plenty of land. Your beauty makes men faint. You are gentle and polite. The perfect age. There’s no woman on earth I could want more.”

  “I’m going to art school. College. In the east.”

  “Kiss me.”

  I’m not going to claim I was certain I liked kissing him, but I sure never had known that strange stirring it caused. I almost felt relieved when he let me go and sort of settled back in place, saying, “Here come the courting ones.” He laughed and I felt at that moment the sound of his laughter was music to me. I never expected this to be the outcome of a simple buggy ride. I felt as short of breath as if I were having the ague again.

  I couldn’t look at my aunt and Mr. Hanna, but luckily for me, they only had eyes for each other. First thing Aubrey did was pipe right up and say, “We’re thinking about getting married, too, folks. Miss Mary Pearl says she’ll have me.”

  “Well,” I said, “I said Ma would want us to be engaged before—”

  Mr. Hanna smiled over his shoulder at his son and me, and said, “Maybe we were the ones needing to be the chaperones, eh, Sarah?”

  It was a happy drive home. Aunt Sarah and Mr. Hanna planned to marry. Aubrey and I planned to marry. I made them all promise to let me tell my folks, and not to make a fuss about it until I had done so. The three of them reluctantly agreed, and for the first time in my life I felt as if Aunt Sarah and I were girls, instead of her being the older.

  A few days later, I rode Duende to get the mail from Marsh Station. Ezra was perched on behind, and we were both bareback. With the two of us on there, it was hard to balance the crate addressed to Ma from the Park Seed Company. Ma was tickled to pieces and soon as we broke the crate open, she made Ezra, Zachary, and me start to dig up the ground around the front porch. It looked like a box of onions to me. Ma oversaw our digging, and made us fetch the oldest manure from the piles and work it into the soil. While we worked, we sang. And then there was a pause between songs while Ma thought of another one, and I said merrily, “Ma? Aubrey Hanna asked me to marry him.”

  She stared at me as if I’d told her I had danced on the roof, then her face broke into a great grin. “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I told him I am going to school, and I’m too young to marry anyway.”

  “Well, well, no, you’re not. Plenty of girls marry at seventeen.”

  “I’ll be nineteen when I get home from school. I always figured to marry at nineteen.”

  She handed me a bunch of bulbs and said, “Put one of these in each hole. Five inches deep. When did he ask you?”

  “A few days back. I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “You’re not going to turn him down, are you?”

  “What do these flowers look like? I reckon I can learn to draw all kinds of flowers at art school.”

  “But you’re engaged. Betrothed. You can’t leave home now. That’s my final word.”

  “But, Ma, I’m no different than I was ten minutes ago before I told you. You told me I could go to school. Aren’t we going to talk it over with Pa?” I asked. “I’ve been planning on going away to school. I told Aubrey about it. That it was settled.”

  But right then, Aunt Sarah drove up in her buggy with Granny seated beside her. First thing Ma said was, “Mary Pearl is going to marry Aubrey Hanna. She’s not going to Illinois. Isn’t that good news?”

  My aunt looked surprised and gave me a look I couldn’t figure. “No art school? I thought you’d had your heart set on it.”

  Ma said, “I’m planting daffodils. I ordered five dozen.”

  “You know the javelina will eat ’em,” Aunt Sarah said.

  Ma’s face reddened. “Spring should be in May, not February. Flowers bloom in spring. Here it is March and every night for the last six months I’ve been so hot I never got to sleep.”

  “Savannah,” Sarah said gently, “Mary Pearl wants to go to college. I see it in her face.”

  Ma nearly shouted, “She ain’t going to college. She’s getting married. You children bury those bulbs right where I told you.”

  “Mama,” Zachary whined.

  Well, Aunt Sarah said something more and Mama scolded back, and before you know it, Mama blamed Aunt Sarah for turning me into a brazen hussy. Me, standing there in a long-sleeved drab dress that once was Rachel’s, my brother’s cast-off work boots, and a ragged old sunbonnet, hardly the picture of a fallen woman, unless a person meant she’d fallen down a mine shaft. I’d rarely heard a cross word from Ma in all my days except to scold us children for some nonsense, and it wasn’t like her to fume so hard, but she laid into my aunt without mercy, until we all just stared at her like she’d lost her mind.

  Granny banged on the side of the buggy with her walking stick and said, “You girls quit fussin’ and Mary Pearl come get in this wagon. I’ve come to get Mary Pearl to take down my words. I’ve a mind to put down my memories. Mem-wars, you say them.”

  “Don’t you move until you’ve finished planting my bulbs,” Ma said.

  Granny just smiled at her and said, “Could be you’re going through the change, honey,” and nodded as if she’d just proclaimed the answer to Ma’s problems. “Take some prickly pear tonic.”

  Ma put her apron to her face and cried out as if she were stung, and ran up the porch steps to the door. There she turned to me and said, “Mary Pearl Prine, you are not going to leave home and you are not to set foot in Sarah’s house ever again.”

  By then I was crying, too, and Aunt Sarah’s face looked as if she was holding back a storm. Only Granny smiled and said, “That’s the change, for sure. You, Mary Pearl, you come along tomorrow.” Mama slammed the door. Granny continued, “I am the matriarch of this family and I got an inclination to set down my memories and I’m gonna tell ’em to you and you can write every word before I die. Starting tomorrow.”

  When they drove away, I ran to the barn where Pa and Clover were stacking burlap bags of pecan shells. Brown dust hung in the air like a fog, and I had to call out to find them. I felt I had to tell my side of the conversation before Ma could sway him into making me get married. I told them everything that had just happened. I told them about Ma having a conniption, too. Finally, I asked, “What should I do, Pa? I sure did want to go to school. Wouldn’t a man wait a few months for me to try it?”

  Pa leaned his head like he does when he’s thinking. “If he loves you he’d wait fourteen years for you. I’ll go talk to your ma. Likely she’s been working too hard. It’s a tedious hot spring, this one.”

  I was left there with my brother Clover, who’d never paid me more than a passing glance as far as I could remember. He said, “It ain’t likely that another fellow is coming down the road anytime soon.”

  “So you think I should marry right away and stay home?”

  “No, you’re just a child. I’m wondering why he’d ask you, only having made your acquaintance a few hours before.”

  “Is that too soon? Ma has told me again and again that all she and Pa had to do was lay eyes on each other and they were sworn for eternity from that moment.”

  “Well, what do you think of the man?”

  I know my face turned dark and I was glad for the shadowy barn. Still, I turned away from him and stared out the open door. Memories of Aubrey’s arms around me, and his lips on mine, and the churning of my insides flooded over me like a fever, and my knees trembled. “I … I reckon I love him. I’m not sure. He made me feel real strange.”

  “I’m thinking of inventing a shelling machine that doesn’t crack the meats so much. What do you think?”

  “That’d be nice, I suppose.”

  “I’ll go to town and ask some folks about him. Sheriff ought to know something. You ain’t getting married tomorrow, anyhow. Rest easy and if you love him, you’ll figure it out. Plenty a girl has said yes and then had second thoughts, just like Violet McMurphy did to me.”

  “Well, all right then,” I said. “If you think it’s all right to wait. Did she break your heart?”

  “I reckon. But she went on, and so did I, and why would I want to be married for a lifetime to a girl who took a notion on a whim? She got engaged about eighteen times before she finally threw a noose around one of ’em.”

  “It’s different for men,” I said, thinking of the rich fellows in Pride and Prejudice who had fortunes I didn’t understand, and the girls in the story who had to marry or starve.

  “Nah. You’ve got a home and family and you ain’t going bad, long as we’re around. You don’t need a man for that,” he said, just as if he’d heard my thoughts. “Go on to school. You can get married some other time. Maybe to the nineteenth fella. This is only the first of hundreds of boys who’ll fall in love with you.” He tossed a pecan toward me and I caught it, smiling.

  That made perfect sense to me. In just a moment I’d gone from being betrothed with my whole life planned out according to Ma’s outline to a free person who could choose something else. I felt such a relief I could have hugged him, but Clover was wearing a heavy apron and even his face was as brown as wood from the pecan dust. When he grinned at me his teeth looked so white and sparkly it made me grin, too. “Thanks, mi hermano.”

  “De nada.”

  The next morning I prepared to take down Granny’s memoirs by wrapping white papers and pen and ink into a brown paper folder. Pa kept on saying how his ma was to be respected, even if she seemed addled most of the time, and that she was the boss in her own way, although we didn’t usually pay much mind to anything she said. Ma was fit to be tied, and said as much. She wrenched her handkerchief until it was shreds in her hands. I was just about to go saddle up Duende when we heard an awful racket in the yard. The dogs were going after something like it was the end of destruction, and I opened the door to see a herd of probably twenty full-grown javelina, along with eight baby ones of varied sizes, ripping through the daffodil bulbs and tossing dirt all around. Mama cried almost as hard as when Esther had died.

  “Everything in this sorry, forsaken place is wrong!” she cried out. “Nothing lives here normal. Nothing grows unless it’s covered in thorns. My children won’t do what I tell them and my husband won’t listen to me and my child is dead and my flowers are gone.”

  She ran to her bedroom on the ground floor and shut the door. I picked up a rifle from behind the kitchen door, and Ezra and Zack came with pistols. We shot several of those pigs and the rest started running. In just a second, here came Mama and she jerked the rifle out of my hands and aimed it into the scrambling herd. “Ma!” I shouted. “You’re going to kill old Jess. You don’t know how to shoot a gun. Look behind your target; you could have killed the dog.”

  She looked so beaten, so sad, I felt my own tears start. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Oh, Ma.”

  But before I could say more, she handed me the rifle and went back to her room. The boys and I had to get a lariat and a horse to drag those carcasses away from the house a mile or so, or we’d be set upon by coyotes in a few hours. Ma was rocking in the rocking chair, staring out the window at the ruined daffodil patch, when I went to tell her good-bye so I could go to Aunt Sarah’s. She didn’t say anything when I left, but Pa came from the barn and asked me where I was headed, as if he’d forgotten.

  It took me all summer to write what my Granny had to say. Pure tedium, interrupted by her tears over nothing at all I could see, and a whole lot of rabbit-chasing stories. To hear her tell it, she remembered things back before her great-great-great-grandma came to this country and worked as a servant. She’d weep over heartaches that were not her own, weep for the struggles of members of our family, and then she’d say how one liked his whisky too much.

  She remembered the Civil War, she said, and I believe the years are right for that, though she’d have been a child. It was all a great conspiracy against my mother’s demand for me never to set foot in Aunt Sarah’s house again, so I was all for it. Mama would glare, and I would smile, and Granny would be satisfied that she was getting her words listened to.

  Now, I know my ma had read Pride and Prejudice, and I believe it changed the way she looked at things. Mama had got the idea I ought to marry Aubrey Hanna from the minute he first looked at me with his big, warm calf eyes. “A young, wealthy lawyer will provide for you,” she’d say over and over, with the point of her finger etching the air in front of my face. I agreed, Aubrey was mighty handsome in a way, and the idea of me being hitched to a big-city lawyer made Mama prouder than she’d ever admit. But he was so old. Twenty-eight. More like Papa than my brothers, most of whom—even though I was small in stature—I could still whip, given a notion. It made me wonder if she thought he was one of those passionate-but-caring rich gentlemen in the Jane Austen books.

  When I was in his presence, Aubrey made me feel all swoony and silly at once. I was as smitten with him as Ma was, but in a different way. Nor could I explain, even to myself, why I had to leave him. I felt as if the art school in that far corner of the world, Wheaton, Illinois, was calling to me, a plain girl from the sorry end of Arizona Territory, to get across a divide of some sort, some gap between me and my ma and pa, and my passel of sisters and brothers. I tried to tell Ma it was a yearning older than the earth, but she was having none of that. She insisted that Aunt Sarah had put notions in my head of a wild and worldly nature.

  So, on a sweltering day in August, Papa gave me money, a bank account book, and a new saddle. My brother Clover and the lot of them set out before dawn for Tucson to catch the train to escort me to college.

  By the time we got lunch put away, thunderheads rolled up from the south threatening another wild rainstorm. I loved the summer storms for the cool air that came with the rain, and hoped we’d get cool breezes just in time to get to town. It was a quiet trip except for a few minutes of commotion when Ezra shot a rattlesnake and wanted to keep the skin for a hatband, but his horse wasn’t having it draped across the saddle, and that animal like to rolled Ezra and Zack into a pancake getting the snake off. The boys were the color of the road and covered with scratches, not to mention cussing mad by the time Zack jumped up and tossed the dead snake off into a bush. Ezra went and got the thing, and while we watched, he swung it around and around over his head and let it go flying high into the arms of a saguaro, where it landed and stuck in the thorns.

  “What did you do that for?” Clover asked.

  “To keep from stepping on it, that’s what,” he said. “We got to get home and it’ll be dark. If this rain comes, the wind could blow it right back in the road.”

  When we got to town, I asked Clover to leave me and my trunks at the depot with Brody to watch over the buckboard, and deliver a farewell letter to Aubrey. My little brothers, Ezra and Zack, disappeared up the street. Clove took Duende and he was back in just a few minutes.

  I said, “Did you give Aubrey my letter?”

  “Mister A. W. Hanna, Esquire, wasn’t in. You’ll have to mail it from Phoenix.” He shook his head toward our old buckboard as he passed my letter to me. “Where’s the little fellas?”

  Brody swung up to the driver’s seat, while I gave a shrill whistle to call my younger brothers, who came scampering from down the street. Clover loaded Duende into the horse car at the end of the train.

  We took seats and Clove let me have the window. We could see the twins fussing over who was to sit next to Brody, and I grinned when I saw it was Rachel. She was the one I figured was eager to set her cap for anything in long pants, and Rebeccah probably would remain an old maid with her poetry and roses.

  Everything about the train was new to me and yet old, as if I’d somehow been late to arrive, that something I’d never even dreamed of was already shredded and used up by other people, all the shine worn off and dull metal showing through. I waved to my family, trying not to seem as happy to leave home as I felt.

  As the train started to move, I spread the letter on my lap. If Clove could not hand-deliver it, I didn’t trust leaving it in the post office in town because I knew the two women who sorted mail were mighty fond of prying open things they could glue shut. Anything I posted in town would be served up on someone’s supper table by tomorrow. Mailed from anywhere else, I’d be sure it’d get stuffed in a different box and go straight to Aubrey.

  I got out a pen and ink and settled them into a handle on the side. I read the letter for the ninth time to see if anything needed changing. Then I frowned and said to Clover, “Are you going to read over my shoulder?”