Sylvanus Now by Donna Morrissey Page A

a gesture of childhood defiance that had become as fixed a feature on her face as her nose. “No wonder you were always banished—sneaking and spying. Well, why’d you come asking me for a walk if you thinks I’m too proud for you?”
    “I never thought you too proud for me. Like I said, I mightn’t have money, but I’m rich. And proud likes rich. That’s what all women aims for, isn’t it, to be a rich man’s wife?”
    “Aiming for?” She gave an absurd laugh. “The only thing I aims for is to soak my hands at the day’s end.” And done with his insolence, she rose, brushing off her skirt.
    “Hey, wait.” He scrambled to his feet as she flounced off toward his boat. “Look, I was just joking—I thought we was joking. Cripes, have you never said a foolish thing?”
    “I don’t walk around thinking I knows what everybody else is thinking, that’s for sure—or calling myself rich.”
    “Now, that part I wasn’t joking about.” He leaped ahead, planting himself before her like the spine of a black vir. “It’s not poor when you chooses the thing.”
    Her face hardened. “Where I comes from, a cankered spud is a cankered spud, no matter you chooses it or not. Chooses!” She balked. “As if one chooses one’s lot.” Brushing past him, she ran down on the landwash, standing beside the boat, waiting for him. He hadn’t followed and she glanced back irritably, catching again that wretched curious look of his, and his hands curling by his sides like a youngster fevering to touch a forbidden toy.
    “Rich,” she muttered. Yet no beggar was he as he shook out the knees of his finely pressed pants and started toward her with the slow, deliberate walk of a lord, despite his awkward gait and rubber boots. Leaning against the boat, she bit her lip in annoyance, begrudging him the truth of his words.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    TRADING A MEADOW
    S HE KNEW HE’D BE CALLING the following Sunday, and as decided as she was that she wouldn’t be accompanying him, she still found herself waiting for his knock. Cruel had been the fates, torching her soul with desire! And the following days as her hands moved mechanically through her chores, she revisited again and again that delectable cupboard of edibles she’d discovered within herself that kept sharpening her senses, igniting her being with the merest touch of cloth caressing a bared ankle, a strand of hair trailing her throat, the tautness of her belly pressed against the windowsill as she leaned against it, gazing outside. And at night, when all was finally quieted, darkness pressed upon her, taunting her with possible worlds and kneading her being with such longing she near cried out with the want of it.
    But no matter the mystic murmurings of dreams bewitching her nights, no matter the sudden splashes of colour illuminating her grey fields of toil, she knew them to be barren, to be the passing glory of the blue iris, which blooms with such fever it withers on its stalk at the day’s end. But, Lord, how much greyer her fields looked after she had glimpsed a bloom, no matter it hadn’t rooted in her. She had seen its glory, had tasted the sweetened nibs of clover on her dream-torn bed.
    Thus, when his knock sounded, her hands shook as she jammed the tablecloth she’d been folding into a drawer and dashed across the kitchen, chasing away the mob of younger ones cluttering her way. Her sisters, Ivy and Janie, stood giggling, peering out the window, and she whipped them a look of such evil they cowed, letting fall the curtain. Rooting through the pile of laundry waiting to be sorted, she pulled out her favourite sweater, shook out the wrinkles before donning it, and coaxing strands of hair behind her ears, she opened the door.
    As though knowing when they parted the Sunday before that she most likely wouldn’t be accompanying him again, at least, not without good reason, he spoke with an urgency the second she stepped outside.
    “There’s something you must see.