Inetta settled in only to read or work a quilt, and even then she tasted pages and flickered over stitches with the energy of a hummingbird. Around him, she wore a mindful quiet that she left behind when she went out, like a housedress hung on a peg. When she returned from her trips to town, the world gusted in with her -- from church from the truck radio, from book club or the library, from people on the street, from the newspaper she brought. He would not say Inetta ever bubbled over, but she fizzed at the brim, especially after her classes at the quilt store. Early on he made some journeys with her, some of it a new husband feeling his way, most thinking it was a more judicious use of fuel to combine their errands. While she attended class, he could pick a load from the feed and seed, stop by Western Implement for necessities, prowl Surplus City’s surprises and absorb a long coffee at the Mesa Drug soda fountain. From there his mission dwindled to time killing, and when he found himself picking through a pawnshop jumble of rusty tools, still waiting for the class to break up, he figured saving gas was costing him one way or another. To his eye, Inetta’s craft seemed advanced already, her sewing too meticulous to require a teacher’s correction. She rarely made another version of the class project, and if her quilting improved after the Saturday instruction, the change was too subtle for him to detect. “I don’t go there to copy somebody,” she told him. “Class is mostly a way to find something in myself I didn’t know was there. Learning doesn’t fill me op so much as opens me me up. Shakes me loose and throws me off my habits -- might even rearrange me. It’s like if you only rode Brandy and not Geronimo or Elvis. Once in a while I want to get on a horse that scares me sideways.” He considered offering to give her a ride himself but let the joke go. Whenever he voiced a stupid think that popped into his head, she took it as commentary, as if he had been working on it for a month. She informed him man jokes were poison darts tipped with the jester’s own hurt. He didn’t think so, but there it was in a book she left out for him with his truck keys marking the page. The woman’s ways were more indirect -- a hint here, a nudge there, a question that appeared offhand but somehow nailed his shoes to the floor and sewed his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Inetta often laid things right under his nose. Like the barn cat that dropped mice in their bed, she wasn’t necessarily trying to feed him, only expressing her nature. What he did with the information was up to him, and sometimes it took a while. When she told him on that first night she was a Christian, for example, he it assumed it was her was of saying he better to try anything. Eventually, he understood she meant that her faith was essential to her and he better know it, the way he needed to know what time his train left the station. Charlie Quimby, MONUMENT ROAD, A novel (Torrey House Press © 2013) pp. 48-9
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:18:47 +0000
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