Hug Dancing Read online

  Also by Shelby Hearon

  Armadillo in the Grass

  The Second Dune

  Hannah’s House

  Now and Another Time

  A Prince of a Fellow

  Painted Dresses

  Afternoon of a Faun

  Group Therapy

  A Small Town

  Five Hundred Scorpions

  Owning Jolene

  This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright © 1991 by Shelby Hearon

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hearon, Shelby [date]

  Hug dancing / by Shelby Hearon. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80039-8

  I. Title.

  PS3558.E256H8 1991

  813’.54—dc20 91-52735

  v3.1

  For my amazing, sweet children

  Anne Rambo and

  Reed Hearon

  I am grateful for the support of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  A Note About the Author

  THEY LIVED HAPPILY ever after. Could it really be true? After three years (or ten years, or more than half our lives, depending on how you counted) of waiting?

  When I saw Drew running across the Heart of Texas Fairgrounds, when he wrapped his arms around me right there in the middle of the field, when he waltzed me around and around, shouting into the air, I knew he had done it.

  “I told her,” he crowed. “I told her I was leaving.”

  When he whirled me around again, lifting my feet off the ground, I kissed him, full on the mouth, right there in plain sight of anyone. Oh, Lord.

  We’d talked about it—his leaving, my leaving, us, Drew and Cile—about almost nothing else, since that first time we made love with hail big as walnuts beating down on the roof of his old farmhouse. Or, really, since that first time we’d got back out on the dance floor again, amazed that nothing at all had changed since high school.

  It was Wind Day, and everyone in our part of town, our part of the world, was flying kites. My two girls, middle-school Amazons, were far across the grassy expanse, letting theirs rise into the blue of the March sky. They’d brought homemade, ecologically sound newspaper box kites, tied with twine, anchored with rag tails made from scraps of old shirts and pajamas. Beyond theirs overhead were hundreds of brighter, newer kites: taloned see-through dragons; segmented fish; wide-winged butterflys in paint-box colors; sleek Mylar sharks; Czech, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, German, Korean banner kites of spinnaker nylon; tissue paper and balsa wood throwaways. All diving and dipping like sea gulls into the surf, like ships’ sails snapped by sudden gusts. Like dancers leaping against gravity.

  The faces of the children, gazing upward, were as multihued as the kites themselves. Here in central Texas near the confluence of two rivers on a faultline, it was easy to believe the school district’s statistics: that by the turn of the new century a scant fifth of all our students, K through twelve, would be white.

  I’d been looking for Drew, knowing that on Wind Day he’d be there with his sweet boys, the three of them flying model planes on another part of the Fairgrounds. I’d heard the loud aggregate hum of small motors like Judgment Day locusts, and strained for the sight of him, longing to see him.

  Wind Day was a happy time for us; we loved the kite fliers all trying to get their hopes airborne. We joked that the Saturday got its name from the fact that it was the one day of the year in this town I called Weather, Texas, when the wind was calm enough not to rip kites to shreds and splinters, or blow topsoil under your eyelids, or spiral your car right off the ground and land it in one of our dammed-up lakes.

  We’d come every year since we’d found each other again, every year when the sky was this fine cerulean blue, and the gentle nudging wind pushed at our shoulders and legs, shoved us into one another, tumped toddlers on their behinds, sent dogs scurrying off, coats ruffed as if chasing rabbits, blew hair into wide-open mouths and ice-cream scoops off cones, tugged strings from slippery little fists, sent plastic killer bees and yellow happy faces into high wires and treetops, dumped biodegradable tatters into vacant lots.

  We waved to my daughters, who were looking our way. They waved back, pointing to their recycled kites bobbing like corks high in the sky. They’d be fine, about the news. His mild-mannered sons would be, too.

  “Where are the boys?” I asked him, looking toward the whirring sound that reached us from the athletic field.

  “They said I was old enough to fly my own model planes now.” Drew looked momentarily glum. “They don’t mingle with the masses anymore. They’ve got a tennis match. Besides, their momma thinks they’ll get Pasadena tick disease standing in the grass.”

  “Oh, don’t do that.” I hated it when he got down on his two. We went a long way back together, his boys and I. Back to when they were almost lap babies; back to “Ring Around the Rosy Rag.” They were different from their tall, long-legged daddy in his stovepipe jeans and boots, his heavy longhorn belt buckle reaching my rib cage. They were a smaller, more gentlemanly breed.

  “Yeah,” he said, giving me a casual public arm around the shoulder. “You get on with them, Cile.”

  “Should I tell Eben tonight?” I was, in truth, hesitant to tell my husband I was leaving him, not so much because, a pastor, he had the authority of the church behind him and the approbation of his flock, rather because I knew from long experience that he’d put his prying fingers on my news. He liked to appropriate my surprises; to confiscate my secrets. I’d have preferred to say nothing to him until after Drew and I had moved to the farm together. But that was wistful thinking: another name for cowardice.

  “Sure, tell him you’re gone.” Drew looked up at the sky and shouted out, “She’s gone,” and then, “She’s mine,” amazed at the utter wonder of saying it right out loud, his voice blown away on the wind with hundreds of others, parents calling their young, kids calling to friends.

  “Maybe I should wait until after Easter? You know Easter in the church.”

  “You’ve got to tell him, honey. I did it. I told her. The rest of them can wait. His whole congregation doesn’t need to know yet; most of all my mother, the preacher’s biggest fan,
sure doesn’t need to know yet.” He looked anxious just talking about her. “It’s going to take a while, anyway, to get my things cleaned out of that half acre of carpet, to move everything up there.”

  We’d planned this for so long—our living together in his tin-roofed old farmhouse, north of Waco and east of West, on the rolling blackland acres that had been in his family as long as there’d been a state of Texas. On the plot of ground where his bones felt at home.

  That was as far as we ever got making plans. Then he’d start talking about how his great-granddaddy had almost lost the farm to flooding, his granddaddy to drought, his daddy to the tornado of ’53, which wiped out the downtown here and cleared a path up through the countryside. How he, Drew, was damn sure not going to be the one to lose it, no matter what kind of bribe the federals came up with next as an excuse to grab the grasslands for themselves.

  “I can’t believe it yet,” I said, joy sinking in. “That we’re really doing it.” I looked at the lightness of shapes scudding the sky.

  “Believe it,” Drew said, grinning, scratching his cropped red hair as if he was just getting used to it himself. He looked the way he had at seventeen, back when we used to dance our legs off to country music on sawdust floors. “Believe it.”

  “And the kids?” I asked him, looking off toward my big girls. “They’ll be okay, won’t they?”

  “They’ll be great, honey. Every last one of them will be great. Nobody will even notice we’re gone.”

  THE GIRLS HAVING decided to come later with friends, I drove home alone in the old clunker of a Pontiac for which Drew foresaw a great future. It was a vintage model, he said, the ’74 Firebird, a real muscle car; fixed up they were fetching fifteen gee. Not fixed up, in the meantime, it had that sound old cars make in high gear on city streets, as if their underbellies were loosely wired on, liable to drop out on any dip in the road, not so much without shocks as without even the memory of springs.

  It wasn’t far through the Lake Shore section of town from the Heart of Texas Fairgrounds to the parsonage: down Loch View to Lago Vista, then up Laguna Vista to Lake View, our street. Our neighborhood of family homes, primary schools, playgrounds and churches sat, as did Waco proper, between two rivers—to the east, the wide Brazos, which alternately watered and flooded the countryside, and to the west, the forking Bosque with its white chalky cliffs—on a faultline that ran from San Antonio to Dallas and attracted weather the way a magnet attracts iron filings.

  The faultline dividing the city divided also the loamy farmlands to the east and the grassy prairies to the west, and, more recently, served as a line of demarcation between the past and its cotton and the future with its particle physics. (It was a sign of the times that the nearby community of China Spring, originally named for its stand of chinaberry trees, was now home to Chinese researchers who were building a science corridor connecting the supercomputers to the south of us with the supercollider to the north.)

  On a more daily level, the faultline divided the rice belt from the potato belt. Waco was essentially a rice-eating town, what with the old Deep South boiled white rice, the Mexican rice-bean dishes, the Pacific Rim influx of brown rice, plus a touch of Cajun dirty rice. I had, for some reason, sided with the potato people, mostly Germans and Czechs, a minority in the church, and through the decade I’d been here in service to Grace Presbyterian, I’d developed a small repertoire of dishes: potato soup for the family on weekends, potato dumplings with company turkey, potato fritters and casserole potatoes for congregational meals. There was even Cile Tait’s Potato Bake in the new church cookbook.

  Pulling the dragging Pontiac into the driveway, I reckoned how much I would miss the house, if not the marriage, despite the fact that it had always been, being a parsonage, only on loan to us. It was an authentic 1920s ranch house, in a city of a hundred thousand ranchstyles, and had (small tidy world of the faithful) once belonged to Drew’s mother’s parents. Across the front ran a large, spacious gallery room, divided into dining and sitting space. We had half a dozen cane-bottomed chairs and a cane-backed sofa whose cushion held the original horsehair. These could be arranged in a circle for company, or the chairs pulled up to the old trestle table for meals. Or, when needed, pushed out of the way to make a fine polished meeting room. The girls’ bedroom and bath opened off a long hallway as did a small former nursery with desk and phone which each of us used when in need of a bit of privacy. At the end of the hall was the room Eben and I shared, and our small bath fashioned from what had once been a second linen closet.

  The only restriction on the house was that nothing could be hung on the walls; the plaster was not puncture-friendly. When we moved in, the one exception had been two heavy gilt-framed mirrors that had hung by guy wires set in the molding at the ceiling. I hadn’t been able to live with that—seeing myself going in all directions, serving plates and tea glasses, making guileless smiles, seeing Eben’s too attentive, too hopeful stance. I’d packed the mirrors away in the back of the remaining walk-in linen closet in the hall, and hung cow pictures instead. One, by a local artist, was a stand of black and white Holstein with soulful eyes and doglike ears, gazing out in front of a milking shed. The other was a nineteenth-century primitive (a gift from Drew’s mother) of a flat orangy Guernsey, broad-backed and small-headed, who possessed both a jutting horn and sagging udders.

  It wasn’t only the parsonage I was thinking about missing, of course; it was my big, beautiful daughters. I tried to tell myself, I had to believe, that they were so grown-up now, so responsible, so independent, that they would have no trouble with their father and me living in different locations. That they’d quickly expand into the extended space, flourish, even, at the change.

  I’d take it a step at a time. Let them get used to the idea of my leaving until school was out; then, when I really packed to go, they’d be free to help me, to come with me, to get me settled. To make a place for themselves that they felt was home at the old farmhouse. Choose a bed; argue about the bath. Get to know the land, the grassy blackland acres. We’d have long hot lazy months to make our gradual transition. They could come into town on the weekends to help Eben at the church, he’d expect that; come back to the farm on Mondays. Have the best of both worlds.

  Then, by September, we’d have a surer footing, a comfortable routine to continue in reverse, for trying out our school-day separations. I’d be in and out of town; we could have a Dr. Pepper in the afternoons, catch up. I could run errands with them; teach them to drive my old beat-up Pontiac.

  (Although what I was going to do about sharing them with Grace Presbyterian when I moved, I couldn’t think about now. They could not be asked to absent themselves from the heart of Eben’s life; my moving would be disruption enough.)

  Right now, I ached at the prospect of not seeing their faces on a daily basis come fall, at the idea of not being able to reach up and brush a young cheek with my hand in passing, a mother sort of touch. But it would all work out fine, I told myself. They’d be fine. I had to believe that: they’d be fine, and I’d be fine, too.

  Tying an apron on over my shorts, I put pared potatoes, sliced leeks, chicken fat and skim milk on the stove to simmer. Turning the burner on low, I took off my Reeboks and checked the clock. Plenty of time to move a bit. I put Willie Nelson on the record player that dated back to university days—time stood still in parsonages—letting him sing his gospel numbers: “Shall We Gather at the River,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” “Whispering Hope.”

  Thinking of the potato, going through the reflex and comforting work of changing its raw starch into our meal, I considered that the church might retain my recipe but it would soon no longer have the taste of my potato bake. Because like most cooks, I’d left out the one ingredient which gave it that special flavor. I’d listed the potatoes, the leeks, the heavy cream, the black pepper, the hot oven, but had made no mention of the tablespoon of anchovy paste. Just as, in giving out freely m
y recipe for the German potato fritters—grated raw Idahos and raw onions, raw apple, egg, baking powder, nutmeg—I’d never mentioned that I cooked each batch of six in a stick of creamery butter. Old cookbooks were rife with similar omissions. The ancient granny did not reveal that her dark rich giblet gravy contained half a cup of strong black coffee; the bride, that her chocolate pie which tasted like Hershey’s kisses had two teaspoons of real vanilla.

  This exclusion was an instance of the oldest fight between Eben and me. He found my secrecy grudging and withholding; I found his scrutiny invasive, intrusive. He accused: You hold back. I accused: You usurp. I suppose it stood to reason that the basic discord of a marriage should spill over even into such a minor matter as a recipe in a church cookbook.

  As I added a tablespoon of Parmesan cheese to the bubbling soup, I wondered how he would handle the more serious secret of another man.

  WASHING MY HAIR in the shower stall of the small bath, I was getting myself ready to tell Eben. Preparing myself for what we’d really be talking about when we talked about my leaving.

  The custody fight between us was not going to be over the girls, who’d want to stay here close to the schools on weekdays, or over the house, since it belonged to the church, or money, because even in a community property state, neither of us had much for the other to claim. No, the painful tug-of-war was going to be over Lila Beth Williams, a woman who had been the mainstay of Grace Presbyterian, an elder, my husband’s good right hand, and who had also been for ten years like a real mother to me. Like a fairy godmother who’d waved her wand and brought all manner of kindnesses upon me and my daughters.

  She’d come into our lives back in Baby Days, back when I slept light as a cat, able to hear the tiniest gurgle or fret a room away, back when the short people, as I called my children, played patty-cake and Where’s the baby? and wore those sturdy cotton snap-on clothes. Back when every place we lived, even the lovely new parsonage with its polished floors, dripped with dresses, panties, little socks, nighties, drying on doorknobs, hanging from door-jambs, so that you had to duck to go in and out of every room.