Bellwood Again

In October the Reyes party came back.

They came back to Bellwood in two cars with a dog and a cook, and Julian Reyes called at the orchard on his second morning with a box of pears from the market and a face like a man who has been rehearsing something in the car. Faye, who had not been downstairs for a week, came down. Sylvie, who had been told nothing and had suspected everything, was in the barn.

He and Sylvie walked for two hours along the ridge road. They came back with her hand on his arm and her face doing the thing it had done in May, and Faye said to Gil, soundlessly, across the kitchen, the single word yes, and Gil looked at his paper and did not answer, and Hollis went out to the creek and stood on the footbridge and pressed her hands flat on the rail until the wood hurt.

Roman Ashcroft came with him. He was at Bellwood for a fortnight. He called at the orchard four times, always with Julian, always correct, always with a reason: apples, the distributor in Albany, a question about the press. The third time he brought a printed sheet.

It was a yield sheet for the Spy block, four years of it, printed off a machine in Albany and folded twice. Gil turned on the barn light, put his reading glasses on, and read it for four minutes without a word. Roman Ashcroft stood with his hands in his coat and waited, and went on waiting after the silence had gone past the point where waiting is comfortable, and did not look at Hollis once. She watched him stand there being waited through by her father, and it was the first time in her life she had seen him at a disadvantage, and she did not enjoy it as much as she had expected to. He was a different man in Ashford than he had been at Litchfield, and the difference was not that he was pleasant, which he had never been at Litchfield, but that he was trying, and that he had no skill at it, and that she could watch him fail at it in real time. He asked Faye about the heat pump. He asked Petra about the keyboard. He stood in the barn with his hands in his coat and watched Gil rack a tank and said, "You have twenty acres of Spy that should have come out ten years ago," and Gil said, "I know," and Roman said, "I have a man," and Gil said, "I have no money," and Roman said, "He works for nothing until it pays," and Gil said, "Why," and Roman said, "Because I have asked him to."

On the fourth visit, on the last day of the fortnight, they were left alone for eleven minutes in the cider barn, Camille Reyes having gone to the house with a message.

Hollis said, "My mother says you have sent a man to look at the Spy block."

"He is coming on Monday."

"My father says he works for nothing."

"Until it pays."

"That is not a thing a man does for an acquaintance."

"No," said Roman Ashcroft.

He stood in the barn door with the October light behind him and the rows going down past him to the creek, and he looked at her for a long moment, and then he said, "I was told yesterday that my aunt has heard a report that I am to marry you."

Hollis put both hands flat against the barn door behind her and left two wet cider prints on the paint.

"What did you tell her," she said.

"What did I tell her? No one asked me. I am telling you, because — " He stopped. "Because if it is said about you, I would rather you heard it from me than from a woman who has been wrong about everything for thirty years."

"You do not deny it."

"I do not deny it."

There was a silence in the barn with the press in it, and she could hear the tank ticking as it cooled, and he said, "I am not asking you anything. I have asked you once and I will not ask you again unless you tell me I may." Then he said, "I have to go. Julian is waiting," and he went, and she stood in the barn with her hands covered in cider, and she dried them twice on her apron without knowing she had done it and then carried the same crate of apples from the north wall to the south wall and back, and did not go to the house for an hour.

That night Camille Reyes was almost civil to her at dinner, and Sylvie was engaged, and Faye wept for joy, and Hollis went to bed at ten and lay awake until two thinking: he has been told that I will have him, and he has come here to see whether I will, and I have said nothing, and he is going away tomorrow, and I have said nothing.