Fairhill

The Frosts lived eleven miles southeast, on the only ground in the county that had ever grown anything easy, and their place was called Fairhill, which told you everything about the family: they had named their luck. There were three of them then — old Alden Frost, dead by the time Pearl got deep in this story; his son Alden; and the daughter, Junie — and they had money the way Windrow had wind: steadily, from directions nobody argued with.

The Murrow children knew Fairhill the way you know a magazine. Then, in the winter Cass was fifteen, the two of them went down off the ridge on a dare of Cass's own making, to put their faces against the windows of the Frost place and see how the other half kept warm.

They got caught by the dogs. Not the family — the dogs, a pair of vast white sheepdogs that came out of the dark of the yard like weather, and Dane, who got Cass over the fence first, took the worse of it, a gash down his forearm to the bone. The Frosts brought them in. Cass, bleeding from the scalp where she'd gone through a rose trellis, stayed five weeks at Fairhill while it healed and while Mrs. Frost — the widowed grandmother, absolute in her own house; the aunts contributed opinions by mail — remade her. They washed the barn out of her. They put her in dresses. They taught her to lower her voice and choose the fork, and she came home at Christmas walking like a visiting cousin and talking about the piano.

Vic was delighted, and you could see the arithmetic behind his eyes: a polished sister was a saleable sister. Dane waited three days for her to come up the ridge the way she always had, and on the third evening he followed her into the kitchen instead and watched her read the piano sheet music Vic had ordered her, and made a joke about the dogs, and she looked up at him — this is the hinge, Pearl said, I saw it with my own eyes and I have spent fifty years wishing I hadn't — and she laughed, pleasantly, at a distance, the way you laugh at a hired man.

The barbs went in deep on both sides and kept going. Dane, wounded in front of the room, went straight to the one wound he knew how to open: "You never looked like that at me. Not once in ten years." And Cass, stung, said the unforgivable true thing back, which was that his three years in the bunkhouse had made him a sullen stranger, that the Frosts would have made something of him, that he might do well to wash his face and learn some manners.

Pearl stopped the account there a moment, because after that evening came the war years, and she had buried the details one by one as the people involved died, out of a mercy she was no longer sure had been wise. The shape was this: two years of laceration. Vic degrading Dane at every turn in front of Cass, because humiliating the boy humiliated her. Dane swallowing it and sharpening. Cass riding the fence line between two countries, the polished daughter at Fairhill suppers and the wild partner on the ridge, until the strain of carrying both began to show. And underneath it all, the two of them as close as ever when no one watched — closer, Pearl thought, because nobody watched, and because each was the only one the other could be entirely himself with, and neither of them knew how to say a single honest word about it.

The bust came the summer Cass was seventeen, at a fair in Redbank with a band and beer and the whole county, where Alden Frost, home from his two years of college in Seattle, stood in the dust in good boots and looked at Cass Murrow in her good dress like a man reading the deed to something.