Chapter 5: Tiny wife is sick
The first week of June came in like a brand pressed to the county's forehead. The thermometer on the porch nail read ninety-eight by ten in the morning, and the air over the hay fields shimmered the way water does when it isn't water. The flies grew bold. The dogs quit pretending and lay flat in the shade of the water trough, tongues out, surrendering by the hour.
Vivi had never known heat like this. Hanoi heat, her mother always said, was a wet blanket; this was a dry iron. It found the thin skin at her wrists and the back of her neck and sat there. And it left something behind when it went.
She discovered it on a Tuesday, scratching at her forearms while the washing machine groaned through its second cycle. Little red bumps, close-set as seed pearls, marching up from her wrist to her elbow on both arms. The same across her collarbones where the sundress gapped. She pressed one with a fingernail and watched it whiten, then flush red again.
She didn't tell Johnny. There was nothing to tell, she reasoned, running a cool cloth over her arms at the sink. She was from a tropical country. Heat was in her blood, her grandmother had said so. It was probably the new soap.
By Friday it had spread to her shoulders, and she had learned to scratch with a wooden spoon while she stirred the stew, one hand staying busy so the other couldn't testify against her.
"You're quiet," Johnny said at dinner that night, watching her over the top of his glass of iced tea. His voice was mild the way his voice always was when he'd already noticed something.
"It's hot," she said. "Nobody's loud in this heat."
Casey, three-quarters through his second helping, shook his head slowly. "I'm loud in all weathers, Mrs. Reyes. It's a point of pride." He pointed his fork at her. "You've been doing the spoon-scratch all week. Don't think I haven't seen it. My grandmother did the same thing with her psoriasis."
"Casey."
"Yes ma'am. Shutting up ma'am."
Johnny said nothing at the table. But after Casey's truck lights had bounced off down the drive, he caught Vivi's wrist as she passed with his plate, turned it over in his huge hand, and looked at the red rash climbing her forearm for a long ten seconds. His thumb, gentle as a man handling a bird's nest, brushed just above it.
"How long?" he asked.
"It's nothing. Heat rash maybe."
"Vivi."
"Since Tuesday." She pulled her arm back and tucked it behind her apron like a girl hiding a bad grade. "It's just heat. I'm from a hot country, Johnny. I'm built for this."
He looked at her, and there was something in his face she couldn't read, something that had more than doubt in it.
"You're built for Saigon humidity," he said. "This is prairie sun. There's a difference, and I'll show you the difference tomorrow when Doc Whitfield's neighbor, that's Dolores, tells you the same thing I'm about to. You're wearing sleeves in the sun from now on."
"I'm not wearing sleeves to hang laundry in ninety-eight degrees."
"Wife." He said it gently, warningly.
"Husband." She gave him her sweetest smile, the one that had gotten her extra dessert her whole childhood, and he sighed the sigh of a man who knew exactly what that smile was and had lost to it before.
They compromised, the way they always compromised, which meant she agreed to sunscreen and he agreed not to call the doctor yet. That was her word for it later. His would have been different.
The rash didn't care who had won.
Saturday dawned already hot, the sun coming up like something with intentions. Vivi hung the first load at seven, working fast in the yard between the house and the fence line, the wet sheets heavy in her arms and the light falling on her bare arms and the open collar of her sundress where the rash had gone from seed pearls to a coarse pink map. She had sunscreened at Johnny's insistence. She had forgotten the back of her neck.
The second load was Johnny's work shirts, heavy denim, and she pinned them one at a time, reaching up, the clothesline taller for her than for anyone else on the ranch. The sun sat on her shoulders like a physical weight. Somewhere in the third shirt her arms felt far away, the pins strange little coins between her fingers.
She thought, quite calmly: I should sit down.
The grass came up to meet her before the thought finished.
Casey found her eleven minutes later, per his own estimate, having driven in from the east fence for water. He had the presence of mind not to yell, which surprised everyone afterward including himself. He scooped her up one arm under her knees and one behind her shoulders, and she weighed nothing, and he ran with her across the yard to the porch calling her name in a voice pitched low and fast, "Mrs. Reyes, Mrs. Reyes, come on now," and set her down on the porch swing in the shade.
Her eyes fluttered. She came back to the world in pieces: the groan of the swing chains, the smell of cut hay, Casey's freckled face an inch from hers, whiter than she'd ever seen it.
"Hey. Hey. There you are." His voice cracked in the middle. "Don't do that. Don't ever do that again, Mrs. Reyes, I mean it."
"Casey." Her voice came out papery. "Why are you holding my hand?"
He looked down at both her hands engulfed in his, which he did not appear to have noticed taking. "No reason. It's a medical technique. I read about it."
"It's not in any book."
"It's a Boyd family technique. Very old. Very secret."
She started to laugh and then started to cry, which startled her more than the fainting had, and Casey sat on the porch boards at her feet like a guard dog and let her, saying nothing, which was the single wisest thing he had done all year.
Johnny came around the corner of the barn at a walk, then not a walk. He had seen Casey's truck from the far pasture and something in the geometry of the yard, laundry half-hung, one pin basket overturned in the dirt, had read to him before he could name it. He crossed the last thirty yards at a speed no man his size should manage and came up the porch steps two at a time, and the boards complained like they were being murdered.
"What happened."
"She fainted." Casey was up and out of the way in one motion. "Heat, I think. She was out maybe ten minutes before I got to her, but she was out in the sun maybe twenty before that. She's talking. She's scared, boss."
"She's right here," Vivi said, "and she'd like everyone to stop discussing her."
Johnny knelt. It was a sight, a man that size folding down onto one knee on the porch boards, and he took her face in both hands and looked into her eyes the way he checked a horse's eyes, steady, unhurried, reading everything.
"How do you feel."
"Dizzy. Embarrassed."
"Anything hurt?"
"My pride."
He almost smiled. Then he pushed her sleeve up, gently, and looked at the rash, and then he looked at her collar, and then he took off his hat and put it over her face to shade her and said, in the voice he used for decisions, "Doc Aguilar. Today. Not next week, not Monday. Today."
"Johnny, it's a heat rash."
"It's a sun allergy, Vivi, and I watched it happen. The day you stopped telling me things is the day we started having this problem, so we can discuss that on the drive or not, but we're going." He stood, and his hand came down and cupped the back of her head for a second, the hat still shading her. "I'm not being angry at you. I need you to hear that. I'm being scared, and scared men drive fast."
They drove. Doc Aguilar's office in town smelled of iodine and old carpet, and the doctor, a compact grey woman who had delivered half the county and patched up the other half, looked at Vivi's arms, her neck, the tops of her shoulders, and asked questions with the efficiency of a woman who kept her own time.
"Polymorphic light eruption," she said at last. "Sun allergy, plain terms. Your skin doesn't care where you were born, Mrs. Reyes. It's decided it doesn't like ultraviolet radiation, and it's staging a protest." She wrote on her pad. "Hydrocortisone for now. Long sleeves, hat, shade. And the serious stuff: you fainted?"
"Twelve seconds," Vivi said. "Casey timed it. Well, he estimated."
"He should have driven you in immediately, but since you're here. You fainted in heat, with sun exposure, mildly dehydrated, on your feet all morning." Doc looked up at Johnny, who filled the doorway of the little exam room like a doorframe himself. "This isn't a mystery, Mr. Reyes. Her body's telling everyone what it thinks of this climate. Some people's skin just votes no."
"Can it get worse?" Johnny asked.
"It can. It can also settle down, if she stops treating sunlight as an adversary and starts treating it as a hazard. There are people who live full lives in this country with what she's got. They're the ones wearing the long sleeves and the big hats in July, and everyone teases them, and they outlive everyone doing the teasing." She handed Vivi a small tube and a printed sheet. "Also, and I say this to every wife in this county who faints in a field: the heatstroke part is the one that kills people, not the rash. Water. Shade. Mornings and evenings for outdoor work. High noon belongs to the livestock, and even they hate it."
In the truck Vivi held the tube in her lap and looked out the window at the shimmering fields and did not say anything for four miles. Johnny drove with one wrist draped over the wheel and let her.
"Say it," she finally said.
"Say what?"
"You're thinking something very large and very quiet. I can hear it from here."
The corner of his mouth moved. He pulled the truck onto the shoulder, gravel popping under the tires, and turned to face her.
"I was thinking," he said, "that I married a woman from the coast of a hot country and moved her to a place where the sun itself wants to fight her, and that I've been watching her scratch for a week and let her talk me out of the doctor because she smiled at me." He shook his head once, slow. "That smile should be registered as a weapon."
"It works on everyone."
"It works on me worst, which is why you aimed it at me." He took her small hand and folded it in his, and his thumb moved over her knuckles. "New rules, and I'm not negotiating this one. You're up with me at dawn. Yard work mornings. Afternoons you're in the house or under the porch fan, and I don't care if you tear the whole kitchen apart and rebuild it, you do it in the shade. Hat stays by the door like my boots do. And if you feel dizzy out there, you sit down in the grass and you stay there till someone finds you."
"Sitting in the grass is how this started."
"Sitting in the grass with shade over you is how this ends next time instead of worse." He lifted her hand and pressed it once against his beard, brief, like a signature on the agreement. "You scared ten years off me today, little one. Let me have the rules."
She looked at him for a long moment. "You watched me scratch all week."
"I did."
"You're never going to let me live this down."
"I'm never going to mention it again," he said, and pulled the truck back onto the road, "except every day for the rest of our lives."
Dolores was on the porch when they got home, having heard, as she heard everything within five miles, via the grapevine that ran between ranches faster than phone lines. She took one look at Vivi's arms, clicked her tongue, and went to her truck, and came back with a canvas item she dropped into Vivi's lap on the porch swing.
A wide-brimmed straw hat, sun-faded, the ribbon replaced twice by the look of it.
"Wore it forty years," Dolores said. "It's got more life in it than I do. Every woman in this family of a county who's fair-skinned or sun-cursed wears a hat like that, and every one of them got teased and every one of them outlived the teasers." She sat down heavily on the swing's other end and looked at Vivi over her glasses. "You passed out?"
"Twelve seconds."
"Sit in the grass next time. Toughest women I know have all done it. Mabel Jeeter fainted into a stock tank in '89 and came up with a catfish in her blouse, and she tells the story better than anyone alive, so you're already ahead." She patted Vivi's knee with a spotted, capable hand. "You'll learn the country's hours. We all do. The country doesn't run on the clock. It runs on dawn and dusk, and the middle of the day belongs to whoever's smart enough to be asleep."
Casey came by at sundown with a gallon of cold water and an expression of a man who had rehearsed a speech. He stood at the bottom of the porch steps and delivered it.
"I want to say, for the record, that I carried you and I did it right and I didn't panic." He paused. "I panicked a little. But the carrying part was textbook."
"It was," Vivi said. "Thank you, Casey."
"And I want to say that from now on, I'm checking on you at noon. Every day. Even days you don't need checking on. It's called a welfare check and it's very official."
"That's very sweet."
"It's mostly because if anything happens to you on this ranch, your husband is going to plant me in the hay field face down, and I'd like to keep living here." He shifted from foot to foot. "Also I brought the water because Doc said water."
Behind Vivi, from inside the house, came the sound of Johnny laughing, low and rare, and Casey's face went bright with the victory of it.
That night the house held the day's heat like an oven, fans turning uselessly, and Vivi lay on top of the sheets in the dark with her arms out flat because even the weight of cloth on her rash felt like too much. Johnny came in from his shower smelling of soap and the last of the cool evening, and lay beside her, propped on one elbow, and looked down at her arms in the dark without touching.
"Does it hurt?" he asked.
"It itches. It's uglier than it is painful."
"It's not ugly." He said it simply, the way he said true things, and touched the inside of her wrist with one finger, feather-light, above the rash, not on it. "I've been thinking about something."
"That's twice today. I'm worried."
His laugh was mostly breath. "Christmas is a long ways off. But I've been thinking about it since Doc said mornings and evenings." He was quiet a moment, and she could feel him deciding whether to say the rest, the way she'd learned to feel it, the stillness in a man that size when he was weighing words.
"Say it," she said again, her own words handed back to her.
"You asked me once what I wanted," he said. "First person who ever asked you. You said that's why you married me." His finger traced a slow inch of her wrist. "So here's what I want tonight. I want you to tell me one true thing you need right now that you've been not saying, same as the rash. One thing. I'll get it or I'll do it or I'll stop doing whatever needs stopping. But you have to say it."
Vivi looked up at him in the dark, at the shape of him blotting out the window, this mountain of a man waiting on a five-foot-one woman's word, and she felt the itch and the heat and the fright of the morning all gather up and turn into something warmer.
"I need you to stop treating me like I'm going to break," she said. "Doc gave me rules, not a cage. I'll wear the hat. I'll sit in the grass. But when you look at me like I'm made of glass, I feel small again, and small is the one thing you never made me feel."
For a long moment he didn't answer. Then he lay back beside her with a sigh that moved the whole bed, and pulled her onto his chest with one arm, careful of her rash, not careful of anything else.
"There she is," he said into her hair. "Alright. No glass. Hat stays, though."
"Hat stays," she agreed, against his skin. "But I'm picking my own sunscreen."
"That's fair. Doc's tasted like burnt rubber." His hand moved slow up and down her back, above the rash, an old rhythm from a hundred nights. Outside, the coyotes started up somewhere east, and the fans turned, and the heat finally, grudgingly, began to let the house go. "One more thing, then I'll sleep."
"Johnny."
"You fainted," he said, "and a twenty-two-year-old boy caught you before your husband did." She could hear the grin in it before she saw it. "I'm hiring him a bigger truck so I don't have to think about that again."
From the bunkhouse, faint across the yard, came the sound of Casey Boyd's radio playing something with a fiddle in it, and the porch hat sat on its nail by the door, and the summer went on being the summer, but they had learned its hours now.