Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [135]
“Sounds good,” Alice says, reverently. In her life she has experienced neither men who talk a lot nor men who cook, and here is one doing both at once. She would have paid money to witness this, and not been disappointed.
“I love it with hominy,” he adds. “It kindly puts you in the mood of fall, when you smell kunutche.”
“Did your wife teach you how to make it?”
“Well, now,” he pauses and stares at the wall calendar. “I guess my mama did. My wife did the cooking, mostly, but I always pounded up the kunutche. She said all that grinding hurt her bones.”
Alice stands up and wanders the length of the cabin, wishing for family pictures or some other hint of what Cash belongs to. Her eyes rest on his toothbrush, which seems small and stranded up there, and his gun. “You shoot anything with that rifle?”
“Oh, a squirrel now and then, if he’ll set still long enough to get hit. My eyes isn’t what they was. Usually I’ll miss three or four time, and then one’ll keel over and die of a heart attack.”
Alice wants to give him a hug. If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world. She touches her earrings, whose tiny beads shiver away from her fingers. They were delivered to her one morning in an envelope marked only, “From a secret admirer.” Sugar, who had stood breathing on Alice’s head while she ripped open the envelope, instantly identified the turquoise-and-silver beadwork as Cash’s. She said he had been selling earrings just like that to the trading post at the Heritage Center.
Alice sent Cash back a note that said, “Many thanks and a special hug from your mystery date.” She gave it to Sugar to mail at the P.O., and was mortified later to find that Sugar had run into Letty in town and asked her to hand-deliver it.
“Sugar says you do beadwork for the trading post. That a fact?”
“I do a little. It relaxes me at night.”
“Somebody sent me these earrings. Can you imagine? Some fellow must think he can knock me over with a feather.”
Cash grins. “I got your note.”
“I’ll bet Letty opened it up and read it first.”
“Looked like it. She’s not as professional as she used to be.” Cash’s face broadens under the eyes with a smile that seems to be settling in and getting comfortable.
“I guess I ought to try my hand at that,” she says, coming over to stand next to him. “Either that, or sing for my supper. Of the two I think you’d ruther me mash nuts.”
He positions her hands on the club, then stands back to watch. “I don’t know about that. You got a real nice talking voice. I was thinking the other day, if I had a telephone I’d call up Alice just to listen at her voice. I bet you could sing like a bird.”
“A turkey buzzard,” Alice says.
“Now, you stop right there, I don’t believe you. I’d pay a dollar to hear you sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ Or ‘Don’t Set Under the Apple Tree.’ Here, it helps sometimes if you put more shoulder into it.”
He stands behind her with his arms over hers, gripping her hands gently and pushing downward. The precise hissing sound returns to the kitchen, nut powder urged against metal. Alice feels a similar sound in her chest.
“You’d ask for your dollar back when I was done,” she says.
Cash eases the pressure on her hands. “I wouldn’t. Even if you did sound like a turkey buzzard, I wouldn’t care.”
Alice leans her head back against him at the same moment he lifts his arms across her chest, holding her there and dropping his face into the crown of her hair.
“Cash,” she says.
“Hm?” He turns her around, keeping her within the circle of his arms. She looks up at his face, which at close range without her reading specs is blurry, except for the window-shaped lights in his eyes.
“You might be able to knock me over with a feather,” she tells him. “It’d be worth a try.”