dream that something horrible had happened to him and awakened in the middle of the night in a bath of terrified sweat, seeing his face smashed and bloody. It was a foolish dream, but the memory still sent her blood cold.
She placed bacon and scrambled eggs on Ted’s plate. “There you are. I don’t mean to nag.”
Silently he sat down and began eating. She poured a cup of coffee for each of them and sat down across from him.
“You going to eat or not?” he asked.
“When you’ve finished. I wanted to get yours ready right away.”
“Easy life, isn’t it? I got to eat on the run and go out and work my hands down to a nub. You haven’t anything else to do but eat breakfast whenever you feel like it.”
“Don’t be mean, Ted.”
“I’m not. I give you a good life. Maybe it isn’t good enough for you though? Maybe you liked it better in Omaha?”
“Ted, why all this—” She spread her hands. “Eleven months! It still ought to be a honeymoon, and we don’t even—”
“You shut up about that, do you hear? I told you once. I won’t any more!”
“Ted—”
“I mean it! I know what you’re talking about! Take a filthy mind to think about that all the time. Where’d you get that mind of yours? Where’d you learn to think about that all the time?”
“Can’t you understand? There’s nothing filthy about a man and wife—”
“I told you!” he said menacingly.
She looked at the vivid flush of his face. For the first time since that memorable moment of their first night together in this house or anywhere, she thought he might hit her again. She had a fleeting thought of Dr. Hugh Stewart. She had a strange impulse to get up suddenly and flee to him for protection.
But Ted Burley did not hit her. He’d done that just once so far, and that had been after their first night of married love. That night Ann had found out a lot about Ted Burley.
She did not know Ted Burley when she married him. Their courtship had been only a month long. He’d come to Omaha from the farm, a lonely man who needed her desperately, he’d told her. He’d been thirty-one and large and, even in his wind-burned and raw-boned look, handsome enough. He’d seemed to Ann as capable and strong as her idealistic concept of a noble frontiersman.
But she was on the run. She’d left San Francisco and gone to her father in Sacramento because she did not trust her mother with the knowledge of where she was. Only her father knew that she’d dyed her hair from dark brown to blond, that she’d then gone to Omaha and assumed a new name of Brown. Only her father had her Omaha address. He had not written to her since she’d got married. She had not written to him.
On the run, she had chosen what seemed solid protection in the form of Ted Burley.
She’d met him at the Stockyards Exchange where she’d gotten a job as a secretary. He’d come once on business, then returned again and again. Suddenly they were married. And Ann had gone home with him to the farmhouse outside Arrow Junction and the bed of his mother and father.
It was there, eager with a love she was certain was real, that Ann found that, despite his large size and rugged look, Ted Burley was but a prudish child.
She’d sensed his nervousness and had thought it was simply a strong man’s hidden shyness. So she’d done the advancing, and he’d been caught up by it, driven to a wild emotion. She’d willingly accepted the drive of it, no matter how brutal and selfish. When it was over he hit her.
She did not understand, and he didn’t care that she didn’t. He’d left her alone. His soul having been exposed, he seemed to hate her. He slept in his child’s bed that night; he’d slept there ever since. For weeks on end he would contain his emotion, then he would unleash it as though he were using a whip on her. Then the same withdrawal again. She began to understand more about the child within the man’s exterior. But she could not mature the spirit
Jack Coughlin, Donald A. Davis