The Waltz I Could Only Feel

What Wesley Heard at the Elevator

On the twenty-seventh of September, a Sunday, Wesley came out to the shop where I was changing the oil in the grain cart. He took a long time to say what he came to say. He wiped his hands on a shop rag and handed the rag to me, and then he took it back.

“Dad,” he said. “I’m only telling you what I heard.”

“All right.”

“They’re saying at the elevator that the Stromberg widow is working on you. She has one quarter and you have two. They’re saying she’s setting her cap at a man with 320 acres.”

I put down the wrench. I was not angry at Wesley, who is a good boy and said it to my face, which is what a good son does. But I was angry in a way I did not have a name for, because I had spent two Fridays with Gerda Stromberg, and in two Fridays she had never asked me one single thing about land. She had asked whether I took cream in my coffee. She had asked what Dolores liked to bake. She had told me that Clifford snored.

And the whisper had come to me exactly as it came to her, I would find out. Hers went to her daughter. Mine went to my son. The same story about the same two quarters, only turned the other way up like a coin.

I did not tell Gerda. I want to be plain about why, because it is the only thing in this whole affair that I am not proud of. A man does not carry a rumor to a woman he is waltzing with. It is a coward’s reason and it is also a kind one. If I said it to her, it became a thing that had been said. If I kept it, I thought, it would die by itself, the way a rumor will if you do not feed it.

For five weeks I did not feed it, and I did not sleep well, and every Friday I danced with Gerda with that whisper sitting between us like a third person at the table.

The Night She Said It First

On the thirtieth of October, at the break, Gerda sat down beside me with her pie and leaned toward my left ear.

“Ivan, my daughter says you want my land.”

I said “Pardon?” That was a lie. I had understood every word, because she had spoken slowly and directly into the one ear I have and, I think, because I had been waiting for a month for somebody to say it.

She said it again, louder. A woman at the next table turned around. I set down my fork.

I will tell you what I felt, and it was not insult. It was relief. It went through me like a drink of cold water. Somebody had said it, out loud, at a table in a lit room, where it could be looked at.

“She is right to ask,” I said. “Any daughter would.”

I had been thinking of Zabel since the day Wesley told me. Mr. Zabel’s father was a banker in this town and so was his grandfather, and he has a way of making a hard thing sound like a form you fill in. I said, “Would it help if we both went to see Zabel?”

She told me she had been about to ask me the same thing. We looked at each other across the pie plates, and I laughed, and I do not believe I had laughed that way since Dolores. It startled the woman next to us.