Maybe he thought I needed the salve but my conscience hadn’t even tingled, whereas I think Bob got beat up by his. He denied himself the next day and that night; before he gazed up at the galaxy of stars, he probably took stock of himself in his diary and listed three or four more resolves.

3

HE USED TO CLAIM that he knew secrets about women that no other man did, and there were rumors late in his short life that prostitutes would take him upstairs for free just so they could be schooled; and more than once I saw Bob straddle a chair opposite a strange woman at a café or train depot and, after some brief talk, stroll out the door with her arm engaged in his.

I never had his knack but I was jealous of it. I was common as toads to women. To work up even the faintest glimmer from them took everything I had and I’d sleep that night plumb worn out.

Julia Johnson was my sweetheart then and twenty years later I married her. She was sixteen when I first saw her practicing hymns on a church pedal organ that had a small mirror on the music stand so she could see the altar and pulpit. I rode up so close to the church window that my horse sunk down to its fetlocks in a spaded flower garden, and in the mirror Julia saw me leaning in with my elbows on the sill and my fists making my eyes slant like a Chinese rube, and her eyes dispatched me with one of those glances that girls have the handle on, which said I was boring and simple and big-eared and she’d just as soon I disappeared. I was seventeen and sold on myself in those days, however, and I couldn’t countenance disregard, so I clomped inside that vacant church in my brown plow boots with red mud sliding off them in dollops and with two months’ worth of smoke and unpleasant smells in my coat, and I slumped in a pew fairly stupefied as she worked through every song she had, from funeral to wedding march.

She had sun-browned skin the color of gypsies, and blue-black hair that was dark as a raven’s wing and spilled down her back almost to the bench she was sitting on. I recall to this day that she wore a light-blue dress with a bow at the waist that had come untied, and she wasn’t wearing shoes, just knee-high white socks that seemed new. And I believe the first sentence she used on me in that church was, “I hope you’re not going to make a nuisance of yourself.”