What Do Ducks Do in Winter? / Secrets

Parley himself had been a poor but well-behaved student, a football player of more enthusiasm than skill, but skillful enough to get a football scholarship to the local teachers' college during the Depression. After his first year, he married Faith, and before the second was half over, Faith gave birth to a baby girl. That the baby, Cassandra, looked full-term was no secret either. The next three came at decent intervals, a boy named Thomas and then twin girls, Suzanne and Marybeth. (Faith would have nothing to do with those all-too-common pairings for twins, names like Richard and Raymond, Mae and June, Leon and Leanne. That was no secret either.)

Faith looked no more unkempt when she began those strange buying sprees than she did in her more ordinary days. All her dresses fit her well enough (she was given to flowered cotton or rayon dresses that buttoned down the front), but they did so as though she didn't care whether they fit or not, as though they'd been bought for someone else. They weren't exactly messy—and they never looked dirty—but they looked as though they'd been [45] worn at least once before. Add to that the way her slips usually hung half an inch below one side of the skirt and the way the older and more faded they got the more she seemed to favor them, put them on a slightly overweight and middle-aged woman, and you start to get a picture.

"Faith is out in the pickup again," someone might say if he saw the dusty vehicle pass one of the farms, the bed of the pickup empty. "I wonder what she's going after this time." Faith's hair would be blowing, loosened from its binding behind, a strand stretching across her face, another fluttering past her ear. More than likely she didn't know what she might find. And of course she drove not as though she didn't care what anyone was thinking but as though she didn't expect anyone to be interested at all in what she was up to.

Faith's behavior was stranger if you knew the family she came from. Her father, Dr. Laved Gardner, was one of the first doctors in town. In 1915 he set up as a general practitioner next to the public library and over the years prospered as the town grew. Most of the town's young people of a certain age were delivered by him, either in the town hospital or at the Dana Maternity Home. If he failed to recognize them as they grew older, he never forgot their names. Introduced or re-introduced, he would pick up a conversation as though it had lapsed yesterday, even though it might have been five or ten years. "Well, young man," or "Well, young lady," he would say, looking far above their heads to indicate how much, in his view, they had grown. But he never talked to them as though they were children. He seemed glad indeed to see them. With his courtly manner, he made them feel intelligent.

But Dr. Gardner had peculiarities, too. For one thing he decided not long after he arrived to buy a farm. Farming was the way a person made his living, and Dr. Gardner was already making a good one. Yet here was the most popular of the town's doctors buying the old Hathcock place and then the Ikeda farm next to it, [47] moving his family out to Jarom. He remodelled the Hathcock house, installing an indoor bathroom, took down fences, joined fields and orchards. Twenty acres of citrus, thirty of alfalfa, and twenty of vegetable garden. He did not himself farm; he hired others to do it for him. He took on Ed Wellington, a Pima Indian from the nearby reservation, a kind of foreman who saw to the irrigating, the milking, who disced the trees and plowed for new crops. During World War II, Dr. Gardner put in long staple cotton, important for parachutes. The Jarom School would close for the day, and to help "the war effort," the kids would be bussed out to pick. Yes, Dr. Gardner did well. So too the two Gardner boys who grew up to go to Johns Hopkins, one practicing in Seattle, the other at the Walter Reed Army Hospital, until they both retired.

Faith might have done the same. No one would have been surprised. The two Gardner boys, popular in school, had a bit of "class" that came across to some as "superior." Part of it showed in their bearing, part in their intelligence, part in a seriousness that could yield to fun but understand the difference between that and frivolity or rudeness. Part showed in a kind of inbred respect, a natural courtesy. Part of it was that they seemed unaware—or at least indifferent to—their father's position in the town. And part of it, it must have been a large part, came from their mother.

It was strange that with a mother like Rose Gardner, Faith was the kind of person she was, so different from her two brothers. Unkempt, with her straight brown hair that was once blonde but unlike her brothers' did not stay that way, pulled back and fastened behind by a barrette, a ribbon, or a rubber band, Faith was not a typical Gardner. Of course, no Gardner was "typical." Perhaps Faith was simply being Faith, and Mrs. Gardner, being the kind and intelligent person she appeared to be, understood that and let Faith be the Faith that she was intended to be.

Rose Gardner had her own distinctive features. She had met her husband when he was in medical school. She belonged to one [48] of those Mormon families who lived a solitary religious life outside the regular population. Her father was a zoology professor at the University of Maryland. Sometimes the family had held its own Sunday services, sitting in the living room, even around the kitchen table, all dressed in their Sunday clothes, her father presiding over the meeting. When they moved to Maryland, they met every Sunday upstairs in a community hall, where the family arrived early to gather beer bottles, sweep cigarette butts, and set up folding wooden chairs for the meeting. A young bespectacled medical student from Idaho Falls began to arrive early too. At the end of her third year as a literature major, Rose married Laverl Gardner and moved with him to Utah.

She was a small sturdy woman whose large brown eyes, hesitant smile, and small hands made her look frail. Her movements were small. But they were quietly, gently efficient, whether hanging wash, a clothespin in her mouth, directing her sons in their Saturday chores, moving about her kitchen with quiet steps, cooking meals, seeing that the children cleaned the kitchen properly afterward. She wrote poetry, some of it published in the Relief Society Magazine from Salt Lake City. She read church leaders like B. H. Roberts or James E. Talmage, writers like Charles Dickens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Somerset Maugham, and Pearl Buck, whose works she checked out of the public library. She had kept a journal since she was sixteen: I do so little in the day, yet it passes so quickly with my work at home and my tasks at school. Today, I helped mother … I do believe in God, most fervently. I believe with all my heart. But after an evening with Laverl hearing all his doubts, the way he wrestles with his faith, I wonder if I am any stronger than he. If we are to marry, I am afraid I must be the stronger spiritually. Is that possible? Over the years Laverl did not change his views, only carried them further afield. Sometimes in Sunday school, he would pull off his glasses to point with and say, "Now I know you don't expect me to let that comment pass." People would chuckle because of his self-mocking manner, and Laverl would have his say. Sitting beside him, Rose might smile, or she [49] might not. She'd long since become accustomed to his views. She might pat his knee ("There, there …") or she might not. She herself seldom commented.

Faith's zaniness began to show after her father died. Dr. Gardner died the year her daughter Cass—her name shortened from Cassandra—was in her father's seventh grade class. No one thought anything strange about what Faith did. But looking back …

Faith had been out to Queen's Creek with her mother to pick apricots for canning, something they did together each year. Cass and Tom had gone with them. The twins stayed home. On the way back, Mrs. Gardner saw a sign for a farm auction. Faith showed some interest, and Mrs. Gardner herself was curious. Along with machinery—discs, harrows, plows—were household furniture, dishes, pots and pans, milking equipment. Faith bought a full set of china—place settings for twelve—along with a milk strainer. "I thought they would be nice to have" was all she would say. She piled them into two cardboard boxes a worker at the auction found and brought them home.

Parley was upset about the money but not angry. "If you think you can use them," he said.

"Where you going to put them?" one of the twins asked.

She had no room in her disorganized cupboards, so they were left with her other piles of clutter that gathered in boxes stacked in corners, next to chairs, behind doors. They became a part of the room as much as the furniture. No, the dishes made no special mark in the house. But they were there, Faith said, in case she needed them.

"There, there …" Perhaps it was such an attitude that Mrs. Gardner took toward Faith. "There, there, dear."

But what was there about Faith that needed to be restrained? Faith seemed to have little need of secrets. Her way was different from her mother's, from her two older brothers'. But what of that?

	What Do Ducks Do in Winter? And Other Western Stories Lewis B. Horne Signature Books; Salt Lake City, Utah © 1993 by Signature Books. Table of Contents Zina's Version Mansion, Magic, and Miracle One of the Kippers Secrets Time for a Showing What Do Ducks Do in Winter? His Brother South Robinson Street The Scorpion Fire A Summer to Sing—A Summer to Cry Blue Point cover


	Secrets [45] It was no secret: Faith Riggs had gone a bit off her rocker. But what difference did it make whether people heard or not? Everyone at church knew. Most of Parley Riggs's students who still lived in Jarom knew, those who had attended the Jarom School, four miles northeast of town, and had Parley for their seventh grade teacher. They knew it, but it made little difference to the way they looked on Parley and Faith. They had known them too many years. Parley himself had been a poor but well-behaved student, a football player of more enthusiasm than skill, but skillful enough to get a football scholarship to the local teachers' college during the Depression. After his first year, he married Faith, and before the second was half over, Faith gave birth to a baby girl. That the baby, Cassandra, looked full-term was no secret either. The next three came at decent intervals, a boy named Thomas and then twin girls, Suzanne and Marybeth. (Faith would have nothing to do with those all-too-common pairings for twins, names like Richard and Raymond, Mae and June, Leon and Leanne. That was no secret either.) Faith looked no more unkempt when she began those strange buying sprees than she did in her more ordinary days. All her dresses fit her well enough (she was given to flowered cotton or rayon dresses that buttoned down the front), but they did so as though she didn't care whether they fit or not, as though they'd been bought for someone else. They weren't exactly messy—and they never looked dirty—but they looked as though they'd been [45] worn at least once before. Add to that the way her slips usually hung half an inch below one side of the skirt and the way the older and more faded they got the more she seemed to favor them, put them on a slightly overweight and middle-aged woman, and you start to get a picture. "Faith is out in the pickup again," someone might say if he saw the dusty vehicle pass one of the farms, the bed of the pickup empty. "I wonder what she's going after this time." Faith's hair would be blowing, loosened from its binding behind, a strand stretching across her face, another fluttering past her ear. More than likely she didn't know what she might find. And of course she drove not as though she didn't care what anyone was thinking but as though she didn't expect anyone to be interested at all in what she was up to. Faith's behavior was stranger if you knew the family she came from. Her father, Dr. Laved Gardner, was one of the first doctors in town. In 1915 he set up as a general practitioner next to the public library and over the years prospered as the town grew. Most of the town's young people of a certain age were delivered by him, either in the town hospital or at the Dana Maternity Home. If he failed to recognize them as they grew older, he never forgot their names. Introduced or re-introduced, he would pick up a conversation as though it had lapsed yesterday, even though it might have been five or ten years. "Well, young man," or "Well, young lady," he would say, looking far above their heads to indicate how much, in his view, they had grown. But he never talked to them as though they were children. He seemed glad indeed to see them. With his courtly manner, he made them feel intelligent. But Dr. Gardner had peculiarities, too. For one thing he decided not long after he arrived to buy a farm. Farming was the way a person made his living, and Dr. Gardner was already making a good one. Yet here was the most popular of the town's doctors buying the old Hathcock place and then the Ikeda farm next to it, [47] moving his family out to Jarom. He remodelled the Hathcock house, installing an indoor bathroom, took down fences, joined fields and orchards. Twenty acres of citrus, thirty of alfalfa, and twenty of vegetable garden. He did not himself farm; he hired others to do it for him. He took on Ed Wellington, a Pima Indian from the nearby reservation, a kind of foreman who saw to the irrigating, the milking, who disced the trees and plowed for new crops. During World War II, Dr. Gardner put in long staple cotton, important for parachutes. The Jarom School would close for the day, and to help "the war effort," the kids would be bussed out to pick. Yes, Dr. Gardner did well. So too the two Gardner boys who grew up to go to Johns Hopkins, one practicing in Seattle, the other at the Walter Reed Army Hospital, until they both retired. Faith might have done the same. No one would have been surprised. The two Gardner boys, popular in school, had a bit of "class" that came across to some as "superior." Part of it showed in their bearing, part in their intelligence, part in a seriousness that could yield to fun but understand the difference between that and frivolity or rudeness. Part showed in a kind of inbred respect, a natural courtesy. Part of it was that they seemed unaware—or at least indifferent to—their father's position in the town. And part of it, it must have been a large part, came from their mother. It was strange that with a mother like Rose Gardner, Faith was the kind of person she was, so different from her two brothers. Unkempt, with her straight brown hair that was once blonde but unlike her brothers' did not stay that way, pulled back and fastened behind by a barrette, a ribbon, or a rubber band, Faith was not a typical Gardner. Of course, no Gardner was "typical." Perhaps Faith was simply being Faith, and Mrs. Gardner, being the kind and intelligent person she appeared to be, understood that and let Faith be the Faith that she was intended to be. Rose Gardner had her own distinctive features. She had met her husband when he was in medical school. She belonged to one [48] of those Mormon families who lived a solitary religious life outside the regular population. Her father was a zoology professor at the University of Maryland. Sometimes the family had held its own Sunday services, sitting in the living room, even around the kitchen table, all dressed in their Sunday clothes, her father presiding over the meeting. When they moved to Maryland, they met every Sunday upstairs in a community hall, where the family arrived early to gather beer bottles, sweep cigarette butts, and set up folding wooden chairs for the meeting. A young bespectacled medical student from Idaho Falls began to arrive early too. At the end of her third year as a literature major, Rose married Laverl Gardner and moved with him to Utah. She was a small sturdy woman whose large brown eyes, hesitant smile, and small hands made her look frail. Her movements were small. But they were quietly, gently efficient, whether hanging wash, a clothespin in her mouth, directing her sons in their Saturday chores, moving about her kitchen with quiet steps, cooking meals, seeing that the children cleaned the kitchen properly afterward. She wrote poetry, some of it published in the Relief Society Magazine from Salt Lake City. She read church leaders like B. H. Roberts or James E. Talmage, writers like Charles Dickens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Somerset Maugham, and Pearl Buck, whose works she checked out of the public library. She had kept a journal since she was sixteen: I do so little in the day, yet it passes so quickly with my work at home and my tasks at school. Today, I helped mother … I do believe in God, most fervently. I believe with all my heart. But after an evening with Laverl hearing all his doubts, the way he wrestles with his faith, I wonder if I am any stronger than he. If we are to marry, I am afraid I must be the stronger spiritually. Is that possible? Over the years Laverl did not change his views, only carried them further afield. Sometimes in Sunday school, he would pull off his glasses to point with and say, "Now I know you don't expect me to let that comment pass." People would chuckle because of his self-mocking manner, and Laverl would have his say. Sitting beside him, Rose might smile, or she [49] might not. She'd long since become accustomed to his views. She might pat his knee ("There, there …") or she might not. She herself seldom commented. Faith's zaniness began to show after her father died. Dr. Gardner died the year her daughter Cass—her name shortened from Cassandra—was in her father's seventh grade class. No one thought anything strange about what Faith did. But looking back … Faith had been out to Queen's Creek with her mother to pick apricots for canning, something they did together each year. Cass and Tom had gone with them. The twins stayed home. On the way back, Mrs. Gardner saw a sign for a farm auction. Faith showed some interest, and Mrs. Gardner herself was curious. Along with machinery—discs, harrows, plows—were household furniture, dishes, pots and pans, milking equipment. Faith bought a full set of china—place settings for twelve—along with a milk strainer. "I thought they would be nice to have" was all she would say. She piled them into two cardboard boxes a worker at the auction found and brought them home. Parley was upset about the money but not angry. "If you think you can use them," he said. "Where you going to put them?" one of the twins asked. She had no room in her disorganized cupboards, so they were left with her other piles of clutter that gathered in boxes stacked in corners, next to chairs, behind doors. They became a part of the room as much as the furniture. No, the dishes made no special mark in the house. But they were there, Faith said, in case she needed them. "There, there …" Perhaps it was such an attitude that Mrs. Gardner took toward Faith. "There, there, dear." But what was there about Faith that needed to be restrained? Faith seemed to have little need of secrets. Her way was different from her mother's, from her two older brothers'. But what of that?