Bodark Creek - 51. Chapter 51

It was fun. It was more than fun. I really was in love. Not for the first time. My loving William has nothing to do with my still loving Martin. And it’s not that Martin would have wanted me to stay alone. But I’m sure he never thought I would be. There were our children. And our grandchildren. And there was always the farm.

I kind of left the farm to Del and Neal for a while. I was home for many of the holidays, and William and I stayed at the house. And we were at his house in Montana for other holidays. But mostly we traveled.

We didn’t always go by plane. We drove to Tucson, where Charley and Faye lived. By that time their children were grown and had moved to California. So we drove to California, though not just to see them. William had a granddaughter there, too, in college. He had three daughters and two sons, and five grandchildren, four boys and a girl. If we only visited family, we would have been plenty busy.

But he wanted to show me Europe. And I said, “All right, but somewhere they speak English first. So we went to England. Then we went to Ireland. Then we saw Scotland and Wales.

“As long as we’re here,” William said, “we may as well go to France.”

So we did that, and then I was curious about Germany. “It’s where our family came from, after all.”

William had already done some research. “Actually, they came more from England,” he told me. He could take them as far back as 1665. “Even then,” he went on, “they’d been in England long enough for our name to be Anglicized.”

“It wasn’t always Bronner?”

“Who knows what it might have been? Last names weren’t important back then. Not in small towns.”

So we saw Germany, which was very pretty outside the cities. And we saw Italy, which was beautiful, again outside the cities. And we saw parts of Greece. I especially liked the smaller islands.

“You don’t really like cities,” William mentioned at one point.

“I like people more. And it’s not that you can’t meet nice people in cities. But it’s so much easier when you’re in small towns.”

The big difference between William and Martin was William talked more. Martin was as curious, but about smaller things. And practical ones. Things he could use on the farm. William was always giving me books to read, or newspaper and magazine articles, then asking what I thought. Martin never did that. He had his reading, and I had mine. But even if I read something that he did, about farm equipment or feeding the animals, we didn’t talk about it.

“What did you talk about?” William asked. “If I’m not being rude?”

“You’re not,” I said. Nothing he wanted to know was too personal.

So I told him that Martin and I mainly talked about everyday things. What the children were doing and who I ran into in town. Or who I saw at church and how Albie and Dock were holding up. And I had to admit that it was more fun sharing things with William. Or sharing them all with one person. Before, I used to spread out what I was thinking among Rosalind and Charley and Del and Joann. Neal listened, but he never had much to add. And Pat always seemed too busy.

“Did you talk this way with your wife?” I asked William, after one of our long conversations.

“Since before we got married,” he said. “That was the first thing we had in common.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“In college. She was a year ahead.”

William and his wife had gone to the university in Jackson. They both studied to be teachers.

“She took to it right off,” he told me. “But I had more trouble. I couldn’t keep my classes under control. The boys were always asking what I thought were stupid questions, and the girls never seemed to listen. But I really wanted to teach, and I knew I’d be good at it if I could just figure out how. So I worked really hard.”

He started teaching in 1930, when jobs were hard to find. But he was lucky enough to get one, and he only left it twelve years later to enlist in the army during the war. He already had a daughter and two sons, so he didn’t have to go. “But the army was something I knew I should do.”

“What if you’d gotten hurt?” I asked. “Or worse? What would have happened to your family?”

“Jean would always be fine. I knew that. And for a long time, we had her younger sister living with us. She helped with the children.”

After the war, William used the G.I. Bill to get his Masters and then his Ph.D. They were both were in American history. “That’s when I started teaching college,” he told me. “And when we started moving around. We went to Oklahoma first. Then to Iowa and Nebraska and Montana. I began at small colleges and ended up the university.”

Jean also had their last two daughters after the war. “It was two accidents in a row,” he’d said, grinning. “The girls are barely a year apart. But by that time our oldest daughter was grown enough to help out. That was a good because I was back in college full-time, for almost three years. Jean made most of our money.”

“How did you manage?”

“Oh, you can do almost anything when it’s important. And our families helped.”

William stayed close to his sister Audrey when they both lived in Mississippi. Only when he and Jean moved did the families see less of each other. Audrey was at the reunion, along with three of her children and their families. But I barely got to talk with them. William and I made up for that when we visited Audrey and her husband later in South Carolina. They’d moved there to retire.

“I tried to get them to come to Montana,” William said. “But it was too cold.”

“Do you like it there?” I asked. He’d lived in Missoula for fifteen years.

“I could move back here, if that’s what you want to know.”

It wasn’t, but I smiled, knowing that. As often as we traveled, I always liked coming home.

“There’s much more here for you,” William admitted. “More than there ever was for me.”

“You didn’t stay very long.”

“But you had such a large family. You stayed close to your brothers. I only had Audrey.”

It was funny, but I nearly thought of William as another of my brothers. Which just made what happened between us seem worse.

“Are you really that uncomfortable?” he asked.

“Yes,” I had to say.

“You know how much I love you.”

“I do.”

“And you know how happy I am just being with you. I never thought I’d have that again.”

I didn’t, either. But it made me uncomfortable even thinking about it. So we didn’t talk about it a lot.

Instead, we read, and we traveled, and we went to movies. William even took me to the theater.

“I can’t believe you’ve never seen a professional production,” he joked.

“You’re starting those ‘I-can’t-believes’ again,” I kidded back.

“But you lived so close to Dallas. There’s decent theater there.”

“We were never interested.”

“At least, you saw movies.”

Only by chance. If it was something Rosalind wanted to see or something everyone was talking about. But Martin rarely cared.

He also didn’t like museums. He saw no reason for people to keep things that were that old. And I kind of agreed with him about paintings. They shouldn’t be worth as much as people paid.

“But you like history,” William said.

“That’s about people.”

“Paintings are, too.”

“You’d have to show me.”

We started with the history museums in Washington then went on from there. I liked the art museums eventually, and the ones about science. The art museums in New York and London and Paris were nice, too.

“Is there one you like best?” William asked. “I know that’s an unfair question.”

And it was one I never answered. I liked the idea of the museums more than anything in them. I still got bothered by the amounts of money.

“Paintings are valuable,” he insisted.

“I know. And it’s not that I don’t know anything about art. I know a little.”

That’s because I read practically anything. Rosalind used to joke that I probably checked out every book in the town library.

“There aren’t that many,” I’d tell her. But what she said was almost true. I’d start on one shelf then go down the entire row. And when I was finished there, I’d go to the next room. I didn’t always remember what I read, and sometimes I had to read books over. But I read a lot.

“Sometimes, I swear you’re smarter than I am,” William joked. “And you pick things up so quickly.”

It always embarrassed me when he said that. He knew far more about history. Though I knew more about farms.