Our Daily Bread

by Lauren B. Davis

  “Cut that out,” said Albert. Astonished and horrified at what he was feeling, Albert wanted to reach out and wipe away those tears. He wanted to put his arms around the kid, hold him to his chest. It made him clench his fists, made him strain against the two tethers of rage and . . . what? He refused to name it. “I’m warning you,” he said. If Bobby didn’t stop crying, he wouldn’t be held responsible. “Stop it! You are not coming up to the mountain, is that clear?”

  “Okay, Albert. It’s clear.”

  “Fine. So what are you snivelling about?”

  He wiped his eyes. “I don’t belong anywhere. Nobody wants me.”

  If he had said it with self-pity, if he had said it with even the slightest hint of a whine in his voice, Albert might have blacked his eye, might have picked up a rock and concussed him with it. However, there was no self-pity, nothing maudlin in his voice—only a flat, accepting resignation. He was stating a simple truth, an immutable fact.

  “Sorry,” Bobby said. “Sorry.”

  Albert saw the younger boy as if from a long way off. As though Bobby was as alone as Albert felt: an isolated, skinny, sad boy, sitting on a rock in the middle of a swirling river. It was as though he was a younger version of Albert himself, and Albert realized perhaps this was what he had seen in Bobby all along. Not really himself, maybe, but a variant. Not as tough, sure, and not as smart, but a boy at a turning point, little boy lost, and maybe, just maybe, with a slim hope of being found. Albert would always be sitting on the rock in the middle of the river. He knew that, sure as he knew water was wet and rock was hard. Nobody was going to find him. He had no one but himself to depend on. But, fucked up as Bobby’s family was, his father was still there. Bobby didn’t have any idea how good he had it. Maybe the only way to teach him was to show him how bad it could be. His gut tweaked. If he showed Bobby the truth of life on the mountain, he’d probably never see the kid again, and Albert was surprised to find out how much that possibility disturbed him, but maybe it was time for some self-sacrifice here. Some nobility. Yes, that was it.

  “All right, you win,” said Albert. “I’ve reconsidered. I’ll take you.”

  “Where?” said Bobby, his face still blank.

  “Up to the old homestead, young Bobby. I’ll take you up to the fucking mountain.”

  “You will? You’re not fooling?”

  “I’m not fooling. But you better take me up on it quick before I change my mind.”

  “Really?” Bobby said. “Tonight?”

  “No, Saturday.” There would be lots of people around on Saturday night, lots of cars coming and going. It would be easier to slip the kid in unnoticed. “All right? All right then.” Albert looked at the flush of pleasure spreading on the boy’s skin, on his cheeks, his chest, mixing with the first tinges of sunburn. He looked away.

  “Really? Wow. That’s fucking fantastic, Albert. I really appreciate it, man. I won’t be no trouble at all. And I’ll get a bottle of something from my old man’s cabinet. I’m not coming empty-handed, you know?” He grinned from ear to ear. “That’s really great!” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. He kept nodding his head, saying, “All right, then. All right.”

  “Listen, Bobby, what would you tell your old man? You can’t exactly tell him you’re hanging out with me up on the mountain.”

  “No problem, I’ve thought all this out, right? I can, like, say you’re a friend not from here but from Pemberton,” he said, naming a nearby town, “somebody from school he doesn’t know, and then you can call and pretend to be the father, right? And say it’s all right and I’ll be fine and all that shit. He won’t give a shit. He’s a fucking zombie these days.”

  “I’m not sure. It sounds complicated.”

  “No, no it’s not. It’s simple. Isn’t that what you’re always saying? Simple plans are the best, right? No complications. Like the houses—nobody home, no dogs, no alarms, all that, right?”

  “It’s rough on the mountain. I live rough, Bobby. It’s not like your comfortable little suburban life.”

  “Hey, I don’t mind. What, you think I can’t handle rough? I can. I can handle rough.”

  “I’m not talking about no indoor plumbing, although there ain’t no goddamn hot tub. I’m talking about other stuff.” He felt exposed and it made him squirmy.

  “Albert? You wouldn’t change your mind now, would you?”

  “Look, kid. You just don’t know.” Albert sat up and grabbed his shirt, jerking his arms into the sleeves so violently he tore a seam. “Fuck! There’s a lot of drinking and drugs, all right? Sometimes things get out of hand. It can be dangerous.”

  “Like fights?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Fights.”

  “You got your own place, though, right? We’d be in there, right?”

  “It’s a fucking cabin, Bobby, it ain’t a hotel!”

  Bobby considered for a moment and then said, “You don’t have to worry about me, Albert. I can take care of myself.” He cracked his knuckles, popping them one after another. He nodded his head quickly, in little bounces. “And we’ll be together, right? I mean it would be the two of us if anything happens, and, well,” he hesitated, looked at Albert and then looked away again, “I’d have your back, you know, if anything happened.”

  Maybe it was the dumb defiance, the pride in the jut of the kid’s chin, maybe it was his unbelievable ignorance, or maybe all three, but part of Albert wanted to laugh out loud. Part of him wanted to slap the kid upside the head for his idiocy; part of him was kind of proud of the sentiment, even if the kid wouldn’t last thirty seconds in a fight with his knife-happy mother, let alone with The Uncles. Then there was that other part of Albert who found the back of his eyelids prickly with something revoltingly like tears. It was laughable, the kid having his back. A joke.

  But all right then, let him come, let him come. Let him see what it was like at the bottom of the well. “I’ll call your old man. If it goes without a hitch, all right then. It’s your ass.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Three days after her visit to the evanses’, Dorothy sat under the dryer at Julia’s Hair Salon. The chairs were pink leather, the mirrors framed in gold and the air smelled of hairspray and shampoo. Clive Hawthorne’s wife, Francine, and Doris Heaney, who owned the Pretty-as-a-Picture Dress Shop, were getting manicures across the room. Dorothy couldn’t help but notice them watching her. The whoosh of hot air afforded her a certain amount of privacy, thank heaven. She kept her eyes firmly on a copy of The New Yorker. After some minutes, Eva, a young woman with luxurious red curls and the sort of green eyes produced by vanity contact lenses, escorted her to a seat in front of the mirror, ready to brush out her hair. Shortly thereafter, Francine and Doris came over, waving their hands to dry their bright pink nails.

  The usual pleasantries and smiles and then Francine, a thick-waisted woman approximately Dorothy’s age, with hair dyed resolutely auburn, and three very large rings on her fingers, said, “We just wanted to tell you, Dorothy, how wonderful we think it is that you’re taking such an interest in the Evans family.”

  “I’m not taking an interest, Francine. I’m a friend of the family. I’ve known Tom all his life, as have you, and you, Doris. You were great friends with Tom’s mother, weren’t you?”

  “Well, yes, but the family’s certainly changed since those days.” Doris’s slightly bulging eyes meant her thyroid condition was probably acting up again. “Such a pity.”

  “None of us are spared misfortune, Doris. It visits every house.” It would be, Dorothy decided, unkind to mention Doris’s husband, Melvin, who was known to have led a rather, shall she say, gregarious life himself before he and Doris found salvation with Reverend Hickland.

  “You do realize she ran off with a Corkum?” said Doris.

  “I don’t pay attention to gossip, which takes some
effort in this town.”

  Eva laughed a rather snortish laugh. “Sorry,” she said. “I need to get another brush. I’ll be right back.” The girl disappeared into the back room and as Dorothy watched her flit off, she wished the girl wasn’t quite so tactful.

  Francine plopped down in the chair next to Dorothy’s. She glanced at Doris and then back to Dorothy again. “We wanted to talk to you about all this.”

  “All what?”

  “Don’t be difficult. You know very well what we mean. Between Patty Evans running off with a Corkum and Tom drinking and those poor children, well, things are clearly escalating. Mabel even told us Bobby has been seen with one of those Erskines. Steps have to be taken.”

  Dorothy frowned. “You’ve lost me.”

  “Lost is an interesting choice of words. Saved is another word,” said Doris. She clasped her hands lightly at the level of her heart.

  “We’ve been discussing the situation in our Bible class and we feel it’s pretty clear, Dorothy. The influence of the mountain is creeping down toward us. This is a war we can’t afford to lose. Reverend Hickland says—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Were all Church of Christ Returning parishioners going to start spouting Hickland’s pompous nonsense?

  “Exactly, Dorothy, for heaven’s sake,” Doris continued. “Reverend Hickland says if we don’t band together against Satan, who apparently already has a foothold among us, the evil will spread. You must cut out the evil root! You must—”

  Dorothy stood and picked up her purse.

  “—exorcise the demons. Drive them into the swine and drive the swine off the cliffs.”

  “You’ve all lost your minds!” Dorothy said. She’d brush out her own damn hair. She quickly paid Eva, who stood discreetly at the cash register.

  Francine called to her as she stepped through the door, “We’re trying to save you, Dorothy Carlisle! And the Evans family! You’ll all be left behind.”

  “I certainly hope so!” said Dorothy.

  That evening, at her kitchen table, Dorothy finished up her asparagus omelette and salad. Still fuming and restless from this afternoon’s unpleasantness, she stabbed at the last piece of radish with her fork. A single candle graced the table, next to a yellow- and burgundy-speckled orchid. The table was one of her prized possessions: an Arts and Crafts piece designed by Charles and Henry Greene. It was an odd shape, almost a circle, but with subtle, shallow arcs in the edges, giving the table the slightest impression of a cross. On the seven o’clock NPR news, she listened to a story about the overturning of a Nigerian woman’s sentence to be stoned to death for having sex outside of marriage. A bit of good news from halfway around the world. Dorothy was rather surprised they didn’t bring stoning back to Gideon.

  She wiped her mouth with her napkin, blew out the candle and brought the dishes to the farmer’s sink in the kitchen, where she washed them and set them in the wooden rack to dry. She flipped off the radio. She was restless. Of course, she would not go to the Evans house. But something. She needed action or else she would sit not reading a book and fussing until it was time to go to bed.

  She remembered the boxes she had put together the week before, waiting for her next trip up to the mountain. She looked at her watch. It was a Tuesday night, when she presumed the moonshine customers to the mountain would be few, if any at all, and the forecast was for clear weather. It wouldn’t do to leave food and clothes and books out when they would get rained on.

  Having made up her mind, she felt better and set about getting the boxes from the guest bedroom. She had never liked the guest room, a plain room with white walls and a matching blue bedspread and curtains. It always felt like a hotel room, and since she and William had had no children and his brother had long since moved to Denver, it had rarely been used. Over the years since William’s death, the room had become a sort of storeroom for little things she picked up here and there for the Erskines. Dorothy did not want gossip about her nocturnal visits, and so she never bought anything in town, other than grocery items. All the rest—books and kids’ clothes and so forth—came from the big box stores out on the highway. With no children or grandchildren of her own, she didn’t want to have to explain why she bought so many children’s clothes.

  Over the past weeks, she had divided the goods and clothes into three boxes so none would be too heavy to manage. Powdered milk, peanut butter, prepared macaroni and cheese, cans of baked beans, peas, corn, and carrots, tins of soup, tins of tuna and sardines. Protein was important. There were socks, underwear and two pairs of running shoes for the children. She’d had to guess at sizes, of course, but she tried to bring up a couple of pairs in different sizes every few months. Children went through shoes so quickly. T-shirts and diapers. Some crayons and colouring books. The Secret Garden. The Five Children and It. Rumble Fish. There were also two books specifically for Albert, a collection of Raymond Carver stories, and The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy. She hoped these manly, pared-down works would appeal to him and had written To Albert on the inside, although of course she had not signed it. She had questioned the value of books over food when she had first begun her deliveries, wondering if they would be tossed aside, if she were wasting money that might otherwise go to things of higher practical value. However, over the years, in casual conversation from time to time, Albert had mentioned, in a showing-off sort of way, that he had read this book or that, saying he liked Joseph Conrad but thought John Cheever was a wimp.

  “You must keep the librarian very busy,” Dorothy had said one day, surprised at how easy it was to keep up the deception.

  “She says I’m advanced,” fifteen-year-old Albert had said, surprising her not at all with his own talent for untruth.

  “Perhaps you’ll be a writer yourself one day,” she’d replied, and he had grinned hugely.

  Only once in all the years of going up to the mountain had she ever feared her anonymity might have been breached. It was three years back on a fragrant June evening. The moon had been full and the sound of crickets filled the night. She was coming down off the mountain when Albert’s truck passed her. She hadn’t been sure it was him at first, since the headlights blinded her, but as he passed she had been quite sure. She didn’t think he recognized her, for her car was a nondescript Honda sedan and she always wore a hat pulled low over her face just in case. As the truck came alongside, she put her hand up over her face and turned away. She saw Albert a day or so later and he nodded at her and said hello and passed a few niceties as he always did, without in any way indicating anything out of the ordinary. Such a relief.

  Still, she did wonder sometimes. What did they think of the magically appearing supplies? Initially, she had been concerned no one would find them by the side of the road where she’d left them, or they’d be considered garbage, even though she affixed a bright pink paper sign that read, “For the Erskines.” The first few times, she and William had gone back the next day to see if they were still sitting there, but they were always gone. And then came the day when a carefully printed note appeared on a little stick. “Thank you,” it said, “Albert Erskine.” Printed very carefully.

  Now, she carried the boxes one by one to the trunk, each one emboldened by a pink sign. Traditions should be maintained, Dorothy felt. She loaded the car and headed out for the mountain. It was a pretty night, with the scent of warm spring on the air like honey and peat, and the crescent moon just discernible now and then over the tops of the trees. Dorothy rolled the window down to breathe in the dark perfume and drove slowly. There was something enveloping and comforting about a star-filled sky seen through the black outlines of trees. One knew one’s place in the world at such a moment. One knew how small one was in the great scheme of things. Dorothy found that reassuring somehow. She was, in the end, responsible for so little.

  She rounded the last curve before the track led off into the deeper wood where the c
ompound lay hidden. She cut her lights so as not to draw attention. She sat for a moment, listening. A slight breeze rustled the new leaves, and far off in the woods dogs barked. This didn’t bother her. Dogs barked at all sorts of things in the woods at night and the Erskines were known for keeping several huge beasts of indeterminate breed chained near their shacks. They would settle down in a moment. Someone shouted something, but it was too far off to make out the words. The dogs protested with another round of barking, and then petered out. Something small moved in the undergrowth, a fox, perhaps, or a raccoon. A soft mewling noise. She hoped it wasn’t a mother skunk with an early litter of kits. She didn’t much fancy a tomato juice bath. She waited, and when all was still again she began to unload the boxes. Her shoes sank a little ways into the muddy ground and made a slight sucking noise when she stepped. One, two, three, she piled the boxes in a neat stack on a large rock so the damp earth wouldn’t creep up and so they might be more visible. She hoped if raccoons or other creatures prowled nearby they would find the scent from the garbage heap not far from the compound more appealing than the smell of freshly laundered overalls.

  It was very dark, with the slim moon now behind a cloud, and she had to be careful of her footing. Lights—feeble and sickly—twinkled from unseen windows far off in the heart of the wood. A few early fireflies, their love life restricted by bad timing, flashed hopefully in the trees. The breeze shifted and carried a strange sweetish odour. She presumed it was from a still, but it was an odd smell for beer or liquor and she hoped it wasn’t a bad batch, which might make people ill. Funny how the night brought scents to you that in the day you probably wouldn’t notice at all, so busy were you with all the other impressions with which eyesight flooded the brain.

  Her work done, she checked the stack of boxes was secure and, satisfied, turned back to the car. It was then the small curl of sound reached her ears and she stopped, her fingers on the door handle. It was a sort of cry, perhaps even the sound she had taken for an animal’s mewling a few minutes before. However, this was not an animal. She froze, holding her breath. Part of her very much did not want to hear the sound again. A voice in her head told her to get back in the car as quickly as possible, and lock the doors. She was aware of her own heartbeat, and of the blood pulsing in her veins. Crickets. A mosquito near her ear, which she forced herself not to swat. And then . . .