‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.
He said nothing.
‘I’m trying to help,’ I said.
He said, ‘You’re sucking me dry.’
As I fell asleep, the rain ticked against the window glass. I dreamed I was in class, teaching recitation from memory – a kind of teaching almost no one does anymore, not for fifty or sixty years – and two dozen twenty-year-olds chanted lines from Emily Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly buzz.’ The students knew the words, and they inflected them precisely, but I felt that a sound was missing, and I realized that the sound was Sheneel’s voice. Then I realized that the other students were reciting the poem for her.
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see.
I woke. The lamp on Johnny’s side of the bed was on. The clock said it was one thirty-five a.m. Light rain fell against the windows. Johnny was gone.
I got up and went to the kitchen and then to the sunroom. The glass doors from the sunroom to the backyard were open and a cool wet breeze blew into the house.
I stepped out on to the cold, slick grass. Johnny was lying on the lawn chair, wearing only his boxer shorts. ‘Hey,’ I said.
He said nothing. The cold rain stung my skin through my pajama shirt.
‘Come inside,’ I said.
He said nothing.
I went to him and stood by him. His eyes were open, staring into the rain. ‘The rain will ruin your cast.’
He said nothing.
I thought, This is the way it ends. Then I unbuttoned my pajama shirt and let it hang open. Johnny watched the thick dark sky. I slid my underwear down and left it on the wet grass. The rain fell into Johnny’s eyes. I stepped over the lawn chair, straddling him, and lowered myself on to him. His eyes focused on mine for several seconds, and he pushed me off of him, on to the grass. I lay on the ground, the cold rain stinging my skin, then got up and returned to him, stepped across him, lowered myself on to him, and when he tried to push me away, I grabbed the wrist of his undamaged hand and held it, and I reached down and pulled his shorts away. He cried out – with anger, pain, desire, I didn’t know what – and I took him in my hand until he was hard and I put him inside me. He struggled, but I held him and ground down on him again and again. ‘Never,’ I said, and rain spat from my mouth. ‘Never, never, never.’ I ground down on him deeper and deeper, and his struggling softened until, with a groan of anger or pain or desire, he bucked his hips against me.
‘Never,’ I said, and he collapsed on to the chair, breathing hard, his eyes closed now against the rain, and I lowered myself against him until our skins touched and the deep warmth of our bodies burned through the cold rain that coated us.
‘Never?’ he said.
‘Never go away from me,’ I said.
He lay quiet beneath me, then said, ‘I won’t.’
But in the morning, over breakfast, with the rain clouds gone from the sky and the grass dry, he said, ‘If you treat me like I’m already gone, I don’t know what to do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You put me in the hospital. You—’
‘You put yourself in the hospital.’
‘Shhh.’ He stared at me hard and said, ‘You took my gun from my office. You keep treating me like I’m broken.’
‘I’m trying to—’
He held my hand to silence me. ‘Maybe I am broken. But if you treat me this way, I’m nothing. You understand? Nothing. I won’t be able to go away, because I’ll already be gone.’
‘I—’
‘You can’t save me from myself. Only I can do that.’
I stared at him, waiting for him to finish.
He smiled a little. ‘I give myself about fifty-fifty odds.’ He nodded, as if permitting me to speak.
I said nothing. Instead, I went into the bedroom and got his gun from my dresser drawer. I brought it to him and laid it on the table.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
I stared at it – a piece of squared black metal with a trigger. ‘Will you teach me to shoot it?’
‘I guess so. Why?’
‘Because if you come at me in the middle of the night, I want a fighting chance.’
THIRTEEN
Stephen Phelps
A seven-year-old’s nightmares.
Claws on bark, feet in the leaves, unseen wings in the branches, sex-and-hunger cries of animals. Forest musk. The dark has its own odor. Wisps of night breeze, ghostly webs and nonfingers that brush the cheeks and hands, the threat that closes on the body from all sides.
‘A family that grows trees for a living can’t be scared of the woods,’ Dad said when I turned eight. ‘Pine sap rises through your veins as sure as blood.’ Around midnight, he parked the pickup at the side of the timber road and led me by the hand into a mid-growth grove. We sat in the dark on the pine-needle floor. He identified an owl cry and the skittering of an armadillo. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ Then, ‘Don’t come out until dawn,’ and he went back to the truck.
I managed ten minutes – maybe ten. I scrambled out of the woods and on to the passenger seat.
He slapped me.
I preferred his slap to the forest.
He slapped again. ‘Goddamn it. You will not be afraid.’
He dragged me into the trees and made me sit. When I ran after him, he dragged me back. ‘If you follow again, I’ll drive away and leave you here.’
All through the night, I wished I would die. But the sun rose and Dad returned and asked, ‘Are you afraid now?’
‘No.’
He slapped me. ‘You’re lying.’
Two nights later, we went back to the woods, and again after a week. My terror swelled, but Dad started to believe my lies or else decided he’d done what he could.
In fact, it was enough. When I was thirteen, I started to long for the night terrors as I started to long for sex. When Dad took me to visit the mature timber tracts in South Georgia, I snuck out after he fell asleep and I wandered among the trees, terrified but feeling as if I possessed the woods as I soon would possess girls and women. In the morning, chainsaws would rip through the trunks. Afterward, the scarred land where the grove had stood would be silent and smell of sawdust and gasoline fumes. But in the dark I touched the trees as I passed – their warm wood on my palms.
Not so different from girls and women. Not so different from Lillian Turner? I had put my hand on her shoulder – a touch, a palm on her heat, no more.
My husband didn’t do this.
Who says he did?
Thank you.
She was grateful! To me! If only I’d had a chainsaw. If only I’d had a bed, a kitchen counter, the hood of a car. If I wasn’t careful, I would fall in love.
She wore a dress. Silent scars of time on her bare knees where she’d kneeled as a girl or a woman. On what? Gravel? Pavement? Beach sand? A pine-needle forest floor? Knees, scarred. Neck, slender. The tender and the slender. Not my fault.
FOURTEEN
Johnny
We spent Saturday at home – Lillian, Percy, and me. The doctor had told me to rest for forty-eight hours, which I took to mean only that I should avoid getting hit with more baseball bats. So I read the newspaper about Alex Greene’s death, which the police were calling unexplained, and Lillian checked online for other coverage, which turned out to be mostly the same as in the newspaper. No one was accusing me of killing Alex Greene anymore, and that was good, but I wondered what was unexplained about his death. He’d been beaten, probably with the same baseball bat that had hit me, and he’d been cut with a knife.
I looked at Percy and said, ‘What’s to explain?’
He returned my gaze with
his wet black eyes.
Through the morning, Lillian stayed near. ‘How are you doing?’ she asked every hour on the hour. ‘How are you doing now?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Fine.’
‘How’s the hand?’
‘Not so bad,’ though it throbbed like a pulsing coal. My head, where the man hit me, ached worse.
‘Do you want the hydrocodone?’
‘No.’ But in the afternoon, I swallowed two white tablets, and a dull comfort spread through my arm to my wrist and hand. My head still pounded, but I fell asleep on the sunroom couch with Percy lying on the floor beside me. I woke for a late dinner, slept through the night fitfully, and in the morning the throbbing and aching had become tolerable. With Lillian standing at the stove, I emptied the rest of the hydrocodone into the kitchen sink and turned on the disposal.
‘You do know that you’re insane?’ she said.
I asked, ‘Do we have orange juice?’
We spent a second day at home, and when the pain returned just before lunch and brought sweat to my forehead, Lillian left me alone. She drank a vodka and tonic with her sandwich, and in the afternoon we sat together in the backyard – her reading, me staring at the blue of the sky and listening to the breeze in the leaves of the oak tree at the foot of our property.
That night, as Lillian slept, I went back outside to the lawn chair and stared at the stars, which made no noise, though I knew, up close, they would roar like immense incinerators. I don’t remember closing my eyes. I would almost swear that I didn’t close them. But I must have slept, because sometime later a man’s voice woke me, and, when I looked up, the whole sky had shifted to the west. The man was singing in a low voice, just above a whisper. He sang, ‘Johnny on the island and I heard him groan—’
‘What the hell?’ I said, and he stopped. He was an old man, dark-skinned, wearing denim overalls and a blue work shirt. After a moment, I recognized him. Papa Crowe.
There was no sense to him being in my backyard. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Singing, mostly.’
I fought to clear my head. ‘How did you get through the fence?’
‘I open the gate.’
‘What do you want?’
‘To show you something.’
‘What time is it?’
He glanced at the sky, as if he could read it like a clock. ‘Late.’
‘What do you want to show me?’
‘Come with me. I take you.’
‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’
He stared at me in the dark. ‘Have it your way.’ He turned and walked toward the gate.
I called after him, ‘What do you want to show me?’
‘You come or stay, that up to you, but I go.’
I pushed myself out of the chair. ‘Let me get dressed.’
‘Leave the gun behind.’
‘What gun?’
‘Leave it behind.’
We drove north in an old brown Chrysler LeBaron that smelled like wet carpet. Papa Crowe steered with both hands on the wheel, his body tipping toward the windshield, as if his eyesight was bad and he needed the advantage. We left the windows open and the cool night air beat against our clothing. He frowned the way men sometimes do when they’re missing lower teeth.
When he saw me watching him, he said, ‘When they ain’t no way, sometime you got to make a way out of no way.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘That what I’m about to show you.’
When we reached the exit for Fernandina, he kept his foot on the accelerator. We crossed the Georgia border, and ten minutes later left the highway. We drove down a commercial street, turned, and for another half-hour drove on rural roads, the headlights gleaming off red-bark pine trees that grew in rows as neat and regular as orchard fruit trees. Then Papa Crowe pulled to the side and stopped, angling the car so the headlights shined into the rows.
He nodded into the narrowing light. ‘This the land I talk about.’
‘What land?’
He leaned across me, the smell of soap on him, and took two flashlights from the glove compartment. Giving one to me, he got out of the car and walked into the rows of trees.
When I caught up with him, he quickened his pace. We walked a quarter-mile or more over a pine-needle carpet. Black-winged night birds, startled by the flashlight beams, flushed from the low branches and disappeared into the dark. The old man stopped once as an animal – an armadillo or a possum – moved through a stand of palmettos ahead of us. He said, ‘This land, back to the road and clear a mile on either side, the Greenes and Crowes owned it all. Lived on it, hunted on it, prayed on it.’
A bird dropped from the low branch of a pine tree, made a strangled sound, and flew away from the light. I asked, ‘We needed to see it in the middle of the night?’
‘Come in the daylight, get yourself in a mess of trouble then.’
Following a marker that I didn’t see, he turned left, and soon we walked up a slow incline, and the flashlight beams fell upon the ruins of an old wooden house, the windows all punched out, the front porch roof sagging under the weight of pine needles, the front door gone from the hinges. ‘This it,’ the old man said. ‘A lot of generations live here. My granddaddy. His granddaddy. My Uncle Crowe and his family. We used to call it the Garden House. We have twenty, thirty people here sometime. You don’t want to go in there now.’ He turned his flashlight so it shined on an open-walled, tin-roofed carport. Under the roof, an old sky-blue Chevrolet sedan – its wheels missing, its hood pried off, its engine hauled away – remained, though thirty or more years of pine growth had rooted into whatever might once have been a driveway.
We went to the car. ‘One of the Phelps mills is two miles that way.’ He pointed north. ‘Night like this you don’t know it, but thirty years ago the air make your eyes burn like a dry-leaf fire. Look at this.’ He ran a finger along the roof of the Chevrolet. Under the dust, the paint chipped and fell away like a dry canker. ‘Fly ash from the recovery boiler. It fall some days like rain and eat the paint off the house and car. My cousin Mary – it eat her skin like this, so she get the cancer.
‘My Uncle Crowe leave this car. He fight the Phelpses, shoot holes in the signs at their mills, get arrested too. But when it come clear that the Phelpses going to take the land and nothing he can do but die on it, he get his wife and children and grandchildren – twelve of them, a little tribe – and they just go, disappear in the night like that. Story my daddy tell the children is they take a bus to the ocean and step right in like the old Ebo king that walk off the Dunbar Creek dock with his family in St Simons all those years ago. My daddy tell the children that my uncle don’t drown. He say his family walk across the ocean all the way and they living free.’
I ran my finger across the car and the paint grit clung to it.
‘Don’t put that in your mouth,’ the old man said.
‘A Phelps mill did this?’
‘Come with me,’ he said, and he left the carport and continued into the woods. ‘First the garden die, then we start finding dead animals – squirrels, raccoons. Mary and her boy eat them, like they was God’s gift, the goddamn fools. Then Mary get sick and her boy too. Now the government come and tell the Phelpses to clean it up, but it too late. Those of us that don’t leave, they die right here.’
We arrived at a narrow creek. Under the beam of the flashlights, the water shined clear against the orange-brown bank. ‘That where the family get the drinking water. Wasn’t sweet, but it was water to live on if you boiled it, and that was sweet enough. The government tell the Phelpses to clean the mill, and now you can breathe the air like you on God’s earth, but I wouldn’t drink the water if you put a gun to my head, ’cause it amount to the same thing.’
Lillian had told me about the Phelps land grab, but nothing like this. ‘It’s pretty terrible.’
‘Yes, sir, it is that.’
‘But what does it have to do with Sheneel Greene’s death? Or Alex�
��s?’
The old man held the flashlight beam on the creek. No minnows swam in it. No insects skimmed its surface.
‘Sheneel been spitting in the Phelpses’ stew.’
‘I don’t understand.’
He said, ‘The Phelpses been whipping the Greenes and Crowes a long time. Sheneel got more fire than water in her. She take it to the Phelpses and threaten them. She know what in this water. I show her myself. She know it can poison the Phelpses too if people find out.’
‘The government?’
‘Sure.’
‘But Sheneel also was a Phelps.’
‘Half Phelps. All Greene.’
‘So she threatened the Phelpses?’
‘’Course she did.’
‘And they killed her?’
‘She dead, ain’t she?’
‘How do you know they did it?’
‘If it look like a snake and it slide through the grass, it a snake.’
‘Who’s responsible? Stephen Phelps?’
‘Or his daddy, Edward. He a mean bastard, Edward, always been.’
I looked at the old man, but in the deep dark of the woods I couldn’t read his face. ‘So you don’t really know who killed her?’
‘I know what I know.’
‘What do you think she wanted from the Phelpses?’
‘What she really want, or what she tell them they got to give her? She really want them to suffer for a hundred years like they make everybody else suffer. What she tell them? I don’t know. Maybe nothing – maybe she threaten them to make them squirm.’
‘So they killed her. What about Alex?’
‘Alex know what Sheneel know. Maybe Alex don’t talk so much like Sheneel, but the police coming around and you coming around, and who can keep his mouth shut with all these people asking questions?’
‘Why don’t you go to the police with this? Why didn’t you report what the Phelpses were doing at the mill?’
‘I been to the police ten time and a hundred. No one believe a man like me. Beside, they arrest me for trespassing on Phelps land many time, going back thirty year now, and they arrest me for wrecking Phelps machinery. So I tell them and tell them but no one listen. A lot change in my lifetime but this don’t. So that what I got you for.’
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