(2008) Down Where My Love Lives

by Charles Martin

  In my mind's eye, I imagined giving both copies to my grandfather. Palms up, he walked into the kitchen where the light was brighter and hefted each like Lady Justice-balancing the scales. Feeling the difference, he squinted an eye and asked me why I had not centered the bubble.

  THE AFTERNOON SUN BORED INTO MY BACK, REMINDing me that not even Hades was hotter than South Carolina between May and the better part of September. It was as if God held a magnifying glass as big as the state in between us and the sun, cooking us from the inside out.

  The mixture of sun and heat can do crazy things to a man, especially when he's sitting atop a tractor. Gives a man a lot of time to reflect. Rambling along the rows, dust and diesel fumes rising up all around me, I often thought about the slaves and how they managed. I don't think you can farm in South Carolina and not wrestle with that; it is what it is. Most of the irrigation ditches that drain the low country were hand-dug by black men and their sons.

  I have never been able to settle that in my mind. Where in history did one man convince himself that he could buy another? I understand the spoils of war and taking a man's house after you've fairly whipped him on the field of battle, but men aren't made to own one another. I don't care if I owned all the tea in China; I could no more "own" Amos than I could walk to the moon. I'd die for him, but if you tried to sell him to me or anyone else, I'd probably shoot you.

  One day when I was a boy-maybe in first or second grade-I got home from school and ran out to the field to climb up on the tractor with my grandfather. He was drilling seed into the ground, his hat tilted back, straw stuck between his teeth, and pretty soon he began showing me the ditches that the slaves had dug. They're hard to miss; you could drive a Buick down them.

  Whenever Papa spoke of slavery, his top lip grew tense and he shook his head, as if something disgusted him. I asked him why somebody didn't just buy up all the slaves and set them free. He stopped the tractor, cut the engine, sat me up on the wheel well, and pushed back my ball cap. He said, "D.S., a long time ago, a man did just that. He gave all He had, bought up all the slaves, and set them all free."

  That didn't make sense, so I asked, "Then how come there were still slaves?"

  He leaned over the side of the tractor, spat through his teeth, and switched the straw to the other side. He looked a long way across the pasture-well beyond where it ended. "That is a question I have given much thought to. And"-he smiled-"when I get to heaven, that's one of the first questions I intend to ask Him."

  Whenever I think about the slaves, or the Holocaust, or Columbine, or Amanda being tied to a tree, or my son behind me buried beneath a stone slab, I know that Satan is alive and well on planet Earth. And whenever I hear my wife's voice, feel her touch, listen to her breathe, or feel her skin on mine, I know that God is too.

  While the wound on my forearm had healed long ago, the reminder it left was mounded like a Band-Aid stuck between my skin and muscle. Sometimes at night I would wake to Maggie's fingers unconsciously tracing the outline while she slept.

  A lot of people have asked Maggie if she could hear uscould hear me-those many months that she was in her coma. I've never needed to ask that. Of course she could. Love has its own communication-one you can't prove in a courtroom, in a lab experiment, or on a doctor's chart. It's the language of the heart, and while it has never been transcribed, has no alphabet, and can't be heard or spoken by voice, it is used by every human on the planet. It is written on our souls, scripted by the finger of God, and we can hear, understand, and speak it with perfection long before we open our eyes for the first time.

  A tickling breeze ushered itself upriver, bringing with it some early wood ducks and a few welcome clouds, turning the unbearable afternoon sun into the bearable evening sun. The breeze swirled about me and cooled my neck, which had once again turned red, etched with the charcoal lines of dust and dirt packed into the crevices of my sun-spotted skin. The clouds rolled in, stalled overhead, graciously protecting me from the magnifying glass, and slowly squeezed out several large drops. Big as acorns, they splattered on the dusty soil, sizzled on the muffler, trickled between my shoulder blades, and ran down the lush green leaves of the cornstalks spiraling above my head. Those few drops were usually the early warning system that God was about to spray hell with ice water. Within moments, I couldn't see twenty feet in front of my face.

  I pulled off my cap, faced up, let the cool and delicious downpour drench me, and drank what I could. I had not seen or heard from Maggie all day. Normally, she'd have found me by now. But given the little gift I'd left on her bedside table, I didn't expect to see her till along toward dark.

  It was hard to hear over the thunderous clap of drops on leaves, but toward home, I heard a screen door slam, followed by the hollow pounding of bare feet on the back porch and then screaming. Not scared screaming, but "Where are you?" screaming. I stood up on the tractor seat, looked out over the corn, and saw Maggie, wearing a T-shirt and cotton underwear, standing on the back porch, shielding her face from the rain with what looked like a stack of papers. She jumped off the back porch and started crashing through my neatly laid and quickly growing stalks.

  When she appeared in the clearing, her hair was stuck to her face and her T-shirt and underwear were soaked clean through. The sides of her arms and long, thin legs were red where the cornstalks had slapped her, and the shirt stuck to her stomach. Her face was puffy, eyes red. And by the looks of her, she'd not been out of the house-or bed-all day. In her right arm, she clutched what remained of my manuscript. The rest of it had scattered like bread crumbs between us and the front door.

  I stepped off the tractor and held my hat in my hand. Judging by her half-naked run across the pasture, my story had spurred something inside Maggie. I just couldn't tell how deep, or whether it was joy or anger. Both emotions are fueled by the same fire, and Maggie's face told me hers was raging. Then there was the deeper question: Could she spot the counterfeit without ever having seen the real thing?

  She stood there, rain dripping off the ends of her hair, the lobes of her ears, the tips of her fingers, and cascading through the goose bumps on her thighs and calves. Her bare feet were caked with sand and mud, and so help me, with God as my witness and probably the cause, a Maggie-sized hole broke in the clouds and let through one ray of sun that, like a heaven-sized flashlight, lit the rain droplets on her skin like ten million diamonds.

  Lord, I love my wife.

  She walked up and leaned against me, her head to my chest. Then she dropped the pages in her hand, threw both arms around me, gripped me like a vise, and clung there while the sobs exited her chest. We stood there a long time. I wanted to tell her I had lied to her, but given the opportunity, I would do it again, so I said nothing. She wiped her face, brushed the hair out of my eyes, and tried her best to smile. She swallowed, fought for words, and then kissed me-her wet face pressed hard to mine. Finally she drew back and nodded. That was all she needed to say.

  Since she'd been home, parts of Maggie's soul-down where her love lives-had been tied up in knots. Waking up from the coma didn't untie them; it just helped expose them to the daylight. We'd spent the last several months trying to get at each one. Sometimes we had to back up and start over, only to back up and start over again. But when you're untangling the rope that holds your anchor, you take all the time you need.

  There in the cornfield, draped in rain, tears, tenderness, and uncertainty, her eyes told me that many of those knots had loosened. I'd like to think my story did that, but I imagine that was only part of it. The bigger part was the miracle that is Maggie.

  That night we sat in the tub, floating in bubbles and laughter, soaking until our fingers grew white and prunelike while reading her favorite parts. Finally she just shook her head and slid up next to me. We sat there a long time, long enough for the water to get cold.

  Awhile later, she stepped out, toweled off, took me by the hand, and led me across the room, where she hung her arms about my neck. I don't how
long we swayed atop those magnolia planks, but somewhere in that dance, we lost track of time. Later, soaked in a sweet South Carolina sweat, she pressed her chest and forehead to mine and managed, "Thank you ... for waiting for me."

  I locked my hands behind her waist and tried to smile. "I'd do it again."

  Outside, the ancient gnarled oaks, covered in Spanish moss and crawling with red bugs and resurrection fern, stood like silent sentinels guarding us from the world that began just beyond the edge of my tractor rows. The quilted patchwork of South Carolina that had sewn itself into the fabric of us, with soybean and watermelon, corn and kudzu, cotton and tobacco, hay bales and barbed wire, old tractors and hand-dug ditches, rivers and moonlight, sweat, blood, tears, tombstones, and worn magnolia floors, rose up out of the dirt and covered us like dew before the dawn. And where God had once doused us with the other end of the rainbow, now He painted us in starlight and all the wonder of the Milky Way.

  EVIDENTLY MAGGIE'S EMOTIONS WERE IN TUNE WITH HER clock.

  Early in June-six weeks later-I hopped off my tractor and walked up the steps, smelling worse than any man should but led by the smell of pot roast and the promise of gravy and a stack of biscuits. Maggie met me at the door in a turquoise colored sundress held up behind her neck with a single spaghetti strap. She led me to the kitchen, where the table was covered in a white tablecloth, candles, my grandmother's silver, and a small package-about the size of a Cross pen box set-tied with a bow.

  I looked at the table, sniffed my yellowing shirt, and said, "I'm not sure we can live with me right now."

  She pointed at the seat and half closed one eye. "If you don't open that box in the next sixty seconds, I'm going to blow a gasket." She pulled my chair out, sat beside me, and set the small box in front of me. In the background, Celine Dion and Frank Sinatra were singing "I've Got the World on a String."

  Maggie was one big fidget. She pushed her hair behind her ears, crossed her legs, uncrossed them, crossed them back, and then crossed her arms. I studied the box, then untied the bow and lifted the lid. Inside sat four small, familiar white sticks with four unmistakable pink lines-all pointing directly at me. They were lined up in a row and dated-one for each of the last four weeks.

  I'll never understand how she kept it a secret.

  I held the four sticks, their meaning slowly registering somewhere back in my mind and then hitting me like a lightning bolt to the brain. I looked at Maggie, then at her tummy and our child growing inside and nearly six weeks old. I hit my knees, stuck my ear to Maggie's stomach, pressed in, and listened, wondering if he was a boy or she was a girl.

  I've never been a fearful man. That does not mean I've never known fear; God knows I have. There's no S pinned on my chest. I just mean it's not something that stays with me all day perched atop my shoulder and whispering in my ear. In the months after Maggie woke up, I wrestled-even battledwith a long litany of what ifs that scared me. But her waking every morning had put that whisper to rest.

  But the moment I leaned in and listened, tasting the trickle of hope and wondering at the unfathomable enormity once again, that whisper echoed. It smelled like the air behind a trash truck, the soil in Pinky's stall, or the floor of the delivery room. Its breath alone could gag a maggot.

  Whereas hope had returned only after I'd cornered him in the barn and extended an invitation, what if reached up out of the floorboards, threw his bags on the couch, and made himself at home without so much as a peep. And unlike hope, who was tidy and neat, what if was a slob, seldom cleaning up after himself, and made it his point to throw remnants of his life in every nook and cranny of the house. Polar opposites, hope never raised his voice, while what if never lowered his. Not compatible roommates, they charged the air with a tension that even Blue picked up on.

  That night as we lay in bed and Maggie twirled her finger through both of my chest hairs, I closed my eyes and saw the giant patchwork that had enveloped us. Once perfect and without blemish, it had begun to fray along the edges.

  Within weeks, it would be coming apart at the seams.

  DAYLIGHT FOUND ME AT THE KITCHEN TABLE NURSING some Maxwell House, reading the paper, and trying to erase the constipated look off my face. My snow angel was still zonked out with Blue, and if the last couple of months were any indication, she'd miss breakfast and brunch entirely. Don't get me wrong; every moment Maggie slept meant energy stored in reserve, so on the one hand, I was grateful. On the other, we used to eat eggs, grits, and toast off the same plate.

  Since Maggie could spot a fake-especially in me-a mile away, I was trying to find a legitimate reason to get out of the house before she woke up. The moment she walked into this kitchen, she was going to take one look at my twisted face and say, "You want to talk about it?"

  After sitting a long while at the breakfast table, skimming both the business and metro sections of the Charleston paper, I was no closer to knowing how to answer. In fact, my mind was swimming in questions. All I knew was that the most precious person in my life, who thought I actually had something to do with hanging the moon, who-maybe more than anything in life-wanted to be the mother of my children, was wrestling with stuff way down deep in her soul and needed me more than ever.

  I was right back where we started-I couldn't protect her, nor could I wave a magic wand and make life all better. And though her doctors had not mentioned it, what if had echoed back into my head. I might have been staring at the newspaper, but the headline my mind read was WHAT IF SHE HEMORRHAGES AGAIN? I stared at the columns and knew one thing for sure: there was no easy way around. Like it or not, we were going to have to live through this.

  My skin was crawling, my heart was racing, I'm sure my blood pressure was elevated, and I had no defense. I needed some time alone.

  The phone rang, bringing me my chance.

  "Dylan, good morning. How are things?" It was Caglestock. "I'm calling about Bryce," he continued.

  Usually that meant a stock transaction, but his tone of voice told me he hadn't called to talk about money. "We've had no contact with him in over a month. Neither have the couriers we've sent for signatures. You mind checking on him?"

  "No worries. I'll phone you as soon as I know something."

  I scrambled some more eggs, browned a few pieces of toast, and then slopped that, along with a spoonful of cheese grits, onto a plate that I covered with foil and placed in the oven. I left a note on the kitchen table, grabbed the keys and my FM scanner, and headed out.

  The scanner was a small black digital radio, covered in buttons and a single antenna, which Mr. Carter-Amos's dad and chief of the Digger Volunteer Fire Departmentgave to all department volunteers. Not much happened from Charleston to Walterboro and surrounding parts that I didn't know about.

  The DVFD No. 1 is Mr. Carter's baby. He put it together from nothing. He even petitioned the state for a grant that built us our own firehouse and got us a couple of trucks and all kinds of gear. We handle mostly local calls, and in truth, we're support personnel for the guys who really know what they're doing.

  They don't let me drive the truck yet, and I haven't saved anybody's life, but I do have my own suit, complete with helmet, boots, ax, and air tank. I've used the jaws of Life twice, though only in drills, and they let me blow the horn whenever we're racing through traffic. That might be my favorite part. Amos says I'm the most obnoxious horn blower he's ever heard, but he can't complain because people get out of our way. Every time I put on my suit and go running out the door to meet the rest of the team, Maggie takes one look at me and falls on the floor, laughing.

  To keep us up on the latest information and techniques, and give us an excuse to practice or drive the truck, Mr. Carter holds weekly safety meetings where we learn stuff we've never even thought about. He travels all around the state getting trained and certified, then brings all that back to us.

  I slid the scanner into my pocket and whistled softly for Blue, who did not appear. I walked around the house and looked through our be
droom window and saw him cuddled up at Maggie's feet. When I motioned for him to load up, he laid his head back down and covered his nose with his paw.

  I could hear Pinky snorting and kicking her stall in the barn, mad that I hadn't appeared earlier. I stepped into the stall, spread a bucket of corn, and offered to give her a scratch. She ignored me and crapped on my boot.

  "Hey," I said, tossing her a kernel of corn and shrugging my shoulders, "I thought we had an agreement."

  Pinky grunted, buried her nose in the dirt, and then flicked a shovel's worth of mud and manure high into the air, where it umbrellaed about me.

  "Thanks," I said. "Love you too." I hung up the bucket, pulled the gate behind me, and showed my heels to Pinky.

  As I backed up the van, the flash of the screen door caught my eye. Maggie came stumbling over the threshold, her hair sticking up and eyes half closed, wrapping my pajama shirt around her. She jogged down the porch steps and stepped up to the window. "You okay?"

  I nodded.

  "You sure?"

  I lied again.

  She narrowed her eyes and folded her arms. "You've been kind of quiet since last night."

  I shrugged and stumbled for words.

  She put a hand on my shoulder and then ran her fingers through the back of my hair. "Hey ... it's just me. I know you." She grabbed my hand and laid it flat across her tummy. "We're doing this together, same as last time. I'll be the mommy; you be the daddy. Right?" She smiled and shrugged. "All except the little hitch in the delivery."

  I am such a pile of crap. How does a woman like that love a man like me? I cussed myself and nodded. "Coffee's probably cold by now."

  She tugged on my sleeve, pulling me closer. "Are you lis tening to me?" Her lips were warm and wet. "Dylan Styles, I'm not talking about coffee. I'm talking 'bout us. All three of us."

  "Maggs." I took off my cap and made a pitiful stab at the truth. "I lost you once. I don't want to ..."

  She smirked. "Well, we should have thought about that"she pointed to the window of our bedroom-"in there."