One Foot in Eden

by Ron Rash

  She put the coffee in my hands and sat down in the other chair.

  ‘Taste of it,’ she said, and I wanted to pinch myself. Everything done or said was the exact as in January and I felt I was snagged up in a dream or a memory and somehow or another it was like it was Widow Glendower’s dream more than mine. I didn’t find that feeling a bit settling and I gave a heavy sort of thought to putting that coffee down and getting clear of that cabin once and forever.

  But I didn’t. I took a sip of the coffee, felt its warming all the way to my belly, a belly where no new life waxed. I started tearing up then. All of everything that had happened and not happened in the last couple of years raised up in me like spring rains. It was a hopeless kind of tears, like what you’d shed at a wake or graveyard.

  ‘There ain’t nothing to be done about it, is there?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer at first. She sipped her coffee and looked into the fire like she was mulling something over.

  ‘There’s a thing to be done,’ Widow Glendower finally said. ‘A simple thing if you have want enough to do it.’

  ‘I’ll do any or everything to get a baby.’

  ‘Will you now,’ she said, like she doubted me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Then it’s a easy thing, easy enough you should have figured it out your own self.’

  Widow Glendower wasn’t looking at the fire no more. She was looking flush at me.

  ‘You got a man who can’t give you a baby, so you got to lay down with a man who can, and the man who can give you that baby ain’t no farther from you than the next farm.’

  You’re a terrible old woman to say such a thing, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud.

  ‘I couldn’t never do something like that,’ I said.

  ‘Then you don’t want a baby near bad as you put on.’ Widow Glendower’s words was cold and hard as winter turnips, and the least kindness had left her face.

  ‘Billy couldn’t never forgive me doing such a thing,’ I said.

  ‘Can you forgive him if you don’t have a baby? Can you reckon he will forgive himself?’

  It was like she’d laid bare my heart’s secretest place, for I knew the truth of her words soon as I heard them, a truth I’d tried to hide from my own self.

  I looked into the fire, looked at it the way Widow Glendower did, like as if I could find answers inside. I watched the flickering yellow flames a long time, thinking how when you looked at fire it was like looking at moving water, both ever changing and not changing all at the same time. Sweat started beading my brow like I was fevered. I felt like I did have a fever for my mind was fretful with a lot of both real and not real. Not real at least for right now.

  ‘You’d give me a charm to bring him to me?’ I asked.

  Widow Glendower laughed.

  ‘A girl as fetching as you has got considerable enough of her own. All you got to do is let him see them charms, see all them. He’ll give you a baby.’

  ‘You promise?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, for certain I can promise that.’

  I got up from my chair.

  ‘I don’t know that I can do such a thing.’

  ‘I think you can,’ Widow Glendower said, standing up and reaching the cup from my hand. ‘And you will.’

  I reached into my dress pocket.

  ‘I brung you this,’ I said and held out a jar of blackberry jam. ‘I owe you and figured if you wouldn’t take no money you’d take a little something like jam.’

  ‘I’m not partial to blackberries,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘If you want to make us square even with each other, let me midwife that baby when the time comes.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, hardly giving a thought to what I was saying, for the most part of me still had no real believing it would happen.

  ‘It’ll be a joyous time and I’d not want to miss it,’ Widow Glendower said as she walked me to the door. ‘I’ll be a good granny-woman for you and that baby.’

  I followed Wolf Creek back down to the river, the water swift and over its banks like even the smallest rivulet most always is in April. The river was high too, high enough the walk-log below Wadakoe Pool was near level with the water. Billy would be coming in from the fields soon for the sun was near noon high, but there’d be no plate of cornbread and beans waiting for him.

  I hadn’t told him I was off to see Widow Glendower. In the last few weeks if I offered her name or her notions he spoke harsh against her, saying I never should of gone to her in the first place. He held it much against her that what she’d told us hadn’t worked. But it was more than that. She showed us both how hoping we was for a child, doing things many another person would of scoffed at as silly superstition, maybe even ungodly.

  ‘That old woman had a good laugh on us,’ Billy had said. ‘She played us for fools.’

  The land evened out. Even blind I’d of known I was nearly home. I left the river so if Billy was in the fields he’d not see me. I cut through woods that was on Mrs. Winchester’s property instead.

  I was almost onto our land when I heard what sounded like gun shots on the high ground a ways up the ridge. I stepped out of the trees so I could have a better look-see. A man with no shirt on hammered barbed wire to fresh-sawed fence posts. I knew it could be but one man.

  At that moment I couldn’t help but notion Widow Glendower had somehow put him there, and though I’d walked two miles and worked up a good lather of sweat I felt somebody had run a big icicle down my spine.

  I watched him strike another staple, far enough away that the sound followed a couple of seconds later. He stepped a few feet to the next fence post and I saw he was going to run that fence down the line between his Momma’s property and ours. I knew in a couple of days he’d work his way down that ridge and be working right beside the house.

  You ain’t decided nothing yet, I told myself as I walked on into the yard. I can do or not do anything.

  But I knew the moment I stepped back in the house that was a lie. There was a coldness no fire or spring weather could shuck off. Billy sat at the table, eating cold cornbread I’d fixed the night before. By his plate was a glass of milk he’d got from the springhouse. He didn’t look up when I came in.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t have you nothing ready,’ I said. ‘I went looking for some flowers to pretty up the place but I couldn’t find none.’

  I reckoned that was the first lie I ever told Billy. It wasn’t a much convincing lie but he hardly paid any mind to it. He finished his cornbread and swallowed the last of his milk.

  ‘I’ll fix us something special tonight, maybe a pie or cobbler,’ I said.

  ‘I got to get back in the field,’ he said, and walked out the door without another word more.

  I sat at the table and nibbled at a piece of the cornbread but I hadn’t the least appetite so laid it back in the bread box. I listened to Holland’s hammer up on the ridge. It no longer sounded like gunshots but a telegraph sending a message, a message I might soon enough answer.

  For the next two days I washed clothes and cooked and fed the chickens and all the other chores but my mind was careless. A part of me always listened to Holland tapping his way closer and closer. I idled by my looking glass more too.

  Come the second morning I planted a dogwood in the yard, picking a place where Holland would likely see me. It wasn’t the time of year to do such a thing but I reckoned it might have a chance of living. I got the shovel from the shed. I dug my hole and walked into the woods and picked out a stout-looking sapling. I rooted it in the hole, then packed the dirt good and watered it.

  While I worked I’d glance up the ridge ever so often and see Holland, close enough now to see his big shoulders, the black hair thick on his head. He came steady closer and soon I saw the muscles in his arms and hair on his chest. I knew he saw me by now too. I made myself a natural sight around the yard and there was moments I felt his eyes full upon me.

  He never came to church with his momma and I won
dered if he even knew my first name. Mrs. Winchester had probably told him, told him that while he’d been off fighting in Korea Billy Holcombe had married a girl named Amy. He probably hadn’t cared one way or another. Now I was trying to change that not caring each time I stepped into the yard.

  Something is going to happen come morning, I told myself that second night while I laid in bed not able to sleep, and when it does life ain’t never again going to be what it has been. There was a scariness in knowing that change was coming but there was a craving as well, like change was something I’d been starved for ever such a long time. Now it had been laid out before me where all I need do was reach out my arms and it was mine. Billy laid beside me but faraway in his dreams. He muttered something but I couldn’t make it out. I nuzzled closer to him, my lips next to his ear.

  ‘Whatever I do is for the both of us, Billy,’ I whispered. ‘If there was another way, if there just was. But there ain’t.’

  I kissed him soft on the cheek and set my head back on the pillow.

  The next morning after Billy left for the fields I didn’t put my hair up the way I usually did. I sat down in front of the looking glass and combed it out real good. Then I put on the lipstick and cheek rouge Momma gave me.

  I didn’t get up. I just sat there in front of the looking glass. It was like as if I hadn’t really looked at myself for a long time, was looking at someone who’d grown to be almost a stranger. There was something different about the face that stared back at me. Then I reckoned the differing. It wasn’t the face of a girl anymore.

  All you got to do is let him see your charms, I told myself. He’s a man, a man’s yearnings will take care of the what-after. I remembered three years ago when Billy had brought Sam for Daddy to shoe. I’d been helping Momma pin the clothes on the line when he came down the road. There was something the matter with his leg, nothing too bad but enough so it was the first thing you noticed him.

  Then as he got closer I saw the brown hair and gray eyes, the sunbrowned face, high-boned and handsome. I saw the strength in his arms, the muscles that wrapped around his bones like muscadine vines. It was like his upper portion and his legs belonged to two different bodies. You could tell those arms and shoulders was able for more heavy sweat than many another man’s.

  Yet there’d been a gentleness about him too. You could see it in the way he treated his horse. I wondered even then if the limp had somehow made him more kind and openhearted, the same way it had Matthew.

  ‘I’ll hang the rest of the clothes, Momma,’ I’d said. Momma had looked Billy’s way.

  ‘I see,’ Momma said, giving me a little smile before walking back to the house.

  Billy’s eyes had been on me as well, from the moment he’d stepped in the yard. I was barely fifteen and for the first time in my life I knew what it felt to have a man honing me. There was something wanting and needful in his eyes, like I was a lacking part of himself that he didn’t know was lacking till the moment he saw me. I knew it was something more than I felt for him, more than maybe I could ever feel for him or any another man.

  ‘That man’s taken quite a shine to you,’ Daddy had said after Billy left, telling me nothing Billy’s blushes hadn’t already made clear. I’d had never a doubt he’d be back to court and marry me.

  I stared in the looking glass, into the blue eyes Billy saw that day when he’d showed up at our farm. I saw the lips I pressed against his that first night weeks later as we sat on the porch after Momma and Daddy and my brothers and sisters finally went in the house. I saw the yellow hair I took down on our wedding night when I got ready to lay with him for the first time.

  I sat a while longer. Holland’s hammer started up again, ever so close and persistent now. I fussed with my hair a bit more but I was just wanting to slow down what was going to happen.

  I picked up my scrub-cloth and towel and walked out the front door into a spring morning all cool and bright. Dogwood blossoms bloomed full now and the branches looked like a skiff of snow laid on them. Oaks and poplars was springing green. You could almost hear them humming with new life. The sapling I’d planted yesterday looked to be holding its own. It needed watering but that could wait till later.

  I looked across the plowed land and saw Billy in the cabbage next to the river, so far away he looked no bigger than a poppit-doll. I turned and walked around the house to the well, my eyes studying the ground. I wasn’t going to flirt with him, not with words at least. If I was to have my way about it, there’d not be a word spoke between us. The hammer stopped for a few seconds. I knew Holland had his eyes on me as I crossed the back yard.

  The hammering started up again but in a half-thoughted sort of way. I laid the towel and scrub-cloth and soap on the well and brought up pails of water and filled the wash tub. My back was to Holland when I started unbuttoning my dress but I could feel his eyes boring in on me.

  I heisted the dress over my head and laid it beside the towel. I picked up the soap and scrub-cloth. I eased myself into the tub with my back to Holland. The sun hadn’t enough time to warm the water and goose bumps sprouted sudden on me like pebblerocks.

  I soaped up the scrub-cloth and rubbed it on my face and then my arms. The hammer was silent now. Everything was, like the woods too was waiting for what was going to happen. I listened for his footsteps but heard none. I washed my legs and then between them and finally my belly and my bosoms. My teeth chattered and my teats got hard and round like uncooked peas.

  I stood up, faced myself toward Holland and stepped out of the tub. His dark-brown eyes laid full upon me, moving up and down my nakedness like as if it was something he was afraid he’d forget if he didn’t study on it careful. I turned to pick up my towel. I’ heard him stepping toward me, stepping fast. I took a deep breath and then his arms laid firm on my shoulders. I knew then it had all been decided.

  He didn’t shove me to the ground or turn me to him or push me against the well. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders. It was me that turned to him. Holland had been working without no shirt on. His flesh felt warming against mine and I leaned against him longer than I ought have just taking in his heat. He tried to kiss me but I turned my face.

  I stepped away and laid my towel on the grass, then my own self. Holland unloosed his overalls and laid down too, leaning his body onto me and then pushing himself inside, his beard all bristly against my cheek. I put my hands on his back and pulled him closer but I carried my mind as far in the way-off as I could.

  I closed my eyes and went back years to quilt-washing day, recollecting how once a year in the spring Daddy and Momma would pile the quilts and washing powders and pails and the wash pot and all us young ones into the back of our pickup and we’d bump down the dirt road to the Whitewater River.

  ‘You all go fetch some dry wood,’ Momma would say. ‘Me and your daddy will empty the truck.’

  We’d fill up our arms and take it back to where Daddy built his fire. All the while Momma filled the pot with pails full of river water.

  When the water got hot and bubbling and Momma had dropped a washing powder in, Daddy took a big stick and doused the first quilt. He chunked the quilt to keep it under, then a ways later him and Momma both used sticks to haul it between them to the shallows.

  Me and Ginny did the rest. We carried the quilts out to where the river was most to our belly buttons and swished and twisted the quilts clean. The current would be strong against us. We’d dig our feet into the white sand to hold our balance. It was a good, pure feeling to be out in the river on a warm spring day, knowing that come cold weather months later you’d lift quilts up to your chin and smell the washing powders and the damp of the river. But it was more than that. It was knowing something could be made clean no matter how soiled and dirty it got.

  ‘That was nice and pleasuring,’ Holland said when he’d finished. He spoke his words in a soft sort of way and that was bothersome to me.

  ‘You best get back to your fence-making,’ I said.

&n
bsp; His brown eyes stared into my eyes, puzzled-like.

  ‘Yeah,’ he finally said, and his voice sounded a little cross with me. ‘I reckon I better.’

  I pushed my hands against his chest and he rolled off. I got up and swaddled the towel around me. Holland still laid on the ground, like he hoped I might change my mind and lay back down with him.

  ‘Momma told me your name but that was before I laid eyes on you,’ Holland said. ‘I’d of not forgot it if I’d reckoned on how pretty you was.’

  ‘You don’t need to take any notice of my name,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll learn it again,’ Holland said,‘ and this time I’ll not forget.’

  I picked up my dress and scrub cloth and went inside without another glimsen his way. I sat down in front of the looking glass with my brush and scrub cloth. I combed my hair to get the trash and tangles out, then rubbed the lipstick off my lips as Holland’s hammer started up. I looked careful at myself, like I’d find some kind of stain or mark on my skin that hadn’t been there a hour ago. But there wasn’t any such a stain or mark. Nothing changes but on the inside, I told myself.

  I got dressed and busied myself cooking a good noon-dinner for Billy. I tried not to ponder how long it had been since Billy had turned toward me in bed or how hard it had been to think of quilt-washing when Holland pressed his body against mine.

  Holland came calling the next morning, dressed handsome in his soldier uniform like we was going to Seneca to the picture show. He had his hair roached back and shiny with oil, his breath sweet-smelling like cloves. I pulled a quilt off my line and laid it on the ground between us. I laid myself on it and hitched up my dress with never a word.

  ‘There ain’t no necessary in hurrying it,’ Holland said, laying down beside me. ‘Some things ought to be done in a easeful kind of way.’

  Holland laid his hand on my bosom and my teat budded to his touch.