One Foot in Eden

by Ron Rash

  Don’t do that. Those were the words I should have said but my words melted like butter on my tongue as his hand moved soft over me like he was gentling a newborn. It wasn’t no morning chill that made me shiver then or later when he unbuttoned the front of my dress.

  ‘I’ve had women before but this here is different,’ Holland said later when he belted his pants.

  ‘No, it ain’t,’ I said, buttoning my dress. ‘It’s the same thing, excepting this time you didn’t have to pay.’

  That was a spiteful enough thing to say but I wasn’t ever so certain whether I was spiting him or my own self.

  ‘There’s been women what didn’t want my money,’ Holland said.

  ‘Two vowed they loved me. I had feelings for them too. I’ll not deny that. But I never felt a yearning like I feel for you.’

  ‘I got chores to do,’ I said and started to lean myself up. Holland’s hand gripped my wrist. It wasn’t no bruising grip but sure enough not to let me leave less he allowed it.

  ‘I ain’t trifling with you,’ Holland said. ‘I done some wrong things in my life but I ain’t never been a liar.’

  ‘Let me go, Holland,’ I said, but I said it in a gentling sort of way.

  Holland’s fingers loosed my wrist. ‘I’d never hurt you,’ he said.

  Holland came back that afternoon and the next day and the day come after, always sweet-breathed and in his uniform, like we was sparking. Morning and afternoon I’d lay down with him on the quilt back of the house or in the woods or in the barn, anywhere but me and Billy’s bed. He’d want to tarry and talk after but I wouldn’t abide it. He’d try to kiss me and I’d turn my face. But that was near about all I didn’t allow him. He did things to me Billy never had, things I’d never reckoned a man would know to do to a woman.

  Then it was Sunday and me and Billy went to church. Holland wasn’t there but his momma was. She glared my way with narrow eyes. It was easy enough to see she knew the truth of me and her boy but she could no more stop what was happening than she could stop the sun from rising.

  On Monday morning Holland met me in the side woods next to the fence.

  ‘I brung you something,’ he said, and reached me a war medal in the palm of his right hand. ‘It’s a Gold Star. They gave it to me in Korea.’

  ‘I don’t want nothing of yours,’ I said.

  ‘You certain enough want one thing from me. You want it as any woman I ever been with.’ He closed his hand over the Gold Star. ‘I don’t understand your ways,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t need too,’ I said and unbuckled his belt.

  We laid down together then, his hand still closed around the medal. He was soon enough inside me. I turned my head so he couldn’t kiss me. I looked toward the river and saw Billy in the distance. I remembered the first night Billy and I had laid down together, how it had hurt some but there was still a pleasingness in making ourselves one flesh. I remembered how the times after was better as the hurt disappeared.

  Holland gasped. His mouth clamped on my neck and it seemed he was trying to suck the marrow out of me. His left hand tightened around my hair. Then I felt something else, something deep inside of me, a kind of brightness welling up and spreading all through my body like spring water when it bubbles out of the ground. At that moment I knew certain as anything ever in my life that Holland’s seed had took root inside me.

  We got up and picked the woods off our clothes. Holland opened his right hand and blood slicked his palm where the points of the Gold Star had jabbed through. He held his hand out like me seeing his blood on that Gold Star would change my mind.

  ‘Like I done said, I want you to have it.’

  I shooed his hand away like the medal was no more than a bothersome fly.

  ‘We’ll never do this again,’ I said. ‘So don’t come round no more.’

  He looked at me, his brown eyes searching mine for something he wanted to find in them. I turned away. I half expected him to grab at me, maybe slap me or call me a nasty name. I hoped he would but he didn’t. For a minute he stood there still as a scarecrow as I walked to the house.

  I’d just closed the door when I heard Holland come up the steps. His fist pounded the wood hard enough to shudder the whole house. I cracked the door a few inches but not before I fastened the latch.

  ‘I want to marry you,’ Holland said.

  ‘I got a husband, a good man I wronged being with you.’

  ‘I can be a good man. I’ll quit my roughhousing. I’ll treat you in a everloving way. You got my word on that.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s done over and finished between us.’

  ‘So you’re just going to get shut of me.’

  For the first time I heard the fury in Holland. He seemed ready to tear that door right off the hinge and come after me.

  ‘I’d kill any man done me like this.’

  ‘Don’t darken this door never no more,’ I said.

  Hit me, Holland, I thought. Hit me and make me lose what I can’t help myself feeling. But the fury had sluiced out of him sudden as it rose. What was left in his brown eyes made me look down at the floor.

  ‘You leave now,’ I said and he did.

  The worse part’s all done with and over now, I told myself as I leaned against the door, my heart pounding quick as a rabbit’s.

  Yet of course it wasn’t and I was ever a foolish girl to think it was.

  Billy couldn’t help but see the mark on my neck and he let me know in a roundabout way he’d sighted Holland up here at least once. Billy didn’t say anything else though it was clear he had his suspicions. He must have had more when I throwed up a few times a month later, or when I went to bed earlier, got tireder quicker as the last blossoms fell off the dogwoods and cicadas started singing in the trees. I’d see Holland in his fields every now and again but he kept his distance. He’s forgot all about me, I told myself. He’s certain for sure sparking some gal in Salem or Seneca, sweet-talking her the same way he did me.

  All the while Billy didn’t say the first thing about the throwing up and my tiredness, like as if it couldn’t really be true without he made notice of it with his words, that silence could hide most anything between two people.

  But come the dog days my belly poked out between us. There was no way to pretend any longer. The women at church had figured it out by then and in little ways let me know as much.

  ‘Whose child is it?’ Billy finally asked.

  As I answered that question I reckoned something I’d hid from myself for a couple of months—that all and everything had been headed toward this one moment where me and Billy would decide to go the rest of the way together or apart. It was like we’d been sick and failing and swallowed a draught that would cure or kill us.

  The next morning Billy harnessed Sam and went to the field. The groundhogs had been bad to bother the cabbage so he took his shotgun with him. If he hadn’t things might have went down a different path. Maybe not. Maybe there was but one path to follow from the moment I laid down with Holland.

  I busied myself around the house a while before deciding to feed the chickens. When I stepped out on the porch Holland stood in the front yard by my dogwood sapling, standing there in his soldier uniform like I’d planted him there.

  ‘It took me a while but when Momma told me you was in a family way I figured why you laid down with me,’ Holland said. ‘I know that’s my baby inside you.’

  Holland strided across the yard and stepped up on the porch. He held his arms out to hug me. I stepped back, slapping at his arms as he pressed close.

  ‘I’m part of you now and you’re part of me,’ he said. ‘There ain’t no other way about it and that baby will forever make it so.’

  Holland reached into his pocket.

  ‘Here,’ he said, holding the Gold Star out to me. ‘You keep for that young one.’

  That Gold Star laid in his palm like it was being weighted on scale.

  ‘A gift to that baby from his daddy,’ Hollan
d said.

  ‘I’ll not take it,’ I said.

  I slapped at Holland’s hand and the Gold Star clattered against the porch wood.

  ‘I can take care of you and that young one better than Billy can,’ Holland said. ‘I got more land. I got electricity. You come live with me.’

  ‘No, Holland,’ I said and backed up till I bumped the railing.

  ‘I’d be a good daddy to that baby,’ Holland said. ‘I’ll be a good husband to you.’ Holland reached his hand to hold mine.

  A gunshot came from the field, no louder than the sound of Holland’s hammer that first afternoon but enough to stop Holland, make him step off the porch to meet Billy under the white oak.

  I stepped off the porch too. Soon enough Holland and Billy stood face to face. Billy had the shotgun but it was Holland doing all the talking.

  ‘Please,’ I said, but whether my word was spoke to Holland or Billy I couldn’t certain say.

  Then the shotgun went off and my word or any another mattered not a whit.

  Holland stumbled backwards, smoke wisping out of his chest like his heart was a fire that had been doused. The baby kicked hard inside me and I had no want to ponder that portent. I ran over to see how bad it was and saw Holland’s face gone white as August cotton bolls. Hopeless as it was I’d of kneeled down beside him but for the way Billy’s eyes had honed on me like it wouldn’t much matter to him to mash that trigger again. Him and me just stood there, quiet as Holland who laid there dead between us.

  It was like that shotgun had blasted all three of us outside time, because the world of a sudden turned still and everlasting, me and Billy and Holland was forever trapped, like weevils in tree sap.

  After a while me and Billy passed some words but wasn’t the least comfort in them. Then Billy went to the shed and rope and a loop of barbed wire. He heisted Holland’s body up on Sam and headed toward the river. I reckoned I knew what the end of trip was.

  ‘Things ain’t never bad as they seem,’ Momma had always said in the worst times.

  I spoke those words out loud but it did not a speck of good. I went inside and sat down at the table but after a while I picked up a rag and started dusting the front room, needful to give my hands something to do besides tremble. I ran my cloth across the fire-board but when I picked up the clock it slipped from my hand and hit the floor. The glass wasn’t broke but the hands was on top of each other like dead man’s hands and they was every bit as still. Just be ever thankful that glass ain’t broke, I thought, for broke glass is the most bad luck there is. I laid the cloth down and went outside, figuring there’d be less things that could be tore up in the yard. I scattered cracked corn for the chickens, then got me some water from the well.

  I was headed back to the house when I heard a shotgun blast down by the river. My knees got saggy and the water pail felt heavy as my heart. I laid the pail on the ground and steadied myself over to the porch steps.

  All of everything bad roamed through my mind. Maybe Holland hadn’t been dead. Maybe he’d got the shotgun and killed Billy. Carolina Power men had been up and down the river all summer. Maybe Billy had shot one of them too.

  But my most worse thought was the sure likeliest, that Billy had leveled that gun on himself.

  I sat there on the porch and waited, for it was all there was to do. If the worst had happened I’d soon enough see Sam, making his way back to the barn, maybe with Holland still strapped on his back. I closed my eyes. Let this all be a dream, I told myself. Let me wake up in my bed and all this just be imaginings.

  It seemed a whole year passed before I saw someone coming up the riverbank. He stepped into the cabbage and picked up a hoe. I knew then it was Billy. I was going to go to him, tell how scared I’d been with all the bad thoughts loose in my mind but I knew he wouldn’t want me down there. I watched him chopping the cabbage and knew what he was saying to me without the bother of words. Go on with your chores, Amy, each lift of his hoe said, act like nothing ain’t happened.

  I leaned myself off the steps to go inside and start a noon-dinner I had no craving for. That’s when I saw the Gold Star, shiny on the gray boards like a piece of mica. I knew I had to hide it but not in the house. I crossed through the barbed wire Holland had strung and found a stump with a rot-hole. I laid the Gold Star inside. Even if it was to be found it’d be on Winchester land, not ours.

  Billy stayed in the fields till suppertime. When he came in the furrows in his brow looked to be cut deeper. His gray eyes looked washed out and empty, the white of them red-veined like he hadn’t slept for months.

  I hugged him a long time. It was something he must have needed much as me for he wasn’t the least wanting to let go. It was easy to reckon the why of that. Like me he’d had a mess of bad imaginings trailing him all day.

  It was good for the both of us to hold onto something real, something we hadn’t to be afraid of, because Billy was Billy again, not the man who’d killed Holland or the man who’d talked scowlful at me. We went on inside and sat down to supper but neither of us had any hunger though we’d had not a crumb since breakfast.

  ‘I had to shoot Sam,’ he said. ‘If anybody asks, tell them broke his leg.’

  Billy’s eyes wandered out the window, then come back to mine.

  ‘Sheriff Alexander gave me a little visit.’

  When Billy said that I got weak and trembly again for I hadn’t figured that part of it would be on us so hasty.

  ‘He’ll be back and he’ll certain sure have some words with you,’ Billy said. ‘If he asks about Holland, you or me didn’t see him at all today and he ain’t been over here the last few months. We’re going to go about it like nothing happened.’

  Billy gentled his words, but there was iron in his eyes. ‘You understand?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And you ain’t never going to tell me what you did with Holland?’

  ‘It’s one less thing you have to act out not to know,’ Billy said.

  There was no doubting the smarts behind Billy’s words, for there’d be plenty enough else for me to lie about. l looked at Billy and wondered how after all that had happened this day we could sit down to supper and act like things was no different than any another evening. But the how of that was easy enough answered. A time such as this was when you most had to do such a thing, for it was the most common things that might could get you through.

  I recollected what Momma did when my Uncle Roy got killed in the World War. She’d been on the porch that morning with a peck basket of pole beans and a big gray-metal wash tub when my Uncle Wade came to the farm to tell her. Momma had laid her chin on her chest. You could see the tears dripping into that big wash tub but all the while she kept stringing and snapping beans. She hadn’t quit till everyone of those pole beans was inside a mason jar.

  As I thought of that morning years ago I reckoned how shameful it was to argue me and Momma being the same. Momma did no wrong to profit that kind of misery but I did plenty to bring about mine.

  ‘I’ll start on a baby crib tomorrow,’ Billy said, getting us both back out of ourselves. ‘You best lay down for a while,’ he said. ‘You and that baby need some rest.’

  ‘I reckon I will,’ I said and got up, leaving the dishes and pots where they laid for it hit me of a sudden how wore out I was, like I’d had so much worrying up to that moment I hadn’t had a chance to take notice.

  I laid down without a hope of sleep for my mind was busy as a bee hive. I kept seeing that smoke coming out of Holland’s chest. I kept hearing what Holland said to me on the porch.

  The sun dipped behind Sassafras Mountain after a while. The last light drained from the window but all that meant was I didn’t no longer need shut my eyes to see Holland there on the ground dead.

  When Billy came to bed he nuzzled up close for the first time in ever a long while. He laid his hand flat on my belly and there was comfort in knowing he wanted to feel the baby stir. It was a way of telling me that whatever happened we’d all
three be a family.

  Good a husband as he’s been to you, how could you have ever had feelings for another, I said to myself. I wanted us to hold each other so I turned, not sure of what he might do.

  But his wanting was strong as mine. We rubbed our bodies together in the dark and it was better than any time other. It was like all that had happened in the last few months, all that had happened today, had got us to where nothing could ever more be hidden between us. I held him tight and pushed his body against mine and soon me and Billy was moving together in a way we never had before.

  ‘Just lay there and let him have his way,’ Momma had told me the day before I married, like it was a shameful thing for a woman to show a man how to pleasure her body. I was beyond such as that now.

  ‘Keep doing it, Billy,’ I said. ‘It feels so good when you’re in me.’

  We did other things, things I’d never have reckoned to have done with Billy even in the dark. It was like I was opening up more and more to him, showing him everything there was of me, our bodies swirled together like two creeks becoming one. But all the while I kept my eyes wide open, let the moonlight that spilled on the bed show me Billy’s body, Billy’s face. I was afraid to shut my eyes, afraid if I did it would be Holland’s body tangled with mine, Holland’s breath hot against my ear.

  Soon enough we was breathing fast, touching and kissing in a heavy-fevered sort of way. Then it was like as if my body was nothing but water spreading out into the dark, each ripple taking me farther and farther away from all that burdened me. I came back to myself slow, slow enough for to fall asleep.

  After the day Holland got shot, that baby was persistent in letting me know it was inside of me. It fussed and kicked most any hour like it was afraid I’d forget it was there. The more real that baby was inside me the more everything else seemed trifles. Even the law searching every nook and cranny of the farm didn’t heavy my mind much as it ought have. September came. Things I would have made much notice of any other fall—how beech trees turned shiny bright like they was filled with goldfinches, or how maple leaves favored red stars, hardly caught my eye.