One Foot in Eden

by Ron Rash

  For a minute or two I just laid there on the snow and checked myself for broke bones. There wasn’t any, though I knew I’d be purpled up good by morning, if I saw morning. I tried to get myself calmed down. You ain’t too far from her house, I told myself, no more than a field’s length away. But my notion of direction was lost in the tumble. Downhill, I told myself. You’re up on a ridge. You go down and find the path. If you can’t find the path, find the creek. It’ll lead you the rest of the way.

  That sounded easy enough except I had tumbled onto level ground. Every step I took in any direction a laurel branch slapped my face or tripped my feet. It was like some kind of monster with a thousand arms was grabbing at me. I was soon spun around so much as to not reckon if my feet and face was pointed in the same direction.

  There was no moon or stars to follow and the wind had died down so as not to give me direction. The snow was just another thing confusing me. I was in the worst kind of fix for the cold had got on the inside of me when I took my tumble. I reckoned I’d not last if I had to wait out morning to see my way to help.

  Then I remembered the kitchen matches. I reached down slow, almost afraid to know sure if they was still there, for they was the last smidgen of hope I had. I felt the box bulged in my pocket and I almost cried for the relief of it,

  I struck one and got a glimsen of the laurel slick and stumbled a few feet in one direction. Then I struck another one and made my way a few more feet the same way. My fingers counted ten more matches but I saw no choice but to use them. I struck another and then another and I’d made it back into trees and where the land took a slanting.

  I knew which way the creek was now but I was of a sudden weary and felt ready to just set down and get it over with. It was the cold doing that to me and I made myself mindful of things to make me go on.

  Think of your baby, I told myself. After all you done to be his momma, you ain’t going to leave him without a momma. Think of your man too. He’ll die if you do. I prayed then. There seemed no other way I’d get saved.

  ‘Get me out of this fix, God,’ I prayed right out loud. ‘Don’t do it for me. Do it for that innocent baby. Get me out of this so he can have parents to raise him.’

  I struck another match and made my way a few more steps. I struck another and saw the big rocks but I was on the other side above them now. I struck three more matches. I didn’t find the path, had walked right across it without knowing, but I found the creek. I figured to be close now. I stepped right into the creek and walked up it, not caring that my shoes was getting doused. I fell a couple of times but got myself up and walked on.

  Then all of a sudden water splayed out in two different directions. I took another step and my feet was on dry land and it was like the creek had disappeared under the ground.

  I raised another match and saw the creek forked. I was standing on dry ground there between two prongs. At any another time I’d have known to follow the left fork but the cold had got so into my mind I couldn’t think out the simplest thing. I just stood there between the two prongs, my body going numb and no idea which way to go.

  Then something brushed against my left leg, something big. If I’d of had my full mind that might have finished me off. I’d have been near terrified to death it was a panther or a bear. But my mind wasn’t working that way. I wasn’t scared. I was just a little curious to what might be bothering at me.

  I fumbled a match from the box and dropped it in the creek. That left me one. I steadied my hands best as I could and struck the last match and there beside me was the black dog I’d last seen in April. The dog nudged my hand and took a few steps up the left prong. The match went out but I followed the sound of him, more because it was easier than trying to think out anything else to do.

  We hadn’t gone but a few yards when I saw a square of light. I stumbled across the yard and up on the porch. I knocked on the door. Then I just slumped down on the porch and everything grew like as if a coffin lid had closed over me.

  When I woke up I was warm. I opened my eyes to a big fire a arm’s length from where I laid. A pillow eased my head and heaped heavy on me. A chair, the same chair I’d sat in last, crowded close to the fire. My stockings and dress and overcoat laid on it.

  ‘You’ve had yourself quite a adventure tonight.’

  I turned and saw Widow Glendower in a chair on the other side of my pallet. She was knitting, the balls of thread at her feet. The big needles caught the firelight and glimmered like silver.

  ‘How long I been asleep?’ I asked, my face still mashing the pillow.

  ‘Oh a good long time, girl. It’s near dawn.’

  That woke me up good for my first thought was if Billy had made it through the night. I got up and faced the fire as I put my dress and stockings on.

  ‘So how’s your young one’ Widow Glendower said.

  Warm as I was it was like that old woman had laid a handful of snow on my heart. I turned to face her.

  ‘My baby’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘I thought we had us a agreement.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d hurt him.’

  Widow Glendower gave a laugh.

  ‘So you believe that slack talk about me after all. Is that why you got salt in your pocket?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, saying it bold for my mind was heavy with how Billy was faring.

  ‘And what might be your reason for to visit me?’ she said.

  ‘My man’s pining away with a fever.’

  ‘And you think I done that to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a way to get square with me for not letting you be my granny-woman.’

  ‘If I wanted to revenge you why didn’t I let you freeze to death out on my porch?’ Widow Glendower asked.

  Because maybe you got the wanting of something more just folks’ lives, I thought.

  Widow Glendower shuffled into the other room. She came back with a poke and went straight to the big blue trunk in the corner. She bent down and sorted out what she was looking for.

  ‘Here,’ she said, laying the poke at my feet. ‘There’s willow bark and boneset. Make him a tea of it and his fever will break.’

  ‘He’ll live then?’

  Widow Glendower didn’t answer.

  ‘You claim to see things that ain’t yet been.’

  ‘I reckon I do,’ she said, like it was something she’d forgotten. She looked into the fire. I recollected again what Grandma had said, that flames was the devil’s tongue reaching up out of hell. If that was so I reckoned that tongue was speaking to Widow Glendower now.

  ‘Fire and water,’ she finally said. ‘Fever’s a fire. Your man’s not to die by fire, Leastways if you give him what’s in that poke.’

  I looked out the window and saw the dark was drawing back. Snow had quit falling and everything looked quiet and still like a calendar picture. I fetched my shoes from under the chair and laced them up. Then I grabbled in the matchbox and pulled out the Gold Star.

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘I found it in the woods a few months ago. It looks to be pure gold. I reckon it ain’t enough of what I owe but it’s something.’

  I didn’t know if she’d take it or not but she opened her palm.

  I put on my coat and picked up the poke.

  ‘I best be headed back home.’

  I stepped out on the porch and the dawning was milky-blue.

  The snow had hardened up and made a crunching sound every time I laid my foot down, but it wasn’t slippery and I made my way down to river without much bother. The rest of the way home was trifling for the sun was out bright by then.

  When spring returned and the dogwoods lit up the woods, I tried not to think of all that began the last time they had bloomed. I could keep those rememberings off my mind days at a time for I was so busy tending to Isaac and my chores. Yet thoughts of those bad times laid deep in my mind like river snags. They would raise to the surface ever so often just to let me know they was still there. When they did I had never a doubt ther
e’d come a time I’d pay for all that had happened and the cost would be a lot more than a piece of gold.

  THE

  HUSBAND

  When deep summer comes and the Dog Star rises with the morning sun, the land can scab up and a man watch his spring crop wrinkle brown like something on fire. It’s the season snakes go blind. Their eyeballs coat over like pearls and they get mean. A rattlesnake allows no warning and a milk snake that would have cut the dust to the tall grass in June quiles up and strikes at anything that steps its way. It’s a time when foxes and dogs go mad. They’ll come shackling toward you, their lips snarly and chins white with slobber. You’ll raise your gun and they’ll come on like they just want to get it done with.

  Sometimes that time of year a man will act no different. A man who any another time would step around trouble, a man who, if his truth be known, might be a bit of a coward, will of a sudden turn mean and crazy. He’ll do something nobody, even himself, would reckon likely. He’ll even kill a man.

  ‘You couldn’t give me a child. I had to be with one that could,’ Amy said the first week of August when her stomach swelled like a muskmelon and neither of us could counterfeit any longer not to know.

  By then that baby was about the only thing growing. Corn stalks stood dead in the fields, the beans half-buried in gray dust. The only crop that looked to make it was tobacco I’d planted beside the river, that and some cabbage, if the groundhogs didn’t get it.

  ‘Whose child is it?’ I asked, like when I’d been down by the river that spring plowing I hadn’t looked up to see Holland Winchester saunter past the big white oak that marked the property line between his family’s land and mine, and like when I came back to eat my noon-dinner that day my beans and bread wasn’t ready and Holland had left his mark on Amy, a spot on her neck purpled like a fox grape.

  I waited for Amy to answer my question, my mind taking me back a month to the July afternoon I first suspicioned her being with child. The weather had turned summer by then so the wash tub was out back near the well. After supper Amy had got her towel and such and went to bathe while I took my whetstone out and sharpened my scythe. She’d drawed her water early afternoon so it’d be sunny-warm come evening. All she needed was to take off her clothes and get in.

  When I’d got my scythe sharpened I tarried by the window and watched Amy bathe, because that was a sight so pretty as to make my heart ache, not so much in a lusting way but something somehow above that. A woman is never more pretty than when she’s bathing or so it was when I looked at Amy. A man bathes just to get dirt off him but it seems more to a woman than that. Amy bathed in a slow, easeful way like the soap and water washed away every care the day had laid on her. Then she took the tin and sloshed water over her head and her yellow hair darkened to the color of honey.

  The sun had been slaunchways over Sassafras Mountain so when Amy raised from the wash tub the water streamed off her like melting gold. There’s no angel in heaven more lovely than this, I told myself. Then Amy turned as she stepped from the tub. I saw the curve her belly, a curve no more than the scythe blade I held in my hand but enough to wonder me about her and Holland Winchester. I raised my finger to the blade and ran it across the edge. I felt the steel cut right through. Drops of blood bright like holly berries spotted the floor.

  I hadn’t wanted to follow that trail where Amy’s ripening belly led. I tried for a month to keep what I suspicioned about Amy and Holland clear of my mind but it came creeping back when my thoughts got idle, the same way a rat waits for things to get all still and silent before it shows. I hadn’t said the first word to her. I was scared to, scared as I’d been when I reckoned the polio would take my legs from me.

  What really set the fear in me wasn’t so much Amy carrying another man’s baby but losing her to that other man, because in the years we’d been married she’d became a part of me ever sustaining as my legs. Even when I was in the fields and her up at the house, my thoughts was often upon her. I’d think of her in the house cooking or canning, knowing that though we was working apart we was still working for each other.

  So all that July I hadn’t offered a word to Amy about her belly. I’d known once it was words something would come of those words. If that something was losing Amy I’d be in a fix I couldn’t see my way out of. I’d been like a man in his field who sights a tornado hauling towards him and puts his head down reckoning if he don’t look up and admit to its coming it might some-ways pass him by.

  But Amy’s belly had just kept on waxing like the moon. Now as the Dog Star raised up with the morning sun, that tornado I’d closed my eyes to had sucked me up in it and I had no notion of where it would set me down. But I was about to find out on a August dog day when most everything that surrounded me had seemed to lay down to die.

  ‘Whose child is it?’ Amy said, repeating me as she raised her blue eyes to mine. ‘It’s my child, Billy. But it can be ours if you want.’

  Her saying that gave me pause, because there’s currents that run deep in a woman, too deep for a man to touch their bottom. I seen the look on Amy’s face when her younger sister’s children crawled into Amy’s lap. I’d heard her in the kitchen singing the last few months when I came up from my field. Amy had always carried a pretty tune but there was a difference now, a kind of smile in her voice I’d never heard before. She hadn’t been singing because of me or Holland Winchester. At least that’s what I reckoned. But I had to know for sure.

  ‘What about him?’ I asked, not wanting to own up Holland’s name, because if I did I’d bring his face and body back into the house and I’d see what I’d been hauling in my head for months now Holland Winchester and Amy in the back room, their clothes half off, him between her legs like a plow in a furrow.

  ‘What about him?’ Amy said, repeating me again.

  ‘You leaving me for him?’ I asked, for now that we’d started it was best to go ahead and see how the land lay between us.

  Amy looked at me, her blue eyes steady as a plumb line. ‘No. I’m your wife, Billy, not Holland’s.’

  I suppose that should of swaged me some but right then I didn’t feel nothing like good. Every man must eat a peck of dirt before he dies, Daddy had once told me. I felt I was eating of it by the shovelful.

  ‘When’s the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Two months ago,’ Amy said. ‘Soon as I was sure it took I told him not to come round no more.’

  ‘What’d he say to that?’ I asked.

  ‘He didn’t say much. I told him certain it was over and done with.’

  ‘Does he know you got a baby coming?’

  ‘No, that’s not his concerning,’ Amy said. ‘What’s happened between me and him is finished but it ain’t finished between us, without you want it to be. That child can be mine or it can be ours.’

  Amy lifted her hand and brushed back a strand of yellow hair that had fell over her eye.

  ‘So what you going to do, Billy?’ she asked.

  At that moment I truly did not know. I knew what many man might do. He’d raise his hand and slap Amy stout enough to lay her flat on the floor. Some would do worse. Then they’d walk out the door and never come back.

  ‘Do you love me?’ I finally said, my eyes steady on hers. That was my last question, the one that most mattered.

  Amy’s blue eyes looked tired, the way they’d been a lot the last couple of months, but she looked pretty, prettier than she’d ever looked, her bosoms and hips fuller, her skin bright and glowing like she’d bathed in a tub of sunshine.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘You swear you’ll never be with him again,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve done told you that,’ Amy said.

  ‘Swear it then,’ I said.

  ‘I swear it,’ Amy said.

  In bed that night I listened to the cicadas calling for rain. The window was open but the air laid on the night still and stale as stump water. I couldn’t hear the river the way I could any other time of the year. It was easy
to believe the dog days had sucked it dry as a snakeskin.

  I laid with my chest pressed against Amy’s back, my hand on her stomach. I could feel the baby stir under my palm. As I dozed on and off it seemed I was touching my own belly, the young one inside me, not Amy. I was thinking, the way I often had since seeing Doctor Wilkins, about what my life might could have been without the polio.

  Doing that was like mashing your tongue on a sore tooth, something that only gave more pain but you couldn’t keep from doing it.

  My thoughts went back twenty years, to the morning I’d stirred awake with my head hot and hurting and my legs not listening when I told them to stand me up. Momma had her fearings what it was and sent Daddy on horseback to Seneca for Doctor Griffen. Momma stayed on her knees while me and her waited through a hard couple of hours.

  ‘Please, God, don’t take my onliest boy from me,’ Momma said over and over.

  She was less than certain to do anything else, even give me a sip of water though my throat was parched as roasted chestnuts.

  Doctor Griffen had finally bumped up through our pasture in his big Dodge car. He stepped in the house toting a black doctor’s bag big enough to be a grip. He was old, his hands liver-spotted and shaky, but Momma confidenced him.

  ‘Can you move your legs?’ he asked.

  ‘No sir,’ I said.

  Doctor Griffen just nodded to that.

  ‘I’m needful of some water,’ I said.

  Doctor Griffen took the stethoscope from his bag.

  ‘We’ll get you something to drink in a minute, son.’

  He poked the stethoscope around my chest, his eyes closed shut and listening. Then he asked had my neck stiffed up. I had to nod because by then I had a thermometer sprouting in my lips. He put his hands on my legs, the softest hands I’d ever known for a man. He took out the thermometer and studied it. Then him and Momma went out on the porch a few minutes. I finally got my glass of water and was asleep quick as it took me to close my eyes.