One Foot in Eden

by Ron Rash

  Amy reached me a lantern and I lit it.

  ‘Step ahead of us and be the bell-cow,’ Sheriff Alexander said. ‘I’d rather see a snake before I put my foot down on him.’

  ‘What you got on your mind, Sheriff?’ Bobby Murphree asked as we followed the field edge to the water.

  ‘Maybe just a snipe hunt, but I don’t think so.’

  The strut in his words laid heavy on my mind as we waded across. I recollected what I’d heard about the Columbia jailhouse, the way men lived in packs like wolves and did things you wouldn’t want to dwell on to those that wasn’t a part of their pack. I was thinking I’d be looking forward to the state killing me after a few months being sport for such men.

  But I knew that to be a lie quick as I thought it. I’d still want to live, no matter what men might do to me in jail. If I did have to die I couldn’t think of no worse way than a sit-down in the electric chair.

  I led Sheriff Alexander and Bobby Murphree into the woods, walking slow, waving the lantern low in front of me for Sheriff Alexander was right that copperheads and satinbacks liked to crawl at night. My mind was near as fevered as it had been when I killed Holland, for I recollected what I’d been told about Ansel Crowe when the state killed him for a murder over in Long Creek.

  His family went down to Columbia for the execution. Ansel’s brother had told me how they’d watched through a big piece of glass while the guards strapped Ansel in and then put a hood over his face. That had made it worse, because Ansel was jerking his head all every way to keep them from getting the hood on, trying to gain himself a few seconds. When they’d turned on the electricity Ansel’s body tried to raise up out of the chair. His hood had caught fire like a match. The warden had told Ansel’s family he’d felt never a thing but like Ansel’s brother had said, how the hell did that warden know what Ansel had felt.

  I tried not to think about Ansel but I couldn’t forget it. The lantern got trembly in my hand. Only the dark kept Sheriff from knowing the state I was in.

  You’ll walk this slow when they take you to the electric chair, I said in my mind but it was as like the woods had whispered it to me. My legs buckled and I almost fell. If I had I’d of been too feather-legged to get up. I’d of probably broke down and confessioned it all right then and there.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ Sheriff Alexander said.

  Yes, I told myself, watch yourself. Don’t give yourself away. Make them show Holland’s body to you. I took slow breaths trying to settle myself as we stopped in front of the white oak.

  A possum wiggled out of a hole in Sam’s flank like it was getting born. It was bloated like a tick, its belly rubbing the ground. The possum raised its bat face and hissed before heading toward the river.

  ‘We got to move that horse,’ Sheriff Alexander said. He looked at Bobby Murphree.

  ‘Do you think if we put a rope around its neck we could drag it a few yards?’

  I didn’t know the exact of what he was studying. What I did know was he hadn’t raised that lantern toward the white oak’s branches or told Bobby Murphree to shimmy up the tree. Keep calm, I told myself for the hundredth time since dawn, and keep a bridle on your mouth.

  ‘We can try,’ Bobby Murphree said.

  He made a noose and tightened it around Sam’s neck. He didn’t take a breath while he did it and came back over to us sucking air like he’d been underwater.

  ‘You help too,’ Sheriff Alexander said to me.

  The three of us gripped the rope end and dragged Sam till Sheriff Alexander said stop. He took the shovel and stepped to where Sam had laid and stabbed the ground a few times.

  Sheriff Alexander looked up at me like I had doublecrossed him somehow and I knew if he didn’t reckon where Holland was in the next minute or so he never would if he lived a hundred years. Because he was shutting away a possibility the same way you nail a board over a well you’re sure has gone dry.

  We recrossed the river. As we came up the bank I smelled rain. The cicadas had quieted some and I reckoned they smelled it too. I wondered if maybe there was something to killing blacksnakes after all.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Sheriff Alexander said when we got to the house. ‘Who knows what might turn up, especially after a good rain.’

  But his voice had no swagger like it had earlier. He was fishing with a bare hook and the both of us knew it.

  I stepped inside the house and watched the law car’s red tail lights disappear down the washout. This time Sheriff Alexander didn’t stop and turn around.

  ‘I think everything is going to be all right,’ I told Amy, and she nodded. She came over and hugged me, the baby pressing my belly.

  ‘There have been times of late I’d never have believed it,’ Amy said. ‘But I almost can now.’

  I kissed Amy on the cheek.

  ‘I’m out to the shed to start on that crib.’

  ‘You ain’t obliged to just for me,’ Amy said. ‘It can wait if you’re wore out.’

  ‘I don’t mind none,’ I said. ‘I won’t tarry longer than to get a start on it.’

  I poked around the shed a while and finally settled on some wild cherry I’d put an axe to last winter. It was pretty wood and I knew it would please Amy. I sat down at my lathe and busied myself, pumping the lathe and working the wood with the chisel. The lantern light was shadowy but it was enough. The wild cherry had a bright smell, like honeysuckle. The breeze made the shed door creak.

  Bring that rain this way, wind, I said to myself, bring enough to keep me out of my fields and in this shed come tomorrow, a big enough rain to wash the Dog Star out of the sky. That wood felt right and comfortable in my hands. It was a happy kind of work making that crib and I soon lost myself in it, the way you can when you’re doing something pleasing.

  Amy came to fetch me after a while, though it was hard to know if ten minutes or two hours had passed. We went to bed and joined flesh again. It was different than the night before, not so much needful but sweet and contenting.

  Afterward I laid there, my hand on Amy’s belly. For the first time I duly felt that young one was mine too and that damped my eyes. I made promises to myself and to God to be a good daddy. I thought about the sinner on the cross Jesus had saved and prayed God and Jesus to forgive me. Unlike my prayer in the white oak, I reckoned this one might have a chance of being heard.

  I felt the baby kick and at the same moment the window lighted up. Signs of new beginnings, I thought. The cicadas was hushed in the trees and it was like the whole world was quiet and listening. A breeze lifted the curtains on the window. I heard the first grumble of thunder coming across Sassafras Mountain.

  It wasn’t long before drops of rain tapped the roof and that’s the best sound ever I’ve known to make a body drowsy. I knew if I rathered I could be asleep quick as a cat. But I didn’t want to sleep yet, because for the first time in months I didn’t feel a loneliness in my heart. I just wanted to lay there with that good feeling awhile.

  Amy nuzzled her back closer to my chest. The rain came harder, setting in like a dog settles in front of a hearth. I let my thoughts carry out the window to the corn and beans and the splats of rain turning dust back to dirt. I thought of the roots sipping up that rain and it raising through stalks and stems like a river reversing and going up its prongs. I knew many of my plants it was too late for but some would make it. That was a high yield to what I’d of expected yesterday.

  I felt the young one stir again and told myself my luck had changed, was changing with every drop of rain that fell on my thirsty fields. Next spring I’d plant just tobacco in my bottomlands and I’d have electricity and a new truck come harvest time. That’s what I told myself as I let sleep fall over me like warm rain.

  It was the first week in November when I went back across the river, on a scawmy morning when fog covered the fields like the earth itself was smoldering. I carried a shovel and burlap cabbage sack. Out hunting sang, I’d say, if I happened on anyone, though that was ever so doubt
ful on such a dismal morning.

  Sam was nothing but bones and patches of hair moldering into the ground. I shoveled out a hole to bury what was left of him and the ground was boggy enough to make it easy work. I wanted to believe there was something more of him somewhere. I knew the Bible claimed no soul for a animal but I wanted to believe part of Sam somehow lived on. If it wasn’t a soul like a man’s maybe it was some kind of happy lingering of what it had felt to rest easy in the barn after a hard day dragging a plow.

  Then I climbed the white oak. Holland had a tuft of hair on his head but the rest of him was nothing more than bones held together by barbed wire and rope. I loosed the wire and rope and let him fall. A foot and arm broke free and the head scattered off under a poplar sapling.

  After I shimmied down I used the shovel to snap Holland’s backbone in two. I broke off his legs and the other arm and poked out the cabbage sack with his bones. I picked up the head last. That’s when I saw the dog tags laying on the ground. Seeing the dog tags was a bothersome thing, though I couldn’t say the exact why of that.

  I walked a good quarter mile deeper into the woods, up the east face of Licklog. I found a big white ash and let that be the spot. Since the ground wasn’t froze, getting Holland buried was no hard chore. I dug a hole a good three feet and laid the sack in the bottom. I shoveled the dirt back in, then scuttled leaves over where I’d dug and stepped off a ways. You couldn’t tell the ground had ever been bothered.

  ‘You got away with it,’ Sheriff Alexander had said that last afternoon he came, and in some ways it had all been unsettling easy. A part of me troubled over that, because I knew there was a price to be paid some way or another. Even if the state of South Carolina didn’t collect that price, sooner or later God would. That thief on the cross was forgiven but he still had to hang there and hurt. I recollected how Mark warned about the sins of the father being laid on the child. The closer to the baby coming, the more that verse troubled my mind.

  Maybe it was traipsing out in the woods on such a drizzly morning but the next day I felt out of sorts. I figured it for a cold and reckoned it would pass in a couple days. But it didn’t pass. By December I could hardly raise out of bed.

  When the baby came, I tried to be of some good but it drooped me to do the least little thing. But sick as I was, I was ever so eased to see the baby wasn’t afflicted. They wouldn’t let me hold him, which was the right thing with me ailing, but I did get to see him the day he got born. He lay there all asleep and peaceful looking, his little body scrunched up next to Amy. I studied his features careful. What sprigs of hair he had was blonde and fine as corn silk. That and the shaping of his nose and mouth made there no mistaking Amy was his momma.

  By February I was no more able to raise out of bed than years back when I’d had the polio. Fever was thick upon me now. I didn’t get up but to go to the outhouse and that was like walking up Whiteside Mountain. The world got all blurry and dim and I hardly knew it for day or night. All I knew certain was someone else was in that back room with me.

  He leaned out of corner shadows with his dark eyes watching me with never a blink. A strand of barbed wire tore into his brow. The blood from the barbs streamed down his face like tears.

  ‘What do you want of me?’ I shouted at him, but he didn’t answer.

  When Amy came in to lay a fresh poultice on my brow I’d point to him in the corner. Soon as I did he melted into the shadows like black ice.

  ‘There ain’t nothing there, Billy,’ Amy said, but when she left he took shape in the corner again. Just standing there, waiting.

  It was the tea that finally did me some good. By then I was so on the down-go I couldn’t hold the cup. Amy reached it to my lips and I sipped slightly as a hummingbird.

  ‘You got to swallow it all, Billy,’ Amy said, keeping that cup pressed to my lips.

  Day and night for three days, every time I opened my eyes Amy had more tea for me to sip. I could feel it spreading through me, doing its work to cool my fever. Soon enough I held the cup in my hand.

  The fever broke the third evening. I sat up in bed and ate something besides soup for the first time in a far while.

  ‘You look something of your old self,’ Amy said, taking my empty plate.

  ‘I feel mostly alive,’ I said. ‘That’s a come-up from where I been.’

  Come early morning I had to go to the outhouse. I slipped my coat over my long handles and put on my brogans. I lit the lantern and stepped outside.

  A hard frost crunched under my feet. Stars speckled the sky and a wet moon snagged on the white oak’s top branch. Somewhere down near the river a horned owl hooted but the rest of the night was quiet. The bullfrogs was gabbed down in river mud, the cicadas froze dead by frost.

  When I’d done my business, I had a thought to check the mule I’d bought in the fall but went back to the house instead. I was still puny, like something had sapped the very marrow from my bones, but my mind and the world was clear again. I knew in a few days I’d have my strength gained up.

  Amy hadn’t brung the baby to the back room when she’d tended me so it had been a good month since I’d laid eyes on him. I stood by the hearth and held the lamp over the crib, looking as I always had to see Amy in his features. He slept on his back, a quilt pulled up to his shoulders, little fists no bigger than walnuts tucked under his chin like he was praying.

  ‘Isaac,’ I said softly, getting used to the name. I touched his head with my fingers, what hair there was fine and yellow as corn silk. His eyelashes flickered and Holland Winchester’s dark eyes stared straight into mine.

  I knew then my certain future. It was like those eyes was God’s hands opening palm up to show me the way it would ever be. I knew then the truth of that verse about Him seeing the fall of the sparrow. I knew He witnessed the quietest stir of a leaf, the smallest bead of water. I saw the coming years when those eyes would look at me from across the table every meal I ate, would be waiting for me every afternoon when I came from my field. I saw me and him later on working together, putting up hay, planting the fields, and all of a sudden his eyes on me and how it would feel like a icy fishhook stuck barb-deep in my heart and I’d wonder if somehow Holland was watching me from the other side.

  The easy thing to do would have been to walk the four miles to the highway. Some farmer taking eggs or milk to Seneca would get me the rest of the way. If nobody was at the jailhouse I’d set down with my back against the door till Sheriff Alexander or Bobby Murphree showed up.

  But I couldn’t do that. No matter what Amy said that young one was Holland’s too. The only way to do right by Holland was give his child shoes and a full belly and teach him how to be a man. To do those things I’d have to stay on this farm and love him for what he was—a son.

  I hadn’t got away with nothing.

  THE

  SON

  I was four years old when I first knew she was watching me. Momma had given me a puzzle to put together, so I’d laid the bright green and red pieces out on the pew while Preacher Robertson shouted about things I didn’t understand. I couldn’t make the puzzle pieces fit together. I’d soon given up and started fidgeting and looking all around like a kid will do in church.

  I’d looked across the center aisle to the row opposite of us where Mrs. Winchester sat. Our eyes met. At that moment I realized those dark-brown eyes had watched me a long time—not just seconds or minutes but months, maybe years, and not just here in church but from across the barbed wire fence that separated her farm from ours.

  Her eyes locked on mine, like there wasn’t anybody else in that church but me and her. I couldn’t have looked away if I’d have wanted too. Those eyes held me firm as any arms could. They were hungry eyes.

  She fumbled in her pocketbook and took out a peppermint. ‘After church,’ she said, but silently, mouthing the words.

  When the last amen was said I made a beeline through the tall legs of the grown-ups to where she waited. She unwrapped the candy, and her
bony fingers laid the peppermint on my tongue.

  ‘There now, sonny,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you one of them every Sunday.’

  I felt Momma’s hand on my shoulder, her grip firm as her voice.

  ‘Come on, Isaac,’ she said, and she pulled me away from Mrs. Winchester.

  ‘I don’t want you taking candy or anything else from that old woman,’ Momma said in the truck. ‘I don’t want you around her.’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ I said.

  But I lied.

  Whenever I thought Momma and Daddy wouldn’t notice, I sneaked away before or after church and found her. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, played not with other children but with grown-ups. As soon as Mrs. Winchester saw me coming she opened her ragged black pocketbook and took out a peppermint. There was hardly a word between us, like we were spies trading secrets.

  After a while it wasn’t just church. Sometimes when I was playing she’d show up at the fence, always when Momma was inside and Daddy in the fields.

  ‘Here,’ she said, reaching through the rusty barbed wire. ‘You enjoy that sugar tit.’

  By the time I was eight I was sneaking over to her house. On days breath bloomed from my mouth in white puffs and frost or snow crunched under my feet, she poured me cups of hot chocolate. If it was hot she gave me Cheerwine or Coca-Cola in ice-cold bottles that made it taste all the better.

  ‘How are you doing in your school-learning?’ she might ask as we sat at the kitchen table, or‘It looks like we’ll have rain by evening.’

  But it always seemed she was about to say something else. She’d purse her lips as if to speak, then seem to think better of it.

  It was a dark house she lived in, the shades always drawn, the lights never on. There were rifles racked on the walls. Rods and reels cluttered a corner near the door, a pair of men’s boots on the floor beside them. In the kitchen a calendar yellowed above the stove, its edges curled. The month on the calendar was August, the year 1952.