by Deborah Reed
“I’m sorry to have to call you over,” Mrs. Lanie says. “And the day already half gone.”
Annie finishes buttoning her jacket on Mrs. Lanie’s porch.
“I wasn’t sure what else to do,” she continues. “The pickers can’t get here for another two days. They weren’t scheduled for another week.”
“It’s no trouble,” Annie tells her, slipping on her leather gloves. “I was headed over before you called.”
“Do you think we can use the smudge pots?” Mrs. Lanie asks. “I haven’t used them in years.”
“I’m afraid the fruit can’t stay on the trees either way. It’s already ripe,” Annie says, squeezing her stiff gloves into fists while her mother’s voice runs through her head—Why are your hands so rough? When was the last time you picked up your guitar?
Something no one knows about Annie is that she’s spent months sanding down nearly everything in her house. Its rooms smell of her father’s old workshop, fused with resin, wood pulp, sweet and bitter dust. The pine armoire in her bedroom with Made in Mexico stamped on the back was whitewashed when she and Owen first bought it from the flea market, and it’s stood against the wall, holding winter clothes and blankets, virtually invisible for years. But after Owen left she couldn’t stand the way the evening sun lit the deeper streaks of paint, the ones absorbed into the long, slender cracks like narrow bands of fat in a slice of meat. She was filled with an overwhelming urge to strip it lean.
It took weeks of going through the grits before every last trace of paint had been ground away and the wood restored to a brightened, velvety finish. But it didn’t stop there. As the days passed Annie felt a certain irritation when the light in the house was at its fullest and the brassy patina was laid bare across the buffet. Then the mahogany chest in the mudroom, the end tables, a headboard on the guestroom bed. The fireplace mantel where Owen had left the note proved the most difficult with its hand-carved vertical drops, scrolling urn, and fluting and oval rosettes in the corners. She had to use a chemical compound to boil away the stain and then scrub the tiny crevasses clean with the toothbrush Owen had left behind. She scraped and scrubbed until her right shoulder locked in pain, and still she got up at four in the morning to begin again. Foot and paw prints have dotted the dusted floors for months. She finally exhausted all the furniture by her birthday and swiped every surface clean. The only wood left untouched is the instruments. Guitar, dulcimer, bongos in the corner, tambourine on the mantel, and a violin she’d just begun learning to play.
“I don’t have any fuel for them anyway,” Mrs. Lanie says.
“What’s that?”
“The smudge pots.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a lot of work,” Mrs. Lanie says.
“I’m happy to do it,” Annie says.
Mrs. Lanie plucks the keys to her late husband’s old Ford pickup from the tiny hook near the door. She squeezes them inside Annie’s hand. The television blares the local news jingle in the living room behind her. Annie sees the look of recognition in Mrs. Lanie’s eyes and is certain the woman has seen the same mugshot of Calder that’s plastered on the front of the paper Annie’s mother left on the porch.
“I saw your mom was here earlier,” Mrs. Lanie says.
“Do you have enough canned goods?” Annie asks. “The storm might knock out the power.”
“It’s going to be all right,” Mrs. Lanie says.
“Yes,” Annie replies. “Yes it is.”
In the barn Annie heaves the wooden crates into the truck bed and drives to the grove, taking care not to bore deep tracks into the wet grass and loose soil as she parks between the trees.
She hops from the cab with a lantern from the barn and balances her knobby soles in the ribbed bed of the pickup. The lantern reminds her of fireflies, which remind her of Mrs. Lanie stopping by on that first evening without Owen. Annie was floating in a dreary daze, on the verge of unexplained laughter as if everything could only be explained by an elaborate joke. She was sitting on the front porch, watching fireflies, when Mrs. Lanie joined her. For the longest time they just sat there, listening to frogs and crickets pulsing along the lake and beneath the dark edges of the porch. Detour lay behind them in the light of the front door. “I know just how you feel, sweetheart,” Mrs. Lanie finally said. “Everybody knows I lost my husband to the Lord. But what most don’t know is that I had someone else before he came along.” She caressed Annie’s hand with the papery tips of her fingers. “He left me of his own free will,” she said. “And I don’t know what’s worse, this is the God’s honest truth, I don’t know what’s worse. A final good-bye at the hands of the Lord, or a lifetime spent wondering if he’s ever coming back.”
Giant hailstones have beaten some of the upper fruit. Bruised tangelos litter the ground between broken branches and melting balls of ice. Annie knows she needs to get the low-hanging ones first, the ones more vulnerable to frost, but she can’t help trying to include as many as she can grab above her head, the ones hit by the hail. For having such a thick rind tangelos are surprisingly fragile.
Tiny hailstones needle her upturned face. She quickens her reach, snatching the bells of fruit into her gloved hand, alternately, meticulously, plucking the wire picker above her head in the other, then releasing them all into the crate. Reaching, dipping, turning herself around. The crates begin to fill, and yet there are still so many trees. After twenty minutes her hands are already stiff and achy from the cold. Maybe the frost will hold off for a couple more days. Long enough for her to haul the bulk of the crop safely into Mrs. Lanie’s barn.
He married her, Annie. It’s over now. It’s done.
“Calder got himself into this mess,” she suddenly tells the trees. “I beat those boys senseless over him,” she adds, as if the incidents are somehow connected. She examines a tangelo, trying to decide its fate. “Josh.” Her voice strains like the man’s on the radio did that day, giving way to another that doesn’t fit. She tosses the tangelo into the crate for keeps. She wants to say his name again and stops herself, but the emotion it packs bubbles up from her chest all the same. She grips a branch in her fist and rests her forehead against her own shoulder. She catches her breath and begins again.
FIVE
Twenty-eight years ago Annie lifted a steak knife from the kitchen drawer and sneaked out through the screened-in porch. She waited for Calder near the tire swing at the front of the house with the knife hidden in the front pocket of her coverall shorts. It was summer, which meant they were on their way to pick peaches for Mr. Peterson. It meant four hours a day of slippery, risky ladder runs in the heat as they raced to see whose crate would fill first.
Annie never mentioned the knife during her shift. In fact, she nearly forgot about it until they were walking home down the dusty road and she heard, “Hey, retard!” coming up from behind. A breeze lifted the smell of hog farm, sweat, and oily teenage hair.
Annie and Calder weren’t teenagers. They were twelve and eleven years old, and they picked up their pace.
“I’m talking to you, retard,” one of the brothers said.
Annie turned to look at the boys. Their chests were bare and sunken, cherry colored from the sun. Both wore cutoffs with loose fringes fluttering at the knees. Josh had on red high-top tennis shoes without any socks. Gabe wore the same in black. Their rusty hair swung loose and curly, clownish around their ears. Calder had told her that mosquitoes bred in pet bowls and kiddie pools and could travel up to three miles in the muggy night air to thrive off the skin of sleeping kids. From the looks of all the red bumps covering their arms and legs, someone ought to have had enough sense to drain the standing water off their farm. Or else fix the holes in the screens.
Josh grinned. He flopped his hand in the air and gave a cutesy kind of wave.
Annie spit, quick and sharp. She turned her back.
“Mmn,” somebody said.
All week long she’d tried to ignore them, keeping her sticky fists in her pockets
where she jangled loose change from Mr. Peterson. She sang songs beneath her breath, church hymns, especially church hymns, ones she’d picked up the summer before when her mother decided that her children should learn about the Bible at Lakeview Baptist. They lasted three weeks, long enough for Annie to memorize a handful of hymns, and maybe too long for the congregation, including the smiley deacon who Annie could see had begun to count on their dollar in his basket. But a dollar a week wasn’t worth Calder jumping up and down and grunting every time someone got dunked in the baptismal tank. The deacon finally hissed that the Holy Spirit didn’t make people act like that at Lakeview Baptist.
This little light of mine. Annie hated that song. Hated the way it wouldn’t leave her head, and that was the whole point. She could count on it to loop until she and Calder reached their driveway and the Pinckney boys lost their bluster and carried on down the road.
But as much as Annie had tried to distract herself from the Pinckneys, Calder had tried to win them over. “I saw your mama down at Lukeman’s picking up some melons,” he’d say, or something like it, while his legs did a jig on their own. “You know the thing about melons is…” Annie would grab him by the arm and spin him back around while he twisted his neck out and cleared his throat raw. The boys laughed until they choked.
“You stick your finger in a light socket, tard?” Gabe asked now. “Is that what makes you jump around like that?”
Annie thumbed the blade in her pocket.
The boys whooped and howled at the wonderful time they were having.
Her mother had planted a kiss on top of her head when Annie first told her about the Pinckneys. “Just walk away from those boys,” she’d said, breezily, well aware of who they were, though never seeming to take them seriously. She was a popular middle school English teacher with flashing green eyes. Words came from her glamour-girl mouth as if they’d been scratched clean before they reached one’s ears.
“Hey, stupid!” Josh yelled at Calder. “You jerking around like that cause you’re a retard or what?”
Annie rolled her eyes far enough to the side to take in Calder’s face. Her own muscles tensed as if willing his to do the same. But his eyebrows jumped and his mouth—rimmed in Tropical Punch—flicked sideways. He slapped the sweat from his forehead as if the sweat was the cause of all that was wrong with him.
A small, round ache formed in the bottom of Annie’s throat.
The day after her mother had told her to walk away, her father pulled her aside where her mother couldn’t hear and said, “Listen, songbird. A person needs to know what his own limitations are so when he gets pushed beyond them he can rest assured that no one, not even his own sense of right and wrong, can claim he’s acted in any other way than self-defense. After that you can have ‘em shakin like a dog shittin peach pits if you need to.”
Annie let go of the knife, suddenly unable to figure taking on two boys with a single knife. She cut loose from Calder and darted along the shallow ditch, looking for a branch that was big enough. Fresh streams of sweat trailed down her sides.
Calder ran to catch up. He wasn’t the least bit dumb like some people thought. In fact, he was smarter than anyone around, especially when it came to growing things in the hot Florida sun. He knew the difference between nimbus and stratus clouds for nothing besides his own pleasure, and his mind sometimes got so dreamy with tertiary roots and photosynthesis that he didn’t see what was right in front of him.
Calder’s eyelids fluttered. His hands rose to the sides of his hips, opening and closing like sticky traps.
“Here we go.” Annie pulled up a branch that was twice as thick as a baseball bat and slightly shorter than a rake. She heaved it to her shoulder. The sweet smell of peaches under her fingernails mixed with bark and soil and compost. The Pinckneys’ smart mouths were generally lined with spitballs. They made fun of girls with braces and shoved boys whose parents had a little money down onto the shiny hallway floors. In the wintertime with all the windows closed and the heat turned up, Annie had smelled them until she was sick to her stomach. She’d imagined this moment for years.
“Hey, boys. How’s it going?” she said when the brothers caught up.
“Supposed to hit a hundred degrees today.” Calder blinked so hard it was as if he were purposely putting on a show.
Gabe started throwing a fit like his skin was on fire. He slapped himself as if trying to put it out. It looked like it ought to hurt. “F-f-f-fine,” Gabe said in answer to Annie’s question, though he was looking at Calder as if accusing him of stuttering. He and Josh took a moment for laughing. “F-f-f-fine!” He swung his hips and jerked his arms in the air.
Calder sidestepped toward Annie. His shoulder shot at his ear and his eyes squeezed shut even as she knew he was now trying to keep still.
“You look fine,” Annie said. “For an idiot. In fact I’d say you make a perfect example of an idiot, Gabe Pinckney.”
Gabe put his hands on his hips, and it finally occurred to her which animal it was that the Pinckneys resembled. Dolphins. Eyes with too much lid, nose bottled out from the face.
“We’re thinking of getting us a job,” Josh said. “Picking peaches seems like an easy enough thing. What do you think, Gabe? Get us a little pocket money?”
“The thing is, you have to…” Calder sniffed the air once, twice, three times, “pay attention to the shade thrown over by the branches.”
“Is that right. Well, there you go. Can’t be that hard if a retard can do it,” Gabe said.
Calder twisted his neck long and blinked. “Let’s get on home,” he finally said.
“Yeah, let’s get on home,” Gabe said in imitation. “So I can finger you with my quick action finger.”
This seemed to be the funniest thing Josh had ever heard.
It took a moment for Annie’s face to burn with awareness. The crude joke was directed at her.
Josh whooped and cried and doubled over. The thrill he was experiencing seemed to shed onto Gabe. They were both so busy having their hysterics that neither seemed to see the branch swinging left and right into their faces. Annie knocked them to their knees.
Josh held his hands out and shook his head in quick little spurts as if trying to keep the horizon from slipping upright. Blood dripped from his nose.
Calder ducked and scrambled backwards onto all fours and gouged his fingers into the ground and pulled up two fists full of gravel, which he flung at the boys. The rocks bounced like rubber balls off their chests.
It was like having the most satisfying fever dream of her life. The deep blue of the sky, the greens and browns of trees, the wet red blood on the boys’ white faces sharpened into view as if all Annie’s life color had been dulled and filtered out of focus, and only now could she see it in the way it was meant to be seen. Her mind sharpened, too, clicked tighter into place. A part of her was well aware that a person could kill someone with these kinds of blows to the head, but the thought of killing these two boys didn’t equal to putting down the branch.
“The only retard around here is going to be the two of you with half a brain each,” she said.
Gabe looked at her with an eerie grin. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “What a little bitch you are.” He rose and stepped toward her. She swung with a force that began in her feet and worked its way into her hands. The wood made a crackling sound that startled her when it hit the side of his head, but the branch remained in one piece. Gabe yelled out and stumbled sideways. A ball of blood formed on the side of his head.
Her own head began to drift like a hollow, helium-filled skull above her neck.
Josh was still on his knees, rearing back from his brother’s fall when he turned to Annie, arms hanging gorilla-like from his sides. He seemed unsure what to do without Gabe’s direction.
Gabe raised his hand, then his head. Blood pooled in the dip of his sneer.
Josh leaned forward and offered him a hand. Gabe swiped it away.
Calder hopped quickly fro
m one foot to the other.
Blood throbbed at the side of Annie’s neck. The sharp swirl of undigested peach spun up from her stomach. She willed it back down and hit Gabe again, aiming carefully to the right of the bloody knot she’d already caused. He went down just like before, and his fall seemed to signal some direction for Josh, who growled and pursed his lips and lunged at Annie with fingers for claws.
Calder screamed so loud his voice broke midway through. He covered his head and stuck his long leg out and by some miracle tripped Josh and caused him to stumble toward Annie’s knees. She brought the branch down with another whomp, and this time it busted in half on the back of Josh’s head as he fell to the ground. A small trail of blood slid across the pale scalp beneath thin wisps of tangled hair. His smell sharpened as if more filth was let loose from his veins.
The piece of branch in her hands was hardly the size of a ruler. She threw it to the ground and pulled out the knife.
Calder seemed more shocked by the knife than anything else. “What the hell?” he yelled.
The bubble of elation suddenly burst. Annie tried not to cry as the dry fear of what was happening fully set in. The church hymns came back to her. But the reason wasn’t the same.
Calder picked up the piece of branch lying near Josh’s shoulder. He blinked at Annie and the two of them stood with legs apart, ready and waiting for whatever was to come.
Calder looked left and right down the road. “Put that thing away,” he said as he crouched and shoved the boys’ shoulders until they groaned. He stood and nodded to her and she took it to mean that she hadn’t killed them after all.
“Put it away.”
She slipped the knife into her pocket.
“Hey.” Calder shoved each boy in the shoulder again. “Come on. Get up.”
The boys stirred and gradually lifted themselves onto all fours. They cussed and balanced on their knees. Finally, they rose to their feet, brushing themselves off, swatting the flies already darting their wounds. And then they laughed.
