by Laird Hunt
“Come on out now, Alcofibras,” I said.
“Taking my time, just like you,” came his answer.
I could see him. Just as young and dark and fresh as he was when he was still drawing his breath.
Linus Lancaster did not like for Alcofibras to tell his stories to us, but that is not why he got taken to his end. It was one week not long after I’d been named mother to the brood, and Linus Lancaster had brought Horace and Ulysses on the two-day ride to the big town to sell off some of the pigs he’d set loose and had the devil’s time herding up. He’d planned on just bringing Ulysses with him, but the pigs had turned ornery with their freedom and wouldn’t walk straight without sufficient encouraging, so Linus Lancaster took Horace away with him too. That very same evening we had a visitor, and when Alcofibras came back on ahead of him down the lane he passed me and Cleome and Zinnia and said, “That’s the Draper Man come to call.” And when all three of us had cried out, he said, without slowing his step, “Not tonight, and ain’t for you, that’s the Draper Man for me.”
The Draper Man was one of Alcofibras’s stories about the man who comes to measure for the drapes, then has you step out the door with him to cut the cloth he will wrap you up in, then carries you off to your end. The man who came up the lane behind Alcofibras had on a top hat and purple britches. There were two of his help with him. I had Alcofibras take the help out to the barn and went inside the house with Mr. Bennett Marsden, as he said his name was, who was a friend of Linus Lancaster’s from his days in Louisville when he had liked to sing on the stage. I had Zinnia, whom I had struck across the face that morning with the heavy spoon, see to supper, and I had Cleome, whom I had slapped across the back that afternoon with a switch of pig hide, fetch a bottle. They went to their jobs without any word to Bennett Marsden, who sat in Linus Lancaster’s chair at the table and looked at them and said they had done grown up and transformed themselves into fillies.
“That Alcofibras ain’t any more giant or any less ugly than he was, though,” Bennett Marsden said when he had his soup and whiskey. “He still tell all those stories?”
“Have you heard Alcofibras’s stories?”
“Tell you what, I’d like to hear another.”
I sent the girls away and called for Alcofibras to come and stand by the table and tell a story to our guest. Alcofibras came in holding a potato in one hand and an onion in the other.
“Put those things outside and tell Mr. Bennett Marsden a story. He has asked for one,” I said.
Alcofibras was quiet a long minute. He had a way of being quiet that cooked at your patience. I was fixing to correct him on it and for not taking the vegetables outside when his eyes flicked up at Bennett Marsden and he asked if he wanted to hear the story of the potato or the onion.
“Both,” said Bennett Marsden with a laugh.
Alcofibras did not laugh, just let his eyes drop and went back into his quiet and stood there.
“Onion, then,” said Bennett Marsden.
“He called for both,” I said.
“Onion,” said Alcofibras. He tossed the potato out into the yard and held up the onion. Then he went to the counter in the corner and took up the big knife sitting there and cut off its skin. When the onion was skinned he lifted it up and gave it a good sniff. There was some flour and bacon fat and corn pone and chopped apple and stewed oyster at the ready for Zinnia’s cooking. Alcofibras took a little of each of these and set them in a line on the counter. Then he picked up the onion and turned to us again.
“The onion slept with a cord attached to its ankle in the coal cellar unless the coal cellar already had company and then he slept with a cord attached to his ankle in the yard. In the coal cellar the coal spoke to him, and in the yard it was the trees. One night the master came home with his face painted for the stage. The master lay about him until everything he struck had fallen. One did not rise and never would again, and when the master woke from his rage he wept, and before he had finished weeping the onion was gone. The oyster shell he had cut his cord with he kept along with a piece of bacon, a pocketful of flour, two apples, and a hunk of pone. He ran through the streets. His onion legs grew tired, so he took a bite of pone and made them strong. His onion arms and chest grew tired, so he took the oyster shell and cut the air in front of him and continued on. The city stretched before him. He ran toward the rising sun. A woman fetching water asked him why he was running, so he took a bite of one apple and turned her into an apple tree. Her child started to cry, so he took another bite and turned it into a buzzing bee.
“The onion ran and he ran. Near the outskirts a group of men set against him, so he broke off bits of the bacon and turned them into pigs. The pigs set into chasing after him, so he turned and cut at them with his shell. When they were killed he lit a fire and set a pot to boil and hung them over it and scraped them one by one. Then he butchered them and set some of them on skewers and caught their fat in a cup. He could hear barking, so he took off the cooled fat and carved it into a woman, and when he took a bite of his pone that woman blinked her eyes open and off together they ran.
“They ran but she was new to running and fell behind, so he turned her into a twig and put her in his pocket. The dogs came running after them, so he took some of the flour and flung it into the air and the air began to burn. The dogs ran through the fire and men came after them. They came and they came, so he flung more flour into the air and the air filled with water and the dogs drowned.
“When the dogs had drowned he took the twig out of his pocket and turned it back into his wife. They lay together on the mosses. They scratched their backs and fronts against the bark. They floated above the leaves. They had barely finished when his wife said, ‘Here come some men.’ The men carried torches. The onion took a bite of his other apple and the earth split asunder. The heavens raged and its powder kegs roared and a cataclysm ensued. The earth turned to water and the water to earth. Ice smashed at the trees. Time burned. There was a howl in the throat of the winds. Still the men came. He turned his wife into a stone and put her back in his pocket. He turned himself into a ball and went rolling and bouncing through the wood. It was dark, but the onion could see his way by the light of the torches behind him. Ever closer and ever brighter. The trees around him grew taller. They spoke to him. A door opened in one of them and he went into it.
“Inside the tree the sun was warm and there were soft grasses and a stream trickled by. There were sheep in the fields and flowers blooming and fat bees buzzed between them. An old man sat astride a mule and smiled down at the onion. ‘You may stay here for ten years but must never ask for more,’ he said, then rode away. The onion changed himself back into an onion and pulled the stone out of his pocket and made it into his wife again. ‘We can live here for ten years.’ ‘Yes,’ she said. They built a small house and planted a garden. They sat quietly together in the evenings. They lay down on soft blankets woven from cotton that grew wild in the hills. Once he tried to kill one of the sheep, but it scampered away laughing. So they ate that which they grew. By and by his wife had children. One after the other. The children poked sticks in the stream and played in the fields and tamed the sheep.
“When the ten years were almost up, the onion climbed onto one of the sheep and rode off in search of the man who had told them they could stay. He rode for weeks. Once he thought he saw the one he sought and called out to him to let his family stay. Immediately the onion became confused and could not find his way back to his house by the stream. His wife and children by the stream. Beneath him the sheep baaed and died and disappeared. A cunning darkness crept up. The onion heard his master’s laugh. It was hot in the hollow of the tree where the onion was hiding, and pig fat ran from his pocket. His apples were gone, his pone and bacon were gone, he had no oyster shell, his flour was soaked with fat.
“That night the onion slept in the coal cellar with iron on his ankle and his eyes shut from bruising. The next week the onion and his fellows rode out of Louisvill
e in a procession. The onion wore a yoke and strained with the others to pull his master’s wagon. He wore chains and was given nothing to eat.”
“And what happened to the onion in the end?” Bennett Marsden said when Alcofibras had finished.
“I already showed you,” Alcofibras said, holding up the skinned onion.
“So you did, so you did,” said Bennett Marsden and roared, and I called for the girls to come back in and sent Alcofibras and his onion away again.
“Did you know my husband, Mr. Linus Lancaster, in Louisville, then?” I said after I had found my hosting voice, which had gotten lost in that wood with its pigs and sheep and furies.
“Yes, I knew him,” Bennett Marsden said. He said this like it was something to say and laughed at the end of it. When he had finished his laugh, he said Alcofibras hadn’t lost any of his storytelling style, and I asked him which of Alcofibras’s stories he had heard, told him “Black Bark” and “Wet Dough” were my favorites, but he didn’t respond, just looked far away for a while, then asked me for some of Linus Lancaster’s tobacco. I sent Cleome out to fetch it. When she was back with it the kitchen seemed crowded, so I sent her away. Bennett Marsden watched her go out the door. When he had started up his smoking, he pushed his hat back on his head and pointed over at Zinnia, who was stirring her oyster and apple concoction at the long table by the wall.
“I knew the mother to that one and the other too. There was about twice as much to her in terms of dimension, physically speaking, as to either one of these, but she had a pretty face like they do.”
“Was she also in my husband’s service?”
“That’s one way to sum it up.”
“And did she pass?”
“It was the fever took her off is the story got told. A bad gust. She wasn’t the only one that fever struck down.”
Zinnia did not turn when he said this. She did not stop stirring the soup either. Bennett Marsden then showed us a trick about how he could pull his lips back and put his spoon into his mouth through the teeth he was missing on one side. He laughed at his own trick, and I laughed too. Then he turned and asked, though there wasn’t much question to it, if I was the new lady of the house. I reckoned he was looking at me and thinking of Linus Lancaster’s dearly departed, so I straightened up and smoothed my skirt in my lap and asked him if he had known that lady who had preceded me. He gave me a kind of squint when I asked this, then gave it over at Zinnia, then squinted at me again. Then he called over to Zinnia for another spoon and showed us how the trick could be done with two at once.
“Yes ma’am, I knew her,” he said when he had completed his trick.
Bennett Marsden laughed his laugh and drank, and the evening found some tolerable way to complete itself. When we had him into Linus Lancaster’s bed, I asked Zinnia to explain the poor consideration she had tended toward a friend of Linus Lancaster’s from the old days, and she didn’t answer, just looked down at me, so I hit her on the side of the head with the wooden bowl I was holding and she went down on one big knee and stayed there bleeding until I told her to get up.
The next morning Bennett Marsden said he couldn’t wait for Linus Lancaster, but that I should extend his kindest regards and memories of the olden days and their business dealings together, especially their business dealings together, the good and the bad. Then he and his two help left back down the lane, and I told Alcofibras that his Draper Man had come and gone and he ought to feel just like a fool for calling him that and for inventing tall tales about pig fat and magic trees, but Alcofibras would not answer. He walked away, and as he walked away another one of his stories came to me. There wasn’t much to it. It was about a piece of red rope. The whole of the story was that sometimes that piece of red rope lying there without anybody to touch it would move.
Two days later Linus Lancaster came home, and when he heard that his old friend from Louisville, Bennett Marsden, had come to call and had spent the night in his bed, he tied Alcofibras to the oak tree by the barn and whipped him until his back was a sheet of crimson cloth.
We all of us were directed to form up a line and look on while the whipping of Alcofibras was conducted. I had first place in the line because of my standing. Horace and Ulysses stood next to me and Zinnia and Cleome were at the end. Not a one of them said a word. Linus Lancaster had explained to me that Alcofibras should have never let that Bennett Marsden onto the property when he wasn’t there. That Bennett Marsden was a liar and a disreputable individual and should have never been granted access to his piece of paradise while he, Linus Lancaster, was abroad. I was excused from the matter because I had never known that filthy cheat Bennett Marsden in the old days as Alcofibras had. I should have known better than to let anyone into the house when he wasn’t there, and should have been able to judge the quality of the character of the man I had let sleep in his bed and smoke up his tobacco, but it was Alcofibras had to answer.
As that whipping went on you could hear pigs they hadn’t sold off at it in the dusk light at the corners of everything, and out over the field you could see tornadoes of evening birds harrowing the insects.
“You must stop now, Husband,” I whispered at one point. I know the four of them next to me heard this. I also know that Linus Lancaster did not.
When Alcofibras was dead of the crimson cloth on his back, Linus Lancaster had Horace and Ulysses carry him out to the woods for the pigs we had been hearing, but I know that when Horace and Ulysses got Alcofibras out there they took sticks and scraped a hole and buried him and covered the place with rocks so the pigs couldn’t dig him up.
That night, as I lay there in my room while Linus Lancaster paid his visits, I couldn’t conjure up any daisy fields. I couldn’t conjure up any castles in the clouds or lemonade. I couldn’t see my way back to my father’s house with its goose pond and my corner bed. It was just lengths of red rope, rope that shouldn’t be moving, rope untouched that was slithering over the walls and windows, filling my mouth and apron pockets, wrapping field and flower, tree and bush, bird and pig.
5.
SNOW IS COME UP ON Lucious Wilson’s barley field. It falls just every other day now and the wind has taken some of it up over the fence rows. There were some stray dogs through yesterday, and they just walked up over one fence and across the snows of the field and up over the other. I haven’t seen them before. They looked like they had business. I’m happy for this little house. I wouldn’t ever say otherwise. The stove works and heats these old boards. A crack or two court the drafts, but there are hay bales and paper wad to talk to that.
Before I came up into the flat country here and found Lucious Wilson and his farm, I lived in other accommodations. In Spencer County I lived under some boards stretched across an old dogwood. I lived there until I woke up one morning next to a snake attempting to swallow down a rat. In Evansville I had a pallet next to a gun rack. It was a brother and a sister owned the place and sold charms and remedies out of their kitchen. One night I wandered in my sleep and upset one of their buckets. The oil covered the kitchen floor and swept its wet way into the front room where they slept. I’d seen the sister kick a slow goat in its teeth. I didn’t stay to have any of my own kicked out. When I got my way up to Indianapolis I lived in a closet down by the capitol building, and my first week up here, until one of Lucious Wilson’s women found me, I lived my nights in a cold frame attached to an outhouse. I don’t care to count this second how many years ago that was. Lucious Wilson is old now too, and there are the others who call me Scary Sue come up under him and are waiting for him to go. I told them stories when they were young and gave them baths, and they some of them look in on me, but charity passed to the next generation has its limits, and I’m counting on being gone before Lucious Wilson heads out on his way.
It is cold here in Clinton County, Indiana, far up away from Linus Lancaster’s piece of paradise in Kentucky is all I was saying. And that there aren’t many lately of the young ones who come to the house and holler. They t
ried to get me over to church last week, but I slipped on the walk and two of them had to carry me back into the house. About the last time anyone got carried into this house was during the war. It was some soldiers got lost and drunk, and one of them caught a fever and fell off his horse. A little like Lucious Wilson’s pig herder. The battle guns were still a-blazing off somewhere, so Lucious Wilson said they ought to carry him into this little house until he could get back up on his horse and rejoin the festivities. I was still living in the big house then, but I brought him over a supper one night. He was a handsome boy. He had green eyes and fine red lips and little curls in his beard. There have been times even into these older days I’ve enjoyed remembering his face and long arms lying down in the bed that’s just right there behind me. That bed and mattress where I have spent all the nights of these years. There wasn’t much wrong with that boy except being young and wore out on fighting.
I know that there was snow in between what came next in that place in Kentucky and that visit from the Draper Man, but in my mind I just take one little step over the dead Alcofibras, and one little step over myself where Linus Lancaster had beat me down half dead the next week for asking what business he had been in with Mr. Bennett Marsden in Louisville, and a hop over Cleome and Zinnia and the dark thing that had recommenced nightly visiting them, to that knock on my door early that morning that interrupted a dream I had been busy having about grinding chicory for a breakfast drink.
There was a knock and then some talking, then the door opened fast and both girls came in. They took me up out of my bed and pulled me through the door and down the hall past their own door and into the kitchen. They sat me at a chair opposite my husband. It was dark in the kitchen. And cold. My husband looked to be sleeping. Like he had been up the night drinking his drink and had just settled out where he sat. Cleome turned up the lamp and Zinnia went behind Linus Lancaster and shoved him and he came down onto the table and his face dropped down through the lamplight, and you saw before you saw the pig sticker in the back of his neck when his face dropped down through the light that there wasn’t going to be any more singing or visiting and whippings come from him. The face was as white as a piece of china plate, and you could see the veins of it writhing in the lamp flicker like worms a-swarm in milk soup. The mouth was open like he was preparing to cough, and his eyes were looking up and over to the right. The hairs that lived in his nose grazed down through the lamplight too. They looked like they were trying to jump out overboard. Like hooked hands going down to drown.
