by Laird Hunt
“You must have your breakfast now, Mother,” Cleome said after my husband’s head had hit down on the table opposite me and I had been permitted to consider it for a time. The pig sticker in his neck looked like a thick-stem flower that had had its head lopped off. Like it had had its head lopped off but not yet set in to droop.
“I aim to get you up some of that pig mush, fix you up just right now,” Cleome said. There were sundries on the board behind her. A small fire in the stove. Zinnia nodded. There was sweat on her forehead. It looked like her face was bubbling, like it was porridge fixing to depart the pot. The room was still cold.
“I don’t care to take my breakfast just now, Cleome,” I said.
“It’s already cooking,” said Cleome.
“It’s already cooking, Mother,” said Zinnia.
“I have spoken,” I said. “We must tend…We must…”
“We must what, Mother?” Zinnia said. She said this in a whisper from just behind me. I hadn’t seen her move. Cleome had stopped working the mush but was still looking down to it through the spit from the fat and the orange steam. I couldn’t remember ever having seen her at the stove for anything more than serving before.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I put my hands on the table in front of me and Zinnia put her hand on my shoulder, and it felt exactly like I was trying to stand myself up under a piece of iron bar. Zinnia had on that hat Linus Lancaster had put her in the shed over those years before. She had been in that shed many times since. I had put her in that shed. I had put Cleome in that shed. I had put them both in there since Linus Lancaster had thrown me down onto the floor out of his bed and had set in to visiting them. Visiting them while they dreamed of anything but twisting daisies with me. I had put them both in there since Alcofibras had been fitted for his drapes by Mr. Bennett Marsden. I had stood in the sunlight of the doorway and told them I was going to drop the key to their shackle down the well. Zinnia leaned her face down around in front of mine and there was the sweat bubbling on her brow, and I thought I could see myself in each dull black bead, and Cleome came up next to her and took the hat off of her sister’s head and put it down on mine.
“You going to eat your breakfast now, Mother,” Zinnia said.
“Where is Horace? Where is Ulysses?” I said.
“Run off. Run off far away. Gone from this place. Ain’t never coming back,” said Zinnia.
Cleome set down an empty bowl, an empty spoon, and an empty cup in front of me.
Then Zinnia picked them up, one by one, and fed them to me.
Now let me tell of my four-square kingdom. At one corner of it was the barn where Alcofibras had dwelled and spun out his stories and the oak tree where he had been whipped into the other world. At another was the miserable house where I had lived for six years and where Linus Lancaster had paid his visits and been lord to us all, and where he now sat royal and dead. At the third was the little bridge to the creek-lipped field Horace and Ulysses had put in where once there had been pasture for horses and where I had once frolicked at my ease with those around me, and where now the pigs liked to come down out of the wood and lay down their huge carcasses and roll and tumble like flippered creatures on some black beach at the edge of hell. At the fourth was the shed with its chain and its rats. In the middle of it was the deep well we pulled our water up out of and dropped rocks down into when it froze. All around us were the woods. Through the woods went the lane. Down that lane my figment self would trot. Up into the leaf-lit sky my figment self would rise. Into the black Kentucky earth my figment self would sink. Down the well and past the dangling ghost of young Cleome and out through the endless waters of the earth my figment self would swim.
The flesh part, the blood part stayed put. Here is why. After that breakfast and after they had poured a bucket of water over my head to wake me up, and put Zinnia’s pig-slop hat back on my head, they dragged me out to the shed and put the shackle on my leg and told me to rest up awhile. That while was three days and three nights. After the second night Zinnia walked in with a bowl of water, and when I grabbed for it, she kicked it over then walked back out. After the third night they had me back into the house to breakfast again with my husband. There was food to it this time. My husband lay like he had. His hair was spilled forward. The rats had found their way in at him. He hadn’t been able to fight them like I had. Hadn’t been able to wake from his sorry sleep and shake a chain at them, toss a kick at them. Zinnia put foodstuff and water before me and told me to eat, or I’d have another breakfast like the last one. I ate. I had a cracked tooth or two but I ate. Cleome sat on the bench outside while I did so. I heard her say to Zinnia she would not set her foot again in that house. They had laid down their blankets in the barn. To sleep where Alcofibras had. Among the animals. Where it was clean.
I ate and imagined my punishment was complete. That my children would now bathe me and put poultices on the bruises they had administered to me and return to their rightful places. That I would take them each by the hand and lead them off down the lane on an outing that would end in the sun somewhere, with peppermint and licorice and sugar candy and a peek at a Chinaman sitting in a black barrel. I looked at Linus Lancaster as I imagined this, and in my looking saw him raise his head up off the table and point the pig sticker at the flour sack behind him and start to sing. He sang “Glory, Hallelujah” as I ate and looked. By and by Zinnia grabbed me up by my scruff and took me out to the oak tree.
“For some seasoning, Mother,” Cleome said, lifting up off her bench. When she lifted you could see clear as crisp-light the condition all that visiting from Linus Lancaster had put her in.
“Keep that old hat on your head while we cook you, Mother,” said Zinnia.
“Stand up straight now, Mother.”
“Please don’t have nothin’ to do with it, Mother.”
“The woods will eat all that hollerin’, Mother.”
“You can cry out those tears later, Mother.”
“Cryin’ don’t help with a thing when that thing is set on coming to pass.”
I breakfasted with my husband all the days following. After the first week Zinnia made me get my own breakfast while she and Cleome waited together on the bench outside. When I wasn’t in there getting and having my breakfast, which was the only meal I got each day, they kept the doors to Linus Lancaster’s house closed so that nothing beside the rats could get in there after him. The pigs, I believe they reckoned, would have made too quick a job.
I don’t know what it was they discussed while I was at my breakfast. It may not have been much. There was never a good deal of talking between them. Even when we were all younger. There had never been a great deal of discussion between my husband, Linus Lancaster, and myself, so that hadn’t changed much with the situation either. He had liked to talk at me a fair amount, and I had listened as he did so and looked to my work. So to keep a sense of balance where there was none any longer, I talked at him now during those breakfasts while Cleome and Zinnia waited outside on the bench, and while he listened and looked to the work of being dead as a doorstopper. I talked at his forehead, which was ever dripping forward and pooling up on the table and sogging toward the edges and spooling toward the floor, and I talked at his hair, which had a blue sheen on it that had probably settled down from the stink stuck to the dust that had always been in that air. I talked to his shoulders and his brown, heavy cloth shirt, and his big hands glowing yellow and purple and gray in the kitchen light.
At first it was just things about whippings and being beat and the nothing work they’d set me to that came out of my mouth like the thought that runs a black garble through a mind and can pass, if you petition it kind enough to, for anything you ever hoped it could be. Then I told him about how he had never ought to have come up to my father’s house in Indiana and fetch me. How he ought to have left me to my corner in that house and to my church up there above the river, where there had been other Christians to commune with and where th
ey hadn’t minded if every now and again I would sing.
“I have a pretty voice,” I said to my husband.
“You never built your big house with its fifty-foot porch and its wide staircases and its columns and gables,” I said to him.
“Look at you dead now,” I said. “When you took us all to that carnival in Albatross, you ought to have let me have those stockings I saw or brought back Cleome and Zinnia that bag of candy. You ought never to have whipped Alcofibras, let alone until he was dead. You ought never to have started your visiting down the hall or taken your boot to me in your bed. A pig is a filthy thing and here I am still eating it for my breakfast, and how, husband, do you like how your dream about the greensward turned out?”
I said these things to my husband with the pig sticker in his neck, and the house beyond him no longer seemed like it had anything to do with me or the six years of my life it had bitten the head off, and I crunched my breakfast and when I came out into the light and fresh air, Cleome and Zinnia would be waiting. At the first days, Zinnia would take me by the arm or the scruff, but after a time she would just shove me on along in front and the two of them would follow me out to wherever they had set my chore for the day. One morning it was mowing spring grass with the hand sickle. Another it was clearing rocks. I thought once or twice that I could have run away from Cleome, but Zinnia was like hell with wings, and no matter what lead I could have conjured, she would have chased me down and smashed my bones to powder. Even when Linus Lancaster had laid his hands on me I had never felt so infirm. Zinnia was all quiet, then all noise. Like it was coming out with her sweat, clouding into steam.
Once, after they had left aside the regular chores and settled into making me dig holes—as deep as my head, then fill it up and start again—Zinnia leapt down into the hole with me and hit me with her fists and elbows until they had to haul me out of there with a rope. This was the hole I should have had dug for Alcofibras she said as they hauled me up. This was the hole would have kept him soft and safe and quiet, not left to the snakes and cold winds under a blanket of rocks.
“You can keep digging holes until your hands fall off, Mother,” she said.
“I will,” I said.
“I know you will.”
“I’ll never stop.”
“No, you won’t.”
“First my fingers will fall off, then my hands, then my wrists, then my elbows, then the rest of my arms.”
“And you will still keep digging.”
“Yes.”
For her part, Cleome got quieter as her time passed. Her small face grew wider and her eyes larger, and her hair fell with fresh oils that caught the sunlight.
I would tell Linus Lancaster about all this at our breakfasts together. I would eat pork and mush and look at his dead forehead and talk at him about how the angel he had carried on his shoulder sat on Zinnia’s shoulder now and about how quiet Cleome was and how there was a sweetness somewhere sipping at that quiet and how far she had gotten along.
Sometimes I picked up my talking at the end of the day when I was lying on the dirt floor of the shed. It wasn’t unusual that my lips were too cracked to move nice enough for real talk, so I would just run it in my head. Linus Lancaster, you are dead and I am lying out here with a shackle on my ankle, and Cleome is grown bigger and bigger, and Zinnia is fixing to strike me down so I won’t come up again. The rats are in there at you, and then they’ll come out and look to me, and everything they ever sang in those old songs about the hard places a body can come to are true.
But the cold dark is a fretful place to pose a colloquy, even if it is just in your head. So mostly I just lay there. Waiting for my breakfast. Looking out for the rats. Without any more dainties about outings and candy and Chinamen in barrels and daisies and such. My arms still digging into the black and rock of the earth, even though it had been hours since they had in the actuality stopped. Counting, as my arms still dug, as I waited for them to fall off, on the pig sticker or any one of its evil cousins to come for me and swallow me up.
6.
WHEN LUCIOUS WILSON’S WOMAN had me out of the cold frame behind the outhouse and into the light, she did not lift the heavy stick she had taken up at me and she did not ask me any question about how I had come to be there. She was an old woman and had an eye to see through things, and she saw through my skin where it had healed or it hadn’t to the wounds I had lately had, and through those to the wounds I had offered unto others, and through those to that four-square kingdom in Kentucky and the woods that surrounded it and the thundering tunnel of my days that led up to my father’s house in Indiana where I had started out from. She looked at me and she blinked her crop-colored eyes and dropped her heavy stick and told me wherever I’d been, I couldn’t live in Lucious Wilson’s cold frame and I’d better come on.
Lucious Wilson didn’t have that old woman’s eye, but he had that old woman, and after she had nodded, he told me there was a place for me in his employ if I knew how to work and wanted it, and I told him I did. He did not ask me where I had come from. I expect that after she had gotten me bathed and settled the old woman had told him. Whether or not her seeing extended to the naming part of things, she told me that first night they would need to know what to call me. I thought of my old teacher and told her that my name was Sue.
“Well, Sue, you aren’t sleeping in a cold frame tonight or any night after if that’s the way you want it,” she said.
“That’s the way I want it,” I said.
The next weekend they had me over to a revival outside of town where there was a line-up for dunking, and that old woman had me take my place. The minister spoke and dunked and spoke again. It was a pretty place, and they had set up garlands on the bushes. The spot they were in was next to a short bridge and the little ones had their legs dangling off it. Lucious Wilson went in the front of us. He had on a fine suit and waded right out into the water and let the minister speak his words and dunk him down. There were some of his other folk in the line, men and women, then there was me. I had on some Sunday clothes they’d given me. There were good folks on the banks, all dripping and weeping and wiping at the air above their faces with their hands.
“Go on now, Sue,” the old woman said.
I went. I stepped into the water and the water, which the minister had been telling could be robe and belt both to any who wanted it, walked away to either side of me. I stepped on the bottom and as I stepped, the water walked even away out of the mud and my borrowed shoes kept dry. The minister spoke his words about salvation and the blood of the good lamb and leaned me back and pushed me down, but the water had walked away, and when I came up I was dry. I know the minister knew this because when he spoke his words again about the robe and the belt, he whispered them up against my ear and never when he was finished with his whispering said amen, and I know the old woman knew because when I got back out onto the bank, she said the best thing to do about it would be to sit on the grass by the garlanded bushes with the others and, dry or wet, commend myself to Him who was lurking everywhere. To Him who sat in the shadows and the dark parts with us. To Him who would in the end harrow every evil and offer even those of us the water didn’t want, and whom the water wasn’t helping, a jewel from his glittering crown.
That’s not what Alcofibras came back to tell me. All those weeks after Linus Lancaster had been pushed down onto the table, Alcofibras didn’t walk through the wall of my enshackled night to sit cross-legged and ringed by rats before me and commune about robes and jewels and crowns. After he had sat, shrunk and whip-broken, lit by the glow of his own burning eyes, wrapped in a red shawl, he hadn’t stood himself up to speak about the coming of the Lord. I know that, even though all he said to me by way of greeting in that bowl of blackness was, “Evenin’, Miss Ginny.” No one, not even me with one of my eyes shut to bruising, would have mistaken what followed for anything to do with the lamb.
Alcofibras flung back that shawl and showed out his whip-cut shoulders and
lifted up his gangle legs and twisted his arms, and the light from his eyes lit up every bit of him. His knees went up either side higher than his head, and the pink soles of his feet slapped back down on the ground. There wasn’t any music to it beside those pink soles slapping the cold ground. Presently his hands commenced to hit together. When they had come back away from each other, he would hold them out at me like he was saying Stop. Then he bowed and showed his back and shoulders then threw up his eyes at me. Then he bowed again and pulled his shawl over his head and shuffled around until his naked back was before me, then he raised up and leaned this way around, and as I looked an eye the size of a saucer opened up in the middle of his shoulders then closed, and he turned and pulled his shawl back down and smiled at me and recommenced lifting his legs and slapping his soles and hitting his hands and holding them out like he was saying Stop.
Then he stood still and looked at me, and looked at me and looked at me, and mouths grew up over his arms and legs and each one of them opened and all of them wailed at once, then went closed and quiet. Alcofibras then came up closer to me, his knees climbing to either side of him and his hands hitting together, and he leaned in close and when he did, ears came out of his forehead and his cheeks and his neck and his chest, until they were on every part of him and even the ears had grown ears and the ears were shaking, and I found myself sobbing because all they had to listen to was my poor breath and my poor heart, and all his mouth had had to wail to and all that eye had had to look upon was my poor self, shackled in the dark, a sorry thing of the earth, when outside there was so much, when out beyond my four-square kingdom, out along the midnight flanks of the republic, out atop the great wide oceans there was so much, and I called out to Alcofibras, who after a hundred, a thousand years was sitting quiet again with the shawl wrapped around his shoulders and his own dead eyes and ears and mouth, “What have you shown me?”
