Work Like Any Other

by Virginia Reeves

  I lead him round the back, and it’s a worry to see him crouching down. I keep as much a distance as I can, but I can’t close my ears to his grunts and curses, laboring to haul that body around.

  “Well, goddamn,” he finally says, belly balanced on one of his knees. “I can’t see a goddamned thing.” He lifts himself from the ground the way he pours himself into the saddle—fluid and easy. “You got to dig this out, Martin. Get us a line to those pups.”

  “From what I’ve read,” I venture, “it’d be good to let them alone for a few days.”

  He points his eyes at me. “You running this show now, Martin? You the new deputy warden?”

  I know not to answer, so we stand quiet for a bit, Maggie’s pups keeping up their racket in their den.

  “What’s it we’re supposed to do for the bitch?” Taylor asks.

  “Broth. And sloppy food. Not too much at the start here. In a day or two, we need to get her a little exercise. Helps keep the milk up.” I have been reading.

  He looks down at the raw dirt under our feet, recently turned by Maggie’s paws. He toes a clod, then kicks it toward the wire fencing. “Let her rest till tomorrow. Then you start digging this out. Be good for her to have an easy run in and out, too. You head over to the mess and get us some broth, now. Make her up a slew with the bonemeal and all.”

  “Sir,” I say, and make toward the gate.

  I start early. The days are long and sun-hot, the corn high. I’d like to have my digging done before noon. Taylor’s good about giving me shade breaks with water and food, but there is no escaping a midday sun in early July. It drops closer to the land, these interminable days of summer, hovering just above our heads, a great round furnace. This low sun turns every lick of water to steam, even the fresh-pumped drinks in our mess-issued bottles. The sun bakes those metal canteens, boiling the liquid inside, and we chase our thirst with water so hot it burns our tongues.

  This is the season Maggie’s pups have been born into. They will learn how to pant before they open their eyes.

  Maggie crawls out when I get there. There’s still slop in the bowl I left her last night, and a bucket of water, and she goes after each with fury. She has transformed again, yet another dog I’ve never seen. Her spine ridges out of her back, jointed and sharp, and her ribs show through her skin. All that remains of her belly are the sagging red teats that hang from her like the Guernseys’ udders. She curls her tail between her hind legs.

  I set to work with the hoe, my left arm fronting the work. On my fourth drag, I wrest loose the hardened remains of a giant rat. Its body is still intact, the skin stretched tight and hard over the bones, something in the soil preserving it this way, rather than eating it back into dirt. The claws are long and yellowed, and the teeth are the same color, jagged extrusions from the sunken skull. The nose is a hard, blackened ball atop them, the whiskers like blackened string. The tail coils toward the hind legs, spiraling in on itself like a pig’s.

  Maggie comes to inspect. She brings her nose close to the body and huffs loudly, sending dust into the air. She raises her head to me, indifference on her face. The rat is so past life, it doesn’t register as anything more than ground, something to dig loose in the making of a den. I scoop it up with its surrounding dirt and deposit it in the wheelbarrow.

  Maggie paws at the ground. I’ve blocked her way in.

  “Give me a minute, girl.” I chain her while I finish. “Wait.”

  She won’t listen, pulling against her chain.

  Finally, I have the trench dug, and with one of Taylor’s spurned blankets against my side, I belly-crawl my way under the shed. The ground is cool and rich as turned soil in the spring, the scent and lick of short winter days bound up in that dirt, seeping out with every fresh turning until the high-summer sun parches the rows dry.

  The warmth of the puppies crowds my face.

  It’s difficult to bring an arm round the front of me, a hand to close round these small, whimpering beasts. A muscle near my right shoulder blade squeezes itself tight in protest, a stiff cramp that takes my breath. In the movement, my head strikes the sharp edge of a shed beam, hard enough to bring blood. There is no reason to remove these dogs from this space. But, still, I load them one by one onto the blanket, their round bellies and tiny ribs stirring the pain from my back and arm. I grope in the semidark to be sure I’ve collected them all, my hand running over the round nest, its edges gone dry with age. Maggie is a mess of noise by my feet.

  “Here we come,” I tell her.

  The pups are tiny things, half the size of the rat I found, and lighter in color than their mother. Their heads are golden tan, their snouts dark and wrinkled. Their ears are the size of my thumbnails, small flaps on the sides of their heads, not even to their lips, though I know they will dangle to their shoulders once they’ve grown. They squirm and writhe in their pile, a crawling mass of need, hungry.

  I carry them into the shed and set Maggie free. “They’re right in here.”

  The doorway is large and open, the pups easy to see, but Maggie returns to the burrow, laying her body flat to edge back under. Marie once told me about particular birds that won’t accept their offspring once they’ve taken on the scent of humans. This surely can’t apply to bloodhounds, these animals we’ve bred to serve us, but I’m worried all the same.

  Maggie scratches and paws under the shed. I hear her moving under there, the shuffle of her breath.

  I know these pups won’t hold without her. I think of the chapters—“Orphaned Pups,” “Hand-Feeding Pups,” “Whelping Your Own Pups”—we will need goat’s milk and bottles. And even if we get them to eat, we will still lose several. That’s what the books say. I will not be able to tell Taylor it’s his fault, that we should’ve left the dogs alone. I’m fearing their deaths already, fearing the regret and guilt that is building in my stomach, in my back, in the cut on my head, the hardening blood in my hair.

  But then Maggie emerges, the nape of a pup’s neck held tight in her teeth. She passes me without care or notice, returning the lost pup to the others in their pile. She digs at the blankets and encircles the pups, a wall of a house. They crawl to her teats and settle into eating—all seven. Alive, and their mother, too, this dog in all her transformations, she is still there, whole, and the thought makes me ache for Marie, going again to that Saturday morning in March when Gerald was born in our marriage bed, in our village house, the resident doctor there to catch him.

  The boy was slippery and bloody, and the doctor handed him directly to me. “He’ll go to his mama soon enough. We just need to do a little cleanup here. Why don’t you take the child out to the kitchen, Roscoe?”

  The babe’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was wrinkly as an old man. I dampened a rag at the sink and set to removing the junk from his face. It made him howl.

  “Shush,” I whispered, trying to rock him in my arms. I didn’t know how to do it—how to soothe anything that small.

  I worried about Marie hearing the noise and insisting on rushing through whatever the doctor had to do, so I took the baby outside into the clear spring day, a more fortunate time to be born than July. I stood on our small front porch, hoping for a woman to hear the baby’s noise and come to my aid.

  Nettie Williams, our next-door neighbor, came within minutes.

  “Oh, Lord! The baby’s come!” she shouted. “Let me see the little thing.”

  I was happy to settle him into her arms.

  “Why he’s not even cleaned up yet. Has something gone wrong?”

  “No.” The thought hadn’t occurred to me at all.

  But Nettie Williams gave the baby back quickly. “The babe’s ruddy and loud, sure enough healthy. I’ll go inside and see about that bride of yours.”

  In that moment, I wasn’t concerned for Marie, only for this wailing thing in my arms, this sloppy infant in need. I settled into the
one rocker we had, its joints squeaking under my weight, and I bent the pointer finger on my left hand so that his small mouth could close round the knuckle, far less dirty than the fingertip. As soon as my knuckle met his mouth, he stopped his fit and sucked away contentedly at my empty skin.

  Marie was far from us then. And we were far from her.

  And now Maggie is here in this shed with her seven pups, all of them in need of nothing from me.

  “ONE of the females is missing,” Taylor says to me on the pups’ eighth day. He sets me to searching, and eventually I find it along the east side of the run where the grasses grow tall, winding their way through the wire, creeping along the edge of the dirt, hearty enough to thrive in this dog-heavy ground. Midway down, the dog’s small head rises barely higher than the dirt, slightly covered by grass tufts. It’s in a hole Maggie must have dug.

  The warmth of the pup’s body tells me it’s not yet dead, and when I bring its head to my ear, I can make out its breath, weak and ratty. It is too light, and its head cocks to the side, something wrong in its jaw that I hadn’t noticed before. It needs to die, so I press my palm against its snout, the shortest fight left, a tiny reach of the legs, a shake in the neck—not enough to constitute a struggle.

  I return it to its hole and shout for Taylor.

  “Maggie must’ve known,” he says.

  I dig the pup’s grave right where Maggie started it, deep enough to keep out the scavengers.

  Maggie walks outside into the sun, off to a corner to relieve herself. Her spine ridges out of her back in a notched line, her ribs tracing down her sides between deep furrows. Her tail is tucked between her legs, her ears dragging on the ground. Those long ears are dusty, all that silk gone gummy like horsehide under a saddle. Whelping doesn’t suit her, and I wish I could free her from it. She should be tracking someone down. She should be tied to my waist, straining and braying, those ears scooping a convict’s scent toward her nose. Ears like that have a job to do, and it has nothing to do with nursing pups.

  Taylor tells me to spend the remainder of my day in the library. “Go on over to your books, Martin. Get your mind someplace else. That dirt’ll be dry come tomorrow.”

  “I haven’t worked the other dogs yet.”

  “Get.” His hand finds its way to my good shoulder. “Go on. I’ll expect you early tomorrow.”

  I leave the barn with its smells of bone and leather, and I walk that red dirt back to the wall, where I’m let through with little notice. The yard is quiet, every man off to his job, and I’m taken by the loneliness of the place. I pass the chapel on my way to the library, and Chaplain is out front. He’s watering the flowers he’s planted. I suppose we need flowers.

  “Roscoe, what brings you here?” He is crouching down, the silliest watering can in his hand, a miniature thing, fit for a child.

  “On my way to the library.”

  “Taylor gave you a day off?”

  “We lost one of Maggie’s pups.”

  Chaplain sighs, a deep, heavy breath that shakes his frame, then he holds the watering can out toward me, and like a fool, I take it. He goes inside his church without saying anything. He has disappeared before I realize he’s going, and I’m alone with that dog in a hole behind me and this watering can in my hands and these unnamed flowers at my feet.

  This is Kilby Prison. We exercise in a dusty yard. Around it, a high wall is strung with wire, and in that wire is electricity, enough electricity to kill me and George Haskin and anyone, more than they run through Yellow Mama. Listen. Electricity so strong, you can hear it. A chapel is here, and our chaplain has planted flowers. They are red and blue, and because I do not know their names, I feel that they are foreign. They are not Alabama’s flowers. But they are ours.

  CHAPTER 19

  Nothing precipitated Wilson’s arrival—no letter from the state that had sold him or the mining company that had leased him. Wilson was gone, and then one day he was standing on the front porch.

  Marie and Gerald were returning from their lessons in Rockford.

  “Who’s that?” Gerald asked.

  Marie squinted her eyes. “Charles?”

  Gerald shook his head. “Too tall.”

  They kept walking, pecan shells under their feet. Marie’s mind filled up with the crunching and cracking, the sharper moments when a shell caught the sole of her shoe in a way that nearly pierced the leather. She could almost feel the pain it would cause. A great hope was in her, something growing like a child in her stomach. She knew that frame and height, familiar as the land around her, familiar as her father’s house. She wouldn’t let herself look at the porch again, though, wouldn’t allow herself another glance until her sight would be clear and solid.

  Gerald started hollering when they were about ten yards from the house, his now-long legs sprinting him forward and up those peeling porch steps. Marie tried not to hear the name her son was shouting until she was there, right next to him.

  “Wilson.”

  Gerald stepped away.

  Marie saw Wilson’s arm, but she brought herself forward first, letting herself ignore it for the moment of his holding her, brief and chaste. Marie had put her arms around Wilson on so few occasions—the birth of Charles, her own father’s death—that they kept them light and quick. Maybe it was history pressing on them, the deep color-divided lines of their state, but maybe it was just their nature, neither of them in need of lengthy contact. Marie liked to assume the latter.

  She stepped back to see Wilson fully. She closed her eyes, the picture sharp in her mind, projected against the backs of her ­eyelids. There was Wilson—tall and broad, a denim shirt tight across his shoulders, one sleeve of it flowing down to his right hand, the other sleeve cut short at the elbow. His left forearm was gone, the wrist and hand. Those fingers that he’d always had, capable of such work, gripping and turning and lifting—they no longer existed.

  “It’s all right.” Wilson placed his one hand on Marie’s shoulder. “I’ve made my peace with it.”

  “How?”

  “It got me out of the mines.”

  “You shouldn’t have been in the mines in the first place.”

  Wilson smiled. “That’s a matter of opinion, Miss Marie.”

  Marie heard Moa’s voice: “Wilson?” His name was a question, not that of a person standing there on the porch. His name was of a ghost, something as dead as his arm, something looking for its place. Moa didn’t move from behind the screen, and Marie watched her eyes rove over her husband, taking in the hair cropped close to the scalp, the new scar lines on his neck and cheek and remaining hand, the same wide-open face, and then the sleeve rolled and pinned where his left arm used to hinge.

  “Oh.” Moa rushed from the house. She grabbed Wilson by the neck and covered his face with her lips, every centimeter, every ridge and dip—eyes, brows, nose, cheeks, lips, temples, forehead, lips again. And again. “Oh, Wilson.” She gasped his name like air. Then, Moa moved her attention to the remains of his arm. She gripped the biceps under its cotton, and Marie watched her fingers exploring whatever muscle and bone must be left there. Moa felt down to the pinned roll, and Marie found herself curious about what the flesh must feel like, puckered and swollen and scarred.

  “I went to our place,” Wilson was saying to Moa, “but no one was there, and I was trying to figure how to knock on this door when Gerald and Miss Marie came up the drive.” It wasn’t their place to have seen him first.

  Moa put her hand on Wilson’s shortened arm.

  “This is Roscoe’s fault,” Marie said, already starting new blame, replacing the unconfirmed knowledge of Wilson in a dark mine shaft with this new, fragmented man in front of her. Roscoe had done this. He had employed Wilson in his crooked work, and he had left him to the destruction of greedy coal miners and foremen, to the self-serving hand of the State, selling off its convicted men for penni
es. Roscoe was the new face of convict leasing, the new villain and perpetrator. He was the foreman, the owner, the coal itself, hunkering deep in the earth, hard to reach, tempting and tempted, looking for a fiery explosion to set it free.

  “Now, Ms. Marie,” Wilson said. “I knew what I was doing.”

  Moa spoke over them. “Come inside. Let’s all go inside. I’ll make us some coffee, and you can tell us what’s happened. Oh, my love. Oh.”

  Gerald stepped forward—Marie had forgotten him for a moment, hidden back behind Wilson—and she caught him by the arm. “Go find Charles and Henry, and Jenny. Get them to come to the house.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Marie trailed behind as Moa led Wilson to the kitchen. Moa held that shadowed arm as though the rest of it might disappear should she let go. Marie could see it—the slow disintegration of this incomplete man. First, that stranded biceps and its shoulder would go, then the chest and neck, the evaporation traveling down at a quicker rate, taking his stomach and hips, his thighs and knees and shins, his ankles and feet, and then his face would dissolve, one feature at a time: chin, lips, cheeks—all those places Moa had just kissed—gone. They wouldn’t be able to tell whether he’d been there to begin with, or whether they’d simply wished him there, conjuring him out of their great need.

  Wilson sat on a stool at the butcher-block table, and only then did Moa let loose of him. She went to get the percolator from the stove, and Marie stopped her before she made it to the sink. “Sit with Wilson. I’ll make the coffee.”

  Moa relinquished the pot without a word, but didn’t sit. Instead, she pulled his great head against her chest, the fingers of one hand turning small circles along his temple and forehead, up into his hairline and then back down. Her fingers had turned the same circles on Marie’s back when Marie was a little girl, stranded in the dark of her room after her mother’s death—night was the only time the hurt could control her. “There, there,” Moa would say. “Hush, now.” She’d coax young Marie back down to lying, then trace her long fingers in slow circles up and down Marie’s small back. Marie had spent her childhood falling asleep to that touch, and she remembered it stronger than any specific intimacy she’d shared with her mother.