Work Like Any Other

by Virginia Reeves

“Did Marie send you?”

  Wilson eyed me, an old look I knew well. “When’s the last time you heard from Marie, Ross?”

  “Nine years ago.”

  “There’s time for that, too. Kilby hand out pets to everyone they let go?”

  “I worked the dogs.”

  “You a dog boy, then? Chasing down escapees?”

  I nodded.

  “That was a wanted job at the mine. Kept you aboveground, got you out in the woods. What’d it keep you out of?”

  “The dairy.”

  “Dairy sounds good to me.”

  There are days the dairy sounds good to me, too. Days I picture myself back there even though I know it’s nowhere I belong.

  The truck rattled down the dirt lane to the highway, and there were the oaks. Kilby sat behind us, watching our dust through its many eyes.

  “Where’s Marie?”

  “Mobile.”

  I didn’t know how that could be true. I had always—only—seen her on her father’s land. Marie moving us to that place set me to building those transformers and stringing those lines along the cornfield and electrifying that thresher. George Haskin wouldn’t have had anything to explore if we hadn’t been there. The time I’d served in Kilby grew from my time on that land, and there would have been no time on that land without Marie’s insistence that we move there.

  Electrical work could be come by in Mobile. Why not take us there directly?

  “Mobile?”

  “Moa’s making you a fine meal, Ross. All the trimmings.”

  “Why is Marie in Mobile?”

  Wilson had the stump of his arm up on the door now, alongside the open window. His right hand was scarred, raised strips thatching the skin, some pink, some black. “You were expecting her here? Thought she’d be waiting?”

  I don’t know if I thought that. “I didn’t expect her to be in Mobile.”

  “There’s plenty you didn’t expect, Ross.”

  I thought he was referencing George Haskin and our sentences, but I know now he was talking about our new lives, the lives that were starting there in that truck.

  The highway went on before us. Spring had come, the oaks bright with their new leaves. Hollies dotted green in the lower brush, some sprouting high enough to rival the trees. The road was smooth and newly painted, and it made me think of Ed’s chair. We passed into a stand of shortleaf pine, with its bunchy needles and clustered cones. The cones grow opposite one another on the branch, a reflection—that’s how you can tell the tree apart from other pines.

  Maggie held her head in the air, nose tipped high, ears flapping.

  “What’s Marie doing in Mobile?”

  “Teaching.”

  “And Gerald? Where’s he?”

  “Tuscaloosa.”

  “Going to the university?”

  “That’s right.”

  Gerald made sense there, but Marie was a mystery I couldn’t solve—not the young version of her or the grown one that might have come to see me in the infirmary. Nurse Hannah had never confirmed or denied that shifty presence.

  “Did Marie visit the prison?”

  “We got notice of you being laid up. Course Moa got no word about this.” Wilson lifted the stump of his left arm. “They didn’t even tell her where they sent me, probably had no record of it themselves. Just a list of numbers, you see, taking our shifts. You know their favorite saying about leased men? ‘One dies, get another.’ ” Wilson thumped his damaged arm against the door. “See, I’m told I’m lucky, Ross. Would’ve been dead if they hadn’t chopped this off and cauterized what was left. You ever smell flesh burning?”

  “Not up close.”

  “From a distance, then.”

  “There’s a smell when they use the chair at Kilby.”

  “The chair!” Wilson laughed. “They give you dogs when you get out. Infirmaries when you’re hurt. Books to read. Even your executions get special treatment. At Sloss, it’s either the mine or a guard that delivers that sentence.” He shook his head and smiled as if it were the funniest thing he’d heard. “A chair! You get to consult on that, Ross? Lend your electrical expertise?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  I didn’t tell him how close I’d been to its builder.

  We eventually left the highway for a county road, the packed clay spinning into red dust behind us. The trees on the right had yielded to long stretches of peanuts just starting to spread. Small plots of spring crops were amongst them—lettuces and onions. It sent me back to the mess hall, some fellow from the fields talking about onion bulbs, yellow and red and white. “We’ve got two onion seasons,” I heard him say. “You got to put the bulbs in the ground early February, pull that crop early June, then you’re in with your winter bulbs late September.”

  The poles alongside us held the line I had tapped. They turned about two miles up to run along that far edge of the field.

  In a quarter mile, we pulled onto the rutted drive that led to the house and the barn. The same pecans lined the way, their leaves full and green. The fields stretched out behind them. Everything I saw made me terrified to see the next. The pole fence still ran to the west end of the sling-backed barn, one new rail bright against the weathered others. There was the chicken coop, the chickens. Every piece was there, not much different from how I’d imagined it at Kilby. I’d seen myself walking up that drive, Maggie next to me. “We’ve been hunting rabbits,” I’d heard myself say. I am just a hunter with my dog.

  Maggie whined in the back loud enough for us to hear.

  “Nice of her to do the speaking for you both,” Wilson said.

  Then the house emerged from the oaks. There was the white clapboard and the double porches—top and bottom, as Marie’s father had insisted. The chimneys rose from their opposite sides, the brick seated in place with signs of fresh mortaring. The porches had not sunk with time like so many we’d driven past—an eastern corner sagging toward the ground, a post rotted through, the eave collapsing. The paint was fresh. The same two rockers sat on the lower porch, but they’d been sanded and varnished to look new. They must have been made of strong wood, and I wished Ed were there to tell me the grain.

  When I first saw Kilby, I thought it looked like a school with a lighthouse out front, strange things to me both, but that clean farmhouse was unfamiliar, too. We’d never polished the grounds quite that shiny. Even when the money was coming in, we’d left the creepers on the chimneys. Marie had liked them.

  Her horse was nowhere to be seen, long dead, I supposed.

  Wilson pulled up to the shop and reached across his body to open his door with his only hand. “You sit here a minute if you need to. Supper will be ready soon, and I know Moa’s anxious to set eyes on you, but you get your bearings out here first.” He stepped free of the cab. “You want me to let your dog out? She won’t go after the chickens, will she?”

  “No.”

  He slammed his door, and I watched him lift one of the wooden rails out to give Maggie leave of the truck bed. She was reluctant to jump down, and Wilson slid that stump of his arm under her waist, his right arm round her neck, lifting her to the ground gentle as a baby.

  Wilson had been my friend. We had strung lines and seen crops turn to money and eaten dinners and watched our kids grow. Marie’s father had always hired his help. Marie’s grandfather hadn’t had slaves. Wilson had been a free man his whole life until our arrest.

  Maggie was sniffing at his one hand, unsure. She glanced toward the truck cab, and all I could give her was a nod before I looked back at the shop that held my thresher.

  I don’t know how long I sat in the truck, but it stretched long and vindictive like my time in solitary. I got out only when I heard a woman calling my name.

  I so wanted it to be Marie. I wanted her to appear before me and
tell me she’d needed all that time to think it through—nine years, she needed, all right. But she had realized that I’d acted for her and Gerald, for the farm, even for Moa and Wilson and their children, as much as I’d acted for myself. She realized that I had to have my hands in electricity, that I was driven by all those attractions that lay hidden until ignited. I saw her take me into her arms, letting me bury my face in the thick hair she’d let fall down her back. I could smell the cooking she’d been doing for my return—the ­maple-and-bacon beans I’d fallen in love with, bread, roast chicken, coffee. I could forgive her silence if she could forgive the work I’d done.

  But it was Moa standing near the front door, her hands held tight over her apron. She’d aged more than Wilson—more lines at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth, her hair gone gray along the edges of her face. She was heavier, too, broader.

  Maggie rose from where she’d been waiting near the back wheel and followed me to the porch steps.

  “I didn’t want him to collect you, you know,” Moa said. “Told him to let you find your own way. Like he did his. Go get yourself a job in a coal mine. See how it suits you.”

  “You know I’ve spent time in a coal mine, Moa.”

  “With your own daddy as the foreman. You spent most of your time up top.” Moa towered above me. “Wilson has his compassion for you, Mr. Roscoe, but it’s hard for me to see why.” She squeezed her hands tighter, then pulled them apart and slapped them against her thighs. “You took him right down with you, didn’t you? Never even tried to help.”

  “I was in prison, Moa. What could I have done?”

  “Told them it was your fault.”

  “I did that. They didn’t listen.”

  Moa lowered her eyes. “He lost his arm, Roscoe.”

  “I’d change that if I could.”

  “You’ve said your piece, Moa,” we both heard from inside, Wilson’s voice coming through the screen. “Let’s have some supper.”

  “That dog’s not welcome in the house.”

  “She’s never been in a house.” I put my hand on Maggie’s head as I told her, “Wait.” She lay down on the brick walk, which had been hard-packed dirt before.

  The porch was clean and the rockers even shinier up close. Electric lamps graced the sides of the door, and it didn’t squeak when I opened it. Inside, everything was a greater version of itself, too. New wallpaper lined the foyer above the wainscoting, curving vines with starlike leaves and bright orange berries against a pale yellow background. Birds of all colors and shapes sat amid the branches, and in the middle of them, a yellow-orange squirrel held court. The old paper had been dark green and nothing more than an angular pattern.

  A new electric chandelier dangled overhead, its crystals bright even when the bulbs weren’t lit. “Marie felt like lightening things up in here,” Moa said. “A while back, we took down all the old paper and put up new. You’ll see on the way to the table. Hang your coat.”

  The stand was the same, tall oak with a box for umbrellas and a seat for putting on shoes. Its mirror reflected one of the squirrels just to the right of my head. My face had grown old and thin, and I looked preposterous against that wallpaper, like a tramp brought into a nursery.

  “Come on through the sitting room,” Moa said.

  I didn’t want to see any more.

  The wallpaper in the sitting room was pink and light green, full of flowers and leaves. Gerald’s reading chair in the corner was now rose colored, an electric lamp next to it.

  “I would like to sit down.” I went to that chair. I reached instinctively for a small book on the side table, a novel that Rash had forced on the other men, another Melville book about the sea. “It’s about mutiny,” Rash had demanded. “Isn’t that enough to interest them?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll fall asleep in that chair if you don’t get up,” Moa said. “Come on. There’s food to eat.”

  I set the book back on its table and followed them through the wide arch to the dining room. The pink flowers had bled across the walls in there, too.

  Moa poured me coffee, which was every bit as good as I wanted it to be. She brought out a whole chicken, then a crock of beans, corn bread, and fresh butter. The canned peaches were brilliant orange in their jar. Moa had cooked up some chard and collards with crisp bits of pork fat. She’d outdone my imaginings, this woman who was not my wife. And on my other side, I didn’t have my son, but rather a man whose arm I had helped to crush and cut loose from his body, whose skin I’d held a flame to in order to stanch the bleeding.

  Moa recited from Deuteronomy, one of Chaplain’s favorite passages: “ ‘For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.’ Thank you, Lord, for this food.”

  We said “Amen” together and worked through the meal without talking. I ate everything Moa put on my plate. I took second scoops and thirds. More, please. I had missed that food so much, and my mind could fix only on the plate and the fork and the knife, the meat dipped in the sweet-salty syrup of the beans, the moist corn bread spread thick with butter I had not tasted in years. Spices mixed with the peaches, clove and cinnamon, the greens bitter and sharp. The wallpaper didn’t matter, nor the company, the whiteness of the clapboards outside, the absence of the creeper, the new brick walkway, not Maggie lying there, the shop and its thresher, the growing crops. I was just a man eating his dinner.

  “Thank you, Moa.”

  “You are lucky I am a God-fearing woman, Mr. Roscoe. I’ll get the pie.”

  It was peach, and she drizzled it with fresh cream.

  “Another?” she asked when I finished my first piece.

  “Please.”

  Neither Wilson nor Moa had seconds, and they watched me with caution and worry as I finished mine. I wanted to rest a minute more in that food before they told me what was drawing all those lines across their foreheads.

  “We’re living in this house now, Roscoe,” Wilson said. Crust was still on my plate, a few slivers of peach, a pool of cream. “Marie set us up here when she went to Mobile.”

  It had never been my home—that big house. Not before, not then, certainly not now. “How often does she come back?”

  “Infrequently,” Moa answered.

  Nothing was left for me to do with the last of my pie but to push it away. “Who’s running the land?”

  “We are,” Wilson said.

  “Yes, but who’s paying you?”

  “We are,” Moa repeated. “It’s been a while now.”

  “How long?”

  “Five years.”

  I didn’t know how to put Moa and Wilson in Marie’s house and Marie in a school in Mobile. Did she have a view of the bay, gulls out the windows distracting her students?

  “Where are your children?” This was the question I set upon, though it was the least of my interests.

  Moa started gathering plates. “I can’t do any more of this. I’ll go get started on the dishes and send Jenny out for the rest.”

  “So Jenny is here?”

  Moa huffed and pushed through the door.

  “You’ll have to give her some time,” Wilson said.

  A beautiful, dark woman came out from the kitchen, hair in braids to her shoulders. She looked like her parents, but only their best parts. “Jenny,” I said, “you were just a little one the last time I saw you.”

  She looked to her father.

  “It’s all right, honey. Just clear the table.”

  It took her three runs to and from the kitchen to get it all.

  I didn’t speak again until she was done. “Am I that awful?”

  “We aren’t sure.”

  I pressed m
y thumb and finger into my eyes until I saw red sparks against the backs of my lids. The food turned against my insides, and I yearned for Kilby, for the ease of routine, the simplicity of my meals and lodging.

  My stomach doubled over itself, and I pushed myself quickly from the table, overturning my chair. I didn’t make it off the porch, but I got to the railing, and I heaved my dinner into the decorative shrubs that now lined the house. Maggie stood at attention on the walkway, unsure what to make of me. My body wouldn’t stop until everything was gone. When I could stand, I headed to the pump by the shop, bringing water up first to wash my face and mouth. Pumping with one hand, I held my head under the spout, the cold water shocking me conscious. Water ran in and out of my mouth, down my cheeks and chin, soaking my collar. I filled a rusted bucket to wash away the mess I’d made of the bushes, and like Jenny and her dishes, it took three trips. Maggie trotted along behind me.

  I told myself to write Taylor a letter thanking him for that dog.

  Wilson came out on the porch once I’d finished. I was sure he’d watched from a window.

  “If it’s all right, I’ll hear the rest tomorrow,” I said. “I’d like to sleep now.”

  “Course. Help me pull a few things from the shop.” Inside, Wilson threw a switch to cast the whole space with light, my thresher before us. “We’re still using it. We’ve had electricity a long time now—legally, that is. There was a big push right after we went away to electrify us backcountry folks. They used your same route.”

  He was telling me how inequitably priced my project was, how much we’d lost for a gain we would’ve gotten just a little ways down the road.

  Wilson pulled two oil lamps from behind a jumble of machine parts. “There’s oil in that can behind you. The lines are in.” I filled the lamps’ bases. “We just haven’t gotten them run through all the buildings. Could be something for you to do, if you want.”

  “Where am I sleeping, Wilson?”

  He handed me one of the lamps and a box of safety matches, yellow and wooden.

  THE trail from the house had grown over, the grass itchy through my trouser legs. I could see that walk I took out to the north field, excited to tell Wilson about my plans to electrify the farm. “I’ll do this thing,” I’d said, “or I’ll leave.” They had seemed exclusive—the doing and the leaving—but I know now that they had always been entwined. The doing set in motion the leaving, which I suppose set in motion the return.