by Lance Weller
Ellen let go his hand and squeezed his arm. “But you’re all right?”
“Ah, they weren’t shooting at me.” She looked at him sharply, and he grinned and nodded. “Well, I might’ve gotten a little banged up in town, but they tell me Farley got worse than what he tried to give.”
“Glenn … He’s going to be the death of you.”
He touched the pads of his fingers to her lips, then leaned to gently kiss her forehead. “It’s over and it’s done and it’s nothing for you to worry yourself over,” he said. “It’s nothing now and wasn’t much of anything to start with.”
Abel groaned wearily in his sleep and smacked his lips. Ellen squatted near the old man’s feet, pushed her hair back from her face, and began to unlace his boots where they were stiff with mud and tight with old rains soaked and dried into the leather. Wrinkling her nose, she put a hand over her mouth. “Good Lord above,” she breathed. “When do you reckon this man bathed last?” she asked the air, then stood and rolled up her sleeves. Looking at Glenn, she said, “Why don’t you go on put up Emerson and bring the things in while I settle him.” He nodded and she watched him leave the room. After a few moments she heard his footsteps crunching through the icy grass, could hear him speaking alternately to horse and dog.
Ellen finally levered Abel’s boots from his feet and paired them by the wall. The old man had been traveling sockless, and his ankles were ringed with raw sores where the old leather rubbed bare flesh. Remembering the teapot, she fetched it and added to it and brought back with her a bowl and some clean cloth. Kneeling beside him again, she washed his feet. She washed Abel’s hands and cleaned his fingers and slipped his thin coat from his hunched shoulders. Curls of steam stood from the bowl. Ellen’s strong fingers worked loose the buttons of his shirt, and she gasped to see the varicolored bruises chaining the old man’s chest, the little maps of blood that had dried to hard ridges along the lines of old white scars—a lifetime of hurting plotted there for any to follow who could read such charts. Ellen peered at the bruises and the long, stitched cut arcing redly down his face, then pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Someone’s been caring for you,” she told his sleeping face. “I’m glad.” Then, clucking her tongue, she continued washing him. Abel’s lips moved and his eyes jerked beneath their lids. He whimpered in his sleep as she washed his back, and when she settled him down again he yawned widely and silent before falling back into a deeper sleep.
Ellen released her breath and mastered her nausea. She cleaned the road dust from his crow’s feet and from the deep lines at the corners of his mouth, his sad face pale and shrunken-looking where his beard had been shaved. By the time she’d finished, Glenn had brought the supplies in—stacking boxes and small crates, bags and canvas sacks filled with oil and saw blades, potatoes, onions, and flour, extra linen, and all the other makings for the long winter—and was done with what outside chores he could do by moonlight. He’d stoked the fire for the night, banking the coals to keep back the cold, and it was after two o’clock in the morning and even the little owl had gone quiet.
Ellen shut the back room door and she and Glenn walked wordlessly together to the bedroom to undress by what little star- and moonlight filtered through the windowdrapes. She: pale and wan by darkness. He: a splinter of shadow and warm. They embraced silently before putting on bedclothes—flesh to flesh and pressed tightly along the lengths of their bodies and their mouths fast upon one another. Silent but for the moistness of lips and tongues and the dry, cool drag of fingertips on flesh. And after, still silent and now clothed for sleeping, they slipped beneath the covers and lay quietly together. The soft hush of the wind blew over the eaves and they could hear it in the forest as it passed through the trees. After a while, he asked into the dark, “Did you …” He stopped and sighed and went on haltingly, “What I mean is, are you …”
She put her hand to her stomach and pressed. “No,” she told him. “I’m not expecting. I was only … late. It’s mostly done now, I think.”
She felt him nod, and he told her how sorry he was, as though that would help. He took her hand and held it in his own and said nothing more at all and she stayed silent in the soft, cool dark beside him until he was asleep. She felt his warmth all along her side and in the quiet moments before sleep she fancied she could hear, too, the sound of his blood within his body—ancient, African, noble, fast, and hot—as it rushed through the fine, thin veins of his arms and his neck and legs and in his belly through to the very center of him. The largeness of him seemed to cast a warm, soft glow over her in the dark, and she wondered, could he ever hear her blood? The fast, nervous thrum as it raced through her? Slowly, half shy, Ellen cupped his sex in her palm, holding it there a long time before drawing back her hand and making a tight fist against her belly as though to push his fierce, slow heat into her for keeping as she would. She desperately needed to warm the hollow cold they’d put inside her along with the gun barrel that summer’s night beside the tide-swollen river. And when she finally slept, it was only a light sleep peppered by dreams that twisted the sheets about her legs.
Ellen woke. Beside her, Glenn breathed softly, dreaming his own dreams and of what she had no inkling. She stepped from the bed into the dull, dark cold and went to the front door. The dog came inside and turned three tight circles before the hearth, where the backlog had burned down to red coals, sighing softly as it settled before the heat. Ellen stood watching it for a time before finally returning to bed and sleeping a sleep dreamless and deep.
Abel did not wake all the next day, and the hard frost that Ellen had expected did not come. Instead, the day dawned to a sky darkly clouded and the rain came lightly back. The sky was a puzzle of clouds of gray and darker gray. And through the woods came the sound of water falling, running, dripping upon the trees and through the trees and beneath the trees where it ran in little rivulets that lifted burnt-colored pine needles and sent them flowing into Little Sugar Creek and thence down into the green, fog-bound valley.
Glenn spent that day resting and chopping wood for winter—an activity that was, for him, a sort of rest itself where he could lose himself in the easy motion of his arms. Lifting the axe, letting it fall precisely where he wanted into the wood with great thunking sounds, then wrenching it free, lifting and letting fall again and again. The sound of the axe on the wood like the sound of the season’s own heart. For her part, Ellen swept out the cabin while she listened to Glenn. She shooed Abel’s dog outside and beat the dander from the rug on which it slept. She mended the holes in the knees of Abel’s trousers and used cold water, salt, and extract of lemon to scrub the blood from his shirt where it had spotted in designs strange and repugnant. A story of violence there that she had no desire to read.
After a time, she went to the back room where the old man lay sleeping and stood looking down at him. A rank smell had settled into the room, fouling the air and tainting the curtains. Ellen thought, suddenly, of her father and the way he’d died—from the inside out and so slowly you could smell death in him like turned meat, as though his very pores exhaled it. The flesh itself, her father’s flesh that had rocked her to sleep and brushed her hair and held her close during storms when it seemed the very world would end, had turned suddenly contrary. Had tightened and loosened, moistened and dried, and, in the end, shuddered all on its own like horsehide touched by flies. His flesh imposed its will upon his mind and he’d gone to sleep and never woke, her father when he died, and Ellen had come to reckon that as about the only part of his sickness that was kindly in the least.
And even though she’d washed him the night before, Abel still looked roadsore and dirty. He’d woken enough at some point to use the night jar she’d set out for him, and Ellen carried it to the outhouse. The stink of age and strange food. When she returned she brought with her a small sack and the scissors and she knelt on the floor beside the old man’s head. Lifting a hank of his long, metal-colored hair, she rubbed it between her fingers. It was not soft and smelle
d like the smokes of countless cooking fires. It hung limp and bedraggled to his shoulders and was, on the whole, impossibly dirty and ill-kept, matted and shot through with all manner of dirt and moss and pine needles, bits of mud and tiny stones and other matter that she hoped was merely mud and tiny stones. Clumps of things snarled the ends like decorative beads or small, strange berries. “Looks to me like you’re about half tree,” she told him, shaking her head.
Ellen clucked her tongue and began to cut back Abel’s hair. It was slow work and she cut it back to finger-width so it stood straight and bristly from his scalp. When she finished, Ellen fetched and warmed a bowl of water and washed what hair remained, feeling the hard ridges of scar tissue that, even here, laced his skull like the stitching of a well-used ball. “It’s a good thing your dog’s away and you’re sleeping,” she told him. “Elsewise neither of you would let me near.”
That night, Ellen let the dog indoors again. It followed her down the hall to the back room and when she opened the door it went inside where the old man still lay sleeping. Sniffing the floor cautiously all around him, it licked his ears and face and, as Ellen watched, turned three circles and settled down on the corner of the blanket just beside him. Shaking her head, she shut the door and went to the bedroom where Glenn lay waiting for her.
They held hands beneath the covers in the dark. Glenn lay on his back, staring at the shadowed ceiling, and Ellen knew what needed discussing and knew, also, that she would have to be the one to broach the subject, speak aloud the decision each had already separately made but neither had yet found the voice for. She took a breath and squeezed his hand. “We can’t turn him out,” she said softly, addressing the dark. “We both know it. Even if we don’t want him here.”
Glenn sighed deeply and long as though a great weight had been lifted from him. “I know,” he said, his voice deep and soft and close as shadows. “I know it.”
And then silence came between them, broken only later when Ellen said, “I think he’s sick.” She shook her head in the dark. “No,” she said. “I don’t think it. I know it. I can smell it. I think he’s dying.”
She felt Glenn nod. “I know that too.”
She wet her lips. “But?”
“But what?”
“You tell me. You say it.”
He let go her hand and cradled his head with laced fingers, still staring upward through the dark. “You’re right, we can’t turn him out. Not with winter coming.”
Ellen sighed. “Do you really think he’d stay? That he’d even want to? To settle for that little room?”
“Do you think he can do much more?” asked Glenn. And then, softly, “No. No, I don’t. But what can we do? … What I’ll do,” he said, thinking aloud. “What I’ll do is tell him I need help clearing the upper field. Which I do. He could drive the wagon back and forth, if nothing else.”
“He won’t,” said Ellen. “Granted, I don’t know him well, nor do I really want to, but a man like that driving for you? He couldn’t conceive of it, I’m sure.” She sighed. “When he wakes,” she said with a certain, heavy resignation, “I’ll offer him the room for the winter. That’s all we can do and that’s what we have to do. We’ll offer the room, and he can decide on his own.”
“You don’t think we should force him? For his own good?”
“I don’t, and we couldn’t,” she said. “There’s his good and the world’s and then there’s ours. Our good, Glenn. It might not be Christian, but I don’t care. If it comes to it, ours has got to win out over his, over the world’s. After everything we’ve …” Ellen took a fast, hot breath and Glenn took up her hand and pressed his lips to each of her knuckles in its turn. She watched his shadow in the dark beside her—how he moved, the soft rustling of fabric as he shed his union suit. The sudden warmth of him pressed flush against her. His fingers at her knees, bunching the nightdress around her hips, and the cool kiss of wintery air upon her flesh.
And she was conscious of her own breath and his, suddenly synchronous. Their frantic pulses of blood beating in time as their tired, hurt hearts thrashed against each other with only thin walls of flesh and bone to keep them separate. She opened her eyes, trembling in the soft, cool dark, and saw his sad, lonely face hovering close. His eyes closed and his face held as though he’d weep. She said his name and he told her he loved her. “Can you see me?” she whispered against his ear. “Can you feel my skin?” He told her yes and yes and their hands fisted together atop the sheets as though struggling quietly, desperately. But before it was beautifully finished things went all wrong within her as they often did and she cried out, pushed him back. Away. Kicking the sheets from her legs and her legs pale and thin in the dark where they were tucked under her. She clawed at the wall beside the bed and scuttled into the corner, covering her face and trying to will away their smell, the old, cold feel of the gun barrel going into her.
Glenn covered his eyes with his forearm and breathed deeply until his heart had slowed. He knew better than to talk or try and touch her, so lay instead damning them for what they’d done and damning himself because he’d not been there to stop them doing it. Ellen wept. She told him she was sorry, and after a time he sat up and held out his hand and after a time she took it and without another word they lay back down together.
She lay, telling him how she loved him, and he answered. Their hearts slowed, the sweat and tears evaporated from their flesh into the dark cold—rising through the shadows and through the roof and on into the clouds where they would, days hence, fall again as rain upon the town below and the townsfolk would look up from their lives, suddenly melancholy and for what reason they would never know. And finally, in the cold, moonshot dark, Glenn and Ellen fell asleep and dreamed dreams quiet and weary and sad.
Down the hall, Abel woke in the dark. He could hear their urgent, soft, grief-struck lovemaking and could hear them when they fell apart. At the change of his breath, the dog rose and licked the side of his face. Abel grinned and swore softly and when he finally did fall back to sleep it was with his good arm outflung over the dog, fingers curling into the soft fur behind its ear.
The next morning, Glenn rose early. The rain had ceased and the sky was gray, charged with a high wind that you sensed more than felt. He hiked to the upper field to judge the work that needed doing, calculating two men’s labor against the scant days remaining before the first snowfall. Ellen stayed behind to warm water on the stove for bathing. It was cool and she spent some little time coaxing flames from the ash-hidden coals. By the time the fire was crackling the water was warm, and she cupped her pale hands into the pot to raise the awkward bowl of her palms to her face. Running wet fingers through her brown hair until her face and neck and scalp were damp, she was lost for the briefest of moments in the pleasant steam, the water’s soft warmth. When next she looked up, Abel stood with his dog just without the room in the dark of the hall, looking studiously at the floor with his old boots in his hands.
When he sensed her eyes on him, the old soldier looked up and grinned lopsidedly. Wincing a little, he ran a hand over his shorn head. “I’ll be damned if every time I wake up anymore someone hasn’t barbered me,” he said softly.
Ellen smiled and Abel nodded and ducked his head and pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek. The deeply callused soles of his bare feet rasped on the swept floorboards like shy whispers. After a few silent moments, they both raised their voices to speak, then both fell quiet again. Abel raised a palm. “You go on,” he said.
Ellen nodded. “I was just going to ask how you were feeling. You’ve had us worried.”
“Yes ma’am, I reckon I was pretty worn out. Still a mite woozy, but I do feel one whole lot better’n I did.” Sniffing, he looked at her. “Must’ve been you who doctored me?”
Ellen nodded, plucking up a towel and pressing her damp hair into it. “I didn’t do all that much, really. Just cleaned you up a bit and gave you a little trim.” She patted her forehead with the towel and dried her ch
eeks, then raised her chin. “That cut on your face looks like it’s healing pretty well. Whoever stitched it did a good job.”
Abel touched the long cut that ran the length of his face. “That was old Charley Poole and his kin,” he said, nodding. “Like Glenn, they come crost me when I was in a bad way.”
Ellen set the towel aside and looked at the old man. “Glenn said he found you in the woods north of town.”
“That could be,” said Abel. “And I’m obliged to both of you.” He looked down at the dog where it sat next to him, leaning against his leg and dampening a spot on his trousers with its wet panting. “And for takin’ in this fool, too.”
Ellen shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said. “But it looks to me like someone beat you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Abel, looking away. “I reckon it would. I reckon they have been.”
Ellen sighed heavily and crossed her arms. “Abel Truman,” she said. “What happened to you?”
The old man stared off into the corner of the room. He whistled flatly through his teeth. After a moment, he reached down and scratched behind the dog’s ears, then looked back up at Ellen. “Ah,” he said. “That’d be a long tale.”
She pursed her lips and stared at him until he shuffled his feet and shrugged. “We run afoul of brigands,” he finally said, nodding to include the dog.
She looked from the old man’s face to the dog’s and back again. “Brigands?” she asked, raising her fingers to her lips to cover the smile forming there.
“Well,” said Abel, shrugging again. “They was bad men, sure enough.”
Ellen’s smile faded and she nodded. “There are a few of those about,” she said.
