by Rae Meadows
Styron backed into the office balancing a stack of books and dropped them with a thwack on the desk.
“Municipal projects,” he said.
“Did we get a windfall I don’t know about?”
“Something to pitch the WPA folks. Get some of our guys working. I wouldn’t mind a public swimming pool with wages paid by the feds.”
For someone who didn’t get more than a stipend, Styron was sure industrious. Jack Lily would give him that.
“Say, I have a question for you. If you needed a fair amount of old lumber, where might you go looking for it?”
“Building a tree house, boss?”
“Not quite.”
“The rail yard out at Herman. Where all the old boxcars die. I saw it the other day. Heaps of wood. Some painted and such.”
“I think you’re going to like this one,” Jack said.
“What’s that?”
“Bell. He’s building a boat.”
* * *
FRED WOULD GET to steer. That was what his father had told him. The rains would come fast and hard, the likes of which they had never seen, and the water would rise up and up and spill into the house and carry off the coop and knock down the barn. Fred had decided he would bring the chickens and the cows even if the boat was only for the family. Noah had brought two of every animal on the earth—even cheetahs even hippos even boa constrictors—so Fred thought they could make room for their own. They couldn’t just leave them. They didn’t know how to swim. Two winters ago, one of the cows had gotten stuck in the pond when the water was too cold and they couldn’t get her out even pulling her with a rope and the tractor. The water had frozen around her and she died. A frozen cow in the pond all winter long. Now that the pond was dry he’d found her bones right where he’d seen her last and added them to his stack for the bone crusher. His father said he didn’t know if they were paying anymore since there weren’t many takers for the meal. Maybe next year. Everything was maybe next year.
“When the rain stops?” Fred wrote, and Samuel said he didn’t know what would happen but that God would show the way just like he had always shown the way. They would plant again, and there would be no more dusters. “Other people?” Fred wrote. “You ask good questions, son,” his father said. “I wish I had good answers but I don’t.” Fred thought he would be sad if the flood washed Caroline Hawlings away because she smelled like honeysuckle and took the chalkboard he wrote on at school and drew flowers on it before giving it back. He wrote, “Thanks,” and she took it back again and wrote, “You’re welcome.”
Fred wore his mask out of the house, but then he took it off. Who wanted to wear a mask when other kids weren’t wearing them, especially when you were already the one who didn’t talk? He was tired all the time, like he’d been running through the night when he woke up in the morning. The mask just made it harder to get the air in.
He wondered if his father was going to tell everyone about the flood. Fred thought he should warn them. It seemed like something people would want to know. It was probably good the Macks left, Fred thought, even though Birdie was sad all the time and even he was a little sad because he liked Cy and his little sister. He wrote to Birdie, “What are you going to take with you?” And she just rolled her eyes like he had said they were going to fly to the moon. “You think all of a sudden it’s going to rain from the heavens?” she said. “Have you been outside lately? A boat can’t float on dust. Pop isn’t thinking straight with the heat and the crops and people leaving. He’ll come to his senses.”
But Fred thought his father had come to his senses. He would build the boat, and Fred was going to help him. He read:
The lumber should be largely free of knots. Wood won’t bend properly if there are knots of any size, although knots smaller than a pencil eraser should be fine. Secondly, the grain should be as straight as possible. Watch for areas where the grain runs off the board, which will affect the strength and bending properties of the wood. Third, the material should take and hold fasteners strongly. Wood that is too hard to drive a nail in, or too soft to accept a screw without splitting, is not right. Last, avoid warped boards. Softer woods like spruce, pine, fir, cedar, cypress, and juniper are good options.
The only thing that grew out here was juniper and sometimes ponderosa pine, but felling those wouldn’t yield enough. Fred hoped his father had already figured that part out.
They couldn’t get to work on the boat until harvest was done, so he just kept reading and thinking about it. Today it felt like he was breathing through a straw. Tomorrow would be better.
Birdie didn’t believe it about the rain, but Fred did. He knew the flood was coming because he’d heard the rabbits scream.
* * *
THE BARBED-WIRE NEST the crows had built was still there, but the tree trunk now leaned, its roots jutting out of the sand. A crow took flight with a whoosh of wings as Birdie approached. She sat in the shade of the nest and watched the skimpy puffs of clouds drift overhead. The breeze carried the sounds of tractors, harvest time. There would be a baby and she would be a mother without a husband and she would live in her parents’ house milking the cows and scraping grit from her fingernails. Stop thinking, she told herself, stop thinking about any of it. But the loop continued: Cy gone; baby; life, or any real life, over. The baby was the weight that would keep her here forever. A crying, flailing baby that was hers alone. She wondered if she could hurt herself enough to lose the baby and not die. She’d heard of a pregnant girl in Herman who’d drunk kerosene. Birdie imagined the fire in her throat, the fumes tearing her eyes, the terrible pain in her belly. There had to be another way. She stood on the roots of the tree and reached for a knot, finding a depression for her foot and hoisting herself up. The tree was smooth, its bark long gone, and her other foot couldn’t find a wedge. She groped for another handhold until she found a nub of a branch, her free foot searching blindly until it caught a small ledge. She was four feet off the ground but as she looked to check her progress, her hand slipped and she fell back off the tree, landing without enough force, she knew, to do anything other than give her a sore backside.
A car moved along Gulliver Road from town, its tires leaving a trail of dust behind it. Birdie stood and tracked the car as it approached, knowing it wasn’t her father, who was out in the field. A green Ford, the mayor’s car. Birdie waved, hoping he’d stop, eager now for the distraction and a ride home. But if he saw her he didn’t slow until up at the crossroads, where he turned on the county road in the direction of the house.
* * *
THE CRUST OF the bread was golden and crisp as Annie pulled it from the oven, setting it on a rack to cool. She stood back and looked at the bounty she’d been able to pull together, satisfied and proud. Ham, chicken-and-corn pudding, mashed potatoes, green bean salad, baked squash, strawberry pie. A good wife, she thought.
A knock on the door was such a rare occurrence, she assumed it was Samuel hammering at a sticky part of the combine. The second knock startled her. She untied her apron and pushed the hair off her face as she walked to the door. There was Jack Lily behind the screen.
“Afternoon, Annie,” he said.
It was what she had tried not to want. He stood with his hands in his pockets, his hat low. He smiled and her mouth trembled into a smile in return. She looked quickly around, even as she knew Samuel was in the field, Fred was out near the old pond, and Birdie had run off.
“You weren’t in church,” she said. It was not what she had wanted to say. She held her arms to keep from opening the door.
He squinted off in the direction of the field where Samuel’s tractor droned.
“Thought it best,” he said.
She nodded, naked to her want. If only someone else had been home.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“Samuel had asked me about wood. I have an idea I wanted to discuss with him.”
“Wood?”
“For the boat.”
Annie closed her eyes and exhaled. “The boat.”
“Annie,” he spoke softly now. “Are you alone?”
She dipped her head in a half nod. She could hear Samuel’s tractor finish a row and then it turned, slipping out of sight.
“Meet me again. At the old house. Tomorrow late afternoon.”
“I will try to get away,” she said, knowing that there, inches from him, she would find a way.
He leaned toward her, his forehead against the screen. She did the same.
* * *
IT WAS THE mayor all right, Fred recognized the car. He ran his finger through the dirt across the car’s rear window. But when he came around the back and saw him up at the house, he didn’t bound up to wave hello. Why didn’t his mother open the door? He pulled down his mask, hoping it might help him think, but he didn’t want to go up to the house, even though he’d come back for a pail to help with the smaller bones. He hoped they weren’t talking about the boat, trying to get his father to give it up. He would have to ask Birdie about it later. She understood grown-up things better than he did. He retreated and set off for the pond.
CHAPTER 9
Her faded forget-me-not-print dress lay in a crumpled heap, and her stockings—the toe of which she’d crookedly mended with ugly black thread—snaked across one of her shoes, which had fallen on its side. Where was her other shoe? Jack Lily was asleep beside her. She was tired, but her body thrummed. A bristly wolf spider skittered into the debris-filled corner of the room. It was a female as big as her palm, a white egg sac on its back.
By the door was a basket of eggs Annie had brought to deliver to the Jensens. She had been gone an hour or so. She ran through the list again. Samuel had gone in with a load of grain. Birdie was driving the combine in the far glade. Fred was cleaning out the coop. It would take fifteen minutes to walk from here to the Jensen place. She might make it back even before Samuel returned. But she couldn’t make herself get up just yet. Just one more minute. The musky smell of him. The warm wind on her bare skin. She was only ever naked to bathe, but she had no urge to cover herself now. He had brought a quilt again for the mattress, but it was on the floor where he’d dropped it, gathering her to him as soon as they had crossed the threshold.
She hadn’t thought that much about sex after she and Samuel had settled into their marriage. There had been moments of passion, certainly in those early days—finally they could be together in that way—but she relegated her needs to a shelf just out of reach, as she thought she should, as women did. And it wasn’t as if she could talk about it with Samuel, couldn’t even imagine talking about it. Eventually she saw sex as part of being a wife. It was enjoyable enough sometimes, made her feel closer to him, but she didn’t feel she was missing out. After the children, she did not long for affection, and she often wished she could go to sleep when she felt his body hug hers, his needy hands seeking her out. The only other man she’d kissed had been William Thurgood, and when he’d pushed his wriggling tongue into her mouth she’d thought she might gag.
Now she was afraid she would think of nothing but sex for the rest of her life. What a crazy thing to have a new body with hers. Jack was taller, fuller, sure of himself as he unbuttoned her dress and slid it off her arms to the floor. But it was his undisguised hunger that fed her own, his confident hands and eager mouth that had made her feel warm and slithery. Wanting was dangerous.
Get up, Annie, she said to herself. She raised herself up on her elbow and put her hand on his chest, feeling it rise and fall in a quiet rhythm. He did not wake. She shook out her undergarments and got dressed, shoving the stockings in her pocket. The other shoe she found under his pants, which she folded into a neat square.
It was only outside in the sun and heat that she began to feel the weight of what she had done. Her feet were terribly hot and slipping in her shoes, and the sand worked its way in. With each step she fell more into herself, and her stomach roiled with the curdled truth of her betrayal. I can see you, she imagined God saying. The basket of eggs hit her hip and one shell cracked, freeing yolk and white into a slippery mess, which dripped through the wicker and landed in thick shiny drops on her skirt.
* * *
AFTER JACK HAD told Styron about the boat, word was all over town in a matter of days. Did you hear? Samuel Bell is building an ark. It made people laugh, but it also made them uneasy and then angry. How dare Bell think he’d been chosen?
Styron loved it. He was positively gleeful. An ark! In Mulehead, no less. He couldn’t have dreamed up a better idea on his own. When Jack returned to the office, he found Styron sketching billboards on the back of an envelope.
“I probably shouldn’t have told you,” Jack said.
“Everyone knows anyway. I overheard the fogies yammering about it last night at Ruth’s. It’s going to put us on the map.”
“We’re already on the map.” Jack pointed to the Cimarron County map tacked to the wall.
“What do you think?” Styron slid one of his sketches in front of him.
“Easy there, Styron.”
“You think we should wait until it’s finished before advertising it?”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”
Jack stood at the window and watched the gaunt McCleary brothers crouched on their haunches, chewing tobacco and spitting into a can shared between them. He fidgeted with the piles of papers at his desk. With his thumbnail he scraped at a smudge of dried glue on the filing cabinet.
“You okay, boss? You look a little flushed.”
“I’m fine. Feel pretty good, actually.”
Styron glanced up, wondering, not for the first time, if Jack had a woman. He ran through the short list of available ladies in town, but couldn’t settle on any likely candidates. There was a rumored woman for hire over in Beauville who worked in the hat shop or a candy store—he’d heard different accounts—but the mayor seemed a little too straight for a working girl.
“I have to go to Chicago,” Jack said. “Probably leave in a couple weeks.”
“Chicago?”
“My father’s not doing so well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Styron said, already clicking ahead to when he would be left in charge. He could bring Hattie to town to see his office. She always told Styron that he should be the mayor, that he would be mayor, that he was meant for great things. They had lain on his couch together and he had pressed himself against her stockinged thigh and she had run her fingers through his hair, before he excused himself to the bathroom, quickly turning away to shield from view his tented trousers, while Hattie took out her latest issue of Ladies’ World and returned to a dog-eared recipe for hush puppies, which she thought sounded quaintly Southern and gosh-darn delicious, and wouldn’t he like her to make them for him next Saturday night?
“I don’t know for how long,” Jack said.
Without Annie, as short a time as possible, he thought. He felt buttressed by their afternoon together. The smell of her neck, the curve of her hip. She had been waiting at the door for him and fell into his arms without even a hello. Afterward they had not talked much—he felt a little sheepish at having fallen asleep so quickly—and then she had left. But it didn’t worry him, not with the wildness of their bodies coming together like that. He’d planned to tell her about Chicago, but, as soon as he saw her, he forgot everything. They’d barely gotten upstairs before he had slipped her dress off her shoulders.
“Maybe the ark’ll be finished by the time you come back.”
Jack peered over at Styron’s drawings.
“Something tells me you’ll be keeping pretty close tabs on Bell’s progress.”
Jack felt a small ding of guilt about not going home immediately. He could barely admit to himself that he hoped his father would die before he arrived so he could remember him as he was, not as an old, sad man caged in a wasted body.
“Hey, you never told me if anything came of the dinosaur meeting,” Styron said.
“T
hey think there might be bones out there near the mesa. A hundred and fifty million years old.”
“A hundred and fifty million years?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t begin to get the science of it.”
“That’s million, with an ‘m’?”
“That’s what I said, Styron. I’m not sure how well it’ll sit with folks trying to keep their fields from blowing away to know some eggheads from Oklahoma City are after prehistoric bones.”
“They really think they’re going to dig up a dinosaur in Cimarron County?”
“They really do.”
“Things are looking up around here,” Styron said.
* * *
IT WAS SUPPER, day three of harvest, and Samuel could barely lift his fork, having worked through the day and most of the night before. He would go back out to finish the last load before nightfall. In the flush years, they’d hired men and the neighbors helped and afterward they all feasted together, but this year it was just the four of them. Fred was already through a drumstick of fried chicken, his mask hanging loose around his neck. Birdie picked at a wing. They had moved the table outside into the shade of the locust trees, as was tradition. The fans of leaflets sent polka-dotted shadows across the bounty.
“It’s wonderful,” Samuel said.
“You haven’t even taken a bite,” Annie said.
“It’s still wonderful,” he said. “We’re blessed.”
“Can you tell how much is coming in? What do you guess on yield?”
“Five. Five and a half.” It was meager, but it was something.
Despite his weary body, Samuel was feeling recharged. For hours he’d swung the tractor through the rutted dry rows, the combine devouring the wheat; the rumble of the machine and the rush of grain spitting into the tank blocked out all sounds of the natural world. In his head he saw in vivid relief how the boat should be. A three-chined hull. Humble but elegant. He had prayed on it, and returned again and again to an image of the four of them on the boat.
