“A man running flat-out could cross a mile while you were out there,” she says. She cranks back the hammer with her thumb.
“Woman! I know damn well I give instructions on this carbine.”
“He’s downstairs! I heard him!”
“Who?”
“I don’t know!”
I lift the Sharps from her clutch and lean the barrel next the hutch. “Downstairs?”
She nods.
“Jake—run outside. See if the door’s locked.”
Jacob bolts.
“I don’t care if the door’s got iron bars. I heard him.”
I throw open the cellar door and march into darkness, grope the wall with one hand and wave the other in front. A cobweb snares my fingers; I clasp a handrail. Each step carries me further into cold and damp. Smells like mold. The handrail ends. I reach with my foot and find cement, then face the light from the kitchen entrance and raise my arms. My fingers close on a string and I pull. A yellow bulb glows and the reluctant blackness recedes.
I turn a circle: ahead, a square door to a potato cellar; to the right, a room with darkness forbidding as a locked door; on the left, a workbench with scattered junk; behind, the chimney foundation and beyond, in shadows so deep they only resolve as I step closer, shelves. Below a blue rat poison dispenser, the corner of a suitcase bears the inked shape of a rose. Should’ve burned the damn thing, and the two below.
Emeline’s brushed the dust with her hand, by the marks. She’s seen the monogram, penned in ink many times over, as a child makes a thick letter from a thin pen: L.M.M.
I return to the kitchen. Emeline stands with a cleaver from the knife block.
Jacob stands at the kitchen entry. “It’s locked.”
“You was runnin’ hot water,” I say. “It’s the pipes.”
“Pipes?”
“Jacob, run along.” I wave my arm. “Copper expands with hot water. Pipe squeaks against the holes in the trusses.” I step to her. “Who was you expecting, Miss Emeline?”
“I didn’t run water when the noise happened.”
“The basement door’s secure. Who’d you think you saw?”
“No one in particular.”
“Secrets ain’t too good, see. We got to have trust. There’s no other way for a man and woman to live in the same house.”
She looks to the floor.
“I’m heading back to the woods. You see him again, get his name. Hell, invite him to supper. Just don’t touch my fuckin Sharps.”
Passing the hutch I dislodge the carbine. Make a grab but miss and it clatters against a bucket and discharges, the angle perfect for the lowest center pane in the window. Now my fuckin ears ring. I lift the Sharps, press palm to temple. Feel the bulge of veins in my neck.
“Oh Lord Jesus. I’m sorry.” Emeline rests the knife on the counter.
“Yeah. You talk to the lord.”
I cross to the living room, replace the carbine on its mount.
Six
I’m on the porch resting on an Adirondack chair. Emeline cooks as she cleans. By suppertime I smell ammonia, mashed potatoes, gravy, breaded venison and onions, and a side of boiled carrots. Plus she’s mopped the floor.
The sun dips into the horizon. My older boy Deet drives the tractor into the barn bay and comes to the house. He’s spent the day on the back forty, cutting first hay. His skin is sunburned and his hair hangs limp. A sheathed buck knife clings to his hip. He kicks dirt from his boots, hocks a loogey to the grass, ignores me. The porch light goes on. Emeline must have watched him approach. He goes inside.
Deet’s her age, roundabout.
“Deet?” she says.
Silence. I’m looking away from the house but I can see him sure as I can see the lake. He studies her. She got a regular woman’s face but her hips and rack are special. Next he sees the work she’s done in the kitchen. And then he adds it up.
“How old are you?”
I want to turn and read her face, but I let things play.
“Eighteen.”
“Shit. You could be my wife.”
I watch through the window with the bullet hole. Deet grabs a glass from the drying rack, fills it with water, downs it without stopping. He does this every night. Too ornery to take water with him to the field.
“Would you mind cleaning your shoes and not tracking mud?”
“Sure, Ma.” He refills the glass, drinks again, and lifts the lid from the cast iron skillet. Slips his deer knife from its sheath, spikes a strip of venison and eats.
“There’ll be no more of that,” she says. “You’ll find a place at the table, like the man of the house.”
Deet snorts and looks out he busted window to me. He holds his look long enough to challenge but lets it go before I rise.
Jacob arrives from the lake with a fishing pole, leans it against the house and I follow him inside.
“You want to get cleaned up for supper?” She says to Deet.
He looks at his hands. His pants. “What’s your name?”
“Emeline.”
“Sure. Emeline.”
I step to the stove and fork a cut of breaded venison. I sniff it, and drop it to the pan. “Miss Emeline, maybe you could have food on the plate when I come in?”
She looks out the window, lets a long breath escape. “Everyone does things differently; it takes a little time to learn new ways.” She swipes my plate.
“In the future,” I say.
Emeline heaps potatoes. “Gravy?”
“On the table.”
“Aren’t you going to wash up?”
I study my fingernails, flip my hands palms-up and spit at a blotch of pine pitch. “Deet, you get the hogs and cows fed?”
He nods.
“Jake—the chickens?”
“Yessir.”
“Clean out the coop?”
Silence.
“Well?”
“Nossir.”
Emeline’s busy filling plates. I unbuckle my belt. “Outside.”
I follow Jacob to the door, take him to the end of the porch. He braces against the wall and endures three wallops without commotion, and confirms he’s the toughest little shit ever lived. We go inside and Deet’s staring at the table. Or Emeline’s ass. I can’t tell.
Jacob smirks at Emeline, wiggles onto his chair.
“All right, dammit. Let’s eat.”
“Stop!” Emeline says. “Lord we thank you for your bounty and ask you to bless all who live here. We thank you for your redeeming grace and—”
“Miss Emeline. I said it’s time to eat.”
Deet’s outside helping Jacob clean the chicken coop. Emeline’s at the sink. I open the hutch door. “You move my whiskey glass? The one with the turkey?”
“In back, on the right.”
My cuff catches another glass; I watch it drop to the floor and shatter then I sit at the table and pour. I glance at Emeline, then the window shot out on account of her disobedience, and the shards at my feet. “Our love affair’s been hard on glass.”
Emeline fetches the broom and dustpan. She sweeps and picks fragments from the gaps in the floorboards. “You get a fire ready, down at the lake?”
“All but lit.”
“I’ll just be a minute cleaning up. Why don’t you go down and start the fire, and relax?”
“Miss Emeline, this being our first day, you ought to know I don’t tolerate henpeckin’, nebbin’, or proddin’.”
She studies my face and offers a tentative smile. “Angus, that was a suggestion.”
I lift my glass, swirl the fluid. “You drink whiskey?”
“Never tried.” Emeline carries glass fragments to a bin on the porch. When she returns, I have a second glass on the table, both half full. I work an ice cube tray at the refrigerator door.
Emeline runs the sink full of dishwater while I rap the metal tray on the tabletop. I drop a chunk of ice in each glass. She scrubs dishes and bumps my stomach with her elbows. I press against h
er bottom and rest my drink on her shoulder. Scrape my stubble on her neck. Press against her back and take her wrist in my hand like a rope might in a few minutes.
“May I have a taste of that?” she says.
I lower an arm across her front and press the inside of her thigh.
“Angus, the window.” She wiggles away. “‘Sides, I want to see the fire.”
I put the whiskey to her lips while her hands work in suds. Tip it and she gulps too fast. She chokes and breathes hoarse. Teary, she looks to the darkness outside and says, “Let’s build that fire, Angus. If you’ve a mind.”
I’ve a mind.
Seven
Emeline yawned. The clock read four-thirty. Through the kitchen window red taillights drifted toward the road. Angus worked at an oilrig in Franklin and drove two hours to get there. He told her last night at ten. This morning he barely said a word except he’d be home by dark, or not.
She rubbed her wrists and though she stared at a rubbery fried egg, in her mind she saw darkness and felt the animal terror of being bound wrist to ankle, crushed under his weight, pinched and sobbing. She put the thought away. Following the Lord required resolve. The world was cruel but it was cruel for everyone.
Emeline pierced egg with her fork, spiked a strip of hog sidemeat that remained after Angus took his fill, and ate. Her stomach rolled and she waited. When the nausea subsided she gathered and washed dishes, then made a mug of second-strain coffee. The boys slept upstairs; outside, not even morning birds stirred. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour.
With the comforts of her Bible and coffee, she curled her legs and cold bare feet on the living room sofa. She opened the curtain behind her to a gray, moonlit lawn with mist rolling from the lake. The yellow lamplight seemed bright now, and she flipped to her bookmark at Deuteronomy 6, Moses talking to the people.
Ye shall observe to do therefore as the Lord your God hath commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.
No mistaking the tone of authority. Read Deuteronomy and you know you’re dealing with the LORD. Contrasted with Angus, who last night after retiring called out, “I’m gonna spit in the air!” Emeline ducked under the covers only to gag on the smell of raw sewage. That, after he’d trussed her and ridden her like an animal for a half hour by the lake.
Emeline rested her hand on her belly. She looked outside at the darkness. Angus had arrived as a specific answer to prayer, and upon further prayer, she’d accepted his proposal. In trouble, she’d turned to the Lord and He said “trust me,” and she had. Her struggle was continuing to trust Him, for the Lord never revealed everything at once. He confirmed little steps and her faith grew. Except marrying Angus Hardgrave felt like a big step.
The Lord had said to marry him.
Doubt was blasphemy. She bowed her head.
Lord, I trust you and will wait for your plan. I married Angus like you told me to but I don’t know what angle you’re taking and I might need you to give me the power to keep believing. I’m not seeing how any of this works for the good of anyone.
The wait was an opportunity to grow in faith. The Lord had said she would doubt and fear. In the gray light she felt numb. Heaven and salvation were easy, but earthly living required deeper faith.
Deet stretched. The beautiful girl from his dream became his father’s new wife.
Emeline.
Below his bed, a canvas knapsack contained everything he needed to escape: a change of clothes, pliers, fishing line, hooks, and ten dollars he’d accumulated by hoarding sidewalk pennies and the dimes his father paid for working the farm. Plus a two-dollar bill he’d swiped from the old man’s dresser one afternoon last doe season when he’d seen Angus teach Jacob a lesson he called Human Frailty.
Angus and Jacob were in the barn and Deet arrived as Angus said, “The hardest part of the human body is the tooth. Lookit this big old molar. Watch.” Angus laid the molar on the barn floor and crushed it with a roofing hammer. “See that? There’s your lesson. Yessir.” The tooth had belonged to Jacob’s mother, and had resided in her mouth until a few hours earlier. Deet had seen the two dollar bill on Angus’s dresser and paid it no mind, but witnessing his father murder his third wife, and then teach her son the Frailty Lesson with her tooth made Deet return and swipe the money.
The canvas bag under his bed held everything he’d need to meet life on his own terms, everything except the knife that hadn’t left his hip since he’d seen Angus drag a body from the barn to the lake.
Leaving would be a hell of a thing. It’d be an admission that his understanding of the world wasn’t right enough to stand up for. He couldn’t quite get his mind around that kind of cowardice—yet he was ready to go. Winter had descended like a cold hurricane that night. Wind drove ice pellets against the window panes. Drifts of ice nuggets locked the door. All last summer the old-timers at the barbershop had said local weather followed a thirty-year cycle, and the last bad winter was 1927. Snow drifted six feet, so cold that trees snapped in the wind. One geezer told of finding a trophy buck in the spring of ‘28 that he’d hunted for years, starved to death. Deet considered that hard, versus the warmth of his bed and venison in the skillet. It had always been apparent that Lucy Mae irritated the living shit out of Angus, and being around Angus all his life, Deet understood that only women need worry about him.
If he ran, he’d never survive without stealing a car and heading south. Even in all his winter clothes, maybe kifing a rifle and a box of shells, he’d freeze or get found out. As long as Angus didn’t act up, Deet’s departure could wait until spring.
Four months passed and the land thawed. Angus worked at the derrick most days and only returned at night. Deet remembered that December day, seeing his father with Lucy Mae’s body and the subsequent Frailty Lesson, but during the day-to-day solitude of tending the farm, one thought stayed his leaving. What of the livestock?
Deet planned to take Jacob, but he couldn’t bring the hogs and cattle. The thought of the livestock slowly starving as Angus drank himself unconscious left only one alternative. Before leaving, Deet would have to slaughter Pete, the old moss-horned bull; Gretel, the three-year Holstein milker; Loozyannie, a Jersey with soft eyes and a strange smile so pretty you could kiss her—in cold blood, or turn them loose to wander the land. The hogs would thrive. Angus fattened those pegged for slaughter on acorns every fall. But the cattle would graze the small pasture to dirt in a week.
As spring deepened Deet spent every day dragging a plow or harrow from a steel-wheeled tractor, his guts scrambled from bouncing, his skin burned from sun. In early spring he’d work most of the day before his thoughts turned to slaughtering the animals, but as spring wore on he had more time to reflect on the fact he was working like a sharecropper for a slave’s wage, and he confronted earlier and earlier in the day his dread of killing the animals.
Two weeks ago he rose from bed and his first thought was no more, he wouldn’t do it anymore. He’d packed a bag and stuffed in under the duffel. He’d plotted the sequence, the timing, the destination. Last night would have been the slaughter, and today he and Jacob would have been a hundred miles away.
But Angus went to town and came back with a wife.
Emeline woke on the sofa to the smell of cinnamon and oatmeal. Deet and Jacob clattered spoons on bowls. Her feet were cold.
Yesterday before bed Angus had harried her unpacking. While she was barely awake Angus tripped on her suitcase, cursed, and carried it to the basement. She’d spent a few moments sitting upright, wondering what day it was and why she lay in an unfamiliar bed, and then realized she was a married woman with obligations. Her first duty was to see her husband fed before he left the house. She dressed but couldn’t find stockings or her suitcase. Meanwhile Angus had already risen and left the room, and the
thought of earning his reproof stirred her to arrive in the kitchen barefoot to fix his breakfast.
She’d prepared a meal while he brooded over his headache, and after he left she had fallen asleep trying to read her Bible. Now that the boys had wakened her, more than anything she wanted warm feet.
“Good morning, Jacob. Good morning, Deet.”
“Morning,” Jacob said.
Deet chewed bread.
Emeline went to the hutch where yesterday she’d found a tall, yellow-brown beeswax candle and a box of matches. She lit the wick, descended to the basement and turned on the light at the foot of the steps. She noticed the cord that carried electricity to the light socket appeared new. Turning, she found some of the seams in the stone foundation were wet. The corners of the cement floor glistened. She looked for other light fixtures on the joists but found none; but she did spot shiny copper pipes through the trusses. A stone stair led to a slope-doored exit. She pressed against it and found it locked from outside. Leaning a moment she wondered that Angus would spend money on running water and electricity, but not paint or basic repairs. Had he come into money?
Or wanted to make the house more appealing for a town girl?
Her suitcase rested on the shelf where she’d found the others yesterday when she’d ventured downstairs looking for a broom and cleaning supplies. She dragged it to the floor and removed her stockings from an elastic compartment. The candle flickered. She tapped the pockets for other stowaway garments and returned the case to the shelf, on top of the one with L.M.M. penned on the shoulder. She brought the candle closer. The next shelf down supported another suitcase, and lower, a fourth. Dust caked each in successively deeper coats, and the one on the bottom seemed fuzzy with mold.
Emeline looked at her bare feet, now numb, on the cement floor. She placed one foot on top of the other and looked at the cobwebs between the support timbers, the shadow-filled recesses, and back to the suitcases. L.M.M. A corroded silver Christmas tree stand, an iron with a frayed cord, a stack of empty photo frames. A blue warfarin dispenser: De-Ratter—De Mouser. She remembered her mother telling her a story about a boy who’d eaten a warfarin pellet, thinking it was a candy. How a boy could mistake rat poison for candy was impossible to guess, but judging from what little boys became when they grew up, it wasn’t out of the question. Either way, it killed him.
Nothing Save the Bones Inside Her Page 4
