In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  There were four loafpans of bread rising on the counter and she was not in the still-dark barns. From there, as the day came on, he saw the clear trail breaking the frost on the meadow grass above the house leading up into the woods. She had gone for a walk, was all. He went back to the house and ate a meal of bacon and biscuit, a thing learned from her. He drank a single cup of coffee; years recent his bowels could not stand more. He smoked his pipe and went to the outhouse and resolved again to consider indoor plumbing. He waited for his children to rise on their weekly lazy morning and waited for his wife. He sat reading the days-old paper, sitting in the parlor to have no view of the hillside, not wanting to watch for her.

  Midmorning Abby baked the bread which they ate with beans at noontime, still with Leah gone. The bread was without salt, lacking savor and texture, tasting not so much of flour as nothing at all. Without speaking of it, after the meal Abby took the remaining bread to the yards and broke it apart for the hens and returned to the kitchen to turn up a fresh sponge. Pru hitched a single sorrel to the high-wheeled cart and took Jamie to town for ice-cream sodas. Norman sat in the parlor a brief time, his stomach rumbling from the rough lunch. His pipe held no pleasure. After a time he went out and stood in the yard, surveying the hillside for movement. Beyond the small flock of sheep there was nothing. He went into the house again, to the scarred rolltop long since forgotten to have been his father’s and sat to his accounts and after a time the afternoon fell before the trickle of pencil markings into columns. In the kitchen Abby roasted a chicken for dinner, also halved squash, baked onions, the last of the tough old snap beans boiled down with salt pork as her mother made them and also turned out a pie from the select first few ripe Pound-sweets. After a while Pru and Jamie came back from the village and Norman rose and did the chores, Pru joining him after changing clothes. They did not speak. She went on to the house ahead of him with the baskets of eggs. He stood a long while in the blue dusk, running his eyes up the hillside, trying to recall just where her track had broken through the frost that morning. There was no sign of her. He thought to go up after her but knew she could be anywhere, knew also she would scorn him should he chance onto her. She was out where she wanted to be. He recalled how she’d rambled odd hours and days when they seemed cornered to be childless. He went to the house and sat to Sunday dinner with his children. The bread was rich, the chicken fell from its bones. Jamie was restless but someway that afternoon Prudence had impressed him and he made no complaint, did not call out for his mother. Perhaps he was simply sated, tired, content. Norman did not know. Then the meal was done with and the girls worked fast to clear the table and take the boy up, leaving Norman alone to smoke his pipe. And wait his wife. He woke from dozing at the table sometime before midnight to scrub his face with the fading warm water from the reservoir and went out into the moonlight to scan the hills again and smoke once more. There was nothing to be seen. Scant high thin clouds. A halo around the moon. He wanted to call her name. He tapped out the pipe bowl into the air and watched the embers flare toward the ground and die. Heard their faint hiss against the frost already down. His stomach wrenched, torn, as if the midday beans worked their way back up. There was nothing he could do. Finally, he knew he was not a man to trust anything to return to how it had been. He went up to bed and lay there cold and sleepless. Still, she woke him when she came in before dawn, woke him with the chill of her backside pressed into him. He did not speak. He knew she knew he was awake. She did not speak either.

  It was not that she would not talk to them. After her long sleep and long walk the days patterned again to a resemblance of what had been but she fooled none of them, not even the boy. She was brisk, never brusque, blunt with her statements, directions, admonitions or corrections. There were no odd misplaced sighs drifting from her mouth mid-meal or mooning empty eyes glazed off into a distance only she might see. There was none of that and yet she was not quite there. As if she moved with an invisible glass of water balanced on her head, the water perhaps the liquid of all the cries, the withered shriek, the discharge of her soul, that she believed hidden from her family. Even when she raised her voice there was no emotion to it but simply a rote thing: the child spilled milk, command him to clean up after himself. Less walking through motions than some vacancy at the center of herself that all the outer layers could not completely shroud. This lack in her spread out to those around her, and the days tightened with the nut of anger drawn up a shaft of despair. The sisters fought bitterly over small things out of earshot of her and then subdued, worked with a frenzy visible to their father but not their mother to accomplish what must be done and even what might be done before she might notice it. As if their action might assuage her, ease her back, perhaps even just cause her to notice how deeply wrong things were. Jamie went through a rough patch, clinging and tearful, and his mother would take him up, hold a handkerchief to his nose, command him to blow, wash his face and utter her soothe, the same words that worked only months before, but she would now set him free and not see his eyes working over her, as he sought to find the mother he knew in the familiar form turned inside out. Or outside in. Sometimes Norman thought the boy knew better than all the rest of them what was wrong with her. More than once felt the impulse to draw the boy off, take him up to the sheep pasture with the hope someway that what the boy knew might come clear to him.

  Norman with an anger swinging loose and wild and tamped down, all at once. What conversation he held with Leah he grew quickly to hate. There was nothing there but a perfunctory response. He felt played with. He felt it was not her doing the playing. But did not know who else it might be. His anger was selfish also; he felt too old for this. He was trammeled, bludgeoned, wrought to a fine spin. There was nothing he could do. He admired her skill. He blamed everything, most of all himself. For what exactly he did not know. She did not so much continue to refuse to speak of her travels as ignore his questioning. There was nothing to be said. The world was a short squat globe, tiny, that daily peeled away more and more of itself, as a vast endless onion of fine incalculable skins. Smart to the eye, right up through to the brain.

  She reminded him over and again of the wild horse. A strawberry roan, bunchy little mare, got from his brother-in-law the summer Abby was six. The Pete horse was grown old and Tommy too. And there was this mare who just needed gentling. So she came. Portia, she’d been called. And what he remembered now was not her fear of mankind, which he understood and shared; and not those fine moments when her fear grew so great he felt ensnared by it, almost a rapture, as if each treaded a circuit known only to the other; and also not when he finally made enough gain with her to know he’d make no more and determined, hard as it was to admit, he was not the horseman to calm her or, easier, she not the creature to have around two small girls. While all this happened, what he recalled in those weeks after Leah returned—and this he’d forgotten for years for it had been one bad afternoon and nothing more—was the time she tried to kill him. It was that simple. Now he saw how clever she’d been, the cleverness nothing more than an animal suddenly flaring or perhaps even choosing her moment. He’d hitched her to the single-row cultivator to run through the hilled potato drills and they’d gone up the hillside above the house and went down the first row and halfway up the second, the dark dirt folding up soft and flaking like flour under his feet, the thick-leafed potato plants to either side seeming to grow even darker as the soil turned up between them and he’d fallen into the steady walking mesmerism of the job when the mare bolted: her hindquarters hunkered as she sprang away, the cultivator handles jerked from his hands, the machine tipped sideways tearing through the drills as the mare sprinted for the open field, Norman chasing half-assed behind, the looped and knotted lines around his neck and they went on that way until they came into the tall grass of the field and the cultivator tines caught and the machine flipped and he stumbled against it, still drawn forward, and fell, the back of his neck snapping hard when the lines drew tight, smacking hi
s head against the ground. Even as he struck one hand was up getting the lines off his neck. His eyes spangled. He fought to gain his feet. The mare then turned and came onto him, raising her forefeet off the ground just inches to lunge, her lips twisted away from her broad snapping teeth, her eyes rolling huge with whites surrounding them in the sockets, the whites blared with bursting veins. She was over him, one hoof grazing his shoulder and the other concussing the air beside his head as his hand bunched tight and shot forward and he punched her hard in the soft tip of her nose. He broke his middle two knuckles and felt the gristle between her nostrils crumble and spread under the blow. There was a long time, perhaps a second, when his fist was driving hard into her and he twisted it to do as large a damage as possible. Then he sat down. The mare retreated a dozen feet and stood blowing, watching him. He rubbed his hand and only then cried out with the pain, only then knew it was broken. When he cried the mare’s ears came forward, first one, then the other, then both flickering before centering forward. He cursed her. She was gone. Already gone. A canning horse. She had no way to know this. She watched him sitting in the grass, the harness askew on her, the cultivator upside down to one side. After a moment she bent her neck forward and blew again. Great gobs of excited snot feathered out onto the grass. Then she dipped her head and grazed through the timothy to the rich clover below.

  He lost his temper with Leah only once that fall and nothing was changed by it although for a couple of days he felt a great relief, as of an emptied vat filled near to bursting, and also a timid embarrassment, as if he’d taken advantage of someone smaller, weaker than himself. And within three weeks would have the opportunity to rework the episode endlessly to carry as another man, in another time and place, might have carried a many-lashed short-handled whip to cut himself across his own back with, walking barefoot in thorns and nettles, hatless under a white burning sky.

  He’d been on the barnfloor, cleaning the ciderpress. The cider was made, down basement in barrels, and he’d washed the tub and leaned it to dry in the sun. He’d taken out the metal workings of the press itself and these he washed and dried with sacking and then worked in a fine coat of machine oil, the oil flowing onto the metal and enriching it, the parts taking on a rich patina. Even the small pits and faults on the outside nothing more than inevitable: the abrading of time. And Norman then dropped the larger of the two gear wheels and it fell against the press-plate and two of the cog-teeth on the gear broke off and with no more effort than that the gear was junk, a thing graceful in its utility and beautiful in its simplicity now scrap. And cast scrap, not even something to be reforged or made to some new purpose. He sat looking down at it. He looked at it a long while and then sat looking out onto the farm. The press was only forty years old. He could order a new part for it but this was not the point. It was a good thing ruined through carelessness, through not paying attention. It was not an accident. He felt his mind overloaded and, feeling it, knew it to be true. He felt the stiffness in his shoulders and arms and twined through his bowels as a heat and down again into the muscles of his legs and all of him ached. It was not work. It was not age. He spat onto the chaff litter over the floorboards and cursed. A short vile spew of language meant to purge but was only coal oil on his burn. He looked again out onto his farm. Prudence was gone, in school for her final year. Abby and Jamie were up to the orchard with a single horse and the stone boat with plank sideboards, filling it with the last bruised windfalls to bring down and parcel out daily to the sheep before they rotted. High on the trees the last remnant apples clung in the wind. Some would be there through snowfall. Partridge would fly in at warm midday in November to eat them as the sugar fermented and then the birds would spin off down hillside in crazed drunken flight. Last year they ate a brace that crashed into the barn and lay dazed on the dooryard. He rose and bent to lift the broken gear and placed it with great care on a ledge of framing on the inner barn-wall, broken teeth gaping up, where he knew it would remain for years. He already wanted to save it: as reference to his anger, as reference to the day. He went to the house. His gait a stalk. Each footfall hurt and drove him forward. He felt extraordinary: taut, wakened, shrewd, elaborate, guileless, enraged, simple. Righteous.

  She was in the parlor, on the year-old sofa covered in blue-black velvet with a raised floral scroll of navy. She was sitting with knees together, hands in her lap, head tilted back against the rest. Not sleeping but with her eyes closed. He sat in the peg-back Windsor opposite, feet apart, elbows on his knees, chin cupped. He waited but not long and his voice broke into the room. He liked it, liked the way it filled up the room that for weeks now had seemed to him shrouded with fragments and whispers and held-back sighs, with her lackened to a pulse just able to carry life, not even forward but maintaining a stasis. His voice brash as hammered piano ivory, he said, “You made an effort, maybe you could tell me just how long you expect to go on like this. Then I’d know, we’d all know, how much more of this horseshit’s piled up ahead. Seems to me that’s fair to ask. Since you cannot or will not tell me. Maybe just don’t want to or don’t even know whatever it was bound you up tight as a bandage on your little trip back down home. And I guess that’s your business. But there’s a family right here in front of you that each one wonders where it is you’ve gone. Even that little chap wonders where his mother’s got off to. You thought about that? How it is for him? Little boy doesn’t know first thing about any of this at all. All he knows is Mother’s a stranger to him. Me, I never saw you the sort to let your own misery spill over onto somebody else, least of all some helpless little feller like that. Not to mention the rest of us. The rest of us can go to hell I guess. Seems like that’s how you’d have it, at least.”

  He paused then, took breath, considered if his anger was out of him and it was not but surged again.

  “You won’t talk to me. All right. I don’t like it but I can live with it. Maybe someday you will. Nobody there, you said. Well. I’m not an idiot. So. What you learned was not what you’d hoped for. Maybe even worse than what you’d feared. I’m guessing. Guessing since that’s all I can do. Goddammit Leah, I’m tired of this. I never once stopped you from doing what you wanted or thought was best and more times than you might think another man would have. And most all those times you were right on the money. I give you that. But I’m here to tell you. Right now. I will not live like this. I cannot see the way to live like this. And I won’t do it and I can’t see what to do about it. So. You. It’s your turn. You’ve got to tell me something and I don’t know what it is. But you do. So.”

  Partway through, when he spoke of Jamie or just after, she opened her eyes, gazing up at the ceiling. Then closed them again. Her features spread evenly over her face as if calm. Or held down placid under urgent control. Or a slackness of fatigue so complete as to create a vision of composure. Or a resignation almost chemical in her, chemical if the soul were made of compounds and elements.

  Her eyes still closed she said, “That boy be fine.”

  His voice low now, through his teeth. “Jamie. I’m talking about Jamie. Not some boy.”

  One eyebrow stirred, settled, a fine etched arch. “You all. You all be fine. Leave me alone, Norman.”

  “No. I left you alone a month now.”

  “You keep right on.” And her eyes still closed she lifted one hand and made a throwing-away motion. “You doing a good job at it.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m done with it. Done with humoring you. Done with watching these children try and do the same. Time you got a hold of yourself.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. She smiled. Terrible as a skull. Her eyes flat with anger, hatred. Far worse, pity. “Oh, a hold of myself. Mister you got no idea how good a hold I got. The rest of it, you be done with whatever you want. It don’t change nothing with me. You, you need to learn to be satisfied with me. That’s all you get. It’s a terrible thing over me, ain’t nothing to be shared with nobody, not nobody here. So, you think on that. Think mayb
e you all spared some things. I ain’t hurt you; I ain’t hurt them children, don’t matter what you think, all of you. I ain’t hurt none of you.” She closed her eyes again.

  He stood and, standing, did not know why he was up. He made a step toward her and stopped. Turned, looked out the window. Nothing there. Same as always, each thing of outside broken by the sixteen panes and fluid with the old glass. He looked back at her. His hands itched and worked before him, wanting to take something up, rend it, shred it, peel it off away down to a core. He looked at her and imagined striking her and felt in his chest the heat of satisfaction and his stomach wrench up with disgust. He said, “You’re hurting each one of us, every day. Hurting yourself too.”