In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  Foster could taste his eggs, the whiskey from the night before. His stomach was tight. Mebane was no longer smiling but his face was bright, pitched up. Foster ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth and swallowed. He said, “It was all a trick. Is that right? It wasn’t true?”

  Mebane made a sound, a sigh, a hiccup of sadness, despair. It could have been a chopped-off laugh. He said, “I never knew where Helen went to. What happened to her. I was bad sick with fevers and somebody—it could have been her—got word to my mother in Raleigh who came after me. It was a terrible time to travel. The railroads was all torn up and shut down, the roads filled with Yankee patrols and every other sort of criminal you could think of. I don’t know how she did it. She got a man and a team and made that trip for me. Thirty miles. But by the time my mother got to me I was alone. Helen was gone, the other old nigger woman too. I didn’t know where, didn’t care. I recall lying on a tick in the back of that wagon sweating under a stretched canvas, crying with every step and jounce of the way.”

  Foster stood. “It was all a lie then. What you told her was lies.”

  “I was not interested in anything,” Mebane said, “except watching her break. All I wanted then was her gone. She needed something and I gave it to her. What did it matter? She needed that bad news the same way she needed to make the deal with me to get it. She did you know! She needed that deal. Maybe more than me. She had tried to trade her way into a new life. Fancy-go-to-town nigger woman! I wanted her to know what it cost. Cost me. I wanted her to have that weight over her every walking moment of her life.”

  “Jesus,” Foster said. “Why? I don’t understand why.”

  And for a brief moment Mebane’s eyes were focused on Foster, and when he spoke his voice was triumphant, soft.

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” Mebane said. “She had that debility, stronger even than doubt. So there was that. But mostly,” he added, “because I could.”

  “Because you could,” Foster repeated. He had grasped the top of the chair before him, the chair tipping on its casters, his arms shaking.

  Mebane did not move. His face was pink, filmed with sweat. His shirt beneath his arms drooped dark along his sides. Foster could smell him. He let go of the chair and swung his arms loose along his sides. Mebane smiled once more, gray lips a rictus against the blot of his face. He said, “It wasn’t even that good a piece of tail. She was on top of me of course, her eyes closed. Just slapping up and down against me. I’ve paid for better. It was not the pussy I expected it to be.”

  Foster started around the table. Mebane stepped back, away from the flue and leaned against the wall. He raised up the cane and cut several passes with it. “That’s it. Come on, boy,” he cried out. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Foster stopped. He turned from the old man. The rain mapped dissolving continents down the window glass. He thought then of his father, of what he would’ve done. After a moment, he looked back at Mebane, the cane pointed at the ceiling, ready to descend. He said, “No.”

  “No? What do you mean, No? It’s what you came after. It’s why you’re here.”

  Foster put his hands in his pockets. He stood very still. Again, he said, “No.”

  “No? A hunting man like yourself? You got those dogs. I seen you out in the woods with them. What’s the matter with you? Can’t you do the right thing?”

  Foster stood silent. Mebane took a step forward, waved the cane in the air. Foster did not move. Mebane looked at him. There was a long silence.

  Mebane was wheezing. He placed the cane-tip before him and leaned upon it. His breath broke. “I know you got a gun. I seen you carrying it in to the nigger cabin.”

  Foster walked up to stand before him. He was as close as he had been to the man. He reached over with his left boot and tapped the cane-tip. “The worst thing I can think of. Is to leave you just the way you are.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Tell you what,” Foster said. “I’ll see you later.” And stepped around the man, aiming for the swinging kitchen door.

  Mebane wracked, “Come on back here.”

  Foster, already in the kitchen, straight for the back door, heard some crashing in the room behind him. Some flailing, some thing breaking. Breaking apart as it fell.

  He went across the yard with his head bent down, the rain striking hard his humped back. He opened the door of the cabin but the dogs failed to pour out as he expected. He stepped up inside, shaking the water off his head. The dogs were up on the bed, one either side of Daphne. Who sat crosslegged, her hair in wet matted ropes, peeled away from her face, the L. C. Smith held over her lap.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said and stepped forward to take the shotgun up from her, her hands coming off it and held up a moment in the air after it. He broke it open and drew out the two shells and put them in his trouser pocket and snapped the gun to and leaned it against the wall. Her eyes wide upon him, her face damp with rain from her hair. He said, “What’re you doing?”

  “I got scared,” she said. “I thought something happened to you.”

  “I’m all fucked up,” he said.

  She stood off the bed. In heavy dark denim jeans too big for her belted high on her waist with four-inch cuffs over rough old boots also too big, a flannel shirt buttoned tight to her throat. The clothes splotched with rain, the boots rimed with red gumbo mud. She stood before him, not too close. When she stood the young dog Glow also rose up, sitting on the bed, watching. Daphne said, “When you didn’t show up last night I woke up this morning feeling something was wrong. I called Uncle Lex on the telephone and he didn’t sound right to me, sounded giddy and worked up, kept telling me everything was fine. The way a person does when it’s not. There wasn’t any way to get into town so I set off walking. I got a ride pretty quick.”

  “What were you up to with my shotgun?” Feeling offkey. He wanted to be alone. Yet there she was. Her lips parted, her breath coming onto him a little sour. Her fear, he thought.

  “I came right in the front door, down the hall and stood looking in the dining room at the two of you. He was off, wild, talking about somebody, I don’t know who. And you, braced back in your chair like you’d been hit. And not either one of you aware I was there. So I went out and came around here. And seen that gun leaned up against the wall and knew you had a reason for it being there. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was sit here and wait, thinking if you came through the door in a hurry I could maybe stop whatever was coming after you.”

  He looked at her then, the wet girl. “Is that what you thought?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  He shook his head. “Whatever is after me, that shotgun wouldn’t be much good. I’m not making fun.”

  Both quiet then. She was so lovely. He thought This is how it is, with all of them. Someway. His father and mother. His grandfather and grandmother. Even all skewed and twisted the old man in the house pale clean scent of her skin, her wet clothes. Her head laid sideways against his chest, her face turned down so he saw the crown of her head, the split-through to her scalp where her hair fell apart, the delicate rib of the back of her ear, the smooth swelling column of her neck going into the collar of the shirt. And when he stopped crying he still stood holding her, held her until they were both silent and still and he could feel her life against him, the beating of her heart. And stepped away when he felt himself begin to rise against her.

  “Oh boy,” he said, turning from her, “am I ever fucked up.” And he took the box of his father’s stale cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and lighted one and squatted in the rain at the open door of the cabin. And then, as if released, the two dogs came off the bed and went out the door into the rain, tracking again through the yard. He squatted there smoking, watching the dogs. The smoke came off in slow wrought spirals that held out in the rain before breaking apart. Behind him he heard her sit once again on the bed, the faint clicking sound as the tick settled.

  “Where are you go
ing to go?”

  “I don’t know.” He did not look back at her.

  “Back north?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “I don’t think so. Not right off.” Thinking of the house in Bethlehem, the two old women on the Vermont farm. Them he would need to send some kind of word to. Some letter. Without any idea what he would say. Get away from here first, he thought. Then write something simple, painless, fill it up with his love of them, whatever it was he would finally be doing.

  Behind him she said, “Take me with you.”

  Where the rain ran off the shake roof there was a line of beading streams that were trenching pods into the earth, into the mire of mud, forming a shallow little trench. He said, “Before my dad died he talked of going out west. New Mexico. Arizona. We joked about it. I wonder how serious he was about it now. Maybe I’ll drive out there. Drive right on through the fall. Quail-hunt these dogs all the way, wherever I can find a place to do it. Right on through the fall and winter. See what it’s like. See what all that country is about. I don’t know.”

  She was silent behind him.

  After a bit he flicked the cigarette out into the mud and watched as it drenched through with rain and fell apart. When he couldn’t see any of it anymore, when the paper and tobacco were all mixed with the mud and gone, he said, “The thing is, I took you along, what I’m afraid of is everytime I looked at you I’d think about this place. And what I got to do. What I’ve got to do is put all this behind me.” He still did not look at her.

  Her voice was very low. “You’re wrong. If you were to carry me along I’d just become a part of everywhere we went. You’ve got it backward. You leave me here, everytime you think of me you’ll think of everything else happened here. And I’ll get all mixed up with that. I’ll never be just me, to you, again. I’ve got forty-two dollars.”

  He did not smile at this. But felt what he thought was a smile turn over within him. He stood, one last long look at the rain and turned to look at her. He did not say anything, just looked at her. As if reading every line of her, every part he could know or hope to know. To hold it with him. To take away with him. She saw him doing this.

  “Then go,” she said.

  “Daphne.”

  “No. Just go. Go on.”

  “Listen to me.”

  “No. Go on, Foster Pelham. Look! What’ve you got here? That old ruint suitcase? Your gun? Those dogs’ll carry themselves out to your car. There’s this old sleeping bag. Here.” And without getting off the bed she rolled sideways and pulled it from under her and still sitting on the bed folded it and placed it on the end of the tick. “There. You’re all set.”

  “Daphne—”

  “You be quiet! Whatever it is you want to say, I don’t want to hear it! Maybe you found what it was you couldn’t say the other night. Well, that’s an old song and dance. I don’t want any part of it. Keep it, Foster. Keep it for yourself. Tell yourself those things. I don’t want to hear it. Just go. Just get out of here. Get away from me.”

  He stood silent before her. Feeling crude, shambling, struck by her fury. After a time, knowing it was the wrong thing but not clear what else he might do, he said, “At least let me give you a lift out to your house.”

  Her head jerked up to look at him, her eyes wild with anger. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to set right here. I don’t want any rides from you. Just get the fuck out of here.”

  He carried his things out to the lane where the Chrysler was parked and sat in the car and used the oiled rag to wipe down the L. C. Smith and then shut it in its case and set the case down in the compartment with the whiskey and money under the rear seat and replaced the heavy seat cushion. Then back to the yard gate where Glow and Lovey waited him and he let them out and into the backseat of the car. They lay curled as if knowing it would be a long ride this time. He sat in the car, the rain streaming down outside, the day all brown and gray, even the leaves on the live oaks just a deep gray, a neutral tone against the downpour. Soon he could not see outside at all as the windows fogged from the wet dogs and everybody breathing. He opened the window and let the rain fall in to wet his left side and he smoked another of the cigarettes. And knew he would not leave her, would not abandon her to this place, certain that she trusted him because she was right to trust him. That he could be trusted. And then knew he could not leave her, and this had nothing to do with trust and all to do with her. That he could not leave her anymore than he could leave himself. He threw the cigarette out and sat a moment longer. Aware that for once his life was about to change because he wanted it to. Not as a result of what some other person had done or said. Thinking that right then, that moment was the true beginning of his life. He got out of the car and went back through the yard to the cabin door where he stood outside a minute looking in. She was seated still crosslegged on the bed, her elbows on her knees as her hands held her face, her shoulders rocking back and forth. She could have been laughing but no sound came from her but a desperate ceaseless suck for air. He watched her a moment and then stepped in and said, “I got no idea how far we can get today with all this rain. What I’d like is to get this place a ways behind us. Then, somewhere, we’ll hunt down some maps.”

  She lifted her head, her face moist and blotched. She dropped her hands into her lap and studied him. Her chin was tilted off toward her shoulder, her lips as if she were silently whistling.

  Then, somehow satisfied, she said, “You think we need maps?”

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Ginger West & Allan Wolf for their reading of the work in progress; Dan Morgan for generous and thorough research assistance; Kim Witherspoon for her outstanding advocacy; Elisabeth Schmitz, Morgan Entrekin and the entire crew at Grove/Atlantic for the dedication and focus brought to this project; extended family members who, regardless of their private doubts, never offered anything but encouragement over the years; and finally, my mother, who, among other passions, instilled in me the love of reading and books beginning all those years ago on the lawn of the North Pomfret farmhouse.