by Odie Lindsey
From the idea of the pig, to the plan, and through the breadth of execution, the action had burst with life, with promise. Colleen had felt mission critical at last. She’d been exceptional, again.
The experience had also reconfirmed her convictions, the truths she’d picked up while away. First and foremost, Colleen knew that no blossom or tree, no estate manor or land, held any real value. As such, she understood that neither JP nor the LMA were any better than conscriptors: each of them, all of them, always, the same. Folks like Colleen suffered the blows of their campaigns. Always had, always would. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight. Her twins would be the next ones put to service.
Still. Her target that night hadn’t been JP, or Susan George. It was Derby. It had to be. The Wallis House was a quagmire, and she believed that the pig would either scare him off site altogether, or radicalize him to confrontation. With his father, or the LMA, or . . . whomever he needed to move past, in order to move free.
Fight, or flight, the sow would shove Derby off track. (This was, after all, how terrorism functioned. Whether hung from a rope or put on a pike, or a cross.) It would spurn his independence. He would liberate himself.
But no. She had only compromised him. Versus an awakening or a reckoning, he’d instead followed his daddy’s example: Derby threw his lot in with Susan George and the rest, and the promise of their domestic cachet. And hell, he’d even wavered on that.
“An insurgent,” Colleen stated, her babies at breast. “I can be the destroyer.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Susan George asked.
Colleen’s squad had learned foco theory while killing endless downtime in their barracks. Trapped between boredom and anxiety, and with small-arms pop on the periphery, they had battled insecurity care of discussions of the Brigate Rosse, the Red Brigades, or the ELF. In the chow line, they were emboldened by talk about the Free State of Jones County, Mississippi. About AIM and Pine Ridge and the occupation of Wounded Knee. They watched The Battle of Algiers in the rec tent. Streamed AQI kill vids on their smartphones in the Humvees.
Power. Procedure. All it ever came down to was land. Was people wanting, taking, or using land, and the throwaway bodies that were needed to secure it. From Sykes-Picot to Wallis Farm, federal redlines or shock and awe, Colleen and the rest of the squad had slung example after example of this history at each other, while flopped out on a rack, say, or while huddled up to smoke. One troop would tell of a wiki-borne factoid, while another cited a newswire or documentary, an op-ed or conspiracy site. No matter the source or the era, the cause was always the same: another fucking land war.
“Here’s the deal,” Colleen said. “You’re the regime. JP’s the invader. So we gotta have us an insurrection, right?” She grinned. “Somebody’s gotta put a little squeal in the pigs.”
Truth be told, Colleen had also hung the sow for herself. It was a protest. A lash out. A slap to the face of her domestic reconscription. From the moment Derby had taken the Wallis House job, she knew she’d been dragged into a fight without benefit. A battle based on everyone’s development but her own.
Susan George stood up to leave. “As I said, I can do without the platitudes. Now, listen, please. This is the last time I’ll offer.”
Colleen nodded her understanding. “Then I guess you should get back to Pitchlynn.”
Susan George sighed, then gazed over at the infants. “They’re beautiful. Just like their mama. But Colleen, I’d say it’s best if you hide your drinkin’. Better not let anyone catch you up on that roof with your twins left alone in this heat. Word would spread like fire that you’re an unfit mother.” She tapped on the doorframe. “Someone’ll call CPS. They will steal your children away.”
4
The windows of Wallis House were removed. The empty sashes had been tacked over with plastic sheeting that pulsed ghostlike in the breeze, and snapped like pennant flags at a car lot. The exterior paint had been stripped from the substrate, and scaffolding crawled up the walls. To an extent, the home now resembled one of those mansions-turned-scabs back in Chicago. Only in this case, wind depending, the putrid scent of the pig wafted well beyond the property, into the streets.
On the back lawn, JP and Derby worked beneath a pair of maroon tailgate tents, heat-stripping the old window frames, the muntin and casement, metal turnbuckles and hand cranks, while ever-mindful not to crack the leaden glass. Their faces bore sweated galaxies of paint fleck and splinter, and their eyes were hatched red behind plastic safety glasses. The canvas drop cloth they stepped on was littered with wormlike strips of old paint. Their voices muffled by resp masks, they still cut up quite a bit, generally at the expense of one another.
Though their formal relationship remained employer-employee, they were partners, and they both knew it. JP took the lead on capital and contract (and again, on the caustic visual strategy of this project). Derby set the pace for how the work was to be executed, illustrating and educating about the craft-based processes.
Day after hour at the back of the house, the sun blazed onto the maroon tent fabric above them like a diffuse, bloodlike ball. They drank Gatorade and water, and dragged themselves to the meat ’n’ three counter at Cothron’s Filling Station for lunch, or, more frequently, they went home for the break (JP to dote on Lucinda; Derby to take in the twins), never gone long enough for work-weariness to set in . . . before coming back to slog through the hellish afternoons. Gatorade and water, Gatorade and water.
They were heat-stripping the last of the wooden window frames when a tan SUV pulled around the back drive and parked. Susan George stepped out, as did a man in a khaki poplin suit, and a cop.
“I don’t know who you continue to think you are,” she barked. “But I know who I am, as does this town. And as of eight o’clock this morning, the LMA and Historic Pres District have filed for statutory authority of this house—alongside every other damn injunction my attorney here could file.”
The man in the suit issued JP a thick envelope. “It’s all inside. Why don’t you come on by my office to discuss? Or send representation. Or both.”
JP flung the envelope on the workbench. “Sure thing,” he said, wiping the grit from his neck. He motioned as if to resume work.
Susan George threw her finger in his face. “Listen here. You may be able to shove yourself into any neighborhood in Chicago, places just black enough to gobble up yet white enough to flip. But this house won’t be made into your spite-born spectacle. You are to desist, immediately.” She gauged the blizzard of paint and wood scrap, likewise the plastic-covered windows and the scraped house itself. “My lord. Don’t touch anything else.”
Susan George marched toward the front of the house, calling her men to follow suit. The cop tromped off on command, though the lawyer lingered for a moment.
“JP,” he said calmly. “I don’t want you to take this as any sort of threat, but this thing can turn real ugly, real fast. I knew your wife as a kid, and . . .” He held a hand out to try and calm JP’s glare. “Please. Her parents were good people, which is why I hope you’ll hear me out.” He went on to detail the letter Dru had sent to Susan George, likewise the notion and threat of the former’s compromised capacity. He then detailed how the document would impact any judicial proceeding, let alone mark his wife’s memory, both to the town and to Lucy, when the child got old enough to wonder.
“Are you implying that my wife was too sick to have a will?” JP said. “Or that I took advantage of her state?”
“A judge will determine that. I’m only telling you this out of courtesy. To Dru.”
JP scoffed and turned away. “Derby? A favor?”
“Okay,” Derby answered. “I guess.”
“Show these people off of my property?”
After Derby nodded his confirmation, JP walked off, past willow and oak, cedar and magnolia, then stepped inside his bungalow and snapped the dead bolt. He drew the curtains, kicked off his boots, grabbed a beer, and stretched out on the couch.
<
br /> The sitter had taken Lucy for toddler play at the local Y, so the silence was marked only by the humming refrigerator coils and the kick-on of central air. JP’s mind reeled so fast it exhausted him. He put the beer on a coffee table and shut his eyes for a moment. He heard the smack of the SUV doors before the car pulled out of the drive. He drifted.
His catnap was broken by the distant rev of a power tool. He took in the ribbons of sunlight through the part in the curtains, and he smiled. Sitting upright, he listened to the whine of the small engine and tried to match its identity. A mower? Weed Eater?
It was a gas-powered pole pruner. JP bolted up and out the door, screaming for Derby to stop. Rounding the front corner of Wallis House, he saw the massed magnolia branch smack the walkway. From atop the adjacent ladder, Derby killed the pruner motor and made his way down.
“Sorry, JP. The cop ordered me to—”
“Bullshit. Nobody forced you. They can’t.”
“But what did you want me to do?” Derby asked. “Or please, better yet, what are you doing? Why are you trying to—”
“Like I told you, this isn’t about me. And all you had to do was let them live with this. See it. Breathe it. Let them stew in their own rot. But you just couldn’t. You just couldn’t help but help them. Could you?” He turned back toward the bungalow. “It’s like you’re on command. Installed, at their service. So pack your gear. You’re done.”
“Huh-uh, no. Hold up.” Derby marched behind JP, peppering him with requests to reconsider, to understand.
“Done,” JP repeated, then stepped inside and shut the door.
Derby loitered for a moment, expecting a chance to talk it out when the adrenaline ebbed.
Didn’t matter, didn’t happen. So a few minutes later he walked back to his truck, grabbed a square-point shovel and a blue plastic tarp. He spread the latter out beside the carcass and started scooping. Somehow, he believed this was the right thing to do.
Working the sow with the shovel, black flies nettling his skin, Derby cursed the bullshit notion of right and wrong anyway, then drove deep into the country to dump the body.
5
Damp black cotton. Buttery croquettes and raw shrimp in a crystal bowl on crushed ice. This is the last memory you left me of her.
Do you recall what you asked me, Susan George? After the funeral, before I was sent off to school? Before I began cutting my home my family my state out of myself, gutting myself from the shame? Can you remember?
You and I stood amidst all of them: the LMA, and the town folks of note, all gathered in your dining room. I wore black fabric. The window light lacquered your long oak table. Folks had brought crystal and porcelain bowls of shrimp on ice and croquette and fruit salad. Oyster crackers and all manner of whiskey.
“Couldn’t you have saved her?” you whispered to me, your fingers like talons on my arms.
My shoulders and back stuck to damp black cotton. I had wandered so long in the heat outside, bawling behind the house. Praying to see her, to be allowed to see her one last time. Bawling and sifting thoughts as the fact faded to memory. Even then I tried to understand how she fell. I was just a girl. What had I done? What was I capable of?
“Did you even try?” you demanded, your nails carving crescents into my shoulder. “Did you even want to?” The cotton stuck to skin. My bangs slick against my forehead. When I didn’t answer you told me I was a mess and to go clean myself up. You turned away and ordered someone to refresh the veined shrimp.
White skin blotched red. Engraved. I am writing in circles in the grey winter light. The gust of dry heat falls from ceiling vent. Snow gently thumps on the windows. My child: nursing, taking my nourishment, my memory, my lie. Save save save: I am not well after all.
Oh but remember taking Lucy and me to the Gulf that first time, Susan George? Our “History Trip,” you called it? Even now: in frozen Chicago I still remember you cruising the two of us on Highway 90, by the coast. We remember, as she is right here with me. Lucy and I were what? Nine? Like twins, like sisters: riding along and staring at the water. The two of us in the back seat our bare legs stuck to vinyl. The car windows rolled down the hot salty gusts. Astonished by the sea birds to the right. Cruising just over the water, the steel-blue-brown-green-water.
Only, you made us look away from the shore, and to the houses: “Now look at that one, girls. A beauty. Girls? Pay attention.” You made us look at the houses, so pillared and colossal. You educated us about spiral double front stairways. Ionic column or Creole porches. You stopped the car to order our attention away from the salt on skin, from the pelican dives. You ripped our fascination: ordered us away from the winglike double-rigs of shrimp boats, and to the houses, the monuments of power on earth. “Land Markers” you called them, prepping us for the family take: the Pitchlynn CC and the tracts of development, the commercial in-town holdings. My very own house: a candidate for development to come.
How much do we even own? How much is enough and what have we done to get it? To keep it? Could it really be that the land was all that mattered to you? You said it was the birthright we’d been given. The earth that made us Wallises.
I lost track of what is important. Sitting in Chicago, the fat snowflakes against the window, the patting of audible fact: Lucy and I try to remember. We are lost to the process.
Do you always dress the body? Wipe it clean? Right the neck? Reposition patella and hip? Or did you just leave her on display, to make a point? Tell me: is the sewn skin covered? I am asking you now since you kept me from seeing her. Do you ever question this: shutting me out? The sending away? Do you question the effect on me, or the rift that arose within my family? Tell me: do you display cracked teeth or torn lips? What shade of wax was puttied into her forehead? Please tell me how you tended to our pulped, broken Lucy?
No more revisions: I am furious with you. I am furious that I could not see her or say goodbye. Despite the child at my breast I remain so enraged. You cut me you cored me you left me in loop: suspended: she and I are still in the tree. We still sit together, our legs dangling from the branch. And then: a flinch of time. A nothing touch, so goddamn quick. Wasn’t it? A little shove, I,
I watch her fall: now so slow, until her head hits the lower limb. Her neck cracks backwards. Eyes open. Shard teeth.
Susan George I have saved: my god I have amended. I have cut clean through to my spine to find facts. Still: she is here again, now. Have I not done enough?
I have not. So I am coming to you with my final amend: I will bring you my daughter. We will reconstruct without lies. The shame the love, the brutality of it all: for your Lucy George, and for my girl, named Lucinda.
For you: for all of us,
Dru
6
The pine panel walls of Colleen’s living room gave off a buttery glaze from the sun. Deana’s daughters—Ruby, three, and Emma, five—darted in and out of the room, ever involved with a proliferation of strewn toys. Her son, Forrest, was out “runnin’ chores” with his daddy, meaning that the two were holed up in some smudgy BBQ joint, watching SEC football analysis and devouring pulled pork.
“I just can’t get over these babies.” Deana beamed. “I wanna eat y’all up!”
Colleen sat on the couch, the nursing pillow around her waist. She winced as Derby Jr. and Sara nursed.
“Sore?” Deana asked.
“Oh my f’in’ god.” Colleen’s eyes welled just to acknowledge the pain. “I’m a failure.”
Deana knelt down to examine, putting a hand on Colleen’s shoulder as she peered close to the breast. “No wonder! They’re not latchin’ right! They’re gettin’ ahold of it, sort of, but they’re just off. Look here.” As if examining an under-sink leak, she guided her hand down to Junior’s chin, using one finger to pull it down. The result was a more fully open mouth, which accepted the whole of Colleen’s nipple.
“Better?” Deana asked.
“Maybe? I think?” Colleen replied. “But still. Ouch.”
/> “I know it, girl. I remember. But it’s not about failing, okay? It’s just about knowing what to do. Give it a couple more minutes, and when they’re done we’ll fix you up. Meanwhile, I just want to stare at this scene. All sunlight and twins, hallelujah!”
A decent breeze coasted through the open windows. The room was a soundscape of suckles, of ice splitting in tea, and of the small brass ball chain clacking the globe light of the ceiling fan. Within minutes, Colleen draped Sarah on the hand towel over her shoulder, while Junior continued to nurse. Deana got up and grabbed a second towel, then softly removed the boy, baby-talking him about his pudginess while holding him to her own chest. The women couldn’t help but giggle while each one burped a baby, offering drum rolls of back pats in unison.
“Thanks, Dean,” Colleen said. “Derby told me I should just lay one down while I take care of the other.”
“That’s just silly. Did you tell him that was silly? That whoever was lyin’ on their back was gonna get fluxed?”
“I did—but using different words! Anyhow, I figure it’s best just to let one keep feeding while I burp the other, you know?”
Sarah let out a hatchling’s worth of gas. “Did I just hear a dry burp?” Colleen asked, looking to the towel. “Yes. A gift from my sweet girl!”
Junior, however, soiled both the towel and Deana’s shoulder. The beautician shrugged, stood up, and put him down in his crib. She cooed and covered him, then cleaned herself off.
Colleen began to fasten her blouse, wincing with every button.
“Whoa, hold up,” Deana said. “You’ve gotta leave ’em out for a second. Those whales must surface!” She reached over and swatted Colleen’s hands from the shirt, then unfastened a button. “Now you open the rest.”
Colleen did so, exposing her swollen breasts to the breeze. Though her nipples felt shredded, the air was somehow gentle.