by Nancy Mauro
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, did you tell him I wasn’t around?”
“I don’t want him to know you’re not here.” Her voice riles into sopranic peaks. “We need to go over—what if they found the pig?”
Duncan is glad that she’s not angry with him. Feels a clean, white flash of relief that lasts a few moments before he realizes what she’s really saying. One of the last things he wants to do tonight is listen to Skinner’s lung-busting hack.
“I knew I shouldn’t have left you here.” He turns, sets the lock on the Saab. “But you wanted to be mixed up, right?”
“That’s why I’m not letting you go alone,” Lily says. “If the townies are taking you down, I’m going down with you.”
He looks at her, so serious in the evening light. “Thank you,” he says gruffly though touched by her words. “But we don’t have to go anywhere we don’t want to go.”
“It’s not an invitation. If we don’t go to them, you know they’ll come here.”
Duncan’s exhausted from his drive. His shirt is moist under one arm and he can feel a pimple pulsing beside his nostril. “Fine. Let them come.”
“Duncan.”
“Or better yet, let me go there, explain the whole thing.” He turns, starts walking down the drive.
“No, wait,” she says, following him. “We’ll go together and deny it all.”
“Lily, I don’t care what these people think.” He stops, looks at her. Could this embroilment be her way of avoiding the truth, of dismissing the real problem between them? “You can come back to the city on Sunday.”
“No! I cannot just go back to the city, Duncan.” She crosses her arms over her breasts. “What about Tinker—the bones?”
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t tell her he’d forgotten. This Lily reminds him of an outdoor child, wild and feral. His mouth swells. He would like to fish her from the long grass and bring her inside.
“Where is this meeting, anyway?” he says finally.
“I wrote it down.”
“Fine. Let’s do it.”
The cannon is mounted on a grassy strip of lawn between a tar-paper shack and an aluminum barn, its muzzle angled toward a yawning gap in the treeline and the ribbon of Hudson beyond.
“Here’s what you need to know about firing a ten-pound Parrott rifle without blasting a hole through yourself.” Skinner slaps the side of the cannon, turns his red clotted eye on the men gathered around him. “Owing to some unfortunate accidents with cast-iron pieces, this particular piece of ordnance enjoyed a bad reputation among many artillerymen.”
Lily is, maybe unsurprisingly, the only woman in the farmyard. Her presence clearly compromises the Masonic atmosphere, but what was she supposed to do? Let Duncan come here alone? Between the two of them, she’s the only one thinking straight about the wild boar. She watches as Skinner marches Duncan into the “second” position at the mouth of the cannon and hands him a corkscrew-ended rod he calls a wormer.
“Your job’s to scrape out any leftover bits of embers before we load in fresh ammo.” The old man’s voice is a whistle from a reed pond. “You getting this? Otherwise, you’ll push in fresh gunpowder and blow yourself sky high.”
That they have not been discovered—that instead, the locals are conscripting her husband into some sort of military reenactment—does little to lighten Lily’s mood or loosen the sensation of a gunpoint summoning. Duncan’s face is hard under cumulative stubble, but she can still read his disbelief. He’s been singled out for an elaborate hazing ritual involving exploding ordnance. Drove two hours to escape the lunatic fringe in the city only to be greeted by its rural counterpart.
If there is some significance to the firing, Skinner has yet to explain it, though Lily is sure it has somehow been instigated by their presence in Osterhagen. In addition to the dozen or so onlookers, a small group of men—Duncan included—has been chosen to actually participate in the firing. While the old man demonstrates how to plunge the cannon tube clean Lily looks around. She recognizes two people from the library gathering last week. Wakefield, who owns the hardware store, and the sickly Armenian with the ponytail who’d dribbled a trail of cranberry punch down the front of his denim shirt. There’s a fifth making up the active band around the flaking piece of artillery. Dressed in a pair of gumboots and green gunner’s cap is a pint-size twist of a man who can only be Skinner’s son from Poughkeepsie. Ancient in his own right and with a grizzled head, he has the same bulbous eyes that turn wolfishly on Lily now and then as his father explains how to use a tube of fulminated mercury to ignite gunpowder.
“The Model 1861 has a bore diameter of two-point-nine inches, effective range of nineteen hundred yards, and weighs eight hundred ninety pounds. One of the most accurate and economical artillery pieces during the Civil War. But cast iron is brittle—which you’ll see for yourselves, there’s lotsa pressure in the breech when you fire it off. That’s why it’s reinforced with wrought iron.” Skinner knuckles his fist against the metal barrel skirting. “’Course, they still occasionally blow up.”
A chuckle rises from the villagers. Lily shudders, looks around. In the darkened lot the men are all slouch and peaked ball caps, lumps of flannel trained on Skinner’s scratch track of a voice.
“Wet sponge, Emmett!”
Skinner’s son, occupying the “first” position, dips the sponge end of his rod into a bucket of water and then drives it up into the tube. Lily senses there’s something moist and loathsome about him. The sort of creature found under bridges, awaiting the crossing of the billy goats. Even the thought of Lloyd cycling through his comprehensive collection of perversions isn’t nearly as offensive. Also, she can’t ignore the fact that he’s staring at her while pumping the sponge rod aggressively in and out of the shaft. She takes a step to the left, hoping to move out of his sight line. But those eyes trail her, two poached eggs sliding sideways in their cups.
“The Parrott system here was the workhorse rifle of the artillery for the first years of the war. They kept them rolling out even after bringing around ordnance rifles.” The old man watches his son tap the rod against the barrel mouth. “Seems to me if it was good enough for the Battle of Bull Run, it’s good enough for our purposes tonight.”
“Which are what, exactly?” Duncan interrupts. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
Lily watches Skinner turn sharply on her husband. He stands just under Duncan’s nostrils. The old man has the unwarranted bravery of a toy dog, she thinks, and the same propensity to bite.
“Ten o’clock cannon is a warning to whosever got our boar,” he says. “Go ahead and set your watch by us. Every twenty-two hundred hours. Now get ready to load.”
Wakefield, blunt-thumbed and severe despite a waft of frosty hair, comes forward with a blackened sackcloth (which Lily assumes to be gunpowder) and loads it into the cannon muzzle. Emmett tamps it to the back of the tube with the ram end of the rod.
“I’m gonna sight the piece,” Skinner calls with emphasis in the direction of the trees. He kneels at the breech end of the cannon and peers along its nozzle as though to locate a Confederate battery hidden in the bush.
Lily glances at her husband. He looks soldierly in the dusk, his wormer rod the spear of classic battle. She remembers the night they arrived, how he’d stood frozen on the road staring at the boar while it thrashed under the front wheel. How she’d held out the tire iron to him but knew, already, that the extension of her arm was just reflex. That she had already executed the action herself. Something alone and instinctive within her had already carried out the deed without him.
“How’s this going to bring back the pig?” She hears her voice for the first time.
Skinner looks up at her. He pushes back from the cannon and brushes his hands against the obliques of his thighs. “You ever come under cannon fire?” he asks. “Eleven thousand Union soldiers did not just fall at Appomattox under natural circumstances.”
/> Lily and Duncan glance at one another, seeking interpretation. Maybe they’re being toyed with, but how much do these people know?
The old man steps toward her, zippering his hunting vest tight across the aquatic rumblings of his chest. “You might be king of the hill living in that fancy old house. But when there’s an 1861 Parrott rifle trained on your front porch, you’re going to think twice before you take that which does not belong to you.”
It’s impossible to know the depth of this indictment. Lily thinks of her conversations with Lloyd, his appreciation of her stoic demeanor, and wishes for a bit of that unflappability to settle over her heart right now.
“Prick and prime,” Skinner tells his artillerymen.
While Wakefield fusses with a lanyard and the small tube of mercury, the Armenian finally steps to action. It’s his job to insert a metal pin into a tiny airshaft at the rear of the cannon and pierce the sack of gunpowder. Of all the men gathered, Lily is least afraid of him. He’s a pound shy of swimming in his chambray shirt and she’s almost certain she could outrun him.
When Skinner finally calls “Ready!” Duncan is bent over, tying his shoelace. The rest of the artillerymen take a step toward the rear of the weapon. They angle their bodies away from the direction of the charge and flatten the palms of their hands over the ears closest to the cannon. There is a strum across Lily’s spine. Duncan straightens up and looks around. He holds his post at the mouth of the cannon but looks bewildered, a man lost midstep in an aerobics class. She has a vision trimmed with gunpowder grit, her husband with a ballistic path straight through his belly.
“Jesus Christ, Duncan,” she calls. “Get out of the way.”
Skinner tips his pruned head in disgust. “I believe he wants to be blown into next Wednesday.” There’s a swish of nylon vest as he raises his hand to halt the proceedings.
Duncan, suddenly aware that he’s holding things up, spears the wormer rod into the ground and jogs over to the side of the cannon. Lily can tell by the way he puts a hand through his hair that he’s both shamed and impatient. She hears the coughs and brays of the outdoorsmen surrounding her. Sensing the potential for a casualty, flannel and work boots draw closer in the darkness.
“What do you boys think?” Skinner turns to his pod. There’s an audible trill from his lungs, his voice a harmonica played underwater. “Will Old Parrott be a widow maker once again?”
A weak holler from the crowd. Emmett lofts his sponge rod over his head. The Armenian fiddles with his snarled ponytail. A motion lamp on the barn is triggered, bathing the entire scene in staccato illumination. Lily sees the figure of her husband at the edge of this situation. She smells wood smoke in the air. Skinner taps her roughly on the shoulder. “You go ahead, wish your man luck. Might be your last chance.”
The old man’s gummy snort of pleasure actually eases her mind. He’s just having a little fun with the downstaters. Still, Lily understands that Skinner is a restless bloodhound. Despite his scattered eccentricities he is genuine and bred to track to the death. She and Duncan will have to rethink this eventuality. To make for the forest or the hills, to give the posse the slip, to leave the car and clothes—to reinvent themselves and disappear—is not an option. There is the wrench of Tinker. Lily has been trying to tell Duncan that she has a familial obligation to the nanny. That she cannot go back to the city, back to nothingness. How to make him understand the importance of the lovely white femur! And they’ve only just begun; fold now with such a miserly bone count and all of it will be a wash. They haven’t pulled enough from the garden to form a woman. They haven’t gotten far enough to constitute success.
She trips across the lawn toward Duncan with only this intention. To tell him that they can’t give in, can’t buckle just yet. They haven’t even found her head. Maybe then. Once they’ve found Tinker’s skull they can run, leave the small bones buried.
She goes to him. He hesitates in the darkness. While he does step forward, she can see that he’s confused, maybe resigned. She has flown across the strip of grass and into his arms to share the foreseeable problems with conventional escape. Instead, his arms close around her, he braces her as if catching something that’s fallen out of a window. Her mouth opens against his own, an incisor cuts a horizontal slice through lip. They come at each other this way, with optimism hammered thin as foil, still sentient of all that is hostile, muddled, and injured between them. The inescapable trace of farm manure in the air makes everything less desirable. The Osterhagen they have never discussed is the one they have just arrived in at this moment, with the singular task of deciding whether to leave together. The others—the boar and the nanny, the pervert, the artillerymen torn between this graceless kiss and blasting a charge through the trees—are the complications they have invited to avoid being alone with the truth.
Lily sits up in bed. The linens around her are too tight, sterile. Like she’d been tucked into bed by a nurse. She hears Duncan plucking around in the sunroom below and touches her lip. It had stopped bleeding almost immediately, the wet flesh repairing itself at a stunning rate. Duncan had scraped a few dry specks from her chin, then walked beside her to the truck. Sat himself in the middle while Skinner drove them home. It was possible that they were thinking the same thing, how pleasant it was not to talk, not to encourage familiarity.
Lily snaps the top sheet and watches it billow over her fresh-shaved legs. When she hears him take the stairs quietly she tries to level the velocity of her breath and fill the room with a quiet, welcoming consistency. She rubs left leg against right, remembering the pleasure of frictionless calves. The bedroom door is partially open. Lily has re-created herself under the sheets in the likeness of sand, a soft landing. Yet beyond this rolling topography—more satisfying than sand, she knows—are the hard ridges beneath. Tooth and toe and nail and the simple, painful angles at which their mouths may meet. He must feel this? Her buried lures? For what other reason does he return to her each weekend? Lily sucks the small nub formed over her cut lip. In piecing together a dead woman might they also resurrect another?
He comes down the hall. She closes her eyes. He walks past.
Lily sits up. Despite the bread knife in her gut she sits up. She can scarcely believe it, the sound of his sneakers retreating down the hall. For some reason, she was sure he would come to her. She’s embarrassed—no, she’s outraged. Why is it that he won’t even try? At some point in the night the radiance had returned to her. Couldn’t he feel it? The afternoon that they’d sat together in the closet, in the ease of darkness, hadn’t he felt it then? Or does Duncan think he can just go on living in the spaces around her? If so, Lily thinks, he’s got another thing coming. Tomorrow night, he’s got another thing coming.
CHAPTER 14
Articulations of the Upper Extremities
In the morning she watches Duncan unload groceries and wonders why the silent rubbing of her smooth calves failed to draw him in. She scoops her plain oatmeal right from the pot and watches him stock the cupboard, trying to ignore his careless shelving (the cans should be arranged by content, not size). Duncan’s hair, she notices, has grown an extra inch or so beyond the collar. As he moves Lily thinks, I have licked the split between those shoulder blades. Felt his weight on top of me. Now the thought makes her envious, as if she’s read these details in another woman’s journal but has been denied the pleasure herself. Something about the leanness of those places, the scull of rib beneath his arm, the groove of lower back; they are unrecognizable. What would Duncan do if she went to him now? Slipped her arms around his chest, pressed her body to his back?
She crosses her legs, looks away. The trick, she knows, is to allow him to initiate. A year ago, she wouldn’t have thought twice about offering him her body. A year ago, she was sure he’d accept, gratefully. Last night he’d kissed her to appease the jeering cannoneers, but the action was lined with the mercury of bad temper and the shame of being ridiculed. He’d forgotten himself. And she was encouraged. Now with
the morning burning on, and distance back between them, she finds herself petrified of rejection.
Duncan begins a low whistle, something unmelodic. She knows the tune, the one he uses to fill space.
“What do you think?” She will try. “What are we going to dig up tonight?”
He pauses midbar. Ties a grocery bag in half. “Actually, I’m going to have to take a break.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I got a call from work this morning. You were still asleep.” He scratches his head and looks at the cans. “It’s this idea we’re working on for Stand and Be Counted. The Vietnam War.”
“Oh.” Lily’s word for all occasions. Comes out round and mealy to disguise the burn.
“You can dig if you want,” he offers. “But I’ve got to go back and look at some old footage.”
She feels the roots of her hair incinerating. “No, that’s fine. I’m busy too. At the library.” Lily curses herself for having made this ridiculous pact to dig together. She can’t renege now, as if she has nothing else to do up here, like she’s dependent on him. As though her life, when tacked up alongside his, lacks diesel and passion.
He turns from the shelf suddenly, holding a can of beans. “Garbanzo? Same as chickpeas, right?”
She scrapes the last rubber edges of her breakfast. “They don’t exactly hand out doctorates, you know.”
He puts the can down on the table. “I know that, Lily. I know you’re busy.”
She can’t look up or she will cry. She’s done with this heavy lifting, this pretending, the illusion of chatter and interest. And what does Duncan know about Vietnam? He took a booze cruise through the Bay of Tonkin once. How’s that supposed to sell jeans? Lily can feel him look at her and so she folds the newspaper in half, her eyes circling the same paragraph.
“So we’ll both get some work done this weekend, okay?”
She doesn’t respond. There’s a static crackle surrounding him and it annoys her that he holds his work up like something that must be carried across a swollen river. In Duncan’s paranoid landscape he is forever on the verge of losing his job. And in its impermanence it becomes vital, tragic, and necessary. Blue jeans as vocation.