by Rhonda Riley
Momma and Daddy didn’t mind Cole courting me. He was a good, respectful boy. They were fine with him walking me to church and Momma welcomed his help on the weekends when my family came up to the farm, but they would not have tolerated his night visits. So Cole and I had to be discreet.
Still, Momma seemed to know somehow. Frank Roe, a cousin on my father’s side, had been discharged and would be coming back from Japan, she told me. He’d need a place to stay. With him at the farm, I would not be alone and I would have live-in help with the harvest every day.
“It’s not good, you staying up there by yourself. What if something happened to you? We might not know about it for days,” she said.
My being on the farm alone had never bothered her before.
Frank was not one of my favorite cousins, and I did not want my solitude broken, but how could I protest? The farm was not mine, I was just the caretaker until it was decided who would inherit it. But I told myself, if I had less work to do, I might be able to meet Cole more often.
As soon as Frank jumped off the back of Daddy’s truck and I saw his swagger, the way he wore his uniform and threw his duffel bag down, I knew that seeing Cole would be more, not less, difficult. Frank always had an edgy side to him, like a strange dog, alert and ready to lick you or rip into you. You could never tell which, and you didn’t want him to do either. His eyes seemed smaller now, more doglike, his body harder and more compact. The war had concentrated what he had been as a boy. He was not a man you would want to give the advantage of your secrets.
He moved into Ricky’s old room at the far end of the hall from me, and the house immediately took on the smell of his cigarette smoke and shoe polish.
“Looks like my little cousin is all growed up and got herself a farm,” he announced after he had given himself a tour. Then he looked me up and down in a way I did not like, sucked on his cigarette, and flicked the butt down onto the barn floor. I stared at the smoldering stub and he stomped it, twisting his heel into it. “I got it, I got it. I’m not going to let your precious barn burn,” he said.
As we walked out of the barn, Cole came up from across the field. Frank saw Cole’s face change as he realized I was not alone.
“I guess you are all grown up,” Frank leered.
Frank was a hard worker, but he was also a man. He expected me to fix all of his meals. The first night, I did make him a nice ham supper as a welcome. But on the second day, when he came to me at noon, I returned his dog-stare and told him, “You are not my husband and you are not my daddy. For the work you do around here, I’ll get our supper in the evening and if I make biscuits in the morning, I’ll leave you some. Otherwise, you take care of yourself.”
He ate heartily each evening, but never cooked. His eyes followed me. But he seldom spoke. Only at night did I hear much from him. I shut my bedroom door, but I could still hear him turn and shout in his sleep. His bed lurched and squeaked when the ghost of the war visited his dreams.
At the end of the first week, he went into town, bought a battery radio, and put it in his bedroom. Then there was smoke and music every night. Sometimes I could smell the booze on his breath by mid-afternoon.
He had been at the house a few weeks when I walked by the half-open door of his room one night. He sat on his bed, his back to me, staring at some pictures spread out before him. A man and a woman whispered to each other from the radio. I opened my mouth to speak, then realized that he had his hand down his pants. He may have just been scratching himself. As I stepped back, he turned, grabbed the pictures with both hands, and laid them over his lap. He shot me a look of pure disdain and said “war pictures” over the cigarette smoke that curled up his jaw.
Frank began drinking more and going into town during the week. One of the nights he was gone, I went into his room to see the pictures. I expected they would be images of naked girls. I couldn’t tell what the first one was. In the middle of a gray, textured background was a black spot, like a hole or a rip in the negative.
The next few photos, all black-and-white, showed the rubble of bombed-out buildings, like the photos I’d seen of London but flatter, ashen to the horizon. Japan after the bomb. In one picture, an American soldier stood in the field of trash under a low, dark sky. Nothing stood higher than his knee. He grinned, holding up a bottle in a congratulatory toast, his left foot propped on a half-crumbled block of stone. What I first thought was a flutter of torn, singed paper sticking out from under the block was, when I examined them closer, two arms. One stuck straight up from the elbow, and the blackened hand at the end of it had only a thumb and two fingers. The other, much smaller arm, ended with a splay of bone at the wrist joint, no fingers. Bile stirred in my stomach, water in my mouth. I looked back up at the soldier’s smile. There was no way to be sure if he knew about the arms. But how could he have missed them?
The next one was similar, the same dark sky, the same lifelessness to the horizon. In the foreground, the GI from the other photo had been joined by four American GIs, all with their shirts open or off. They smiled triumphant and happy. Not a line on their faces. Their bare, hairless chests pallid against the background of sky. The next photograph showed more GIs, more smiles, and ashy lumps on the ground. The GIs were smaller, the sky lower and darker with each photograph as if the photographer had moved farther away with each shot.
The last photograph was a close-up of a Japanese woman, her eyes closed. Shown from the waist up, she lay on her side. From her temple down her jaw, her neck, and over one breast, the skin puckered in a strange way, halfway between the crispness of a burn and the swirled, glossy scarring that comes months later. Her other breast, the one she lay on, was smooth, the cylindrical nipple only slightly darker than her pale skin.
I thumbed back to the first picture. The gray textures resembled the delicate ash left when we burned garbage. The hole in the middle was shaped like a baby, a baby curled on its side—a baby-shaped hole with no light in it, no reflection, no texture. Nauseated, I put the pictures back. My hands trembled.
All night I saw those pictures, the baby, the woman, and the GIs. Such wholesome smiles amid the hell of destruction; they seemed like some new kind of evil. Yet their faces looked like mine, like the faces of my people.
Not long after I found the photographs, Frank came home late one night, cussing, stumbling drunk at the back door, and woke me. I went to help him, but when I got close, he grabbed me and pressed me up against the door frame.
“Betcha give it to that Cole boy. Gimme some,” he hissed, as he tried to find my mouth with his. My arm hurt where he gripped it, but he was very drunk. I got my knee up between us, pushed him backward down the steps, and bolted the door.
I found him on the steps in the morning. Stinking, muddy, and bloody from a scrape on his cheek, but sleeping like a baby. I kicked him to wake him up.
That afternoon I left my work early, walked down to the mill-village, and told Momma what had happened, showed her the bruise on my arm.
“His daddy was bad to drink. But I was—we all were—hoping the war would make a difference in him. Grow him up,” she told me.
I shook my head, remembering the photographs. “I think the war made it worse, Momma.”
“I reckon you could be right about that. Made things worse for a lot of people. Go get your daddy and have him drive you back. Tell him we need Frank down here in the mill-village more than you need him up there. He can come up with the rest of us to help on Saturdays. Meanwhile, we can knock some sense into him if he goes after any of his own family again. If your daddy has questions, he can come see me.”
Daddy talked to Momma and then drove me back to the farm. It took Frank about five minutes to pack up the duffel bag and they were gone.
Later, when I was putting clean sheets on the bed in his room, I found one of Frank’s photographs under the bed—the one with the burned girl in it. I kept it.
I hadn’t liked what Frank said about Cole. I didn’t know what else he might say. Si
nce Frank had arrived, Cole had visited only a few times and then we just sat on the porch talking, the tension of what we wanted sparking around us. If we got caught, both our daddies would have shotguns after us, baby or no baby coming. I wasn’t particularly romantic, but I wanted to choose my husband rather than have my daddy decide for me. Though I wanted to be near Cole, I wasn’t sure I loved him, and he was still more boy than man. Not ready to be a husband.
The next time I saw Cole at church, I told him he couldn’t be coming over anymore, that I was afraid of getting into trouble. He thought I was talking about getting pregnant. He’d be careful, he assured me.
“I mean getting caught by my daddy,” I said. “Momma seems to know something. And if she knows anything, he’ll know it soon enough.” At the mention of my daddy, Cole took a step back and looked so sad and defeated that I found myself adding, “Not forever, just a few months—until after Christmas.”
“So you gonna wait until after Christmas to give me my present?” He trotted off to join his family, but I heard the grin in his voice.
That was late October. The cold nights were already coming on, and the trees had turned. Christmas seemed a long time to wait.
But those weeks alone again gave me time to think. Becoming Cole’s wife—or any man’s, for that matter—would mean leaving the farm. A wife was expected to follow her husband.
By then, I’d been on the farm over two years. I’d managed to keep a good-size kitchen garden, most of the livestock, and a few acres of hay, corn, and alfalfa. Even with the help of my family, it had not been easy. I was proud of my work. I wanted to stay where I was. Alone in my bed at night, I wanted Cole, but I didn’t want anything else to change.
But things did change.
For Christmas, Momma got one of her wishes. By virtue of her interest in the farm and the small sum she paid her siblings, the deed to the farm was hers. None of my aunts and uncles wanted to live in a house without an indoor toilet or electric lights. If it had been up to Momma, she and Daddy would have moved to the farm, but he wouldn’t have it. Momma made it clear to me that the farm was mine to live on as long as I kept the family in vegetables, eggs, milk, and meat. I knew I could keep my part of that bargain.
As everyone returned to their post-holiday work routines and Cole, who still had not received his “present,” was laid up with the flu, an early January snow fell. The house ticked and sighed around me with the change of temperature. Outside, an expectant hush of white enveloped the land. The contours of the world changed, angles softened to clean abstractions of themselves. The blank expanse of the fields seemed new, brilliant, and beguiling.
A week later, as the snow melted, receding to expose the rust-red clay again, the farm seemed reborn. A hard, steady rain followed. Lightning winked on the horizon and thunder muttered, still distant. Within hours, water rose between the house and the slight elevation of the fields. From the parlor window, I looked down at a narrow rush of water, roiling against the foundation of the house like a trapped animal seeking escape. The fields usually drained east behind the barn, then on to the creek or south to the tracks. But now they sent their runoff straight at the house as if the land had, indeed, undergone some subtle shift. In all my time at the farm, including the times with Eva when I was a little girl, I’d never seen that happen. But I’d also never seen rain like this, either. Lightning was unusual for a winter storm.
At dusk, as Eva’s dog, Hobo, and I stood on the back porch watching the storm, the blown mist swirling around us, I was glad for all the canned vegetables in the pantry and for the cords of firewood split, stacked, and dry. Beside me, Hobo whimpered and nudged my hand with his damp nose. Rain undulated across the fields like a living thing, in wild, flapping rows.
Two
The Yield
The next morning, well before dawn, a flash of lightning woke me. Immediately, darkness returned and thunder vibrated the windowpane. The drumming of rain followed as I rolled away from the bed’s warmth and groped for the lantern and a match.
After I dressed, I put on my uncle’s oilcloth coat and a leather hat, then went out to the barn. Lester had been dead for years now, but the recent dampness brightened all odors. As I went about my morning chores, the smell of his sweat and tobacco lingered around his clothes.
By the time I’d finished my work in the barn, the rain had slowed to a steady soft sprinkle, giving me an opportunity to check the drainage outside the house. That odd gathering of runoff I’d seen the day before made me uneasy. It was too close to the house. I couldn’t risk a flooded basement or a compromised foundation.
I stoked the stove, draped a fresh set of clothes and a quilt over the dining chairs nearby, then headed for the front yard. The storm had uprooted a small tree, washing it against a clot of dead leaves and blackberry bramble. Overflow from the field backed up the shallow ditch that normally drained down to the railroad tracks.
When I’d finally extracted the last branches, the plug of debris broke. The freed water plunged twenty feet to the tracks below. Not convinced that the tree, hardly more than a sapling, and a bunch of dead leaves and vine could account for such a backup, I shoveled the newly drained trench. The exertion warmed me, but my hands were wet and cold. I looked forward to the warm stove and my dry clothes as I slogged around the house toward the back porch. Hobo barked a greeting from the steps.
But something caught my eye. The ridge where the land rose a foot before plateauing into the fields had collapsed in one spot. Red lumps of clay lay tumbled down onto the roots of the apple tree below. I walked along the edge of the rise. The ground felt solid and gave no more when I pressed my foot at the edge. But it needed support. There were old fence posts and some planking in the barn. Daddy or Joe would have to help me, or maybe even Cole. He was probably over the flu by now.
Despite the rain’s pause, the horizon remained dark and mobile in all directions. There would be more rain very soon. Beyond the fresh-washed barnyard stretched the unbroken brown of bare trees and the rust of the earth. The air felt clear and cold, as if it had never been breathed.
Leaning slightly forward, I listened. Hobo leapt to the ground and took a quick trot around the yard. He bounded around the barn, then skidded to a stop a few yards away, his nose to the ground. His tail uncurled and he sniffed and whined.
I stepped toward him. He jumped back, barked at me, and then circled as if avoiding something on the ground. He pressed himself against my leg and whined again. I reached down to pat him. The ground was slightly depressed before us. I’d never noticed rain puddling there before.
“It’s just a puddle, boy. Just water.”
Hobo danced beside me, bumping my leg, not taking his eyes off the ground.
I squatted and skimmed my hand over the water. Fat, sparse raindrops spattered the ground.
Hobo barked sharply, then muttered a low, startled growl. I petted him with one hand and fanned my other hand through the puddle. The water was not more than an inch deep, opaque and rust-red. I meant only to reassure the dog, but saw that something was down there. Something round stuck up out of the puddle, solid like a rock, but the texture of it was unusual.
For balance, I kept my hand on Hobo as I stretched farther; the thing in the puddle gave when I pressed it. Instantly, Hobo leapt back from my hand with a full-throated bark. What was in the water? Wet fur? Skin? I thought I saw a bubble of air rise through the puddle, but it was difficult to tell as the rain pocked its surface harder now. Hobo ignored my commands to quiet.
I pulled my hat down more firmly against a gust of wind and pushed my sleeves up. Kneeling, I used the flat of my arm to rake the water away, clearing the odd lump. Hobo barked and whined, pacing. I pushed more mud away. For a second, I didn’t recognize what I was looking at: a shoulder and the slope of an arm. I jerked my hand away and tried to scramble sideways, but my knee, sunken in the mud, hit something—a hip. I’d been straddling it.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” I scooted back farther.
I glanced over my shoulder down the hill. No one would hear me shout from there. I motioned violently for Hobo to shut up. He dropped to a loud whimper.
What was a dead man doing here?
I forced myself to look again. Judging from the hip-to-shoulder distance, he was about my height. I followed the line of his shoulder down to the muck. Stretching forward, my belly almost touching the ground, I pressed my fingers into the mud where his hand would be. There it was, solid. I felt it twitch and saw my own fingertip rise with it. I lurched back and set Hobo barking again. The rain picked up.
I took a deep breath and reached forward again. The wet clay gave easily. I held the arm aloft by the wrist. The mud-caked mitt of a hand hung limp. Then it flexed, turning in my clay-slick grip.
I froze. Blood rushed to my head.
He was alive!
I dug into the slurry, following shoulder and neck to the roundness of his head. I scooped him up, straining to gain leverage on the wet ground. There was a loud sucking sound as the soil released him from its grip. Mud encased him completely, obscuring his features. I tried to hold him with one arm and wipe his face, but he slipped, tilting in my arms, his face turned away.
Rain spat down harder. I jerked off my hat and used it to shield the head I cradled. The rain battered my bared head. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?” I shouted. A low mutter of thunder erupted behind me. The wind flared, whipping my hair across my face.
He hung limp, heavy in my arms, entirely covered in clay. No sign of clothes. I twisted out of my coat and threw it over him, tucking it quickly across his chest and over his body. I tried to hold the hat with one hand and use the other to wipe his face, but that only seemed to make things worse.
I hunkered over with his head against my waist and glanced under the hat, my wet face inches from his. Under the shadow of the hat, he seemed to have no face and no hair, just a muddy round head. I drew back, slung my hair out of my eyes, and tried to blink away the gray-white curtain of rain.