Ryde had entered Andy in the Prettiest Baby in Ft. Gibson Contest. He was agitated about winning. Maud understood he needed the prize money. And she understood the usefulness of contests for cattle, horses, hogs, pies, and quilts. But a prettiest baby contest seemed mean-spirited to her. She figured all women probably believed their babies were beautiful, and she felt it was cold-hearted to spoil that illusion. But she also thought that Andy was dark enough that he had a good chance of winning. Babies with Indian blood seemed to win more often than pale little things. While Maud ironed, her mind went to the children she might have with Booker. She hoped they’d be dark. But, standing next to the stove, she felt as hot as a firecracker, and with her cousins more lively with their father out of the house and Nan tired before they’d even left, she also hoped that whatever children she and Booker had were far off in the future and few. She turned her mind to perspiration. She wanted away from the irons and the stove, and hoped, on the way to town, she could maneuver into some shade in the wagon.
She assigned her cousins seats in the buckboard based on where the sun was most likely to hit, and she slid down into a little patch of shade. But when they came to a point on the section line where she knew she’d be able to see Booker, she sat up high. He was talking to a man next to a car. She waved twice but couldn’t catch his eye. She leaned again into the shadow of the tailgate and tried to avoid both the sun and the dust. She wished for rain and asked Nan how long it’d been since the last good one. Nan told her to the day, and for the rest of the journey, Ryde cussed the heat, worried aloud about his corn and onions, and talked about his crops wilting.
When they arrived at the circle of trees where the contest was, the photographer sponsoring the event had already set up his backdrop and camera. However, not many contestants had shown up, and Maud, having been to other photographic contests, knew that the Indian mothers weren’t very particular about time. She knew the photographer, too. He was white and clock finicky. Maud spent much of her time watching him crane his neck, take his watch out of his pocket, and wipe his brow with his handkerchief. The rest of her time she spent trying to ensure that Andy stayed in a better disposition than the photographer did. From where their quilt lay, Maud also watched the wagons, cars, and horses on the main artery into and out of town. With so much to look at and Andy so wiggly, she gave little thought to Lovely sick at home or to her father searching for his money while she was gone.
Booker joined her in time to see Andy win, Nan get a free set of pictures, and Ryde get the ten-dollar cash prize. Shortly afterward, she and Booker escaped on his horse over to the remains of the fort, where the food was spread. They were eating fried chicken and wilted lettuce on a log near the fort’s well, and she was telling Booker what she knew about the efforts to rebuild the stockade when she saw her cousin Renee running their way.
Renee stopped, heaving for breath. Maud said, “Just take your time, take your time,” wishing the child would gulp in enough air to say whatever she’d come to tell.
Finally, Renee spit out, “Daddy said to tell you, John Mount was bit.”
Maud laughed, relieved. “Well, that’s too bad. Did your daddy bite him? Or was it somebody else?”
Renee’s eyes grew wide. “Not Daddy. A dog. A rabid dog.”
Maud felt like a fist grabbed her heart. “When, Renee? When did this happen?” She stood. Booker laid his plate on the log and stood, too.
“I don’t know. A few days past.”
“Last week?”
The child nodded.
Maud turned to Booker. She hadn’t told him about the dead dog. And that smacked her almost as hard as Renee’s news had. He would realize she was holding back. While she was trying to decide how to justify that, Booker asked Renee, “Is John Mount a friend or a family member?”
“Neither,” Renee said. “We hate the Mounts. Last week, they left a dead dog on Uncle Mustard’s kitchen table.”
Booker turned to Maud. His eyes were wide. “I see,” he said. Then he added, “No, I don’t really.”
Maud put her hand on his arm. “I was going to tell you. I was just looking for the right time. Then it slipped my mind.”
“That happens. Dead dogs in the kitchen are as common as biscuits.”
“It just . . . It’s part of a feud. It goes way back.”
Maud was remembering her daddy telling Lovely and her to keep their eyes wide for something sneaky when Renee added, “The Mounts axed one of their cows in the back.”
Booker’s chin pulled in. “When was that?”
“Last week. Sometime before the dead dog,” the child added.
Booker frowned and cleared his throat.
Maud’s mind was caught like a shoat in a fence between trying to read Booker’s mind and the possibility of the dead dog being rabid when Renee turned to her and said, “You told Mama that Lovely’s sick.”
“With more than the knock on the head?” Booker asked Maud.
She was trying to recall the symptoms of rabies. They weren’t coming, except for the fear of water. She’d left a cup and a bucket freshly drawn under the tree. She was focused on the image of that bucket when she answered. “He has the influenza or something. He’s running a fever.”
“Is he turning away from water?”
“I was just trying to think. I can’t say for sure.”
“Did the dog bite him before it died?”
“No, it was dead when we found it. But Lovely touched it.”
“I don’t think you can get rabies from a dead dog. I think it has to bite you.”
“What if you get some of its spit on you?”
Booker ran his hand over his mouth. “I don’t know about that. Maybe.”
“We better get home.”
“We better get a doctor,” he replied.
They sent Renee back to her parents, left their food on their plates, and rode to Dr. Ragsdale’s office in the middle of town. A sign on his door said his hours were during the week. They walked to Berd’s Drugstore. John Berd didn’t think rabies could be carried without a bite. He thought the skin had to be broken for the virus to get in. It was then that Maud remembered Lovely’s thistle poke. Her mind’s eye saw him massaging his palm with his thumb. She felt sick to her stomach. She leaned against Booker.
They left Berd’s and stopped everybody Maud knew. No one had seen Dr. Ragsdale. But one woman said she’d seen his car in front of Taylor’s General Store. They went there. Booker knew his employer’s son and Hugh Singer knew Booker’s position with the law. He went with them to ask the sheriff to run the doctor to ground. But the sheriff and neither of his deputies were in, so the three of them walked back to the store, and the merchant placed a telephone call to the doctor’s home. His wife said he was on the bayou fishing, that she didn’t expect him home until after dark. Singer asked that the doctor call him at his home and he took down from Maud a list of Lovely’s symptoms.
By that time, Maud was racked with worry. She was too anxious to meet up with her family or attend the speeches at the fort. But she was afraid to go home to see what was happening with Lovely. All she wanted to do was stay with Booker and cling to him like silk to an ear of corn.
They rode toward the bottoms, Maud clutching his waist. They stopped at Mr. Singer’s. Booker had hidden his wagon in a clump of trees between the potato barn and the main house. He parted the blue canvas. They crawled into the nook between the shelves and onto his pallet. Alone and in relative private, they did what came naturally—up to a point.
Maud told Booker she was too worried about Lovely to go any further than they’d already gone. And although she felt some guilt over using Lovely that way and more over not going home to tend to him, she didn’t feel guilty for enjoying herself as much as she could. Sex felt as natural as sunshine and weeds. But she wanted out of the bottoms and into a stable life with Booker, and she didn’t want to be in a family way until she had what she wanted.
Eventually, Maud asked Booker to take he
r home. They left the shadows of his bunk in the moonlight and rode south down the section line. The piles of the school’s remains looked like giant watermelons looming up from their vines. The Beechers’ house, under the trees, was dark. Lamplight in Nan and Ryde’s front room spilled out onto their porch. At the end of the line, Gourd’s house looked like it’d been abandoned for years. Booker said, “I think the guard’s down.”
Maud was on the back of the horse. She leaned so she could see. “Maybe Doc Ragsdale came and didn’t put it back up.”
She slipped off the horse and walked not far in front of it because she didn’t have a snake stick. She closed that guard and the next one. Mustard’s car wasn’t in the lean-to or anywhere in the yard. Neither was any other. Booker dismounted at the hitching rail.
Lovely was in the chair on the east end of the porch. He didn’t move. Maud called his name. He turned and looked at them. The moon lit his features.
Maud said, “How’re you doing?”
“Had the shakes. They’re better now.”
“Maybe your fever’s lifting.”
“Maybe.”
“Did the doctor come by to see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’ve been sleeping off and on.”
Maud was close enough to Lovely to see him well. He didn’t look completely himself. But she thought maybe her guilt and worry made him seem odd. She put her hand on a post. “Are you gonna sleep outside?”
“My cot’s under the tree.”
“Is there anything I can get you? Some water, maybe?”
“No. I’m fine. Howdy, Booker.”
Booker returned the greeting. Then he asked Maud to walk him to his horse. He asked if she was planning to tell Lovely what they’d learned in town. She didn’t have a ready answer, and with moonlight on their shoulders, they whispered about the wisest course of action. Maud enjoyed their sharing something, even a problem, and neither of them stuck to a firm position, and not just because they were trying to please each other. They both thought Lovely had a right to know, but they also agreed that telling him could cause unnecessary fear. In the end, they decided to let the subject rest until the doctor could explain it with some authority and reassurance.
After that, they talked about whether Booker would stay the night. He said he’d sleep on the porch using his saddle for a pillow. And in making his case, he used kisses to be persuasive. Maud didn’t want to send Booker away; his body turned hers like the sun turns the face of a sunflower. And she was also afraid of being alone with Lovely’s strangeness. But she didn’t entirely trust Booker not to slip inside to her bed or trust herself if he did. And she didn’t want him there, or anywhere near, if her daddy showed up drunk. She knew full well how drunkenness looked to most white people. So in the end, she sent Booker off down the lane.
The next morning, Maud looked first to Mustard’s bed. It was empty and untouched. Then she looked to the pile of books that Lovely’s cot usually hid. The piles were coated with a sheen of dust. She rolled onto her back and looked to the ceiling. There was a crack in the cardboard up there that she sometimes imagined as a river, sometimes as a fissure in the earth, sometimes as a scar on a face. But she felt too worried for the crack to suck her in. She hoped Dr. Ragsdale would show up as soon as the sun got higher. She thought again about the possibility of rabies. The more she thought about that, the tighter her stomach grew. She began to feel like she was going to throw up. She decided that would be a good thing. Lovely had a bug. She caught it. She swung her feet over the side of her cot. She didn’t hear Lovely outside on the porch, and the sun was too high for him to be sleeping unless he was even more poorly. She got up and peeked out the door. Lovely wasn’t on the porch. She stepped outside. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen. She walked to the outhouse and called his name. She went to the live oak tree, parted its leaves, and found his empty cot in the shade. She went back in, dressed behind the sheet, and began to feel hungry.
Lovely didn’t turn up for breakfast. He didn’t return while Maud was feeding the chickens, milking the cow, or sweeping the dirt in front of the house. He didn’t come back to help her hoe. And neither did Mustard or the doctor show. She didn’t expect Booker; Mr. Singer was taking him to church to sit in his pew to be seen. So she was left to her own cogitations. And, slowly, as she chopped weeds and grass that seemed more attracted to garden dirt than to the yard, she decided that if she wanted something done she was going to have to do it. She’d visit the Mounts and see if John Mount had gone mad or was just his usual mean self. She didn’t intend to get right up on them or have an actual conversation. She didn’t even intend to get within running distance. She knew a place down in the wild where she could climb a little rise, peek over, and see their house. At that time of day, they both should be outside. It was too hot to stay in.
So Maud changed into a shirt and a pair of overalls that she’d inherited from Lovely, slipped her mother’s pistol into her pocket, and picked out her Winchester from the cluster in the corner. She walked the lane, turned at her uncle Gourd’s house, and took the ruts to the river. Not far under the ridge, she veered off east onto a cow path. The vegetation on either side was tall. It rustled with the breeze, buzzed with insects, and was full of nettles. She knew the cottonmouths were thick, and she kept her eyes on her boots and repeatedly used the barrel of her rifle as a snake stick. She wondered how on the face of the Earth the Mounts, or anybody, could stand to live in such a forsaken place. The sun was high in the sky. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead, her crown, and the back of her neck. Patches appeared under her arms.
At some distance into the wild, Maud found the spot she’d come looking for. It was a hill of sandy soil, not high, but higher than anything else around except the other little rise that the Mounts’ house sat on. While climbing the mound, Maud realized that she didn’t really know if the Mounts’ house was still there. It was so close to the river that it could’ve easily been swept away in the flood. The thought made her heart sink. She’d come out far into a place she’d always avoided, a place so wild with poisonous creatures and wolves and occasionally even bears and wildcats that her mother had used it to scare her into good behavior. Maud shifted her rifle to her left hand and freed her right one to grasp a root to lift herself to the rim of the rise.
In the distance, she saw what remained of the Mounts’ house. The porch was gone. The single front window and the door were so high above the ground that they looked like they were part of a second floor. Wooden steps to the door were of a different color than the wood of the house. Maud figured they’d been laid after the flood had taken the porch. Next to the house stood a willow. The movement of its limbs was the only movement around. Maud had been worried about the Mounts’ dogs smelling her and barking, but she didn’t hear a sound beyond the low rush of the river. She looked south and saw a ribbon of water. She turned back to the house. She looked for dogs. She decided the Mounts had put theirs down, fearing the spread of rabies.
She was squatting below the crest of the hill, watching the house for movement and listening to insects, when the ripple of a shadow glided across the tangles in front of her. She looked to the sky. A buzzard had flown over. It circled out toward the river and circled back in. Another buzzard came in from the southeast. It was higher and circled in a clockwise direction. The first buzzard landed next to the Mounts’ stovepipe. The second buzzard disappeared behind treetops. The buzzard near the stovepipe dropped off the house out of sight. The other buzzard flew back in and landed on the roof. It flapped its wings. Then it, too, slipped below Maud’s line of vision. A third buzzard flew in.
When the third buzzard landed on the roof, Maud’s fear of the Mounts disappeared and was replaced by a fear so great it propelled her to stand. She made her way quickly down the hill and then ran the cow path toward the Mounts’, past their cow lot to their front yard. She heard whooshing noises, flaps, and hisses. She climbed the s
teps to the door, entered the house, held her breath against its filth, and walked to the only window in the back wall. That window was open. Beyond it, on the ground below, were twenty to thirty black buzzards and turkey buzzards. They were in two groups, stabbing, tearing, raising their heads to swallow, flapping their wings, and jabbing at each other.
Maud’s breathing grew more and more shallow until she felt faint. She steadied herself with the butt of her rifle against the floor and a hand on the window frame. She turned toward the room. There was a cast-iron stove in the corner, two chairs and a table in the middle, a dipping pan on a table, and two beds against opposite walls. Maud used her gun to steady herself, walked to the table, and sat down. In front of her was a bowl crawling with green flies, a saltshaker, a tin cup, and a box of matches. The birds made a loud racket.
Maud pushed the bowl to the far side of the table. The flies hardly stirred. She studied the saltshaker. It was glass, smudged with dirt, and half full. The salt in it rose higher on one side than on the other. Her eyes were still clamped to the shaker when she heard the flapping of wings nearby. She looked to the window. A turkey buzzard was sitting on the sill, its red, wrinkly head cocked at her. Her hand went to the bowl. She threw it and hit the bird. The buzzard rocked backward, hissed, and disappeared. The bowl fell out of the window. The swarm of flies filled the air. Their buzz was shrill.
Maud’s mind focused. She walked to the window, swatting flies. The birds were still tearing away. She took her mother’s pistol out of her pocket and fired at the ground. Wings flapped in every direction. Some birds landed in trees close by, some on other spots on the ground. They looked at Maud like she looked at them. She steadied herself in the frame but then recalled that the buzzard had stood in that place. She stepped back, stumbled over to the dipping pan, cupped up a handful of water, and wiped it over the back of her neck. She sat down at the table again and tried to think.
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