Lovely had thrown his sheet onto their father’s bed. He was breaking his cot down. “What’re you doing?” Maud said.
“Moving my bed.”
“To the tree?”
“I’m gonna sleep in the chicken house.”
“You’re not sleeping in the chicken house. That’s a fool thing to do.”
“It’s safer in there.”
“Safer than what?”
Lovely looked around the room. “Safer than here.”
“There’s nothing here to fear. Daddy’s gone.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I wish I knew. You’re not going to the chicken house.”
Lovely continued folding his cot. Maud grabbed his shoulder. He jerked loose from her grip and backed away. “It’s not your bed.”
“Of course it’s not.” Maud ran a hand through her hair. “But why on earth sleep in the chicken house?”
“Are you not listening to me? It’s safer in there.”
“What do you think’s going to happen to you in your own home?”
Lovely ran his hand over his mouth. “I’m not sure.”
Maud stepped toward him. “Look, you’ve been poorly. You’re not yourself. But you’re with me now. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you. Remember how I took care of you when you had the throw-ups? I’ll take care of you again. Nothing’s going to hurt either one of us. If you don’t want to sleep inside, you can take your cot to the porch and sleep out there. Or you can sleep under the tree. But you can’t sleep in the chicken house. It’s dirty. And you’ll upset the chickens.”
“They won’t care.”
“They will, too. They’ll stop laying. They’ve almost stopped because of the heat as it is. We need eggs. You can’t be irritating the hens.”
Lovely seemed to consider that. Then he unfolded his bed and Maud handed him his sheet. “Why don’t you go on out to the porch? There’s still some light to read. Get your Bible or one of the books Booker brought. He’s coming soon. He’ll be glad to see you.”
Lovely turned and walked out the door. As soon as Maud felt he’d stay in his rocker and not wander off, she turned back to the kitchen. The water in the washing pan was moving with the heat. She tested it with her finger and set to washing dishes.
Booker hadn’t come by sunset. And Maud sat in a rocker long after Lovely had brought his cot out to the porch and fallen asleep. The moon was dark. She finally went inside and lay on her father’s bed. She lay there all night, fighting to sleep, winning toward morning, but waking to the first crow of the cock. In the gray of dawn, the chest stood against the wall like a hunkered bear. The sheet hung like a ghost. Maud felt queasy. She rolled over and closed her eyes. That didn’t help. She got up feeling sluggish, wished she’d had more sleep, and checked on Lovely. He was still knocked out on his cot when she went to do her business.
She came back in, fed kindling into the stove, stoked up a fire, and poured flour into a bowl for biscuits. She was cutting lard into the flour when she suddenly felt like she was going to throw up. She made it to the side of the porch. Then she went to the pump and washed her mouth out. Lovely was up by then. She told him he needed to make the biscuits and fry the eggs and side meat if he wanted to eat. Then she sat on the porch and rested her head on the back of her rocker until he called her. She slid into a chair at the kitchen table and ate half a biscuit. That made her feel better. She went to the main room and lay on the bed. She quickly fell to sleep.
She woke sweating with the heat. Her first thought went to Booker, her second to Lovely. She went outside. Lovely was nowhere to be seen. She came back in. Next to the Calumet tin on the kitchen table was a note in Lovely’s hand. He’d milked the cow and gone to work. She felt relieved. She pulled the pan of biscuits from the oven and ate two with some honey and a piece of side meat. She dressed and let the chickens out. She took her rifle from the corner and walked the lane to the road.
She went right past Nan’s without going in and without, apparently, being seen. She saw Lovely and the mule pulling a log toward a pile. At the cross of the section lines, she checked their mailbox. It was as empty as usual, except for a flyer addressed to the Beechers and misplaced in their box. She took the flyer to the Beechers’ door and talked to Mrs. Beecher about the weather and the crops, but she turned down an offer of buttermilk. Then she walked on. When she got to the ruins of the school, she barely noticed them because her eyes were focused ahead, searching for the rolls of blue. She didn’t see them or the wagon. The potato barn grew bigger and bigger.
She was close enough to the barn to smell the potato stink when a man she’d never seen came out. He looked at her rifle. She said, “It’s for the snakes.”
“Sometimes they lay in the spuds,” he said.
“Do you work in the barn?”
“Not usually. I work the fields. But the feller who was selling the spuds has up and gone.”
Maud felt like she was going to sink to the ground. She steadied herself with her rifle. “Where to?”
The man scratched his head. “Don’t rightly know.”
“Is Mr. Singer in?”
“I reckon. I ain’t seen his Packard go out. You want some spuds?”
Maud shook her head. She held her breath through the potato barn and walked out the other side. The Singer house was painted white. It was double storied, sat facing south, and had a large back porch. A summer kitchen sat not far behind the house; a wisp of smoke curled from a chimney. Maud climbed the back steps and knocked on the door. Inside the screen, she saw a long hall and the back of a staircase. She heard footsteps descending the stairs. The outline of a woman was coming her way. At the door, the woman said, “Can I help ya?”
Maud had seen the woman before when she’d borrowed books and returned them, but she didn’t know her by name. “I’m Maud Nail. I’d like to see Mr. Singer if he’s in.”
The woman bit her lower lip. She was a Negro. She was wearing a white apron that went down past her knees and her hair was done up in a red kerchief. She held a broom in her right hand. “I’ll see ifin he’s around. But ifin he is, leave yer gun on the porch.”
Maud propped her rifle against a window frame, turned toward the summer kitchen, and clasped her hands behind her back. She stood there, straining to hear what was going on inside the house. But the sound of a tractor prevented that. She was caught by surprise when a voice behind her said, “Maud, I suppose you’re looking for Mr. Wakefield.”
Maud turned as quickly as if she’d been tapped on the shoulder by a finger from the grave. Mr. Singer was standing inside the screen. He was slighter than she last recalled, and through the screen, he looked pale. He opened the door and stepped out. Maud wanted to step back, but she was at the edge of the porch as it was and she didn’t want to step down. She put her hand on a post.
Mr. Singer had on a white shirt, its cuffs rolled up to midforearm. He took an envelope out of his pocket. “He left this for you.”
Maud reached for the envelope. “Thank you.”
Mr. Singer pursed his lips. He looked off over Maud’s head but didn’t move. She felt her hand trembling. She didn’t have a pocket to put the letter in, and she didn’t want to open it in front of Mr. Singer. She said, “Is he going to be gone for long?”
Mr. Singer seemed to consider that question. Then he said, “You’ll probably know more than I do when you read the letter.” He paused, said, “Good to see you,” and turned back into the house.
Maud grabbed her gun and left the porch quickly. She veered away from the potato barn to avoid its odor and another conversion with the man she’d talked to earlier. She chose a path that went up a rise and ended at the highway near the Arkansas River bridge. She’d crossed the road all of her life, but she was rarely afoot that far west, and she heard the roar of the water and the sounds of traffic on the planks. When she got near the road, she stopped in the shade of a tree and stared at the envelope. Her future was in it. Booker’s hand had writt
en her name across the front; his tongue had licked the flap. Maud started to open the letter right there but hesitated. She was a long way from home on foot. What if it said something she couldn’t bear? She leaned against the tree, then sunk to a root at its trunk. She heard a car rattling the planks on the bridge. She watched it pass. She looked at the letter in her hand, studied the writing for any sign it could give.
After a while, she reached inside her dress, undid a safety pin, and fastened the envelope to her slip over her heart. She sat under the tree until a wagon and three more cars passed, all from the direction of Muskogee. Booker had gone over there to pick up more wares on more than one occasion, and Maud began telling herself that was where he’d gone again. She got up from the root, walked the road to the edge of the bridge, and looked at the planks stretching to the far side. She stayed there until another car came onto the bridge, and then she crossed the road quickly before it went by. She walked a path down to where an old ferry had been.
Maud had ridden the ferry as a child and knew that Mr. Singer had hired her grandfather to steer it when he’d first arrived in Indian Territory. She envisaged those days as she walked deeper into the bottoms, forcing her thoughts away from the letter by using her imagination as she always had to carry her away from her father’s drinking, her mother’s death, and the dust and hard work.
She hadn’t walked the path from the river to her mother’s allotment very often but she knew the way. When she finally came through the field behind the chicken house, she was weary and her feet hurt to her shins. Lovely was sitting on the edge of the porch. When she got to him, he said, “Where the dickens have you been?”
“You lay out. Can’t I do the same?”
“You can, if you are of a mind. I was just thinking about supper. You weren’t here when I came in for dinner.”
“I wish men would learn to cook.”
“I had some biscuits and side meat. That’s all I was getting anyway.”
“Did you take the mule back to Mr. Singer’s?”
“She’s in the pasture over there.” Lovely pointed with his thumb.
“Was Booker’s wagon at the potato barn when you got her this morning?”
Lovely’s brow furrowed. “I don’t reckon it was. Has he gone off somewhere?”
Maud sat down on a step close to Lovely’s leg. “Seems that he has.”
“Well, he’ll be back. What’s for supper?”
“Have you picked anything from the garden?”
“Not yet.”
“Do that, and I’ll cook it up. You’re lucky I’m hungry myself.”
Maud watched Lovely’s back as he walked away from the porch. When he got to the garden gate, she unpinned the envelope from her slip and held it in her hand. Her name was written in ink; her sweat had smeared it some. She placed her thumb over the smear. If she opened the letter, she would know her fate. She felt as certain of that as she was of the cock crowing at dawn. She turned the envelope over, moved her thumb to the fold. Both the thumb and the hand holding the envelope trembled. She bit her lip. A cow mooed in the distance. A small toad hopped out from under the house. Maud got up, opened the screen, and went inside. The curtains were drawn, the room dark. She went to the chest and opened her drawer. Her little handbag was in there. She undid its clasp and tucked the letter inside.
Maud was limp from her walk and from lack of sleep. She followed the sun to bed, slept soundly through the night, and awoke at the first crow in gray morning light. She was again cutting lard into flour when nausea hit her. She got as far as the yard and threw up there. She washed out her mouth at the pump and cupped her breasts in her palms. They felt tender. Her visitor should be on her.
She walked back to the house. She kept track of her cycle, the dates of plantings, and the numbers of eggs with notes on the calendar on the front room wall. She took the calendar off its nail, flipped to the previous month, and counted. Forty-one days. She was late, but she wasn’t that regular; and Booker always pulled out, had never not. She bit her lower lip.
The door banged. Lovely sank to a chair at the table. Maud went back to making biscuits. They talked a little and eventually ate. Then Lovely took off to the pasture to get the mule. Maud let out the chickens, milked the cow, and did her inside chores. By that time, the heat was too high to work in the garden, and thoughts of Booker were filling her head until she felt like it was busting. She was afraid of the letter he’d left her and wanted out of the house and away from it. She picked her rifle out of the corner and decided to see if her uncle Ryde had escaped the sheriff.
She found Nan in her side yard at her kettles, washing clothes. Ryde was back at home in the cornfield with Morgan and Renee. She pitched in to help Nan, and by the time the clothes were flapping in the wind with a noise that sounded like they were being paddled, she felt better than she had in a couple of days. They went to the porch to rest. Andy was asleep in a wagon in the shade. Sanders was building a stick fort on the side of the house away from the wind. They positioned their chairs so they wouldn’t be covered by blown-up dust, shelled beans, and talked. Eventually, like Maud had hoped, Nan asked about Booker. She told her the full story, holding back only the counting of her days.
Nan told stories about various men in the family laying out, and she told them with such good humor that Maud felt reassured. But after that, Nan said, “Do you remember yer first cousin, Able?”
“Sort of. He’s not around much anymore.”
“He ain’t around at all. He’s up in Vinita.”
Able was, Maud believed, her aunt Sarah’s next to oldest child. Sarah had married at thirteen and started having children a year later. Some of her ten kids were a good bit older than Maud, and Sarah had lived in Muskogee since before she and Lovely were born. Maud didn’t know those cousins as well as she did her others. But she did know that the ones she’d seen recently had cars and went to college, facts that gave her hope. She said, “Is there a college up there?”
“Don’t know about that. There’s a hospital fer people who are tetched in the head.”
Maud sucked her breath in and looked toward the side of the porch. She could see the top of Sanders’ head. She looked back down to her hands. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Figured you didn’t know it. Happened ’bout the time Lila died. You was little and grieving. And nobody talks about it much now. But it nearly broke yer aunt Sarah’s heart. She can’t get over it.”
“Why’d she do it then?”
“His daddy did it. Sarah fought it. But I believe Carter waz right. Hadn’t been right about much in my book, but right about that. Able got to acting wild. Not jist the usual wild. But talking to people who weren’t there and seeing things. He got hard to handle. He was already big. Eighteen or nineteen and well over six foot. And he got one of his little sisters by the head. I can’t remember now which one. But he wouldn’t let go, and he nearly broke her neck before the rest of them boys got him off her. That did it for Carter. You know, he’s a successful man. He always ran around on Sarah, and then up and left her for good. But he’s taken care of his kids. Is sending little Early and Buddy to college. Gonna send them to law school. But he sent Able to Vinita. I ’spect he had to.”
“Does it run in families?”
“Don’t know. Don’t know what it is, neither. But it’s peculiar.”
After that, Nan moved to talking about a bull her uncle Coop had had that wouldn’t mount any cow. Maud wasn’t sure what the bull had to do with Lovely or Able, and she was trying to figure out if anything more than peculiarity linked the stories together when Lovely and his mule came toward them on the line. Ryde and his older kids came in shortly after that. They all ate together, and when the meal was over, the wind died down, and Ryde and Lovely went to the porch and the children to the yard while Nan and Maud cleaned up. After that, the two women settled with their legs dangling over the edge of the porch. That was when Ryde said, “Heard anything from Mustard?”
&nbs
p; Maud looked to Lovely to answer. But Lovely looked to her. She said to her uncle, “No. Have you?”
Ryde was cleaning his fingernails with his knife. He scraped under the nail on his thumb. “He might need to stay away. The sheriff’s looking fer something on him. So far, his only clue is the burnt quilt.” Ryde arched his eyebrow at Maud.
“That was stupid. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You happen to mention it to anyone?”
“Not outside the family.” She recalled her conversation with Booker. Her mind had gone to his letter when her uncle said, “We didn’t kill John. Claude did.”
Lovely said, “Why would he kill his own brother?”
“Accident. Trying to kill yer daddy. Missed. Shot John instead.”
Maud licked her lips. She wanted to hear the story, but she was also pulled in the opposite direction. Renee was sitting in a wheelbarrow, reading a book. Morgan was pitching rocks toward a mark in the dirt. Sanders was picking the rocks up and bringing them back to Morgan. Any of them might be listening. It was Lovely who asked, “How’d Claude get killed?”
Ryde pulled a hand-rolled cigarette from his pocket. He pinched one end and put the cigarette in his mouth. He picked his lighter up from the porch, lit up, took a deep draw, and leaned forward in his chair. He spoke softly. “I’m not saying we didn’t go down there to kill ’em both. We did. They both did the deed with the dog. We got that from a reliable source. But Mustard wanted ’em to know who waz killing ’em and why.
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