Maud's Line

by Margaret Verble

  “Maybe he does. But showing up on his doorstep and announcing I’m carrying isn’t likely to rekindle his interest.”

  “It might. He might want a baby.”

  “I want him to want me.”

  Nan seemed to study the trees. Eventually, she said, “That Billy’s a worker.”

  “That might be, but the baby’s not his.”

  Nan grunted. “He’s too full-blooded to care.”

  Maud put her chin in her hands. Her elbows were balanced on the book on her knees. She knew Cherokee men weren’t too bothered by who’d fathered the children in their own homes. Mostly, they parented their sisters’ kids, their certain blood kin. That, Maud supposed, was the upside to their everlasting comings and goings. She said, “You don’t understand. I’ve got to get out of here. Aunt Nan, the whole world’s passing me by. Will you talk to Aunt Viola for me?” Her voice sounded high.

  Nan sighed. “You haveta please yerself. But if ya do it, be sure it’s in the right sign.”

  “What sign would that be?”

  “I’d have to study on it. But not in the heart, belly, or reins. You’d bleed to death as quick as that.” She snapped her fingers.

  The snap startled Maud. And the thought of bleeding to death filled her with horror. She didn’t think astrological signs were reliable, but most of her family was high on them, particularly for planting, hog killing, and tooth pulling. She didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances. Bleeding to death in the bottoms would be worse than being snakebit and getting it over with fast.

  Nan patted Maud’s back. She asked her to stay for supper. And they were eating when they heard a wagon. Morgan hopped up to see who it was. He came back and slid into his seat with a grin on his face. Ryde said, “Well?”

  “It’s one of Maud’s fellows.”

  Maud said, “In a wagon?”

  “Yep.”

  “Does it have a blue cover?”

  “Nope. Got a rocker and chest in the back. Saw a dog, too.”

  Maud burst out crying. She jumped up from the table and fled out the back door. She ran to the smokehouse, lifted the latch, stepped into salty dark, and pulled the door closed behind her. She turned her face to the wood, beat her forehead against it again and again, and sobbed. After she cried herself out, she wiped her nose and face on her handkerchief. She turned around and peered into the dark. Her uncle was renting this house and had been in it for only a couple of years. She was unfamiliar with its particular smokehouse, but she’d been in smokehouses all of her life. They didn’t much vary. When her eyes adjusted, she saw three hams hanging from the ceiling and a curing chest against the back wall. She moved over to the chest, swiped her finger against the wood to test it for grease, and tasted the results. She sat down. She needed to think, if she could just get her head clear. She inhaled salt. It burnt.

  7

  When she got back home, she couldn’t think any better. Billy was in the barn, his dog patrolling the front porch. Maud growled at the dog louder than he growled at her. She threw out a leg in his direction as she went inside. Billy’s chair and chest were hunkered in the main room like a couple of contented hogs. The chest was particularly grating. It was sitting where Lovely’s cot usually sat and it seemed solid and permanent. But Maud had already felt that living alone without the hope of Lovely returning was worse than living alone thinking he would show any day. So her feelings were running completely crossways.

  Maud went to the cow lot, prodded Carrie into place with a little stick, and fussed at the cow, even though the animal was as cooperative as usual. She stood behind Carrie and smacked her on her rump more than once, trying to make the cow kick her in the stomach. But Carrie just turned a big brown eye and a wide, wet mouth Maud’s way and flicked her tail like she was bored with the whole conversation. Maud gave up. She set her bucket and stool in place, rested her cheek on the cow’s side, and closed her eyes. She tried to get some comfort from Carrie’s hide as she milked.

  When she came in from the cow lot, Billy was hungry, first for food and then for sex. Settled some by milking, she provided him both. But while she and Billy rocked back and forth, she got to thinking about Booker, seventy or eighty miles away in Tulsa, doing the same thing with a big-city girl. Probably a flapper with a long string of pearls. Maud started crying before Billy was through. She cried over Booker having a girlfriend in Tulsa, over Billy’s furniture making her choice for her, over Lovely’s death. Billy was so deeply occupied that his rhythm didn’t change. But when he was through, he asked her what the matter was. She said, “I’m just crying for Gilda. I told her today.”

  As the days and nights wore on, Maud got used to the furniture. She also stopped worrying about Sheriff Talley showing up to ask questions about Lovely. Everybody knew Lovely had lost his mind; as gentle as he’d been, even Talley wouldn’t think anybody in the family had killed him. She bought some stamps and wrote her sisters and her aunt, hoping one of them would get word to her father. She checked the mailbox every day, both for word back from them and for another letter from Tulsa. Twice, when Billy was off working, she sat under the live oak tree and tried to write Booker. But each time she tore up what she had written. She realized she didn’t have enough information about his state of mind to know exactly how to cast her lines. And the thought of writing Booker the wrong thing and then waiting for an answer that might never come—or, even worse, might come and push the last hope she had away forever—was more than Maud could bear.

  But more immediate, with her every day, was Lovely’s being gone. She’d never been without him before and she hated the empty spaces he left in the house and on the porch. She had a hole in her chest that sometimes seemed so big she couldn’t swallow. She felt like a hollowed-out tree. She got the most relief from her grief when she and Billy were having sex. But that always ended in tears, and the crying began to interfere with Billy’s ability to keep his interest up. After a few wilting experiences, Maud told him that her tears were releasing her grief and that bed was the only place she felt safe enough to let it out. Billy perked back up after that and applied himself like a woodpecker to a tree. Maud enjoyed his hammering and the senselessness that came over her when she rocked back and forth with her legs locked over his rear.

  She’d dropped the squaw root she’d gathered when she found Lovely’s body. She couldn’t go back there and pick it up. And she thought it was likely her grandfather and great-uncle had picked that sack up when they’d gathered Lovely’s remains. She’d need to cut more squaw root, but she didn’t want to walk to Blue’s allotment and relive that awful day unless she knew for sure how to put the weed to use. She kept trying to get Nan to help her get rid of the baby. But Nan kept shaking her head, saying the signs were all wrong and recalling her uncle Tomahawk who’d died of a tooth pulled when the sign was in the heart. Nan said, “Bled plumb to death” more than once in such a somber tone that Maud began to wonder if Tomahawk had really died that way or if Nan had just made that story up.

  On the day Maud brought the rattle back for the baby, she asked Viola to help her. Viola was watering flowers, dipping out of a bucket with a cup, and didn’t respond. Maud hoped she’d get an answer when the bucket was empty, and she studied the petunias until her great-aunt turned the pail upside down over a cluster and finally spoke. “Sometimes I look at these flowers and see the faces of all the dead Indians in the ground. They killed us in ever’ which way. Smallpox. Measles. Firewater. Starvation. Shot the ones who crossed them. Burnt our crops and houses to the ground. Ran us off our land. Stole ever’ last thing we had. Preached hard religion that scared the spirits out of the world. Then told us we was going to Hell unless we took up their God.” Viola handed Maud the bucket, spat, and marched around the side of the house.

  So Maud went back to sex. She started grabbing Billy as soon as he cleaned up. She unbuckled his pants at the pump. She pushed him under the branches of the live oak tree and tickled him with twigs until once he came without even a
hand. She sucked his dick right out on the porch. Inside, she rode him on top, pinning his shoulders to the mattress. She squeezed his butt like a vice while they were on their sides. And, under him, she lassoed his rear with her legs. She’d decided the only way to get rid of that baby was to fuck it out, and the more positions they tried, the better chance she had. She got to where she was sore between the legs all of the time. She greased herself with the salve her father used on sows when they were being nursed to nubs, and that worked not only to smooth her rough patches but helped Billy, too. His penis had gotten to looking like it’d been in a fight.

  Lovemaking kept Maud’s thoughts about Booker at bay. But sometimes during the day, he would appear to her as clear as a stalk of corn, as clear as a cow in the pasture, as clear as the live oak tree. She never caught a glimpse of him out of the sides of her eyes; he was always in front of her, full-blown, sometimes naked but more often with a book in his hand, wearing a white shirt and red suspenders, his bowler on the back of his head. At first, Maud thought those visions were real. Her breath left her body; she stood still. But then Booker melted away into the sun, into the air, into the branches of the tree. So when the apparition showed up, she made even more passionate love with Billy. And she sometimes thought about Booker watching them. That both excited her and provided a temporary balm to her feelings of abandonment and injustice.

  But her crying got more frequent. She cried if the wind blew dust in her eye, cried if she saw an animal hurt, cried if she wanted her way. Billy started going to the barn or over to visit Early until the storm passed away. But that infuriated Maud. More than once, when he returned, she threw a cup at his head or pushed him down the steps off the porch. Billy, however, seemed to be able to handle a fighting woman better than a crying one, and when her temper was particularly elevated, he sometimes pulled his pecker out of his pants and stroked it up and down. That drove Maud into a frenzy and made her wet with desire. She and Billy started enjoying their fights because of the making up.

  Maud didn’t hear back from her aunt Matilda, who she wasn’t certain could write. She did hear from her sister Peggy. She’d seen their father several days back and would tell him about Lovely when she saw him again. She didn’t say exactly where Mustard was, but did say that he was following the oil and that he had come to her and stayed a few days after a fight that she thought would leave a scar over his left eye. Peggy was sorry she hadn’t been able to travel with her children to get to Maud’s wedding and wanted to know how she liked married life. Maud tore that letter up and put the pieces in a nest in the chicken house that was on the top row, rarely used and out of sight. She couldn’t say at first why she didn’t just burn the letter, but she knew she felt chagrined that she hadn’t told Peggy the marriage was off, and eventually she figured out that she was lonesome for her daddy and didn’t want to send any mention of him up in flames.

  She didn’t hear any more from Booker. And she didn’t write him. She couldn’t tell him about Billy or the baby, and she envisioned his head being turned by women in Tulsa. She calculated she couldn’t compete with store-bought shifts, silk stockings, and shoes with fancy buckles. But even though she kept her hair bobbed and cut her three dresses up to the knees, she got to where she couldn’t stand to look at the Sears and Roebuck Catalogue. When the new one arrived, she took it straight to the outhouse. Billy rescued it from there, and they had a fight over whether or not to leave it on the kitchen table. Billy won that fight by screwing her against the wall so long and hard that she slid to the floor and told him, “Do what you want. I don’t care.”

  Still, seeing the catalogue on the table every morning, noon, and night reminded Maud of Booker. She didn’t know enough about Tulsa to know what kind of store he was working in except that it sold ready-to-wear. But she imagined it looked like the Woolworth Building, whose picture she’d seen again and again. She also imagined Sears and Roebuck housed in that same structure. And after a while, Sears and Roebuck, the Woolworth Building, and Booker’s store all merged into an image that loomed so large in her mind that it seemed like a force of nature as powerful as the river. She beat it back by going to the cellar and sitting on a bench until the smell of the earth brought Lovely to her. She carried on conversations with him about their parents, about books, about how the hens were laying.

  And so September wore on with Maud tuned to her inside feelings and visions more than to the outside world until one Sunday evening late in the month, after a meal at Nan’s and making love, Billy ran the palm of his hand over her belly and rested it below her navel. He said, “That ain’t yer aunt Nan’s cooking, is it?”

  Maud looked past her breasts like she was checking on her situation for the first time. There was a definite mound there. She hated seeing it. “I reckon.”

  Billy’s head was propped on his other hand. He pulled his chin in. “‘You reckon?’ Don’t you know?”

  She rested her forearm over her eyes to hide as much of her face as she could. “I’ve been suspecting. Just thought I’d wait and see.”

  “Do ya think we better stop?”

  “Stop what?”

  “You know.”

  “Stop doing it good?”

  “Yeah. It might hurt the baby.” Billy’s brow wrinkled.

  “Well, number one, we don’t know there’s a baby in there. I might just be over fed. A satisfied woman can put on weight.”

  Billy smiled, but asked, “What’s number two?”

  “There isn’t a number two. I was just using an expression.”

  Billy frowned. He ran his hand over her stomach again.

  Maud turned onto her side and cupped his balls with her fingers. “I’ve just eaten a big meal. When did you start wanting to talk in bed?” She squeezed just a little.

  “I can feel that in the roof of my mouth.” He started to say something else, but Maud kissed him on the lips; whispered, “Shut up”; and then kissed his neck and his nipples, and moved down in the bed. Billy didn’t do anything but groan, and by the time she was through with him, he didn’t make any sound at all. He slept without moving and went to work the next morning humming a tune.

  But Maud was distressed. She’d been examining her body every day and had seen the changes in it. Her breasts were heavy, the brown around her nipples too dark, and the curve to her belly wasn’t going away unless she did something about it. She was afraid she’d poison herself if she tried the squaw root without instructions, afraid she’d bleed to death if she stuck something up herself, and figured Dr. Ragsdale wouldn’t help her out. The only thing she could think to try was jumping. She stood on the edge of the porch and jumped off of it until her shins hurt and dirt was ground into her palms. Then she sat on the steps and tried to feel if anything had changed inside. She decided it hadn’t. But she resolved to jump every morning as soon as Billy went off to work. She went about her chores in a foul mood.

  She was carrying a pail of milk back from the cow lot when she heard Billy’s dog barking. He was on the ground in front of the porch, so she first looked past him for a snake. She couldn’t see anything unusual in the dirt; she looked closer at the dog’s head. It was up, not down; his ears were pointing forward. He’d heard something in the distance. Maud kept walking toward the house, and a car soon emerged from the trees on the section line. It was the sheriff’s.

  Maud was already so blue that the sight of the car stirred her interest more than her fears. She walked on into the kitchen and poured the milk into a pitcher while the sheriff negotiated the guards. When he called from the steps, she came to the screen and said, “Good morning, Sheriff Talley. Would you like a glass of milk?”

  The sheriff licked his lips. But then he shook his head. “I’d like a word with ya. Could I come in?”

  That request was unusual. The weather was still hot. Most anybody would prefer to talk on the porch. Maud recognized that Talley wanted to see if anybody else was inside. That probably meant he’d come about her father, not about Lovely. Sh
e said, “Have you located Daddy?”

  Talley stepped up to the porch. “Do ya mind if I come in?” He took his hat off with his left hand.

  Maud knew that meant he was saving his right hand for his gun. She didn’t much like anybody seeing the inside of the house, but she really didn’t have much choice. She opened the screen door.

  The sheriff stepped into the kitchen, looked it over, and stepped into the other room. He pulled the sheet back and looked behind it. He let it go and paused in the threshold between the two rooms. “Laswell says yer daddy came by the feed store to pick up money owed him.”

  Maud’s first reaction was to feel hurt that her father hadn’t come to see her. She said, “When was that?”

  “Jist let me ask the questions. Have ya seen him?”

  “No. I wish I had. I don’t even know if he knows Lovely’s dead.”

  “I heard about that. Had a little talk with yer grandfather. I’m sorry. Do ya think the rabies sent him off in his head?”

  “Could be.” She didn’t know what her grandfather had said and didn’t want to contradict whatever it was. He’d never mentioned talking to the sheriff, and it could be that Talley was casting a line to hook her. On the other hand, it was just like her grandpa to say as little as possible about anything disturbing. Both to buy time and because she really felt it, she said, “Do you mind if we step outside? I’m overheating.”

  The sheriff held the screen door open. Maud stepped out on the porch. She didn’t want to offer Talley a seat, so she leaned against a post, her hand cushioning her rear. The sheriff put his hat on, walked to the front edge of the porch, and picked a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He shook a cigarette out, crumpled the package, and stuck it back in his pocket. “I’d offer ya one, but I’m out.”

  “I just smoke at night.” She waved her hand in front of her face. At that time of day, there wasn’t a spot of shade on the front porch.