Work Like Any Other

by Virginia Reeves

  “We’ve not had time to keep it up,” Wilson said, as we emerged into the field where his old house stood. “But it’s yours as long as you want it.”

  The brush had crept closer to the cottage, some of the old pines felled by hand or on their own. Creepers had taken over most of the siding, the few exposed planks closer to mulch than wood. New sounds ran their way around us—creaks and rattles, glass gone to shards in several of the windowpanes.

  “Too much to do on the land,” Wilson said. “Too much to do at the big house.”

  I was glad of the ruin, grateful to see something that had aged as much as I had. “Is there furniture?”

  “Table and chairs. I won’t make any claims about the cleanliness, but there are beds to sleep in, plenty to choose from.”

  The evening was bringing a chill, and I’d left my jacket in the big house. “There are blankets inside?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Thank Moa for the meal.”

  “I will.”

  I watched him walk through the grasses and brush. I should have called out, offered some sentiment about this place where we’d found ourselves. Instead, I went inside the cottage. The door latch was misaligned with the plate, unable to catch and hold. I would straighten it in the morning, drill new holes for the hinges, replace the rotted pieces of the doorframe.

  “Come on,” I said to Maggie. “It’s not much more than your shed.”

  She curved her spine in nervousness, tucked her ears close to her head, the ends trailing down her neck.

  “Come on.”

  She wouldn’t come.

  The gloom of evening was already thick inside the cottage, and I lit both lamps to fight it off. A long table and benches stood in the center of the main room, cupboards along one wall, a sink with a hand pump, ladder-back chairs, a blackened stove in the corner. Two small bedrooms were on the left—one for the parents and one for the children. The outhouse was around the side.

  I hoped for food in the cupboards and was rewarded with a few jars of pickled beets, peaches, and a small sack of dried meat. The sack was mouse chewed, the meat gnawed, but it was enough to coax Maggie in.

  Maggie didn’t understand why she was in this house. She wasn’t hunting anyone, wasn’t working. She took the meat and chewed it slowly, her head hung with the effort. I closed the door behind her and sought out a broom in one of the cabinets. A dead mouse was in one of the corners, and when I opened the stove, I found three sparrows. They must’ve come through the chimney and gotten stuck inside, dying of thirst and starvation in that dusty tomb. I scooped them onto the pile I’d gathered and edged it all to the door. I again saw those chalky bodies drop from the hayloft of my parents’ barn, and I thought of the comfort I’d taken in my sister’s company. We’d shared our exile then, just as I was sharing it with Maggie now.

  MAGGIE and I stomped around the cottage in the morning. We were both tired and cautious, neither of us having found much sleep. After nine years of the same noises and perpetual lights, the same smells and rough sheets and rougher blankets, it was hard to sleep in the quiet of a cottage in a stand of pines, with the rattle of broken glass and the shifting of branches, a down pillow and a thick mattress, old and musk soaked as they were. I’d eventually gotten down on the pallet that the children must have used, and on its thin mattress, just inches from the floor, I was able to sleep a bit.

  Maggie and I circled out toward the fields to get our bearings, and we came to the power line. It ran straight from the big house, and it stopped just before the pines.

  I figured I’d stay long enough to power the cottage, long enough to decide where to go. I’d never believed I would pass up electrical work were it to come my way. I’m sure my parole board didn’t either.

  I heel-toed my way back to the cottage, a little less than fifty yards. We’d raised poles every twenty-five yards or so along the roads when I was with Alabama Power, but this line was lower and would benefit from extra support along the way.

  “Three poles,” I said to Maggie. “We’ll cut them from around the back of the cottage to let in a bit more light. All right, girl?”

  She sat and whined.

  “You’re hungry.”

  I had no desire to return to the big house, but I knew I would need Wilson and Moa’s help to live in the cottage, even for a short time.

  They were on the front porch, sitting in the rockers, drinking from mugs.

  “That dog’s not welcome in the house.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it, Moa.”

  “How’d you sleep?” Wilson asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Took me a full week before I could sleep in a bed at all.”

  “More than that,” Moa said. “I’d find him curled up on the floor of the hall more times than not. Went on nearly two months.”

  “I’ll see how the floor suits me tonight.” Before the semblance of comfort was completely gone, I said, “I’m going to need a few things for the cottage. Tools, mostly.”

  “There’s work for you to do there, sure enough,” Moa replied. “Some of your things are in the closet off the kitchen. You best have a cup of coffee first. There’s ham and biscuits, too.”

  “Wait—” But Moa was gone through the screen door, and Maggie was lying on the walkway as though my word were for her.

  “There’s all sorts of confusion,” Wilson was saying. “All you can do is make sense of the pieces in front of you. It was the same when I got back.”

  “And when was that?”

  “A bit ago.”

  “Marie was here?”

  “Yes.” He held the screen open for me. “Come on in and have some breakfast.”

  “Wait,” I said, even though Maggie was already waiting.

  The dining room was swept clear of any memory of our dinner, and the door to the kitchen stood open. The worktable was the only thing I recognized, though it was as shiny and polished as the rest of the house. An icebox thrummed loudly against the wall. The sink had a lever and a faucet. The electric cookstove had coiled burners circling round the black dots at their centers. New, white cupboards lined the walls, top and bottom, and several cooking gadgets sat on the countertops. I didn’t even know what they were. Mixers? Grinders?

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” Moa said. “Marie had it done over like this for me, seeing as I spend so much time in here. She let me pick the paper.”

  There was only one wall of it—a pattern of lacy squares framing miniature men offering miniature women disproportionately large tulips. The women’s faces looked out at the room, surprise on their features, the men in profile, expressionless. That paper still rings desperate to me, and pointedly sad.

  “Mr. Roscoe,” Moa said, “the closet is over here.”

  I remembered the closet, a narrow shaft of a room used for storage of strange or useless things, often with sentimental value. We’d rarely go in with the mind of taking something out, as opposed to putting something in.

  It was packed tight with everything I once owned.

  “Wilson’s parked one of the wheelbarrows out the kitchen door for you to use for the hauling. I’ll get you some breakfast. Suppose that dog’ll need to eat, too.” She dropped a pile of meat scraps into a metal bowl. “You can call it round back if you want.”

  Maggie and Wilson hadn’t moved from their spots.

  “Tried to call her up here, but she’s not interested in listening to me. Figure she’s used to treeing men my color.”

  “There weren’t that many men your color at Kilby.”

  “Why put a man in prison when you can sell him to the mines for a few bucks.”

  I could only look at Wilson, his empty, pinned-up sleeve, the scars on his remaining hand, and imagine myself saying something that righted it.

  “Once you take stock of what you have in the closet the
re, you let me know what else you need.”

  “Thank you. Come on, Maggie.” I gave her the bowl to sniff, and she followed eagerly, sticking her nose into my leg a few times, nudging me.

  Wilson laughed at us from his height on the porch. “I think that dog’s got a good retirement in front of her.”

  I remember chewing on that word—retirement.

  MAGGIE lay flopped on her side in the grass outside the back door of the big house while I sorted my belongings into piles on the lawn. I imagined Marie collecting the big things first—my toolboxes and my clothing—and the small pieces last. I could see the stages of stashing away. The first layer—the last Marie had added—was made up of items of questionable ownership. I found the ashtray her father gave me one Christmas, one of the only gifts I’d ever received from him. “It was his father’s before it was his,” Marie had told me, and not only had it belonged to her grandfather, it had been made by him, too. Her grandfather had been a silversmith, the house full of his platters and candlesticks, the family silverware, the tea service. Marie had a silver-handled hairbrush and hand mirror that he’d made for her when she was a girl. That ashtray was likely put in the final layer because Marie couldn’t decide whether it was mine.

  A framed photo of our wedding was stacked next to a painting done by my mother that Marie had admired, a silhouette in profile of my own head that Marie had commissioned and hung next to a matching one of hers, a small relief map of the state, hand-painted by the cartographer, a friend of Marie’s father. I found a carving knife, also the work of Marie’s grandfather, a silk handkerchief. Toward the back, I would find my electrical texts, but at the front I found an almanac from 1923 and a cookbook. I found a stuffed bear of Gerald’s with blue button eyes and a red plaid jacket. I didn’t know why these things were mine, but I sorted them all the same. Clothing and sitting-room things and trinkets and books. By the time I reached the back wall, I’d uncovered my rifle and three boxes of cartridges, all my tools, several jars of nails and screws, nine long coils of wire, and a remaining box of ceramic insulators.

  MAGGIE was chewing on a bone when I carried out the last items.

  “She’s got that face,” Moa said, hanging sheets on the line. “Puts those ears down and she can get ’bout anything she wants, can’t she? Wilson got two deer last week. There’s only so much stock I can make with the bones. Set you a bagful by your boots.”

  “Next thing you know, you’ll be letting her in the house.”

  “Careful, Mr. Roscoe.”

  It was almost nice standing there, my dog gnawing a bone, the hint of humor between Moa and me, the warm sun, the leafy oaks, the fields stretching off behind them.

  Moa took a clothespin from her mouth. “I’d like to see this lawn again before nightfall.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I’d never before said those words to Moa.

  Maggie trotted along behind me as I pushed the first load to the cottage, the bone a prize in her mouth. She was already calmer than she’d been when we arrived, shrugging off that nervous need to run and sniff and hunt.

  “Better not get too comfortable,” I told her. “We won’t be here long.”

  My arms and legs were worn-out by my second run, and I took a rest after the third. It was dusk, and the air was crisper, but my shirt was wet through with sweat. I still hadn’t retrieved my jacket from the foyer. I pumped water at the sink in the cottage and filled a small cup. Maggie poked her nose into my knee.

  “Thirsty?” I filled a bowl to set on the floor. She let the bone down gently and lapped at the water with her long tongue. She’d always been a dainty drinker. Even after a tough chase, she’d keep the same gentle motion, the other dogs nearly drowning themselves in their frantic thirst.

  My jacket sat on a crate of jarred food in the yard, a towel-­wrapped package on top of it. Moa had brought me dinner and something for the pantry. I loaded the painting and map and photo, the silhouette, the ashtray, the bear, having saved them for the end in the half hope that they’d disappear. I added my jacket and my food, and Maggie and I started for our home.

  We’d already knocked the trail back down, the grasses flattened underfoot, but I wouldn’t clear the brush or trim the branches. I’d rather duck to avoid those limbs overhead than open up a view to the big house.

  Ten yards from the cottage, Maggie stopped, pointing as she’d been taught at the figure who ran toward us. Recognizing Wilson, she relaxed her pose and wagged her tail. He bent down to rub her head with his half arm, running it along the ridge of her skull. His right hand held an old thermos and a burlap sack.

  “Moa thought you’d do for some coffee after your labors. Said you can keep that thermos. And there’s beans in the sack there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I think this dog’s won Moa over. You have a good night, Ross.”

  “You, too.”

  I watched him start back toward the house, and I called out to him before he disappeared. “Wilson?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When will I know what’s become of my family?”

  He was quiet a minute. “Suppose when the timing’s right. It’s not much of an answer, but it’s all I’ve got for you.”

  “All right,” I said, though it wasn’t.

  At the cottage, I emptied the last load, tipped the wheelbarrow against the siding, and sat down at the table with Moa’s food. She’d given me more ham and biscuits, enough for my breakfast, too. I pulled a jar of corn kernels out of the crate, loosened the ring, poked a hole in the lid with my silver carving knife, and pried off the top. Maggie settled back into her bone, and I poured myself a cup of coffee. A bird was singing a six-note whistle outside. “Do you know,” I remember Marie asking, “what a group of warblers is called?” These were some of her favorite bits of knowledge, her students all experts on collective nouns.

  “No. What is a group of warblers called?”

  “There are options. You can call them a bouquet or a confusion or a fall, but my favorite is wrench. A wrench of warblers.”

  She’d told me that before we were married. These are the things I remember.

  I lit one of the lamps and cleared away my crumbs, closed the remaining biscuits and ham inside a lidded tin to keep the mice away. I’d meant to fix the door, but it would wait.

  In my pile of clothes, I found an old pair of pajamas, thin but soft. Pajamas were not part of Kilby’s clothing allotment. The cold water from the pump felt good against my face and back and arms as I sponged myself clean at the sink. I’d found a bathroom in what I thought was a closet between the two bedrooms, all set with a basin and a chamber pot and a soaking tub. But that would wait, too.

  I opened a copy of Billy Budd, Sailor that I’d found in the closet. Marie had left it for me in the first layer, one of her last additions. I’d already read it at Kilby—poor old Billy mistaken for a mutineer by his master-at-arms, the accidental death, the court-martial, the execution sentence—and I wasn’t sure what Marie intended me to glean from it. Billy was wrongfully accused. Marie could be saying the same was true of me, that the trial, the conviction, the time at Kilby, had all been a mistake. But her silence had left me to assume that my guilt was absolute in her eyes. Maybe she’d wanted me to look only at the sentencing, Billy’s execution a parallel for my own rightful end. I could still hear the young version of her telling me to claim Stevens’s death and walk myself to Yellow Mama.

  Marie had written in the front cover, Dear Roscoe. Those words in Marie’s hand were the start of every letter I’d wanted her to write.

  Dear Roscoe, Gerald and I hope you enjoy this book upon your return.—Marie

  Dear Roscoe. Dear Roscoe. Dear Roscoe.

  What would I have had her write?

  Dear Roscoe, Gerald and I look forward to reading this with you upon your return.

  Dear Roscoe, We miss you terribly. />
  Dear Roscoe, Welcome home.

  Dear Roscoe, For you, a book, with love, from your wife.

  The young version of Marie had been right—she’d had nothing to say to me.

  I’d thought I’d read the book again, but I wasn’t interested in Marie’s written words or the typed ones she’d gifted me—messages for a man she no longer cared to know.

  THE trees around the cottage were straight and tall, and it took two full days to fell and strip one—work that would’ve taken a quarter of the time back when I had full use of my right arm. The poles didn’t need to be perfect, but I wanted them to be smooth like the ones I’d raised for the power company. I’d found my drawknife in the closet, and I sharpened it with my file, holding it up to the sun to see the flat spots I’d missed. The beveled edge pulled the bark off in bits and pieces and then the pale wood off in strips. The motion was methodical, like mucking stalls in the dairy barn or filling tins with dog food, and my mind moved back to my old cell, Ed still there, dusty with sanded wood, tired and bitter about his chair. “Yellow!” he shouted. “They’re covering that beautiful maple with highway paint, the bastards! Painting wood is a disgrace. You hear me? They’re disgracing my profession in this bloody place.”

  “I won’t paint this pole,” I told him.

  We weren’t in our cell. We were in that small clearing by the cottage.

  “That’a boy, Ross.”

  He looked stronger, thicker in the arms and neck.

  “You visiting me now?” I asked.

  “Suppose.”

  “Did you come here?”

  “I told you I would, didn’t I? Hell, I told the State I’d build them an electric chair, and you didn’t see me backing out of that promise, did you? Paying a visit’s an easy enough commitment to see through.”

  “What did Marie say?”