In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  She ran her fingers through his hair, and they were not small, soft fingers but withered, bony fingers, hard as cured leather.

  This time, he remembered thinking. This time. It will all. Be. Different.

  And so it had been.

  He was shaking so he could not stand.

  She helped him. He felt her arms lifting him as they had lifted him before, and he kept his eyes shut tight and was led to his bunk. She took him there and helped him undress, slowly, lovingly, and the fingers that caressed him were fine and soft as long as his eyes were shut. They lay side by side in the narrow dark and she told him things, things he needed to know, things he needed to do. She explained how everything was different, how what was lost was found, how the dawn was a lie and the night a grace, and the words she spoke were all things he had not imagined possible because the world, even without such nightmares, was bad dream enough. And when the night was not yet gone, the creature Rue left him, and he lay awake shivering and reckoning all through the lonely hours with the choices before him, none of which, in the days to come, would seem like choices at all.

  Tuesday

  October 7

  In the predawn light, Annabelle saw him standing across the highway in a field, watching where the sun would crack the eastern mountains. He wore a fresh denim shirt, the sleeves rolled down and buttoned tight. His hands were in his pockets, out of sight, but there were no white wrappings around his face. Over the denim shirt he wore his denim jacket. Black Bullhide on his head.

  A thin line of gold lay along the hills, all the valley graying up before them. She sipped her coffee and watched him from the farmhouse porch. After a while, she went into the kitchen and fetched from a shelf a ceramic sugar bowl that had been her mother’s. She set the bowl on the table and took out Billy Calhoun’s twenty-dollar bill. This she put in the pocket of her robe. She replaced the bowl on its shelf and went down the drive, across the road, and out into the field.

  Travis watched the sky. The sun was soaking through like blood through a garment and soon it would stain everything. He looked all around, up and down the highway, across the fields of tarbrush and yucca and mesquite. The valley a flat bald between the mountains. Nowhere to go, he thought. He had lain awake all night listening to his insides make sounds like the timbers of a new house shifting. You are not dying, the Rue-thing had whispered, her final words before she faded, before the weight of her against his back had lightened, then vanished. You are already dead.

  “Hello,” the woman said from behind him.

  She stood several feet away, having come on cat’s feet, dressed in a blue bathrobe and holding an orange mug of coffee. The mug was Fireking, a brand he remembered from when he was a boy.

  “Pretty, ain’t it,” the woman said of the sky, which was the color of a ripe smashed plum. “How are you?”

  “Better,” he lied.

  “You look like a man with leaving on his mind.”

  He made no answer.

  “Where will you go?”

  He looked toward that part of the world still dark. “Reckon I’ll keep west.”

  She was silent, as if there were something she wanted to say but didn’t know how. The silence stretched between them, and the wind blew across the plains. They could hear, faintly, the sound of a truck shifting up through its gears far away.

  Finally, she came out with, “There’s a lot more to be done around here. Tom couldn’t do much after he got sick.” She paused, searching for more words, but they weren’t there, so she drank a swallow of coffee.

  Travis looked at her. The wind blew her robe against the shape of her. She was pretty, he thought, but she was thin. He felt a restlessness in his breast, a feeling for which he had no words, a thing he had not felt for a woman in a very long time. It scared him, so he looked away, back to the dawn.

  “What got him?” he asked.

  “Cancer.”

  Travis nodded.

  The woman reached into the pocket of her robe and took out a folded bill and held it out. “It’s not much,” she said, “but it’ll get you a ways.”

  He did not take it.

  “Please,” she said.

  He made no move to take her money. Only kept looking west, toward the night. A few lingering stars.

  She held the bill a handful of seconds more, then put it back in her pocket. “I don’t mean to insult you,” she said.

  “It’s no insult,” he said.

  Another silence, and then she spoke, and the words sounded to Travis like the words of a woman who had seen great hardship. They were measured, slow, and flat. “After I knocked on your door this past Sunday,” the woman said, “I got baptized. They call it asking Jesus into your heart. To me it feels like he just walked in of his own accord.” She drank another swallow of coffee.

  Travis thought, strangely, of a man named Carson, a man he had not thought of in years. A man who had set whole jungles to blaze with the torch he had carried on his back. There had not been any good men there, no, not one.

  “I was never baptized,” he said. “Maybe now I wish I had been.”

  “Come to me, ye who are weary and heavy-burdened, and I shall give you hookup,” the woman said with a smile. “And meals at the cafe,” she added, “some pay every week. If you wanted to stay.”

  “Meals,” he said. He hunkered down and picked at the rocks among his boots, sifting through the alkali, cupping the bone-chips of some small animal. After a moment, he stood and tossed them, dusting his hands. A centipede crawled among the stones and disappeared into the scrub-grass. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said to her.

  “I reckon I do,” she said.

  After that, she went on her way and left him alone.

  Travis watched, helpless, as the sun welled up out of the east and bathed the plains and arroyos and dry creeks in its terrible light. He saw in that flood of gold his own black fate, and he knew that nothing good or purposeful would ever take root in him again.

  II

  Rue

  Borgo, Oklahoma

  Spring, 1935

  No wind,” her brother John says, standing on the porch beside her in the late-afternoon light. The tin-can chimes that hang from the eaves aren’t moving, the top of the brown oak in the hardpan stiff as a straw broom. The windmill at the edge of the property stands silent. “When was it ever so still? Ruby?”

  She does not answer. Instead, she puts a hand on the boy’s knobby shoulder and squeezes, keeping her eyes on the horizon, where the plains spread out flat and dry and the two-lane dirt road joins a darkening sky. She watches the rise to the northeast that the truck should top within the hour, its cracked windshield winking in the dying sun.

  “Reckon Pa’ll make it back before she hits?” the boy says.

  “Maybe. But we best be ready if he ain’t. Go out to the barn and help Matthew with the shutters.”

  “Yessum.” The boy clomps off the porch and hits the yard at a trot.

  She touches the locket at her throat—her mother’s, made a gift by her father after her mother passed the winter before, inside a picture of her and her older brother, Matthew. Far in the distance, against the purple sky, she sees a man walking along the road, headed this way. Another mouth to feed from the lines in Shawnee or Fort Smith. Another soul seeking work and board like the rumors they are. Wearing a stovepipe hat, tall and thin. He reminds her of the silhouette of Abraham Lincoln. God help you, she thinks, to not get caught out in what is coming.

  She works her way around the outside of the clapboard house, closing shutters and locking them, thinking to herself that if the winds blow as strong as folks in Beaver said then no hook or latch will keep them out. The house, like the land it sets on, has seen better days. The boards have long since shed their paint, a few flecks left here and there among the eaves and in the corners, beneath the window sills. Time and weather have scoured the rest of it. Even the mortar between the bricks of the chimney has turned to powder.

&nb
sp; Shutters secured, she goes back inside to the kitchen and stirs the pot of chipped beef stew simmering on the stove. Shortly, Matthew and John come in, the older tall and lean and rangy with muscle beneath his hand-me-down overalls, the younger with his hands stuffed in his pockets and one of his oversized brogans untied.

  “It’s all done up,” Matthew says. “He’ll not be coming back tonight. Storm will keep him.”

  “If he even heard,” she says.

  “He heard. He’s probably seen it by now.”

  “Maybe he’ll race her home,” John says.

  Ruby holds out a steaming ladle of stew. “Just sip.”

  John takes the ladle with both hands and sips. She takes a knee and ties his shoe. “You should not be wearing these muddy things in the house, John Goodwin,” she says.

  Matthew puts his arms inside his overalls and goes to stand at the parlor window. He peers out through the shutters. “Pa will not chance it. He knows better. They’ll have to get that calf in and shut everything up. Brother George wouldn’t let him go with the storm on its way.”

  “You are a wise brother yourself, Matthew Goodwin,” she says. She walks up behind him and touches the dark thick hair at the base of his neck, twines her fingers in it.

  “Pa gone, you want to play house?” he says. He is not smiling, but there is a smirk in his voice. He speaks low so their brother, who is sipping more stew from the ladle, cannot hear.

  “You like to be mean about it,” she says.

  “Let’s eat,” John calls from the stove.

  “Get your little brother up from his nap and see he gets some, too,” she says.

  The boy puts the dipper aside on the stove-top and goes into the bedroom that the three brothers share.

  “Ruby,” Matthew says, voice low.

  She closes her hand around his forearm, just above the elbow, and his flesh is warm and solid in her grip.

  “Sin,” he says. “Plain and simple. Pa ever found out, I don’t know what he’d do.”

  “I’m with child,” she says.

  Across the room, above the fireplace on the knotted pine mantel, a family heirloom clock ticks away the seconds. From the bedroom down the hall, John is talking to Luke, the littlest, telling him to get his shirt on, and Luke is babbling back his questions, some of them coherent, some of them nonsense. Otherwise, the silence is the loudest it has ever been in the little farmhouse, even when their mother lay in a pine box before the hearth.

  Matthew—his face slack and white with fear—opens his mouth to speak, but a knock, like a pine heart exploding in a fire, sounds at the back porch door before he can.

  Ruby, eyes brimming with tears, takes her hand from her brother’s arm.

  Both look to the door.

  “He made it back after all,” she says, wiping her eyes.

  Another knock, three solid raps.

  “Get yourself together,” Matthew says. “We will talk later.” He starts away to answer the door, then stops. He turns and touches her cheek, and she will remember this for years to come, his last gesture to her, the most tender and careful of touches. He walks through the kitchen and, just as three more steady knocks sound, hard knuckles against soft pine, he opens the door.

  She wipes her eyes on her apron and sees, through the screen, a man who is not her father. It is a drifter, the one from the road, his black top hat in hand, a bald pate gleaming white. He speaks in a low voice to Matthew, and Matthew says nothing, but his spine has straightened and his arm is fixed firmly on the door and he does not open the screen. Right away she knows this man, pale and gaunt, is not like the others who have crossed their threshold for soup and water. This one is different. Thin and threadbare, a white button-down shirt open at the throat. The pipe of his hat gapes at one edge like a slack mouth. She steps into the doorway of the kitchen and leans against the frame, her arms crossed, and she sees the man is wearing a tattered suit coat, the edges of his shoes unglued from the soles, but the grin on his long, narrow face suggests it’s all some elaborate disguise, a joke he’s playing. He sees her over Matthew’s shoulder and, while still speaking to the boy, winks at her. His smile is terrible.

  “Who is that?” John asks from behind her. He stands at her right hip, little Luke’s hand in his. Luke, only four, watches with his thumb in his mouth.

  “Go back to the bedroom,” she says. “Go back in there and shut the door and do not come out until I call for you. You hear?”

  John nods and pulls the baby after him.

  Outside, the wind kicks up and the shutter over the living room window bangs open. On the horizon she can see what looks like a dark, immense cloud. It is low and churning and moving fast.

  “She’s about to tear it up out here,” the man says beyond the screen, aiming his voice over Matthew’s shoulder, his smile unwavering. “Smells like soup on in there?”

  Matthew turns and looks at her, and his eyes are strange and far away, and he reaches like a man sleepwalking through a dream for the eye hook that latches the screen door.

  “No,” she says, meaning to shout, but the word comes out a whisper.

  The hook slips free of the catch.

  The pale man opens the door and steps into the kitchen, past Matthew, who closes the door and locks it. “Thank you, sir,” he says, his eyes on Ruby.

  She does not like the sound of the stranger’s voice. It is high and thin, and though his mouth is spread in that friendly way, his eyes are cold and bright with an unsmiling light.

  It is the devil, she thinks. The devil come to collect us for our sins.

  The stranger’s smile widens, and Ruby hears a voice inside her head, a man’s voice, and the voice is his, she thinks, somehow, though his lips do not move: Yes, young one. Sins so sweet.

  Frozen in the kitchen, she trembles at the memory the stranger seems to pluck from her head and heart, her deepest shame: the night she and Matthew had birthed the puppies in the barn and later lay up in the loft on their backs, marveling at the stars and trying to forget about the coming day’s problems. She, reading from a library book of love lyrics, nonsense. I cannot make heads or tails of some of these, she had confessed, thumbing through the book, but others I can. Some I just feel. Here. She had taken Matthew’s hand and pressed it to her heart. And here, she said, and moved his hand lower, to her belly. And here. Even lower. It had seemed so natural, so soon after their mother’s passing, the puppies taking suck from their own mother in the barn below, to roll over into his arms—

  A roar descends upon the house, and the living room window explodes.

  Ruby screams, and in the bedroom John screams.

  Matthew cries out Ruby’s name.

  The house is plunged into darkness.

  She feels the grit and sting of dirt and sand against her bare arms and face as she moves along the living room hall. Feeling her way, she barks her shin on her mother’s sewing cabinet, the machine she uses to make her own clothes for summer, patchwork dresses from scraps of fabric bought cheap at the mercantile in town. She makes for the shutter, hoping to close it against the storm, and then Matthew screams. High-pitched and full of terror. She calls his name over the freight-train roar that shakes the walls and floorboards. She feels along the wall in the dark and her fist closes on a doorknob, the closet by the front door, and in this closet, she remembers, is the shotgun her father uses to scare off the bank men, but he does not keep it loaded and once she’s in, the door shut against the howling dark, she cannot see to find the shells, and they are only rock salt anyway. She feels on the shelf above for a coal-oil lantern and a box of matches. She knows where both are kept, always close together, always against the wall. Hunkered down on a stack of spare stove-wood, eyes adjusting, she primes the wick and strikes a match, and in the oily light that spreads, she puts the globe over the lit wick and dials back the flame.

  The closet flies open.

  She holds up the lantern and the light throws the pale stranger’s shadow huge and crooked across the
ceiling. He grins down at her, his teeth the whitest she has ever seen, his hat tall and black. He wipes the red from his face with the back of his hand as the room behind rages with grit and dust.

  “You and your brother have delicious secrets,” he says.

  He reaches out and seizes her wrist, her pulse running fast and hard. He yanks her to her feet, tight against him. He smells sour and wet, and as he drags her out of the closet, taking the lantern from her, the house is creaking and groaning beneath the weight of the dark cloud howling all around it, through it.

  He leads her into the hallway, the air here thick and suffocating. She catches a glimpse of a body on the kitchen floor, a pair of legs in overalls, trailing away—

  Matthew, oh Matthew, no

  —and now he’s pulling her into the bedroom, where John and Luke are huddled in the middle of the bed, the older boy’s arms wrapped around his baby brother.

  The pale man, holding her wrist, smiles a bloody smile, his mouth a crevice of teeth in a face that, in the lantern light, resembles a rotting skull stretched with skin. She stands frozen in terror and time. Frozen by the pale man’s touch. His voice.

  “Let me confess something that you, child, with your simple girl’s heart have already suspicioned,” he says. “I am a phantom in this old world. My anchor is blood.” He traces the nail of his right index finger across her throat, and the nail is long and yellow and caked with something black and bad. “Watch me, now, Ruby Goodwin. Watch me, you beautiful, lost girl. And know the pleasures of my kind.”

  He sets the lantern on a nearby chest of drawers and takes a step toward the boys on the straw-tick mattress. Luke begins to cry. John calls out his sister’s name, and her last glimpse of him before the pale man’s shape blots him out is of John’s eyes, wide and stricken with terror.

  Her own eyes want to close but they cannot. She is under the stranger’s unspoken command to watch.

  She sees a blade, short and curved, appear in the pale man’s hand.