by Alix Hawley
I remain where I am. I take out my knife.
Rebecca has another cherry. A bee from the hives across the orchard drops onto her wrist. I flip the knife over my knuckles and in and out between my fingers. She pays no heed. Her eyes stay on the bee as it crawls towards the fruit. She turns her wrist and does not flick the insect away. It gets to the cherry, its fat lower body quivers as it sucks. She stretches her fingers lightly. She appears to be contemplating one of the world’s marvels, that is to say her own hand.
Now she closes her fist around the bee, I see her do it. Its buzz goes on, though dampened. I say:
—Are you a witch? What evil do you have in mind for that innocent creature? Has it ever done you any harm?
She goes on holding it. It does not sting her, or it does not appear to. Her face shows no pain, at any rate. It shows nothing.
I throw the knife. It is a gentle throw. It catches the edge of her white apron and pierces the lace.
For half a moment she stops chewing. Aha. I say:
—Nice afternoon.
She says nothing. I go on:
—Nice apron.
I take up the knife and flip it again, and then throw it once more with a touch more force so it goes straight through the fabric of her apron and pins it to the ground.
If she tries to get up, the apron will rip to shreds. It is a flimsy fine thing, not homespun. It is expensive.
She keeps up her stillness and silence. The bee drones on in her fist. If it is stinging her she shows no sign of it. I toss the knife again and again, I make reckless holes all along the cloth, closer and closer to her thigh. All the time she does not move. It seems to me she wants to laugh. She eats more cherries, and I watch her chewing and daintily removing the pits into her other marvellous hand. I say:
—A shame to get cherry juice on it.
Now she opens her lips as if to speak, but she only pops in another black cherry from the basket. She spits the pit far off towards the forest. Dark juice sits in a bead on her lower lip and drips purple onto the white cloth of her apron. The knife is still embedded at an angle. I nod in the direction the pit flew and I say:
—Well now there will be another tree. Perhaps a little far from the orchard, though. You can call that your own when it grows up. Pick all the fruit for yourself.
A pit bounces against my skull. Juice travels down my temple. She looks up at the sky as if it were nothing but rain beginning. She opens her fist at last and the bee sits in her palm swaying its head before it flies off crookedly. She goes back to her cherries. I say:
—You shot me. You shot me.
I feign injury, I feign death on the grass. And I hear her voice for the first time. It is low and a little rough. She is still looking away when she says:
—Do excuse me. I could hardly help where the stone wished to travel to.
I say:
—Begging your pardon also. I could hardly help where my knife wished to go.
I see her do it, she pulls up her skirt so her stockings show. They are faintly streaked with grass. Her ankles are narrow. She wants me to see. Now she covers them again and smoothes the apron as though there is nothing at all wrong with it. As though she cut it full of holes herself and dotted it with juice and stuck a knife through it for an ornament. She flicks her black eyes at me and they eat me whole.
I always say I was so bold because I was trying her temper. She might shoot me yet, if I am to see her again in this world.
—Here you are.
I am loud and bloody. I want to make her speak, I want to hear the scratches in her voice. Her glossy eyes, all black with no keyholes and no key.
In her granddaddy’s yard I have butchered the deer I dragged here, I have piled the cuts up tidy on the skin. I stand and I wipe my brow and wait. She and her sister live here, her pack of half-brothers live with their father. As I reason, the Bryans are rich but still need food. It seems to me a perfect gift, a mess of uncooked meat, a gift she cannot ignore and will have to deal with.
Standing in the doorway she looks me over. Suddenly I feel my coat of blood and sweat, I see the dark spreading stain I have left on the ground. A house slave appears behind her, followed by the nervous big-eyed sister, Martha. She puts her hand to her mouth while the black woman laughs a disbelieving laugh and folds her arms. To her Martha says:
—Jean, hush.
I swab at my forehead and I laugh back:
—Here you are, just as I said. A butcher’s life is a hard one. You see how hard?
Rebecca vanishes. I go on standing like a great bloody infant who has just got itself upright and does not know what to do next. Martha goes on looking, her hands pressed together at her waist. Jean laughs again, shaking her head, and I say:
—You will not get fresher meat. Alive-o. Or near enough. Might get up and run off yet.
But Rebecca reappears with a bowl. She sets it precisely on the step. She returns to the doorway. There she stands as though the house were a ship and she a figurehead.
I go close and I see the milk. The white surface is as innocent as the moon.
—A cat, am I?
I grin and pick up the bowl, I am glad to bloody it with my hands though it is already none too clean and the milk is sour as I can smell. I put my tongue out, I hold the bowl in the air and speak to it soft:
—So you and I have found one another at last. We both need a good scrubbing. Is there no help for us here? No one to get us clean all over? But perhaps the girls of this house know nothing of clean. Perhaps they are all unclean. Perhaps it is my lucky day.
I lick the rim. Martha stares on. Now Jean stops laughing, and Rebecca begins.
Soon enough we are in old Bryan’s big house, the lamps are all lit though it is not dark, not quite dusk. Daddy sweats next to the bank of lanterns, but he is smiling. He begins loud:
—Friends.
A flicker crawls over his face, the word is still bad to him. He is still no Friend, though he has been appointed a magistrate here in the Yadkin now, which he feels down to his bones, and so he keeps these straighter than usual. Rebecca’s half-brothers stand in a great row. Old Bryan, Rebecca’s granddaddy, sits in a rocker, looking cobbled up of the wrong parts. His brows are lowered at his new kin. Perhaps he is thinking that there is still time to have us out of here. But no. Daddy is stuttering out the marriage vows for Neddy and Rebecca’s sister, Martha. Our young Neddy has made his choice, or perhaps it has been made for him. Perhaps the owl was only his first gift that evening. Martha looks rounder than usual, and not just her eyes. But no one speaks of it here, we need no further talk of fornication in the family. Ned looks content as ever and Martha keeps hold of his arm as she says yes, she will be his wife.
And now for my turn. I am occupied with keeping myself as still as Rebecca is. Out of the side of my eye I see her breast rise slightly. She is alive, she is seventeen years of age, I am twenty-one. She is near as tall as I am. I pull myself up.
At this time I cannot believe that she has agreed, I cannot believe that it will happen. Some disaster will now roll in, fire or stampede or instant plague. Daddy turns, his face is clouding. Do not go bandy, Daddy: this I think at him as in old times. He slows his talk, making every word a smooth separate pebble in his mouth. No stammers over my name. Daniel.
I know I am his favourite among us now that Israel is gone, though I do not know why. Daddy, I try to ignore the shine of your teary eyes and the way your face has gone so old, but for a moment I do get foggy myself. I have to cough before I can say:
—Well all right, if you say so, I will take this woman to wife.
This woman. My wife. A miracle and no disasters. I give my head a shake, I want to laugh and laugh. I grip her hand.
Well. It is done. Old Bryan has the air of one dragged out of a tomb and forced to put up with this life again. Rebecca’s stepmother brings herself to kiss Ma. Two of the little boys press their mouths to the rum jug, hoping for it to sweat. Hill looks up and down my wife, all
ideas about her possibilities. He hoots with his hands circling his mouth:
—Good night. Good ni-i-ight. Thumping big children to you. Give her a thumping, Boone! Who has the bottle?
When I am upstairs with Rebecca, I can still pick out his shrill shouts among those of the crowd below. For a moment I fear he will set to telling stories of my first marriage to little Molly Black. I almost fear little Molly will chatter her teeth in my ear. But Hill is laughing like a crow now, trying to convince himself of the merry time he is having, though I know he wants what I have.
I have a wife, a real wife, beside me. I am struck by a thought of my Uncle James’s red face after my sister Sallie’s wedding, telling me to find myself a woman, marry her first. When I was small he would pet and spoil me, rubbing my nose with his bristling whiskers, wielding his jollity like a club for bashing at disappointment. Not enough land, spiteful neighbours, a poor school to run, a dead wife, no new life here. Though I did not like his school, I remember him talking about ancient times, Jericho and Greece and Troy and Rome, which he knew I liked, and sometimes he would press sweets into my pocket until it tore. He said: Danny, you will have to do better than I have.
Hill yowls and a dog sings after him outside. The dancing reels along like a brawl. The boots seem to have increased their weight, the thump of a body falling rises up to us on a current of hard laughter. The air in the house seems a mouthful of liquorish breath let out. My own breath is liquorish, I admit, and Rebecca’s is lightly so, though she keeps her mouth closed to a pinpoint and seems hardly to be breathing at all. The bed trembles. It is not our doing. A loud stumble and roar downstairs and Neddy’s slow easy laugh from across the landing where he is with his own new wife. Ah-ha-ha. Ah.
Well Uncle James, here is my bride, my new life. To your health. I take another swallow from the jug for good measure.
Rebecca beside me is in her nightgown where Bryan’s house slave Jean propped and primped her before leaving the room with a wink when I appeared. Her hair is cobwebby, black and soft against the pillow. The candle gutters as the dancers shake the walls, it reflects in shudders in her eyes. She is as still and quiet as ever and seems to want for nothing. I feel little guns going off all along my limbs and up my back. I am near to being purely happy, though there is plenty I want at this moment. I say:
—Here you are. Here we are.
She is unmoved. Someone below is singing “Black Betty” in the saddest wail.
Well. My hands seem dumb hammers as I fold them over my chest. I send out a prayer to Maria and the others in Philadelphia, I hope I will do better here. If I had my knife I could make a few holes in her nightdress. Look for dimples.
I roll onto my side and grin at her and say:
—Do you remember the cherry orchard?
At this she inclines her head towards me and says:
—Marriage has turned you sentimental.
In her voice is a flint lightly struck. The possibility of a spark, if not a spark itself. I say:
—It is known to do so.
—Rum is also known to do so.
—Well. Milk is too. Have you brought a bowl along for me tonight?
She says nothing. She winds a strand of hair around each finger on one hand. I say:
—At any rate, you are married yourself. You should know what it is like.
—True. I am married.
She says so as if it is nothing to do with me. I touch her hair.
—Mrs. Boone. Poor woman.
—Do I know who you are?
This is first time she says it. She gives me a sudden vicious little smile and I am seized with tomcat joy.
She catches her breath, I feel it.
Nine months later, we have Jamesie. Rebecca, you know that I have counted it out. I know he was mine.
YOU CAN HAVE a new life for a time. But it does turn old, everything does.
Rebecca loses no shine for me. The truth is that I am full of aching for her, I am near always so, even now, after all that has happened. When we are new married, her face appears in the corn. Or the axe-edge of her shoulder blade does, or her ribs riding up under her skin as she lifts her arms, or the tiny cushion behind her sharp knee. She is built of weapons, I tell her, and she agrees: Yes I am. I know all of her, every inch, I cannot leave her body alone, even in my mind in the fields. At night I call her a Welsh witch, or Beautiful Helen, Queen Not-of-Troy but of the Backwoods, and I lie her down and kiss her low on her back and feel her silent laughter in her backbone. There is the proof of it.
Little girl, I wish I could see you now, any part of you.
Her grandfather’s fields are dull. The soil is good, things grow readily. But everything here has the taste of Bryan property, a rusty weepy taste. Besides I have never been one for cropping. I am a poor enough ploughman, I make wobbling furrows, I strike any rock in any field. The work presses on me like an anvil. The corn is like lead. In truth I hate corn, God damn the corn, I would like to hear it all pop itself to nothing. But I stupefy myself. I sink my thoughts into Rebecca and our bed and anything that takes my mind from the plough.
Do not think of the army or the French or the Indians. That life is not for you. This is life.
This I hear in Ma’s voice. I stop and bend to clear away a speckled chunk of rock. The horse throws back its head.
Do not think.
But it is easy enough to think of the French and the Indians. They are closer to Carolina again and more unhappy than ever with those settled here and those pushing farther to the south and the west. And now the British, that is to say the true British in the old country, want to tear us up by the roots. We are still Britons, our settler militia flies the King’s flag, but we are not subjects enough, it seems. We go too far, we get in everyone’s road, we interfere with their fur trading and their treaties, planting ourselves here wherever we like, moving into places they do not want us. It is all a game, all cats and mice. At any rate I find myself neither cat nor mouse.
I stand and look in a circle about me, checking for sound or smoke from anywhere. A pair of Bryan’s slaves is at work far up in one of his fields, talking now and then. Their voices carry, slow and easy. The house at the end of the flats is quiet, closed in on itself like a basket with Rebecca and the children in it, Jamesie and my own little Israel now, as well as Jesse and Jonathan. The other Bryan houses are not so far off. The fences are up. The cows look stout enough, and cows can kill, as you know, poor Jezebel. Surely happiness is some protection. It is natural to feel so. But I feel also that if I could stand on a clifftop and look down, the farm would be a tiny rough island in the darker ocean of wilderness. All the toil of hacking down trees, dragging out stumps, clearing away brush, for this.
I want to look into the dark.
I sigh, which I do not like to do. I want to run off. I throw down the plough. The horse snorts and sets to work tearing up a clump of thin grass. I close my eyes and think of last winter, when I crossed the Blue Ridge for the first time after a slave herding cows in the mountain pastures showed me an old trace. His name was Burrell, and he had a broad face and a thin neck. I gave him a few swallows of my whiskey for his help. He said there was more he could show me, but I had no more whiskey. So I followed the trace west myself for two days. I found many creeks and springs and a lot of ginseng, which I took to sell, and the game was very good. In my mind I can see every tree, every nick in the bark, every plant, every animal shit, every sign.
But I had to come back. And now it is spring, there is no end to this work and this place. The wind in the trees has a sound like waves. When we wanted a real story, Ma always used to tell us of her own mother’s crossing of the ocean. Her poor little Ma from Wales, going off to a fearsome new world. She was certain the ship would fall through a hole in the water straight into Hell but was glad enough to think of any end to being so seasick.
The wind drops, the sound lessens. I am still here. Well. I sit and lie back and strike my head on another small stone. My he
ad throbs. Now I foresee myself turned under in the Bryan burying ground or in this very field, pressed flat with a cartload of the red soil, my face mashed by a spadeful of it.
A soft rushing sound comes, like the breath of someone running along lightly. Something is coming for me. My heart sets to beating hard. I have not felt them for a time, the dead ones who trail along behind me. I am alive, I have Rebecca, I have children. But here also are the dead. I feel their coolness and their interest once more.
They will dig me up: so I think. I laugh and the laugh goes flat in the dirt.
I get up. Nobody is here. The horse sees me and lays its ears flat against its head. I still have the speckled rock in my hand, and I am sighing again.
Fate hands me another exit. Though at the time I do not wish to take it.
Rebecca is boiling over with fear of attack, and her fear is pointed straight at me. It is late spring now, and everything is bone dry. It has hardly rained in a month. The Cherokees and Iroquois have raided settlements up and down the Yadkin Valley too many times in the last weeks. Not enough food, as the new-planted crops are drying up. And more settlers are coming in all the time, claiming more of the land. Some are thieves looking to take anything they can get. They stole a young girl from Halseys’ over the creek. We gathered the militia and got her back before they could hurt her, but Halsey said she did not speak for a week. Now the Halseys have gone. So have others.
Rebecca pulls me out the door when the children are asleep. The insects are fiddling at a high pitch. The fat-lamp sizzles and spits inside. She is listening hard to every sound and she has a twist of my shirt in her fingers.
—Do you really wish to stay here? Do you?
Her black eye is sharp and her voice is soft. She knows how to pierce me through. I know she is foreseeing my death and possibly her own. Or capture and imprisonment. Her eyes flood with a rush of pictures of the children captive or dead, but she pushes them down. She cannot think of them so—who can think of their children dead?