by Brad Watson
She was trembling. The man scared her. She stayed there, squatting and holding Top, sound seeming to disappear into the noise in her mind. She stayed until she finally calmed and then she and Top started home, first walking, then running down the trail.
“What in heaven’s name is the matter with you?” her mother said when they burst into the yard. She was taking clothes from the line and had a bunch of them draped over one arm, a basket for pins crooked onto the other.
“Nothing,” Jane said when she could. “Top and me thought maybe there was a bear.”
“A bear!” her mother said. “This close to the house? Did you see it?”
She shook her head. Then her mother shook her head, too.
“Imagining things again, are you?”
And Jane knew she was talking about that quiet evening when she was little and heard some terrifying beast walk growling by the house beneath the open window and burst into tears, but no one else had heard a thing. And now she was old enough to wonder, what if she had only imagined the beast, and if so, where had that come from? Why and even how would a small child carry something like that in her imagination if it were not already there when she was born, and for some reason? And if it were not to make sure the child learned to keep in her heart a certain measure of fearfulness, in order to keep herself safe, what other reason could there be? There was something frightening about Lon Temple that seemed to bring up a similar feeling in her.
But these were not the kinds of things she cared to try to discuss with her mother. It was perhaps something she could bring up with Dr. Thompson. But she couldn’t imagine how she could bring it up without feeling silly, like a little girl with an overly rich and foolish imagination.
IT WAS JUST under a fortnight after her encounter with Temple in the woods when she came home from a long walk down by the fishing pond and saw Dr. Thompson’s car parked in the yard. He was sitting in her father’s rocker on the front porch, smoking his pipe, a glass of water on the little stand beside him. She stopped still in the yard, that same kind of fear she had thought she might discuss with him suddenly there, inside her. After a moment, she walked on up.
“What’s happened?” she said.
He puffed his pipe, but it had gone out.
“Something got to be wrong before I can come by, now?”
“Well, no.”
“But it’s kind of odd, me sitting out here on the porch by myself.”
“Yes.”
He nodded as if to himself, tapped his pipe out against his boot.
“Temple’s wife is in there with your mother and father,” he said. “There was an accident. You might better wait out here with me awhile.”
Her heart did a double bump in her chest.
“Tell me.”
He looked at her, as if trying to figure her state of mind.
“I haven’t even told you and you’re pale as a ghost.”
“I can tell it’s something bad.”
“Well, it is. Young Temple was killed today.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was an accident. He fell off the tractor and was cut up badly by the disc harrow. Died out in the field. Didn’t come in for lunch and his wife went out looking, found him there, tractor run up against a tree at the edge of the field and faltered. He’s down at their cabin, laid out on the floor there. His folks will come to take the body for burial.”
“How did it happen?” she said then. Her mind keening with the memory of their encounter, how she had hated him then as much as she’d feared him.
“Seems he was drinking. He smelled strong of it. I believe he got into your papa’s makings.”
She sat down onto the porch beside Dr. Thompson and they sat there awhile. Soon they heard the breezeway door to the kitchen open and Lacey hurried past them in tears.
“Miss Lacey?” Jane called, but all she could get out was a whisper.
Lacey Temple didn’t hear, her head down, walking slowly now toward the cabin where her husband lay dead.
“Boy wasn’t but twenty-three years old,” Dr. Thompson said. “And she’s not but, what, eighteen or nineteen, maybe.”
“I don’t know, really,” Jane said. She was watching Lacey Temple make her drifty way down the lane almost as if she were a bit drunk herself, wobbly.
“Still, not even twenty years of age and a widow. I need to talk to your mama and papa for a minute before the sheriff and coroner arrive, soon enough. I expected they’d have been here by now.” He got up and went into the house.
When she heard a car coming down the road and then turn into their drive, her father and Dr. Thompson came out onto the porch and went to meet it. They spoke to the two men in there, one the sheriff, and the other man in a dark suit must have been the coroner. Then the doctor went in the car with the coroner down toward the Temple cabin while her father and the sheriff walked that way and veered off toward the pasture where Temple must have been discing when he fell off and was killed. The four men came back around the same time and stood talking around the sheriff’s car for a few minutes, and then the sheriff and coroner left. Dr. Thompson said some words to her father, then got into his car and left, too.
Her father came over and told her to tell her mother that he had to go see Virgil in town and would be back as soon as possible.
“You take a plate of dinner down to the Temple girl, see if she’ll eat,” he said to Jane. “Your mama’s got one fixed in the kitchen.” Then he got into his cattle truck and left.
She stayed on the porch. She didn’t know what to feel anymore. She smelled supper cooking in the kitchen. She went inside just as her mother was covering a pie tin with a clean kitchen towel.
“You take this down to her,” she said.
“Mama,” Jane said, “I don’t want to.”
Her mother stopped and gave her a long stern look that didn’t need words to convey its meaning.
“But what if she won’t eat? How could she be hungry right now?”
“All you can do is try,” her mother said. “Go on, now. What’s the matter with you?”
Jane shook her head and didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
She freshened herself up and then walked down toward the Temple cabin, careful with the warm edges of the tin, using the towel so as not to burn her fingers, careful not to trip and spill it. She felt wooden and clumsy. When she got up onto the porch she set the tin down and knocked on the door. There was no lamp on inside although light was fading and shadows already deep inside.
When there was no answer, she called out, but in a fainter voice than she’d meant to. When Lacey Temple didn’t reply she grew worried, turned the knob on the cabin door, picked up the tin, gently opened the door with her shoulder, and went in.
It was just a two-room shotgun cabin with a little kitchen area in one corner of the front room, a small dining table with a couple of chairs in the other, and a sitting area against the other wall by a small fireplace. She stopped still when she saw, in the shadows, what had to be the body of young Temple lying on the floor over by the fireplace, covered with a bloodied counterpane. She felt a coldness run through her, and sick, as if she might vomit.
“I can’t bring myself to wash him,” she heard Lacey’s voice say then, coming from their little bedroom in the back. Then she saw the ghostly figure step into the shadowed doorway. She no longer wore the bonnet and her pale face glowed softly in the faint light left in the windows.
“He’d been out there in the sun long enough the blood had dried hard and I don’t want to hurt him cleaning it off. I know he won’t feel nothing but I can’t do it.”
Jane could hear the crying in her voice. She worked hard to find her own.
“My mama fixed you a plate of supper. I’ll set it over here on your table.”
She started for the table and was setting the tin down when Lacey spoke again.
“I’ll not touch that, you can take it back.”
Jane set it down anyway. She could hard
ly grip her fingers on it and feared she might drop it to the floor.
“I told Mama you probably wouldn’t want to eat.”
“I’m not hungry but I would not eat it anyway,” Lacey said. She took a step toward Jane, and Jane could see now that her face had not only grief in it but anger. Jane thought she might strike her.
“I’m so sorry,” and then she sobbed, overcome by emotion she couldn’t begin to understand.
“What have you got to cry about?” Lacey said.
“I don’t know.”
Lacey stepped even closer and Jane felt herself let go, let loose, expecting the blow. She wished for it. She wanted to fall to her knees. She needed something to happen to her, something that in some odd way would make sense.
“You think I don’t know she or your daddy, one, put something in that whiskey he was drinking? I could tell. He wasn’t right. He drunk before but he was different.”
And a whole other kind of shock came into Jane then.
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t you know he took out that insurance policy on Lon, and on Harris, too? And he stands to make good money on my Lon’s death here?”
Jane froze at the words and tried to make sense of it.
“That just doesn’t make any sense, Lacey. My papa wouldn’t do that.”
“Lon said you seen them arguing. Your daddy theatening him.”
“But it wasn’t like that. It was—well, I don’t really know what it was, but it didn’t sound like that to me, Lacey, I promise.”
“Well, that’s what Lon told me he said. Wanted us gone. Lon might have had him a temper but he didn’t lie to me.”
Jane was speechless again, hearing these words. Lacey stepped closer, close enough that Jane could see her ruined eyes from the crying, the crusty trails of tears on her pale face. She worked her mouth and blinked her eyes. Then she looked straight at Jane.
“What happened between you and him in the woods that day? Don’t lie to me. I know he seen you in there. He told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Said he told you to leave us alone.”
Neither said anything for a long minute.
“Did he touch you?” Lacey said. “Did he try to hurt you?”
Jane shook her head, and shook it again. “No. No, he didn’t, I swear it.”
“And did you tell on him for it? Tell me the truth.”
“I swear it, Lacey, I didn’t tell a thing.”
“What did he say to you?”
Jane felt the tears coming to her eyes again and tried to stop them. When she spoke her voice was clouded with them.
“Nothing, Lacey. He just told me to stay away. Like he just didn’t like me. Or us. Like he was mad about y’all being our tenant.”
Lacey stared hard at her for a long moment, her eyes moving back and forth on Jane’s.
“You tell your daddy and your mama that money ought to go to me. All of it. I’m the one took care of my husband day in and day out. I’m the one now left with nothing. A widow, at my age.”
Jane said quietly, “Okay.”
“Now you go on, and take that plate of supper with you.”
“It’s good food, Lacey. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
But Lacey only stared at her, saying nothing. She looked over at the body of her husband on the floor beneath the counterpane by the fireplace, then turned and went back into the bedroom.
Jane stood there. She felt a fearful chill, averted her eyes from Lon Temple’s covered, still form, grabbed up the plate, and hurried back up the hill to her house.
“She wouldn’t take it,” her mother said.
“No’m.”
“Why didn’t you just leave it, case she changed her mind?”
“Mama. She thinks Papa put something into that whiskey Lon was drinking.”
Her mother’s face went hard.
“Or even that maybe you did.”
Her mother’s head jerked back and her eyes went sharp.
“What, now?”
“That’s what she said. She said it was because of the insurance.”
Her mother seemed to gaze, stricken, at something above Jane’s head for a minute, then she shook her head and turned toward the counter and leaned against it on her hands. She shook her head again.
“It was my idea, to get that insurance,” she said then. “But good lord, it wasn’t me or your papa did anything to that boy. He stole whiskey and drove that tractor drunk and fell out. He was bound for a bad end, anyone could see that.”
And she stayed there like that as darkness fell and didn’t move to light a lamp. Jane left her in there and went back out onto the porch and sat in her father’s rocker. In a bit the tree frogs and crickets began to whir and sing. A dog barked, sounded like from a nearby farm, and Top came around the house, barked back once, then went under the porch to settle. Bullfrogs traded notes in their offbeat basso chorus, peepers like playful notes in response.
She couldn’t get the image out of her mind, the shape of Temple’s body beneath the bloody counterpane. In that dim room.
When her father finally drove up some time later, and the scents from the early supper her mother had made had all but faded as she apparently had not bothered to keep it warm in the stove, she waited for him to reach the porch, then stood up.
He stopped and stood there facing her in the dim light of a half-moon just beginning to rise over the trees.
“What is it, girl?” he finally said.
“Nothing, Papa.”
He stood there looking very tired, then went inside, and she followed. Her mother was there beside the fire in the main room working on a quilt. She looked up at him, then at Jane.
“Jane tell you what the Temple girl said to her?”
“No.”
She told him.
“Are you going to give the girl any of that money?” Jane’s mother said then.
He looked away at the room’s back wall for a minute, his long, grave face half obscured in shadow.
“I’ll give her some,” he said. “I’m the one paid the premiums, to protect his crop.” He went back outside. They heard him on the porch, and then descending the steps and walking across the drive toward the work shed.
What Jane had never told anyone was that she had gone down there once in the late afternoon and, before she reached the house, heard them in their bed. She couldn’t see in the window, but she heard the sounds they made and was embarrassed to be so stirred by them. And when the sounds died away she took off her shoes so as to sneak away in the gathering dusk as quietly as possible. It had felt low-down, like stealing something from them. But in her heart she had planned to try spying on them again, this time in the dark, when she might get into position to see something. She wanted to see again what she’d seen with Grace and the Barnett boy, and maybe understand better what she was seeing, now that she was older and smarter. So she had crept down several times in the evenings just after supper, sneaked away from the house and went down, and found a place behind a cedar tree whose lower limbs she could spy through, and waited, thinking, They’re a young couple and they must be wanting a baby. Several times she gave up, as it was taking too long for them to go to bed, and once she was petrified when Lon Temple came out onto their front porch to smoke. But it was always after dark when she went, so she wasn’t discovered. It wasn’t long into this routine that one evening she saw Lacey light the lamp in their bedroom and then turn it down low, but Jane could still see as she removed a towel wrapped around herself and got into their bed, a bit of a rawboned girl but fleshy enough in the bottom and legs, and then she noticed Lon Temple standing in the bedroom doorway looking at his wife. She watched him drop his overalls and remove his shirt and get into bed with her. Jane felt the electricity of seeing what she wasn’t supposed to see, what no one but this couple was supposed to see. To be. She was violating a great privacy, something sacred between the two, but she could not take her eyes away from wat
ching them in the act, which was like what she had seen between Grace and the Barnett boy except that it was tender and slow, and Lacey seemed so vulnerable. It was almost shocking to see Temple act so gently with his wife, as he had always seemed only a man of anger, a man with a temper, impatient. But now he was touching her tenderly, touching her breasts, and with his hand down there, and she was closing her eyes and parting her lips, and she was guiding him into her, and then for a little while Jane was as lost in the act as they were, so that when they finished, and kissed, and pulled themselves apart, she was flooded with feeling as if she had been there with them, that somehow she had embodied them both and experienced what they had. Then she was overcome with shame, a feeling that she had stolen it from them somehow. When in a moment she was brought back to a clear consciousness of herself she saw Lacey sit up in the bed, pull her knees to her breasts, and begin to sob, while Lon first tried to comfort her but she wouldn’t accept it, and so he rolled away and snuffed the lamp, turning the room into darkness. In a horror of guilty wonder Jane, barefoot, moved away as quietly and quickly as possible toward her house—just in time, as her mother called out to her from up there. But ever after that she would worry that she had done something terribly wrong, that by watching what she was not supposed to see she had interfered with their effort to have a child, and that Lacey somehow knew and that’s why she was crying. My wife said you been coming around snooping, Lon had said to her in the woods. And Jane had the awful thought, Now I have become the monster outside the window, the one who cannot do what normal people who are not monsters can do in loving each other, and I have stolen something human away from them.
THE NEXT DAY a buckboard with an older man and a younger man came rattling by the house on its way down to the Temple cabin. In a little while it came back up, with Lacey sitting on the seat beside the older man, in full bonnet, and the younger man in the back with Lon Temple’s body still under the same counterpane.
Her father stepped off their porch and approached the wagon, which stopped and waited on him. She saw him speaking to Lacey, who would not look at him. The younger man in back was looking at her father with his mouth half open, as if he was thinking of something he might say but couldn’t come up with it. The older man looked at her father briefly, then turned his eyes straight ahead again. Then her father held a brown envelope up to Lacey, who sat very still for a moment. Then she took it from his hand, tucked it into her lap. The older man tapped the reins against his horse’s backside and the buckboard continued on up their drive and out of sight. Her father watched them go, then came back to the house. He didn’t say anything to Jane, and went inside.