In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

  “I screamed and hollered for it till I spit out blood. Kept yelling to Memaw, ‘Let me in.’ But she never did. Just went about her work, I guess. Bound up that woman’s titties, gave her the dry-up tea. I screamed in the vain hope I could stop her. Screamed to where I couldn’t holler anymore ’cause no sound came. When Memaw finally got out on the porch, I was standing with my short pants down around my feet and flailing on my little peter like a banjo.”

  He laughs and shifts his head against Katherine’s breast.

  “Memaw beat the tar out of me right there and next day took me into town, bought me my first long pants. Said I’d got too big to suckle like a baby.”

  He props up on an elbow, looks at her. “Point is, the woman in that shack was full of milk without there being any baby. Like I said.”

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “What?”

  “Grinning that way, laughing.”

  He wriggles there beside her like a squirmy toddler, looks at her with his innocent eyes. “Because it’s funny. Don’t you think it’s funny, me wanting that poor woman’s big old titty so?”

  “No, I think it’s heartbreaking.” All of it. An orphan, that’s what he truly was. Is. A poor orphan boy that she has made a place for.

  He frowns. His frown of pretending not to understand. Then he curls himself into her body’s nooks and crannies, as close to her as he can get, stares up at her.

  “Play like I’m your little baby. Hold my head and put your titty in my mouth. Just like that woman would have done back then.”

  His eyes beseech her. It’s an easy thing to do, no matter that she doesn’t want to. A gift given out of love. She tips his head forward, her fingers on the hard bones of his skull. He sighs so sweetly as she gently rubs his neck and scalp and with her other hand squeezes her breast, pinches its nipple hard, slides it along his closed lips until they open slightly and he takes it in his mouth. She is amazed she knows as if from instinct how to do it.

  “I promise I won’t bite you. Tiny babies got no teeth to bite.”

  The room, everything, is quiet all around them. His lips make tiny sucking sounds.

  “Sing me a song,” he asks then. “Sing me Memaw’s lullaby while I suck on your tit.”

  His body wrapped around her shelters her from the cold. She shifts position, sings to him soft and low.

  “Hushabye, don’t you cry. Go to sleep my little baby.

  When you wake, you will have all the pretty little horses.

  Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, all the pretty little horses.”

  They lie there. His gray eyes glisten dark and wet in the twilight and his hand still plays between her legs as if he’s unaware of it. She spasms then, without expecting to. Private and satisfying, deep inside herself. As if she has a secret.

  “Sing it all again.”

  She does, then stops. Can’t remember the next verse.

  He looks up at her, takes her nipple from his mouth, rubs it along his slightly parted lips.

  “You’re everything.” The words slide out against each other and against her breast, almost inaudible. “You’re the whole world.”

  Later that night she wakes, untangles herself from his embrace, goes to the window. Moonlight silvers the bare trees, turning them stark and beautiful. She remembers the lost verse of Memaw’s song.

  “Bees and butterflies are picking out your eyes.

  Oh, you poor, poor little baby.”

  She shudders, chafes her cold arms, doesn’t want to see what’s out the window anymore. Back in bed, she pulls a second quilt around them, buries her tear-damp face against his warm back. And once again, for a brief moment, terror washes over her as pure and silver as the moonlight.

  Spring

  38

  Green Growing Things

  THAT DAY AND NIGHT, THOUGH ONLY IN MID-FEBRUARY, MIGHT AS well have been the first few hours of spring. They’ve had nothing since but temperatures too warm for her new flannel nightgown and air heavy with the smell of leaf mold and the sounds of birds going about the most important business of their lives. Wild daffodils thrust up green spears around the porch.

  A new lethargy that has to be spring fever has her wanting nothing more than to lie up in the loft to catch the breeze and rock him in her arms, thread her fingers through his baby-fine blond hair. It’s where they are this afternoon. As if that first, hot, urgent rush has gone to something deeper, as if all clocks have slowed, even the sun. In its long warmth, her body has grown so exquisitely tender she can hardly bear it.

  “Touch me light as feathers,” she says to him. “Touch me soft as smoke.”

  It’s all so peaceful then.

  But once he’s left her, gone up on the mountain, her fears escape the cages that she keeps them in when he is near, and they run free: He is a poison in her blood and she’s the same for him; each weakens the other, saps the other’s strength; they have infested themselves, infected themselves with each other as if with some disease, and somehow they will have to pay. Lying naked in the soft breeze from the window, she jams her fist against her open mouth to keep from crying out.

  Get up. Get out. The sharp voice hisses in her head. She pulls on her jeans, their denim harsh against her thighs. Beneath the soft chambray shirt her skin feels sunburned, dry. Boots crush her insteps and she loosens their laces, descends the ladder with great deliberation, trudges through the house and then reluctantly outside. She carries her shovel upright, its blade near the ground, not slung over her shoulder in the usual way, for fear its weight will bruise her.

  She has fallen behind in the garden, should have cleared the beds out days ago, brought new soil from underneath the trees. Her shovel bites into soft ground beneath the largest of the oaks, releasing familiar, earthy odors as intoxicating as perfumes. She plunges her hands in deep where she has dug, brings up both fists full of black dirt. A red worm hangs from her right thumb.

  “Hello, little one.”

  She strokes its wriggling length, lets it twine around her index finger before depositing it in what will be this year’s lettuce bed.

  Lethargy slips from her shoulders with the shovel’s rhythmic crunch into soft ground, and she works as though hypnotized, digging out two small beds, replacing the spent soil with new, black dirt, stopping only when her limbs begin to weaken and she knows she will be sore. Tomorrow she’ll start planting seeds that spring’s cold nights won’t harm, seeds captured from last season’s strongest plants. A crow caws in the shadows at the garden’s edge and jays shriek out from nearby trees, the same sounds she heard her first day in the forest, a whole lifetime ago.

  The dirt’s rich smell has left her starved for something fresh and green, it’s a sharp pang in her belly. Heading for home, she detours off the path to the low, spongy spot where last spring’s fiddleheads raised up. Oh, please, let them be there, don’t let her be too early. Already, in her mind, she sees the new ferns’ slick white humps pushing through winter’s crust. “April is the cruelest month”—save March, which forces fiddleheads from the dead ground. Already she imagines them, their sharp, green taste of early spring, runs toward the spot, can see them from this distance as a pale smear in the dark loam. She kneels in front of them and, with more gentleness than needed, brushes back dry, crumbling leaves. Then, with her garden knife, she slices the first fiddlehead clean and quick, an inch below the ground, wipes away the rich leaf-soil from the new shoot, slips it in her mouth. It tastes fresh as the start of life itself.

  She chews greedily, swallows fast. How good it felt, that strong young plant between her teeth. How good it feels inside her, a swallowed blessing. She cuts another, then another, eats them quickly, then eats more. Later there’ll be time to savor them; right now she crams them in her mouth, chews, swallows. Glorious to hold so much new life inside her. Glorious to contemplate a future of long, warm days and green, growing things that spring up everywhere she walks.

  She eats until all the fiddleheads are gone,
wipes her mouth with the back of her dirt-covered hand, pockets her knife. She has left none for tomorrow—and none for Danny, who eats nothing anyway but meat. Her mouth still tingling with the ferns’ green taste, she gets up from the dirt, brushes off her hands and starts for home.

  But something’s wrong, her belly’s knotting up with cramps. She wraps her arms around the sudden pain, bends over, throws up in the undergrowth.

  Quick, kick dead leaves over it to hide it. That way it won’t have happened.

  She wipes her mouth with her palm. Won’t look at the small pulse throbbing on the blue-veined inside of her wrist. Won’t imagine things. She has not had enough fresh vegetables through winter, that’s all. Her stomach is unused to so much roughage. Hereafter, she’ll be careful; it won’t happen again. In the unlikely event Danny asks after the fiddleheads, she’ll say they never did come up. This lie creates a little lift inside her, as if from some small life that’s all her own.

  39

  A Reversal

  “EXCUSE ME, SORRY, CAN’T HELP IT.”

  She pushes away from the dinner table, overturns her bench in her haste to get outside, then dashes down the path, hands clapped over her mouth. Walks the few more steps to the outhouse, sits inside it, panting.

  These last few days she can’t bear the greasy smell of cooking meat. It’s the same with many vegetables, even those from the garden. Not only is she throwing up her food again, her skin has grown so sensitive to even her own touch that she feels peeled. And she is so tired every day. It’s all coming back, one horror at a time. Soon she will need to fight to hang on to the memory of her name.

  And worse, oh, so much worse, already she no longer wants him. Not in that fierce, hot way she always has. Wants now only the rocking and the cradling, and once in a great while to love him slower, sweeter, deeper than she ever has.

  And then for him to go away so she can sleep forever. She has not thought for a long time about the gun’s dull metal. Her hands shake.

  Meanwhile the light is fading. She needs to get back to the cabin before he thinks of coming after her. So much effort, getting up. More than anything, she yearns to curl into a tiny bundle in the corner where she saw the corn snake that first morning. Hushabye, hushabye.

  Don’t think crazy thoughts. Go wipe your mouth off at the creek and head for home.

  “What the fuck’s got into you?” He’s sitting by the cold hearth, lashing reeds into a fish trap, jerking the leather tight.

  “I had to go.”

  She turns away, goes in the kitchen to scrub the dinner plates before their meaty odor makes her sick again. Scrubs so fast it looks like anger. Done.

  “I’ve got a headache. I’m going to bed.”

  “Shit. Work all day, come home to this.” Mimics her: “ ‘I’ve got a headache.’ ”

  He flings a piece of rawhide on the table, gets up and grabs the fireplace poker, jabs repeatedly at a single red ember in the ashes.

  Upstairs, she scrunches into a far corner of their quilts, wishes she could hide herself and hates the moon for shining.

  Wishes she still lived alone. Wishes he would come and hold her. Even now.

  40

  In Too Deep

  HE’S STANDING IN THE LOFT, BUTT NAKED, KICKING AT THE QUILTS she’s balled up under like a possum. Bitch didn’t used to hide from him like that.

  “How come you lay around all day?”

  “I don’t. I go down to the garden. Times when you’re away.” Mumbles into the quilts, won’t even poke her head out.

  He squats beside her, sniffs a couple times, makes a huge, deliberate point of it. “You smell weird.”

  She, by God, sticks her head out now. Eyes all wide. “Weird how?”

  He shrugs. “It’s like, we used to taste, smell pretty much the same. Now you smell … I don’t know … different. Down there. More like just you.”

  But that doesn’t get it, doesn’t come even close to this wild, animal scent so strong it scares him. Scent that keeps his nostrils flared out all the time craving like hell to smell it. Not a sweet scent like perfume or flowers. Something rank and strong. If she was lost from him he’d have to follow it and find her. No choice in the matter.

  She sniffs lightly, like a prissy girl, wrinkles her nose. “More like me? That’s crazy. How can I smell more like I do already?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.” She’s starting to piss him off. “What I do know is the shithouse smells like puke.”

  He wants to shock her, make her cringe. Wants, needs her to explain it, explain it all away. But she won’t. Just slips back under the covers. Inside his head, his heart, somewhere, he feels one of the rigid parts that keep him held together slide out of its slot.

  She peeks out from the blankets. Frightened-possum eyes again.

  “I threw up once yesterday. Must have eaten too much meat.”

  “Once? Stinks like you’re running a goddamn puke factory.”

  She sits up in nervous little jerks, makes a point to keep her body covered with the quilt, something else she never used to do. Fakes a smile and shakes her head like he’s some kind of baby. “I don’t know what’s got into you.”

  “Into me? Nothing’s got into me. It’s what’s got into you we’re talking about here.”

  Danny bites a ragged thumbnail, chews it smooth so it won’t scratch her skin. Never used to bother with that shit. Never used to matter. Now there’s weird times he curls up in her arms like she’s his mama and that’s all he wants to do. Just stay there, let her hold him through the night. Hold him through all the nights. Other times, she pulls him into her so deep he’s scared he’ll never make it out again. Some dude Jimbo turned him on to that wrote dirty—Henry Miller? Somebody Durrell?—wrote how he got sucked into some woman’s snatch and found a grand piano. Danny and Jimbo laughed for months. Tromped through the jungle pounding make-believe piano keys.

  But with her it’s not like that. With her these days he has to leave the house right afterwards to keep from pasting her. That’s how bad he needs to put a mark on her. Some little scar to keep him in her mind times when he’s not around. Scar like a cattle brand that says she’s his, won’t ever leave him.

  In any way. For any reason.

  Because he knows now something’s wrong. Whatever sickness he smelled on her that first day has never left her. Just gone underground to jump back up and take her now that he can’t let her go.

  He nudges the ball that’s her inside the blankets, kicks it gently.

  “Hey. I got to go up to the house.”

  “Will you be back for dinner?”

  He loves how the words sound so normal, loves their muffled pleading. Waits, wants her to say them all again. Bitch won’t do it. Stays so still he wants to shake her. Shake her till all her fucking teeth fall out.

  “Well, now, I got to come back, don’t I. Whether I want to or not. Can’t work up there in the dark.” Yanks his clothes on, pulls his boot laces too tight, slams the door on his way out.

  All the way up the mountain he runs things over in his mind. Same as he does the nights he lies awake watching her sleep. Somewhere in everything that’s going on with her, he feels the presence of some cold, dark little snake hole. Something he ought to recognize for what it is—and yet can’t see at all.

  YEAH, AND HE COMES back that night to sit across from her at dinner, watch her hand shake when she lifts her fork to eat her rice and beans, watch her clamp her mouth tight shut to keep what she just ate inside her. Watch her go to hell in a handbasket, puking under every bush, scuffing a few leaves over it like a sick cat. Yeah, he’s seen that, too. Today. Oh, yeah, he spent time watching.

  “What the hell is this shit?” He shoves his plate across the table. It tips onto the floor. “I brought you a rabbit. Why did I spend half a day sneaking up on bunnies before I could kill one? For you not to cook it? What did you do with the goddamn rabbit?”

  “It’s outside. On the porch.” Pinchy little mout
h. Lines around it, starting to show her age.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I didn’t want it.” New, dull voice.

  “Well, I do.”

  “We eat too much meat.”

  “Some of us don’t eat nearly enough.”

  Jerks open the door—getting to be a habit—lets it slam behind him. Let her eat her goddamn beans and leaves. He pulls the shovel out from underneath the porch, digs a hole outside that she can see from the front window. Bitch needs to know what he’s about, see how he has to feed himself all by himself in order to survive. He breaks dry branches into the hole, brings logs and kindling from the shed, rigs up a green-wood spit and roasts the rabbit on it. Sits in the shadows, keeping one eye on the window, watches her climb the stairs, watches her blow her lantern out. Just like old times, only not. Nope, not at all.

  He eats the rabbit with the crickets and the owls for company, leaves its bones for whatever might want them. Goes indoors, starts up to the loft.

  “Wash your hands in the sink. Please.”

  Yeah. Let her say please. Say it again. Say pretty please, you fucking whore.

  “The meat smell on them turns my stomach. Please.”

  He does it, washes them a damn sight cleaner than the bitch deserves, then climbs up to the loft, takes off his clothes and pulls her to him so she’ll never get away. Yeah, this is how they’ll die someday. In each other’s arms.

  41

  Snake Hole

  BREAKFAST AGAIN. DAYS MARCH PAST LIKE STUPID ANTS, ONE BEHIND another. She seems smaller lately, like she’s always looking up at him. Makes him want to gently brush her hair out of her face. Makes him want to backhand her.

  Because she isn’t like she was. Because he’s losing her.

  “You want to go to town?”

  “With you?”

  “You see anyone else around we could be talking about?”