Nothing Save the Bones Inside Her

by Clayton Lindemuth

  Ticky tossed a loaf to the table.

  “I need your help, big brother.”

  “I knew it.”

  “I’m pert nigh stranded. Crawled up the driveway on fumes. Need you to spot me gas money to New York.”

  “I ain’t made of money, for crissake.”

  “Well, maybe not, maybe so. I thought a business man like you—”

  “What’s in New York?”

  “I’m in the delivery business.”

  “And can’t afford gas.”

  “Now hold on—”

  “Vic, I give you money and I never see it again. That ain’t how to do a brother, but it’s how you do me. You got some gall, owing me two hundred already, and coming here strutting like a cock in a hen house.”

  “This delivery’s a special deal. Lemme show you. It’s in the trunk.” Vic tossed Ticky his car keys, left the bottle but took some bread and a slab of cheese, and followed Ticky outside. “Check the trunk.”

  Ticky opened it. “A suitcase.”

  “Open the suitcase.”

  “What’s this?”

  “That, big brother, is cocaine; made on the other side of the earth, come across the equator, through Mexico, ferried across the Rio Grande, up to Chicago, and I’m the last leg of the trip, like the Pony Express, almost. I got to get the goods to my people in New York, else I’m done for.”

  Ticky waited.

  “I’ll bring a thick wad of cash back through, you can bet your sweet ass.”

  “This why you’re blowin’ snot on my bushes?”

  “I got a little of my own, you know. They gimme a little of my own. That’s all. Christ, no; I don’t use their shit.”

  “Let me see what you been takin’ on your own.”

  Vic smiled tight. “You want a try, that it?”

  “I want to see what you got.”

  Vic opened the passenger door, reached under the seat, tossed a folded envelope to Ticky. Ticky opened it, lifted the flap, smelled inside. Dabbed a wet finger. Touched his tongue.

  “Get a good snort up your nose,” Vic said.

  “You got speed?”

  “Speed? Shit, that ain’t even outlawed, is it?” Vic tossed a bottle of pills.

  “I’ll be hangin’ on to these ‘til you get back—a couple of days, right?” Ticky tossed Vic a roll of bills.

  Sixteen

  Emeline punched a double batch of bread dough, spread flour on the cutting board, folded the glob on itself, and punched it again. Through the window, she watched Angus set up Papa’s tools in the barn. Not another word had passed about her furniture, but the barn overflowed with tools.

  Jacob scraped his chair from the table.

  After a week of nonstop work, Angus’s kitchen smelled like a harvest, spice and flour and sugar. His drab living room was clean enough to invite a guest over without a twinge of shame. The bedrooms were red up. The bathroom—which she’d found looking like a barn stall and smelling like a cesspool—why, she could eat a ham sandwich while looking at the base of the toilet without the slightest revulsion. Oh…Angus Hardgrave’s house was clean.

  The eve of their wedding, when Angus described the orchard, picking apples before the frost, sunrises over the lake, she saw it all as if spread out in some comfortable dream. All the warmth she remembered as a child, now hers as a wife and mother. Pumpkins and venison and snow. Fresh eggs. She punched the dough and her wrist ached.

  “Why you angry?” Jacob said.

  “I’m not angry. I’m making bread. Why aren’t you in the barn?”

  “Pap don’t want me in the barn. Says I’m in the doghouse.”

  “I don’t think he’s angry anymore. Your father can be impatient, but he’s not angry.”

  Emeline thought of the night Angus learned he was the grandson of Jonah McClellan. It hadn’t seemed to register a change in him. She wondered, if she had grown up in a family that was at war with another, would finding out she was the child of the enemy mean something to her? Of course it would. All sorts of alignments would change. She would begin to question everything she thought was good about her family. Everything sacred would be suspect. She would take a fresh look at her family’s opponents with a desire to find something redeeming.

  But Angus didn’t change at all. He never struck her as introspective and didn’t communicate his thoughts, so it was impossible to guess. But there had been no outward change. No moment caught musing. No kind word toward the widow next door.

  As if bidden by the Lord she wondered if that was because Angus was already as irredeemable as Jonah McClellan. Was the whole family lost?

  “Can I ask you something, Jacob?”

  He nodded.

  “Have you ever gone to church?”

  “What for?”

  “To learn about God.”

  “There ain’t no god. Just god damn. Ask Pap.”

  “Someday I want to take you to church. Until then, I want to start a Bible study with you and Deet every morning.”

  “Aw, no way.”

  “Yes.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want to hear another word about it. We’ll begin tomorrow morning. Make sure you tell Deet. I don’t know where he is half the time. Now I want to ask you one more thing. Did you ever have a little brother or sister?”

  Jacob shook his head.

  “Did something happen a year or two ago and you lost a brother or sister?”

  “Huh-unh.”

  “Did your Papa bury a dog, or an animal down by the lake?”

  Jacob’s jaw tightened. He bolted from the kitchen. Emeline watched the window. Jacob strode toward the field to the left of the barn.

  She kneaded dough and thought about the grave under the walnut on Devil’s Elbow. She thought about Angus spending so much time at the tree, and taking her there on their wedding night.

  The strangeness here was different than any she’d experienced. It was like Angus, Deet, and Jacob lived in punctuated moments that never cohered into… life. She hoped so much that the Lord had come with her, with His plan. Because so far, it seemed like everything Hardgrave was just random ugliness and evil.

  Seventeen

  I bite the corner of a four-quarter maple board and show Deet the impression.

  “Well?” he says. “Soft?”

  “Hard. Look. Barely dented. Good hard maple—machines damn near like metal.”

  “Won’t it dull the blades?”

  “Yeah, but you build with hard maple, you got something. You can always sharpen a blade.”

  We stow boards in the barn loft in the same order we found them at Margulies’: the longest, widest, and heaviest on the bottom. The rough-cut maple is generally knot-free, but empty knotholes and sections of dry rot render a quarter of the walnut useless. The boards are gnarled and warped, and milling them flat and straight will take hours. But the rich color and the leather and gunpowder smell invite me to make sawdust.

  One ten-inch wide crotch board caught my eye when we were loading it at Margulies and unloading it now, the last on the trailer. Margulies must have set it aside special, otherwise it would have been unloaded first, with the other heavy cuts. A black and brown knot ripples across the bottom four feet, long and skinny, so turbulent it’s like to drag your eyes under and drown them. The plank is six feet tall and maybe three inches thick, and heavy as a dead man. I lean it against the wall.

  “Take a look at that,” I say. “That’s character.”

  Deet sits with his legs hanging over the loft.

  The board won’t work for commercial furniture—people that don’t know jack shit about wood insist on straight-grained lumber. But that crotch will be a jewel. The ripples and rolls, even through the sawmill finish, promise a spectacular piece.

  Something in the board speaks to me. The swirls and pattern suggest something that can’t be.

  “You can c’mon down; that’s the last,” I say. I rock the planer stand across the barn floor and position it with a
dozen feet clear for in-feed and output. I rotate the elevating screw and the cutter box lifts from the steel table. Slip my hand inside, press the blade, and show Deet the blood on my finger.

  “Margulies kept his tools right. How about you plug me in?”

  I lower the screw until the indicator points a hair over three inches, then back off an eighth turn. The crotch board rests on the in-feed. I flip the toggle and the motor whines. I summon Deet with a wave. “Support the board! Don’t lift; don’t pull!”

  Deet assumes a limber stance facing the output slot.

  The rollers jerk the board forward but the cutters are too high and it slips through with nary a shave. I spin the screw counterclockwise and feed the board again. The blades bite the walnut and spray black shavings at Deet.

  Deet stands the board on end and I study a long bowl untouched in the middle. I run my fingers across the shaved edges, both directions, smooth as the bottoms of Emeline’s tits. I lower the cutter a thirty-second and pass the board through again.

  With each pass the bowl flattens and the grain picture resolves like I’m blowing dust from an old painting. Chocolate colored shavings pile at Deet’s feet. I work faster scarcely believing what I see, and hide my eye from Deet’s each time I retrieve the plank for another pass under the cutters. The fevered motor whines. Something in the board is damn hard to cut. The scent of sawdust and electric, copper and magnets fills the air.

  Bone.

  Finally, slack-jawed Deet holds the board as if looking at a portrait.

  Encased in the wood is a spine, with a purple glow like the sheen on old roast beef.

  I fish my Copenhagen.

  “Looks like some animal got buried in a tree,” Deet whispers. “Ain’t these ribs, here, each side, one on top of the other?”

  I take the board and flip it. The bones shimmer like the inside of a clamshell. I press a vertebra, each the size of a fist and hard as a rock. The length and dimension indicate a large man. I hold the board to my stomach and align the lowest vertebra with my hip. This man bests me by six inches, maybe, making him close to seven feet.

  Whiskey might put things in perspective. I rest the board on the bench and Deet studies the markings. I gulp Wild Turkey, wipe my mouth with my sleeve and get walnut and bone shavings in my mouth, and the walnut leaves an aftertaste I can’t clean with whiskey, and it ain’t at all bad.

  “You think a deer or something got petrified?” Deet says.

  I drink again and swallow a little Copenhagen spit with it. Run my fingers along the bones. Do math, subtract years. I nod at the board.

  “Say hello to your Grandpap, Jonah McClellan.”

  I tramp along the cornfield with the lake over the grassy slope to my left. Fireflies glow green where the forest abuts the field. I lengthen my stride and follow the deer path through knee-high weeds. On cue, a spooked deer flashes its white tail. I squint but fail to make out antlers from the forest. The deer crashes through a blackberry thicket.

  A hundred yards shy of the road, a footpath used by generations of McClellan and Hardgrave boys cuts to the left. Larry McClellan died on Omaha Beach. The machinegun bunker that got him looked like an eye set deep below the hillside’s brow. Larry was a few years my junior, but growing up in the country, a boy and his neighbors is fast friends—even if they don’t know they’re half brothers, and even if they belong to a rival clans. I took shrapnel in my eye carrying him to cover just so he could bleed to death in peace.

  I came home and Mitch McClellan told me a joke. He called me a bastard at the cemetery and I didn’t get the punch line for twelve years.

  It is dusk. I turn into the forest and watch the ground for protruding roots. Fifty yards ahead, a fractured yellow window shifts with the sway of branches. In a couple minutes I tramp across the widow’s porch. A dog growls inside and the dry-rotted floorboards creak. The porch light comes on; the curtain rustles; a lock slides and the door swings open.

  “Only sent for you two day ago.” Widow McClellan shuffles aside. “Hurry ‘fore the moths get in!”

  Outside of Mitch’s funeral, this is the first we’ve been this close since she beat my chest at Larry’s grave. I stand at the entrance and look into her kitchen. She limps to the table and drops to a chair. A dog stands at the living room, head low, a growl floating in her upper register. I give her a quick study; she appears the same as Rebel, a pit bull.

  “Don’t appreciate you sending that insurance man to my house.”

  “If you’d have come when I asked—”

  “Jake said you busted a cabinet door.”

  “Don’t you see it on the counter? Hinge came loose and when it hit the floor, the whole thing come apart.”

  I whistle. “You got your stiles free on each end, and the panel’s falling apart. Looks like old glue dried out. What?” I pull the frame apart. “Mortise and tenon on a cabinet door? Take some doing, but I can fix it.”

  “Well, I won’t pay you an arm and a leg.”

  I don’t have a notion what the widow is up to. “We’ll work something out. Two weeks, if I don’t get any time weeknights.”

  I step to the porch. She holds the door. Damned if that isn’t a red nose pit bitch, growling and eyeballing me.

  Eighteen

  Angus had left for his long morning drive to the oil derrick. Emeline held her fist to Deet’s door. She hesitated. Had Jacob told him about the Bible study?

  She rapped three times. “Time for Bible study, Deet.”

  Further down the hall she stood at the next door. Rapped. “Time for the Good News, Jacob.”

  She returned to the kitchen and emptied the coffee pot into her mug, taking what remained after Angus filled his thermos. An egg spattered in bacon grease on the stove; she slid it onto a bread crust and chewed slowly. Her stomach turned at the salty grease.

  While she waited for Deet and Jacob on the sofa, Emeline found her bookmark and began reading.

  She woke at dawn to a faintly lit and utterly silent house. Without checking their rooms she knew they’d snuck out. She looked upward. Her eyes filled with tears and she didn’t move as they dripped from her lashes and streamed down her face. She stared at the ceiling as if the Lord was behind it, and He would soon give her an insight that would make sense of it all. This very morning she’d browsed her favorite chapter in Ephesians, which reminded her that the Lord had a plan for her life, with good works prepared like footsteps she should walk in. But the harder she sought direction, the more cagey the Lord seemed. The more tantalizingly distant and unfathomable. She couldn’t doubt what He’d said—but she did doubt what she’d heard out there in the praying field. Did He really promise that He was trustworthy and following Him would bring her closer? Because this wasn’t close at all.

  She stared at the ceiling, thoughts cascading through her, none of them a prayer, and yet, every one of them heard. For the Lord knew everything.

  Emeline looked out the window. The sunlight arrived through her tears like a scattered burst of yellow, and she smiled, and coughed phlegm. She would trust the Lord as He had commanded.

  For Jacob and Deet she would pray. Maybe things would change. They were at places in their lives that weren’t conducive to pondering the Almighty. She would be a model for them. She would live on God’s grace and show them what a disciple looked like.

  She closed her eyes and prayed.

  Lord, give them time.

  The ride to town was eight miles, longer than she’d ever ridden a bicycle. She walked up hills and coasted down, pedaled across flats circumfused by light green fields of wheat. Her fingers grew numb in the breeze and the rushing wind whipped tears from her eyes. An hour and a half after she started, her jacket bundled in the handlebar basket, she coasted the final stretch, slowed at the gravel driveway, and turned toward her house.

  A red and white Fairlane sat by the steps.

  She dropped her bicycle on the gravel and ran to the door. It was unlocked. Angus had a key, but how had Chambers go
tten inside? Did she dare enter? She shoved the door open. Her heart raced. Violated again. The living room smelled foreign. The kitchen was dark; the hallway, lit. She charged up the staircase.

  “Who’s there?” His voice came from the bathroom. He stepped to the hallway wearing a towel around his waist, a toothbrush in his mouth.

  “What?” She stepped closer. “Get out!”

  “Hey, I’m supposed to be here.”

  She drove her palms into his chest. He braced his arm at the doorjamb. She pushed again and he swatted her forearms aside.

  “What do you mean supposed to be here? Get out of my house!” she pushed again; as if humoring her, he retreated to the sink and lifted his arms to face level.

  “Careful, Emeline Hardgrave. Go talk to your old man.”

  “I’m going to the sheriff.”

  He swiped her arm, twisted it behind her back and crushed her to his chest. “You’ll go nowhere ‘less I say so.” His free hand clutched her rump. “But now that you’re here, how ‘bout you and me have some fun?”

  She stamped her heel to his naked foot and missed. She spun and he released her. Emeline backed into the hallway. “I’m going to the sheriff. You touch me again you better kill me.”

  “I love you enough, you know… Whichever way you want things to come out.”

  She gaped. “You aren’t right, Brad.”

  “No, I suppose not.” He stepped closer.

  Emeline backed a step. Chambers swung and his fingers grazed her arm. She fled and he raced after her; his towel flapped exposing a black mat of hair and a pug-nosed snake. Emeline missed the top stair and swung her arm shy of the rail.

  She tumbled.

  A blade of pain shot through her leg and blackness closed on her mind like night laying siege to a waning candle, and she lay heaped on the foot of the stairwell.

  “Papa?” she cried, but he didn’t answer. Emeline squinted to squeeze the agony from her mind. Realization flickered: she was alone. She felt wetness on her skin, stickiness, and smelled the richness of her blood.