“We’ll use the money from my bank account. Or we’ll sell a saw. Or we’ll take the money Brad Chambers gave you to live in my house.”
I pitch sideways and rap her foot to the banister. She buries her face in my shoulder, bites my collar. I twist and knock her foot against the wall. I feel the vibrations of her scream in my chest, and her damp sobs through the cloth.
“Mind your tongue, Miss Emeline.”
In the bathroom, I hold her over the toilet while she lifts her dress and sits. Her eyes are red and tears shine her cheeks. Her piss splashes loud against the toilet bowl, and she lifts her face and her eyes draw tight on mine.
“Angus, you got to treat me better.”
Twenty
Deet pushed the barn’s sliding door open. Facing the house, he bent at the waist and allowed his arms to hang. The scent of lumber mingled with crisp morning humidity. Beads of dew glittered on tufts of grass. Even the packed dirt below his feet smelled rich.
Blood rushed to his hand and his thumb throbbed. A dot of pink had already seeped through the gauze. Angus had left without helping Emeline, so Deet had carried her to the bathroom. He remembered feeling her skin under her nightgown and the satin brush of her hair against his cheek. Her sweat was perfume.
He stood. The sun had broken over the lake a few minutes before but the air remained cool. He rubbed his arms and flipped the light switch inside the barn.
Rebel stood at the corner of his plywood pen, paws over the top, tail drumming the wood. Deet crossed to him and scratched behind his ears.
“I’m building you a palace.”
Rebel growled.
“Wasn’t much of a fighter, huh?”
He turned to the shop. A five-inch drift of maple sawdust lay under the table saw, white like snow, and a similar pile sloped from the base of the jointer. A half-dozen other tools, as yet untouched and unknown, waited with gleaming blades. He dragged his fingers across the table saw, thumped the blade and listened to it ring. The sawdust looked good enough to have with milk and brown sugar.
He moved to the twelve-foot workbench and studied Widow McClellan’s disassembled cabinet door. His test-run solution, which Angus had acknowledged, lay beside the broken tenon.
Deet puzzled over how the tenon could have broken. Falling from the cabinet would have dinged the corner. Dried glue would have made the joints loose. Seemed like the only way to break it was on purpose.
Nonetheless it provided an excuse to use the tools.
Working with quick precision, Deet removed the broken tenon, drilled holes, and chiseled a slot that was its exact inverse. He fashioned a floating tenon—a quarter inch wafer that would fill both the new mortise and the old, and rasped the edges to a hand-in-glove fit. He inspected the product, then walked outside to study his second project of the morning.
On Sunday after unloading the wood with Angus, Deet had parked Margulies trailer on the barn’s north side. He now studied the flatbed. Rectangular holes sized for two-by-four inch posts lined the sides. He counted them and returned to the barn.
He climbed the ladder to the loft where they’d stowed Margulies lumber. Looking upward as he climbed, his gaze found the old boat stowed above. A bullet hole that dated to last December reminded Deet of his vow to leave Angus behind. And yet here he was, swooning over his father’s wife. Destruction awaited, yet how could he leave Emeline to his mother’s fate?
Or was he willing to stay because Emeline’s skin smelled like paradise, and if he waited he knew he could have her?
Emeline fidgeted with a pair of pillows propped against the headboard. The clamor of saws that had penetrated the windows all morning had finally stopped a half hour ago. A wind-up clock tick-tocked on the dresser. Each percussion thumped her bladder. Hours had passed since Deet had said he’d check in.
Jacob was off Lord knew where. Playing at the walnut tree? He’d taken to disappearing for hours at a time, and gave smart-aleck answers when questioned.
Emeline squeezed. Her bladder felt like a balloon filled with a barrel of water. How would Angus respond if she diddled in bed? And how was it, again, that Doc Fleming didn’t have a single crutch at his office? The clock ticked. She stared at the minute hand—and the pain in her leg pulsed with maddening inescapability. Emeline watched the door, willing it to open.
The putter of the tractor motor came from the window, and eventually reached a crescendo. Deet must have parked immediately below. The downstairs door clattered and footfalls approached on the steps. Tapping sounded.
“Help me to the bathroom!”
He lifted her and negotiated around the bedroom door. He had sawdust in his hair and smelled musky like a boy, not as acrid as Angus. He rested her on the toilet, eased her cast to the floor. Stood beside her.
“I can do the rest,” she said.
He stepped to the hallway and latched the door. “Time to get you to Doctor Fleming’s,” he called.
“Angus said I’m not to go. I’ll ask him again later.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what he said. That leg gets infected, it’s coming off.”
She rocked side to side and hiked her gown. Searing pain flashed with each movement. Cold sweat stood on her brow and she grew faint. She sat until her legs tingled and her bladder was at peace, then pulled her panties up. Every heartbeat roused agony. A red flush swelled at her knee. Dizzy, she focused on breathing.
“Deet!”
He opened the door.
“Help…me…up.”
“Shit Em, your leg’s infected. See the red streak.” He cradled her and stood; removed her from the small bathroom. “Easy does it; watch your toes. Have you had aspirin today?”
“I left a red and white bottle by the sofa downstairs. It’s for pain.” She pressed her forehead to his shoulder.
Deet carried her down the stairwell and lowered her beside the coffee table; she grabbed the Tylenol bottle and twisted the cap as he continued to the door. She drank from the bottle.
Her leg felt like she’d immersed it in fire, and she watched the cast almost touch the wall, the banister, the whole time imagining the flames that must be devouring her flesh under the plaster. The tractor engine chugged behind her. Deet swung her around to take her down the porch steps and she recognized the trailer—Papa had taken town children on haunted hayrides every year until he sold the distributorship—but what Deet had done to it made the pain disappear for a moment. She kissed his cheek.
He’d cut posts for the side slots, stretched rope between them, and lined the perimeter with hay bales. A pool of loose, golden hay filled the middle, and he’d stretched blankets on top of half. Tethered to a corner post, Rebel lay in the sun, tongue lolling.
“It’s wonderful,” she said.
With her balanced in his arms, Deet climbed a plank ramped from the ground to the end of the trailer, stepped over a bale, and rested Emeline on a blanket. Rebel snuggled close and licked her face.
“Think you’ll be comfortable?”
“Deet, this is wonderful—but my leg’s on fire. It hurts… Could you work a little more hay under my knee?”
He lifted the blankets and manipulated tufts below.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“How do we hide this from Angus? You can’t go to this trouble every day.”
“What’s to hide? If he doesn’t want his wife to be well, I suppose he can go to hell.” Deet pushed hay below her leg until the cast was as high as her head. “That should help.”
Rebel rested his head on the inside of her arm. She stroked his belly.
“All good?” Deet said.
She nodded.
He walked the linkage between trailer and tractor like a tightrope artist, scaled a rear tire, then climbed aboard the Farmall seat. He gave a backward nod and increased the throttle. “This thing takes off kinda sudden, but it’ll run smooth after that.” He put the tractor in gear and released the clutch. The trailer jumped.
Emeline closed her eyes
and squeezed Rebel. He whined and she felt his grainy tongue on her cheek. Still with her eyes closed, she felt a cool breeze and had the sensation of rapid motion, but the wagon never bounced. Grass swooshed against the sides. She peeked. Deet had avoided the rutted drive by taking the edge of the field.
Emeline gulped more Tylenol, rested her head against a pillowy fold, and closed her eyes with morning sunshine on her face.
Lord, thank you for being so good to me.
Looking over his shoulder as he neared the curb, Deet slipped the throttle lever back and chugged to a stop in front of Doctor Fleming’s office. The doctor occupied half of the bottom floor of an ornate, gilded age mansion—or what passed for one in Walnut—which at one time belonged to Giuseppe Marconi, proprietor of Marconi Macaroni.
The outside was yellow brick with wood siding; the inside, dark-stained hardwood floors, knee-high hand-tooled baseboards and crown molding painted eggshell white.
Deet propped the front door open with a rounded river rock left on the porch, and carried Emeline through a moment later. The place smelled of coffee.
The door opened and Fleming waved them through the office to the visiting room.
“Here, yes, this is fine,” Fleming said.
Deet placed Emeline on the leather-upholstered table. Fleming lifted her dress to her knee, and turned to Deet.
“You’ll have to wait in the antechamber, son.”
“Where?”
“The entrance—you’ll find chairs and reading materials.”
“Em?”
She nodded. Deet took a chair and studied the molding, wondered what kind of tool could make a pattern so exquisite. He picked up a copy of Time. “Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady,” he read. The elegant woman perched over Harrison’s shoulder resembled Emeline. Deet brought the photo closer. Emeline was better, more meat on the bone. He tossed the magazine aside and shuffled through a stack of older copies, grabbed another at random, this one with a picture of an admiral with a statue beside him. He flipped through the pages.
“The Big Corn Crop,” he read. He’d better take a look.
Somehow, the story was about Lawrence Welk. Deet pitched it, grabbed a newspaper from an adjacent seat and turned to the commodities numbers. The federal support level for corn had been cut eleven per cent in February, and the nation’s corn crop was likely to be a bumper. The Hardgrave acres would produce top numbers. If the big growers out west had the same good fortune, the surplus would drive down the price per bushel.
He read the paragraphs again and the muscles in his back and shoulders rebelled. Jarring hours on a steel-wheeled tractor, innards bouncing, sun baking his skin. A whole life of it waited. Tilling, planting, harvesting, stacking the corn poles. All betting on the uncertain premise a market would be ready to buy whatever surfeit his ambition produced—and his father would pay him dimes.
He’d planned on being south by now.
Maybe the woodshop would provide a way out. The shop had every tool he could imagine. His skill would improve in time. With luck he’d earn a few jobs. Woodworkers had to make good money. Hardgrave land extended a full mile into the forest, with enough maple, beech, oak, cherry, chestnut, and ash to never run out. No seed costs, no vagaries of the growing season. He just had to learn the craft.
Let Angus scramble his guts in the fields.
Outside, footsteps shuffled by the door. A fist rapped; the door flew open.
“That your white Farmall out front, boy?”
Deet looked up from the newspaper. Stood. The man had him by a foot and a hundred pounds of belly.
“That ain’t your tractor,” the man said. “Who’s your old man? That tractor ain’t allowed to be white.”
“Who thinks he’s in charge of what color my tractor is?”
“Farmall, boy. I own the dealership. You can’t have a white Farmall, and that’s all there is to it. International Harvester has it in the by-laws. In the corporate constitution. The only white Farmall is on the dealership floor. End of story. Now who owns that tractor?” His head jerked around and his back stiffened. “Wait a damn minute. Just wait a damn minute.” He went back outside.
Deet followed.
The man stalked to the tractor. Rebel stood at the corner, head low looking through a bare slit of eye.
“Shut up,” the man said to Rebel. He waved his arm. “This is my tractor—I own the damn thing. This is the ‘47 A-Model been missing from the books since I bought the place.”
“Lay a hand on it and I’ll do something about it.”
“Don’t need to. I’ve studied that serial number on my books every month for nine years.”
“Where’s the number? On the tractor?”
The man sniggered. “Go to the back, at the seat support. Left side.”
Deet found the small metal plate. “What’s it read? You tell me.”
“One eight three, eight one four.”
“One eight three, eight one four. So you memorized it before coming in to find me.”
“Yeah, right after I fudged nine years of ledgers back at the dealership. That’s my property, son. I’ve been writing that number every year. You know anything about ledgers? Inventory? Ah, Shit. Who’s your father? I need to know, or I’m going to find Sheriff Heilbrun.”
The man grasped his arm and Deet twisted away, shoved him against the tire. Rebel strained at the edge of the hay bale beside them.
“You don’t want to make that mistake again,” Deet said, hand resting on the butt of his deer knife. They were still. “His name’s Angus Hardgrave.”
“Don’t know him. Where’s the farm?”
“Figure it out your damned self.”
“Tell your old man I’ll be along.”
Emeline waited on the leather table. The pain while Fleming cut away the cast, debrided her wound with peroxide, wiped balm, bandaged and recast her leg—all without nudging the broken bones’ delicate ossification—had been nearly unbearable. She watched the shiny spot on his head, the white hair. He grunted and mumbled terribly vanilla stories. The new cast, this one also very thin, was hardening.
“Why not use a splint, if it has to come off each day?”
“Two things. A splint would not immobilize your leg to the degree the cast will. Also, there would be more pressure points on your leg, and more pain. Now, blood flow is terribly important—even more so with infection. The rapid swelling, the redness, inflammation, racing heart, wooziness—these are all indications. The bone will mend, but the infection is very bad.”
He removed a brown bottle and a needle from a wall cabinet, filled a syringe, held it to the light, depressed the plunger until fluid leaked from the point. “Have you learned of penicillin?”
“A Frenchman discovered it. Pasteur.”
“No, a Scot—Sir Alexander Fleming. My namesake.” He pressed old, flat fingers to her shoulder. “You should eat more.” He leaned her toward the wall and supported her with his left arm, and pulled her dress high with his syringe hand. “You’re going to feel a tickle.”
Fleming pressed the needle into her rump. He chuckled. “If you can’t see me for any reason, rub bread mold on the wound. The antibiotic comes from mold. I’m teasing, of course. But it is simply amazing. Amazing.”
Doctor Fleming placed the syringe on a stainless tray. “Questions, Emeline?”
She shook her head.
“The pain will lessen. The redness will disappear over a couple of days, and the Tylenol I gave you will do the trick. You might have a hot toddy to help you sleep. I want you to come here tomorrow.”
She nodded.
He stood, opened the door. “Deet?”
Deet arrived a moment later.
“You may carry out your step-mother.”
Emeline’s face had more color than when Deet had carried her in. After seeing to her comfort in the trailer, he steered toward home and watched the hills and fields roll by. The man who’d laid claim to the Farmall might be trouble—but in the worst cas
e, Angus had another tractor, though its steel rims made riding it a bucolic torture. In little more than a half hour, Deet steered into the field along the driveway. He parked at the farmhouse steps.
“Can you put me in a chair on the porch?” she said. “The weather is lovely.”
Deet noticed the scent of evergreen. He situated her on a low Adirondack-style chair with a wide, sloped back, facing the blue spruce off the corner of the porch, and overlooking the lake. “You must feel better.”
“Why?”
“You look better.”
“The break was infected.” She squeezed his hand. “You kept me from being a peg leg.”
“That bad?”
She nodded, looked at his hand, released it.
He studied the lake. “You need anything, now?”
“Water, maybe? Sun’s dried me out.”
He brought a pitcher and a glass, then filled it. “I’ve got work in the barn. Holler if you need anything.”
She pressed her lips to a thin line.
“What?”
“As if you’d hear.”
“I’ll check on you. Promise.”
Deet carried her smile in his mind until he reached the barn. Inside, he pressed close to a knothole in the wall. She sat on the porch, her dress hitched on the chair seat, her plaster cast white against her knee. Her other leg was exposed as well—such a gentle curve. He wavered from the board; she blurred. He glanced sideways. Listened. The barn was empty. He gaped again.
What had she said, earlier, when he’d cut his hand and accidentally rested the other on her rump?
That’s not a good idea, Deet.
Not a bad one, though.
He breathed deep to clear his mind.
She stared at the barn, at this very spot, as if she knew he watched her, and that action revealed her. His thoughts resolved and he could finally categorize her. She was an angel—not just a heavenly beautiful woman, as he’d believed earlier. Her strength called upon a hidden force.
He crossed to the workbench. The Widow McClellan’s panel door lay in clamps. A half-dried, leathery bulb of glue pressed from the new joint. Deet removed the pipe clamps and sliced the glue with a chisel blade. He studied the door from every angle and found not a single blemish in his work. This was real, not like tilling land, planting seed, and hoping for rain. This was progress and satisfaction all at once, taking something straight from a picture in his mind to something that would have honest utility in another person’s life. Corn was real but it took all summer. There was nothing creative about corn.
Nothing Save the Bones Inside Her Page 11