The Empty Heart: A Collection

by Derek Murphy

  Not that it mattered now. Peggy was here and like he had thought before; she was good medicine for what ailed him. At the time. Now, she was getting on his nerves a little. She didn’t work, didn’t look for a job, didn’t have any intention of doing so and seemed to think that a little nookie was all she needed to contribute to the upkeep of the place. If he walked into the house now, there would be her dirty clothes scattered everywhere, dirty dishes in the sink and her dog would be sleeping in his favorite chair.

  When she reached him, she held the beer out to him and leaned close to run her hand under his sweaty t-shirt, twining her fingers in his chest hair. Tugging on a tuft of it, she smiled and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.

  "You reek! When you come inside, I’ll help you take a bath."

  The last came out in a kind of purr and he felt himself rising despite the thoughts that had crossed his mind earlier. Steeling himself, he shook his head.

  "I’ve got to go to Old Man Barger’s. His old roan needs new shoes. Don’t wait up for me. I might be late."

  Looking at him sideways through tip-tilted eyes, she asked, "You’re not seeing someone on the side, are you?"

  Tilting the beer to his lips, he drank deep and sighed as he lowered the bottle.

  "When would I have had time to meet anyone? You’ve been with me twenty-four hours a day since I brought you home with me. Speaking of which; did you call that friend of yours for a place to stay?"

  Leaning closer still, she slipped one leg over his and let him feel the heat between her thighs. She said, "A girl could get the idea that you want her to leave."

  He waved his beer in the air as a kind of shrug and said, "I’m just sayin’."

  She put a fingertip into a trickle of sweat on his cheek and drew it down the side of his neck and to the neck of his t-shirt. Patting his chest lightly, she leaned away from him.

  "Okay. I’ve over-stayed my welcome. I’ll go with you when you go to Barger’s. You can drop me off at Sonny’s. Vickie works there on Friday nights. She’ll give me a place to crash till I can get a job."

  Not wanting her to get the idea that he didn’t care what happened to her, he said, "You can talk to Sonny about a job. I heard one of his waitresses quit the other night. That way, I can still see you every now and then."

  Charles wasn’t sure why he had said that. He had seen enough of her for the time-being and didn’t want to continue this…whatever this was. It wasn’t a relationship. She still had all the faults that had been getting on his nerves all week and wasn’t about to change just because she might get a job. Luckily, she saved him from back-tracking on his words.

  "Oh no, Charles! A girl knows when something is over. It was nice while it lasted and you’re a great lay, but there should be something else. Y’know?"

  It struck him then that her words were an echo of what Becky had said when she left and he wondered if there was something about him that turned women away from him. Did he have a problem with commitment? He didn’t think so. The plans for his and Becky’s wedding had been going along great-guns until the night she announced that she was ready to move on. Was he not emotionally responsive? He guessed that he could stand to change that a little. Being demonstrative in public wasn’t something that he especially cared for, and he knew that women liked for their guys to make big deals of them where others could see it happen.

  "Alright. Go on inside and get your stuff together, Peg. I just need to bank the fire in the forge and I’ll be right in."

  She turned from him, flicking her hips from side to side as though to show him what he was going to be missing out on and he mentally smacked himself on the forehead. Just like she planned for him to do; that was why women acted and moved that way, after all. They always had to show a guy where he was making a mistake. Well, maybe he had made a mistake. Becky was a good housekeeper and cook. Not as responsive in bed as Peggy, but no slouch when it came to sex. But he had experienced a week-long demonstration from Peggy that sex wasn’t all there was to a relationship. Too much of one thing and not enough of another caused imbalances in any relationship and led to problems. If he could have a woman that was a blend of the two women; would that make him a happier man? He didn’t know.

  As her trim butt disappeared into the back door of the house, he lifted his forgotten beer and drained it, tossing the empty bottle into the fifty-five gallon drum he used for trash. Thinking better of it, he fished the bottle out of the drum and dropped it into the wooden box beside the drum with the other recyclables. His mind went back to the vision of Peggy’s form entering the house. Becky had been a little dumpy-looking and prone to gain weight easily while eating very little. Peggy, on the other hand, ate like a starving field hand and still was only a handful of muscle and bone in a compact, little package.

  He shook his head and turned back to the forge, banking the fire quickly so that there would still be live coals in it when he came out to work in the morning. Tidying up the shop, he walked back to the house and stepped inside. Stopping dead, he let his mouth hang open a moment, taking in the sight of his house. The mess was gone. Everything had been picked up and put in its proper place and the hardwood floor gleamed as though it had just been waxed. His eyes went to the door leading into the kitchen and he followed them unconsciously, stepping into it with the same sense of wonder. The countertops shined in the slanting, afternoon sun that streamed through the windows and gleams of polished metal on all the appliances sparkled here and there. The aroma of a pot roast wafted through the kitchen and he went to the oven, opening the door. Inside was a pot that he hadn’t used, or even seen in months, and he knew that a pot roast did indeed, reside therein. The temperature on the oven dial was set low in order to keep the roast warm without ruining it and he moved to the kitchen table, his hand blindly withdrawing a chair as he sat down.

  Peggy walked into the kitchen and ran a hand across his shoulders. "I see you found my surprise. I can cook when I want to. It’s my Grandma’s recipe; you’ll like it."

  Still astounded, he said, "You’ve been busy."

  Shrugging, which set her breasts jiggling inside the t-shirt, she said, "I just wanted you to see that I wasn’t completely worthless."

  Grinning wryly, he said, "Maybe I was a little hasty about asking you to leave."

  She laughed and slid onto his lap as she grasped his ears and tugged them, causing his head to move from side to side.

  "You can’t have your cake and eat it too!"

  Looking sideways at him through the corners of her eyes the way she had outside, she drawled, "We-ell, maybe you could, but I think we better cool things down a little and see if we like each other before we say or do anything that we can’t take back."

  Not sure exactly of what he was saying, he said, "I’m sorry, Peggy. I didn’t mean to give you the idea that I didn’t like having you around. When you came home with me, I was working through some leftover stuff from the breakup. Expecting too much from you was the wrong thing to do."

  Her eyes took on a serious, almost sad expression, and she said, "I was working through some stuff myself, Charles. I don’t just go home with everybody who wants a good time. I’ve liked you since high school and thought that it was about time we spent what I like to call ‘idyllic time’ together. When I indulge myself in something like that, I cut mundane things like work and housekeeping out of my life. You didn’t have any way of knowing that I wasn’t really like the impression that everybody has of me."

  She laid her head against his chest and his rumbled in his chest as he said, "Maybe we’ve been working at cross-purposes without either of us knowing what the other was doing."

  He tipped her face up to look up at him with a finger under her chin.

  "I’d like you to stay."

  A sad, sweet smile came to her face as she said, "I’m moving out, Charles. I’ll get that job at Sonny’s and you can come in and sit at one of my tables anytime you want. When I bring you a barbecue sandwich and a beer, you ca
n smack me on the butt and I’ll smile at you. Then you can ask me out on a proper date and we’ll start over. You can forget that I’m a sloppy bitch and I’ll forget that you’re a silent bastard."

  He smiled back at her, knowing that what she said was true and that maybe; just maybe, they did need to start over.

  * * *

  The job at Barger’s turned out to take longer than he expected and suppertime had come and gone while he shoed not one, but five horses. The last one had been a difficult, stone-bitch. She dropped her head and tried to bite him repeatedly; making it difficult for him to hold her still while he worked. When he fitted her with the last shoe, she kicked him in the hip, just missing his groin, and he was sure the bruise would last at least a week. It was a good thing he didn’t have the shoe on that foot yet or she could have broken his hip. Barger objected to the price he charged him for the job because of the difficulty and they’d had a short set-to which left both of them red in the face and angry. In the end, the old man had ponied up the cash, knowing that if Charles refused to shoe his horses again, the closest farrier was a hundred miles away.

  Now, driving down the road, he moved a hand to his hip, trying to massage away the pain and took his eyes off the road for just a second. When he looked up, a huge horse, something like one of the draft breeds; like a Clydesdale or a Belgian ran across the road in front of him and he had to swerve to avoid the horse. Draft horses got big and he knew what damage one of them could do to his pickup; not to mention what the pickup could do to the horse. He hated the idea of such a good looking horse being hurt. The swerve caused the pickup and trailer to jackknife and he found himself sliding into a clump of medium sized trees sideways. As the pickup struck the largest of them, his head came into contact with the top of the door and he stopped being aware of anything for a while.

  When he awakened, it was dark. Not even the radio in the pickup was going. Then it occurred to him that he should be sitting in the truck instead of lying down like this. Someone must have found him and pulled him out, for he was lying on something soft and was covered with a heavy blanket of some sort. His fingers went to it and encountered fur. Puzzled, he tried to ascertain by feel what kind of fur it was and gave up after a few moments. He shook his head and mumbled curses as the movement made his head hurt. His frown deepened as he continued to curse for a moment, stopping as the incongruity hit him full in the face. He wasn’t speaking English. It sounded kind of French. What the Hell was happening? He decided to forget about solving that puzzle in favor of learning what had happened to him. If the language thing kept on, he would use what came to him and if not, then it was just some anomalous thing that cleared itself up.

  He pushed himself up to a sitting position and paused as the pounding in his head accelerated. At his movement, a figure moved to kneel beside him and he felt hands urging him to lie back down as a young voice spoke softly to him.

  "My liege! You must rest! The priest said you were nearly killed and must heal before taking the field again!"

  Charles’ hand came up to his head and he said, "Light. I want light. Turn on the damned lights!"

  The figure moved away from him and in seconds brought a lamp with a dim flame dancing in it. Charles was sure it was an oil lamp of some sort, but where in the Hell would someone get one of those? And, why didn’t they just use a damned flashlight?

  Squinting against the light, he looked up into the figure’s face and saw the features of a teenaged boy with a weird, bowl haircut. A crop of pimples on the boy’s face made it seem disfigured and Charles supposed the kid had acne and none of the usual remedies worked. Then he saw that the boy was dressed as weirdly as his haircut. Wool tights with trim, form-fitting shoes that came to a point at the toes and a kind of leather jerkin over a wool shirt with full sleeves completed the boy’s outfit. The jerkin was belted with a broad belt from which hung a dagger and a shorter knife of some sort. Charles seemed to know that the shorter knife was intended for eating and wondered briefly where that knowledge had come from.

  The hide he had lain under had fallen away from him when he sat up and he looked down at himself, seeing that his chest and stomach had sprouted a great deal more hair, some of it grey. Lifting the fur, he saw that someone had stripped him of his clothes and wonder of wonders, he was no longer circumcised. The first thought that came to mind was that he was glad he had been circumcised rather later than most and therefore knew how to clean the foreskin.

  Pushing those thoughts from his mind, he asked, "Where are my clothes?"

  "My Lord, you shouldn’t even be out of bed! If I dress you, the priest will have me beaten!"

  Despite his headache, Charles said, "Then I’ll beat the priest! My clothes!"

  The boy bustled around bringing one complicated garment after another, giving Charles’ eyes time to adjust to the dim light. As they did, he ascertained that he was in a tent of some sort, the central pole bringing the top to a peak. When the boy stood before him with a garment held expectantly in his hands, Charles stood, grasping the boy’s shoulder as he felt suddenly unsteady. Unfamiliar with the clothes, Charles took longer to dress than usual, lifting a leg when the boy indicated he needed such done and in time, he was dressed and sitting back on the cot, for such it was, waiting for some thought to come to his mind to straighten out this mess.

  A fold of the tent was thrust to one side and Charles saw that it comprised a simple doorway as a man, a singularly villainous looking man, stepped through. The man’s dark eyes lighted at sight of him sitting up and the man smiled a crooked smile, not helped by the broken and half-rotted teeth that showed in his face.

  "My Lord Charles!" Charles noted that the man gave it the odd, French pronunciation and filed the knowledge away.

  "Yes?" Though Charles’ tongue had stumbled over the strange phrases when speaking to the boy at first, he found the words coming to his mind much more easily.

  "My Lord! Margarethe of Cologne wishes words with you."

  "Who? What does she want with me? I don’t know any such person."

  The sardonic expression on the man’s face slipped just a little and he looked doubtful as he said, "Surely the Duke remembers Lady Margarethe. She has accompanied him these past three weeks. She would have been present upon your awakening but retreated to her tent for sleep. When we heard you speaking, we sent word to her that you were awake."

  Charles frowned and felt slightly sick to his stomach. Upon reflection, it occurred to him that he might be hungry; he had missed supper because of Barger’s horses and there was no telling how long he had been out. The thought of Peggy’s pot roast stuck in his mind and he couldn’t dislodge it.

  He said, "Somebody get me a beer and some roast beef. I’m starving!"

  The man bowed slightly as he moved to the door and stopped to let the boy hold the fold of the tent to the side for him to exit. The boy followed him out with a scrape of the knee on the floor of the tent and Charles took in his environs.

  The tent was of some heavy, canvas-like material that seemed made of wool, or maybe a blend, and rugs covered the floor, which he surmised was probably just dirt and grass underneath. A few pieces of well-made but simple furniture were scattered around the sides and a few racks of weapons and armor stood among them. He grunted as he saw that the pieces that seemed most-used were an ugly but serviceable war-hammer and a blade-heavy falcata. A conical, spiked helmet sat on an upright peg and there were dents and creases in it, one in particular showed more brightly than the others and he couldn’t imagine whoever wore it got away without at least a concussion. A mail-shirt hung on a rack and there he saw spots in the mail where new links had been inserted to repair gashes, denoting heavy use.

  He rose unsteadily and walked slowly to the bench that sat between two of the racks that held the weapons and took the hammer in hand as he sat down. It was heavy and the head, though dinged and scratched, seemed none the worse for wear. The face was serrated with large tooth-like projections and instead of a
claw or knob to offset the weight of the face, there was a long, wicked backspike a good eight inches long. He could imagine that such a weapon, for tool it could never be, must inflict tremendous wounds. Such a thing would crunch through plate armor as easily as an axe. At the very least, it would dent and bend such armor so that it became unuseable. Even if most men wore mail; arms, legs and shoulders would be broken. In direct contact with a helmet, the helmet would come out the loser.

  A rustle at the doorway got his attention and he looked up, careful to move his head slowly so as not to aggravate his headache. A woman stood there, little more than a teenager, actually, and he gave a start. She resembled Peggy so much that he could swear it was her. Speechless, he sat still as she hurried to him, going down on her knees before him. Her head came down on his knees and her voice was difficult to hear when she spoke. Making nothing of her muffled words, he grasped her shoulders and lifted her so that he could look directly into her face.

  No. She wasn’t Peggy, though she resembled her enough to be her sister. There was no sign of the little scar above one eye that she got in a sledding accident when they were ten. The mole at one corner of her mouth was missing, too. But the voice was hers.

  "My Lord, I sat with you for hours until the priest forced me to return to my tent. He said my presence was unseemly and that my place should be reserved for Swanhild."

  His voice, though tired, accepted the words his mind presented and he managed to sound more nearly like himself, even if he was speaking a different language.

  "I’m beginning to not like this priest. But, tell me, I don’t remember some things too well; what are you to me?"

  Her face colored and she looked distraught for a moment as tears came to her eyes.

  "My Lord, you took me as consort just two months ago. Though Swanhild is your wife, it is I who accompany you in this campaign."

  Charles began to put thoughts together and the few things he had learned coalesced into an epiphany that he could scarcely credit. Was he still in his pickup, awaiting an ambulance, or lying in a coma in a hospital somewhere? Was this a crazy dream borne of his interest in medieval history? Who was he supposed to be? The man who had entered earlier had called him a Duke. Duke of what?