by Sheri Holman
She closes her eyes and when she opens them again the moon is setting. In the dark, she feels for his body, but she is still alone. Outside in the breezeway, she hears voices, footsteps, and motion. Tucker? But no, Bud Alley is coming around the corner of the house. With his rucksack over his shoulder, he is headed back down the mountain path, leaving as suddenly as he came. Watching him go, she feels sad he didn’t say good-bye. She thought he had liked her.
She can’t stand being in this room another minute.
The lantern still burns in the kitchen. Water hits tin, a pan held under the constantly running faucet; a match is struck. Cora, in her long white nightgown, is setting a kettle on the stove when she steps in. Tucker’s map is spread across the long kitchen table, but he is nowhere to be seen.
“I’m having a cup of tea,” says Cora, turning around. “Like one?”
“I would, thank you,” Sonia replies.
“It’ll just be a minute.”
Sonia sits uncomfortably on the chair she took at dinner. They don’t discuss the lateness of the hour or why they are both up. Earlier, the kitchen was full of people and light seemed to be carried on the flow of talk. Now the wick is dialed down low and the shadows turned up. Cora is lit by the flame of the stove, and with her hair loose and her body limber, she looks years younger than she did only hours ago in the presence of her husband. Lying with Bud, she’s taken on some of his amplitude. She is graceful reaching for cups and saucers.
“Tucker seems to have disappeared,” Sonia says.
“Men have a way of doing that,” Cora answers.
Sonia picks up the map, touching the towns Tucker marked for their guidebook. His notes barely mention direction or lodging or anything given them by the chamber of commerce. Instead they trace the topography of steeples and dogs scratching their fleas and the peaks and valleys of women who believe they can fly. He has half a page about a blind teenaged waitress who served them in a Richmond diner. The cook was in love with her and every morning before the restaurant opened, he set out bowls of whipped cream, making her touch every chair and inch of counter to find them.
“Mr. Alley had to go so soon?” Sonia asks.
“He needs to make town by sunup if he’s to get a ride back to camp.”
“You must be sorry to have so little time with him.”
“He brought his salary,” she says, drawing down a wooden box from the shelf above the stove and setting it on the table before Sonia. It’s a heavy, handmade cask with dovetailed joints and steel hinges, about the size and heft of Sonia’s own chemical case. When Cora opens it, the room smells like the forest. The box is filled with silver-green bundles of dried plants, spiky purple flowers, seedpods, burrs, the leathery nubs of roots.
“I grew up in the city,” Sonia says, peering inside. “I can barely tell the difference between a rose and a tulip.”
“Sometimes it’s near impossible, even those of us who’ve walked the woods all our lives. The mountain has a wicked sense of humor,” Cora says, lifting two nearly identical feathery fernlike leaves from different sections of the box. “Take these two—this one is Queen Anne’s lace, wild carrot,” she holds up the one on the left. “This one,” she lifts the right, “is poison hemlock. Chew a teaspoon of Queen Anne’s seeds and it keeps babies from coming. Take a teaspoon of hemlock, and well, I don’t have to tell you.”
Sonia’s mouth feels dry and she licks her lips. “I’ve noticed you are a rarity in the mountains, Mrs. Alley,” she says, slowly. “Most women up this way have four, five, six children. You have only Eddie.”
Cora passes the two plants to Sonia, each tied with identical black thread. “The Bible says for every illness God created, he placed its cure in nature.” The dried and brittle leaves crumble in Sonia’s fingers and flake across the pages of Tucker’s work. She blows the pages clean and passes the herbs back to Cora.
“My stomach has been troubling me, primarily in the morning, for the past week or so. Do you think the tea you’re brewing would settle it?” she asks, choosing her words carefully. Cora holds her eyes. Steam rises from the kettle over her shoulder.
“Bud told me they’re not accepting men into the army who have children coming,” Cora says. “Might not be the case if things heat up, but it is now. Bud really wants to go.”
“I’d heard that, too,” Sonia says.
“Baby coming is a good way to keep a man safe, if you’re of a mind to.”
Sonia nods. “Our water is boiling,” she says.
Cora rises and takes the cask with her, strewing each cup with a handful of leaves and pouring in the hot water. “’Course you can get your man to give you a really good shaking one,” she says. “That’ll knock things loose in the early days, they say. And even if it doesn’t get you where you’re going, it’s a fine way to be traveling.”
Cora sets down the two mugs and takes the seat opposite. “I have some honey if you find it bitter,” she says.
Sonia shakes her head no, and stares down into her inky cup. She doesn’t know this woman, has no idea if she is wild carrot or poison hemlock. Cora lifts her cup and the steam curls between her lips just before the liquid touches them. Sonia understands now why Tucker would be attracted to her. She gives you so little, you can turn her into anything you need her to be.
“Do you love your husband, Mrs. Alley?” she asks.
“Do you love yours?” Cora asks in response.
“I’m worried I do.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Then it’ll hurt to see him go.”
Sonia nods. The wind through the door picks up and a cool breeze blows across the table, rustling Tucker’s pages. Sonia lays down her hand to hold them until the breeze dies away.
Thank you, Cora, for making my choice tonight, for knowing when I don’t. She thinks of that Bible always open in her parents’ apartment, her father, so devout. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole. A cool night and a warm drink and a good shaking one, what more can you ask of any given day? She blows upon the surface and watches the ripples lap the sides of the cup.
I know where we can go, Eddie said, wrapping the sheet around his arm. Follow me.
Carrying the projector, Tucker trailed behind Eddie. The yard was hushed and still as if snow had fallen and for the first time this season, there was the hint of winter in the thin, clear night. Tucker wonders if Eddie feels the weight, as Tucker used to, of being a boy leading a man. There is little to say at times like this, speaking feels too much like shouting down a tunnel for the distance it must travel.
“Where are you taking me?” he asks.
“To this place I know.”
“Your mama showed me a little house in the woods yesterday.”
“That’s her old homeplace,” Eddie tells him. “She says when she’s gone, it’ll be mine. But it’s across the gap.”
“Is that bad?” asks Tucker.
Eddie looks at him as if Tucker were not so bright. “You can’t get there from here, you have to go all the way around.”
They have walked along the high ridge of ravine and come to the tobacco field where the sky opens wide above them. Two parallel wooden frames for stacking the leaves still stand in the middle of the field though the crop has been taken in and sold at market. Tucker and Eddie crunch across the dried stalks, sinking into the softer matted grass beneath. When they reach the shoulder-high cradle, Eddie throws the sheet over it, creating a makeshift screen.
“Clever,” Tucker says.
Eddie smooths out the wrinkles while Tucker unlatches the top of his projector and rewinds the film. On the backs of Eddie’s spindly calves are three long red welts, perfectly diagonal and aligned as if an architectural draftsman had delivered the whipping. Eddie catches Tucker looking.
“Daddy is just trying to make a man out of me,” he explains. “So that I can fight one day. Like you.”
> “Don’t be fooled,” Tucker says. “We’re all still boys, we’ve just grown a little manhood around our edges. Twelve-year-old Eddie will hold eight-year-old Eddie who holds three-year-old Eddie who holds that little baby your mama used to hold, and eighty-year-old Eddie will hold them all long after we’re dead.”
Tucker is surprised to hear himself using the same words his mother had used with him the night his father dropped a glass in the kitchen. Tucker was supposed to sweep up, but he’d done a half-assed job and his father had cut his bare white foot on a missed shard and tracked blood all through the house.
Don’t go, son, his mother had said, sobbing, her palms still pink from slapping Tucker’s face, his shoulders, his legs, when she dragged him out of bed to see the stains his carelessness had caused. Don’t ever go off to war because when a man takes a life, he doesn’t just murder the man before him, he murders all those rings of self, past and future, that lived inside the one he’s killed. And worst of all, he murders that piece of himself he’s extended into the human tangle, that piece he puts in others when he tries to live by God’s golden rule and love his neighbor as himself. You have to wrench your humanity back before you can kill, or yes, you are murdering yourself as you murder your brother. That is what happened to your father, boy, and why we must be so gentle with him now. He was ordered into self-murder just like all the others, and he’s come home nothing but skin stretched over bones, there’s no man left in there. They call it shell shock, but it’s not from shells going off, it is because they sent us home the shells of our men, some fragile crust of a hollow pie.
Tucker doesn’t tell Eddie what his mama said, sobbing that night. Her fury always ended in tears and crazy talk. He can’t tell Eddie because he has yet to figure out how one is supposed to end violence by creating more of it.
“Let’s watch the movie,” says Eddie.
“You set the silent speed tonight, chum,” Tucker replies. “I’m too drunk to crank.”
Eddie aims the projector at the square of white sheet and slowly starts to turn. He is a natural, Tucker thinks, watching the look of concentration on the boy’s face. Eddie cranks while Tucker reclines in the bed of felled tobacco stalks. Mole crickets restlessly chew in their burrows beneath his temples. His breath settles around him and he lies perfectly still imagining what it will be like to have his pockets picked and his fillings stripped, hands clasping his ankles and dragging him away.
“No one knows where we are,” he says. “Doesn’t it feel good to disappear?”
“My daddy disappears all the time. That’s why Mama goes off, too, sometimes,” Eddie says. “At night.”
Tucker had thought all of the boy’s attention was fixed on the old Frankenstein. But watching him, he sees the boy is watching the movie as if looking for the key to something else.
“Where does she go?” Tucker asks.
“Men around here say—” Eddie pauses. “She might be—”
Tucker waits, it is the first confirmation of what he’s been dreaming, and yet he almost doesn’t want Eddie to say it out loud because he doesn’t want the boy feeling as crazy as he feels.
“Like the other women of our family,” Eddie says at last.
“Tell me everything you know about witches, Eddie,” Tucker says. “I’ve been thinking I might want to be one when I grow up.”
Eddie glances away from the movie with anxious eyes.
“You don’t want to be a witch,” he says somberly. “They have to give themselves to the Devil.”
“How do they do that?”
“Well, some murder a baby and drink its blood. Some plunge a silver knife into a stream at midnight when the moon is full. Some just talk—they call the Devil and he comes.”
“Say I don’t want to be a witch. How would I go about protecting myself from them, then?”
“You can pour salt under your window and they have to stop and count all the grains. Or you can hang a sieve over your door and they have to stop and count the holes. If you interrupt them, they get all frustrated and have to start over again.”
The film has nearly played through but Tucker has decided if Eddie wants to watch it again, he’ll let him. They are at the most boring part where the monster terrorizes Frankenstein in different rooms but always in the same way.
“But what if a witch is already inside?” Tucker asks, not bothering to joke.
“Well, Mama says, most important, you are never, never to loan a witch anything because if you do, they’ll have complete power over you until you get it back. And you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”
“That’s a sound piece of advice,” says Tucker.
Eddie cranks the movie to its bright white conclusion. The heat from the bulb lifts a small white cloud around the lens as if the projector was slowly smoldering inside. To Tucker’s surprise, Eddie doesn’t ask to see the movie again but walks to the tobacco cradle and takes down the screen. He is so different from Tucker as a boy, who could never get enough, but demanded one more time even with things he didn’t care about. Maybe Eddie knows each time he sees it, he’ll enjoy it a little less.
“I’m going to sleep out here tonight,” Eddie says, spreading the sheet on the ground. “And in the morning hunt some more roots.”
“You’ll be okay out here alone?” asks Tucker. Eddie nods.
“You’re not scared?”
“I’m never scared,” Eddie says.
Tucker fits the top back on the projector and latches it tight. Eddie lies down in his clothes and boots, watching the sky. The cold doesn’t seem to bother him. Tucker understands the desire not to return. He and Sonia will be leaving first thing in the morning and this might be the last time he sees Eddie. He takes in the boy’s crazy cropped hair and his moon-bleached skin. The long, skinny shins ending in new black boots. The faraway, satisfied look, at eight years old, happy to sleep alone in a fallow field and dream of what he would be one day. This, thinks Tucker. You will always be this.
“Good night, Eddie,” says Tucker, taking up the projector and turning back to the house.
“You don’t really want to be a witch, do you?” Eddie asks. Tucker turns back briefly.
“I’m still trying to decide which way to go.”
“Where have you been?” Sonia asks when he returns. She is sitting on the top step of the porch wrapped in his jacket. Her silver hair shines in the dark.
“I went for a walk with Eddie,” he says. “He’s camping out tonight.”
“Did you tell him good-bye?”
“I did.”
His map is folded in her lap; it seems a lifetime ago that she fed him a hard-boiled egg. Sitting down beside her, he takes her hand in his. Her black fingernails and tin wedding ring. He loves this hand.
“Where are we headed, Tucker?” Sonia asks. He knows she is not talking about the map. He’s been thinking of nothing else.
“How can I ask you to wait for me when I don’t know what I’ll be when I get back?” he answers quietly. “My father left as one thing, he returned something else and we were trapped there with him. I would never want to do that to someone I loved.”
“I wouldn’t want to trap you, either,” she says.
“Is there any other way?”
“I want there to be,” she says.
He’s gazed into these pensive silver-gray eyes for such a short time but he can’t imagine not seeing them every day, watching over his shoulder as he shaves in the morning, flashing at him when he says something stupid. He knows he is a man who needs to be in love. He needs it like food and water. The only time he knows where he is, is when he’s inside a woman. It’s the only dialogue he trusts, the giving and taking, timeless exchange of sex. All day, he thinks, we listen and wait our turn to talk, each of us talking to ourselves. But sex is rapt and utterly present conversation. Wasn’t it Shakespeare’s genius, to know this? What we remember are not the exchanges, but the soliloquy coupling of mutually exclusive choices. Man and woman. Here an
d there. To be or not to be? And afterward, in satiety and gratitude—to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream.
He leans in and her mouth is on his and he cannot speak to tell her these things. She kisses him as if to steal all those words he’s hoarding like nuts for winter, the ones he needs to write down before he forgets them. But it is such a relief to lay down the burden of being himself. Tucker wants no more violent rides, he wants only love.
“Come inside,” she says, taking him by the hand and leading him to their room. Tucker wonders what it would have been like to ever have made love with her in their own bed.
* * *
He is dozing lightly beside her when Sonia rises and pulls on her trousers, rebuttons her blouse. She slips on her shoes and wraps herself in Tucker’s jacket. I’m going to wash up, she whispers. Come back soon, he mumbles, kissing her ankle. Carefully, she steps over him and walks to the spring, where she takes it all off again.
The water crashes down, icy from the rock. She hadn’t felt the cold before, but now she sees her breath against the sharp black sky. Her nipples are hard and swollen, her skin is gooseflesh as she turns around under the stream. With a trembling hand, she reaches between her legs to wash herself and, yes, it’s as she suspected, the blood leaks warm into her palm. Was it the good shaking one? The tea? Can she absolve them all and say she just miscounted? The water washes the blood over the rocks back into the ground.
Tucker is awake. She has been gone a long time and now she sees the lamp from the parlor moving down the breezeway and filling the kitchen with light. He throws open the back door and is silhouetted in the frame, looking out into the dark, stretching, lighting a cigarette. She stands still, letting the blood flow. Closing her eyes, she waits for him to come out to find her. She imagines the things he’ll say, the apologies back and forth. His clothes wet by her skin when he draws her to him. She waits for him to come, but when she opens her eyes again, he is sitting at Cora’s kitchen table where he has left his notes. He has his jug and his chipped cup and his closely written map. He is as still as she; only his hand is moving. To raise the cigarette to his lips and to scratch his pen across the page.