In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  “Already walked one of those. I can walk another.” Then, “Less you don’t want me to.”

  Norman looked away from her now, looked down at his hands joined together between his knees, his elbows and forearms flat on his thighs, and was quiet until his voice came and then he said, “I don’t know.” He could hear her breathing beside him, could feel slight movement in her shoulder against his and felt a patience from her as she waited for him and he knew what for and didn’t know how to say it and so only said, “I don’t barely know you.”

  “Course you don’t,” she said. “What it takes to know a person you tell me soon’s you know. I don’t know, not me. You got brothers, sisters?”

  “Sisters,” he said, “three of em.”

  But she kept right on talking as if he’d said nothing. “Your mama and daddy. You known those people all your life but you don’t know what they really all about inside. And you think they all gonna sit around waiting for you to know, Norman? You think even they themselves know? Not like they like to, I tell you that. You and me sitting here strange as can be to one another but here we are, ain’t that right? And what you call that? You call that a accident? I walked maybe three hundred miles to meet up with you Norman and didn’t even know it was you till I seen you laying there under that briar clump and how’d I know then that you’d wake up to be you? I didn’t. You know what I’m telling you Norman?”

  All he could do was nod his head, just once.

  She said, “I look at you, you know what I see? Norman?”

  “I got no idea.”

  “I see a man gentle right down in his soul. All the way down.”

  Then she was quiet and when she spoke again her voice had lost a little edge and he heard it right away, a little less certainty and he felt this loss in his chest like hot water. She said, “So me. You look at me what do you see? Norman?”

  His face furrowed like a spring field, wanting to get this just right. He had no idea what to say and kept looking at her hoping she’d wait for him, hoping she’d be patient. Hoping he’d find his way not out but through this.

  She didn’t wait. She said, “You see a little nigger girl wanting to eat up your biscuit, your bacon, whatever you got? You see me thinking my taking care of you once overnight is something I can trade for lots more than that? Or maybe even just nigger pussy ready for you to say the right words, do the right thing? That what you see, Norman?” And she was reared back away from him now, sitting still on the bench, upright as if at a great distance, her back arched like a drawn bow, eyes burning wide open as her soul welled up but not at all ready to pour out without something back from him. He watched his hands turning one over the other, the fingers lacing and relacing until he realized she was watching him do this. He slid around and lifted his right leg over the bench so he sat spraddle-legged facing her front on. With his face collapsed in sheer terror, he said to her, “Leah. All I see is the most lovely girl I’ve ever seen.”

  She stood off the bench away from him and said, “I told you the truth, Norman. I told you the truth. But you lying to me if that’s all you see.”

  And without even thinking about it he said, “What I see is the most lovely girl and one fat wide world of trouble. Trouble for both of us. That’s what I see.”

  And now she stepped back over the bench to face him and said, “You got that right. You got that just exactly right.” He reached and took one of her hands and sat looking down at their hands lying one into the other, the small slip of warmth between his fingers, her life lying up against his, and still not looking at her he said, “Don’t you ever talk that way to me again Leah.”

  “What way?” Her voice low, already knowing, needing to ask, needing him to tell her.

  So he said, “That nigger-this nigger-that business.”

  “White men talk any way they want to a colored girl.”

  “Am I white men to you then?”

  She reached her free hand and took his other hand and put it against her breastbone just below her throat and told him, “My daddy’s a white man, Norman.”

  “I figured something like that,” he said; in truth he hadn’t thought that far. So again without thinking he said, “He doesn’t talk that way does he?” His hand warming to the heat of her, his brain on the buttons down her dress-front.

  She tilted her chin to look at him. “My daddy has never even said my name to me.” Her voice tight with disgust, venom, a loathing that was distinct and almost covered all what sadness she had but that he knew was there, knew it the same way she believed his soul to be gentle. He scooted toward her on the bench and she brought her knees in tight to the bench to let him come close and he put his arms around her and she laid her head against him and he sat there, holding her like that.

  From the bench to her blankets on the floorboards of the little stockade was not a long way to go but they took a long time moving there, seeming to travel down inch by inch in a locked body motion that neither led nor followed but went with them trembling. Once down, they wrestled with limbs made slow and heavy, his fingers thick with the buttons of her dress and her breasts out then, nipples like summer blackcaps against thick honey, and she shuddered under his tongue. She astride him and with one hand he swept the dress up over her hips and opened his flies with the other, but she arched away from him even as he strained toward her, his thumb once traveling down the length of her as she opened under, the wet there breathtaking. Still she held off from him, their mouths smothering each other, tongues each hot and sharp to the other, almost struggling until she broke away, rolling over to lie beside him, her legs still spread and her dress open to the waist, and she said, “If you’d got it in I would’ve let you.” He rolled over on top of her and as he entered she said, her voice now a wet thing in his ear, “I could just melt all over you,” and with that he was done, thrusting from the small of his back and her soft cries falling into his ears like thin slices of bird-flight entering his brain. She reached down and held him to her after he was finished and told him, “Don’t leave, don’t go.” So he stayed until he slipped from her and still he lay there, the wet between them sealing one to the other. Neither one now wanting or able to leave.

  Walking up that final half mile of rough track above Randolph with the farmhouse not yet in sight, the crown of the elms over the house stretched ahead where the road cut an opening through the trees, the girl already thought she knew something of the place to which she’d come, having walked through half the state just to get here, as well as all the rest of the north that lay behind them now. The boy paced slow with so much home after so long finally in sight, both with those long days and too-short nights behind them; those and the weeks they spent outside Washington where after Lincoln’s assassination Norman waited with his company through a mourning for the president. They stayed through most of May to walk together one final time as a military force down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac, Norman waiting with great agitation while Leah disappeared into the swamped springtime of the capital, a place at odds with itself, wildly festive with the war’s end and murderously foul from the dead president. After four long days, she reappeared with lye-burned mottled hands and a pure gleefulness nothing could diminish; she was working in the basement of a hotel scrubbing linens and ironing them to a slick starched stiffness but earning cash money, in fact a sum that gave Norman pause; during the years of the war he’d come to think of money in the abstract and at those random intervals when his pay arrived he wired it through to his sheep account at the bank in Randolph. Those first six weeks passed and they went their own way, disregarding the packed trains leaving for Philadelphia or New York or Boston and walking up the country through the lush and easy summer, sleeping in woods or fields with hedgerow cover and buying food when they needed it. At times they had to fend off dogs and small boys with their name-calling and meanness strident and forgivable for their age and ignorance. Only once, outside Port Royal, New York, did a man on horseba
ck block their passage, inquiring the price of the nigger whore. And Norman brought the man down from his horse, an easy job after that long-dead cavalryman, and thrashed him there in the dust of the road, three other men off in the distance watching and not involving themselves. It was not the watchers but Leah who stopped him, who began kicking him in the muscles on the backs of his calves and screaming at him until he gave way. They continued up the road, leaving the man lying and his horse standing off some distance in a field, blowing its nostrils clear, and Norman and Leah walked by the watching men and Norman met their gaze and wished them a good day. So they walked to Vermont, to home for both, and told each other stories along the way. Outside a river town in northern Massachusetts they married each other standing naked in the moonlight in the Connecticut River, the water end-of-summer low and syrup-colored even in the night, the rings thin gold bands he’d bought three days previous and carried as they watched and waited for the right place and time. Late the following day they crossed into Vermont and Leah grew quiet, her animation screwed now to a tight focus, watching around her as if careful observation would offer keys or clues to the place she would assume among this landscape. As if her silence before this spectrum offered her protection against any hostilities or animosity.

  They came up that first sharp knee of the home-place hill and the land opened out not so much in a bowl as a series of wide ledges that held the farmstead: the haymeadows and sheep pastures and the high field where potatoes were grown, the orchard just above the house and barns, to where the sugar house stood flanked by the bush of great maples rising in crown over it all, the final pitch of the hillside steep again at the top amongst granite outcroppings and ranks of spruce. Norman’s gait gained with the sudden leveling of the track and the place there before him, his feet for the first time in years striking ground as if each separate egg of gravel and patch of dusty hardpan were known through the soles of his boots, Leah still apace beside him, her head high and her gaze steady before her, her eyes sweeping at first to draw it all in but settling on the house under the elms. Without looking at him she said, “Reckon they seen us yet?”

  As she spoke a figure broke out from the apple trees heavy with ripe fruit. Norman saw the baskets under the trees and the narrow picking ladder and thought Cider—could not smell it yet but could taste it—and then the girl hurtling down the road toward them, short-legged and strong, twice the little girl he’d left behind, still small but grown, her schoolgirl breasts rising against her shirtwaist like young apples as she ran toward him, her voice calling out his name.

  Beside him Leah softly echoed her. “Nawmin.”

  The girl spied Leah and gathered herself down to a walk and Norman saw the moment when she misstepped, saw her head cock like a puppy’s at something strange, and yet she came on, her eyes on Leah even as Norman stepped the last three feet and pulled her against him. Before he could speak she said, “Seems to me, a man or stout boy would’ve been more useful around, you had to bring one of them home.” And she stepped back from Norman then, her eyes already wiser as she looked Leah up and down.

  “Maybe you’ll find out, Miss Quickmouth,” Leah said, “that I’m a good bit stouter than you like.”

  Connie shrugged this away. “There’s work enough to share,” she said. “I guess you already learned how to work.”

  “Worked all my life. I learned how to let my mind work for me too. Sometimes before I opened my mouth. I know my manners.”

  “Well, la.”

  “Ain’t no la about it. There was, you’d be behaving different.”

  “That’s enough,” Norman said.

  Connie said, “You’re a feisty one.”

  “I wasn’t, you think I’d be here? Since your brother forgot himself, my name’s Leah.” She held out a hand. Connie looked at Norman and then back at the hand.

  Norman said, “My little sister. Constance. Connie, we call her.”

  Connie let Leah take her hand and then both women let go. Norman said, “Where’s Mother?”

  Connie said, “Up to the house.” And looked at Norman as if just thinking of something. She half turned and looked back at him. “You don’t look like I remember.”

  He nodded. “You’ve grown some too.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He nodded again, both brother and sister using this time to take measure of the other, recognizing each as familiar stranger to be learned anew, some parts of each never to be glimpsed. Norman strove for the ordinary, some tentative linkage to all that lost. “You making cider?”

  “Getting ready. Pressed some last week a little too rough. Sheep liked the pomace though.”

  “Jug of cider’s about the only thing I can think of that might clear all this road out of my throat.”

  She grinned. “You’ll have to help then.” And glanced again at Leah.

  Norman said, “I believe I recall how to crank a press.”

  “You’ll want some dinner first.”

  “About anything.”

  “I could run help get things started.”

  “Sure,” he said. “You do that. Carry your news along with you.”

  “You home is news enough.” Her eyes cut once more to Leah; then she turned and flew up the road.

  “So tell me Norman. That the easy part?”

  “I guess,” he said. “She didn’t intend meanness. You’re a shock. You have to allow that for folks. Otherwise you’ll just be disappointed every time.”

  They went a little ways and Leah said, “Tell me you love me,” and he did and she reached to take his hand. Norman took stock of the sheep in one high meadow, of the milk cows in higher grass of better pasture close to the barn and also of the broken axle off the wagon that sat upright against it like no one knew what to do next. There were other things, simple benign neglect adding up in his mind, an accounting freed of blame, more in the nature of inventory. Halfway to the house he felt her fingers begin to slip from his and he took a firm grip to hold her there beside him. He thought her only nervous and when she wrapped his hand tight with hers he thought she was fine again. He did not look at her. And so could not see the fear pass over her face or the swift knowing that ran through her, that the woman in the house ahead of her would take one look and read the weakness there that trembled constant as water running, the pith of despair and turmoil of her soul. She said nothing. Together they skirted the front of the house around to the side entry through the long woodshed and small toolshop into the kitchen, where he knew his mother and sister both waited. Leah walked alongside him.

  His mother was an old woman. She was stooped over the oven of the range and she turned to place a beanpot on the table where Connie sat silent. His mother placed her hands flat on the table and looked at Norman as she said his name. Her face was fierce and worn like treebark, her hair pulled back tight as always but dappled gray like a Percheron. Her hands on the table thick with raised veins and spots the color of new rust. She’d grown old in three years.

  So he only said, “Beans.”

  She demurred. “It’s Saturday you know. They was for supper. But it happened I started them early yesterday. Before milking. So they’re ready. I haven’t steamed the brown bread yet, you’ll have to make do with loaf-bread. There’s pickle.”

  “Leah, my mother. Mother, this is Leah.”

  Leah said, “Missus Pelham.” And her body swayed beside him as if almost to dip a curtsy. “Pleased to meet you.” Erect now, not moving.

  Mrs. Pelham remained behind the table, a guarded patience upon her face as if she’d seen wondrous and terrible things before and was waiting for this one to reveal which it was. She had never seen a black woman. And meeting her for the first time not in the village but here in her own kitchen. Brought by her warrior son. The woman was with him. That much was all she knew. So she inclined her head and responded. “I’m sure. You two set. I’ve got buttermilk and spring water and that’s it. No cider, fresh or hard. I’ve not put any barrels up thes
e past two years. Too much work for just the girl and me, without anyone to drink it. So you’ll make do. But set; you must be famished walking all the way back up here.” Her eyes on Norman as she added, “Other men rode trains at least part of the way.”

  Stretching for the beanpot, he said, “I should’ve got back here to help you. I wanted to see the country. Thought I might not get the chance again. And I figured you and sprout here was capable.” And then added, “So we took our time.”

  “You took your time.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Grinning at her, not yet realizing he couldn’t be both the boy-child miscreant and the unassailable man. He dug the spoon to the bottom of the pot and lifted the seasoning onion up through the beans and divided it half onto his plate and half onto Leah’s, then scooped beans onto his own plate and handed her the spoon.

  Connie said, “Could be others might like some of that bean-onion.”

  “Could be,” said Norman. “Could be some been eating bean-onions while others ate stale biscuit and bacon in the mud and rain. Sprout, you’ve grown up.” To see if he could make her blush. She did not, but her eyes clouded with hostility.

  She said, “I started to the Academy this fall.”

  Mrs. Pelham said, “Connie, go bring up some buttermilk.”

  “Not for me,” Norman said. “Spring water’s all I want.” Eyeing it where the iron pipe ran in through the wall, ending over the soapstone sink, the line laid the summer before the war by Norman and his father from the spring high on the hill above the house, the water fed by gravity, running in a steady thin stream year round, draining through clean cheesecloth clamped in a small pouch over the end of the pipe. He said, “I’ve drank more mud than water, enough so that spring ran in my dreams.”

  “Perhaps Lee would—”

  “Leah,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s right.” Mrs. Pelham said, agreeing to nothing. “Perhaps Leah would care for buttermilk.”