In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  “Thank you, no. Water would be fine. But I could get it.” She started to rise.

  “Set. There’s no servants here but we can take care of a guest.” Inflecting slightly on the last word and moving to the sink, filling a pitcher and placing it on the table, this time coming around to stand behind them and reach the pitcher through, placing it between them. She stayed there, her hand on the pitcher until Norman looked up at her, her eyes stark with brightness, a faint flutter around her mouth as she gazed on the bright slender band on his left hand. Her voice a husk, stripped of fluid as she said, “Oh Lord, Norman. What have you done?”

  Leah swung her head sideways to look up but Mrs. Pelham was gone, her skirts swept by her movement. She opened the door of the small parlor and closed it after her. The sound a small clap in the stillness. Leah released a held breath. She said to him, “Go after her. Go talk to your mother, Norman.”

  “No.” Connie stood up fast, her chair a rough scrape backwards. “No. I’ll go. You two just set there. Set there and eat your damned beans.” When he spoke her full name, she turned back as if his speaking had not lessened her angry confusion but charged it further, her small face pinched upon itself, her curls tossed adrift by the speed of her movement. “You waltz on in here in your own sweet time without a word about Father or how we made out alone here and set down to eat up the supper in the middle of the day and that’s not enough, no sir, not for you, but you drag along home with you this … this … colored woman and set her down at the table to feed her while your own mother stands waiting a kind word or embrace from you, feeding her up our supper—”

  “That’s enough,” Norman said. “Leah’s my wife. We’re married.”

  “Married?”

  “That’s right.” His tone meant to settle the matter.

  “Norman Pelham,” his sister said all in one breath, “you’ve lost your mind,” as she walked a mannered step through to the closed parlor and shut the door behind her soft as nothing at all.

  “They not delighted with me,” Leah said.

  “That’s all right,” Norman said, wondering not only why he’d failed to write his mother some warning or caution but why he’d not even thought to. And stranger still, he felt a tingling of excitement at this failure, excitement real as his balls tightening. He looked at the woman next to him and said, “I am.”

  Sunday morning Mrs. Pelham and Connie hitched the mare that killed his father to the high-seated two-wheeled cart and took it to town: to church and, Norman was sure, much more than a usual simple worship and social. It would be late afternoon before they returned. He spent the morning at his father’s old desk, reviewing what passed for accounts and then writing a letter to the horse trader in Chelsea. He would not keep the team with the killer mare. This done he began a close count of the sheep, walking over the high pasture and tallying with a pencil stub on a sheet of brown wrapping paper, always watching Leah as she went back and forth outside, working at the tub, scouring their clothes with lye soap and hand-wringing them before draping them onto the lilac and hydrangea that bordered the back of the house. The clothes from the height of land small bright flags that served to bring the careless summer over him so that he did not fret over the number of ram lambs or the three ewes he absolutely could not find but allowed himself a fine moment at the edge of a stone ledge looking down over it all; this was his and he was needed here and he’d returned to it. He came down off the hill before the middle of the day to find Leah and led her back into the house, up the stairs to the attic where the night before he had taken her, instead of to his old room down just from his sister’s and close to where his mother lay not sleeping. They’d climbed up the small cramped stairs to pull out and shake loose an old feather ticking where they made their bed, and now he was on his back in the empty house with her above him, Norman deep with solace as her face pitched and roamed over him, he watching the steady come and go of mud daubers along the rafters. In the afternoon he stripped down the broken axle, readying it for the smith and then went through the barns, taking stock of the small lay-in of hay and the dairy tie-up, having already run his eye over the five cows in the pasture, small brown and dun Jerseys that all looked poor to him. He’d never cared for cows but accepted the five were there to stay and likely more of them. Then he walked through the empty pig shed and scattered shellcorn to bring out the ranging hens, the flock greater and older than it should have been. They’d be eating a lot of stewed hen this winter. He killed a young roasting rooster and took it to Leah, who sat on the ground in a clean skirt and shirtwaist under the appletrees, her legs bared to above her knee and her chin wet with apple juice. He held up the rooster and said, “It won’t hurt to have supper ready when they come back.”

  “Un-uh,” she said. “I’m not messing with her kitchen.”

  He said, “There’s potatoes and carrots and parsnips on the hill. There’s winter squash on the old manure pile by the barn. You could bake a pie from these apples. There’s fresh cream in the pans down basement. It’s your kitchen.” He dropped the rooster on the ground next to where she sat. He said, “It’s my farm.”

  He climbed the track up the hillside, passing the sugarhouse, not willing to look inside at the buckets with rusted hoops and rotted staves, continuing on through the sugar bush, the ancient maple trunks thickbarked and dense, some capable of holding five or six buckets, from there following the track around the shoulder of the mountain into other mixed hardwood of beech and birch, ash, ironwood and hickory. The woods a carnage of color, the early autumn-smell sweet as if death could be that way. A partridge blew out of the litter beside the track, and Norman flinched without hesitation. He wondered if everything would somehow always remind him of the war. If a partridge could ever be just that again.

  He came around the mountain above the wildland of a small gore and walked another quarter of a mile before coming upon Ballous’. A shake-sided one-story dwelling more cabin than house but for the length of it. Backed up against a granite outcropping the builder had used as backside for the fireplace and chimney. The front door open to the afternoon and Ballou himself seated there, as if waiting for Norman. Dressed in green woolen pants, leather braces up over red underwear, the clothing not so much dirty as having gained a texture from the forest loam, sawdust, deer and fish entrails. His long hair greased behind his ears and his face sharp-shaven, features like a fisher-cat. Smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, the only one Norman had ever seen, the stem and bowl the color of antler from handling and tobacco stain.

  “Heard you was back.”

  “Yuht.” Not surprised the news had leapfrogged up the mountain.

  “One a them boys hellcattin down to Randol’ last night, chasing some little skirt come weaseling back at dawn with word a you. Boys no good for nothin but they got to do her, young like that. Not me, no. Not no more. One old woman is much for me, right? You be learned that soon, eh?”

  “You been keeping my mother in wood?”

  “Yuht, sure. No complain?”

  “Nope. Not at all. Just there’s only two—three cords back behind the house.”

  “She been buying as she needed. Pretty much.”

  “Uh-huh.” Angry but not sure at whom. “You got any yarded up?”

  “Got plenty down. Not sawed and split.”

  “Not too hard to get to?” Norman watching him.

  Ballou grinned, feral amber teeth. “All I cutting here on the backside a you. What I want your wood for, I got all this?” Spreading his arms.

  Norman ignored this, certain come winter or spring he’d find stumps in the far reach of his own land, knowing Ballou enjoyed selling her own wood to his mother. He said, “I need ten cords for the winter.”

  “Them nigger women don’t know no snow. Got to keep em warm and it take more than what you got, eh, Norman?”

  “Henri, you got that much wood or not?”

  Ballou sucked his pipestem. “How soon you want this ten cord?”

  “Two week
s.”

  “No.”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Can’t be done.”

  “Your boys around?”

  Ballou looked around the yard as if to spy them there. He shrugged. “Out the woods somewhere.”

  “You got plenty of help then.”

  Ballou fired the dead pipe. The smoke smelling like the day itself. When it was well lighted he said, “October fifteen. Ten cord.”

  “Split and stacked.”

  Ballou spit. Agreeing.

  “I pay when it’s done.”

  “Half and half. I got to have something keep the boys out the woods.”

  “Five cords, half. The other five, the rest.”

  Ballou shrugged. “You want some tea?”

  “Thanks, Henri, but I got to get on. I got lots to do. Give my best to your Missus.”

  “That war, she bad, eh?”

  Norman nodded. “Yuht.”

  Ballou gazed off, done with it. He looked back at Norman and said, “Well get on with you then. The boys and me we start this week. Come a load and meet your own Missus, eh?”

  Norman went back around the mountain, the afternoon failing, the light rich as butter. The two-wheeled cart was out in the yard before the open barn doors, resting its horseless shafts on the ground. Connie came from the barn and picked up the shafts and backed the cart around into the barn, Norman guessing she’d arrived home and left the mare to stand in the yard while she went to change from her good clothes before coming back out to stable the horse and wheel the cart away. Wondering if his mother was milking. He decided to leave them alone, all three of them, for a little while, feeling some things might be worked out better with him absent. The kitchen showed a clear smoke rising with heat vapors at the chimney top. He settled at the base of a maple, his back against the rough soothing ridges of the trunk and his knees up. He could still see the farm.

  Intending to sort his plans and purposes for the coming days, not only what must be said and done but also what must be established, for whatever lapses might be made then would be lapses with them forever; he knew this, and knew also that payments would be extruded, the least of them in cash or kind. Telling himself he’d known these things, these costs, all the summer long, right down to the first day that he woke to her looming beside him. Telling himself no event lies or falls unconnected to others and that will is only the backbone needed to face these things head on. Determined then to pay attention. As if his father spoke, calling for him to look sharp.

  Gazing out over the bowl of his small fortress, watching a wedge of geese tracking over the far ridge following the branch of the river south, Norman found himself thinking of Ballou: the man as wild goose pursuing his own course without concern of what others cared or thought of him. Norman’s father ever bastardizing his name even to his face, as if his unwillingness to commit body and soul to a patch of rock-studded ground was crime enough without the taint of otherness about him already; the French Canadian unreliable but content to live on the unclaimed wildland above the small gore. Ballou was out on snowshoes all winter long running traplines and felling trees if a market appeared on the horizon, the rest of the year happy to fish, hunt and attend horse races or run hounds. Ballou was among the first of only a few who paid out hard money in gold coin for substitutes for his three boys, not waiting for the draft. Offering no explanation, his smile tight and scornful as if he saw the others fools not to appreciate that life was short and bittersweet enough without being blown apart to serve some other men’s ideas of how things should be. Norman felt that he and Ballou had just executed a short and easy turn of dance with one another: firewood bought; money paid. And Norman now deflated with the effort as if it had stripped some layer from his soul. Knowing the worst men could do to one another wasn’t the clear gore of Marye’s Heights or the wreckage of Petersburg but the relentless small decades of generations of Sweetboro, North Carolina. Which all the efforts of battle might change but not erase from the thinking walking talking breath of the woman down the valley before him. What was he to say, Rest easy now? With both of them knowing however far the distance and unlikely the location she would never, and so neither would he, assume that some peace or ease was theirs to hold the way others assume that peace could be held. Live quiet, was what she’d said. But without knowing exactly what they were headed to, he knew while it might be possible it could never be certain. He wondered if that was why Ballou paid that gold money, as much to save his sons as to announce his intention to live quiet. Would make it so with all the fiber and gut he could string out of himself to ward off everything else. Whatever good it might do.

  What she told him about Sweetboro she’d told him only after they’d left Washington and were traveling north through the war-blown countryside of northern Virginia and through the western arm of Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Camped in the barn of a man they’d met along the road, the man with a yoke of young balking oxen that Norman stepped forward and helped goad. The man who did not offer his home but his barn-loft with good bright barley straw, the man with a woman a head taller than he who stood at the half-door of her kitchen and watched Norman and Leah cross the yard to the barn, the door holding back three round-faced boys no more than six to ten. The man crossing from the house in the summer evening with a crock of sauerkraut baked with spare ribs, a fresh wheat loaf on top that steamed when they broke it open. Leah watching his back until he closed the kitchen door behind him again and only then reaching to eat.

  Norman said, “You don’t care for that feller much.”

  Her mouth brilliant with grease she said without pause, “It’s not him. I don’t trust his woman.”

  Norman almost asked what to trust and then stopped himself, letting his quiet run along under him as he ate his supper. It was the first hot food he’d had not prepared by the army or purchased out the back door of a rooming house or hotel. Since Washington there’d been a wariness, a caution near skittish of strangers about her that she’d not so much hidden as simply acted upon without direct reference, making clear she’d prefer camping in hedge or thicket than asking at a house. She wouldn’t linger in towns or around groups of people, especially groups of men; she would startle at the sound of galloping horses approaching on the road. Recalling the town in Maryland where a police officer had hurried toward them, cutting it seemed across the street to meet them and how Leah had folded herself against Norman’s side even as the man passed them with no more than a glance. In the pale green twilight he carried the crock back to the kitchen door and thanked the woman, returning to the barn to lie in the straw opposite Leah atop a spread blanket. He said, “Why’s that woman bother you?”

  As though she was not sure she was going to tell him she said, “The way she look at us. Everybody look. But some people, like this woman, seem like she trying to line my face up with something else, something she heard or been told or maybe even some picture she seen somewhere. Or like she memorizing me, like she want to get every little line down right. It’s more than not liking me cause I’m me or even that I’m me with you.”

  Norman was quiet awhile, thinking everything she said was true and sure also it was not. When he spoke again it was dark with the summer stars out the open loft door of the barn showing bats slipping out from under the ridgeline, cutting slim arcs against the night sky. He said, “You going to tell me the rest of it now or you want to wait some while longer?”

  “Tell what?”

  “Whatever it is that gets you so spooked around strangers. Whatever it is you done wherever it is you come from. Something makes you think somebody’s watching for you. Or might be.”

  “You got that all figured out.”

  He shrugged even though he guessed she couldn’t see it. “I guess you’ll tell me when you’re ready. Although it might not hurt if I knew what it was we’re looking out for. Or not.”

  “I’m not keeping nothing from you Norman.”

  “Didn’t say you were.”

  “
I just ain’t told you everything yet is all.”

  “I guess there’s plenty about me you don’t know too.”

  “You hush up Norman. Trying to talk to you.” He could not see this but knew she was frowning in the dark. Then she began speaking and her voice gained a flatness he hadn’t heard before, without passion or tone, the voice older than she, as if the voice of the place she spoke of, the voices held there and rising from that place through her.

  She told him of Sweetboro: the late February afternoon alone in the kitchen of the house, with her mother Helen and the old woman Rey not three dozen steps out the back door in their cabin, Leah alone heating flatirons on the stove and pressing the clothing of the white people, all now gone to Raleigh but for the younger son somewhere in the house behind the kitchen door. The white people were clutched near to panic with disarray: firstborn Spencer dead almost a year defending Petersburg and the younger Alex just fourteen run off two months before and returned almost immediately with his right arm gone to the elbow, the pus-stained wrappings among what Leah ironed because everything the white people wore in any way when washed was also ironed. Alex would not leave the house, as if his arm lost was somehow not enough, that it was disgrace to have come back at all. Mebane took his wife and two daughters to the capital where life was only less grim because there were more white people to share it with. Leah was not so much happy with the white people gone as no longer caring; the rumors of the past four years she’d learned to ignore, but what was clear was the state of the white people and she knew things had in some fundamental way already changed, even if she still stood with rising steam burning her nostrils as she pressed their underclothes.

  Mebane the youngest son of a youngest son who went from the coastal plain rice fields below Wilmington to Chapel Hill and then for no reason clear to anyone, brought his bride to Sweetboro where he practiced law and spent much of his time traveling the thirty miles southwest to Raleigh while she kept house with Rey and another slave, Peter, a man brought to tend the stable and the flower gardens that fell in steps between the house and the redclay street. His wife became pregnant almost immediately with Spencer, but four years passed before Alex was born and it was during this time that Helen was bought from Mebane’s brother. Seventeen years ago: Helen at the time two years younger than Leah now was. Mebane would still from time to time pass through the kitchen to nod at Helen before passing out the back steps to wait for her in the cabin, his eyes never more than glancing off Leah like fingers flicking a fly, his eyes the same wetglass green as hers. Other times he’d come to her mother at night, less cautious, taking no notice of the girl or the old woman behind their curtains, his rut then loud and jubilant. Where Leah first heard the words that other white men and boys would direct at her. Where she would lie awake without moving, her face stiff as if held together by will, the breath under her ribs a small sharp thing, waiting for him to finish and leave, waiting for the smell of him to drain out of the night before falling back to sleep. As the February afternoon folded without notice to dusk, the rain still steady down and the kitchen steaming with warmth, her right hand slid the iron back and forth and her left moved fanlike both before and behind the iron. Something pleasant in the sway of her torso over the board, pleasant in the slight clutch of leg muscles anchoring her over it all. Happy to be left alone, to feel left alone. And so only a little less happy when Alex came through the connecting door from the dining room across from where she stood, thinking he would come and go and she would still be alone in the short evening.