In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  “Watch out for that boy.” The child was back on the fence, half through it. She turned toward him. The man called Ben walked away then. He’d missed one of his tent shows. Docked pay. For nothing but to fill some stranger’s vague desire for a touch of something long gone. Nothing to do with him. He held the anger of this inside his chest, wrapped there like a single thread around a ball of threads. Walking away, he saw the daughter watching him from the shadow of the oxen barn, her face not a scowl so much as contempt. Her arms crossed over her breasts, hands holding her upper arms. The same long curly hair as the hair of the little boy, shining like crow feathers. Keeping his course he passed twenty feet away from her, giving her no smile but a glance flicking her away. The girl arched one eyebrow.

  She lied. She lied to herself when she first heard about the man at the fair and again when she saw him. Beyond that she didn’t know how long the lies had been occurring. As if a small phial secreted deep within herself had twisted open some long time since, releasing a vapor that ran all through her, tainting her blood and coloring her vision over everything, so everything became a needle-click off-center the way a compass will fault close upon a certain mass of particular stone. But lied to Norman when she declared no interest in going to see the colored strongman and only knew it then, knew also she was going, would go, the next day. This way discovered she’d been lying for a long time. And could not trace it, could not attribute it, could not even offer specific charges against herself, no instances, no examples, no small disguised misdeeds, but rather as an aroma rising off of her so long it had become familiar as if indeed her skin gave it off rather than her mind. Or her soul. She thought it likely it was her soul.

  And so that morning driving the phaeton with the light team of fine pretty sorrels into the village and beyond to the fairgrounds with the somber Abby and solemn-pitched Jamie she knew already she’d made a mistake, knew it was more than bringing the lie to life but once done she’d have no choice but to follow it back to the source, to let it drain her as a blown beaver dam drains a spreading new-grown marshland and reverts it to meadow. And drove forward, her stretched arms directly linked through reins as extensions of her own drawn tendons to the arch-necked prancing horses. Driving someway toward herself with no excitement but the prickling of inevitable fear. Fear delicious over her as a rupture.

  So tied the team in the carriage shed and hung net bags of hay for them and then with great elaborate gravity toured with her children the livestock sheds, the swine stretched on their sides, some with suckling young, the pens of ewes and lambs and the single great curled-horn rams, the teams of oxen, the dairy cattle, which barn ended with a half-dozen stout high-sided pens for bulls, the plough and dray horses, the barn beside the track with the racing horses some of which had arrived in their own railroad cars and finally the barn layered with stacks of wooden coops keeping fowl, the hens and roosters and a handful of fancy feathered and to her mind useless birds. She went through this last with greater speed, already knowing what the countryside had to offer. There were none of her own birds there.

  They went out then, passing the buildings of foodstuffs and handiworks and onto the carnival edge beyond the racetrack. Here she fed her children but did not eat herself until they came to the ice-cream vendor, where she took up a paper cup and wooden spoon and ate peach ice cream. She hadn’t tasted a peach in years. The chunks of fruit fortified with sugar and folded into the frozen sweetened cream churned flavor that ran over her tongue and down her throat straight to her heart and she could not finish it. Her eyes rimmed wet in the dry rarefied air. She thrust the cup to her young greedy son and without meeting the eye of her elder daughter hurried beyond the tents to the privies set there, locking herself inside standing upright, blotting her eyes and nose with a handkerchief, with great effort making no sound. She wanted water to wash her face, to flush her eyes, but there was none. She emerged and passed around the waiting line and found her children. Wordless still she took each by a hand and led them onto the midway. They found the barking voice of the white man outside the tent and she more than the children gazed up at the broad strip of canvas with a terrible African depicted, a grotesque, breaking horseshoes with his teeth. She paid the fee and they went inside.

  Afterward, after she’d talked with him, she stood there by the rail with light dust from the circling trotting horses raised up in a thin pall over the track, the fingers of one hand tracked onto Jamie’s back to hold him there against his desire and impulse, her eyes lifted off to the hills beyond. It was a curious moment. Her mind was still, without thoughts, yet she sensed profound change, as if her mind would not yet allow words to what her body already knew. Her soul. As if arrived at a point neither guessed nor glimpsed but inevitable once there. And not as if directed from any source outside herself but a small persistent pip burst free of her core. She felt calm, enjoying the calm before the welter of thought and doubt. It was a peaceful moment there in the sweet heat of the end of summer with her hand upon her youngest child’s back, both watching the flashing horses and the silk-jacketed men driving them, the land lifted around as known to her as the boy’s body, the air holding them in perfect stillness and lucidity. It was the last peace she’d know and a part of her knew that too, knew at least that it might be. And still when Abby came behind them Leah knew she was there and turned before the girl reached them and said, “Let’s get on to home. I’ve seen enough, if you have.”

  “I never wanted to come but for you.”

  “Well yes, you did your good deed then. And without killing you. But you might take the frown off that pretty face.”

  Abby scowled. “What’d you want with that pathetic man anyhow?”

  “Umm,” Leah hummed. “Just to see him, talk to him.”

  “Everybody else seen you talking to him too.”

  “Sooner you stop worrying about what everybody else thinks, the happier you’ll be.”

  “I don’t care spit for what anybody says. Never did, never will.” Contradicting herself and not caring. Not even seeing it. A blazing heat coming off her.

  Leah wondered if she and her mother would ever have reached that place together. Likely. Sudden tight focus with all peace gone, Leah said, “And there was plenty odd about that man, plenty frightening to speak the truth. But not one thing pathetic, not that I saw.”

  “Mama, he’s a sideshow freak.”

  “Oh, no.” Leah shook her head. “Not to me he’s not. Not to him either.”

  “I was flat humiliated, watching you two stroll and chat.”

  “No, you weren’t either. What you were was scared to come talk to him yourself.”

  “I’m supposed to want that since he’s a Negro?” Leah shook her head. “No. I guess not.”

  Abby deflected, turning the criticism back at her mother. “I’d been more useful staying to home and helping Daddy and Prudy with the hay. You didn’t need help from me.”

  “It was good to have you here. But you’re right, its time for home.”

  Jamie’s hands wrapped and locked around the top rail. “I want to stay. I want to stay and watch the fast horses.”

  “I spect you do.” Leah unwrapping those hands finger by finger, closing one of her own hands around his as she freed it. “But we’re going home now.” Abby already trailing off toward the carriage shed, a long figure in a white dress tight at the waist and dropping close around her near to the ground, small ruffles at her shoulders like wings breaking through, the sleeves then skin tight down to the wrist. Leah steered the boy after his sister. She said, “Those horses’ll be back another day.”

  She drove the team south back through the village emptied for the fair and on along the river another mile before turning off for the farm road, passing the scarred cellar hole where the Doton house had burned the winter Jamie was born. The hole was already grown up with sumac and black-raspberry canes, the big shade maples still standing and the burned-back lilac clump once again vigorous. She recalled the bent-ove
r old woman who walked with two canes and who’d made no friendly effort toward Leah until the children, the two girls, had been old enough to pour down the hill and snare her with a child’s natural grace and ease. She remembered, too, the adolescent girls at her funeral service following the fire: Abby sitting erect, the only movement the slow glimmer of tears tracking one at a time down each cheek, and Pru hunched into the pew as if her grief were a thing dragging her toward the floor. Pru then and forever after held by abject terror of fire, the nightmares that followed only subsiding with time but never gone, not even when Norman placed sap buckets of water in the corners of the girls’ room and also beyond in the hall. And Leah driving home from the fair past the still-black foundation stones seeing this of her two girls as if holding a kind of photograph of each, some measure complete of each. Not an image as much as a sensation: each held not just as child or young woman but all of life, a totality of each. She could not say the same for the boy-child beside her on the seat, his hands over hers on the lines, his bow mouth chirping the horses on. It was not the simple definition of his years. She feared for him.

  Going up the hill to the farm she knew she was going back. Not home, which spread around her, running deep from the earth like streams into the air and through her each day with husband and children and livestock and livelihood; not home then, but back. Back, back, to a place not so much of memory as of the scrambled fraught dreamland of the last twenty-five years, back to seek sense of that jumble, back to unthread and reweave that nighttime fabric that often as not left her upright in bed re-skinned in sweat and a patina of terror ill defined or all too clearly marked out. Back to reclaim all this and make it her own. Back to learn fates, not least her own. Back to learn who was living and who dead, who was remembered and who forgotten, who remained and who drifted to dust. Who perhaps was sought and if so who was left to do that seeking. And to what purpose. And so to learn herself anew. Coming up into the dooryard of the farm looking over at the bright proud hurt daughter of herself already older than she was then, looking as if to see if a hint was there of how to compose herself for this trip. And there was. And there was none.

  Knowing this effort to learn herself again might be empty, hands raked through cold coals. Knowing also it might prove disaster lying content these years until she returned to face it or be snared by it. Knowing this was the same risk and danger central to her life in the same way she followed the wounded Union soldier boy who proved to be Norman for days through the countryside of Virginia and then finally, with no greater proof than the notion she must, descending to find him again to see how and in what way he recalled her. And clearly calmly understanding that this one success held nothing toward a second. Which was in its own way more reason to go than not. Everything at risk. Everything to be lost. Which she knew was not the same as failure or mistake but rather the thing essential to being allowed each day to draw air into her lungs and put one foot before the other. Walking out from house to barn of a warm summer evening was a simple thoughtless thing, at worst offering up a dead hen or sick ewe or a bare foot glued with chicken manure. Walking out there in the midst of a January storm drawn inland off the coast lacked even the vague premise of reaching the gone-to-shadow barn. Each had to be done, the way every fall forkful of turned-up potato soil has to be hand sifted for the small buttons and larger caked clods to reveal the unbroken smooth-skinned food underneath.

  Back, then, and back to what. It was not a childhood longed for. But her mother first. Her mother surely. It seemed plausible Helen would be right there, if not in the rank squalor of Mebane’s slave cabin then somewhere close by. A colored section of the town. Some small simple place of her own. No longer a young woman but maybe to have gained a husband and even a family of her own. Leah knew it possible her sudden arrival might bring pain, the past made vivid. So be it if it came to that. For all of them. Also as likely, there might be no trace of her. All Leah knew for sure was one way of living had been swept off and in that sweeping surely people fled, went off wordless into the night as she had. Her mother perhaps among them and perhaps even to well and good. And knew too it was more than Helen; wanted also to see what had happened to the town, to the place itself, to the white people. Wanted to see the Mebane house still four-square or broken to rubble as the cellar-hole just passed. Not even sure she knew which would satisfy her. And beyond all that, less precise and yet also in an odd intangible way, of considerable and terrible weight, wanting to know again something of the place she came out of: Beyond the people, otherwise from circumstance, to regain the place and so give form to the vague imagery of dreams. Be September and still hot, pale skim of redclay dust over everything, dulling even the leaves on the trees, the big oaks of the Piedmont pastures and the live oaks and magnolias of town streets all dulled with dust, only the loblollies and white pines shedding it but their needles still pale in the heat-shimmer. Lawns burned back. The midday breeze hot moving hot, the evening air stilled, the sun grown huge, the color of split peach as it dropped to the horizon smudge. September, she thought. People working in the tobacco fields at dawn, figures of clothing in the green waist-high fields with morning mist already burning away from the grinding sun. Children back to school, the streets empty even first thing in the morning. A good time to come in quiet and quiet as she could learn what there was to be learned. The span of summer lengthened out before the fall with people slowed almost without hope for the first cool day. Nobody even likely to pay attention to one strange colored woman off the train. What she hoped for. The advantage of being unexpected. Surprise.

  She let Jamie drive the last five hundred feet to the barns. The sorrels quickened with the barn in sight and immediately she let him have the lines he stopped chirping for speed and held back the team, his feet propped against the dashboard and his legs straight, using his body weight to hold the team in, calling to them, his voice high and serious without excitement or fear. The horses’ hooves clipped up off the dark packed earth like sticks off a drumhead, the geldings swinging smartly in the dooryard to come up before the carriage shed beside the horsebarn. Jamie sinking back slowly onto the seat, still talking to the team.

  Leah sat a long moment on the carriage seat, not long enough for her daughter to look up from unhitching the team but time enough for the sudden sharp recognition of her boy—that whatever streak of doubt and tremble ran through her had made its way into the boy redoubled and been born a new thing altogether, a coiling anger that he held tight to him as another boy might a penny found. Held secret and deep until it was needed. She knew Jamie gained this from her and knew also that neither his sisters nor his father recognized it yet. But they would. She was confident and sad near to weeping that one day they would.

  She could not bear to imagine what it might mean for Jamie, what it would bring to his life. Not yet gone, she knew he was what she would leave behind. What would remain of her. What was most true.

  Norman and Prudence spent the afternoon putting up the first of the last cutting hay of the season, he on the ground and she on the wagon bed, the black Percheron mares drawing the wagon along the rolled-up windrows, undriven, their lines wrapped loose around one of the front uprights, the mares knowing the course by the length of the windrow, walking at the precise pace it took a man to fork up hay. It was hot and airless in the meadow below the barns and Norman worked bareheaded with his shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his upper arm. Pru on the wagon in a loose dress and barefoot with a wide-brimmed straw hat with the edge of one brim sheep-chewed. Norman felt a piker and delight at once, ambling and lifting the forkfuls up to her where she dipped her fork to take his hay and lay it into the load, building the load around and under her as if making a many-layered shingled roof, laying each forkful down in tight crosshatch to the next. The method let her finally stand atop the high mounded load as they drove secure to the barn, where she would hand down the forkfuls in reverse order. She wore the hat against the spray of cinnamon freckles that lay over her body top to to
e as scales, barely letting her skin the color of dry tangerine rind show through. Her hair a soft brown as if sifted with ash. Her eyes wide and deeply set and beautiful like her mother’s, the color of broken shards of pale green mason jar under water, flecked close to the pupils with gold specks only visible with light reflected in the right shade if you knew when to look. She was a short-bodied young woman, thick-waisted and thighed with upper arms strong as a man’s, reminding Norman of his younger sister. He knew she pretended indifference to her looks and did not like herself. He knew she placed great distance between body and mind, a distinct opposite to her sister. He knew her heart was laced with despair and loathing. They’d never spoken of this.

  They talked as they worked.

  “Sister’s about driving me up the wall with her mooning around. Everything’s a production of sighs and sheep’s eyes. Sits gazing off daydreaming and then hissy-fits I ask her to help with something. Then, just like that, she’s mean as an empty purse. The other day, yesterday it was, she turned on me all the sudden. We were washing up after supper and I said something bout how fun it’d be down to the fair today, all the boys she’d see there, something like that, and she brought a hand up all wet with suds and thumped me right here”—touching the end of the fork handle to her breastbone—“and said, I ever say anything about getting married, ever, you whack me over the head with a stick.’ Irked me, I tell you. I wanted to say, It bothers you so bad stay home and make hay.” Her face frustrated and amused, wet with sweat, stubbled with stuck chaff. She moved with the rocking track of the wagon as on a rough slow sea.

  Norman, walking and lifting the forkloads over his head now, had less wind. “She got her heart broke. That’s not easy, ever.”