In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  In straight stalls in the horsebarn there were a team of heavy horses and next to them a team of driving horses and in a last stall a big stout pony the color of cream. The horses stirred and blew when they came in, one of the drafts stamping hard against the stall planking. Prudence took the buckets from Foster and dipped them into the iron-strapped water trough and set them down and the dogs, standing back, noses and ears up toward the horses, crept forward and drank. Then they went through a door into a partitioned sheepfold and the sheep also stirred, moving away from the light to the dark corners. At the end of the walkway was an open area with a pile of sawdust bedding and a stack of hinged two-sided gates used to make small lambing pens for individual ewes. Prudence took up one of these and swung it open and still holding it up against her hip kicked a thick layer of sawdust from the pile up against one stone foundation wall and leveled the sawdust with a boot and then moved the unfolded gate and without them even aware she was doing it cornered the dogs within the enclosure made.

  “There,” she said. “That should do them fine.”

  “They might cry some. A strange place and all.”

  “They’ll settle down. It’s warm and dry. And the sheep, it’s a lot of company. It’s a great calming thing. You’ll see. Your dogs’ll be fine.”

  “I know.” And because he wasn’t sure he leaned over the gate and stroked the two heads and as he did this behind him Prudence spoke.

  “Who can know the amount of despair someone feels that they take their life? It’s as much to ask what it’s like to be dead. All I can imagine is you come to some understanding of having failed in some fashion that is so much a part of you that it is not endurable. That all other things grow small and pale by comparison. The people around us, the ones we depend on, and those that depend on us. Whatever sense you have of God, whatever idea you have of Him. That also has to fail. I’m not talking about a crisis of faith. I’m talking about all your life you hold what you think is a rock in your hand, even though you can’t see it. But it is there, you know it’s there. Then one day you look down and right there, clear as daylight in the palm of your hand is only a pile of dust. And maybe even as you look at it some breeze comes across and blows it away. And you’re left with nothing. Just an old open hand. But that’s not really what you asked, is it? You think there might be a code or a key that will help you understand.”

  “No.” Foster said. “I think you might be right.”

  As if she had not heard him she said, “This is what we know. What she learned when she went back to Carolina all those years later. The old man, Peter, who helped her get away. She learned he was taken out by a group of men and killed. Tortured and killed. Abby heard her talking about it. Talking to herself. He was put up on a block with a rope around his neck and then soaked down with kerosene and set afire while the men stood around and watched him dance himself burning up right off that block so he died by the rope. But all the time burning he didn’t kick away from the block until the last moment, until he couldn’t stand it. Because a man will endure most anything to stay alive. And those other men, watching, waiting for that moment when he gave up hope.”

  “By Christ,” Foster breathed out.

  “That’s what we know. What we can be sure of. But there’s other things. More questions than anything. But they’re still there. Some ways, they’re bigger even than what we know.”

  “Did she find her mother?”

  “No. Not that we know. The thing is, the time Abby overheard her talking—” Prudence stopped, gazing at the rough stone foundation, a soft jumble of surfaces in the lantern light. Then she looked at Foster. “I’m making her sound like a crazy person. But she was not. Even though she hanged herself, I do not think she was crazy. I think she was horribly sane, as if she’d seen something beneath the surface of the everyday. Now, I’m likely the one sounds crazy to you.”

  “No ma’am.” Foster stood blinking at her. His dogs behind the gate curled into the sawdust, already sleeping, as if the strange woman was speaking a lullaby to them.

  “I don’t sound like some old woman going on in years with her head tilted by all this tragedy in her family? I don’t sound that way to you?”

  He grinned at her. “What you sound like is my dad. He had this theory that almost everything people do is not what they want but what they think the world wants them to do. He’d wonder what sort of world it would be, after things got sorted out, if everybody just started doing what they really wanted. And he would grin and say it would be paradise for those that survived the blood of it getting sorted out. I think he was talking about the same sort of thing you’re talking about.”

  “It’s the nature of a human to be vicious.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “But all any of us really wants, in our hearts, is that one long golden day.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  They were both quiet then. After a time Prudence said, “Except for the part about Peter we do not know, any of us, what she found. Who she found. But there was nothing said that made us think she found her mother. But what it seems like, is the person she was addressing—we think it was the boy, the white boy she thought she’d killed all those years ago. We think maybe he wasn’t killed after all. That he survived. You talk to Abby. She was the one there. Hearing Mother. She’s told me but still she’s the one for you to ask.”

  Foster nodded. Then asked, “The boy, the white boy, the one who attacked her? He was the son of the man who owned her?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes to both. But he was more than that. He was her half brother.”

  “Now wait,” Foster said.

  But she did not wait. “He was her brother. Because her father was the man that owned her mother. That owned her too. That owned his own daughter.”

  He sat up in bed in the dark room. The old house still but for nightsounds around him. The creak of a joist. A settling snap of a stairboard. The room of his grandfather. His own father’s room had long since been turned into a sewing room by Abigail. He’d not explored the heavy old furniture, the fixtures of the room. But had opened the old valise that had once been his mother’s to find a fresh shirt for the morning and turned back the covers and blown out the lamp and stripped down in the dark and got into the big old soft bed. Where his grandparents had slept. The mattress still heaved up in the middle to a soft ridge. And pushed himself up to sit. An unfamiliar dark room.

  When he and Prudence had come from the barn to the house it was empty and quiet, Abigail gone from sight. The supper dishes finished, stacked in the drain to dry. Prudence had told him, “She’s disturbed by all this. The news of your father. You. Everything.”

  Foster had nodded, studying the old woman telling him this. He said, “Me too.”

  She’d stood then, silent and awkward, looking at him. Then said, “It shouldn’t have to be like this. I’d do anything for it to be different.”

  He could not say, now, sitting in the dark, which of them had moved. It seemed that neither had crossed those few feet between them. But he was leaning over this woman, this sister of his father, his face buried down in the headcloth wrapped over her springing hair, her arms around him holding him as if she’d been waiting all her life to do so. His own hands running up and down the span of her back, the hard muscles there under the thin housedress she wore. Both rocking. The smell of her. Woodsmoke. The sweet savor of animal, dung, bedding, milk, hay-must; the odors of cooking; the faint sour smell of old body, and underneath this a light floral scent as of a soap used long ago, perhaps, he thought, only this morning. Keening for his own lost mother and everything else lost. But for that moment mostly her. And understood the old woman against him was doing the same for a different mother. He held her tightly.

  In the three weeks since his father died he’d been numb-walking, wild with grief at night, sleeping short dense hours before rising up into another day of the familiar grown strange. Now he sat in bed and knew he’d passed into another life altogether
, where he’d look back upon the years in the White Mountains as the simpleminded innocence of a child. And knew his father was not dead, truly; he would haunt him forever— the man unknown, never knowable. What he told Abigail was only partial truth: he would not simply be adding to what he already knew, but fighting also each new fact along the way to hold intact the laughing ease of his father, the clear sense of the man he’d had until this day.

  He sat in the bed, stiff against the old high headboard, wide awake. Breathing in the smell of the house. As if to add to the memory of his father. He slid down and lay flat on the mattress. Certain he would not sleep that night. He thought briefly of his dogs. Then did not fall asleep so much as pass into unconsciousness as if the day had struck him senseless.

  He woke before first light exhausted with dreams and sadness. He woke to the smell of breakfast cooking. He hadn’t done that in a long time. He dressed in the dark. Because the room was chill he dug in the valise for the worn blanket-lined canvas shooting jacket that old Doctor Dodge had given him. And went out onto the landing and heard the faint riffle of voices from downstairs. He paused there and then, an invader, went down to the lower hall. Pushed open the door to the kitchen.

  The women were bright, dressed both of them for barn work, chirping to him and each other. Behaving as if he’d always been in the house. He accepted coffee from Abigail, the cup a delicate porcelain thing with a winged handle, the heat seeping through as he wrapped his hands around it. Her eyes flashing over him as if noting his discomfort and dismissing it at once. As if some peace had settled overnight in the house without bothering to alert him. He was jangling. He refused breakfast, claiming first the need to see to his dogs. Taking the coffee with him. Feeling both sets of eyes on him as he stepped into the entryshed.

  Outside was blueblack, a slice of moon and one big star low in the east. A planet, but which he couldn’t say. He went to the Chrysler and set the coffee on the hood and took cigarettes from the glove box and lighted one and leaned against the car and smoked it down, drinking the coffee. He considered the case of bonded whiskey he’d dug up out of the ground in Bethlehem that was now in the cargo space hidden under the rear seat, alongside his shotguns in fleece-lined wooden cases. He wanted to crack one of those bottles, take a long drink from it. He watched the house. Those women would be out any minute to come to the barns. He finished the smoke and coffee and left the cup on the hood of the car and walked in through the barns to get his dogs. The first door he opened every creature within stirred and cried out someway. And he understood something of Prudence telling him that this was all she wanted or ever needed. Among this he heard the lowing whine of Lovey and the sharp cries of Glow. Through the dim barns, past the murmur and stamp of the horses, into the sheepfold where the bleat rose like water suddenly swept by wind, down the dark walkway to where the dogs heard him and came piling over the gate to greet him. The sheep went quiet. He took the dogs back the way he’d come, out the door into the now-blue dawn. The hills a soft charcoal against the lightened sky. In the yard he met Prudence and Abby, lanterns lit and swinging. Abby stopped beside him.

  “Your creatures all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You think you ever might just call me by my name?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems an odd thing to do.”

  “I guess maybe it does. You want to eat alone, there’s food there in the house.”

  “Thank you. I thought I’d take these dogs for a little walk first.”

  “I don’t blame you. Get away from all this.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “You and me,” she said, “have a ways to go. But we understand each other, don’t we?”

  He said nothing.

  She said, “Maybe you don’t know it yet. But we recognize each other. You and me.”

  He looked at her. Then he said, “I don’t know.”

  She waved her hand at the hills. A few thin streaks of cloud were over them now, showing pale color from the hidden sun. “Go on,” she said. “Run your dogs.”

  The short cropped grass of the sheep pasture looked like an old man’s hair, flat silver with frost. When he stepped down and lifted his boot the frost was gone, leaving behind him a wedge of trail. He went up to the family burying ground and hunkered amid the old stones. He thought to see if he might capture some feeling there, something brought up by the old bones but it was only silent and chill. On the far eastern ridgetop the first light angled up into the sky. A single crow flew over the bowl of the farm, its rough hoarse cry cutting the air above the land. Then it was gone into the trees, silent.

  But then sitting there he realized that what his father had kept from him was not something as simple as the Negro grandmother (half-Negro? What did that make him? Was he going to learn anything following these lines?) but far more than that. Not only the two women at work below, his father’s sisters whom he would now never see talk or probe or laugh or tease his father but all the rest of it: The old man dead two years when he would’ve been fourteen. The veteran of the War of Rebellion. What exactly had his father denied him by removing him from that old man? He would never know, would always wonder. What complicated levels of emotion drove his father not only to make the choice years before but to enforce that choice throughout all this time? He did not accept that it was as simple as Abigail made it to be, the notion of self-hatred. He sat as the sun came up to quicken the frost and the grass came back to life, the earth began to smell of itself and he warmed in the tender light. The dogs bouncing over the ledges and outcroppings, their tongues out, happy.

  He rose after a time of watching the dogs and went down the hill, calm and resolute and undefined at once, much older than he’d been the morning before raising his hand in farewell to Andy Flood as he drove out away from the Bethlehem house. It may have been only the eggshell coffee but he felt prepared for whatever was before him. The only thing he knew was that he would shrink from nothing. His father had not been a coward; he knew this. But Foster was determined to face it all.

  He stayed two weeks on the farm, with no timetable, no plan save to learn what he could. Following that first shock, what impressed him most, what he admired and desired for his own, and what he finally determined was not a thing that could be assumed but a way one was born and lived thereafter, was the way the women went about their days. There was no distinction between work and life but rather each day was an unhurried yet constant movement from one task to the next as if each woman followed a pattern that was old and worn into their very beings, that the work performed was not routine but life. They were grim but not dour, as if understanding that life was unrelenting but not ponderous. He’d seen enough sour hotel workers to recognize the difference. He only knew it himself through the woods. But as his father had reminded him, dollar bills would not be found in the moss or fern-beds of the woods. Be a dog-man, his father had joked. And he knew the world did not demand dogs the way it did butter or milk or eggs. Or meat. Or whiskey.

  So he grew comfortable with the sisters. And found himself fond of them. Aware of this, he sought to contain it. Not sure he might trust fondness, the empty well in him. And they, mostly, left him be unless he spoke to them. Unless one would come upon him at some time the woman deemed to fit some schedule of her own in which she would speak freely to him of whatever was passing through her mind.

  He did not presume upon their work. Instead he studied the place and so spent most mornings working with the double-bitted axe and the chopping block beside the stacked cordwood behind the house, splitting the wood to firesticks and carrying it by the armload into the entryway shed and stacking it against the empty north wall where scabs of bark and shreds of wood splinters on the earthen floor as well as common sense told him the winter stovewood should go.

  Midmornings Pru hitched the big cream pony to a two-wheeled cart and went to the village with cans of milk and crates of eggs. It was often then, Foster at work with the axe, his shirtslee
ves rolled high above his elbows, that Abby would come around the house with a glass of water for him and settle herself on an upturned round of wood and watch him drink the water and then continue his work until she would begin to talk. As if answering a question he’d not yet quite thought to ask.

  “Look at you,” she said. Then when he stopped in self-conscious confusion she laughed and went on. “So much of Father in you. I can see him as a young man. Is it any wonder Mother risked everything to help him when she found him so?”

  He leaned on the axe handle. “How’d she risk anything, him being a Union soldier?”

  “All those Union boys were not angels, son. Plenty were halfhearted about freeing the slaves; preserving the union was what most concerned them. And even those that were true abolitionists, a young man’s principles might soften up or disappear altogether, they found themselves alone in the woods with a young runaway girl like that.”

  He leaned and lifted a new chunk to the block. “Well. He was wounded you said.”

  “Oh, he was more than that. It’s part of what your own father missed out on, his losing his mother so young. But Sister and I grew up with them; they were everything a man and woman should be together. Whatever oddness had ever been between them, if there ever was any and I doubt there was, was long since gone. They were man and wife, ordinary and difficult as that is. In some ways maybe even easier for them. They’d already jumped the one big hoop; everything after that was simple.”

  He popped the chunk, turned one of the halves sideways and halved it again. “So however it ended, until then they were happy?”

  “They adored each other.”

  He split the other half and kicked the pieces away, keeping the ground between the block and his feet clear. “It was hard for Pop, growing up, it sounds like. How’d people treat them, people in the town, like that?”

  She went quiet then. He kept working. He did not think she had not heard him and so he waited, splitting wood.