by Jeffrey Lent
“They are pretty.” He sat without moving, watching her. She stood beside the bed not looking down at him but off. She was very still but he felt that she was in some motion within herself. Some perturbation, some conflict rising up. It’s me, he thought and reached for her hand. Even as he reached thinking it was the wrong thing to do.
She stepped away from the bed and went before the small single-pane window of old bubbled glass. He could just see the side of her face. She reached up and ran a finger slow in the dust on the glass. Without turning her head she said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. People just make me so damn sad. I can’t stand it. You know, when I was a little baby my daddy used to carry me around with him all the time. I remember it, hugged up against his side. Took me with him everywhere. I went out in the fields, went to town, to the gin, the tobacco warehouse. The livestock sales. And he’d introduce me to everybody—I remember that, shaking big old grown men’s hands. I can’t tell you what that was like, the world of men. All in their overhauls and suitcoats and their big boots and the heavy stained cattle prods they carried, the smell of their sweat and tobacco and the earth on them. Bending down to shake my hand solemn as if I was one of them. Doing that even as they smiled at me in the way they would not smile at one another and those smiles telling me I was someway special. But still let in! Still in with them. Even after I started school I’d come home afternoons and run out to find Daddy and like as not he’d be watching for me, see me coming. Stop what he was doing to hoist me up or squat down talking to me, asking me about my day and then telling me about his, what he was doing. What we were doing. That’s what it felt like. That it was all something we were doing, the two of us. Like my absence was just something temporary. As if he was holding some place for me. I’m the youngest you know. Two brothers and a sister all older and those brothers worked alongside Daddy ever since I can remember but it never seemed the same with them as it was with me. He drove them hard. Still does. They hate him and he hates them but they all love each other and they don’t ever say a word about it. What they talk about is what work they need to be doing. But now he can barely bring himself to look at me, much less speak to me.” She turned from the window and looked at Foster. “But nothing changed with me. I’m no different than I ever was. So, what happened? I tell you what. I don’t know. What’s wrong with me? I don’t know.” She walked halfway back to where he sat on the bed and stopped again, her hands out before her as if grabbing something from the air, her face turned full upon him, working upon itself and before he could speak she said, “Do you think I’m a slut, Foster? Was last night just some slut to you? You tell me the truth, Foster. I’m counting on you for the truth.”
He spoke slow. “I guess I know what it was to me. I’m not sure I can tell you what that is though. What words.”
She nodded.
He went on. “The question it seems, is what it was to you. That’s how it seems.”
“How can I know what it was?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess you either do or you don’t. And I guess if you don’t then it isn’t.”
She cocked her head at him. “It was your first time wasn’t it.”
He looked at her awhile. Then said, “Why are you so worried about what I might think about whatever you might have done before with anybody else?”
“Do you think that’s what it is?”
“Well. It doesn’t seem like you trust me.”
“I don’t trust much of anything.”
“What I’ve found, there’s not much to trust. Not much that stays.”
“So why do you trust me?”
He grinned at her. “Didn’t say I did.”
“What about those words you can’t say?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure what they are.”
“Yes you are. You know exactly what they are. You just don’t want to say them for fear you’d be wrong.”
“I’m not sure it’s worry about being wrong so much as wanting to get things right.”
She smiled at him then. “That’s a pretty thing to say.”
He looked at her again for some time. Then said, “You’re the last thing I expected when I came down here. The last thing on my mind. The last thing I thought to find.”
“It can be funny how that works.”
“I guess so. Some ways it makes sense.”
“It’s funny. The first thing I thought when I heard about you was that this was someone I had to find out. Someone who was here for me.”
He was very serious then. “It’s complicated. There’s business between your uncle—your great-uncle—and myself that’s just starting to get worked out. And I don’t know where it will lead but already I can tell you some of it’s not so nice. There’s no reason to think it will get better as it goes. If it goes any further. He could clam up on me anytime I think. Although I don’t guess he will. He’s going slow with it, bits and dabs, but what I think is that’s more to let each piece sink in all the way with me before we go on. Anyway, I don’t know what’s going to happen with it all. And I don’t know how much he’d want you involved in it.”
“You’re afraid I might mess it up for you and him, my being around?”
“No. I don’t see it as a problem. If anything, it seemed to me he took some delight over me this morning, teasing me about you. But serious too. It seems to me he cares for you.”
“He’s got a soft spot for me, somehow.”
“Thing is, what he’s telling me, it’s not exactly making us close, him and me.”
She was quiet then, studying him, understanding what he was saying. Then she said, “I’m not stupid, Foster. I know plenty about him, those others too.”
“Well I figure you do. Still, you know what they say. About blood.”
She came then to the bed and sat beside him and reached her hands up to his shoulders, just resting her hands there, the droop of her arms between them. He did not move. Her eyes broken shards of winter sky. She said, “It’s all blood, baby.”
The blankets, their skin, the very air of the room a swamp, everything rich, glutinous, gelid and pure as he imagined some ocean, some forgotten lost sea might be. The dogs, both of them now, off on the hearth, watching them, their heads up, their eyes alert, curious and somewhat alarmed.
“I’m not a bad girl. Not really. I just want. I want.”
“I don’t think you’re bad. I think you’re some kind of wonder is what you are.”
“No, no, no. Foster. Anybody, any girl, could do this for you.”
“I’m not talking about this. I don’t know what it is. It’s not what you think it is, what you seem afraid I’ll think it is. I’m just all scrambled up inside is all.”
“You boy. You sweet boy.”
“What is it?” he asked. “What is it you want?”
“Oh Lord,” she said. “Everything.”
Late dunrose dusk, pale light dimmed free of shadow. The blanket off them. Still hot. Still-hot. Something passed, not sleep, not waking but some nether nuzzle between the two of them, drifting up and down.
The door opened. The dogs shot out. Alexander Mebane standing in the door, his cane leaned in like something extended out before him. His head tipped sideways to look at them. Daphne scrabbling the blanket over them, her movements clumsy against Foster as the rough army blanket tented them.
“Children,” Mebane said. And shut the door.
“Oh Jesus wept.” She was up in the half-light, tipped awkward on one foot then the other as she stepped into her underwear. For the brief moment before she pulled the rest of her clothes on as glowing white as a peeled onion. It was the first time he’d seen her this way, naked and struggling with her body, and he sat welled with tenderness, thinking that the very way she lived within space was different from him, that the world someway was not made right for either one of them alone but together they might find balance one against the other. She said, “I’m dead. I am dead. Oh shit I’m shot and skinned an
d hung out to dry.”
He got up from the bed, languid, pulled only by her urgency. He pulled on his trousers and said, “He didn’t seem that worked up about it.”
Her blouse over her head, she was running her hands through her hair. He could not see that this changed the way it fell. She said, “You don’t know anything about it. What it is, is I carried Mama in to Wednesday night church and brought a sack of food for you two which is all I was supposed to do was come over and get you all fed and then be back there to pick her up. Do you know what time it is? I am god damn dead. She’s setting over there, waiting and pretending not to wait and there’s two or three other ladies setting with her pretending to chat about any god damn thing they can pretend to be interested in but all any of them is doing is waiting to see when I show up, if I show up, and they’ll all each and every one of them be sniffing the air, each one trying to figure out if I’ve been drinking or screwing or both or whatever else they can dream up.”
Foster buttoned his shirt, then reached out and straightened the little gold cross where it was caught bottom end up in the chain around her throat. “Well,” he said, “at least you haven’t been drinking.”
She batted his hand away. “Don’t you make fun. It wasn’t you that rolled in at a quarter to four this morning with Daddy already out in the sheds and Mama setting at the table with coffee already made, me stinking of corn liquor and everything else and cross-eyed and her reminding me that however old I might be or think I was as long as I was living under their roof there was things I could and could not do and I was just about done calming her down when Daddy came in and started up all over again. So I got through that and slept and got up and worked my tail off to make this mess of food for everyone just so they’d let me plead to bring you two stranded odd boys something to eat other than soup out of a can while my mama was at church and me making promises left and right and then here I am and I screw it up, screw it right up. Don’t you make fun with me.”
“Was that what it was,” he asked. “Quarter of four?”
“No it was not.” She was sitting on the bed, lacing her shoes. “I must of left you off here about two or so. I don’t know. What I did was swipe the rest of that liquor jar from your car and rode out in the country and set there stopped, just drinking and thinking. Until some old colored man came along on a bicycle and I knew it was later than I wanted it to be and so got along home.”
He wanted to ask what it was she had been sitting thinking about. But she was up, brushing her clothes with her hands. She said, “Don’t you have any idea what time it is?”
“It must be eight o’clock or so. Maybe later.”
“You think that’s all?”
“It’s starts getting dark early this time of year.”
“That’s right. Still, I’m awful late.”
“I could come along. Explain things.”
She looked at him, half-grinned. “Explain just what?”
“Well. Maybe distract her.”
“You’d do that all right. No. What you do. Damn it. I was going to build a fire in that stove and warm things over. Listen. There’s a sack of food in there. You two can warm it or eat it cold, I don’t care. But I got to go.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be fine. Mama and me, we’ll have the ride home to get things worked out. I just want you to go in and eat that food. I can’t stand to cook. And there I was all afternoon in the kitchen, any minute feeling like I might could be sick, just to fix food for you. So you go in there and set down with that old man and eat you that food what was good once, before it got cold. And do your business with him. You’ve got business to do with him, isn’t that right?”
He stepped back, again feeling the faint threat of distance. He could not help himself and said, “When can I see you?”
She stepped up close and kissed him fast. “I don’t know.”
“It’s early,” he said. “I’ve been sleeping all day. He’s an old man. Even if he gets worked up I don’t bet he’s good for more than three-four hours.”
She looked at him. He could tell she wanted to go but still she stayed. Then she said, “You remember how to get out to the crossroads? Pettigrew?”
He nodded, pretty sure he did.
She said, “Between one and two, I’ll do my best to be down along the road. Not right by the house but somewhere along there. If you get out there and don’t see me just drive on to the crossroads and set a bit and then turn around and come back slow. I’ll slip up out of the ditch. If I can get out there. Don’t do it more than twice. Don’t drive by more than twice. Two times, I’m not there, I won’t be. You hear me?”
“I’ll be there.”
“If you’re not,” she said, “I’ll know it’s because you couldn’t help it.”
It was an odd meal. Mebane had it out of the sack, arrayed on the countertop. Wide-mouth jars of vegetables, snap beans and cutup yellow squash and a smaller jar of tomatoes stewed with peppers and okra. A cloth napkin tied around a heap of crumbling cookie-cutter biscuits. And a square tin box that had once held lard or lye or some such now filled with flattened pieces of beefsteak in a thick gravy the color of oatmeal. Chicken-fried steak.
They ate it room temperature off old wide featherweight china plates that Mebane removed wordless from a china safe and wiped clean with a rag, taking each plate down one at a time and setting it on the counter and then lifting the rag to wipe it off, slow and cautious. As if, Foster thought, making clear that all his life had been conducted one patient slow step after another, every action thought out beforehand in a world where there was no free hand to arrest a fall, to catch a mistake.
Mebane disregarded the meat, dabbing spoonfuls of vegetable distinct on the plate, taking up a single biscuit. Foster loaded his own plate, digging deep into the tin of meat with a wide spoon to bring up the warmest slabs out of the thickened gravy. Then followed Mebane into the shabby dining-room where again they ate side by side at the single spare bare area of the table. He felt soft and easy, wide awake and, because of this, wary. He felt this was when he might miss something. He could not help but think of Daphne cooking this food for him. Regardless of anything else, this meant something. Thinking that it is the small things that stitch us one to another. And wanting to be stitched. As simple as a longing toward home. A home that might grow from a plate of food. Seeing her naked and stumbling into her clothes. Thinking he could not find the way to tell her that her being in the world set him to tremble, throughout his soul.
“Okra,” Mebane said, “is not edible.” He was lifting the chunks of green wheel free of the stewed tomatoes and stacking them at the side of his plate. “It was brought from Africa by the coloreds. Or to feed them with. Somehow we all got stuck with it. You can stew it like this or you can batter and fry it but all you’re doing is eating what it is cooked with. Still, everyone grows it and swears how much they love it. I’d rather eat treebark.” He glared sideways at Foster.
Foster put his fork into the stewed vegetables, lifting up a piece of skinned tomato and one of okra together, and ate them. The tomatoes were sweet with the peppers and seasoning and the okra was a sidelong crunch, something to chew and seep out the other flavors. He said, “I like it.”
“Of course you do,” Mebane said. “From her sweet hands. Eat it up. Eat it up, all of it. Eat that meat too. Used to be when I was a young man I could not eat enough meat. For a time I thought it was on account of not getting much through the war. But it occurred to me that it was something else I was after. Some big bite-hold that would never be mine. I’ve been happier since I gave it up. Better for my bowels, too.”
“I’m hungry is all.”
“I bet you are. Well, eat on it. Whatever you don’t will go bad and get fed to your dogs.”
“They’ll have to stand in line.”
“Boy, they already are. Your attention grows more divided by the minute.”
“I haven’t forgot why I’m here.”
&
nbsp; “That’s right.” Mebane speared a chunk of squash, lifted it to examine and set it back down. Took up his biscuit and broke off a crumb-edge with his bright corn-kernel teeth. “You’re the one after the truth.”
The meat did not need a knife but came apart under the fork tines. It was not anything that he thought of as beef but he figured he could get close to the bottom of the tinful anyway. He said, “What happened, that you never got married?”
“Who says I never did?” Mebane now peering down his flung-up nose at Foster.
Foster looked around at the discord of the room. “Nobody. I just assumed—”
“Which you shouldn’t do. Young sir after the truth. No I never got married. What woman would want a one-armed man?” Stabbing green beans one at a time and lifting them to his mouth, eating the food as if angry with it.
“I don’t know,” Foster said. “I’d imagine there might be some. Depending on the woman.” Then he added, “Depending on the man, too.”
“Well, there,” Mebane said. “In one step you arrived at the conclusion of every busybody I ever met in my life. Which is to put the blame for it on me. As if it’s a lack just because everybody else does it. Or most everybody. There’s one-two old maids whose theories are the most severe concerning me. But mostly it’s a simple thing. Regardless of how two people start out, from what I can see, and the view is pretty far from these years, for most it comes down to the little things and the little things for me are ten steps for everybody else’s two or three. And I think anybody patient enough to put up with me that way for years and years would have to be stupid enough that I would hate her. Maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I never found the right person. Maybe it just was not meant for me. Maybe I’m not the marrying sort of person. It looks that way, don’t it?”
“I guess so,” Foster said. He laid his knife and fork on the side of his plate and let his hands rest loose on the table edge. Upright in his chair, looking at Mebane next to him. “Are you a queer?”
Mebane chewed on biscuit. His eyes on Foster. Some of the anger paled, some of the wry twist lifted in his eyes. He swallowed and said, “You’re a regular man of the world ain’t you?”