After Eli (3 page)

He moved effortlessly across the bed, singing quietly to himself as he worked, casually pulling away the bedcovers with his left hand, playing with her flannel nightgown with the tip of the knife blade. He was unhurried, almost gentle, as he slipped the blade into the gown and slit it open.

The smile in his face faded as he looked at Mary’s body.

“You’re a sickly one,” he said bluntly. “Not tit enough to feed a sparrow.” He smiled again as his left hand swept lightly over her breasts, tipping the tiny pink nipples. “But it’s not tit I’m in favor of,” he added. “Not when there’s more for the havin’.” His hand dropped to Mary’s underpants and he tore at them roughly, lifting her from the bed. The knife whipped quickly, slashing at the garment, and then his hand was on the soft feather hair and his fingers were gouging at the tight opening.

Mary cried at last.

THE BOY WAS SITTING on the back of the moving wagon, slumped forward at the shoulders as an old man would sit. His elbows pushed into his thighs and his fingers laced his hands together like bootstrings. His legs dangled from the bed of the wagon and he wagged them unconsciously in small air steps as he stared between his knees at the grass bridge in the center of the hard dirt road, unrolling in a pale green ribbon beneath the spoked wheels of the wagon. There was no expression on his face.

The boy’s father sat up front on a plank seat hooked to the side gates of the wagon. He had a thin back and he, too, was slumped forward, exactly like the boy, but his feet were propped on the front gate of the body and he held the rope reins of the two mules loosely in his hands. The wagon between the boy and his father, sitting with their backs to one another, was empty except for two axes and a large fertilizer sack filled with sweet potatoes.

* * *

Rachel Pettit stood at the front window of her house and watched the wagon moving slowly along the road. She knew it was Wednesday. Floyd Crider was a calendar. If it did not rain, he arrived always on Wednesday, always in the same hour, always at the same languid pace, always in the same
hesitant mood. Floyd intrigued her. She was grateful for his attention and his concern, yet he intrigued her because, of all the men she knew, he was the most guarded and private. He was a male Crider and that was the way of the male Criders, as though it had been bred into them; it was a substance in their blood, passed down from generations in the darkness of mating. If you were a male Crider, you were born to silence and to a hollow, distant face with eyes covered by a dull film of surrender. And if you were a male Crider, you did not change. You lived and died in a monotone that was as empty as a sigh.

But Floyd had been a caring neighbor. Since Eli had disappeared, Rachel had learned to depend on Floyd for the safe man-presence he offered, as well as for the occasional man’s work demanded by the farm. His sense of obligation, sealed by the common borders of their land, was as absolute as an Old Testament law: It was the work of good deeds to watch and to help. And slowly, Rachel had learned Floyd well. She did not impose; she waited. She would not speak until Floyd spoke. She would not ask his advice about the farm until Floyd insisted that he be allowed to help. And she never spoke of Eli. To speak of Eli would have been to whimper and she could not whimper before Floyd.

Each Wednesday, when it did not rain, Floyd escaped the unending oppression of his failing land and made a visit to the town of Yale, and it was his habit to stop at the home of Rachel Pettit. Each Wednesday Rachel would hear the wagon, and she would stand behind the curtain of the window in the front room and watch as Floyd stopped his wagon fifty yards away at the mouth of the road turning into her house. He would sit and observe the house, expecting Rachel, or Dora, or Sarah, to greet him. He would sit and become uncomfortable and remove his hat and fan the air into his face. But he never looked at the boy, though the boy was always with him, always sitting in the back of the wagon, looking down.

And then Floyd would cup his hands to his mouth and call out: “Ho, anybody home?”

Rachel would not answer him at first call. Never at first call.

“Yo-hoo. Anybody home? Rachel? You there?”

In all the years, Rachel had always been there.

* * *

“Yo-hoo. Anybody home? Rachel? You there?”

Rachel stepped to the screen door. She knew Floyd could not see her from the road. She called, “That you, Floyd?”

“Yes’m. It’s Wednesday.”

Rachel pushed open the door and stood beneath the frame of the doorway.

“Mornin’, Floyd. Jack. Come on up. We’re all here,” she replied.

Floyd clucked to the mules and pulled them into the narrow road leading to the house. He stopped the mules at the edge of the yard and tied the rope reins to the hand brake. He then climbed slowly off the wagon, using the front wheel for steps.

“Thought somethin’ might’ve been wrong when you didn’t answer right off,” Floyd drawled, looking beyond Rachel. It was one thing Rachel had long known; Floyd could not look into her eyes when he spoke.

“Nothin’s wrong, Floyd,” replied Rachel. “I was in the back of the house. Didn’t realize it was Wednesday again. Week’s gone fast.”

“Time gets by and you don’t know it, I reckon,” Floyd said. “It sure does. More I live, the faster it goes. A man don’t know how little time he’s got unless he’s got a little age on him.” He nodded authoritatively and mumbled, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

Rachel moved to the corner of the porch, above the steps. She leaned against a support post.

“Y’all all right?” she asked. “Mama Ada feelin’ better?”

“Doin’ good. Doin’ good. Have to help Mama around a little bit, but she’s feelin’ good. Sure is. Y’all all right?”

“Fine, Floyd. Fine. Sarah and Dora’s out back, workin’ out there in the garden.”

“Keeps me worried, y’all bein’ up here all alone,” Floyd said.

“Nobody’s bothered us, Floyd.”

“Can’t tell, though. Sure can’t. Times bein’ hard.”

Rachel knew what he wanted to say but could not.

“It’s been two months since the Caufields was found,” she replied patiently. “Whoever done that must’ve passed on through.”

“Could be.”

“Well, we’re fine, Floyd.”

“Uh-huh.”

Floyd stood nervously beside his wagon. His fingers moved absently to the blouse of his overalls and he withdrew a tobacco sack. He began to build a cigarette with the precision of an artist, his long, hard fingers moving gently over the thin paper, cupping it, tapping it full with shredded tobacco leaf, folding it in a single twist. Rachel watched him, fascinated by his skill.

“Me’n the boy’s goin’ to town,” Floyd said as he lit the cigarette. “I heard tell there was a man wanted some oak shingles cut. Thought y’all might be needin’ somethin’. Maybe you got some quilts you want carried to the store.”

Rachel looked at Jack Crider sitting on the back of the wagon. He had not lifted his head. He seemed preoccupied.

“No,” she answered. “Nothin’ today, Floyd. I’m grateful, just the same.”

“Sure wish Dora wadn’t so dead set against lettin’ me and the boy cut up some wood for y’all,” Floyd said slowly. “Wouldn’t take us but a little while.”

Rachel smiled. She said, “Don’t suppose it’s hurtin’ us, Floyd.”

Floyd sucked smoke from his cigarette. He looked around the yard, his eyes carefully examining the buildings. He pinched the cigarette from his lips and dropped it and ground it into the dirt with his shoe heel.

“Almost forgot,” he said quickly. “Got a sack of sweet potatoes in the wagon. Me’n the boy finished cleanin’ out the hill a couple of days ago. Got more’n we can use.” He turned to the wagon before Rachel could reply and effortlessly lifted the heavy sack and shouldered it. Floyd was small and thin, but strong.

“You didn’t have to do that, Floyd,” Rachel protested.

“Wadn’t no need in lettin’ ’em go to waste.”

“I know they’re good. Sarah loves sweet potatoes.”

“We had us a heavy crop last year. Made up the biggest hill we ever had,” Floyd said. “Where you want me to put ’em?”

“You don’t mind, in the storeroom.”

Rachel watched Floyd nod and drop his eyes from her face. She knew him; yes, she knew him well. Part of his caring was overplanting his garden, though his sharing of goods was always spaced and calculated, presented with timid excuses of having more than needed for his own family. It had become a familiar ritual between them: the gift hurriedly offered like an embarrassment, countered by protest, then excuse, then acceptance. The two could have been players in a motion picture, repeating a memorized script. There was never any improvisation or invention; it was always the same.

Floyd followed Rachel to the screen door, waited for her to open it, then entered the house.

The house was wood-warm. Its walls and floors and ceilings had cured into the soft tan of time and use. The smell of wood smoke and cooked foods and cleaning soaps coated the house and expired from the walls like a living thing, a breath. But there was no odor of a man, nothing of the musk of the field laborer, or of the sweat brine of the sawmill hand. The breath of the house was sweeter, more delicate, like evenings of early spring flowers or the perfume of lilac water on hands. It was a house that belonged to three women and contained only their presence.

There were five main rooms to the house—the living room,
the kitchen, and three bedrooms, one for each of the women. A narrow corridor led from the kitchen along the back of the house to the small sideroom used for storing canned goods and food supplies, and to Dora and Sarah’s bedrooms. The largest of the rooms, belonging to Rachel, was at the front of the house beside the living room. Rachel’s room was both bedroom and workroom. Two heavy quilt curtains had been tacked to the ceiling, almost precisely dividing the room. One side was for sleeping, the other for sewing and quilting. Most of the hours of Rachel’s life were spent in the divided halves of the room. Once there had been a door leading from her room onto the porch, but Floyd had boarded it, with Rachel’s permission. “Makes me feel some better,” Floyd had said flatly.

* * *

“House looks good,” Floyd said routinely as he walked through the living room into the kitchen and to the sideroom. It was more than a compliment; it was a litany spoken by a man who had helped build the house, had repaired it, tended it with a craftsman’s pride. It was something Floyd always said.

“Dora scrubbed the walls this week,” Rachel replied.

“She’s a worker,” acknowledged Floyd, placing the potatoes against the wall in the sideroom. He added, “Woman like Dora, she’ll scrub the wood off.” He blushed at his weak humor.

“She likes to keep busy,” Rachel said. “She and Sarah’s been out in the garden all mornin’.”

Floyd looked instinctively through the window of the kitchen. He saw Dora and Sarah working in a small, flat field beside the barn.

“Been a lot easier if she’d of let the boy come over and run the middlebuster,” he said. “Would’n’ve took but a couple of hours. Make a better garden, bein’ plowed deep.”

“Dora’s got her ways,” Rachel replied simply.

“Yes’m.”

“I appreciate the potatoes, Floyd. I’ll cook some tonight.”

Floyd shifted nervously on his feet. He said, “Long as I’m
here, I might as well take a look at that well pulley. Make sure the boy done it right.” He looked at Rachel and then quickly away. “If it ain’t no trouble,” he added.

“No trouble at all,” Rachel answered. She had forgotten about Jack repairing the well pulley. It had been a month and Floyd had not mentioned it before. “But it’s fine,” she said. “Jack’s handy when it comes to fixin’ things.”

“He’s all right, I reckon.”

“You want to look it over, you can.”

Rachel opened the kitchen door and stepped into the backyard. Floyd followed. She crossed the yard to the well. Dora and Sarah stopped their work in the field and stared. Floyd lifted his hand, a pointed finger, in greeting. Sarah returned the wave timidly; Dora turned to her work with the heavy steel hoe.

“Sarah’s growin’ up,” Floyd said.

“She is,” agreed Rachel. “She’s a woman now. I wadn’t much older when I got married.”

Floyd nodded. He turned to the well and began examining it. He did not know why, but he had always thought of the well as Eli’s single triumph on his farm. Eli had battled for it, cutting through granite and clay, going deeper for water than anyone in the valley. He had used dynamite and a shovel and scoop bucket and had worked tirelessly. He would not listen to advice to move the well, not even a few feet. “This is where Rachel wants it,” he had declared, “and, by God, this is where it’ll be put, if I have to bore a hole to China.” He had persisted and one day his shovel had caved into an underground river as cold as winter. The next day Eli had called in every neighbor within five miles to sample his water.

Floyd had helped Eli cover the mouth of the well with a box of fieldstone, planked across the top by oak shelving. And then the windlass of chestnut, with the winch driven through the tight center eye of the wood’s age circles. The winch had a cog wheel with a drop wedge for locking the windlass and holding the bucket. It was the first windlass lock anyone in the valley had ever seen.

Floyd ran his hand over the lock and the windlass. The chestnut had been burned smooth by the rope. He dropped the bolt and locked the windlass and pulled with his weight against the rope, looped over the repaired pulley. The pulley was attached to a crossbar that Eli had cut from a blackgum and had nailed solidly beneath the roof of the shelter.