Chaneysville Incident (41 page)

“Don’t you need a license or something?” she said.

“Huh?”

“To hunt. Don’t you need a license?”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. She had a strange look in her eyes, and her lips were a thin line of whiteness against her pale face. “You don’t
need
anything besides a decent rifle and a lot of patience.”

“But you’re supposed to have a license. Aren’t you?”

I closed my eyes again.

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you have one?”

“No,” I said. “But it doesn’t much matter; the season’s been over for months.”

“What’s that make you, a poacher?” There was a bite in her voice. I didn’t like it.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, congratulations. Now you’re a minor criminal. It was pretty ingenious, coming up with poaching. It’s a lot quicker to buy a rifle than to try and set up a still. But then I guess your father was a poacher too.”

I opened my eyes again. “Please,” I said. “This is a small cabin. There isn’t any room in here for a couch.”

“That’s too bad,” she said. “I think you need one.”

I looked at her closely then, because she never talked that way. Never. We had had our fights, but her style of combat had always been the blunt frontal attack, so honest it was sometimes physical; she had never resorted to sniping from ambush. Never before.

“I guess you don’t agree with me,” she said. “You probably prefer something else. What is it now? Bonfires? Hot-water bottles? Or is it your old friend Jack? Jack Daniel’s, I mean.”

There was something wrong with her eyes. They were narrowed, as if from anger, and reddened, as if from exhaustion, but there was more wrong about the look of them than could be ascribed to fury and fatigue; lurking behind the narrowness and the redness was a haunted look: I could not understand what caused that.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said. “I’m just—”

“Cold,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“No,” she said, “there’s nothing wrong with you. No. It’s just perfectly normal for you to walk away from everything to come set up housekeeping in a one-room shack with a dirt floor. Why, you’ve got an outhouse and you’ve got a spring, you’ve got a gun and a stove and a kerosene lamp; everything for gracious living—if you happen to like the seventeenth century.”

The odd look was still in her eyes, but now I knew what caused it. Hurt caused it.

“I’ll bet you’ve got it all figured out,” she said. “You’ll can your vegetables and dry some fruit and salt some pork and jerk some beef—that is what you do with beef, isn’t it? Jerk it?”

“Judith,” I said.

“You can get a vat and make lye soap,” she said. “You’ll be good at using lye.”

“Judith,” I said.

“No, no,” she said, “there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s all my fault. I’m a hysterical woman, I guess—when you say you’ll come back to me at a certain time, why, I’m stupid enough to believe you. And to worry if you don’t. Especially when you don’t call. I know, I don’t understand; that’s what you always say. Well, you were right. When you didn’t come back I didn’t understand. I guess you could say I was a little frantic. But then your letter came, and I calmed right down. It wasn’t that you were overdue—you weren’t coming back at all. Oh, I know you didn’t say that; but I could read it between the lines. All four of them.”

“Judith,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

She closed her mouth and stared at me for a minute.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. Her voice was sharper now, cutting like a whip. “Oh. Well. Well, then. Why didn’t you say so before? That changes everything. I feel much better now.”

I didn’t say anything; I just closed my eyes.

“Don’t you do that,” she said. Her voice was almost a shout; I had never heard her shout before. “Don’t you
do
that, you bastard. You open your eyes and you
look
at me.”

“I said I was sorry,” I said.

I heard her move, and I opened my eyes just in time to see her coming for me, charging around the table. I got my hands up to protect my face, but she wasn’t planning on hitting me. She just stood over me, fists clenched, staring down. I lowered my hands and looked up at her.

“I don’t need you, you know,” she said. “I could get along without you just fine.”

I kept very still, not even blinking. After a minute her shoulders drooped, and her hands seemed to unclench. But the look was still there. I looked up at her for a while, and then I lowered my head. But I could still feel her eyes on me, hot and angry. And suddenly I was angry too, and I raised my head and looked into her eyes. We held each other’s gaze for long minutes; then she blinked. I looked at her a few seconds longer, and then I got up, moving slowly and cautiously, but moving, and she had to step back. I stepped around her and went to the stove and poured myself another cup of coffee. I stirred in sugar. I took a sip. Then I turned my head and looked back at her. She had moved; she was still standing in front of Old Jack’s chair, facing it as if I were still sitting in it, but she had stepped back even farther than she had had to; her body was pressed against the table, the edge of it cutting into her flesh. I turned my head away.

In a minute I heard her moving, sliding away from me, around the other side of the table. I heard the creak of the chair as she settled into it. I gave her a minute, and then I turned and went back and sat down in Old Jack’s chair.

“I’ve had a hard time,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“Do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

“What’s this?” I said.

She stared at me for a minute, then shook her head. “ ‘What’s this?’
This
”—she waved her hand around at the cabin—“is this. You want a name for it? I’ll give you a name for it. Going native. Turning into a Goddamn homesteader with forty acres and a mule. Where
is
the jackass, by the way? Or are you playing all the parts?”

I felt the anger come again then, a cold rush in my veins. But then I realized that there had been a change in her voice; the angry words were there, but the whiplash sting was gone. “You’re a little mixed up,” I said then. “A mule is the sterile offspring of an ass and a horse—they aren’t the same thing, a mule and an ass.”

She just looked at me.

“And homesteaders got a hundred and sixty acres—the forty acres were what the Southern freedman expected, as compensation for servitude. And never got.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I don’t want you to talk like that anymore,” I said. “I know you’re angry, but I’ve had enough. I don’t want to argue. And I don’t want you to talk to me that way again. Not now, and not ever.”

She stared at me, but I did not look away. She lowered her eyes. We sat there for a minute, with the silence hanging there like a mist. She didn’t move, but eventually I heard her breath come out in a long, slow sigh, and she seemed to shrink a little in the chair.

“Judith?” I said.

“What?”

“What I’m doing here isn’t because I hate you or because I love you. It has nothing to do with you at all.”

“You son of a bitch,” she said. Her voice was wrong—flat, dead. It made the words sound like a weather report. “You Goddamned son of a bitch. After five years and God knows how much… Oh, God, I don’t even know what to call it. But after all that, you have the nerve to sit there and tell me something you’re doing has nothing to do with me.”

“That’s right,” I said.

She looked at me for a minute, then she shook her head. “I understand,” she said. “I wish I didn’t, but I do. It’s taken an awfully long time, but I understand. You know where I figured it out?”

She stopped, waited, wanting a response.

“No,” I said.

“On the bus,” she said. She shook her head again, gave me a small, watery smile. “It’s a long ride.”

“It is that,” I said.

“I drank a pot of coffee before I left the apartment.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

“I know. Now. I found out the hard way. That’s the point. We were only half an hour out when I had to go to the rest room, but I wasn’t the first one; the man who had been in there before me hadn’t bothered to put the seat up, so I couldn’t sit. I had to squat. Or try to. But before I did I looked down in that hole…. Anyway, I was squatting there with that…
mess
sloshing around underneath me trying not to breathe and praying we weren’t going to hit a bump and cursing you with every word I could think of. Because you never told me about it….”

“Of course I told you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “You didn’t
tell
me anything. You gave me one of your little lectures. I remember it. It was just after we had moved in together, after I practically made you move in with me, and I was supposed to pick up toilet paper on the way home, and I was tired, and I forgot, and when you found out you got dressed and went out—it must have been eleven o’clock—and went wandering around all over West Philadelphia looking for someplace to buy toilet paper. And I sat there, waiting for you to come back, drinking coffee and crying, because I thought you’d take it as a chance to move out, or something—maybe it was stupid, but that’s what I was afraid of. And when you got back you just took the toilet paper into the bathroom and came back and made yourself a toddy and sat down and didn’t say a word. And I tried to apologize. But you wouldn’t listen, you said it wasn’t important, but I knew it had to be, because nobody goes running around in the middle of the night over something that isn’t important, but you wouldn’t talk about it. And I kept pressing you—I shouldn’t have, but I did. And finally you started talking, and you gave me this amusing little lecture, all about trains and planes and buses, and I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard, because I thought that you couldn’t really be angry, not really, if all the while you had been running around on Baltimore Avenue or, wherever you went, you were thinking up something that funny. And I was so happy, I didn’t know what to do. Because I didn’t know you then. Didn’t know how you are when you’re angry, and when you’re frightened—didn’t know how you hide things by putting them in a lecture and bringing it out all neat and logical and precise, and I didn’t realize then that you only do that when something has you so mad you could kill. So I was happy. I didn’t know that what you were doing was taking vengeance. Because that’s what you were doing that night. So you never told me about what it was like back there in that stinking little room. And do you know what I realized when I thought about all that?”

“No,” I said. I was wondering what, if Judith had been upset by the relatively benign aroma of a bus rest room, was going to happen when she had to visit the pungent precincts of Old Jack’s privy.

“I realized that you hide things. Not just some things; everything. You don’t even think; you just hide them. You’ve got a big lead vault in your head and you put things in it. If there’s anything you haven’t figured down to the last quarter inch, anything you’re not absolutely sure about, anything you haven’t torn to pieces a hundred times, you keep it in there. And if there’s something you never understand in there, it will stay; nobody else will ever see it.”

She looked at me, waiting, but I didn’t say anything.

“You never shared anything with me,” she said. “You told me how you acted when your brother died, and I thought it was intimacy. But it was just a little piece of something you had figured out and finished with. It was a bone and you threw it to me, and I chewed on it for a good long while. But it didn’t have anything to do with much of anything, did it?”

“No,” I said, “it didn’t.”

“Well, that’s what I figured on that bus. Because I realized you’ve never told me anything about this place. Nothing at all. You told me lies. You made this place, this…
shack
, sound like some quaint little cabin with a nice warm stove and a kindly old man who told tall tales to little boys and kept them out late and made their mothers worry. You told me about hunting, but it was always some nice story about sitting around drinking watered whiskey with the old men and then following dogs and treeing something just for the sport of it and letting it go. You never told me anything about…” She waved a hand at my coat, hanging on the door, dripping pink onto the dirt floor.

“You lied to me, John. You lied to me from the beginning. And then you write me a letter and think I’m supposed to accept what you’re doing. I’m supposed to understand. But how
can
I understand? You’ve never told me anything. You didn’t even warn me not to drink so much coffee.”

She stopped then, and rubbed her hands over her face. I waited for her to go on, to say what she had to say. I knew what it was, but I waited for her to say it.

“I know why you do it,” she said. “You do it because you don’t trust me. I don’t know why, but I know that. And I know I can’t take any more of it. I need you to share with me. Now. I need that.” She stopped then, waited, leaving the rest of it unstated. But I knew it was there, hanging.

I waited too, trying to think of a way around it all. But there wasn’t any way around it. I took a deep breath. “There’s nothing I can do about that right now,” I said. I looked at her and saw the hurt come back into her eyes.

“You mean you don’t care about what I need,” she said.

“I care.”

“But you won’t do anything about it.”

“Not now.”

“You’re too busy,” she said.

I gave myself time, looking for a way to soften it, finding none that would be true enough to satisfy her. “Yes,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. She just closed her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “I kept thinking—on the bus—I kept thinking about how little you’d ever shared with me. And I kept trusting you less and less and less. When the sun came up we were in the mountains. They were nice, friendly, low mountains, not like those monsters they have out West. There was snow on them, but you could see the shape of the rocks, and the green of the pines, and the fields were white and pure. And the clouds rolling along, tumbling all over themselves, black in some parts and gray in others, and sometimes there was this little wave of mist across the ground…. Oh, I can’t explain it. It was just lovely. And I started to think that you really loved it here, that you never brought me here because you didn’t want to share even that. But I know the first part of it isn’t true. You hate it here. There’s something here that terrifies you. But you won’t share it either way….”