In Wilderness (27 page)

“Eight dollars.”

Danny peels off a five and three ones. “That’s for twenty-five
pounds of plaster, one bucket of Sheetrock mud, you digging out the Sheetrock mud, and you washing and drying out the bucket.”

“Ten. You didn’t say about the washing out and drying.” Skinny shit whines like a mosquito.

Danny doesn’t even roll his eyes, gives up two more bills. “Make sure you dry the inside good. I’ll be back before an hour.”

Time enough to put away three cups of coffee, two pieces of cherry pie at the Elkmont Diner. Time to stare into the window of the clothing store. Dress models with black electrical tape wound on their feet for shoes. One’s got a red flannel nightgown on her just like Memaw used to wear. Little ruffles at her wrists. Nightgown for a fine and proper lady.

Lady like that Lady Chatterley. Oh, yeah.

“I’ll take that red nightgown in the window yonder.” Can’t help the little smile that slides around his mouth. Nightgown to keep his own fine lady from the cold.

“We just put that one on sale for Valentine’s.”

The pinched-up lady store clerk gets a gown just like it from the back, folds it between tissue paper, slides it into a green bag. One more thing to carry.

“You staple that thing shut? I got a ways to go.”

She wrinkles up between the eyes but still does what he says, her with her skinny hands, all brown spots and ropy veins. Someday their hands’ll look like that, his and his Katherine’s, their fingers intertwined. Like his mama’s and his daddy’s should have been.

He trudges back from town, taking the high trail up the mountain under a weak winter sun. The handle of the plaster-filled bucket cuts through his glove into his calloused palm. What is his house now, Gatsby’s house, will be their house someday. House where he’ll be King of the Mountain and she’ll be his queen.

Back at the cabin, with the hearth fire built up to a roar, she takes a year unwrapping the damn package, long fingers worrying out each staple like she’s got some further use in mind for the bag. When she’s finally done and shakes the gown out from its tissue paper, she’s so surprised she doesn’t even smile. Just looks at him.

“You like it?”

She nods. “We need another blanket more.”

“Goddammit! I’ll buy you all the damn nightgowns I care to. And all the fucking blankets you could ever need.” He likes how saying it makes him feel strong, tall, a man of substance. “Put it on. I been picturing you in it the whole afternoon.”

She slips the gown on like a tent and takes her clothes off under it, one way to keep out the cold that creeps in two, three feet beyond the fire. Her hair lays dark and shiny against the red flannel. He grabs thick hanks of it in both his fists and pulls her down onto the quilts. The firelight flickers in her startled eyes. He jerks the red gown up and off her, wads it behind her head, can’t hold off any longer.

Oh, how his fine lady always wants him.

He screams when he comes. Scream that trails off like a hawk’s scream with a dying fall. Afterwards, he wraps himself so tight around her she can’t ever go.

Yet he still falls and falls.

T
HEY LIE UNMOVING IN THE LATE AFTERNOON
,
HIS ARMS STILL
coiled around her, the new red gown still bunched behind her head. Through the partly open window she can hear the winter birds settling themselves for the night, even their smallest sounds.

He breathes softly against her breast, cups his hand around it. “If you gave milk I’d suck your titties all day long.”

She hates how he says “titties” like a nasty little boy. He is holding her too tight, his other arm biting into her side.

She squirms. “If I gave milk, there’d be a baby.”

“You giving milk don’t mean there’s got to be a baby.”

She can tell he wants her to ask why, but she won’t do it. Instead watches the patch of sky outside the window darken to deep blue, ignores his hand playing between her legs.

“Tell you a story.”

She doesn’t want a story, wants them both to lie still now and listen, as the near, clear day sounds give way to the distant, deeper sounds of night.

But he won’t be stopped, angles his head to look at her.

“Not long after I came to live at Memaw’s, she took me with her to this one-room shack where a new little baby had just died. She came to bind the woman’s tits with cotton cloth and give her herbs to make her milk stop coming. Inside, the place smelled like a cow barn. Like there was pails and pails of milk and cream all over. Only thicker, sweeter. Like my mama’s milk I still remembered.”

She is ashamed that his deliberately bad grammar irritates her. And she doesn’t want to hear his story, not any story that includes a baby that has died. Readjusts her nightgown, tugs it down around her.

“All of it, all that sweet milk smell, came from this one woman lying in a corner on a rope bed. Her covered halfway with a blanket. And her titties hanging clear out of her gown they was swole up so big with milk.”

He looks up at her, his eyes wide and innocent.

“While Memaw got out her cloth strips from her midwife bag, I went over to the woman, really close. I tried hard not to look down at her titties, tried to pretend I wasn’t interested. Looked her square in the face instead.

“ ‘Memaw brought me to drink up all your milk,’ I told her.

“That woman smiled at me, such a sweet smile, and didn’t say a word. Just lifted up her titty closest to me, squeezed its huge brown nipple to where I could see the milk bead on it, and held out her other hand to pull me in the bed. I reached out both hands toward her, licked my lips. A drop of milk fell off her nipple onto the dirty sheet, and I wanted it so bad I could have bent my head and sucked it up. I scrambled onto that bed quick as lightning, knowing the next drop, and all that milk forever from those two enormous titties, would be mine.”

Katherine doesn’t like his story, wishes he would stop it. Knows it’s bound to come to a bad end.

“I spread my fingers wide to take that titty in my open mouth. But
before I even touched it Memaw yanked me back and whacked my butt. Hard.

“ ‘That milk was for the baby,’ she hissed in my ear. ‘It wasn’t meant for you.’

“I yelled bloody murder and she shoved me out onto the porch and slammed the door. I was so angry the whole world turned red. I wanted that milk more than I’d ever wanted anything in the good Lord’s power to give me. That woman’s baby’d gone just like my mama, so I knew God meant that baby’s milk for me. Knew it sure as if He’d told me.

“I screamed and hollered for it till I spit out blood. Kept yelling to Memaw, ‘Let me in.’ But she never did. Just went about her work, I guess. Bound up that woman’s titties, gave her the dry-up tea. I screamed in the vain hope I could stop her. Screamed to where I couldn’t holler anymore ’cause no sound came. When Memaw finally got out on the porch, I was standing with my short pants down around my feet and flailing on my little peter like a banjo.”

He laughs and shifts his head against Katherine’s breast.

“Memaw beat the tar out of me right there and next day took me into town, bought me my first long pants. Said I’d got too big to suckle like a baby.”

He props up on an elbow, looks at her. “Point is, the woman in that shack was full of milk without there being any baby. Like I said.”

“Why are you doing that?”

“What?”

“Grinning that way, laughing.”

He wriggles there beside her like a squirmy toddler, looks at her with his innocent eyes. “Because it’s funny. Don’t you think it’s funny, me wanting that poor woman’s big old titty so?”

“No, I think it’s heartbreaking.” All of it. An orphan, that’s what he truly was. Is. A poor orphan boy that she has made a place for.

He frowns. His frown of pretending not to understand. Then he curls himself into her body’s nooks and crannies, as close to her as he can get, stares up at her.

“Play like I’m your little baby. Hold my head and put your titty in my mouth. Just like that woman would have done back then.”

His eyes beseech her. It’s an easy thing to do, no matter that she doesn’t want to. A gift given out of love. She tips his head forward, her fingers on the hard bones of his skull. He sighs so sweetly as she gently rubs his neck and scalp and with her other hand squeezes her breast, pinches its nipple hard, slides it along his closed lips until they open slightly and he takes it in his mouth. She is amazed she knows as if from instinct how to do it.

“I promise I won’t bite you. Tiny babies got no teeth to bite.”

The room, everything, is quiet all around them. His lips make tiny sucking sounds.

“Sing me a song,” he asks then. “Sing me Memaw’s lullaby while I suck on your tit.”

His body wrapped around her shelters her from the cold. She shifts position, sings to him soft and low.

They lie there. His gray eyes glisten dark and wet in the twilight and his hand still plays between her legs as if he’s unaware of it. She spasms then, without expecting to. Private and satisfying, deep inside herself. As if she has a secret.

“Sing it all again.”

She does, then stops. Can’t remember the next verse.

He looks up at her, takes her nipple from his mouth, rubs it along his slightly parted lips.

“You’re everything.” The words slide out against each other and against her breast, almost inaudible. “You’re the whole world.”

Later that night she wakes, untangles herself from his embrace, goes to the window. Moonlight silvers the bare trees, turning them stark and beautiful. She remembers the lost verse of Memaw’s song.

She shudders, chafes her cold arms, doesn’t want to see what’s out the window anymore. Back in bed, she pulls a second quilt around them, buries her tear-damp face against his warm back. And once again, for a brief moment, terror washes over her as pure and silver as the moonlight.

T
HAT DAY AND NIGHT
,
THOUGH ONLY IN MID
-F
EBRUARY
,
MIGHT AS
well have been the first few hours of spring. They’ve had nothing since but temperatures too warm for her new flannel nightgown and air heavy with the smell of leaf mold and the sounds of birds going about the most important business of their lives. Wild daffodils thrust up green spears around the porch.

A new lethargy that has to be spring fever has her wanting nothing more than to lie up in the loft to catch the breeze and rock him in her arms, thread her fingers through his baby-fine blond hair. It’s where they are this afternoon. As if that first, hot, urgent rush has gone to something deeper, as if all clocks have slowed, even the sun. In its long warmth, her body has grown so exquisitely tender she can hardly bear it.

“Touch me light as feathers,” she says to him. “Touch me soft as smoke.”

It’s all so peaceful then.

But once he’s left her, gone up on the mountain, her fears escape the cages that she keeps them in when he is near, and they run free: He is a poison in her blood and she’s the same for him; each weakens the other, saps the other’s strength; they have infested themselves, infected themselves with each other as if with some disease, and somehow they will have to pay. Lying naked in the soft breeze from the window, she jams her fist against her open mouth to keep from crying out.

Get up. Get out
. The sharp voice hisses in her head. She pulls on her jeans, their denim harsh against her thighs. Beneath the soft chambray shirt her skin feels sunburned, dry. Boots crush her insteps and she loosens their laces, descends the ladder with great deliberation, trudges through the house and then reluctantly outside. She carries her shovel upright, its blade near the ground, not slung over her shoulder in the usual way, for fear its weight will bruise her.

She has fallen behind in the garden, should have cleared the beds out days ago, brought new soil from underneath the trees. Her shovel bites into soft ground beneath the largest of the oaks, releasing familiar, earthy odors as intoxicating as perfumes. She plunges her hands in deep where she has dug, brings up both fists full of black dirt. A red worm hangs from her right thumb.

“Hello, little one.”

She strokes its wriggling length, lets it twine around her index finger before depositing it in what will be this year’s lettuce bed.

Lethargy slips from her shoulders with the shovel’s rhythmic crunch into soft ground, and she works as though hypnotized, digging out two small beds, replacing the spent soil with new, black dirt, stopping only when her limbs begin to weaken and she knows she will be sore. Tomorrow she’ll start planting seeds that spring’s cold nights won’t harm, seeds captured from last season’s strongest plants. A crow caws in the shadows at the garden’s edge and jays shriek out from nearby trees, the same sounds she heard her first day in the forest, a whole lifetime ago.

The dirt’s rich smell has left her starved for something fresh and green, it’s a sharp pang in her belly. Heading for home, she detours off the path to the low, spongy spot where last spring’s fiddleheads raised
up. Oh, please, let them be there, don’t let her be too early. Already, in her mind, she sees the new ferns’ slick white humps pushing through winter’s crust. “April is the cruelest month”—save March, which forces fiddleheads from the dead ground. Already she imagines them, their sharp, green taste of early spring, runs toward the spot, can see them from this distance as a pale smear in the dark loam. She kneels in front of them and, with more gentleness than needed, brushes back dry, crumbling leaves. Then, with her garden knife, she slices the first fiddlehead clean and quick, an inch below the ground, wipes away the rich leaf-soil from the new shoot, slips it in her mouth. It tastes fresh as the start of life itself.