The Tilted World (25 page)

“What do you mean, gone?” She was struggling to sit up, pressing her good arm into the soft ground—“They’re evacuating to Greenville, all of Hobnob is evacuating to Greenville, you said so—”

“Yes, for starters. But from there, river steamers take folks to Memphis or Natchez. And if Jeannette has already boarded one”—Ingersoll was sitting up now too, facing her, hand on her elbow—“we’ll find out where she went—”

But Dixie Clay was scrambling, a boot caught in her skirt, and lunging to her feet. “Oh my God, get in the boat, we have to go, we have to—”

“Dixie Clay, we can’t, we’ll die, we’ll die and that won’t help the baby. At first light—”

But she ran to the boat and grabbed the rope with her good hand and was yanking the boat down the side of the mound. Ingersoll intercepted her and jerked the rope away and gripped her burning hand in front of her chest and shook it for emphasis, “We can’t, we can’t, calm down.” He released her arm, which flew up to slap him. It connected solidly with his cheek, the first solid thing in her day, all her fierceness coiled behind it, and then she whirled toward the boat again, but Ingersoll had already sprung to clamp her shoulders and wrestle her up the mound. She thrashed, twisting her shoulders, her arm sparking with pain, and he lost his footing in the mud and fell back and pulled her with him, her back on his chest.

“Stop it,” he yelled. “Stop it,” and he hugged her and she couldn’t free herself and she couldn’t twist loose. She flung herself from side to side and then she suddenly and simply let her head fall back on his shoulder and began to sob.

This whole long day since waking to find Willy missing she hadn’t had time to feel anything slowly and now she did and felt nothing but fear. He still held her shoulders but not rigidly and she heaved with sobs and his mouth pressed into her hair as he murmured, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” He stopped talking but his lips remained pressed to her nape. They moved to her cheeks and he was kissing up her tears. “We’ll find Willy,” he told her. “I promise you, we’ll find him.” She turned her face to tell him something and then his lips weren’t on her cheeks but on her mouth. She was kissing him back, his mouth salty from the tears still pressing from her eyes.

She angled her shoulders now and rolled over with her splinted arm tucked to her chest. It hurt and she welcomed the hurt. His arms cinched her waist and pulled her close. His kisses were warm and his arms and slab of chest were warm, and she needed what he was making her forget and what he was making her believe. Kisses on the underside of her jaw and then on her neck, kisses like the paw prints of a fox, some sap in her rising and ambering in the hollows where her clavicles flared like wings as he pressed his lips there. Oh God. The fingers of her right hand tripping down his neck, then her palm on his chest, her fingers sliding through the springy hair and grasping the solidity beneath. Kissing still and his large hands sliding from her waist up her ribs and then his hands on her breasts. She brought her good hand to her blouse to twist open the small buttons but she struggled, and then his fingers met hers and like picking the mandolin he had the blouse open and she shimmied it down her good arm and the fabric bunched around the sling on the other side but it didn’t matter. There were kisses on her breasts and on her mulberry nipples, and she reached back to pull her long braid over her shoulder and tugged the band and shook her head and her wet damp waves fell about them as she leaned over him, bracing with her good arm, and he was sliding her skirt up and she was one-handedly tugging loose the trousers and the mud squelched as he lifted his hips to help her pull them free.

They were two small humans on a mound of ancient earth banked by rushing waters and her tears were falling on his chest and their faces curtained by locks of her hair like the branches of the weeping willow where she used to pump her swing in Pine Grove, Alabama, and their eyes were corded and she who had never quite done this now reached below to grasp him and fit him into her. She’d never been filled this way before, cored. They were rocking together, a rescue boat, and then words and ideas of words fell away and they were thrust into the golden light that bodies can climb to. They were there and there and there. Stillness at the height.

And then the slow sliding and somehow Dixie Clay back in her body again, which had again its various pains but was also redeemed. Was nestling on his chest, which was rising and falling, as was her own. Song of his blood filling the cup of her ear.

“I love you, Dixie Clay.”

“I know.”

Chapter 17

T
hey woke before dawn to the lowing of a cow being washed past the Indian mound. They unwound themselves from each other’s warm limbs and sat up, sheeted by fog. Ingersoll rose to gather Dixie Clay’s damp clothes and turned his back so she could dress but spun when he heard a small cry. Her face was white, wreathed in white fog, and she was trying to screw her splinted arm through the opening of her blouse. Ingersoll bent over her blue fingers, but she took a step back. “It’s not that bad,” she said.

“Liar. It hurts like hell.”

“It can wait. Let’s go.”

He knew she was afraid of him setting the break, but it had to be done. He slipped his hands into the splint and closed his fingers over her forearm and felt the sick place, the swollen lump of skewed bone, and flicked his eyes to her unsuspecting face and with a wrenching jerk he snapped it into alignment. He’d forgotten how terrible the noise was, the grinding of bone against bone, more terrible even than her cry. Dixie Clay slumped into his arms, which he’d been prepared for, but she didn’t faint. She rested against him for a second and then leaned forward to place her weight on her feet again and he steadied her good arm and then she was upright, though her eyes remained closed.

“You didn’t warn me. At all.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She opened her eyes at last. “No, it was a good idea. But if you ever try that again,” she said, smiling up at him, “I’ll kill you.”

“Gotcha. How does it feel?”

She gave her fingers a tentative wiggle. “Better, actually. Better.”

Ingersoll dragged the boat down the slope and into the water swirling with scarves of cloud and held it for Dixie Clay. Then he shoved off, his boot sinking shin deep into the mud, and clambered in and sat on the stern thwart and reached over the transom to pull the rip cord but there was no growl from the motor. He tried again: nothing. He felt Dixie Clay’s eyes as he reached to yank the cord a third time. Oh, for Christ sake. It stammered and then caught.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Low on fuel.”

They began to needle through the choppy water toward Greenville, and as they rounded the bend Ingersoll had the urge to see the Indian mound one last time so he swiveled his head to view the prehistoric loaf of earth where they had made their love. He remembered pulsing into her, her small fist thwacking his chest three times in an agony of release. Her face above him, the only sky he’d ever want now. As the mound passed from sight he faced forward and met Dixie Clay’s eyes—she’d turned around to see it, too. She smiled shyly and he smiled a bit bigger and then she grinned, she flat-out grinned. Dixie Clay. What a woman.

Then they had no eyes for anything but the tree-stabbed rapids and churning trappings of washed-out river towns, all shrouded by dangerous fog. The motor was fifteen horsepower and would make ten miles an hour, but Ingersoll kept it to about half that. “We could walk faster,” he growled, though that wasn’t exactly true. Dixie Clay, lookout, scanned the water for logjams and whirlpools and submerged sharecropper shacks and alligators—this last probably the least dangerous. When she pointed she did so gingerly, and he’d seen her fingers snake up her side, and he figured on some broken ribs. He wished he could tape them for her. Before they went to sleep, when they were lying quietly and talking quietly, she’d sneezed and squeezed his fingers, as if the sneezing hurt.

They’d gone about a mile when they saw another boat heading toward Greenville, a man paddling his wife and two kids. The man raised his oar, perhaps wanting to exchange news, but Ingersoll merely nodded and touched a finger to where the brim of his hat should have been—they had no news, no food, nothing but a terrible need to press on. In the next mile they passed two more rowboats, both low lying with trunks and valises, folks who lived close enough to the fire station to hear the siren and know the levee had burst. Just once they crossed a boat heading in the opposite direction, a twenty-foot steel motorboat, which pulled starboard. It was loaded with supplies. Ingersoll hailed the driver, a preacher, and they cut their motors. The preacher said that he’d gone to Greenville to set up a church in the tent city.

“White folk that cared to leave done left. Niggers ain’t got the option, they’s in tents unloading the Red Cross supplies. Plenty of nigger preachers setting up hullabaloo on both banks,” he said and spit brown tobacco into the tobacco-brown water. “They don’t need me, so I’m taking supplies back to my people, my congregation, in Semmesville.”

Ingersoll eyed the preacher’s boat, the tarp outlining boxes and parcels. “Red Cross handing out supplies? Thank God,” he said. “We need gasoline for this boat. Won’t make it to Greenville on what we got. Can you spare some?”

The preacher said, “Gasoline is sparse and fixing to become sparser.”

“I bet,” said Ingersoll. “That’s why we’re glad to run up on you. Could you spare, say, ten gallons out of that container there?” He gestured with his chin toward the red gas nozzle poking from the tarp.

The preacher said nothing, gazing at the canopy of an elm resting on the water, thick with meadowlarks wearing their black bibs and warbling worriedly. “Lookit them robins,” he said. “All shouting, ‘Where’s the dang worms?’ ” He chuckled.

“Seeing how you got the gas free and all? And can go back and get some more?”

The preacher turned from the tree still smiling and brought his fingers to his collar and hooked it from his jowls. Ingersoll saw the skin was pinched and red. This was no man of God. He glanced at Dixie Clay and knew that she knew.

“What’ll it take?” asked Ingersoll, a bit of a growl in his voice.

“Ten gallons is a lot, in a hat or a tank.”

“We don’t have time for this.” Ingersoll rose to his full height, which sometimes changed the tenor of a conversation. “What’ll it take?”

“What you got?”

Very little, as it turned out. Dixie Clay had nothing in her pockets but a slim waterlogged volume of Longfellow. Ingersoll’s wallet held eight dollars. At which the preacher laughed.

Ingersoll stepped to the side of the boat and the preacher choked off his guffaw and threw his boat into gear.

How Ingersoll hated to do it. He yelled to the preacher’s back, “Wait.”

The preacher looked over his shoulder but didn’t slow.

“I got something,” Ingersoll yelled.

The preacher was about forty feet away now and killed his motor. “This better be good.”

“Federal revenuer badge.”

“Lemme see.”

Ingersoll reached into his pocket and pulled the white lining out. He propped his foot up on the bench and bent his head and pinched the clasp and then pushed his pocket back into his trousers and kicked and from inside his pants the badge fell out, landing with a splash on the burden boards. He picked up the silver crest and held it dripping toward the preacher, who was motoring closer.

“Toss it here,” said the preacher.

“Where’s the gasoline?”

The preacher let up on the throttle and moved his foot to loosen the tarp and there were many jugs and cans there. He picked up a small jug and held it toward Ingersoll. “Toss me that badge.”

“You first.”

“Same time.”

Ingersoll nodded.

“One, two, three!”

Ingersoll tossed the badge and in the same gesture hooked the jug. Meanwhile, the badge bounced off the preacher’s hand and clattered into the bottom of his boat. He squatted and, smiling, turned it over in his hand.

“We also need food.”

The preacher pocketed the badge and stood. “We done transacted our transaction,” he said, flipping his tarp down, “so, um, God bless you.” His hand went to the boat’s tiller.

“Wait.”

The preacher’s eyes were shrewd, and he drew his lips into his mouth and watched as Ingersoll pulled out his other pocket and fiddled again and kicked again and again bent down. He held up a dripping bronze disk.

“What is it?”

“Valor. Verdun.”

“Lemme see.”

“Food first.”

The preacher kicked the tarp up again and began rummaging and pulling out packages and stacking them on his seat, “Saltines . . . potted meat . . . tin of peaches . . . shredded wheat.” He stood. “Now gimme the medal.”

Ingersoll shook his head. “Food first.”

The preacher lobbed the food, which Ingersoll caught and passed to Dixie Clay. When she’d set down the last box, she looked up at Ingersoll, who was rolling the medal in his hand. He gripped it and then levered it onto his thumbnail and he flipped it. It rose and rose, turning over itself, all three lifting their faces to watch its arc, glint of bronze at the zenith despite the clouds, and then it descended and landed with a smack in the palm of the preacher, who clenched it and gave a hoot.

Ingersoll was already setting their boat toward Greenville, but the motor didn’t quite drown the preacher’s awkward pronunciation, “A La Gloire des Heros de Verdun,” and then some other words, and finally they chugged around a logjam island out of earshot.

“Ingersoll?” Dixie Clay twisted on the bench but he kept his eyes over her head, on the river and its eddies.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said gruffly. “Don’t need a medal to remember it.”

“And the badge?”

He gave a small shrug. “I’m done with that life now.” Then he dropped his gaze to her upturned, guileless, pale face, freckles standing out. Crust of blood along her hairline. He said it again, and this time softer, “I’m done with that life now.”

T
here was a rhythm to the way they worked, her telling him when to steer starboard or duck or to
Slow down, Ingersoll, I don’t like the look of these currents.
Once he saw a floating mass and steered closer for a look and was about to point it out to Dixie Clay when he realized it was a corpse, a man’s back in a plaid shirt, mired in the reeds. He tried to point out something on the opposite bank but it was too late, she’d already seen it.

“Should we . . . ?” she asked, and answered her own question, “No.” And they passed four more corpses there and a smashed dugout canoe circling in an eddy.

They weren’t able to converse much, but he sensed she felt as connected as he did. He liked to let his eyes include her alert frame as he scanned the water. The curls erupting from the tail of the braid that she’d plaited one-handedly, plaited loosely around the gash in her head—he felt so protective of that club of a braid, the shoulder blades it rested between.

How strange to be a twenty-eight-year-old man who had crossed an ocean to fight a war, and to have been shot at, and to have shot, and to recross the ocean to fight another war, and to continue to be shot at, and to continue to shoot, to many times have eked out of death’s lunge with a nimble last-minute feint—and yet feel he had something at stake at last. Yes, he was—stupid, but wasn’t it true, stupid didn’t make it any less true—a new man.

If only he could have met her earlier. What if he hadn’t met her at twenty-eight, what if he’d met her when he was sixteen. She would have been, hm, ten. Well, maybe not sixteen then, maybe later, but to have had her in his life earlier, to feel this grounded, this permanent, a thing he’d never felt before. He’d have been able to spare her the things that she would suffer, to have married her before she’d ever laid eyes on Jesse’s two-tone eyes, ever become a bootlegger, to have Willy be their own blood baby.

Ridiculous. Not just the part about Willy, but all of it. Because even if their ages had meshed, and even if they had met, Dixie Clay wouldn’t have liked him. No way, no sir. A gal that pretty, and that smart—she’d have to choose the Jesses of the world. The handsomest, most charming, most eloquent. Maybe she’d needed her dream to come true to realize it was the wrong dream. Maybe only then could a man like Ingersoll make sense. He realized with a start that his fingers had risen, were stroking the place under his eye where the lumpybumpy—the hemangioma—had been. He dropped his hand to his leg. The strawberry mark was long gone but he still thought of himself as ugly. Didn’t give a thought to clothes. And he was awkward; without a gun or a guitar he hardly knew what to do with his hands. The beads of his words strung with too much silence between them.

And that wasn’t all. He had some kind of remove. He’d felt, he’d always felt, that he was passing through. Passing over, passing under, passing through. Sometimes he wondered—did everyone feel this way? But they must not. Look at all of them
caring
. He hadn’t disdained it, he just couldn’t participate. Why had he never felt attached to people? Could he have chosen differently, better? Hard to say. He grew up with nuns who thought he could be adopted at any moment. Then he fought alongside men who thought he could be killed at any moment. Then he took a job that required he move constantly, two-week engagements, two-week acquaintances. In these jobs, he had done what others considered brave deeds, but they never seemed brave to him because he valued his own existence so lightly. He was temporary. Even his name. Teddy, the nuns had written on his intake form. Not even Theodore, because it was just a three-day name, something to call him until he was adopted.

And into this life came a baby, and a mother for that baby. Between them they probably couldn’t weigh a buck and a quarter. But now
his
life had weight. He remembered again the jail cell in Hobnob, how it faced an identical cell, like looking into a mirror and being invisible. Until he found Willy and Dixie Clay, he realized, that’s all his whole life had been.

A
calm swath of river, rivulets flowing in the same direction like a horse’s mane curried with a comb. It was a good time to stop but there was no place to bank. Still, the body has needs. Ingersoll cut the motor and Dixie Clay scooted to the bow and turned around and stepped up on either side of the gunwale and squatted, but with only one arm to hold her skirts and also the breasthook of the bobbing vessel, she was precarious. So Ingersoll climbed over the forward thwart and slid his arm around her back and listened as she made water, gazing over her head at a small house bobbing along, a chicken on the roof.