Wilderness (25 page)

It was a wagon coming along—she could tell that much from the soft rattle of loose boards and the softer knocking of hooves upon the packed earth. Ellen put by her fear and set her hands upon the rifle. Standing from the chair, she strained with listening, but there was no voice to hear or recognize, so she put the chair out of her way and held on to the rifle.

She stood waiting, trembling a little now. The wagon came through the dark, coming steadily between the trees that flanked the pale road, and she began to tell its shape where those trees thinned before finally opening into the yard. A dark, boxy thing moving slowly along. She pursed her lips and gulped air.

A dog ran out of the brush beside the cabin and stopped before the porch with its head cocked and its breath smoking the air around its muzzle. Ellen raised the rifle, quickly and without thought, and sighted down the barrel, then looked around it, frowning. The dog barked once and without menace, and she knew it then for a dog she somehow recognized, so lowered the gun once more.

And then the wagon was pulling in beside the shed and she heard Glenn’s voice—quiet, deep, with that soft, melodious quality of calm assurance she so loved. He spoke to Emerson, telling him what a good horse he was, his voice all the while so quiet as to be more whispery emotion than true speech.

Ellen went quickly down the steps into the yard. She could sense that something was not yet right, even though he was home, and so took the rifle with her. But then he was down from the wagon and she could see his teeth in the dark and his open arms. His white shirt flashing beneath his dark fall coat. She went to him who was her husband and he put his arms around her and she tilted her forehead into the hollow of his neck. His scent enclosed her and she released her breath. They stood so, together, for a long moment with only the moon and wild stars to light them and were quiet.

And then she stepped back with one palm flat to his chest. “What
is it?” she asked. She blinked and her pale hand darted to his dark, swollen face. “Glenn,” she breathed. “What did they do to you?”

Glenn Makers took her slim white hand in his own two dark and put his lips against her palm where he could smell cinnamon and apples. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

She looked at him and sighed and kissed his hurts and they were silent together again.

There came a soft groan from the back of the wagon, and the dog, forgotten, began barking furiously.

“What is it?” she asked, peering past Glenn’s shoulder toward the bed of the wagon. “I heard gunshots.”

Glenn opened his mouth and shut it again. The dog barked and paced. Glenn turned toward it then looked back at her. “It’s that old man,” he said. “It’s Abel Truman.” And he went around to the back of the wagon and lifted Abel in his arms as easily as if he were a child.

Glenn carried him to the back room while Ellen relit the lamps and bore one after them down the dark hall. They had no second bed or cot, so she spread thick blankets on the floor for Glenn to gentle the old man down upon. There was nothing else in the little room save a small table where Ellen set the lamp. As they stood looking at him, their hands sought each other’s through the shadows and their fingers hooked thoughtlessly after the fashion of those long together in love. The old man’s eyes were closed, and his chest rose and fell steadily, a faint, wet gurgle high in his throat and soft whistle with each out-breath.

“What happened to him?” Ellen finally asked.

“Hell if I know.” Glenn shrugged. “I think he’s sick. Hurt, but sick too. Leastways, he sounded it earlier.” He looked at her. “You heard the gunfire?” he asked, glancing in the direction of the gun cabinet. When she told him yes, he nodded and told her how he’d
found the old man and shrugged again as though there were other things that needed saying that would keep until later.

Ellen let go his hand and squeezed his arm. “But you’re all right?”

“Ah, they weren’t shooting at me.” She looked at him sharply, and he grinned and nodded. “Well, I might’ve gotten a little banged up in town, but they tell me Farley got worse than what he tried to give.”

“Glenn … He’s going to be the death of you.”

He touched the pads of his fingers to her lips, then leaned to gently kiss her forehead. “It’s over and it’s done and it’s nothing for you to worry yourself over,” he said. “It’s nothing now and wasn’t much of anything to start with.”

Abel groaned wearily in his sleep and smacked his lips. Ellen squatted near the old man’s feet, pushed her hair back from her face, and began to unlace his boots where they were stiff with mud and tight with old rains soaked and dried into the leather. Wrinkling her nose, she put a hand over her mouth. “Good Lord above,” she breathed. “When do you reckon this man bathed last?” she asked the air, then stood and rolled up her sleeves. Looking at Glenn, she said, “Why don’t you go on put up Emerson and bring the things in while I settle him.” He nodded and she watched him leave the room. After a few moments she heard his footsteps crunching through the icy grass, could hear him speaking alternately to horse and dog.

Ellen finally levered Abel’s boots from his feet and paired them by the wall. The old man had been traveling sockless, and his ankles were ringed with raw sores where the old leather rubbed bare flesh. Remembering the teapot, she fetched it and added to it and brought back with her a bowl and some clean cloth. Kneeling beside him again, she washed his feet. She washed Abel’s hands and cleaned his fingers and slipped his thin coat from his hunched shoulders. Curls of steam stood from the bowl. Ellen’s strong fingers worked loose the buttons of his shirt, and she gasped to see the varicolored bruises chaining the old man’s chest, the little maps of blood that had dried
to hard ridges along the lines of old white scars—a lifetime of hurting plotted there for any to follow who could read such charts. Ellen peered at the bruises and the long, stitched cut arcing redly down his face, then pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Someone’s been caring for you,” she told his sleeping face. “I’m glad.” Then, clucking her tongue, she continued washing him. Abel’s lips moved and his eyes jerked beneath their lids. He whimpered in his sleep as she washed his back, and when she settled him down again he yawned widely and silent before falling back into a deeper sleep.

Ellen released her breath and mastered her nausea. She cleaned the road dust from his crow’s feet and from the deep lines at the corners of his mouth, his sad face pale and shrunken-looking where his beard had been shaved. By the time she’d finished, Glenn had brought the supplies in—stacking boxes and small crates, bags and canvas sacks filled with oil and saw blades, potatoes, onions, and flour, extra linen, and all the other makings for the long winter—and was done with what outside chores he could do by moonlight. He’d stoked the fire for the night, banking the coals to keep back the cold, and it was after two o’clock in the morning and even the little owl had gone quiet.

Ellen shut the back room door and she and Glenn walked wordlessly together to the bedroom to undress by what little star- and moonlight filtered through the windowdrapes. She: pale and wan by darkness. He: a splinter of shadow and warm. They embraced silently before putting on bedclothes—flesh to flesh and pressed tightly along the lengths of their bodies and their mouths fast upon one another. Silent but for the moistness of lips and tongues and the dry, cool drag of fingertips on flesh. And after, still silent and now clothed for sleeping, they slipped beneath the covers and lay quietly together. The soft hush of the wind blew over the eaves and they could hear it in the forest as it passed through the trees. After a while, he asked into the dark, “Did you …” He stopped and sighed and went on haltingly, “What I mean is, are you …”

She put her hand to her stomach and pressed. “No,” she told him. “I’m not expecting. I was only … late. It’s mostly done now, I think.”

She felt him nod, and he told her how sorry he was, as though that would help. He took her hand and held it in his own and said nothing more at all and she stayed silent in the soft, cool dark beside him until he was asleep. She felt his warmth all along her side and in the quiet moments before sleep she fancied she could hear, too, the sound of his blood within his body—ancient, African, noble, fast, and hot—as it rushed through the fine, thin veins of his arms and his neck and legs and in his belly through to the very center of him. The largeness of him seemed to cast a warm, soft glow over her in the dark, and she wondered, could he ever hear her blood? The fast, nervous thrum as it raced through her? Slowly, half shy, Ellen cupped his sex in her palm, holding it there a long time before drawing back her hand and making a tight fist against her belly as though to push his fierce, slow heat into her for keeping as she would. She desperately needed to warm the hollow cold they’d put inside her along with the gun barrel that summer’s night beside the tide-swollen river. And when she finally slept, it was only a light sleep peppered by dreams that twisted the sheets about her legs.

Ellen woke. Beside her, Glenn breathed softly, dreaming his own dreams and of what she had no inkling. She stepped from the bed into the dull, dark cold and went to the front door. The dog came inside and turned three tight circles before the hearth, where the backlog had burned down to red coals, sighing softly as it settled before the heat. Ellen stood watching it for a time before finally returning to bed and sleeping a sleep dreamless and deep.

Abel did not wake all the next day, and the hard frost that Ellen had expected did not come. Instead, the day dawned to a sky darkly clouded and the rain came lightly back. The sky was a puzzle of
clouds of gray and darker gray. And through the woods came the sound of water falling, running, dripping upon the trees and through the trees and beneath the trees where it ran in little rivulets that lifted burnt-colored pine needles and sent them flowing into Little Sugar Creek and thence down into the green, fog-bound valley.

Glenn spent that day resting and chopping wood for winter—an activity that was, for him, a sort of rest itself where he could lose himself in the easy motion of his arms. Lifting the axe, letting it fall precisely where he wanted into the wood with great thunking sounds, then wrenching it free, lifting and letting fall again and again. The sound of the axe on the wood like the sound of the season’s own heart. For her part, Ellen swept out the cabin while she listened to Glenn. She shooed Abel’s dog outside and beat the dander from the rug on which it slept. She mended the holes in the knees of Abel’s trousers and used cold water, salt, and extract of lemon to scrub the blood from his shirt where it had spotted in designs strange and repugnant. A story of violence there that she had no desire to read.

After a time, she went to the back room where the old man lay sleeping and stood looking down at him. A rank smell had settled into the room, fouling the air and tainting the curtains. Ellen thought, suddenly, of her father and the way he’d died—from the inside out and so slowly you could smell death in him like turned meat, as though his very pores exhaled it. The flesh itself, her father’s flesh that had rocked her to sleep and brushed her hair and held her close during storms when it seemed the very world would end, had turned suddenly contrary. Had tightened and loosened, moistened and dried, and, in the end, shuddered all on its own like horsehide touched by flies. His flesh imposed its will upon his mind and he’d gone to sleep and never woke, her father when he died, and Ellen had come to reckon that as about the only part of his sickness that was kindly in the least.

And even though she’d washed him the night before, Abel still looked roadsore and dirty. He’d woken enough at some point to use the night jar she’d set out for him, and Ellen carried it to the outhouse. The stink of age and strange food. When she returned she brought with her a small sack and the scissors and she knelt on the floor beside the old man’s head. Lifting a hank of his long, metal-colored hair, she rubbed it between her fingers. It was not soft and smelled like the smokes of countless cooking fires. It hung limp and bedraggled to his shoulders and was, on the whole, impossibly dirty and ill-kept, matted and shot through with all manner of dirt and moss and pine needles, bits of mud and tiny stones and other matter that she hoped was merely mud and tiny stones. Clumps of things snarled the ends like decorative beads or small, strange berries. “Looks to me like you’re about half tree,” she told him, shaking her head.

Ellen clucked her tongue and began to cut back Abel’s hair. It was slow work and she cut it back to finger-width so it stood straight and bristly from his scalp. When she finished, Ellen fetched and warmed a bowl of water and washed what hair remained, feeling the hard ridges of scar tissue that, even here, laced his skull like the stitching of a well-used ball. “It’s a good thing your dog’s away and you’re sleeping,” she told him. “Elsewise neither of you would let me near.”

That night, Ellen let the dog indoors again. It followed her down the hall to the back room and when she opened the door it went inside where the old man still lay sleeping. Sniffing the floor cautiously all around him, it licked his ears and face and, as Ellen watched, turned three circles and settled down on the corner of the blanket just beside him. Shaking her head, she shut the door and went to the bedroom where Glenn lay waiting for her.

They held hands beneath the covers in the dark. Glenn lay on his back, staring at the shadowed ceiling, and Ellen knew what needed discussing and knew, also, that she would have to be the one to
broach the subject, speak aloud the decision each had already separately made but neither had yet found the voice for. She took a breath and squeezed his hand. “We can’t turn him out,” she said softly, addressing the dark. “We both know it. Even if we don’t want him here.”

Glenn sighed deeply and long as though a great weight had been lifted from him. “I know,” he said, his voice deep and soft and close as shadows. “I know it.”

And then silence came between them, broken only later when Ellen said, “I think he’s sick.” She shook her head in the dark. “No,” she said. “I don’t think it. I know it. I can smell it. I think he’s dying.”