Читать книгу All the Living - C. E. Morgan - Страница 4

She had never lived in a house and now, seeing the thing, she was no longer sure she wanted to. It was the right house, she knew it was. It was as he had described. She shielded her eyes as she drove the long slope, her truck jolting and bucking as she approached. The bottomland yawned into view and she saw the fields where the young tobacco faltered on the drybeat earth, the ridge beyond. All around the soil had leached to chalky dust under the sun. She looked for the newer, smaller house that Orren had told her of, but she did not see it, only the old listing structure before her and the fields and the slope of tall grasses that fronted the house. She parked her truck and stared, her tongue troubled the inside of her teeth. The house cast no shadow in the bare noon light.

The ragged porch clung weakly to the wall of the building, its floorboards lining out from the door, their splintering gray now naked to the elements that first undressed them. When she tested a board with one foot, the wood ached and sounded under her, but did not move. She picked her way around a mud-spattered posthole digger and a length of chicken wire to reach the door where she found a paper heart taped to the wood. The shape of the thing gave her pause. She read the note without touching it.

Aloma, If you come when I'm gone, the tractor busted and I went to Hansonville for parts. Go on in. I will come back soon,

Orren

In this house, she thought, or the new one? She straightened up and hesitated. Over her head a porch fan hung spinless, trailing its cobwebs like old hair, its spiders gone. She turned to peer behind her down the gravel drive. Displaced dust still hung close behind the fender of her truck, loath to lie down in boredom again. It was quiet, both on the buckling blacktop road where not a single car had passed since she'd driven up, and here on the porch where the breezeless day was silent. A few midday insects spoke and that was all. She turned around and walked into the house.

If it was abandoned, it was not empty. Curtains hung bleached to gray and tattered rugs scattered across the floor. Against one wall, nestled under the rise of a staircase and a high landing, stood an old upright piano. One sulling eyebrow rose. Orren had told her of a piano on the property, one she could practice on, but it could not be this. Aloma edged past its sunken frame, leaving it untouched, and walked back through a dining room washed in south light past a table papered with bills and letters, into the kitchen. The ceiling here was high and white. It seemed clean mostly because it was empty—spacious and empty as a church. She circled the room, tugged open drawers and cabinets, but her eyes stared at their contents unseeing, her mind wheeling backward. She turned on her heel and stalked to the first room. She tossed back the fallboard and reached her fingers to the ivory. The keys stuttered to the bed, fractionally apart beneath her fingers, and it was no more, no less than she had expected. The sound was spoiled like a meat. She slapped the fallboard down, wood on wood clapped out into the echoing house in cracking waves, and then it was gone. She turned away with the air of someone halfheartedly resigned to endure, but as she turned, she started and stopped. A wall of faces stood before her, photographs in frames armied around a blackened mantel, eyes from floor to ceiling. She studied them without stepping closer. They gazed back.

She left the room as quick as she had come, retraced her steps to the kitchen where she had spied a door that led outside. She opened it wide to the June day. From where she stood, she claimed a long view of the back property. A field of tobacco began down a slope a hundred yards from the house and a fallow field neighbored close by, its beds risen like new graves. There a black curing barn stood and from its rafters a bit of tobacco hung like browned bird wings, pinions down, too early and out of season, she could not say why. To her left another barn, this one red, with a large gated pen and a gallery on one side. The pasture was empty. The cows had all wandered up a hillside to a stand of brazen green trees and stood blackly on the fringe of its shade gazing out, their bodies in the cloaking dark but their heads shined to a high gloss like black pennies in the sunlight. Far below their unmoving faces the newer house pointed south, no larger than a doublewide, no taller, no prettier. It banked the barbed edge of the cows' pasture. But none of this held Aloma's gaze for more than a moment. Instead, she looked out into the distance where, because she could not will them away or otherwise erase them from the earth, the spiny ridges of the mountains stood. She laughed a laugh without humor. All her hopes, and there they were. Had they been any closer, she'd have suffered to hear them laughing back.

When he came, she saw the sun flashes between the farthest trees where the road ran out of the north and she stepped forward and waited. Her eyes worried the spot where the tree-line ended. Then when the truck shot free from the last trees and she knew that it was his, she took another step forward and her hands came together of their own accord, but she did not leave the porch. His truck, as familiar to her as a face, turned in the drive, the glass glinted. Her eyes followed his progress up the hill, the dust rolling and sweeping low to the ground in blond curls behind his truck, then flanging and fading to nothing. At first she could see his figure only as a dark shape and the sun firing on the watch on his right arm as he turned the wheel. Then when he was finally before her, braking and leaning in slightly under the shade of the visor to pull the keys from the ignition, she found the broad contours of his face and the color of his skin, much browner than the last time she had seen him, the day after the funeral three weeks ago when he came down to the school and sat beside her and set a question to her. He said, You'll come up? And she said, Yes, yes. And it don't matter if it's all out of order like it is? And she shook her head and took his blanched face in her hands and kissed him, and that had struck her later as an odd reversal, he usually being the one to reach out and pull her to him. But she'd thought of it only later when she recalled how his lips had not made any motion against hers. It aroused a feeling in her like fear, but so slight and quick to fade that she didn't recognize it for what it was. Now she could not take her eyes from him sitting motionless in the truck watching her as she watched him. She stepped off the porch, hesitant at first, but then half running until she was standing at his door, her hand on the burning chrome of the handle. The tips of his eyelashes were pale as straw now, bleached from the sun so it seemed he had no eyelashes at all, nothing to impede his gaze. She yanked open the door of the truck or he pushed it open and she was half sitting in his lap and they were kissing. She said his name. He said nothing against her mouth. When she pulled away, Aloma saw the hatchings around his eyes were deeper than before. He was drawn, even more so than after the funeral she had not attended because she had to accompany the school's choir to Grayson, the principal had not given her the day off, she had her commitments. They were not her people, after all.

Orren placed his hand on his own chest flat-palmed and she saw the dark line of dirt under his nails like earthen parentheses. He looked at her directly. He said, You been here long?

No, she said, I only just got here a half hour ago.

He gave her a little shove then so he could ease up out of the cab, and when he did, she saw there was something altered in his body. Sudden age had impressed itself on his frame. With something like embarrassment, she turned slightly to look elsewhere, but found her eyes unwilling to obey, wary of this new thing, and when he slammed the door and stood before her, they both appeared ill at ease for a moment as if sizing up their differences. Then Orren stepped in to close the space between them and kissed her again and she sought after his familiar tobaccoed breath. He took her hand and said, Come on. You seen the house?

Which one? she said, her hand pressed a slight resistance onto his.

The real one, he said and nodded up at the big house.

Yeah, she said slowly, thought to say something more, but desisted. She let him lead her around the side and she peeked at him as he looked up at the height of it, squinting, his thin lips flattening further. He hitched up the waistband of his jeans and he crossed his arms over his chest and she saw clearly she had been mistaken. He had not turned old in three weeks' time, it was as though someone had come along with a plane and sheered off all the extra that once cushioned him. He was like something corded, every movement curtailed. She had noticed this too that first day after the funeral when he stepped from his truck looking pared as a carving and just as stiff, though he'd felt the same under her hands when she held him. But there was something different in his carriage—he was newly fitted to his skeleton—something that she saw now was a lasting change and not just a momentary trick of grief. This new bounded self had banished the old.

At the rear of the house, Orren steered her down along the rutted path that led to the newer, smaller house. She stepped smart to match his pace, eager to see the inside and maybe show him how much she preferred it to the large and rambling structure behind them. But he stopped abruptly only partway down the path and she stumbled against him and put her hand on his hip to steady herself. Orren raised one arm and pointed out toward the hills.

It's us all the way to the ridge, right under, he said. From where they stood at the crown of the tobacco field, the whole of the back property spread before them. The tobacco, sallow and tawny too early on its undersides, ran halfway out to the ridge where it met the young corn with its young sprouts of hair that skirted the upslope. Between the rows, the dirt was pale as cocoa powder. A few cows had wandered down off the hillside and spread out still and easy in their late-afternoon pasture. They stood singly, one or two with their hides pressed to the fence, watching or perhaps not watching but gazing slackly beyond the strictures of the field. One stood half in and half out of the barn, undecided, unmoving.

Orren reached around and placed his forearm on the back of Aloma's neck. It was heavy and warm and she felt the imposing damp of his sweat.

This is ours now, he said. She swallowed and nodded, but then she said, That makes me a little scared.

No, don't be scared, he said and when she turned to face him, he suddenly looked so much older than she, though he was only three years her senior, that she felt her youth on her like a yoke.

The store was only three miles from the house on the road to Hansonville, the town that straddled the county line twenty miles beyond. When she'd asked what was for dinner and Orren said eggs or peanut butter and not smiled for the irony of it, she took it upon herself to drive down the road in the thinning evening and find them something to eat. The store was a clapboard one-room with nothing else in sight but the trees and the fields and a few dogs that loped across the road farther up, road-raised and emaciated, just skin over legbone and brisket. Two aging pumps stood off to the side of the building. There were no other cars when Aloma parked. The only thing that moved was a sign that hung by a dog-tag chain in the window that read CHEAP TOBACCO, swinging on the false breeze of a fan. Inside, the store was split in two, one half a small grocery, the other a craft shop with rows of hand-painted gourds stenciled with Indian designs. They filled the store with the scent of autumn in summer.

Haddy said the woman behind the counter. Aloma waved, head down and saying nothing, and steered a small buggy along the aisles. She found a ham in the cooler and some kind of green veined with bright red and a few more vegetables that she did not know the name of and had no idea how to cook. She picked up a dozen eggs and opened the carton to see if any of the shells were cracked, she had seen a cook at the school do that once. A white slab of fatback, a gallon of milk, half and half for herself because she was freed from that place, she could eat what she wanted, then a box of chocolate cereal as well. Behind the register, the woman and her hair watched in the bulging mirror tacked above a wall of potato chips. When Aloma's buggy was half full of things she didn't know how to prepare, she wheeled it to the counter.

Mind to put half this on the Fenton tab, she said, just as Or-ren had instructed her.

Oh, the woman said, taking another, closer look at her. Are you from up there, bless your heart.

Aloma nodded, regarded the woman.

Bless your heart, the woman said again. It's real sad about them. She said this with one hand to her high gray hair and the other upending a pencil over and over again.

That lady was real nice, she said. She always set and talked awhile when she come in. And such pretty red hair. Sure had a lot of opinions, though. She watched Aloma as she said this, her lids ridden up so that Aloma could see too much of her eyeballs, big glossy things. Aloma only nodded again, slowly, clutching Orren's billfold in her hand.

It's terrible what people don't deserve.

Yes, said Aloma carefully. She didn't like to yesmam, it always tasted like something foul on her tongue.

The woman leaned over slightly, her lips pursing like a tight unblossomed flower the closer she came. Aloma did not lean back, she gripped the buggy tight.

Now, I don't mean to sound unchristian, but which one didn't die?

Aloma blinked a few times. Orren, she said.

Now, is he the little one?

Aloma looked at her in confusion. He's about yay high, she said, holding her hand a good four or five inches over her head.

The woman threw her head back and laughed. No, I'm saying, is he the old one or the little one?

Oh, Aloma said, the younger one.

You ain't from around here.

No, my people were from Cady Station.

The woman's eyebrows rose slowly to greet her hair. I sure can't hear that in your talk.

Well, I went to a school.

We all got schooling, darlin, the woman said coolly.

One of the mission schools, Aloma said, her eyes narrowing. They worked a few things out of us.

Uh-huh. And what else they learn you up at this school?

I learned to play piano.

Oh. The woman smiled again, the tight mouth easing. Now, that's a right useful thing for a girl to know.

Yes, said Aloma, pushing her buggy forward a little. It's a good thing for a girl to be useful. She did not smile. The woman straightened up and took her time inspecting this statement and then with no speed whatsoever used her pencil to punch the keys on the register to ring Aloma out. But her eyes stayed on Aloma as she did this, and when the question came, Aloma was waiting for it.

So that little one is your husband. It was a question switch-hitting as a statement.

Aloma did not blink this time. You're goddamn right he is, she said evenly and her face did not alter, but a flush ruddied her cheeks before she even finished her sentence. The woman's smile fell by increments until her lips were a little red slash across the bottom half of her face. She uncurled one taloned hand, palm up. Sixteen ninety-five, she said. And instead of using the tab, Aloma paid her cash out of Orren's billfold, then picked up the bags, turned her back on the woman, and left without another word.

She was sent to the mission school the month before she turned a thankless twelve, not because her aunt and uncle couldn't handle her anymore, but because there were nine in the house now—the adults, their five children, one foster child, and Aloma. Her aunt and uncle had always been fine to her, they possessed a kind of hollow-headed decency that couldn't be disparaged. When they told her of the school, they were gentle as doctors, and their voices said, This won't hurt a bit, and in fact, it had not really, at least not that Aloma could recall. Only that first night she found that her eyes stung and to make them stop she turned facedown into her pillow and let them tear with her mouth open ragged against the cotton ticking, but in the morning her eyes were better and she did not cry again, at least not over that.

It was not that her aunt and uncle hadn't cared for her— they had never made her feel guilty for their taking her in when they had no money—but they'd cared in a middling, impersonal way that instinctively reserved their best for their own. During her first year at the school, they made their small familial efforts, they phoned her once a month on Sunday afternoons and sent little cartooned magazines from their church about crossing a wide river in a phalanx of other refugees or about Ruth and her numerous losses. Until she began to play piano, Aloma read these again and again, carefully, stacked them in neat piles under her steel-framed bed. She wondered what it meant to uncover a man's feet, to sleep in his bed, to travel to a far country, to see enemies drowned. She wondered what kind of luck was required to be someone other than the person you were born to be.

The school carried her into a deeper cleavage of the mountains than the one she had known at her uncle's trailer, which jagged out like an aluminum finger from a limestone wall topped by firs, bone out of bone. There the night carried on and on until ten in the morning, then the tip of the finger finally burned with its first sun. When she arrived at the school, Aloma shared a small concrete room with two other girls and here too the mountain walls staggered and threated up over them all. The sun did not appear in the wound of the holler until long past eleven where it remained until Spar Mountain, like a curtain of earth, cut the light before it could naturally sputter out. It was a chasmed world without the twin ceremonies of morning and evening.

Aloma lived in this dark place, a dark county in a dark state, and it pressed on her ceaselessly as a girl until she finally realized in a moment of prescience that someday adulthood would come with its great shuddering release and she would be free. Then she would leave and find a riseless place where nothing impeded the progress of the sun from the moment it rose in the east until it died out easily, dismissed into the west. That was what she wanted. That more than family, that more than friendship, that more than love. Just the kind of day that couldn't be recalled into premature darkness by the land.

The only thing she remembered fondly from her years at her uncle's trailer was a piano, old with a tiger-eye top, its weight causing the linoleum floor to sag. Her aunt played on Sundays after church and the children were made to sit, the restless grappling mass of them, and sing along. But the churchy songs soon bored Aloma, hymns were not enough, they contained the sound in a too-small box of predictable chords. She wanted to see her aunt's fingers spider up and down the length of the keyboard, from the woody lows to the tiny baby sounds of the upper register. She always wanted more than she was given and secretly wished her aunt's hands would slip and press two neighbor keys at once. It was always dissonance that she liked best.

When she learned that the settlement school offered a piano class, Aloma remembered the keys she had never heard struck—their tiny silent voices—and she was choked with desire for it. There were six pianos in the school and there would be six students in the beginning piano class. They let her in because she wrote please in big block letters at the bottom of her application and she pressed so hard with her fist that her pen tore through the paper and marked the laminate top of the desk.

In two years she had thoroughly impressed everyone, most of all herself. She had never been good at anything—not rotten, but not gifted either—so that she was eternally overlooked, and her new skill damped somewhat the sullen disposition her uncle had warned her teachers about. She had exhausted all the piano the school could offer and she was sent twice a week to a woman in Perryville who had a piano degree from up East, but who had married a mine foreman and now played at a Baptist church and took students. The woman, Mrs. Boyle, had given her the Mozart and the Liszt that were now packed carefully away in the few boxes she had brought to the farm. She showed her how to arch her fingers so they fell in a swag from the platform of her hands and how to keep her shoulders down and loose and that yes, she was good, but that was only because she was in a backward place and she had much to learn if she ever wanted to get out and make music in what the woman called the real world. Yes, Aloma thought, that's where she was headed, to the real world. She felt a fierce want at the words. During the long unnatural nights, when the holler lay black under a sky lit far above the mountain walls, she thought about this, about other places. She tried to imagine exactly how leaving would feel. But it was so good, it promised such impossible pleasure, and all her pleasures so far had been such small lusterless things, that she found she could not imagine it all. The closest thing she could conjure was that it would be the exact opposite of lack, but even the hope of it did not feel the way she thought pleasure should, so she counted the nowhere days of her growing up and she waited.

Then after all her dreaming, when her final year arrived, she stared down her future with an unblinking eye. She had no money, no people to speak of. She wanted nothing more than to study the piano in some faraway place, but when the school asked her to continue after graduation and be the staff pianist for their music program, she agreed, because she had nowhere else to go and no way to get there. She ended up staying three years.

Before she knew Orren, she had waited for him. She stood in a line with the older teachers, impatient for the college farm boys to arrive, the assembly was waiting. But the boys were late. It was twenty-five miles as the crow flies, but they had not accounted for Slaughter Creek, its mad mountain-carved curves as it strove down from its headwaters to the larger Bondy River or its switchbacks that laxed the embankments and slapped against the road and the coal towns that hung precarious over its edges. The waters rose and flooded the gullible shantytowns each spring, flung trailers downstream and collected them there in tindered heaps like bleached and broken crayons. The creek churned and broke over rocks as it ran, it ran thick with forgotten things, appliances, hubcaps, dolls, animals, the debris of people who owned little worth remembering so the loss was barely noted. And along its rank spill, the coal trains escaped, black-topped, pollutive. Their hatched tracks crossed and recrossed the road that ate up three counties in its undulations, slowing the boys as they came, Orren at the wheel and driving hard against lost time.

When the boys crossed the last tracks and finally pulled into the school lot, they tumbled from the white van, yanking agricultural placards and pamphlets from the rear seats, and the teachers rushed forward to help them. Aloma followed, ostensibly to carry posters, but really to look at the boys and watch them move about in their Wranglers and boots with their caps pulled low and earnest over their brows. Only the boy who had driven stood still by the front wheel well and leaned against the van, keys dangling from a crooked finger that appeared to have been broken and never properly set. When Aloma stood by the van door waiting to be handed a pile of posters, she stole a look at him, but he was already glancing sideways at her and she thought that was wicked and could not help but like it. When she walked back into the building, a WHERE'S THE BEEF? poster balanced on her forearms, she wondered if he was looking at her from behind as she walked away and if she'd turned around, she would have seen that he was.

Inside the building she stood with her back to the auditorium door, biting her nails and eyeing the presentation on nitrogen and manure, but really thinking about the boy and his sideways glance. She looked around at the tiny auditorium, at the students with their young eyes cast up at the Aggies with their placards. Then she bit one nail to the quick to hurt herself properly, startling herself into action, and she slipped out the main door. He was still where she'd left him, leaning against the van, only now his head was lowered a bit against the midafternoon sun. He looked bored. He was blue-eyed and common-faced, not pretty.

She walked over to him, tried to look casual.

How come you're not in there with them? she said.

How come you're not? he said and she looked down quick and toed the pavement with her old tennis shoe. When she said nothing in response, he said, I ain't much for that sort of thing. They work their mouths a whole lot. They mess around. He waved his hand once.

Well, yeah, she said.

What's your name? he said.

Aloma.

He smiled at her then and she smiled back before she could think of a reason why not to. My name is Orren Clay Fenton, he said and she liked his bookless voice and the way his vowels clung to the back of his throat.

What sort of name is that?

England names. All the Fentons got names like that. I got a brother named Cash, Cassius Linus, he said. He watched her. How old are you? he said.

Twenty next week.

He smiled again and she saw he already had wrinkles around his eyes even though he couldn't be much older than she was. She wondered if he could tell that she didn't know anything about anything. With one hand on her hip, she breathed in and looked up like she was looking at something just beyond his head, the weathered skeletal shape of the trees or the blue sky, and then she sighed.

Well, I got to go back in, she said. It was good talking to you.

But we ain't hardly talked yet.

She gave him a look that had no meaning other than to look at his face again, but he divined something there that he liked, because he said, What if I come back?

What's that mean? she said and her hand unhooked from her hip and hovered birdlike at her side.

He tipped his cap up on his head and then, as if suddenly remembering it was there, he took it off and passed a hand through his band-pressed hair. His brown hair shone reddish in the sunlight and it reminded her of the flank of a brown horse her uncle's neighbor had owned, the way the sun petted it as it moved its weight, rubbing its sides on the wood of the fence, first one side, then the other.

What if I come back and took you out?

Took me out where?

I don't know. I ain't from here. Wherever you want to go to.

I'm not from here either, she said.

Well, that's interesting to know, but that ain't a answer.

She laughed.

Maybe, she said.

Come on now, he said.

She eyed him straight then and unsmiling like a boy would and she saw the yellow edging the iris of one blue eye. Well, suppose I say yes and then you don't come back? I'd be smart just to wait it out and see what you do. That way I don't have to play the fool. Still she did not smile, but she turned her head sideways, offered him her profile.

He grinned and propped his cap back on his head again. Then he took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his tee shirt, watching her, and one finger fished for matches in his pocket. He found none there and so he just stuck the cigarette lightless between his lips and a tiny twig of tobacco fell from its packed end. She took a few steps back toward the school without really turning from him. He watched her dance back a pace and he shook his head. I'm coming back, he said.

When?

Soon's I drop these yokels off, I'm coming back.

Tonight? she said, incredulous.

Hell yes, tonight, he said. I can see you ain't nobody's fool.

He did come back, and he came back again every other day after that. When classes were over in the afternoon and he was freed from work on the college farm, he showered, combed his wet hair, and tore through the three counties that separated them. He took her out in his truck as the sun was going down, and because he didn't know where he was going and neither did she, they went nowhere in particular. They just drove and he told her how big a farm he was going to own someday—bigger, much bigger than the one he had grown up on—and how to cut the testicles on a sheep and brand the hindquarters of a cow and she told him how it was to play a piano for a room full of people, to commit reams of music to memory. She liked the way he was silent and attentive when she talked about the piano, as though she were telling him about a country he had never seen. He nodded his head, his lips pressed together, and she studied his face like a score. But when she spoke, she could not really hear her own voice, but only imagined what all lay behind the press of those lips. And when the night grew late, they drove down the mountain roads to the blackened campus of the settlement school, where instead of dropping her off he parked his truck and the instant he took his hand from the steering wheel, before she could know what that hand was going to do, she scooted over and practically straddled his lap. She did not know what gave her the nerve. She'd never done a thing but kiss a boy once after a community dance and let him sneak his hand up the length of her shirt, but it took his hand forever to get where it was going and then, like an exhausted runner, it had collapsed on the finish line and didn't move but only cupped one breast. Orren's hands had considerably more endurance.

Does this mean I can come back? he said after they had kissed for two hours. She nodded, but they did not stop until the birds called for dawn.

He came back again and again and they took their drives into the mountain darkness. It was not more than two weeks before their kissing gave way to nakedness and her body gave way to his. When he pushed up inside her for the first time, she was unable to move for the surprise of it, not because it was unexpected—she had anticipated it in the unthinking way the body has of presuming its physical destiny—but because it brought the fact of Orren into a proximity she had not previously imagined. Within, but without at the same time and his face more open and more unreachable than she had imagined a face could be. It moved her in a way that had nothing to do with pleasure. That and the way, when he was inside her and reaching and speaking into her hair, he made cuss words sound like praise words. She took for the first time an understanding of what it meant to have pleasure bound up in pain, like a gift in paper. And when there was pain, which there was at first and occasionally after, she was always surprised that she did not want to end it, as if her body knew to push through any hurting for some goal that she could not understand but knew to be there. The goal was not Orren himself, though she wanted him; it was something that she could strive for only through the striving of his body, his body which she held inside her, accepting it sometimes hurting and sometimes not.

They continued on through the chilly nights, through a spring and a summer, then on again into the winter months. Ever driving and ending up parked in a dark corner of the school lot, ever compelled to strip away their clothes without regard for the cold. She told him that she would someday get out of the mountains to study piano and he told her again and again of the farm he would own and if these two strands were like roads that could never converge, neither Aloma nor Orren cared to notice. They tangled, their bodies threshed of clothes, their mouths open to the other like the mouths of baby birds and in their meshing, they did not think about time and they did not think about difference.

Even the night when they almost went sideways into the Slaughter, Aloma did not think about it. They were swooping around a bend where the road fell off into the icy branch of the North Fork when the truck fretted to the right and began to swing out where the road was not and she saw sidewise the tremor in Orren's body as he tried to right the trajectory of its path and was barely able to. The truck juddered to a stop and when Aloma looked down out the window on her side, all she could see was the black swollen creek foaming white and no blacktop or dirt at all.

Out, out, Orren said and he threw his door open fast and before she knew what was happening he had pulled her out of the cab by the waistband of her jeans, jerking her clean past the steering column over the seat still warm from his body.

Holy shit, he said and pushed her behind him. She wasn't alarmed, she didn't have time to be, her vision was filled with the living shape of Orren's back and the patch of skin between his collar and the short hairs at the nape of his neck. She laughed for a split second behind him, fearless. Then Orren walked around the rear of the truck, gazing down at the black water, and she sobered, saw with her own eyes how close the tires had come to the edge. Orren shook his head and pressed the left back tire with the toe of his boot. Then he pointed her up to a hillock with one hand and, with the other, patted the tailgate as if to soothe it. He said to her, Set yourself down and let me fix this. Aloma turned and walked to the other side of the road, which represented the road-end of someone's corn patch. In the dark she could see the shagged corn stalks, close to the ground, casting ragged shadows. She sat down at their harvested edge and watched the road.

The truck wobbled as Orren pulled it out onto the relative safety of the blacktop. Then he proceeded to set his blinkers and jack up the frame to change the tire. He lit a cigarette and knelt at the wheel well, glancing up once and again in hope no one would come wilding around the bend. When eventually a car did come, he stood up and held out his hand to wave them on, and Aloma saw him lit up by the briefest swinging stage lights, his shadow cast like a giant behind him. From where she sat up the little hillock, she could just barely see in the distance the dim lights of a house behind her, too far to matter. Below her, the road curved away to the left and right, swallowed by the black gaping of clustered trees. The horizon was close. Two hundred yards away, the earth draped down sheer from the hills to the water's edge. The hills choked out the eerie lightness of the night sky that lay beyond. But up above the highest line of trees she could see, on this chilly and very clear night, Orion in his slow-motion fall to earth. She looked down at Orren, at his curved back and the cigarette smoke that curled darkly away from his figure, and she thought how beautiful he looked, and how permanent.

Orren! she called.

Huh, he answered back.

Someday I'm gonna be a great piano player and we're gonna get out of here, she said. One finger pointed down at the earth beneath her as she said this.

He looked back over his shoulder at her and she could see the small red spark of his cigarette, but neither his eyes nor his expression. He only nodded and then turned back to the tire, and the force of his hands and the force of his young body jolted it into place.

Aloma wore a long white nightgown, one she bought from the pages of a catalog when she learned she would be coming to the farm. She stepped out of the bathroom and walked down the hall, but hesitated at the bedroom door. Orren lay in the bed facing the window, beyond it stretched a long black pasture of sky. When he heard her at the door, he rolled onto his back and gazed at her. They had never slept in a proper bed together in all the time they had known each other, a year and a half. The back of the truck on top of scattered bits of hay and crumbled dirt was the closest they ever came to stretching their bodies full length.

You look good, Aloma, Orren said.

Instead of moving, she rested one hand on the risen plane of the door jamb and placed one foot on top of the other, the dust of one sole colored the other. She looked at him on the bed, no shirt and just his jeans. She couldn't say now why she'd thought him diminished in his body when it was clear he'd gained weight working outside. Now his darkness contradicted the white sheets. She looked away from him watching her.

Was this your room? she asked, looking from side to side.

It was theirs, Mama and Daddy's.

Oh. It was a silly question, she saw that now. Lace curtains hung on either side of the eight-paned window, the skinny moon situated in one wavy-glassed pane. And though the furniture was old and heavy—walnut greasy and black with age— small crystal and glass baubles dotted the room, knickknacks only a woman would have chosen, someone who wanted to turn a hard thing soft. Caught in the moonlight, a small glass horse reared its lambent head on the dresser, one leg forward, cantering. When Aloma moved her head slightly, the light stuttered on its hard mane and flared.

Come over here, girl, Orren said, patting the bed beside him.

She trailed forward into the room then, but stopped once more by the dresser where the horse gleamed. A photograph of Emma with Orren's father stood on the dresser top along with old receipts and Orren's keys and billfold.

Your mother was pretty, she said. Emma was smiling, her orange lipstick matched her lily-printed shirt. Her eyebrows were arched and perfectly penciled.

I should've met her. Cash too, Aloma said. I wish you'd brought me up here before now. Her fingers passed over the glass, momentarily obscuring the rounded lineaments of Emma's face. When Aloma looked back up, Orren had laid his head down, facing the window again. She stood, chewed her lip, and took one more long look at the picture. She padded over to the side of the bed and sat down and the mattress gave under her. She sat transfixed for a moment, looking down at the wooden floor as if there were something written on it that she was trying to cipher, then she lifted her nightgown over her head and lay down naked on her back. The air was cool on her skin. When Orren didn't move, she said, Do you think she would mind us sleeping in here? She braved a glance at him then. He was looking past her face out the window. And on his face was a poverty of expression that caused her pulse to quicken and she wished suddenly that she had not taken her nightgown off and actually thought to put it back on, but instead she rolled over on her side, in the same position as Orren, and looked out the window into the dark. There were at least six inches between them.

That moon is barely there at all, she said. He said nothing, he just lay there. She wanted to reach back her hand, but she only pressed it to her clavicle. Something unfamiliar rose up in her and it stuck in her throat like a homesickness, but she had no home, it was a longing that referred to nothing in the world. With a start she reached back then and grabbed his hand and brought it to her left breast so that the nipple rested in the crook of the first two fingers on his clay-brown hand. There they lay for more than a minute, breathing, the space preserved between them. Then he slid up against her, barely moving at first like someone waking from sleep and then arranging her legs around his and pushing into her from behind and pressing her down into the mattress so that she took all of his weight and it was hard for her to breathe. To be under him hurt her breasts so that she almost spoke up, but then thought better of it and reached around to gather him in, and she shut her mouth.

She walked naked from the bathroom in the morning, down the hall into the room now bright with the day. Orren had risen and left with the first sun. She'd gone back to sleep and only thought later that she should have gotten up with him and made him coffee and breakfast, because that's what a wife would do, though she was not his wife.

She sat naked on the edge of the bed for a moment and pattered her feet, mulled what she should do. Her big toes left a row of wet thumbprints on the floor. When she looked up, Emma was still smiling from her photograph with a curious power, her eyebrows arched, but whether in question or happiness Aloma could not say. She stood abruptly and pushed the curtains wide. Dust piled on the sills, dust that clung to the bubbled pane that flowed thick to the sash. Grassed land waved beyond it. Light refracted across her breasts and lit the rhinestone droplets of water on her legs and again she felt the small alien power of the photograph and thought to cover herself. She dressed quickly.

Aloma made her way to the hall where she found, in the closet, a few buckets and a broom, a mop, sponges curled and grayed with dirt. She kicked the braided rugs from the bedroom into the hall and with the broom she cut great swaths and arcs across the dusty floor. To the picture, she said, I am here now, like it or not. But she polished that too with the hem of her cotton blouse. She peeked inside the bedroom closet, but all that remained were old shoes. She considered throwing them out, but she remembered the emptied look on Orren's face the night before when he had gazed out past her into the dark as though she had been only accidentally there. It pricked at her mind and she left the shoes where they lay in crackled useless pairs and shut the door. She stripped the linens from the bed, noting the whitish marks that they had made last night, and she had a low, queer feeling that she had spent her wedding night without a wedding. It gave her pause, she stared down at the bed, but then she balled up the sheets and threw them aside and abandoned her campaign in the bedroom for another room in the house.

The next door in the hallway was a linen closet, empty. Then a bedroom with two twin beds, the boys' room. She hesitated for a moment at the threshold and then stepped inside and the floorboards groaned. The room had been closed for a long time, she inhaled the talcy scent of old wallpaper glue. The walls were ringed in pennants from the central college where both the boys had gone, Cash five years before Orren, so that he was back on the farm and in fact the one driving that day when the truck in front of theirs broadsided a station wagon and flung its load of sheet metal with all the force of a train into the cab of the truck so that he was crushed and Emma decapitated all in an instant. He had been an Aggie too and their miniature John Deere tractors stood parked, their tops floured with dust, sides aged blackish green on the two dressers that stood between the narrow beds. The beds were made and tightly cornered, the wool blankets sunbleached near the window. Aloma coughed and the dust motes circled in a wake. She crossed the room to the window, and after she unlatched the hasp, she still had to pound the frame with the butt of her hand before the old window loosed in its casings and gave grudgingly up. The outside air was warm and sudden and it startled the room with the smell of living things.

Out the window, far down in the lowest field, she saw Orren. His smallness surprised her, he was just a speck in the cup of the bottomland. It was not really a large farm, but it was a great deal of space for one man to possess.

As she leaned down to peer through the screen, her hand came to rest on a photograph in a frame balanced on the little bed stand. Orren, seven or eight at the time of its taking. She held it up to the light. Water had found its way inside the photo and rumpled its glossy front. It was taken in this room, the boy Orren sitting on the bed and grinning like a savage, one front tooth missing, the other chipped.

She looked around at the foreign artifacts of the room— tobacco leaf posters, puzzle dinosaurs, horses and trucks forlorn on a shelf—and all of it struck her as strange, the tokens of an unknown boyhood. She herself had no proof of having been a child, nothing imbued with the patina of age. She had packed up her life into two boxes the size of egg crates and they held mostly her scores. She looked again at the picture of him as she replaced it on the bed stand, the small flush unlined face smooth as an ironed sheet, keenless eyes. In that face gathered the nascent force of his life, his other life, constituted mostly of the time before her. She backed out of the room that belonged to a boy she didn't know and in her mind it became tangled—what she did and did not know about the man or the boy called Orren—so that when she shut the door, she did so with a brute clap.

She hurried down the stairs into the open space of the main room. But here the piano waited for her. She touched the top with one finger, careful, as if it could crumble under the force of her small hand. She opened the cover and pressed a white bone key. There was no sound, just a sponging broken depression. She pushed down the neighboring keys and the pitches yawed out, one string buzzed hideously. She stepped away suddenly and looked around herself as if seeing the room, the house, for the first time.

Shit, she said and put a hand up to her mouth to cover it and keep it from uttering another word. She was alone in a strange house that did not belong to her. For a long time, she could not bring herself to uncover her mouth. She blinked a few times. She put her hands on her hips and resolved silently that she would say nothing about the piano, that she would not be foolish, not be lost. Then she began to clean in earnest, and once she started, she could not bring herself to stop for three days.

On the third day, when she'd grown sick of the smell of linseed oil on her hands and even sicker of the meals she'd made in a single skillet using the foodstuffs from her one trip to the grocery, she caught Orren late in the afternoon. He had just come around the front of the house with an auger flighting up in one hand and chicken wire in the other, rolled and tied. He did not look up until he almost ran into her. She said, I need things from that other house, Orren.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and looked down the slope at the small house, the chicken wire graded so it rested on the ground between them. How come's that, he said. He did not look pleased.

There's not hardly anything to cook with, she said. How do you expect me to feed you if there's nothing to work with? Why don't you drive me down there.

He shrugged once, but he nodded. Yeah, he said and continued on around the back of the house where he laid his tool in the bed of his truck and the chicken wire at once sprung loose from his hand and uncurled itself. Orren pressed up the tailgate until it caught and he pulled his keys from his rear pocket.

But he did not come into the house with her. When she slid out her side of the cab, he remained where he was behind the wheel. He took his cigarettes from his pocket, thumbed the lid free. Take what you want, he said. It's unlocked. His finger tapped the white butt end of a cigarette.

The door gave way to the smell of must. The house had not been opened at all, at least she had never seen Orren down here. He was in the fields whenever she looked out the back door for him, or by the barn in the morning scattering scratch for the chickens, letting loose the cows from the rood pen. But this dank little house, into which she walked with its low fluorescent lighting and cracked louvered blinds, this he had not touched. The windows were all closed, they had died on a cool day. One by one, Aloma unhasped the windowpanes and pressed them up as high as they would slide in their painted frames. It was better for a house to smell like cow shit than like something forgotten. Then she drew open the kitchen cupboards and in their recesses found all the utensils Emma had used for her cooking. Aloma discovered a box under the sink and she piled in everything she could use until it brimmed over with skillets and cutting boards, spatulas with the tiniest fragments of unwashed egg adhering, glasses with blue roosters on them. She looked behind her at the darkened hallway that led to the bedrooms. She raised the hem of her shirt to wipe her upper lip and took unfeeling stock.

As she stood there, Orren came up behind her. What do you want me to carry? he said.

She pointed to the box, but looked at him. He stood beside her, straight and plain as a cooling board.

I do like this house, Aloma said.

Orren shrugged. Small, he said.

But it's so much nicer down here. It's modern, she said, turning toward the hallway again.

Well, the old house is cooler, he said. You'll thank me come July. And then he added, as if in answer to a question, I was born in that house. And Aloma, feeling there was nothing she could really offer in response to that, said only, Oh.

Orren reached over then, and in a gesture that she recognized from the day she arrived, one that was new in its filial reserve, he patted her on the shoulder the way he might touch a stubborn animal, and she pulled away suddenly, turning her face. She blinked away the play of feeling on her features. But his eyes were not on her, they had not left the dim low hallway and the closed doors there. She left him where he stood, staring with his arm still partially raised, and walked out empty-handed into the sunshine. She leaned against the raised tailgate, waiting. Beyond the truck, the cow pasture fence flanked one side of the house. Tall bluegrass bearded the posts of the fence where otherwise the grass was short, mown low on the one side, grazed low on the other. Her nose found the green scent of grass in the midst of the manure, hay, hoof-churned soil, the heated mechanical oiled smell of the old truck—all of that mixed in the nerved air, none of it familiar. She lived in a place where nothing reminded her of anything and all that had come before was unknown. For her, the land was starting. And though she had known Orren for a year and a half, she fidgeted now with the dawning sense that perhaps they were only starting too. She remembered the first time he'd spoken of marriage. He'd said one day, You gonna be my wife or what? and she'd made a joke of it, said, Sure, but don't get too stuck on me—I'm not long for this place. His eyes had danced and then he winked at her and only later it disconcerted her, that wink; it seemed to make a fool of her, or it rendered her a little girl suddenly, all aspiration and no plan. And no will to execute a plan if she had one. She thought back to their late-night rides and she divined now the many unspoken rules of engagement she'd been ignorant of at the time. Perhaps her ignorance had been unremarkable, even common. She chewed her lip.

Orren walked out of the house with the box in his hands and they slid into the truck and as he was cranking the ignition and pushing into first, she looked at him furtively, trying to reconcile the features she saw in front of her with the boy's face from the photograph in his old room, the boy grinning without reserve. He felt her staring at him.

What? he said.

Nothing.

He shrugged and then his hand weighted on the right side of the wheel and the truck carved the dust toward the house.

Hold up a minute, she said and she placed her hand on the wheel lightly to stay him. He braked, looked over at her. I haven't really seen the place yet, she said.

Don't let's do it now, he said. My stomach thinks my throat's cut.

Come on, Orren, she said. I live here now, I'm not visiting. I'd like to at least see where I live at.

He looked over at her with his blue eyes and for a second it seemed that he was considering something that was vaguely troubling to him. Then he said, Yes ma'am, and cut the wheel with both hands so the axle complained and the cab tilted like a boat on water. He drove the truck down past the stock barn and the cow pasture. The barn itself, painted a deep and decaying red, looked to be in mid-shudder with its rough boarden sides loosing from its crib frame.

That barn must be about a hundred years old, Aloma said.

No, he said, not near forty. It's a third barn. The first got burnt down by sympathizers that come around the ridge burning crop barns and then my granddaddy tore up the next one when one of the rafters fell in and killed his horse. He built this one all crookwise, put that calf gallery on the early side.

Oh, where are the horses at now? she said, casting back over her shoulder into the shadowy interior of the barn where the stalls were piled with hay or tools but otherwise barren. A few chickens looked drowsy and shipwrecked by the wide door.

I sold em, he said.

What? When?

The day after the funeral.

What for? she said.

For cash, Aloma, he said and he punctuated his words with a hard look. They drove on and the cows turned to watch as the truck passed. One cow, her belly swollen and low, swung a gentle heavy head and stepped once in their direction. Aloma half turned in her seat.

That's the fattest cow I ever saw, she said.

She's pregnant, said Orren. And Aloma barked out pure laughter at herself, but because Orren did not join her—and he once would have, she knew that as she sneaked a sideways glance at him—it sounded hollow, like her mouth was echoing a joy that had already passed. She settled back in her seat and looked away from him and the barn. She tucked her left hand between her legs and pressed her knees tight together. With her right hand, she gripped the door where the window rolled down and touched the dust that sanded the vinyl and the chrome there. When she withdrew her hand and looked into her cupped palm, the dust clung to her. There was dust on her shirt, on her face.

Tobacco, said Orren, looking past her and she followed his gaze.

I know it, she said, her voice husked out in a whisper.

It ain't much, he said as if she had not spoken, but you don't need much. It sells pretty high. Corn out to the ridge, he said and he pointed out past the steering column to the field of corn that touched the skirt of the ridge as it rose out of the tilled bottomland.

She looked over the tobacco. The plants' lower leaves splayed wide from the skinnier tops, but they were not tall and the leaves, though green, depended slightly from the stalk in early, unnatural declension, a weathered anemia she saw when they drew close. Beneath the flagging breadth of the butts lay the tanned face of the soil—not an Indian red, but a pale color paupered by the sun.

They look kinda puny, she said.

It's too goddamn dry, Orren said. If I make a buck this season, I'll transplant into that field next year, and he nodded toward a fallow field that lay to the south, she could just see its bare face beyond the tobacco.

The thing is, I only want … he said, but then his sentence closed down unfinished. He grimaced out at the fields and she saw the deep elevens etched between his eyes, eyes that were the color of the sky and just as distant. He looked to her like a thing seized, as if all his old self had been suckered up from his body proper and forced into the small, staring space of his eyes. She did not like these new blinkless eyes of his and she did not like the way his words all collapsed in his new way of talking. As if his tongue could not bear the weight of words any longer. Or the person beside him were not there.

Orren brought the truck around the far end of the fields, under the upsweep of the rising, wooded ridge and then back around the cornfield so that they came upon the house from the east. They said nothing further and Aloma watched as the house grew larger and whiter, its disuse and age arriving in higher and finer detail as they approached. Orren drove up the slope and parked behind the house so the late-afternoon sun stoked a fire on the windshield and Aloma had to close her eyes before she said, Well, I guess I better cook us something. Orren's only response was to help her carry the box of kitchenware into the house. She didn't know what she was going to cook and she didn't know how to use the mixers and casserole dishes they'd brought up, but she would learn. As she was hanging the pots and pans from the hooks on the walls, Orren set off away from the house, his cigarette answering momentarily for his presence before it too faded, and in a minute or so, she heard the tractor start up and move away out of her hearing. She eyed the empty kitchen and set to work until it was dark.

Aloma had never cooked, but she did not complain. She unearthed a cookbook in the old kitchen pantry, cleared it of its dust, and forged ahead and when she made her first honest meal—the noodles underdone and the chicken tough as jerk— and Orren did not comment, she took it as the compliment it was not. She grimly assumed the duties that were hers, all of which confined her to the house. She had known that this would be part of her life on the farm. She had known without seeing it that when Orren said, I'm taking the farm—and not auctioning it, not selling it off, not even taking anyone on right away but doing it all himself to keep costs low—it would be a great deal for the two of them to handle. And she knew that she would have a house to run, but she'd hoped it would be the smaller house. He had told her of it that very first night when he'd described the farm. He had told her the old house was falling down, the one built by his great-great-grandfather, which his mother had moved out of when Orren was a little boy, only two months after his father died. The house was more than Emma wanted now that she had a farm to run, where before she'd only chased after little boys, and suddenly she was all over the land from the sewing to the bundling, the fencing, the cows and the horses. The only thing she never learned anything about was the machines, and when they broke, she would always shoo the boys away. It was years before Orren realized that she sent them off because she did not want to cry in front of them. Pouring money into machines she ought to know how to fix tore her up. He laughed when he said this, leaned his head back on the seat and looked up at the cone top of Spar Mountain, smiling. She could be right tough, he said. That's about when I quit riding horses.

When? said Aloma.

When I was seven, eight maybe. Right not long after Daddy died.

Why's that? Aloma said.

Two things. One, this old bitch hoss run me out into the pond once, it was pretty deep, and kept me there till after dark and I was too scared to get down and wade my own self out.

Oh no, she laughed.

Alligators. He grinned. But Mama found me. She was mad as hell at me and that horse too. I don't think I never touched that horse again. And two, that's about the time when it was just work. We always done chores before, but when Daddy died, then it was either let the whole thing go to hell or go to work. He shrugged. Mama worked the most, though. I'll give her her due.

Aloma wondered now, Had she ever worked? She had, but it wasn't the same thing, learning to play the piano. She had never been driven by the imminent loss of something like a home. It was more a matter of what she did not have than of what she could not stand to lose. She had wanted to possess something and when she wanted a thing, she wanted it bad. And it was sheer luck that she happened to be good at the one thing she wanted. The fingerwork came easy and so did the memorizing—she did not even have to try, a fact that she liked to show off every week and it both pleased and rankled her teacher, who wanted her to slow down and listen and obey the page, something Aloma could not do when she was young, she whipped the pieces into a wild spirit of her own invention. Mrs. Boyle said Aloma could make people dance at a wake. It was not a compliment. So she reined her in, talked her down, but she never touched the bold part of Aloma's brain that could seize the scores and hold them—sometimes for years without the pieces atrophying—and then release them so a roomful of people were compelled to sit up and listen. Mrs. Boyle was stingy with her compliments, she demanded a great deal, all the while watching carefully the girl who stared fixedly ahead at the piano like a blindered horse. She saw in Aloma a singular want, the fierce driving need of the dispossessed.

But during her first weeks in the house, Aloma did not think about what she wanted, she did not have time to think about the piano or its lack. She strove only to line up her wanting with the same want that sent Orren out of the house each morning and kept him there until the sun fell. She white-knuckle-washed all the windows in the house with ammonia and water mixed in a bucket, and scrubbed on her knees all the wood floors of the house with an old grooming brush she found under the sink. With linseed oil and vinegar, she shined every surface, excepting the piano, which she left to idle in the living room. In the root cellar, where she ventured with a flashlight in her hands, she found an old pie safe with a punched tin front and she was inspecting its backside when she saw the four-foot house snake that sent her scrabbling backward up the cobwebbed wooden steps to the safety of the lawn. She slammed the cellar doors down and stalked there, jittery running her hands through her hair to rid it of remnant cobwebs.

There was no radio in the house to keep her company while she worked, but she tried not to think on it. She did not want to waver. But sometimes when she found herself chopping vegetables at the counter, as the knife tapped home on the wood of the block, her ears caught at the rhythm, or she found herself humming a tune and her fingers jolted for an instant, wanting to stretch on the keys. She would miss it if she let herself, but she was busy in the big house and she vowed to wait until the right time to speak, if her temper did not flare like a match and burn the right opportunity down.

Now in the fading hours of another afternoon, she stood in the kitchen and read the instructions on the back of a bag of rice. She had spent hours bent over the cookbook, learning to slice fatback into her greens and to collect bacon grease in empty glass coffee jars when they ran empty. Her cooking had improved greatly since her first days at the house. The kitchen was her favorite room with its high walls, its white ceiling creeped with discoloration and cracks like old hairs on a skull. The sunlight touched her in this room. Its windows opened to the south, the east, and the north. And when she faced the stove, she could not see the mountains.

With the rice water rolling to a boil, she wandered out of the kitchen through the dining room with its gold pineapple wallpaper, its curio cabinets. She did not go into the front room where the photographs stared out from their wall, she leaned against the door jamb between rooms, uncommitted. Outside, a late light crescendoed to gold over the grasses. Light found the piano, lit its scrolled feet and the swirling and striping of its grain, brown on black-brown. In its splitting and sinking frame she saw the formidable wrack of its previous beauty. She stared at the thing. The house was silent. The crickets had not yet begun to rub. Aloma drummed her fingers onto the wood of the door jamb and thought yet again of Mrs. Boyle and her many hours at the piano. The woman had driven her, drilled her— rapping at Aloma's knuckles with a blue-and-red conducting pencil when she was irritated with Aloma's drumming, as she called it—Are you going to play piano for me or are you going to drum in a rock band? She said the music was found in the silence as much as sound. The pauses birthed the phrase and funeraled it too, the only thing that gave the intervening life of rising and falling pitch any meaning. Without silence there was no respite from the cacophony, the endless chatter and knocking, the clattering pitches. That is what she said, chatter and knocking—though Aloma did not really believe her and she had never learned to take her time or trust to patience. It was Mrs. Boyle, so concerned with sound, who had affected her talk as well. No, Miss Aloma, can't should not sound like paint. Cain't. Can't, like pant. Can't? Can't, exactly. She'd come away from those lessons a bit altered each time—Drop those aitches, said Mrs. Boyle, drop those aitches—less the girl who had left her aunt and uncle's with stinging eyes and more the girl who was always looking outward, getting ready to leave, the girl who dropped her aitches.

She had burned the rice. The black smell reached her and she started up and ran to the kitchen where it was already crisping brown into black on the bottom of the pot. She carried the pot out to the concrete steps and stood before the fan that she'd set on a chair by the open door. The artificial wind tugged her blouse forward around her and flapped the steam from the pot. Aloma could see Orren down in the pasture with his hands up under a cow's udder, doing God knows what, but he would come soon, the westering light was growing red even as she stood, the steam spilling away from her. She had half a mind to throw that rice down to the cows, but Orren would say, Now, why you done that, the way he did every time she wasted. Her eyes narrowed at the thought. She looked down at the rice held out before her, the center was still white as cotton so she kept it.

When Orren came up, his face was rubied from a June sunburn or only the heat of the day even as it was declining away. She saw that the hairs on his arms had been bleached white. His ring finger was naked and there was coal-black dirt edged up under his nails and she couldn't remember if his hands had always been like that when he had driven down from the college in those evenings, freshly showered and shaved. She couldn't remember rightly how his hands looked then when he touched her, because it had always been dark when they bedded down in the back of the truck, or even in the cab when it was too cold to crawl into the back. Too dark to see what was what.

What's for eating? he said.

Rice and chicken.

Well, I'll eat that, he said and nodded.

Damn right, she said and he looked at her then and stepped to her side at the sink and began to slowly lather his hands with her white bar soap, all the while looking at her.

Not that soap, she said. She hunted under the sink with one hand and found a brown soap with chip granules. She handed it to him.

What's wrong with that other one?

That's for me. You touch animals' rear ends all day.

I don't hardly do that at all, he said. And that's what soap's for.

Not that soap. This soap. He looked into her eyes, first one and then the other, and looked at the soap and then took the soap and washed his hands and shook his head, but said nothing. When he was done, he held his hands up before her with one eyebrow cocked just barely, but she was already turning away and said over her shoulder, Let's eat.

She'd set the table in the afternoon as she did each day, waiting for him. He sat down and she served them both. They ate.

Orren took two bites and then he said, Goddamn, Aloma.

What?

This rice tastes like a house on fire.

Orren!

What? His hands up before him, palms out. It does.

Aloma pushed her plate away from her suddenly so that peas and peppers spilled off one side and the peas rolled like pocked green marbles to the center of the table.

What are you so ornery for? he said.

I cooked that for you.

You cooked it for you too.

She said nothing and he folded his arms over his chest and lowered his head fractionally as if he were peering at her over glasses. What, it's only food, he said.

Well, I don't know how to do it, she said. And I think I've done pretty good considering.

Yes, he said.

I'd like some respect, she said.

Well, he said, get you some.

She did not smile. He shook his head then and though he did not smile, he looked like he might and he reached over and poked her hand once with the tines of his fork. She snatched her hand away. He said, They Lord. What is it you want, Aloma?

Whether it was the dirt still under his nails after the washing or the prick of his fork, she wasn't sure, but her tongue loosed itself and she said suddenly, I want you to marry me.

He dropped his fork down and it caught the edge of the plate where it clattered. He stared at her. I intend to marry you, he said. I ain't asked you to come here to … His mouth twisted.

In an instant, the fight went out of her. Well, I know. I was just sort of picking, she said lamely.

He watched her quietly. No. You're ill with me, he said.

No.

You're ill because I dragged you out here and not married you first. His hand curled up on the table, dark and dry like a tanned leather.

It's just how things happened. Her voice was soft, womanish.

That's right, he said. Don't attach nothing to it. You want me to marry you in a real church wedding, right? Ain't that right?

Well, she said and shrugged.

Well, don't you?

Oh hell, Orren, I don't care, she said.

Well, I care, he said and stood up and his chair squawked against the floor as it was forced back. He walked out of the room, not so much angry as purposeful, as if he'd suddenly remembered he had somewhere more important to be. She followed quick in his footsteps until she saw he wasn't leaving the house, only standing at the door with his back to the room, and she fiddled with the dishes in the sink, casting a glance over her shoulder as he removed his cigarettes from his pocket and peered out into the backyard. But she could not be patient long. Her nerves rattled within her when she didn't know his mind, and that was more and more these days. She walked up behind him.

Now you're ill with me, she said in a low voice.

No, not with you, he said, lighting his cigarette and facing out the door where the long day wound out and down. No, I just can't see how I can … His voice drifted and again he did not finish his sentence. Aloma bit her lip and sighed, not able to see past the block of his shoulder to the land. But she did not mind, the land only looked like grief to her.

Well, you're not mad at the farm, she said grudgingly, though it took some effort not to call it the soil, the dirt, the dust that you feel unholy bound to and that's keeping us suckled up to the tit of the mountains. But her voice was even, balanced between her want for him and her distaste for all of this that he was holding in his eyes with tenderness just now like it was a newborn.

You figure it's not right to you, he said, without turning around. A tiny wisp of smoke spun around the side of his face and touched her nostril momentarily.

Don't worry yourself about that, she said.

I got a debt to pay by which he meant the bank loans, but she didn't know that and she said, Well, God, Orren, you could mind to pay me some attention. He turned around and looked down at her then and she grinned and took the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it out the door.

She waited until he was sweaty and spent, having made his bereaved sound against her hair, before she pushed up against his chest and said, Just about now's when I'd like to play some piano. Still half on top of her, he said nothing, but breathed heavily on her for another long moment, his belly pressing with each breath into hers, before he rolled over onto his back and sighed and righted himself. Then he cleared his throat and said, easy and even, I won't keep you. It was this new flirtless damper in his voice, devoid of any play, that she did not care for.

Her eyes rolled over to him in the half-light. That piano's a mess, Orren. I can't play on it.

Is that right? he said and he seemed genuinely surprised.

Aloma tugged at the sheet that he had taken with him when he rolled away. He didn't help her, but just lay there and let her pull and pull until she had a ragged corner to cover herself.

Have you looked at that thing? she said. I can't play on it. God knows how long it's been sitting there. It's falling apart.

Well, if it needs tuned up, we might could do that.

I don't think that's enough.

Well, said Orren, and then in a way that didn't sit right with her, That's all I reckon we can do.

I need a real piano, Aloma said, raising herself on one elbow so that he would be forced to see her more clearly.

Last time I checked, Aloma, that was a real piano.

Orren, I'm a pianist, she said, hissing the word. I want to get serious about buying a real piano so I can play. We always planned I'd go on and I still want to. I want to go to school.

Orren shook his head before she even finished her first sentence. He didn't look at her, though her own stare was unbroken. We can't do that, he said, and her ear caught at his long, drawled vowel, the way it swooped in the air, and for a hopeful second she thought he would say we can do that.

Why can't we? she said.

Because, Aloma, we ain't got the money.

Why not? she said.

Are you being dumb with me? He looked at her straight now.

No, she said.

Goddammit, Aloma, he said and he rose up on both elbows to better meet her eyes, we ain't got dick for a nickel. I'm a happy man I can even feed you at night. I can't afford to shit, much less buy you a piano. Be reasonable.

When she made no response, he went on, softer, You know I want you to play your music, but I got to worry this farm right now. This is all I got, right here, right now. I'm fixing to get you a piano, but I need you to be still about it. Just for a while. We'll get this place going and then I don't mind to buy you anything you want. But I need you to set tight. I swear it won't be long. If you can just set tight …

He settled back down onto the mattress and then, as if it were an afterthought, reached out to pull her in close against him so the scent of his sweated daywrung body bit her nostrils. When he turned his face up toward the ceiling, stretching his neck just slightly so his chin jutted and hardened for a moment, she saw the lie in the way he moved, heard it in his overearnest words. He was lying mostly to himself, she was just a secondary casualty.

You thirsty? she said suddenly, rolling out of his grasp, which was too loose to hold her, and stood unsteadily on the floor. Her legs shook a little from holding his body.

Yeah, he said, but don't work the tap up here. It's rusted out.

She padded down the wooden steps into the shadowed living room. Why he wanted to live in this old place and not the new where there was light and linoleum and good well water, she couldn't say. It was as if he were trying to make it clear to a world that wasn't even watching that he was in this thing alone, that there was suffering under way for the one left alive, but that he could endure. Perhaps even endure it better the rougher it was, as if couched in the pain was the secret satisfaction of suffering. He would prolong now the sorrow if that was all there was to prolong. She walked into the kitchen and filled up a glass and, unable to quiet her thoughts, she watched the rings of light spiral the skin of her hand. As she carried the cold glass back through the front room, she stopped suddenly, her heart cramped in her chest, and she looked up. The photographs hung serried frame to frame on the wall and she did not want to walk toward them, but she did. She met their gazes, the ones she could, there were too many to count. Boys, not older than fifteen or sixteen in their uniforms, the butternut color hand-drawn, their small swords gray and toyish. A little boy, his eyes unfocused, with a tall dog beside him. And young and old women with their flat-cheeked faces and knifed middle parts, all in their black dresses. Everywhere she looked, women in black with their hands on their black Bibles or folded on the fabric of their full skirts. And babies too, their dark eyes closed or open, some of them blurred in motion, while the adults simply stood and managed themselves for the long moment of the gaping shutter. And in the middle, she recognized Orren as a little boy with his mother, father, and Cash standing around him. They posed in front of a white clapboard church. Aloma leaned in. The boys and their father were smiling, but Emma appeared to have only just looked up, no certainty of expression to be read on her face. Aloma straightened up. Perhaps it wasn't about a piece of land, it wasn't about what was expected of Orren, and it wasn't about herself, the girl he once said he would marry. A soul loves most what is lost, so it was about all of these here, even the ones long dead, many he'd never met and probably didn't know the names of. It wasn't fair. Here she was in the flesh, her flesh having just ushered his flesh into hers, but he could not rest even in her. He was bound in perpetual motion to all of them. She watched their pitiless eyes and her mouth twisted. She wanted to say, I'm defenseless before you, even if you are dead. And they wanted to say back, Yes, yes, you are.

Aloma. Orren's voice from upstairs. You alright?

She turned toward the sound. Yes, she said, lying to him out loud for the first time.

The days of her life on the farm took on a kind of regularity. After she rose in the morning with Orren and saw him off to the fields and cows, she continued to pick away at the house. She swept the floors and the crumbling back steps every day mopped every other day mostly because Orren left collects of crumbled mud as he came and went. She emptied all the kitchen cabinets, brushed out mouse droppings and set traps, looking first thing every morning for newly dead mice to toss out with the trash. When she found one, she carried it ceremonially to the can and let go the mouse so it fell to the bag's bottom, its neck still pinched under the bow, its tiny lifeless paws curled gentle and loose as a sleeper's hand.

One morning as she carried the trash to the bin on the side of the house, she found the withered remains of Emma's crow-kept garden. It had suffered in the weeks since Emma's death. Black-ribboned worms clung to the remaining beans that drooped down off their short poles, and a great burst of zinnias withered into greige masses, their eyes turned groundward. Only a blue coned flower clung to its color, though the cone had dropped half its tiny petals and browned. Aloma bent down to it, but even as she stooped, a white-bellied bee alighted, its wings quivering madly, taking the last pollen from a miniature yellow heart. Then it flew away and the plant remained, it stood diminished but indifferent. Aloma thought briefly of rebuilding the garden, though she did not know how. But in the end she did not want to tend another woman's garden, she did not want to tend any garden.

Once or twice when she was bored in the evening and supper was already prepared and waiting, she went with Orren to bring in the cows. She trailed after him as he wandered through the pasture, out around the hillock of trees with its purchase of shade to where they could no longer see the house and the ridge loomed high over them, a wooded limestone wall under a rack of clouds. There the cows—the few they had—collected around the pond, most times with their straight legs stock-still in the water like peculiar cumbrous waterbirds. Orren would circle around behind them, Aloma behind him, and up he would come alongside the oldest, with its aged world-weary face situated on its slim head. He touched her behind her shoulder blades, which winged out slightly below her neck, said, Sookcow, and went on walking in the direction of the house and the barn. The cow came along after him, her rump scissoring in measured paces. Aloma kept close to Orren as the others straggled in step behind. She was still wary of such big creatures and she glanced back frequently over the bodies of the cows to make sure they didn't come too close. Sometimes she pressed Orren for information when she judged his face eased up enough to allow for it. She wanted to know how old a cow could get and how much grass it ate, whether it had a bunch of babies or just a few.

Once, after a few of these sessions, she said, And cows and steers are related how?

Walking beside her, Orren made a motion like falling asleep into his hand, tucking his chin and pressing his splayed fingertips to his forehead. But he said, Now a steer is a boy cow that's cut.

Well sure, she said.

Then she said, But then what's a bull?

He cleared his throat, looked up once at the sky. Them's the ones that still fuck, Aloma.

Oh, she said, a grin. Where are they at?

We ain't got one.

How come?

Sold it. I already got a calf coming. Too much trouble, it was Cash's thing. I don't want no more cattle but can eat up this grass. Just lawnmowers that shit. I ain't got time for no cows right now.

Then she and the cows walked with Orren to the barn where he gestured Aloma to remain outside while he fetched hay—he did not want her to tangle with his rooster—and then he returned, padding the outside troughs with hay and dried corn and turning the spigot so the well water came up cold and splashing brilliant into the concrete trough. Then, finally, with the cows in the pen and the sun falling, he followed her with dragging footsteps up to the house so that he too could rest and eat.

One morning in July, as she mopped the kitchen floor, Aloma heard Orren's truck start up and when its thrumming disappeared around the front of the house instead of dropping into the field, she flung aside her mop on a wild urge and tore out the front of the house waving her arms. Orren, catching her frantic motions in his rearview, floored his brakes and the truck skiddered hard in the gravel, flung up spitting stones and dust. He'd thrown open his door and had one foot on the ground before she ran up and said, Take me with you.

He tossed back his head. Goddammit, Aloma, he said. You like to scared me to death.

I want to go, she said, gripping his open door.

Sure, sure, he said. He shook his head.

He drove across the county line and into Hansonville directly to the bank and Aloma stared out the window, her eyes clutched at everything they passed as if it all could be possessed if stared at hard enough. She was silent beside him, her mouth open slightly, her hand held tight the handle of the door. She liked everything she saw.