Читать книгу Over the Plain Houses - Julia Franks - Страница 11

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FIRST TIME BRODIS CLUCKED THE MULE, IT snorted white breath into the morning and took a reluctant step, just enough to tighten the traces between it and the plow. On the second cluck, it commenced to tramp forward grudge-slow. One step, then two. The spewed frost crunched under hoof, the plowshare bit into the earth and inched forward, and the soil parted, turned, rose up and rolled over the dust of white in a soft brown ridge. Brodis swung his crippled foot around and up the new-turned furrow, and then again, and again, and it wasn’t long before sweat damped his collar and slid down his spine. He leaned on the hickory grips, and the dense grain of the wood told him of the rip of the share, and the upboil of earth, and how the soil resisted a man’s effort until it had no choice but to yield with a sigh of mud and mold and rot.

He’d been at it since ’24, the year he’d quit the logging drives. He’d had a permanent limp after the accident but also a bank account at Asheville Savings and the profits of fourteen years on the river, to say nothing of his new soul. He’d considered himself a rich man, so rich that he’d ignored the feeling that Irenie Raines wasn’t meant to be his. They’d married and set to farming, and he’d learned to plow a straight furrow in the static earth and to clear a stump with a plug of dynamite, to salt his stock in the summer and gather them in winter. There was a repetition to it that river work didn’t have. But it was heavy. A piece of land could never do anything but wait dumb and fallow for the imprint of a man. But his wife moved along it like she’d been born for it, like she had a direction, away and away, and a fellow had to be nimble to stay with the flow of her. And in the evening, she was there, coming out of the spring house or bending to feed the fire in the cook stove, a damp patch of sweat at the small of her back and the cotton fabric clinging to her body, in the house that he’d reframed, on the land they’d sown, and he felt he’d discovered an unclaimed world and made it his own.

But now she’d become a fittified spring that dried up and disappeared on you. Two days ago she’d chose to sit among the sinners. Just sitting with her mama for a change was what she’d said at supper, and he’d let it lay. Let it lay because he was full of good will and Mrs. Dawson’s fried chicken and Mrs. McCurdy’s pie and a dozen congratulations.

Just then the grips of the plow kicked him in the ribs. The blade had caught. The mule stopped, stiff-necked and bored. Brodis pulled up and heard the gray slide of steel on granite. He reached under the share to prise up the stone. The soil was moist and cold, the rock immovable and fair-size enough to need the shovel. He lifted out the blade and stepped past the steaming mule toward the barn. Inside, among the post-hole diggers and fence-stretchers and wire cutters, hung a long handled shovel. The implement was as tall as his chest, and he swung it forward like a limb and planted it in the ground with each step, noting the halo of light at the top of the mountain that meant the rising of the sun. Step, plant. Step, plant.

His eye might have seen it first, but his mind didn’t record it right off. Then it did: an oval print amongst the spears of frost.

He stopped. For a moment he considered going back to the plow, returning to this spot only after the sun had burned the mark away. Ten minutes was all it would take. By then warmth would settle across the field, and the white-cauled earth would brown again. Just walk away.

But no. That wasn’t the promise he’d made to himself whenever he’d taken up with the Lord. He’d sworn to confront the truth head-on. Brodis shifted his weight and swung the bad foot around.

The print was smaller than his fist, too small to be from his own boot. Next to it the heel mark was shallow, hurried. Inside the oval was the word Sear, backwards, no final s.

For some reason he thought of the lady agent. No, not for some reason. For a very particular reason. For the reason that here came a woman driving an automobile up somewhere she didn’t belong and not two days later he, Brodis, was finding the footprint of a woman where it didn’t belong. The closest homeplace was Irenie’s parents, two miles distant by the drovers’ road.

The only woman for miles was his wife. And right now Irenie was washing up the dishes. She hadn’t been out but to go to the privy. There was no way she’d trudged up to this field in the pre-dawn. No way at all. There was no reason on earth for her to be up here.

But why had she sat with the sinners on Sunday? And how was it he’d let it go as if it was nothing?

Somehow he’d let his guard drop. He’d done the same thing he’d done every spring before. He’d gotten comfortable and then he’d gotten old.

But Irenie wasn’t old. She didn’t have a gray hair on her head. And what was it had passed between her and the Furman woman? And why was the Department of Agriculture sending the wives of its agents up into mountain churches?

Every day the outside world crowded further into the valley, and with it forces that were bound and determined to steal away the God-fearing thoughts of right and true people. Every day the devil rallied his legions.

He swung the shovel up above his head until his whole body extended toward the coming day, and the effort of it increased and livened him. Then he bent at the waist and whipped the blade straight down. It slammed into the furrow, incising straight and deep. He left it upright and shuddering.

In a previous life, he’d wanted for resolve. That was a different time, before trains and trucks had replaced the last of the river men. Back then the drives always ended in music and cards and drinking and sworping, and even though he’d sometimes been in outfits that set up revivals and prayer meetings, none of the preaching had ever hit, even after he’d been in the business for ten years. True, the knowledge rode heavy on his mind, always there, along with the sense that there was a thing that needed doing, that was indeed imperative above all else, but that somehow was too distant to actually do. For more than a decade he hadn’t been adequate to it. But after the accident, his life had changed. Lyman and Colter were the ones to find him, naked and facedown at the edge of the water. Brodis remembered being rolled over, the weight of his body a thousand pounds against the dirt of the shredded bank. The only thing he recalled with certainty was a moment when the earth became so white that he was looking at a burned spectacle of the log boom and the river crew, like a photographic plate, the human figures glowing against the blackened sky. Colter loomed over him with fear-struck eyes, and Brodis knew the man then for what he’d always been. He was an angel. Even Lyman, who he hated, looked like an angel. The next seconds changed his life. The concern in the two men’s faces became a visible light, then a bodily sensation, then a fire that burned from the inside.

His body too. His torso that had a moment before been heavy against the earth now weighed nothing at all. He leapt to his feet, vaguely marking that his foot wasn’t behaving the way it ought. But there wasn’t any pain. He shouted with glee, and it was as if all the energy and love he’d ever produced in a quarter century of living were erupting without his consent. Later, the drivers told the story of how he’d run up the bank naked as a baby, waving his arms and shouting to beat the band, embracing anyone who’d let him. No limp.

But Brodis didn’t remember. What he did recall was the sense that a lifetime of pride and hiding-away had vanished, that his heart had broke open, making room at last for that which was bigger than itself. It had taken a near-killing, but something inside him that had been chilled for ten years in the mountain headwaters had at last warmed. He felt love for people he’d once looked down upon and pity for those he’d despised, and the hard pride that he’d lived with since before he could remember thawed to make room for the word of God. He never drank nor played cards nor entered a rough house again. The old habits dropped away, and he lived a clean life. That part was easy.

What bothered him were the questions. That first day, before he’d even got back to camp, Satan had wormed into his head, whining to Brodis that the white light and the angels couldn’t have happened, that it wasn’t realistic. Use common bay-horse sense, boy. You were just scared and excited from the accident, that’s all.

And right then he’d faltered. Already. Not a day had passed, and the devil had succeeded in hardening his heart. Brodis hadn’t rested a moment since. Satan always came in the same sly guise, with lawyerly arguments and rabbit-trap questions, all of which began with the same word: How? How could such-and-such happen, and how did a certain feature make sense, and how come this other had happened? But he’d learned to recognize them for what they were: distraction, illusion, cowardice.

All he had to do was wait until she took the brogans off. Just wait.

In the meantime, fence-mending. It took him hauling the cut planks from the barn and her testing the old ones for rot. Brodis crowbarred the broken palings and kicked them free, surveying the rotten wood for salvage nails. Inside, crabgrass and horsemint feathered across the furrows. Among the weeds, blades of corn furled up stingy as fists.

“Set up that one there,” he told her.

Irenie held the plank against its neighbor and pressed it flat against the weather-gray cross support, leaning in with her full weight. Brodis drove two nails straight in. The top of the plank snugged up against the crossbeam, but the bottom sprang towards them.

Irenie bent and rested her weight on one knee. The sole of her right boot pointed straight out. Now. Brodis stepped back to get a look, but it wasn’t far enough. He stepped again. Irenie glanced over her shoulder at him. “Not straight?” Just then a rabbit bounced out of the furrows, and the dog Stomper erupted into flopping and yelping chase. During all the noise Brodis backed up again.

Ears. The word on the bottom of her right boot was ears. But he hadn’t seen the left one.

Irenie spoke over her shoulder. “Matthew did a good job training them dogs.”

Brodis replied without thinking. “Yep.”

His wife’s too-soon answer: “You were better to tell him that.”

“Did.” But when he tried to lay his mind on the where and when of the conversation, he couldn’t get but so much. He tapped the bottom of the plank. “How about getting lower.”

Now his wife rested on both knees. Both soles pointed at the sky. And there, right there it was: the oval, the backwards Sear, the last s worn away.

Brodis drew up beside her. It made no sense. Her features hadn’t changed: same transparent lashes, same strands of hair loosened from the long braid, same patchwork of freckles easing up the tender skin in front of her ear. And before his brain thought to think on it, his hand went there, his thumb brushing the unblemished skin. Surprise turned her toward him and raised up her features. He didn’t plan to trace the line of her jaw with his index finger, where the skin stretched smooth across the bone. He didn’t plan to ask her the question right then and there. “Tell me what it is that’s got into you.”

Her eyes scouted his, then found a resting place somewhere beyond his shoulder. “Nothing particular.” She pursed the side of her mouth in a way that made it clear there was indeed something very particular. Then she seemed to wrest her attention back towards him as if returning to the world of the here and now from another one peopled by spirits and demons. The transition seemed to pain her. And right then, in place of answering his question she took it into her head to bring up the woman from the extension office again, if you could believe it. “Mrs. Furman says there’s a school in Asheville for very intelligent children. She says the classes are specialized.”

Anger welled inside him. How had they got back to talk of the government? He closed his eyes and breathed slow. It was possible that all boots wore out the same way. It was possible that every woman in the county had a pair with the same pattern on the sole.

Possible. Not likely. His wife was talking now about a new school. Brodis muttered a response and put two nails between his lips. He listened without listening.

The print had been from a small boot. A small foot.

Irenie talked on. Her voice was careful, planned out, and it was this tone more than anything that finally caught his attention. “She says they have scholarships for mountain children. Some of the smartest ones go for free.” She splayed both hands upon the springy wood without looking at him. The veins in her arms testified to the effort involved.

Only then did it occur to Brodis that they were having a conversation about his son’s future. And that his wife was trying to sway him to do something she didn’t think he’d want to do. “How come?” he asked.

“How come what?”

He pinched one of the nails from his mouth and positioned it against the wood. Because of the other one between his lips, his words had to squeeze out sideways, making his voice come terse and low. “How come they to go for free?”

Her voice was casual, falsified. “To get them to stay in school. To get them to a place where they can find jobs as teachers or businessmen or leaders. Someplace where they can use all the parts of their minds.”

“But not working on a farm.”

“No,” she allowed. “Not working on a farm.” Her hands splayed above and below the nail head, long-fingered and slender and traced with a blue-veined filigree that put him in mind of the tiny skeletons the plow turned up in the tousled earth, the white-laced surprise of them.

Brodis grunted. “Charity then.” He bent forward and positioned the nail between her hands. He brought his hammer arm up. Then he stopped. “Nope. Move your hand.”

Her voice came on faster than he expected. “Not charity. Scholarship.” She widened her grip on the chestnut paling, pushing the board flush against the cross timber, close in against the others, the heels of her hands white with the pressure. “So that mountain children can grow up to be leaders in their community.”

It was the first time he knew for certain that the argument wasn’t just a matter between him and her. “Whose words are them?”

Now his wife looked at him full on. Her eyes were belligerent, lawless. “Mine. Those are my words.”

Brodis swung the hammer, and the steel arced strong and true and slammed into the head of the nail, and the chestnut paling cinched up against the cross support. He drew the implement toward his temple for the second stroke. Her words, his left hind foot. They had the mark of the government all over them. Again the hammer dropped. Again it hit the nail true, now flush. He stood, slid the tools into his pocket. “It’s a pretty come-off when a town like Eakin can’t school its own children. There ain’t anything wrong with that boy that he needs a special education from the government.” Behind Irenie, the straw man turned with a whine, his torso impaled upon an axle, each arm a raised wind-paddle. A crow coughed, and the others flurried into the air. It was the only scarecrow in the county that moved. Matthew had conjured and built the thing himself.

Irenie was still talking. “He hates school. He wants to quit.”

Brodis was quiet. His wife didn’t account for the fact that teasing could be good for a boy. Plenty of men had come up stronger for it. “It’s more work here than can be done alone.”

The scarecrow turned back toward them, and the crows scattered like chaff. Brodis picked up the palings and moved down the fence.

Irenie followed. “We could get a hired man.”

Brodis fitted the crowbar behind another damaged paling and put his weight into it. The board moaned toward him. There was a time when his mind had a picture of his son grown strong. But now he couldn’t feature Matthew leaning into a plow or reaching into a bellowing cow to pull out a breached calf. Farm life seemed to splinter his son: the horse that died in labor or the quick wring of chicken necks, the hot slaughter of lamb and pig. Yet here his wife had given Brodis the picture of his son grown powerful again, this time as a leader, and after so many fallow months, the image burned with surprising strength. For the first time Brodis envisioned his son at sitting-down work, at a desk in the courthouse or the school, his hair the same ruffled color as the light on the river in the late afternoon.

His wife kept talking. “A hired man would make. Clabe Ingles would do it.”

Brodis grunted. It wasn’t the point. “It’s fine and good to send a boy for a education, but first you’ve got to ask yourself is it the education he needs.” He turned the rotted board over and examined it for nails.

His wife studied his face. Behind her, the crows hung in the whispering air, waiting. “Mrs. Furman said some of the students go into business. A good portion of them go to college.”

College? Last night his son had asked why Jesus gave three different people three different requirements for getting into Heaven. “I’m not talking about that sort of education. That’s books and reading and arithmetic. He’s already good at that.”

Irenie seemed to consider this. She didn’t argue. “You mean church.”

He turned to her. “You know and I know there’s no point studying history and algebra when there’s no ensuring he’s going to church.”

His wife stood the next replacement board before her like a shield. Her voice came out small, but it didn’t back away, as if some part of her that had been submerged all these years were finally breaking the surface. “They have churches in Asheville.” Maybe the same part that sneaked out of the house and left footprints in the frost.

“Yep.”

“He can go to church without us.”

“Could. If you’re willing to bet his soul on it. I’m not. You saw him last night.” He reached for a new board. “Eternity is a long time, Irenie. A good portion longer than a little unpleasantness here in this world.”

Incredibly, she kept at it, her voice wobbling but still coming at him. “Mrs. Furman said that the—”

“The boy has enough.”

“But he’s—”

“Enough.”

Finally, silence. Or almost. His wife turned her face toward the fence and made something that sounded like a squeak.

He shoved the new board into place. The hammer arced through the air and met the nail head with a loud crack. A man hadn’t ought to suffer a woman to teach, nor to take authority over him, but to be in silence.