Читать книгу Over the Plain Houses - Julia Franks - Страница 12

CHAPTER FIVE

HER HUSBAND HAD SAID NO. NO WAS NO. IRENIE leaned her weight into the handles of the wheelbarrow and pushed. The single rubber tire cut a deep groove in the mudded earth.

Worse, she hadn’t stood against him. Not that time and not the time he’d told Matthew he’d never be a firm kind of man. Her son had given her the one look that night, the one beseechment. He must have seen it in her face, that she’d not help, because he didn’t turn around a second time. And he hadn’t in the days since.

She hadn’t figured herself for the kind of person who knew a thing to be wrong and sat by and watched it anyway. She wondered was this the person she’d compromised herself to be or had she always been this way and just never stepped outside herself enough to see it.

The lady agent was younger than her, but she’d dressed up in a fitted suit and driven by herself up to a town full of strangers for something she knew to be right. That fact unsettled Irenie, not because of what it told about Mrs. Furman but because of what it told about Irenie Lambey.

She set the wheelbarrow by the tobacco frames. Ahead, a jay watched, tapped the ground twice with his beak, then jerked his head up to check her, just like the chickens did. Peck, peck, look. Peck, peck, look. Very same waltz. Blue liverleaf flowers starred the grass. The service trees bloomed on the mountains like puffs of fog, and the branches of the redbud curved and wingled against the naked forest. A wren’s voice see-sawed the morning air. Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle. It had been two weeks since she’d seen the pigs. Since then, they hadn’t intruded into the talk in town or in church or in school. But Irenie knew what she knew. They would be back.

She sank the shovel into the manure in the wheelbarrow and emptied two loads onto each plot. Then she began working it in with a spading fork, using the tines to break up the red earth and separate the greenish-black clumps of compost until each frame was a rich uniform brown. She tamped the tops with the back of the shovel. After the last one she set the blade in the ground and leaned on it. Each box looked the same, dark brown, fecund with nutrients, a promise. She spread the page of newsprint, nicked a corner of the waxed seed pouch, and tilted the contents onto the center of the paper. The seeds were small as sugar grains, and she pressed her index finger into the pile, rubbing her thumb against the pad so that the grains fell from her skin and scattered somewhere on the brown compost, though she couldn’t see where. Even after three years of tobacco, it seemed impossible that something so invisible would grow.

The preacher birds had returned and taunted without stop. Over here, whaddya want? Tell him no. Whaddya want? It was the sound of planting. Another winter had passed. Another summer would begin. Pretty bird, tell him no. Whaddya want? The pallid seasons of the future stretched before her.

Then the songs went quiet, and a jay took flight. A shadow glided across the tobacco frames, the spread of its wings a broken jag against the pine-walled boxes. The outline flapped hard against the sun and cut across the sky. Vultures didn’t do that way. They spiraled in the updrafts, lazy and effortless and beautiful. But this bird was working hard. It flexed its wings once, then twice, and drew itself up on a wooden fence post twenty feet away. A red-tail. Irenie held her breath. The bird was sizeable, the band around her waist and the feathers on her back the color of brick. She folded her wings, hunched her withers and puffed her chest with quick energy, her white breast pulsing and her yellow eye unafraid because she knew that she’d soared across a valley on her own and that she could take to the air again at any moment. Somewhere she had a nest, with young ones, and somewhere responsibilities to them, but that didn’t keep her from sitting here now, magestical in her survey of everything that belonged in her territory. Then, as if deciding that Irenie was no threat, she shifted her interest to the yard below, now empty of chickens—then to the unsprung wolf trap balanced atop the nearby gatepost, the jaws dropped below the level of the wood. Irenie held her breath. There were two traps, each with a wide mouth on a spring lever. If a wolf was to step on the plate, the spring would trigger, clamping the device around the animal’s leg. No amount of thrashing or biting would loosen it. But the rusty traps had hung in the back of the tool shed as long as Irenie could remember, ever since her uncle had owned the land. She’d never known anyone to use them. There were no more wolves.

But last winter Brodis had discovered the contraptions and set to scraping and steel-wooling and oiling. Underneath the orange, the metal was gun-barrel gray.

And when he’d told her they were for the hawks, she’d shaken her head and said it was too much trap for a bird. It was the only thing she could think to say that sounded reasonable, though she knew when she said it that it was no reason at all.

“No such thing as too much trap,” he’d countered. “Dead is dead.”

“But you can’t kill all of them. There’ll be another one to move in when that one’s gone.”

He jerked his head up. “Which is it. It’s either too much trap or it’s no sense doing, but it ain’t both.”

But it was both, and it was neither. He watched her, the steel wool immobile between his fingers. “I don’t know,” was all she could muster.

He didn’t move. “Then say what you mean, and quit coming up with side reasons.”

“All I know is we never did it that way before.” He had resumed his steel-wooling. “And I’m asking. Maybe you could leave off on my account.”

He stopped scrubbing and gave her a look. “I might do. If you were rational about it.”

She had nothing to say back.

Now she propelled herself toward the hawk and waved her arms. “Shaaa!” Without seeming to see her, the bird stepped off the fence, flapped two deep-sweeping flaps, and sailed capably across the yard, gliding to a stop in the walnut tree, then retreating further to the new-leafing oak.

It hadn’t always been so. He hadn’t always been so. In 1924, there’d been lots of boys. She could have had a choose and pick. Whether it was for her red hair or for her father’s 500 acres of rolling orchard either one, she never knew. Neither had a thing in the world to do with who she was. The land had come to her great-grandfather from the Cherokee at three dollars an acre, and the hair was a matter of luck. Yet they were hers and she’d gotten used to them. As a girl, she’d played in the orchards and grown accustomed to the idea that one of the Eakin boys would someday persuade her to leave them. But they bored her, those boys: Frank Pruitt who was so sure of himself because he could wrestle the others to the ground, Hallie Crisp who never missed an opportunity to talk about his father’s store, Freddy Smith who met the whole wide world with his chin tucked in like a bull set to charge. There wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with them, any of them, but all of them tried so hard to please it reminded her of her least siblings. When she imagined a life with one of them, she knew what it would hold, each day visible years before it happened, like standing in the middle of a row of apple trees. If you were to line it up just so, a corridor opened before you, and you could see further and clearer than you ever thought possible, the length of the view making each tree uniform, each gnarled trunk distilled into sameness, no twists, no surprises, no new. The view unsettled her.

That spring the train engines had huffed down the single gauge railroad track, hauling oak and hickory and birch down the mountain, the timber stacked high on the flatbeds. But even then some of the wood came down the river in flotillas, and with it the log drivers, stepping from trunk to trunk as quick as squirrels, each with his pick pole held loose across his thighs, now and then tipping the end against another log to push it away or steady his balance. The men were grizzly with whiskers, and they shouted halloo whenever they passed schoolchildren gathered on the banks, the expectations of the crowd hanging in the air with the smell of the men’s cigarettes and sweat. Some of the drivers whooped at the girls or touched their hats or hollered pretty things. Brodis never did. He was furthest away, his gaze on the river ahead, as if he was bored by the schoolchildren or spied something downstream the others had no knowing of. In those days he had a mad look about him: red woolen shirt flapping loose from his wide shoulders, hair hatless and wild and swept from his forehead like the crest of an owl. Most of the drivers were small agile men, but Brodis was tall and long. He had family near her sister’s husband, and once long ago, had grown up there. Now he lived in the camps.

When the river rose, Irenie and her classmates carried their lunch pails past the bridge to the falls and watched the logs roll over the ledge and skirt the rocks below. The boys argued back and forth about how much skill was required to drive the timber. Frank said the cleated boots made walking on the wet wood as easy as walking on a floor. Bill Hicks said Frank didn’t know his ass from his elbow. But both watched the logs float through the rips and the slides, the noise of the whitewater silencing their shouts and distancing them from the men on the river. Each driver approached the pitch the only man alive, bent at the knee and feet spread, pick pole ready, eyes reading the water in front of him until the log nosed itself over the edge down and down into the boil, burying itself and the fellow’s knees, and then bobbed up at the edge of the foam pile. And when a driver lost his balance in the chute, he pushed against the rocks or another stick to steady himself, sometimes hopping to another piece of timber altogether. Irenie never saw one fall. But some of them did. Some of them died. But when she spied them at the bottom of the drop, they were forever laughing, Brodis too, as if he made a pleasure of stepping so close to the afterlife and then away again, as if he knew something of his own mortality that she didn’t know. And maybe that was the attraction. Or maybe it was the thousand other things the drivers knew that she’d only heard rumor of: the logging camps in the wilderness, the waterfalls on the peaks, the fires in the Smoky Mountains whenever the trees exploded before your eyes, and the whole enduring journey to the mill towns, to Waynesville, to Canton, to Ohio.

She found herself jealous of girls she’d never met who lived in places she’d never seen. It might be he had someone in one of those towns. Might be she was prettier and smarter than Irenie. Did she eat the same vegetables? Did she study the same books in school?

Then one day he was back. He appeared without warning at a Friday night singing, all stringed sinews and knobby knuckles, too tall for his surroundings even when planted in a straw-backed chair. With anguish on his brow and a wooden cane resting across his thighs, he seemed unplaced, like a carnival bear on a chain. There was no one sat next to him. His eyes vigiled the other cake eaters, skipping from one to the next in vexation. They lit on her but didn’t show a flicker of interest, and she wondered if he was the only unattached fellow in the county who didn’t have a thought for her father’s acreage.

The next time she saw him was the July camp meeting. It was the same four day affair she’d attended every summer of her life. She’d just spread the canvas tent on the grass and was pushing the wooden stakes through the brass grommets. A pair of hobnail boots stepped in front of her, above them a splitting maul balanced across a shoulder.

“Want help with those stakes, Irenie Raines?” His eyes were the color of the furthest ridges, his forehead a cliff, the bones below it jagging forward like bedrock. From the side of his nose to the corner of his lip, ravines. She wasn’t prepared for that kind of handsome, and it caught at her throat so hard she had to look back to the wooden stake. When she stood up, her legs trembled, but there wasn’t a thing in the world for it but to peer into the blue wilderness of his eyes and ask, “How come you to know who I am?”

He watched her evenly but didn’t smile. “Everybody knows who you are.”

She thought on that fact. It wasn’t flattery, the way he put it. It was more like stating the colors of the sky or some other thing they could both lay their eyes on and agree to be true. And once it was pointed out that way, you couldn’t put on that you didn’t know. So she just nodded. “Aren’t you gonna ask if I know who you are?”

He smiled now, and his smile was white and wide-spaced, and the way it landed square on her warmed her so much it alarmed her to consider her old life without it. “Do you?”

There wasn’t any other thing to say. “Yes.”

“And how come you to know that?” He swung the maul from his shoulder and set it at his feet as easy as another fellow would a hoe.

“I know all kinds of things.” She willed her voice calm. “You work on the river. You come from over near Mars Hill. You don’t like to wear a hat.”

And then Brodis Lambey tipped back his head and laughed into the sky so that the muscles in his neck shimmered with sweat, and she thought then that she could say anything she wanted to him so long as it was true.

In 1924 she’d had the steam to make decisions that stuck. She’d taken it for granted it would always be so. That she would always be so.

A year later they’d both changed. God had taken their first child but saved her. Then He’d called Brodis to preach. It had seemed unlikely at first. Here was a man who didn’t spend words cheaply and didn’t savor the company of other farmers, much less a crowd. Here was a fellow who was too young or too handsome or too keen on himself, one. It was years before the town of Eakin gathered to his preachings, and longer still for other places. And nowadays there were those that followed him from street to church to revival, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world. But there was a difference between a man who was working to get someplace and a man who was working to maintain the place he was in. Something about the maintaining had made him hard when there wasn’t call to be so, each year more beetle-browed than the last.

And in the meantime Irenie did her best to think on crops. Better to schedule the future by slicing it up. A growing season was a period of time you could get hold of. Potatoes needed setting in the ground by the end of the March moon in order for them to make by September; corn during the growing of the April moon when the whippoorwill sang; squash, cucumbers and mush melon in the May bloom days of Virgo. If you paid attention, you had it in your head the way things would turn out. There would be lettuce and rhubarb in May, radishes, peas, and onions in June, beets, cucumbers and melons in July, corn, tomatoes, peppers, and lima beans in August, cabbage, apples and walnuts in September, and then, in October enough squash, collards, sweet potatoes, and rutabaga to last the winter. Each was the next thing, that was all.

But in the past three years, it had been all about tobacco. And Irenie had learned to focus on the moments she already owned—the choices preserved in glass or stowed in the recesses of a mountain. Now she stretched the cotton sacking taut across the tobacco frames and secured it with paper-string, imagining the green shoots unfurling, the roots stretching timid and dark into the black compost. In two weeks or more, the seedlings might show themselves as clusters of green dots against the soil, and she might have to thin them with a pair of tweezers. Might. Or a hard frost would fur up the sacking and she would open the boxes one morning to find the shoots exhausted and limp.

Pretty bird, pretty bird.

Then a sound like a dead pop, metallic and flat, and she couldn’t lay her mind on the meaning of it. Until she did. After a long second, the hawk’s scream split the air, followed by a spastic beating of wind that flapped and flapped and stretched time out of its track until it flagged and halted as if to take a long breath and gather up the will to move forward. Irenie ran toward the scream, but the bird was a blur of wings and white air, and then all at once somehow in flight, a miracle, pounding her great way into the sky, trailing drops of blood across the dust of the yard all the way to the white oak, her outrage careening up the valley in a high wail. Then she did a queer thing. She bumped into the mid branches of the tree, pitched forward and toppled into the new leaves, took flight again and was gone.

Leaves trembled. Chickens shrieked.

The trap was still balanced on the fence post, the metal jaws clenching two yellow and brown twigs—except they weren’t twigs. They were jointed and hinged and precise. The long toes reached out across the metal plate like fingers grasping for a purchase. For some reason they didn’t bleed.

She scanned the sky but didn’t see the hawk. Somewhere up there she was beating and beating the skinny air, through the updrafts or down the valley. Or maybe towards another tree, one with a nest lodged high in its crown where new hatchlings flopped and squealed. Maybe she watched their open mouths, circling.

Without stopping to study on it, Irenie found the second trap and pressed the point of the spade into the center plate and knew in that instant that that was how you found your earlier self, without planning whatever steps you’d thought needed planning. In the same instant the steel jaws leapt together and grabbed the blade with a violence that jolted straight up her arm and into her spine. When she pulled the shovel away, the steel teeth rasped down the blade and etched four jagged parallel lines into the metal.

And Brodis safe in his place in the world, certain-sure that he could teach the birds a thing or two if given half the chance. He’d leave for the river soon, a week, maybe two. The creeks were rising. Even with his limp, they’d hire him to work the stationary flumes and the sorting booms whenever the waters peaked. And when he returned, his spirit would be as ragged as his feet.