Child of God (10 page)

H
E GOT A FIRE GOING IN THE
hearth and with wooden fingers undid the frozen lacings of his shoes and levered them from the shank of his foot, banging the heels on the floor until they came off. He looked at his feet. They were a pale yellow with white spots. When he went into the other room he could hardly feel the floor. He seemed to be walking about on his anklebones. He went out barefooted and fetched in the ladder and climbed up and looked at the girl. He came back down with the rifle and stood it by the fireplace. Then he opened the parcels from town and held up the garments and sniffed at them and folded them away again.

He opened a can of beans and a can of the sausages
and set them in the fire and he put a pan of water on to make coffee with. Then he put the other things away in the closet and sitting on the edge of the mattress pulled on his shoes again. With the axe in his hand he went clopping across the floor and out into the night. It had begun to snow again.

He hauled wood until the room was a huge brush pile with old pieces of stumps and whole lengths of fencepost with sections of rotted wire hanging from their staples. He worked at it until well past dark and got a good fire going and sat before it and ate his supper. When he was done he lit the lamp and went into the other room with it and climbed the ladder. Muttered curses, sounds of struggle, ensued.

She came down the ladder until she touched the floor with her feet and there she stopped. He paid out more rope but she was standing there in the floor leaning against the ladder. She was standing on tiptoe, nor would she fold. Ballard came down the ladder and undid the rope from around her waist. Then he dragged her into the other room and laid her on the hearth. He took hold of her arm and tried to raise it but the whole body shifted woodenly. Goddamn frozen bitch, said Ballard. He piled more firewood on.

It was past midnight before she was limber enough to undress. She lay there naked on the mattress with her sallow breasts pooled in the light like wax flowers. Ballard began to dress her in her new clothes.

He sat and brushed her hair with the dimestore brush he’d bought. He undid the top of the lipstick and screwed it out and began to paint her lips.

He would arrange her in different positions and go out and peer in the window at her. After a while he just sat holding her, his hands feeling her body under the new clothes. He undressed her very slowly, talking to her. Then he pulled off his trousers and lay next to her. He spread her loose thighs. You been wantin it, he told her.

Later he hauled her back into the other room. She was loose and not easy to handle. Her bones lay loosely in her flesh. He covered her with the rags and returned to the fire and built it high as it would go and lay in the bed watching it. The flue howled with the enormity of the draw and red flames danced at the chimney top. An enormous brick candle burning in the night. Ballard crammed brush and pieces of stumpwood right up the chimney throat. He made coffee and leaned back on his pallet. Now freeze, you son of a bitch, he told the night beyond the window-pane.

It did. It dropped to six below zero. A brick toppled into the flames. Ballard stoked the fire and pulled his blankets about and composed himself for sleep. It was bright as day in the cabin. He lay staring at the ceiling. Then he got up again and lit the lamp and went into the other room. He turned the girl over and tied the rope around her and ascended into the attic. Again she rose, now naked. Ballard came back down the ladder and took the ladder down and laid it by the wall and went back in and went to bed. Outside the snow fell softly.

W
HEN BALLARD REACHED
Fox’s store he was half frozen. A bluish dusk suffused the barren woods about. He went straight to the stove and stood next to the dusty gray barrel of it with his teeth chattering.

Cold enough for ye? said Mr Fox.

Ballard nodded.

Radio says it’s goin down to three degrees tonight.

Ballard was not for Smalltalk. He went around the store selecting cans of beans and vienna sausages and he got two loaves of bread and pointed out the baloney in the meatcase that he wanted a halfpound of and he got a quart of sweetmilk and some cheese and crackers and a box of cakes. Mr Fox totted up the bill on a
scratchpad, assessing the items on the counter from over the tops of his glasses as he went. Ballard had his parcels from town tucked tightly in his armpit.

What about that boy they found up here yesterday evenin? Mr Fox said.

What about him, said Ballard.

I
T WAS STILL DARK IN THE
morning when he woke with the cold. He’d piled dead weeds and brush to lay the mattress on and gone to sleep with his feet to the embers of the house, snow-flakes falling on him from out of the blackness of the heavens. The snow melted on him and then in the colder hours of morning froze so that he woke beneath a blanket of ice that cracked like glass when he stirred. He hobbled to the hearth in his thin jacket and tried to warm himself. It was still snowing lightly and he knew not what hour it might be.

When he had stopped shivering he got his pan and filled it with snow and set it among the embers. While it was heating he found the axe and cut two poles with which to hang the blanket to dry.

When day came he was sitting in a nest of weeds he’d made on the hearth and he was sipping coffee from a large porcelain cup which he held in both hands. With the advent of this sad gray light he shook the last few drops out of the cup and climbed down from his perch and began to poke through the ashes with a stick. He spent the better part of the morning stirring through the ruins until he was black with woodash to the knees and his hands were black and his face streaked with black where he’d scratched or puzzled. He found not so much as a bone. It was as if she’d never been. Finally he gave it up. He dusted the snow from the remainder of his provisions and fixed himself two baloney sandwiches and squatted in a warm place among the ashes eating them, black fingerprints on the pale bread, eyes dark and huge and vacant.

H
E WOKE IN THE NIGHT
with some premonition of ill fate. He sat up. The fire had diminished to a single tongue of flame that stood near motionless from the ashes. He lit the lamp and turned up the wick. A shifting mantle of smoke overhung the room. Thick ribbons of white smoke were seeping down between the boards in the ceiling and he could hear a light crackling noise overhead like something feeding. Oh shit, he said.

He got up, the blanket shawled about his thin and angry shoulders. Through the rives in the boards above him he could see a hellish glow of hot orange. He was pulling on his jacket and shoes. With the rifle in hand he went out into the snow. There in the trampled weedlot he stood looking up at the roof. A crazy-looking gaggle of flames shot up alongside the chimney and subsided again. A rabid crackling from the loft. Clouds of steam were coming off the wet roof and hot pins of light drifted downwind in the blowing snow.

Kiss my goddamned ass, said Ballard. He stood the rifle against a tree and hurried back inside and gathered up his bedding and hauled it out into the snow and dove back in again. He collected his cookware and his little pantry and brought them out and he got the axe and the few tools he owned and what other odds and ends of gear he had stowed in the empty room and flung them into the yard and raced back in and got the ladder and stood it up into the hole and looked up. Huge orange boils of fire were pulsing in the loft. He climbed up the ladder and poked his head through the
hole in the ceiling. Instantly he felt his hair singe and crackle. He ducked and patted at his head. Already his eyes were red and weeping from the smoke. He squatted there at the top of the ladder for a few minutes squinting up at the fire and then he climbed back down again.

When he went back outside he had the bears and the tiger in his arms. The roof was now afire. Above the steady roar of it you could hear the old riven oak shakes exploding into flame row on row at the far end of the house with a kind of popping noise. The heat was marvelous.

Ballard stood there in the snow with his jaw hanging. The flames ran down the batboards and up again like burning squirrels. Through the flames of the roof you could see the pinned framing in a row of burning A shapes. Within minutes the cabin was a solid wall of fire. The few panes of glass crackled and fell from their sash in a myriad rupture and the roof dropped with a whooshing noise down into the house. Ballard had to step back, so great the heat was. The snow about the house had begun to draw back leaving a ring of damp ground. After a while the ground began to steam.

Long before morning the house that had kept Ballard from the elements was only a blackened chimney with a pile of smoldering boards at its feet. Ballard crossed the soggy ground and climbed onto the hearth and sat there like an owl. For the warmth of it. He’d long been given to talking to himself but he didn’t say a word.

T
HE WEATHER DID NOT
change. Ballard took to wandering over the mountain through the snow to his old homeplace where he’d watch the house, the house’s new tenant. He’d go in the night and lie up on the bank and watch him through the kitchen window. Or from the top of the wellhouse where he could see into the front room where Greer sat before Ballard’s very stove with his sockfeet up. Greer wore spectacles and read what looked like seed catalogs. Ballard laid the rifle foresight on his chest. He swung it upward to a spot just above the ear. His finger filled the cold curve of the trigger. Bang, he said.