Kind One (2 page)

I waited two days after the rain had stopped and the waters had receded before returning to the bottom of the well. All that day my wife lowered buckets of colored pebbles down to me. She sent the blue ones first, then the green ones, then the white ones, then a mixture of yellow and brown. Last, she sent down the pinks. I set the pebbles down in the water by the fistful and did my best to spread them out as I thought she had imagined them. Layers of hard color the water could rise through.

That afternoon a man and a woman dressed in buckskin came out of the woods. They both wore bright feathers and pieces of colored string in their hair. They came across the field and stepped onto the yard and went to the lip of the well and looked down. Then they looked over to the house where I stood ready with my gun, but they just nodded at me and looked down the well and walked on.

As I fell asleep that night, I thought of the brick I would line the sides of my well with, but when I slept I dreamt of colored stones. Once I thought I woke during the night and called out, but I did not wake, did not call out. It seemed to me as I dug deeper into my sleep that a chink opened in the side of the house and moonlight crept in. Even though there was no moon that night and no chink for it to creep through.

I was slow to wake in the morning and slower to set to piling up bricks by the mouth of the well. I had no hod so I carried the bricks two at a time, one in each hand. I made a neat pile and checked the pulley. I considered aloud just dropping them down into the dark and following afterward, but my wife said she wouldn’t like that. There was a way to dig a well, and that was the way I had been digging it. During the war I had watched men drop what they needed into wells and had no quarrel with the approach, but followed my wife’s wishes. We saw that the bucket could hold three bricks at a time and she brought our daughter out and set her on the ground and told me she was ready. I was ready too and turned to climb down into the hole.

I saw the bear when I turned. It was standing beside an oak sapling, sniffing at the air. It lifted one of its paws a little as it sniffed. It looked at us, then sniffed the air in our direction. It took two steps toward us then turned and ambled slowly over to the stock pen. It set some of its weight into its haunches then swept out a forepaw and quietly stove in the fence. I could not remember afterward how it had happened, but I suddenly had the rifle in my hands. I shot the bear as it was considering the pigs. The ball did nothing and the bear continued its work. It killed two pigs, sniffed their carcasses carefully, then took the third. The other stock had pressed themselves against the fence walls, mad with fear. I was still reloading as the bear walked off into the woods with its prize. I was still reloading when my wife started to scream.

The baby had been hurt in falling, and when I carried her up out of the well she was dead. I gave her to my wife then went and leaned against the side of the house. The wood was warm from the afternoon sun. Everything below my chest was dripping. I knew our daughter was dripping too. She had struck her head in falling and had a crescent mark above her eyebrow. I turned to look and saw that my wife had not moved. I could see my daughter’s leg, the soft skin above the small, wet boot. We buried her near the stream. We sat together for a long time next to the small grave. Then we went back to our house. I came back out of the house as quickly as I had entered it. I could not stand to see the baby’s basket, the rattle I had made for her, the bowl I had carved. My wife asked me to come back in but I didn’t. Instead I climbed down into the well. There were fresh earthworms floating in the water, but I did not save them. Instead I reached down and pulled up handfuls of pebbles and put them in my pockets. Instead I moaned and tore at my beard.

Later, although my wife asked me not to, I filled in the well. Our baby must be properly buried, I told my wife. She must be safe. And it did seem to me, during my labors and long after them, that my child was still down there, that she was crying and clenching her fists above the colored pebbles, that she was not buried safe and dry in the loamy dirt beside the stream.

Some years hence I dug another well, but I would not drink from it, nor sit at table beside any who would.

ONCE I LIVED IN A PLACE
where demons dwelled. I was one of them. I am old and I was young then, but truth is this was not so long ago, time just took the shackle it had on me and gave it a twist. I live in Indiana now, if you can call these days I spend in this house
living.
I might as well be hobbled. A thing that lurches across the earth. One bright morning of the world I was in Kentucky. I remember it all. The citizens of the ring of hell I have already planted my flag in do not forget.

Charlotte County. Ninety miles from nowhere. It was four hundred acres, varied as to elevation, with good drainage to a slow-running creek. There was a deep well, fine pasture for the horses. Much of the land never went under cultivation, and there were always frogs and owls for the night and foxes to trot bloody-jawed through the dawn. Birds must have liked its airs, because the airs were full of them. A firearm went off independently and we had half a flock for supper. In season, we had fresh corn and beans and tomatoes and squash. There was a boy who kept it all in shape. Two more looked to the pigs. The girls cooked and kept house and kept me.

It was a pretty country. Greens were greens. There was snow for Christmas and holly bushes to make sure it looked white. Breezes and flowers for the summer. Trees in autumntime stuffed with red and yellow leaves. Bulbs to crack open the earth when it came up on spring. It has been my whole excuse for a life since I held my breath and pointed my back at that place, but my mind has never learned to hold what transpired there against it. The land is the land and the land washes itself clean. I had a father who had been through battles who told me that.

Still, even if they are all gone, even if they are all scattered or dead, I would not want to come over the rise and across the stone bridge and arrive there again. No, I would not want that.

My husband’s name was Linus Lancaster, which made me Ginny Lancaster, but they do not call me that here. I live in a house on a corner of a farm that belongs to the family whose floors I scrubbed for forty years. When they come to call, which some of the younger ones still do, they stand in the yard and holler, “You in there Scary Sue?” I am. I’ve got a view of a barley field and a woods they haven’t taken the axe to yet. I’ve got a little kitchen with its own pump and a place to sit on the front porch when it is too warm. I’ve got a shelf of books they have let me have out of the big house over the years. I’ll read just about any kind of a book you could offer, but it is mostly adventures and romances that sit close to hand. Books in which they die by the cheerful dozen and the knight comes to rescue off the damsel and the good lord of hosts lets it pour down happy ever afters like there wasn’t anything else in his skies. Like he didn’t have any other eventualities squirreled away up there.

Linus Lancaster was my mother’s second cousin. He came to us from Kentucky and grabbed me up when I was just settling into school.

“Would you do me the honor, Ginny?” he said to me.

“Yes I would,” said I.

“Then come along with me and be my fair maiden,” he said.

“I’ll come, I will,” said I.

He told my mother about his piece of paradise, said he’d struck it rich as a king in trade and now was going to let the land care for him. He had good bottom land. A stream. A well with water so kind to the throat that it would never let you drink anything else. Good outbuildings. Sharp ploughs and axes. China and cutlery. Larders full. Healthy stock. People to look to it. He’d had a wife in Louisville, but she was now his dearly departed, and each night his soul would beg him to bring it some Christian company. My father, the same who had been through battles, had a wooden foot and a cane to club on us with. Linus Lancaster told my mother about Charlotte County, but my father was there listening, quiet, the way he liked to. With a pipe at the ready and one eye shut.

There was a good deal to say about that place in Kentucky, and my father took it all in, every word. I mostly looked at him and at Linus Lancaster. I liked how new Linus Lancaster’s shirt was. He had two of them in his valise and ten more just like it, he said, in his fine home. My mother liked to hear him talk. She got that look of hers, like a daisy under a sweet raindrop, when he would open his mouth and dance out at us with his tongue. My father saw that look and he saw Linus Lancaster and he saw me, there in my corner, mooning over it all. When it seemed like Linus Lancaster’s tongue was done with its long dancing, my father straightened up on his chair and hit a little at the floor with his wooden foot. He looked at me, then at Linus Lancaster, then he cleared his throat. In school, the teacher had let me lead the lesson, my father said, opening one eye and shutting the other. The teacher had said one day it could be me to stand in front of the class and hold the chalk, and what, he wondered, did Linus Lancaster think about that. Linus Lancaster said he had heard that about me. He said he liked a woman who knew her letters. Said there was great accommodation in his heart for the delicacies of the mind.

“Do you want to go?” my father asked me later.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“I will ask you again—do you want to go down to Kentucky with this man, cousin to your mother, Linus Lancaster, to be his wife and do his bidding?”

“Yes, Father,” I said.

He did not say a thing until the next day, when I was out in the goose pond with mud and wet feathers up to my elbows and all the geese honking and carrying on like I was the rapture come to smite them. My father quietly considered this carnival for a time, then he kicked at a goose come too close to his wooden foot.

“Go on then,” he said.

We left a fortnight later. There wasn’t much fuss to it. My mother and father, a third cousin and an uncle, a cow, the old mare, and a broken-wing chick. A turkey buzzard, looking for his lunch, haloed the house. My mother waved to her cousin with a cloth she was holding. My father pushed down his hat and held up his hand.

Everything I had fit in one half of the small trunk my father made for me after the wedding out of some wood he’d salvaged from a corn crib. As we made the drive down I would turn often and look at my trunk bouncing there in the back of Linus Lancaster’s wagon and wish that I could take off my new traveling hat with its pink ribbon, open the trunk, wrap my arms around myself, and curl up inside. If I had, maybe my body would have kept some of that which wasn’t books, sturdy notions, or linens from breaking into the little bits of nothing I found after I pulled up the nails when we arrived.

Linus Lancaster had his girls get me settled. His house wasn’t what he had told my mother about. There weren’t any columns or gables or fifty-foot porch to it. It was just a cabin with a long corridor and some extra rooms tacked on. But they kept it well. You could make a breeze run in through the windows and down the hall, and the country when I first came to it was fragrant. That was the thing I liked best in those first days. I liked to stand at a window and bite off pieces of that breeze. That was a breeze to chew on and think about and swallow. Never mind that winter hadn’t come yet to freeze it all until your teeth would snap straight off in your mouth if you smiled. Never mind that there would be more than breezes to trot along that corridor in the jolly days to come.

“Welcome,” those girls said, then each tried their hand at a curtsy. They were just little bitty things then. Ten and twelve. I was fourteen.

In the big house that sits one Christian mile due east of this little house and this scrawly stretch of barley that the rabbits like to visit, there is the big shelf of books that is the mother to the little shelf I have here. It isn’t just my happy books on that big shelf. It is other things. It is the shallow and the deep parts of the pocket both. After I had gotten myself up here and had started in to scrubbing floors, on that shelf I searched every day for the word to say what it was that befell us in that house in Kentucky. I looked in every book for that word, but I did not see it. It wasn’t until a Sunday at the church that I learned what that word was and saw that I had looked at it many times in those books and heard it said every day.

It was a kind of spring morning with a kind of warm sun and we had all spilled ourselves out of the church, and I was waiting for them to finish their quiet talking so we could get home and look to dinner when Mr. Lucious Wilson, my employer and the owner of this little house and this barley field and all that surrounds it and the whole wide world for all I care, called over to me, “Come on out of that shadow and into this sunshine.”

So I thought, yes,
shadow
is the word and I have seen it and I have heard it before and thought it before but now I know it. It has been said.

Shadow.

Which is where I’ve been and where I am and where I’m wending my sorry way. So if I say I can look now at my earliest days in that place in Kentucky at the home of my husband Linus Lancaster and see the light of a pretty, unhurt place shining on us all, you can know and I can say that this is just tricks from a mind that wants what was to be otherwise but can’t change it.

If I say that in my early days there was a meadow where I would walk with the girls, Cleome and Zinnia, to look out for daisies, and where we would sit together of a morning and make chains that could have stretched all the way to Louisville, you would be right to look me square in my shadowy eye and say you don’t believe me. If I tell you that in those days I would go to look at the colts when they were dripping fresh, with Cleome and Zinnia to my sides or me to theirs, and that we would pick big tomatoes for the table out of little Alcofibras’s gardens and play in the yard at weighing them on the market scales or go together to the woods to look for mushrooms or lie as flat as you like on our backs by the creek or hold hands and skip like faeries and flap our arms together like blue jays or hold our faces up to the falling snow like three fingers of the same fork, you will say, and I will nod, that it cannot have been.