Kind One (5 page)

At Linus Lancaster’s home in Charlotte County, Kentucky, we ate pork morning, noon, and night. We ate it fresh, we ate it cured, we ate the cracklings, we ate the salty dribblings over our bread. We sat in the yard with pork in our hands, and we pulled it out of our pockets and ate it by the creek. What we didn’t eat we wore. Horace had a hand for turning leather. One Christmas he made me the prettiest pair of boots. You could walk all day in the puddles in those boots and not get wet. Linus Lancaster got a sheath for his knife and Cleome a pair of shoes. Horace had been in a squabble with Zinnia about something or the other, and all she got was a hat chucked out of the scraps. She wouldn’t wear it until Linus Lancaster made her.

The hat was a kind of droopy thing. It didn’t look an inch like my boots or Linus Lancaster’s sheath or Cleome’s shoes. Zinnia said she didn’t want to wear those old pork flaps and spit when she said it but Linus Lancaster put her in the shed for three days and three nights, and when she came out she walked straight over to Linus Lancaster and took it from him and put it on. There were rats in the shed. There was a chain at the back and that’s where Zinnia was. It was a heavy chain. It had thirty-seven and a half heavy links. Cleome cried when Zinnia was in the shed, until my husband hit her with his riding crop and said he would build another shed next to the one Zinnia was in and fill it to the top with rats and throw her into it and then build another one even bigger and with even more rats and toss her into that one next, and then he would take the keys to her shackles and drop them down the well and then she could cry all she liked.

“Down the well, you hear me?” he said.

Cleome came to me after this fine speech as I stood in my pretty boots and asked me would I tell Linus Lancaster to let her sister out. Horace came with her and said he had been at fault for making her that ugly hat. It had been a mean trick, and he was sorry. We could all of us hear Zinnia in the shed. She sang in that private way as she sat in there. Some of them were the songs Linus Lancaster liked to sing, only when she sang them it was like old earth sprinkling through the air.

“She’s just in there, she’s not far off, wait a spell,” I told them.

Linus Lancaster liked us all to take a turn at the killing. He said if we were all going to eat pig and wear pig finery then we all ought to kill it. Those of us who ate the most ought to kill the most. That was me and it was Linus Lancaster. The years went by and we ate and ate, and so we killed and killed. In the early times we killed with the chisel or the axe when they weren’t looking and later with Linus Lancaster’s rifle. The rifle wasn’t much, and you had to be better at it than I was to do much more than set a pig off its feed. So you had to reload, take aim, and fire again. Linus Lancaster liked to have some sport with it, and more than once would climb up on a tree or a roof with his rifle and take his several shots at them.

The pigs would emit a sound when we were robbing the life out of them, and that sound is the one that is still sitting here in my head. A pig is a sensible beast. It knows what you are doing to it and it knows the why. A pig gets a look. It has seen what has been done to its fellows. It has seen them hanging up to drain in the sun. It has eaten what’s left of its brothers in its slops. A pig will tell you plain that you have come to it on hell’s orders and that hell is where you will return and that you with your pockets full of dried pig and your stomach full of cracklings will be comfortable there.

“I’m asking you, please, Miss Ginny,” said Cleome.

“Please, Miss Ginny,” said Horace.

“She’s practically right out here with us, you can hear her can’t you?” I said.

I met a man in Indianapolis once who told it that when you had a hard thing in your head you had to scratch at it here and scratch at it there then dig your fingers into it and yank. This hard thing in my head is also in my arms and elbows and fingertips and ankles, and how do you get that kind of a thing out? There were vegetables in Alcofibras’s garden at Linus Lancaster’s place in Kentucky that took a kind of nursing to get out of the ground. Carrots that had more than one root. Turnips grown too big to just tug. There wasn’t anything that Alcofibras couldn’t get out of the ground whole. He had a way. It was almost like he was requesting that the foot-long sweet potato come out and take the air and kindly not break as it was doing so. I expect that if he had set down cross-legged and commenced to blow a tune on a flute the whole garden would have come up and danced for him. Maybe I ought to find a way to set down next to myself and blow on a flute. Or maybe it’s just yanking that’s the way to get it done.

I was twenty and Cleome and Zinnia were sixteen and eighteen when Linus Lancaster commenced to paying them visits. He had been trying on me for six years and one night he pushed me out of his bed and onto the floor and told me to go and sleep in my room and one of those next nights he went over and saw Zinnia, and because Cleome and Zinnia shared one room, when he was done visiting Zinnia he sang lying there between them awhile then rolled up over onto Cleome. I know this because the real house Linus Lancaster had on his piece of heaven in Kentucky was about the size of a thimble and had walls no thicker than wax paper, and the room he had those two girls in was no more than a good spit away from my own. I didn’t hear a sound in that room except for Linus Lancaster. I expect that’s what they had been hearing those years he had more or less nightly and morningly been trying in on me. Some fast breathing and snuffling then those grunts he liked.

During all those years of nights and mornings while he liked to go in after me I would pass the time while he was breathing and snuffling and grunting in imagining I was elsewhere someplace. Maybe I was home at my father’s house outside Lawrenceburg and was just sitting somewhere quiet and practicing my lessons or writing my story about the clouds and getting fixed to read it to the school. There was a crabapple tree I had liked to sit under in the heat and think about my lessons when I had completed my chores. Some of the books Linus Lancaster had burned up for me in his stove had been read under that tree. I had practiced my singing there. Hymns and hot glories and such. There was also my bed in the corner of the little room where I had always slept just exactly like a stone. Other times I thought about my first months in Kentucky and the breezes and sitting in the fields with Cleome and Zinnia, and that is exactly the place my mind went when I was lying there alone in my room after Linus Lancaster had kicked me, his lawful wife, out of his nightly concerns and walked down the hall to their room that first time to pay a visit.

The three of us would sit in a field and play at making daisy chains and daisy crowns, and one morning, because Zinnia had made the prettiest crown I ran back to my chest in the house and pulled out a spool of heavy purple thread I’d had from my mother and brought it to Zinnia for a prize. I put it in her hand and had to close her fingers over it because she didn’t believe it was hers to keep. She had big hands even then, and when I closed her fingers over the spool it disappeared and all you could see was a whisker of purple thread spilling out over the crook of her thumb. Linus Lancaster paid his visit, and I lay there alone and so peaceful it hurts my head bones to remember it even now and thought about Zinnia’s big hand, which had grown ever more over the years, and the piece of purple thread, frayed at the end, fretting a little in whatever fine breeze there was. She thanked me until I thought I would fall over with it then asked if I minded whether she shared some of it with Cleome. I told her it was hers, and if it was hers she could do with it what she liked, but that this was a day for prizes all around. I said this and fetched another spool, this one red. Cleome clapped when I gave it to her and they took pieces of their thread and wove them into the daisies and we all three stood up with crowns on our heads and took hands and turned a circle around and around.

It was Cleome and Zinnia had taught me that trick about thinking yourself into someplace else. They taught me that when they were ten and twelve and I was fourteen and they came up on me crying one skylark afternoon in the bloom of my youth there in that place in Kentucky. I told them that Linus Lancaster had started his husband ways and that I was ready to die if he kept up with them. They each one of them put their hand on my arm and didn’t say a word then let their hands drop and looked at me then at each other, and Cleome said Zinnia had told her in the old days at Linus Lancaster’s home in Louisville, when she had spilled a bucket of peas and taken her long turn in the dark and stink of the coal cellar where you couldn’t even stand up and didn’t want to sit down, that she had to put her mind someplace else.

“What place?” I said.

“Any place ain’t that place,” Zinnia said.

“Pretty place,” Cleome said.

“Place maybe you been dancing.”

“Place like this.”

So as I lay there twisting old dead daisies and not moving and not lifting a finger and not doing a thing while Linus Lancaster was in there at them, I knew they weren’t in there with him beyond the flesh God had seen fit to drape them in, and that instead they were out twisting their own daisies and turning circles in the fields with me.

Yes, that first night I thought that.

It wasn’t long after those visits started that Linus Lancaster turned his pigs free. He’d had them in their pens and had Horace and Ulysses build them more pens and the herd had flourished, and we had eaten of it until there was pig dripping out of our pores, and there had been the good Lord’s years of that. Then one afternoon he walked out and opened the gates and forbade anyone from closing them up again or slopping the pigs to tempt them to stay, and from that day on we had pigs everywhere.

“I had to be square with my dream,” Linus Lancaster told me after he had done it. “Having the pigs was the smaller portion of it. I needed to see them let loose and people the earth.”

“They are your pigs and this is your land and everything in it is yours, Husband,” I said.

Linus Lancaster turned to me and smiled when I had made this remark. This was at a supper. There was stuck pig spread before us. Pig milk and molasses in our cups. There wasn’t a bit that was lacking. Since he’d been in at them he’d had Cleome and Zinnia sit down to table with us.

“What you say is true, Wife,” he said. He had his bottle beside him. The bottle was filled with what Ulysses made out of a still he kept behind the barn. You could smell the concoction through the bottle glass, and once I saw a sparrow take two wet pecks of it and fall over dead.

“We are a family,” Linus Lancaster said. “We four of us right here and the boys. I am the head of the family, and that is right and proper, but you, Wife, are its mother. The Lord in his mansion above has decreed it that you will not carry for him, not for him nor for me. He has said it that your duty is otherwise. You, Wife, the Lord has written in his tablet, are mother to these girls. You are mother to us all.”

Linus Lancaster took a drink out of his bottle and belched his benediction out at us. Not a one of us said a word. Linus Lancaster had almost put me through the door I was leaning against the day before when I had not greeted him with what he had called the due respect. Cleome and Zinnia had to my knowledge not spoken above a whisper since Linus Lancaster’s visits had commenced, and if they said anything at that moment it was thrown out on their breath to the untouched plates of pork and black-eyed peas that lay fly-worried before them.

Not ten minutes before Linus Lancaster had corrected me about my respect, I had stood by those girls at their bath. Linus Lancaster said that anyone lived in his house would have a regular bath, and here they were at theirs. Zinnia had been pouring the water onto Cleome and the water had streamed off the bubbles Cleome had wiped onto herself. The bubbles had followed the water down Cleome’s back and run white and ropey over her thighs and calves. She was bent and reaching for her towel when I slapped her. Then I slapped Zinnia. They both of them just looked at me. There wasn’t anything beyond the bucket Zinnia was holding or I would have taken it to them. When I slapped Cleome I could feel that the water Zinnia had poured on her was cold. That they had pulled it up from the well. From that dark hole in the earth. When I had my bath the water had been healed of its chill. One of the two of them heated it for me at the stove. One of them poured and the other took a cloth to me. There were bubbles on Cleome’s ankles. She wasn’t shivering. I found myself wanting to slap them again, so I did. I slapped until my hand hurt, and then I ran into the house and Linus Lancaster came down the corridor.

“Wife,” he said.

I didn’t answer. After he had pushed me hard enough that one of the boards in the door cracked he went and stood in the yard and watched Cleome and watched Zinnia who had gone back to their bath. My hand was still wet and soapy from where I had slapped Cleome. Linus Lancaster lit a pipe, looked at the girls, and I looked at my hand glistening and felt it burning in the hall.

None of us looked at Linus Lancaster when he put his spoon into his black-eyed peas and brought it up to his mouth then took a pull out of his bottle and turned and patted my hand and said it to me again. That I was the mother to them. Who would do worse than slap in the coming days. God help us all.

WHEN WE WERE ALL STILL YOUNG
in that place in Kentucky, and before the pigs had been set loose and the visits down the hall had commenced and I had become the mother to everyone there, we used to go out to where Alcofibras had his corner in the barn. We would go giggling out into the evening when Linus Lancaster was still at his work, whatever that was, far from the house and not expected back for supper, and we would find Alcofibras, and he would tell us stories that weren’t out of that good book I never had found or out of any book I’ve ever known, and we would listen and sit together and shiver as he told them to us on the straw. Alcofibras had a voice that could churn as deep as a rock hole or high and twisty as a sick redbird, and he had had his stories from a grandmother who had come over in a boat. When he told his stories he never blinked. His eyes just flicked from one of us to the other. When he was finished we went back to whatever it was we had been doing or were supposed to be doing and needed to get done. We didn’t giggle when he had completed his story. We walked quietly. Sometimes Horace or Ulysses had come in with us for the telling. They were each one of them near as big as Linus Lancaster, but there wasn’t any sound to them when they left either.