Kind One (7 page)

The next morning Bennett Marsden said he couldn’t wait for Linus Lancaster, but that I should extend his kindest regards and memories of the olden days and their business dealings together, especially their business dealings together, the good and the bad. Then he and his two help left back down the lane, and I told Alcofibras that his Draper Man had come and gone and he ought to feel just like a fool for calling him that and for inventing tall tales about pig fat and magic trees, but Alcofibras would not answer. He walked away, and as he walked away another one of his stories came to me. There wasn’t much to it. It was about a piece of red rope. The whole of the story was that sometimes that piece of red rope lying there without anybody to touch it would move.

Two days later Linus Lancaster came home, and when he heard that his old friend from Louisville, Bennett Marsden, had come to call and had spent the night in his bed, he tied Alcofibras to the oak tree by the barn and whipped him until his back was a sheet of crimson cloth.

We all of us were directed to form up a line and look on while the whipping of Alcofibras was conducted. I had first place in the line because of my standing. Horace and Ulysses stood next to me and Zinnia and Cleome were at the end. Not a one of them said a word. Linus Lancaster had explained to me that Alcofibras should have never let that Bennett Marsden onto the property when he wasn’t there. That Bennett Marsden was a liar and a disreputable individual and should have never been granted access to his piece of paradise while he, Linus Lancaster, was abroad. I was excused from the matter because I had never known that filthy cheat Bennett Marsden in the old days as Alcofibras had. I should have known better than to let anyone into the house when he wasn’t there, and should have been able to judge the quality of the character of the man I had let sleep in his bed and smoke up his tobacco, but it was Alcofibras had to answer.

As that whipping went on you could hear pigs they hadn’t sold off at it in the dusk light at the corners of everything, and out over the field you could see tornadoes of evening birds harrowing the insects.

“You must stop now, Husband,” I whispered at one point. I know the four of them next to me heard this. I also know that Linus Lancaster did not.

When Alcofibras was dead of the crimson cloth on his back, Linus Lancaster had Horace and Ulysses carry him out to the woods for the pigs we had been hearing, but I know that when Horace and Ulysses got Alcofibras out there they took sticks and scraped a hole and buried him and covered the place with rocks so the pigs couldn’t dig him up.

That night, as I lay there in my room while Linus Lancaster paid his visits, I couldn’t conjure up any daisy fields. I couldn’t conjure up any castles in the clouds or lemonade. I couldn’t see my way back to my father’s house with its goose pond and my corner bed. It was just lengths of red rope, rope that shouldn’t be moving, rope untouched that was slithering over the walls and windows, filling my mouth and apron pockets, wrapping field and flower, tree and bush, bird and pig.

SNOW IS COME UP ON
Lucious Wilson’s barley field. It falls just every other day now and the wind has taken some of it up over the fence rows. There were some stray dogs through yesterday, and they just walked up over one fence and across the snows of the field and up over the other. I haven’t seen them before. They looked like they had business. I’m happy for this little house. I wouldn’t ever say otherwise. The stove works and heats these old boards. A crack or two court the drafts, but there are hay bales and paper wad to talk to that.

Before I came up into the flat country here and found Lucious Wilson and his farm, I lived in other accommodations. In Spencer County I lived under some boards stretched across an old dogwood. I lived there until I woke up one morning next to a snake attempting to swallow down a rat. In Evansville I had a pallet next to a gun rack. It was a brother and a sister owned the place and sold charms and remedies out of their kitchen. One night I wandered in my sleep and upset one of their buckets. The oil covered the kitchen floor and swept its wet way into the front room where they slept. I’d seen the sister kick a slow goat in its teeth. I didn’t stay to have any of my own kicked out. When I got my way up to Indianapolis I lived in a closet down by the capitol building, and my first week up here, until one of Lucious Wilson’s women found me, I lived my nights in a cold frame attached to an outhouse. I don’t care to count this second how many years ago that was. Lucious Wilson is old now too, and there are the others who call me Scary Sue come up under him and are waiting for him to go. I told them stories when they were young and gave them baths, and they some of them look in on me, but charity passed to the next generation has its limits, and I’m counting on being gone before Lucious Wilson heads out on his way.

It is cold here in Clinton County, Indiana, far up away from Linus Lancaster’s piece of paradise in Kentucky is all I was saying. And that there aren’t many lately of the young ones who come to the house and holler. They tried to get me over to church last week, but I slipped on the walk and two of them had to carry me back into the house. About the last time anyone got carried into this house was during the war. It was some soldiers got lost and drunk, and one of them caught a fever and fell off his horse. A little like Lucious Wilson’s pig herder. The battle guns were still a-blazing off somewhere, so Lucious Wilson said they ought to carry him into this little house until he could get back up on his horse and rejoin the festivities. I was still living in the big house then, but I brought him over a supper one night. He was a handsome boy. He had green eyes and fine red lips and little curls in his beard. There have been times even into these older days I’ve enjoyed remembering his face and long arms lying down in the bed that’s just right there behind me. That bed and mattress where I have spent all the nights of these years. There wasn’t much wrong with that boy except being young and wore out on fighting.

I know that there was snow in between what came next in that place in Kentucky and that visit from the Draper Man, but in my mind I just take one little step over the dead Alcofibras, and one little step over myself where Linus Lancaster had beat me down half dead the next week for asking what business he had been in with Mr. Bennett Marsden in Louisville, and a hop over Cleome and Zinnia and the dark thing that had recommenced nightly visiting them, to that knock on my door early that morning that interrupted a dream I had been busy having about grinding chicory for a breakfast drink.

There was a knock and then some talking, then the door opened fast and both girls came in. They took me up out of my bed and pulled me through the door and down the hall past their own door and into the kitchen. They sat me at a chair opposite my husband. It was dark in the kitchen. And cold. My husband looked to be sleeping. Like he had been up the night drinking his drink and had just settled out where he sat. Cleome turned up the lamp and Zinnia went behind Linus Lancaster and shoved him and he came down onto the table and his face dropped down through the lamplight, and you saw before you saw the pig sticker in the back of his neck when his face dropped down through the light that there wasn’t going to be any more singing or visiting and whippings come from him. The face was as white as a piece of china plate, and you could see the veins of it writhing in the lamp flicker like worms a-swarm in milk soup. The mouth was open like he was preparing to cough, and his eyes were looking up and over to the right. The hairs that lived in his nose grazed down through the lamplight too. They looked like they were trying to jump out overboard. Like hooked hands going down to drown.

“You must have your breakfast now, Mother,” Cleome said after my husband’s head had hit down on the table opposite me and I had been permitted to consider it for a time. The pig sticker in his neck looked like a thick-stem flower that had had its head lopped off. Like it had had its head lopped off but not yet set in to droop.

“I aim to get you up some of that pig mush, fix you up just right now,” Cleome said. There were sundries on the board behind her. A small fire in the stove. Zinnia nodded. There was sweat on her forehead. It looked like her face was bubbling, like it was porridge fixing to depart the pot. The room was still cold.

“I don’t care to take my breakfast just now, Cleome,” I said.

“It’s already cooking,” said Cleome.

“It’s already cooking, Mother,” said Zinnia.

“I have spoken,” I said. “We must tend…We must…”

“We must what, Mother?” Zinnia said. She said this in a whisper from just behind me. I hadn’t seen her move. Cleome had stopped working the mush but was still looking down to it through the spit from the fat and the orange steam. I couldn’t remember ever having seen her at the stove for anything more than serving before.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I put my hands on the table in front of me and Zinnia put her hand on my shoulder, and it felt exactly like I was trying to stand myself up under a piece of iron bar. Zinnia had on that hat Linus Lancaster had put her in the shed over those years before. She had been in that shed many times since. I had put her in that shed. I had put Cleome in that shed. I had put them both in there since Linus Lancaster had thrown me down onto the floor out of his bed and had set in to visiting them. Visiting them while they dreamed of anything but twisting daisies with me. I had put them both in there since Alcofibras had been fitted for his drapes by Mr. Bennett Marsden. I had stood in the sunlight of the doorway and told them I was going to drop the key to their shackle down the well. Zinnia leaned her face down around in front of mine and there was the sweat bubbling on her brow, and I thought I could see myself in each dull black bead, and Cleome came up next to her and took the hat off of her sister’s head and put it down on mine.

“You going to eat your breakfast now, Mother,” Zinnia said.

“Where is Horace? Where is Ulysses?” I said.

“Run off. Run off far away. Gone from this place. Ain’t never coming back,” said Zinnia.

Cleome set down an empty bowl, an empty spoon, and an empty cup in front of me.

Then Zinnia picked them up, one by one, and fed them to me.

Now let me tell of my four-square kingdom. At one corner of it was the barn where Alcofibras had dwelled and spun out his stories and the oak tree where he had been whipped into the other world. At another was the miserable house where I had lived for six years and where Linus Lancaster had paid his visits and been lord to us all, and where he now sat royal and dead. At the third was the little bridge to the creek-lipped field Horace and Ulysses had put in where once there had been pasture for horses and where I had once frolicked at my ease with those around me, and where now the pigs liked to come down out of the wood and lay down their huge carcasses and roll and tumble like flippered creatures on some black beach at the edge of hell. At the fourth was the shed with its chain and its rats. In the middle of it was the deep well we pulled our water up out of and dropped rocks down into when it froze. All around us were the woods. Through the woods went the lane. Down that lane my figment self would trot. Up into the leaf-lit sky my figment self would rise. Into the black Kentucky earth my figment self would sink. Down the well and past the dangling ghost of young Cleome and out through the endless waters of the earth my figment self would swim.

The flesh part, the blood part stayed put. Here is why. After that breakfast and after they had poured a bucket of water over my head to wake me up, and put Zinnia’s pig-slop hat back on my head, they dragged me out to the shed and put the shackle on my leg and told me to rest up awhile. That while was three days and three nights. After the second night Zinnia walked in with a bowl of water, and when I grabbed for it, she kicked it over then walked back out. After the third night they had me back into the house to breakfast again with my husband. There was food to it this time. My husband lay like he had. His hair was spilled forward. The rats had found their way in at him. He hadn’t been able to fight them like I had. Hadn’t been able to wake from his sorry sleep and shake a chain at them, toss a kick at them. Zinnia put foodstuff and water before me and told me to eat, or I’d have another breakfast like the last one. I ate. I had a cracked tooth or two but I ate. Cleome sat on the bench outside while I did so. I heard her say to Zinnia she would not set her foot again in that house. They had laid down their blankets in the barn. To sleep where Alcofibras had. Among the animals. Where it was clean.

I ate and imagined my punishment was complete. That my children would now bathe me and put poultices on the bruises they had administered to me and return to their rightful places. That I would take them each by the hand and lead them off down the lane on an outing that would end in the sun somewhere, with peppermint and licorice and sugar candy and a peek at a Chinaman sitting in a black barrel. I looked at Linus Lancaster as I imagined this, and in my looking saw him raise his head up off the table and point the pig sticker at the flour sack behind him and start to sing. He sang “Glory, Hallelujah” as I ate and looked. By and by Zinnia grabbed me up by my scruff and took me out to the oak tree.

“For some seasoning, Mother,” Cleome said, lifting up off her bench. When she lifted you could see clear as crisp-light the condition all that visiting from Linus Lancaster had put her in.

“Keep that old hat on your head while we cook you, Mother,” said Zinnia.

“Stand up straight now, Mother.”

“Please don’t have nothin’ to do with it, Mother.”

“The woods will eat all that hollerin’, Mother.”

“You can cry out those tears later, Mother.”

“Cryin’ don’t help with a thing when that thing is set on coming to pass.”

I breakfasted with my husband all the days following. After the first week Zinnia made me get my own breakfast while she and Cleome waited together on the bench outside. When I wasn’t in there getting and having my breakfast, which was the only meal I got each day, they kept the doors to Linus Lancaster’s house closed so that nothing beside the rats could get in there after him. The pigs, I believe they reckoned, would have made too quick a job.