Cold Quiet Country (9 page)

I reacted to that, and at the end of the row I didn’t want to turn around, knowing she’d see, and I stood there examining the harrow’s wheel, pretending it wasn’t operating correctly. I pushed it a foot, and stooped, and jiggled it back and forth, and knocked a clump of mud from a spoke. But all I was seeing was a mat of red like something you’d find strawberries and mint leaves in. The more I thought about not thinking about her, the worse I got, until I dropped the harrow and walked out into the trees by the swamp where I could see her and be sure she wasn’t coming my way.

When I came back she was still there and my problem was gone for the time being. I resolved I wouldn’t even look at her until the garden was done. I started back toward her with the harrow and a little blue packet landed at my feet. I stopped.

“Pick it up,” she said.

The devil got the better of me and I said, “You don’t even know what that’s for.”

“I surely do, Gale G’Wain.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Not tellin’.”

“You shouldn’t have that. If your father saw—”

She sniggered. Stood, retrieved it. Walked the length of the garden to an area that I’d avoided, the cucumber patch. She sat cross-legged at the edge of the leaves and snapped a harvestable cuke from the vine. “You watching?” she said, and it was like she was chewing bubble gum while she wasn’t. She ripped the package open and rolled the prophylactic over the end of the cucumber, and I watched because even though I’d seen them I’d never actually owned one. The way her hands moved was like the way you’ll see ballroom dancers glide over a parquet floor.

“What do you think of that, cowboy?” she said.

My mouth was dry, and I had another problem in my pants.

“Now the cucumber won’t get you pregnant,” I said, and headed back to the woods.

* * *

The fire has taken the edge off the house. Only upstairs do I see my breath. In the living room the air is almost too hot, but I leave my sweater on.

My leg is going to be a problem. When the blade went in, I felt a jolt as it hit my femur. Pulling it out was difficult; it stuck in the bone like an ax in a knotty log. Every walking step intensifies a deep, skeletal ache, so much that I’d like to stretch on the sofa and watch the fireplace and its leaping orange ballet dancers. But if I allow my leg wound to become infected, my survival today will be for nothing. I’m not going to hike a thousand miles south on a rotten leg.

I’ve got to kill whatever bugs are growing in me.

I check a window on each side of the house and there’s no indication I’ll ever see another human being the rest of my life. If the storm keeps on, it’ll bury the porch by dawn. Every minute makes it less likely Cal and Jordan will come, but these are not men who stop shy of their objective. I know from listening to Cal—Cal always took the lead over Jordan—revel in a story about tracking a gut-shot buck by lantern light, over fifteen miles of smaller and smaller spirals until he found it dead in a briar patch at dawn. The way he told the story it was adventure, but it was personal between him and the buck. It was about who was going to give up, and Cal was damned sure he wouldn’t. And to show his cleverness, he liked to add a punch line at the end of the story, to make up for the fact that Jordan, Burt, and I had heard the tale a half-dozen times. He added that after he cleaned the buck, the only honest way to get it off the hill was the same way he’d come in, mile after mile around the hill, unwinding the corkscrew.

Cal and Jordan are coming for me.

I expropriate a can of Lysol from under the kitchen sink. Shake it and it’s live. From the lower hutch cabinet, a bottle of 151 rum. I uncap it and sniff. Mister Sharps, at the Youth Home, watered down his whiskey. He said it was to make it less strong, but I suspect it was to stretch a bottle. This rum smells potent. I pour a drop on the sink ledge and reach a match from the cabinet with the candles. The rum flashes and flickers and it’s an amazing sight, a flame that isn’t attached to anything.

From the roll-top desk I kife an ink pen and a roll of tape. A letter on the calendar pad is addressed to Doctor Wilbur Coates, and I surmise I’m wearing Doctor Coates’s pants and boxer shorts and everything else, and digesting his venison and peaches.

I carry the items to the coffee table and drag the table to the hearth. Lastly, I return to Doctor Coates’s bedroom, and gather the gauze and ointments and bandages on his bed.

The brass poker I put into the embers glows red. I sit on the hearth with my pants drawn to my knees. The heat from the fireplace rises and the cool stones remind me I’m not warm all the way through. I undo the knot, and round and round, unwrap the bindings. After a couple circuits the gauze becomes bloody and handling it without getting blood all over my clothes and hands becomes an exercise. I ball them up and toss them in the fire.

The wound is an inch and a quarter wide, and three inches deep to the bone.

I disassemble the ink pen, and when the guts are on the coffee table I chop the ballpoint mechanism from the end of the plastic tube, so that what remains has no ink. I pour some rum onto the plastic tube, then drink a tiny swallow from the bottle. I spit into the fire and figure it is better to feel the pain in my leg, and not in my mouth and throat, too.

I press the ink pen tube into the hole in my leg. It slides and I’m numb until it gets close to the bone and sends a jolt of electricity through me that makes me almost empty my bladder. Instead, I shake the Lysol, and after a moment of thought, slip the white nozzle off the end. I tear a few lengths of tape and stick them to the table, then use one to affix the nozzle to the tube barely protruding from my leg. I cover it over and over until it’s secure and there’s no wiggling one and not the other, and then slip the tube from the spray can inside the nozzle, and before I have time to second-guess my way out of it, I mash the nozzle.

Lysol bursts through the clear tube and there is a second between seeing it go and feeling it hit the meat inside. I scream until I have no voice and Lysol foams out of my leg. I spray and spray and somewhere in all of it I find I’m sitting in a puddle of piss and my face is salty and my eyes inflamed. With no Lysol left I cast the can across the room and press the wound from the sides. Pink liquid squirts out, and panting and choking, I wipe it away with gauze. In one motion I throw the gauze into the fire and grab the brass poker and press it to my skin until the smell of charring, smoking flesh finishes me.

* * *

After a day’s farm work, sleep is sweet. Muscles ache, depending. If the work took a shovel or a pitchfork, there’s likely skin missing on the inside of your thumb, and the muscle above your shoulder blade that you didn’t know you had burns like a devil. Or if you were throwing bales from the field to the wagon all day, your forearms are chafed like you wrestled a kitten for sixteen hours, and the muscle ache starts at the back of your legs and goes all the way to the base of your skull.

And there are lesser pains. You pass a corner in the barn too close and a rusted nail slices your shoulder. Heck, you whittle a whistle from a shaft of elderberry and nick your finger. Say you drop to the ground to hitch a cart to a tractor and rap your knee on a stone. At night you’ll lie there and wonder what you did that caused the bruise and it won’t come to mind until three days later when you rap it again on the same spot doing the same exact thing.

Going to bed was as much respite as rest. Haudesert’s loft became a sort of hospital. Other men might have done farm work without so many aches and injuries, and after a while I toughened up. But in the beginning I was sore all the time and bedding in a nest of hay, which I could clump up wherever I wanted, was the thing I looked forward to all day long.

After Gwen slipped the prophylactic on the cucumber, I steered clear of her. She was trouble. I hadn’t grown up around girls at the Youth Home. Only time I saw them was in town, and all the boys would gape at anything shorter than a full-blown woman that smelled nice. Mister Sharps and the faculty didn’t often take us into public. Even boys unschooled by actual experience wish for a pure harlot willing to get dirty at the first smile—but when a boy sees one acting out his most grotesque fantasies, he knows right off something’s wrong. Gwen slipping that rubber on the cuke after disremembering her underwear signaled she knew what she was doing with her body—and worse, what it did to a boy’s.

We boys at the Youth Home weren’t fools. While the specific mechanics of a boy and girl consummating their interests were a mystery, and imagining how it would work was slightly absurd, we talked sometimes about how difficult it must be to find where you were supposed to go. You take plenty of lessons on the farm. I couldn’t count the times I saw a stud miss a mare altogether, and he’s bumping her and she’s fit to giggle. We boys talked about that happening to us, and generally one of the older guys would say something smart about the last time he diddled Mrs. Smart she was so easy to find he could have drove a tractor in her. But that was when I was really young. Even older, though, the whole thing was an unknown. Most times I’d go to sleep trusting every other guy in the world figured it out, and I would, too.

But how did Gwen already know? Her comprehension extended far beyond the syntax of two bodies, how they fit together. She didn’t even need to demonstrate that knowledge, hers eclipsed it by such a margin. She knew the fundamentals. The biological mechanics. But she also knew how to attract, how to tease. She added fifteen years to her age by pouting her lips and making her brows dark like stormy skies. Daydreaming about her was like slipping off into town and finding a thirty-year-old woman—monstrously old, but magnificently schooled—who teases you to her cozy shack and devours you all day long. Thinking about Gwen was like thinking about an
older
girl, she seemed to know so much, and presented her complexity with such clarity and charm.

One night, after pitching bales from the field to the wagon and from the wagon to the loft, we sat to supper of dumplings and roasted chicken. There were carrots and potatoes and corn, and spices that seemed to come from heaven. Smelling them was enough to make a whole day’s aches disappear.

“Guinevere did most of the cooking,” Missus Haudesert said, and Burt nodded and beamed like his daughter was his prize, and Missus Haudesert caught his look and she didn’t seem quite as happy as she had a second before.

Her look only lasted a few seconds, and I spent them shoveling dumpling and chicken into my mouth. I always wanted to get at least a piece of a carrot with each mouthful; something about the flavor of the carrots pulled the whole thing together for me. But then I realized there wasn’t any talking going on and started watching the table politics around me. There was a signal being sent from Burt to Gwen, and Missus Haudesert seeing it, and Jordan, the cunning son, making sure he didn’t.

Gwen was always in charge of herself when she was around me, but beside Burt, she was anxious as a one-eyed cat watching two rat holes. Tonight, tensions crackled. Jordan was sullen and Cal was in the other room, in bed, his body all broken up from having fallen from the hay loft a month before. Gwen smiled at Burt but couldn’t sustain it in the face of her father’s consuming focus. Missus Haudesert fixed her stare on Burt and put me in the mind of a dog that’s growling that low, low growl, that means there’s bound to be sixteen kinds of trouble, each different.

“You did real good with the supper, Gwen,” I said.

Gwen’s eyes flashed to me and they were glossy. Her glare was steady, as if to accuse and implore at the same time.

Burt nodded while he forked a clump of dumpling to his mouth, but he only looked away from Gwen long enough to cut another, then kept watching her. Missus Haudesert sniffed. Jordan watched his plate.

This was the first that I knew what everyone else knew.

After that, it got more obvious.

I went to bed troubled with questions. Sometimes evil is so entrenched you just go along with it. Burt Haudesert kept me from rifling garbage and begging for food. There was no easy life waiting for me if I just stood firm as an oak and said him having at his own daughter was wrong. I thought about ways to make Gwen’s troubles less burdensome. There was certainly no ending them.

No longer was she the strawberry I wanted to consume and make mine forever. She was the half-used tart that was silently screaming. Maybe my self-interest colored how I saw her. Maybe she loved her father that way and my jealousy made me want to be her savior. I slept like my bed was nails.

Of course I dreamed of her. Torrid dreams that seemed more real for their vulgarity and coarseness, where I saw her doing those thirty-year-old woman things and imagined she did them to me.

About to explode, I woke.

Guinevere was nestled at my side, reaching across me, using her hand—and the realization that it was she and not a dream sent stars across my eyes and paroxysms through my back and legs. I gasped. The barn wall had a knothole you could chuck a football through and a bolt of moonlight caught half her face. She looked as if she expected power, but wasn’t sure if she’d acquired it. Like Mrs. Sharps speaking on behalf of Mister Sharps, borrowing his authority because she had so little.

All that came to me later. At that moment I was in love and wanted to consume her, wanted to steal her entire body so I’d be sure to possess her soul. I needed her to be as frantic to consume me. I wanted to kiss her with my eyes open and see her eyes were open, and know she was just as frenetic and forlorn and bereft as I.

Her lips were lukewarm.

She pulled from me and snuggled her forehead to my cheek, and wrapped her arm across my chest. I was exposed and vulnerable, but she was uninterested. She shuddered. Her sobbing was quiet and she said, “Someday I’ll hear the bullfrogs for
him
.”

I didn’t know about the music, and I didn’t ask. I stroked her hair and told her she was a silly girl and I would love her forever and they were the easiest words to say.

We’d just wait out the evil.