Mr. Tall (6 page)

One afternoon Plutina was sitting on the front step staring down the road when, for no reason she could think of, she turned and stared up the road instead. She said, out loud, “Why, Mr. Tall,” as if he had walked up behind her on the street to say hello. She couldn't see his place, of course, because a shank of App Mountain ran into the valley between their two farms like a buttress, but she imagined him coming around the foot of the ridge. He was walking. He was riding a horse. He was carrying a gun. He wasn't carrying a gun. He smelled awful because he never bathed. He smelled good because Scott brought him soap and bay rum and he was the kind of hermit who was overly particular and washed himself every day. She imagined what she would do when she saw him. She would run in the house and bolt the door. She would fly up the mountain and hide in the woods. He would chase her. He would go on by. She would say howdy when he drew abreast of the house. He would howdy back, or he would stare straight ahead and pretend he didn't hear her. They would talk about how the garden could use some rain and how the watermelons were getting ripe, or they wouldn't. She began to tap the step with her foot. Mr. Tall was more fun to think about than the neighbor girl she knew would never come. It was almost like having a new friend. (She was getting a little tired of the neighbor girl, anyway; all she ever wanted to talk about was herself.) Soon Plutina's attention settled on the wooded, tapering ridge that blocked her view to the end of the valley. She figured that if she climbed it and looked over the top she might be able to see through to Mr. Tall's farm. She bet the place was overgrown and falling in, the fields waist-deep in briars and hardwood bushes and cedar trees, the roofs of the outbuildings collapsed in on themselves. She reconsidered and put roofs back on the barn and the chicken house. She knew that Mr. Tall kept at least a few animals because some mornings, when the wind blew just right, she could hear his rooster crowing and his cow lowing to be milked, and he had to keep them somewhere. She had never heard a dog bark, though.

Mr. Tall supposedly lived in a big house, a fine house, but Plutina imagined the yard full of trash, where Mr. Tall just opened the door and pitched it out. The windows were covered over with the boxwoods that his wife had planted and he hadn't cut back since she died. Poison oak grew up the outside walls and turned bloody red in the fall. Inside, the house was lamp-lighting dark. It smelled like piss and old man. Mr. Tall stayed drunk all the time. He sat in a horsehair chair in the parlor and watched dust float in the single, scrawny sunbeam that sneaked in past the boxwoods. There was a clock on the mantel but he never wound it. He had dribbled canned soup and tobacco juice down the front of his shirt but he didn't care. Cats jumped in through the windows and ate out of the nasty pans on the stove. Mice nested in the stuffing of the cushions on the love seat. His sheets hadn't been changed in years. Plutina almost made herself gag thinking about the sheets. Upstairs behind a closed door was a room with a crib in it. Mr. Tall never opened that door. Plutina didn't have a crib yet. (She knew she needed to tell Charlie she was having a baby, but for some reason enjoyed the secret, her knowing and his not knowing.) She wondered if it was bad luck to put your baby in a dead baby's crib. Mr. Tall, she imagined asking him, what would you take for that crib upstairs? He looked up miserably from the horsehair chair. He waved his hand. The dust swirled. Go ahead and take it, he said. I don't need it no more. Plutina put her hand over her mouth and giggled. “Lord,” she whispered, “Charlie would have a fit if he knew what I was thinking about.”

The next day she almost had to crawl through the laurel to get to the top of the ridge, and once there couldn't see a thing. When she made her way down the other side she found her view blocked by a cornfield. She stomped her foot. She didn't know how wide the field was, or how close she would be to Mr. Tall's house when she came out the other side, so she just went home, where she pouted but did not enjoy it because there was nobody there to notice. The day after that she took a deep breath and plowed into the corn. The middles of Mr. Tall's corn rows were cleaner than the middles of her corn rows, which stung her a little, but the stalks themselves didn't seem to be any higher, or the ears any further along. She was as afraid as she had been on any of her first nights alone, but unlike the fear she had experienced then, this new fear somehow felt good around its edges, kind of like a sex feeling. Her heart thrummed almost painfully in her chest, but she had to clamp her hand tightly over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. She suddenly had to pee and squatted in the middle of the field to keep from wetting herself. She bit on her knuckle and sniggered the whole time. As she approached the end of the corn row she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled the last several yards. When she peeked out she discovered a pasture bisected by a small, muddy branch. A fresh Guernsey cow and a slick black mule cropped at the grass. Beyond the pasture lay a barn and a chicken coop—both as sound as she had imagined they would be—and a pigpen and a corncrib and a smokehouse and a shed covering a wagon and several other small buildings she couldn't identify, all of them upright and square, their roofs intact. Even Mr. Tall's toilet looked solid. Across the farmyard stood a two-story log house, as fine as any in Weald, with long windows and whitewashed window frames and a covered porch wrapping around the three sides she could see. The lower slope of App Mountain swept away from the backyard, and the orchard she had heard about rose in terraced avenues for some distance up the mountainside. The trees were neatly pruned, their limbs drooping and heavy with apples just beginning to color. Plutina dropped back onto her heels and shook her head with wonder. “Oh, Mr. Tall,” she whispered. “You have a beautiful farm.”

For the next couple of weeks she rushed through her work in the mornings so she could spend at least part of the afternoon peeking out of the corn at Mr. Tall's immaculate farm. (When Charlie came home weekends she now had two secrets she didn't tell him.) The yard of the house, she noted approvingly, was swept clean. Not one piece of stickweed sprouted in the pasture, even along the branch; no morning glories clung to the fence posts. Nothing about the place suggested tragedy or despair or even strangeness. The only remotely odd thing was that in days and days of watching she never once caught sight of Mr. Tall. She might have become worried about him, except that from her hiding place she could tell that in the hours she wasn't watching somebody was milking the cow and slopping the hog and strewing corn to the chickens. One day the orchard rows were empty and the next day bushel baskets were stacked at intervals all the way to the top of the terraces; one day the two bean rows in the garden were thick with beans, and the next the staked-up vines had been stripped. Plutina became exasperated with Mr. Tall, as if he had made a series of appointments with her but failed to keep any of them. She began to doubt she would ever catch a glimpse of him, but did not want to stop her spying just in case he appeared. She memorized every detail of his farm and found that at suppertime she did not want to return to her own, which had started to seem small and scruffy and unprosperous by comparison. (Charlie, too, had started to seem small and scruffy and unprosperous by comparison. She imagined him standing only as high as Mr. Tall's waist.) She began curling up on the sun-warmed dirt at the edge of the field and allowing herself to doze. When the air stirred the corn leaves whispered secrets she could almost make out. Every so often she opened her eyes and sat up and gazed across the pasture and said, “Mr. Tall?” but he was never there.

On the third Monday of her vigil Plutina rose from her hiding place at the edge of the field and in a crouch hurried along the fence toward the mountain. To her left Mr. Tall's house was visible only intermittently between the outbuildings. When she reached the corner of the pasture she looked down the fence row and gauged the distance to the barn, which was maybe fifty yards away. She drew a deep breath, whispered “GO!” and sprinted toward it. The cow raised its head and looked at her as she ran. The mule honked in alarm and trotted halfway across the pasture, its ears and tail erect, shitting as it went. When she reached the barn she tagged it and turned around and raced back to where she had started. She dropped to her knees and watched the house intently. Nothing happened. She couldn't remember ever feeling happier than she did right then. She hadn't felt nearly so exhilarated when she said “I do.”

The next day she stopped at the barn with her back pressed to the wall. She stole a look around the corner, then pulled her skirt up over her calves and dashed down through the farmyard from building to building to building toward Mr. Tall's house. The chickens flapped up in a ruckus. The mule brayed and galloped away, this time toward the cornfield. When she reached the smokehouse and stopped, she knew she couldn't be more than thirty or forty yards away from the house. She whispered, “I'm going to tag your house, Mr. Tall,” but she couldn't make her legs move. She counted to ten several times but remained rooted in place. Eventually a cold point of courage flared in her chest and rose into her throat, where it popped out of her mouth with a grunt. Then she was off, her right hand extended toward Mr. Tall's house. She had taken no more than five steps when a stocky brown dog with a white face and pale eyes and an immense square head shot from under the back porch and made straight for her, running so hard its belly almost dragged the ground. In a panic she turned and sprinted back the way she had come, but hadn't even cleared the smokehouse when she realized she had no chance of getting away. The dog was almost on her already. She pushed up the latch of the corncrib, jumped inside, and pulled the door closed just as the dog skidded to a stop outside. It barked and snarled and snapped and bit at the corner of the door. With her fingernails she clung to the wire nailed to the inside of the door and struggled to hold it closed. She could see the dog through the slats, and feel its spitty breath on her legs. It leapt up and shoved with its front paws against the building with such force that it landed on its back. Plutina felt the heavy wooden latch outside the door drop back into place with a thunk.

Once the latch fell, the dog stopped lunging, as if locking Plutina inside the corncrib had been its plan all along. It remained posted just outside the door, however, growling almost silently, its head cocked, staring at the point where she had vanished. Every so often it turned its head and barked sharply toward the house. (Mr. Tall! Hey! Mr. Tall! Come out here!) Plutina tried to shush it, but when she did the dog leapt snapping at the door. She backed away and looked around wildly. The slats nailed to the outside would have been easy enough to kick out, but the inside of the crib was a cage of tightly woven wire mesh stapled every few inches to the studs and the floor, even the roof joists, to keep rats from getting into the corn. It was constructed so soundly that the door didn't even have a hole for a latch string. A few bushels of last year's corn lay spilling from the corners, but that was all. There was nothing she could use to pull up the wire. She could see out, but she couldn't get out. She closed her eyes and whispered, “Oh Jesus, I need Charlie to come get me right this instant.”

Behind her a screen door slammed, and she whirled toward the house. Coming down the back steps was the tallest man Plutina had ever laid eyes on. His legs were so long she thought at first they were stilts. He wore overalls of unimaginable length; eight or more inches of wrist poked out from beneath his buttoned shirtsleeves. Mr. Tall. He had a long white beard. He dropped a straw hat onto his longish white hair as he stepped into the yard. She couldn't see his eyes for the shadow of the hat brim. She slowly backed against the wire at the front of the crib, but jumped away when the dog managed to insert its snout between two of the slats near the floor and bite at the wire just behind her ankle. She stood in the middle of the floor and through the slats watched Mr. Tall stride slowly toward her. Hot piss ran down her leg.

“Noggin!” Mr. Tall said in a gruff voice as he approached. “What you got in there?”

Mr. Tall squinted in through the slats and immediately stumbled backward. He slapped his shirtsleeves and the front of his overalls as if yellowjackets were swarming on him. “Good…Who…Shit,” he said. When he stopped whacking himself he rapidly shook his head. He cautiously stepped back toward the building and leaned forward to stare in at her.

“Who are you?” he said.

Plutina opened her mouth to speak but found that her breath had left and taken her name with it. Her own hands waved uselessly around her face.

“I said, ‘Who. Are. You?'”

Her face contorted and scrunched. A string of snot swung suddenly from her nose and she wiped it on the back of her arm. “Please don't kill me, Mr. Tall,” she managed to say.

“Who are you?”

“I promise I didn't know you had a dog and I didn't mean to get all locked up in your corncrib like this and make you come outside. I promise I didn't. I swear.”

Mr. Tall closed his eyes and grabbed hold of his ears. He stomped his foot. “Who are you! Who are you! Who are you!” he said.

“I was just playing a game and yesterday I came out of the corn and ran and tagged your barn and today I didn't know you were home and after I got to the barn again I decided to run down and tag your house but your dog came out from under the porch and—”

He stopped her by raising his hand. “For the love of God in heaven before he calls me home,” he said, “will you shut up for one solitary minute and tell me your goddamned name?”

“Scroggs,” she said. “I'm Plutina Scroggs.”

“Scroggs? There ain't no Scroggs live within thirty miles of here.”

“Shires, I meant. Plutina Shires. I used to be named Plutina Scroggs before I got married. My daddy's Parcell Scroggs from over in Weald, he works for the railroad, but then I got married to Charlie Shires three years ago this January and now my name is Plutina Shires. I don't know why I said Scroggs.”