Power in the Blood (6 page)

More disturbing than her awareness of Zoe’s intent was Mrs. Hassenplug’s consideration—mere seconds long—of leaving quietly to let it happen. How could she have allowed such an idea to enter her mind! To protect herself from the consequences of unfettered thought, rather than out of love of her husband, she plucked the rifle from its resting place and hurried away. When her husband returned, he would find the rifle where it should be, his victim secured upstairs where she could do him no harm.

The farmhouse, formerly a place in which few words were spoken, became monastic in its ritual observance of silence. The thing that had happened was never mentioned, but the more intense the silence, the louder it became.

For Zoe, the weeks that followed her rape were skewed, unreal, her chores performed in an undersea world of dragging slowness, the burden of an unnamable, crushing weight. She was a tiny fish in a set of rooms on the ocean floor; two larger fish swam carefully around her, blowing bubbles of nothingness, avoiding her eye. Every day she became slower still, until she knew the reason why. It was too big a secret to tell the other fish, but in time they saw for themselves, and were even less pleased than Zoe.

“She is.”

“She ain’t!”

“Look at her! Just look!”

“She ain’t!” insisted Hassenplug.

“Think she got that way on what we eat? You can pretend all you want, it won’t change a thing. Don’t think I’m fooled. You wanted it this way all along, don’t think I don’t know. She can give you what I can’t, isn’t that so? Isn’t that the way you planned it?”

“Quiet!”

The life inside Zoe was growing at a fearful rate, and she wished herself rid of it, but her wish was not granted. Her belly continued to expand, and now she truly did need a new dress. Mrs. Hassenplug gave her one of her own. The hem dragged at the back but was lifted clear of the ground in front. Zoe was still expected to do her share of work around the place.

Hassenplug approached her with an incredible offer one afternoon in the barn. “Listen here. You make a boy and I’ll get you that dress you been wanting. This time I mean it. You make a boy and I’ll get you that dress for sure, and the shoes too, by God. The missus, she can’t make one. This boy, I’d like him better than some adopted boy. He’d be mine, a genuine son. I’d be good to you, you make me a boy.”

When he left her, Zoe cried. To bear Hassenplug a son, the very thing he wanted, would be the final insult to her. The irony was insupportable. She prayed for a girl. Her god would not have been acceptable to any churchgoer, being female, very much akin to Nettie Dugan in appearance, but fifty feet tall. The avenging angel at her side, the one who would take care of Zoe’s secondary prayer—the death of Hassenplug—bore a definite resemblance to her brother Clay.

5

He actually enjoyed digging postholes. The fatigue he brought to bed helped ease the pain of his growing bones. Almost eighteen, Clay stood six feet four inches on naked feet, and he continued to grow. Despite his alarming height, Clay weighed only one hundred fifty-nine pounds. Beanpole, they had called him at school, until he quit.

His departure was prompted by being cast in the school play (a radical enterprise from a new and enthusiastic teacher) as Ichabod Crane, the gangling dupe of Sleepy Hollow. Being called Ichabod was no better than being called Beanpole. Clay had squared his books on the minuscule desktop before him, risen and said to his teacher, “Excuse me, ma’am, they need me at home,” and walked out.

Explaining himself to his father was another matter. Edwin Delaney owned ninety-eight acres west of Tamsen, Missouri, and considered himself something of a gentleman fanner. He was educated, erudite, no friend of fools.

“Why,” he asked Clay, “did you do this thing?”

“I don’t like it there.”

“Because they mock your height?”

“Yes!”

“Please moderate your voice. The measure of a man is often the limits to which he allows himself to be pushed. I find it hard to believe a flock of schoolchildren has pushed you to your limit, Clayton.”

“Well, they did. Them and the teacher.”

“You don’t think you’ve taken their name calling too hard?”

“No.”

“Observe my nose. Do you see its distinct leaning to the left?”

“Yes.”

“In school I was made fun of for that small defect. I rose above it, and I recommend you do the same. An unlettered boy becomes an ignorant man, or do you disagree?”

“No, I just … I can read books by myself. I don’t need school to learn things anymore. I don’t like it there. I like helping you here.”

Edwin had noticed Clay’s preference for farmwork over study. The boy’s hands and feet were huge; he was lantern-jawed, and his ears stood out like jug handles. He already looked like a farmer.

“A lifetime of physical labor is your ambition?”

“No. I don’t know yet. For now … yes. Labor.”

“If I beat you, would you return to school?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Edwin Delaney stared for some time at his son by adoption. The act had officially been recorded at the county seat, and Delaney was proud, in an undemonstrative way, of the boy he had brought into his home. There were, however, aspects to Clayton’s character that puzzled him. The boy’s phenomenal growth was to be marveled at, the manifestation of an unusual physical condition, but it was the stealthy workings of Clay’s mind that prompted a subtle disquiet in the man.

“Very well. I intend working you hard. If you find you’ve had your fill, you will return to school. The choice will be yours, do you understand?”

“Yessir. Thank you.”

“I wonder, Clayton, if you’ll thank me a week from now.” The boy had always been willing to help in the fields but, apart from extended assistance at harvest times, had never truly been pushed. Edwin employed a man named Chaffey to work the farm with him, and Clay was handed into his care for a tough assignment. “Don’t give him any slack,” Edwin ordered. “Use him hard.”

“I will, Mr. Delaney, you can bet on it.”

“See that you do.”

Clay was introduced to the new regimen by being ordered to dig postholes for a new fence. He made no complaint at all, even when his hands began to blister. Next, Chaffey and Clay began felling trees on land Edwin had recently purchased, thirty-three acres adjacent to his own. The former owner, a keen hunter, had left an extensive section timbered for game cover, but Edwin had no need of sport. The trees were all to go, and Clay was to perform more than his share of the work required to be rid of them.

Chaffey reasoned that anyone so tall and skinny wouldn’t have the muscle necessary for reducing woodland to farmland, but the boy surprised him, chopping with a will, manhandling the mule team with a natural talent Chaffey found intimidating. No one should work that hard, or make it look that easy. The boy was showing him up, obliging him—in the beginning anyway—to work beyond the usual parameters simply to maintain his pride. He began to resent Edwin for having placed Clay in his charge.

“Heard you never wanted no more schooling,” Chaffey said, as they shared lunch. Conversation between them was stilted, engaged in only during the daily half hour when both stopped working to eat.

“That’s right.”

“Never felt the need for it either. Had a cousin went to school, though. Fell in a horse trough drunk one time. Drowned. You’d have to be a fool, ending up that way. Learning,” he said, and shook his head. Several minutes later he added, “They ought to learned him to swim, I reckon!”

For Clay, the work was balm, the lunch torture. Chaffey was a stupid person, in Clay’s estimation, and a lazy one to boot, allowing Clay to do more than his share of the work.

“My brother, now, he never went to school, same as me. He does just fine. Works over Jeff City way.”

“What does he do?”

“Turns his hand to this and that. Could do ’bout anything, purty much. Never went to school, not one day. Proves my point.”

Clay always stood up to resume work before Chaffey, who liked to linger while his stomach digested the food prepared for them both by Mrs. Delaney. The boy just wouldn’t sit still for a minute like a normal person would have, just had to be up and raring for more sweat. Chaffey made it a habit to delay a minute or two longer each day, following their lunch, to let Clay know he had no intention of imitating his example. It infuriated him even more that the boy seemed not to mind in the least. Chaffey almost bit his pipestem in two, watching Clay set about hitching the mules to yet another obdurate stump. Clay’s enthusiasm for work was an aberration, against human nature. Somebody ought to teach him to slow down and not be showing off that way.

“Clayton, Mr. Delaney has such plans for you.”

“He told me, kind of.”

These plans were of the vaguest, hinting at the possibility of political office in the state for a young man who wanted such a thing. Clay wanted no such stature in the community, but hadn’t said so outright.

“Then you are aware of the high regard Mr. Delaney holds you in.”

Clay nodded awkwardly. He could never bring himself to call Edwin’s wife anything but ma’am, just as Delaney himself was always sir. They accepted this; each addressed the other, in company or in private, as Mr. and Mrs. Delaney even after nineteen years of marriage. They were his legal parents, and Clay liked them well enough, but they were not of his blood, nor could they ever be.

“Would it not be better to do as he wishes and return to school? Nothing is accomplished in this world without knowledge.”

“I know.”

They were good people both, and it hurt him to go against their wishes. Only his respect for the Delaneys had kept Clay on the farm for so long, but the duration of his stay was the worst kind of thorn, pricking him every day. He had promised Zoe and Drew to return for them, and so far hadn’t taken a single step eastward to fulfill that promise. He was ashamed, didn’t understand why it was that he shied away from leaving the Delaneys. Was it nothing more than a need to remain as far west as he’d already come? Was that reason enough for betrayal?

He could, if he wanted, go east only for as long as it took to locate and sweep up his brother and sister, then all could go even further west together, to places Clay truly yearned for. The one lesson he had studied assiduously in school was the location of Missouri in relation to the continent; it wasn’t even halfway across.

The life he led was tolerable enough to hold him in stasis, divided by westward hankering and eastward obligation. Clay inhabited the narrow margin between indulgence and responsibility, and found it an uncomfortable place. The dichotomy was persistent, insoluble, forgotten only when Clay worked his gangling body to exhaustion. He wished the stand of trees slowly succumbing to his efforts were an endless forest, a magical wood wherein he could lose himself forever, beholden to no one. The illusion might have been possible, on a daily basis, if not for the grating presence of Chaffey, with his inane conversations and casual approach to the work Clay wished could be more Herculean a task.

“Then why, Clayton, do you resist?”

Mrs. Delaney’s round, sweet face could be irritating in its warmth, its quality of eternal forgiveness and understanding. Clay acknowledged she was a woman deserving of a son’s love, but he did not want to be that son, nor did he want to fulfill Delaney’s expectations of him. Wasn’t Delaney himself no more than a farmer with high-flown notions of himself and his place in the world? Who was he to be planning a life for Clay? Neither of the Delaneys knew of Zoe and Drew’s existence. Clay held that secret close, a kind of talisman against falling under the spell of the Delaneys’ cozy concern for him, their careful planning and obvious affection, the very things he would need to overturn when the time came to escape their gentle prison.

“I just don’t want to, not right now.”

“Is Mr. Chaffey working you hard?”

“I don’t mind. I like it.”

“But not forever. You could do so much more.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You know our own boy was clever, like you. He could have gone on and made himself into something if the Lord had seen fit to leave him with us. You could do that too, with just a little effort in your heart.”

He hung his head and felt ashamed. She was right, but Mrs. Delaney’s correctness existed in a world different from Clay’s. There was no bridge between these worlds.

“Good night, Clayton.”

“Night, ma’am.”

“Ever take your toby out?”

Clay looked up from his food. “What?”

Chaffey gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Your toby, your thing, ever take it out and handle it, you know?”

“No,” lied Clay.

“Boy your age, you don’t know about your toby? Never felt it stiffen up, kind of? That’s when you got to take it out and grab ahold and squeeze it, kind of.”

Clay turned away from him, blushing with anger and disgust.

“Course, it’s better with a friend,” Chaffey persisted. “You trade tobies and do the squeezing part. I could show you how.”

Clay stood up so fast his lunch flew from his knees. “Don’t you ever touch me.…”

“Just a friendly offer is all,” Chaffey protested, a look of bafflement on his face. “No need to get huffy.”

Clay was already walking away. Chaffey called after him: “I don’t believe you never done nothing with no one!”

Clay ignored him. Chaffey hated him then, his dislike finally changing to something darker. He was disappointed too. Several times he’d seen Clay’s cock when the boy relieved himself, and it was long as the boy himself, just the kind Chaffey liked to fondle and suck. It was pretty harsh rejection, and he decided he was justified in being offended. Clay Delaney was as high-handed as his father. Both of them needed taking down a peg.

“How is the work progressing, Chaffey?”

“Coming along good, Mr. Delaney, real good.”

“Is Clayton working as hard as yourself?”

“Oh, he’s a devil for it, yessir. Good worker, that boy.”

“No sign of him wearing out? No lamenting his lot?”

“Nothing like that, nossir, not as I’ve heard. He don’t talk much.”