Sonia rode with her camera pointed out the window but Cora rides leaning forward, her eyes gleaming like a child thrilled with the speed. The wind tugs at her bun and softens her face with a few stray tendrils, and it’s not his imagination. She is growing prettier every day they have been here. Outside the window the shade is so green and the sky so blue, and all those familiar mountain signposts have become just something to move through, like a room full of strangers on the way to the woman you’re desperate to meet. Cora throws her head back and smiles at him. They are driving to her familiar general store, but he knows he is taking her somewhere new.
“What’s your first memory, Cora,” he asks her. “The oldest thing in your head?”
“Why?” she asks.
“It’s just a game I made up, a way to get to know each other.”
“I don’t remember my first memory.”
He says, “It would be the first thing you haven’t forgotten.”
She sits in silence, thinking.
“Just anything,” he says. “It’s a game, it’s supposed to be fun.”
“My mother’s hair on the pillow,” she answers.
“That’s a lovely image,” he says, smiling over. “You’ve got the hang.”
“But it was after they took her away,” Cora says seriously. “One of her long, dark hairs was left behind. I remember wrapping it around my finger like a ring.”
“I’m sorry,” Tucker says. “I didn’t mean to bring up something painful.”
“I’m not sure it’s the very first thing I remember,” she says. “There could be something else.”
“It’s a stupid game,” Tucker says. “Forget it.” It was a game he made up for Sonia, to make certain she didn’t confuse him with a lesser man, but Cora is too honest to understand the rules. They drive the remainder of the way silently and Tucker lets parking the car demand all of his attention.
The store’s exterior plank walls are plated with signs for BC Powder and Nehi and Uneeda and Heinz. Boys on the wooden steps drink RC Colas while two pretty girls in turned-up jeans and pigtails jump rope by the gas pump, raising a cloud of dust. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six. He recognizes them as the kids who ran out on Eddie, leaving him for dead on the side of the road. The girls stop jumping as he cuts the engine of the car.
Tucker steps out and Cora waits for him to come around. He opens the door for her and the boys on the wooden steps sit stupidly with their drinks to their lips, forcing Tucker to step around them. He lets the screen door slam and hears the girls start up their jumping again. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Eddie deserves better friends than this.
Tucker has been in and out of a hundred stores on the trip, and Cora’s is much like all the others. He sees bunkers of oats and seed and flour, rows of tinned food arranged on metal shelves that sag where something heavier once weighted them down. As his eyes adjust, he sees a girl, not much older than those outside, sitting behind the register with her feet planted on the top rung of a high stool, her knees peeking above the counter, white and gleaming. Tucker takes in her soft cheeks, her thick head of brown hair that has been set with curlers and brushed out and pulled back from her forehead with a wide blue ribbon. She belongs behind the jewelry counter of a department store or on the arm of some young, handsome thing, boring him with raptures on astrology and the prophecies of Nostradamus.
From behind a bin of spark plugs, two boys watch them. In their plaid shirts and work boots they are almost men, though one’s head seems too large for his spindly body. Tucker walks to the icebox, reaching past the paper bags of bloodworms and half-melted Creamsicles to retrieve Cokes for himself and Cora. He pries away the caps with his penknife, licking sweet brown foam from his hand. Cora takes one from him, matching her sips to his.
She strolls the tight aisles, casual in the way she glances at prices, they are nothing, they are everything. She nods to a bag of white sugar, she points to a wooden box of green coffee beans and Tucker carries them to the counter for her. The soda is helping and he is feeling a little stronger.
“What do you think of these?” Cora asks, holding up a pair of black boots like the big boys have on. “Do you think they’d fit Eddie?”
He likes being asked, and considers thoughtfully. “They seem a little big.”
“You’re right,” she agrees, putting them back.
“He could wear an extra pair of socks,” Tucker suggests. “They’ll last more than one season.”
“I’ll get them,” Cora says, throwing him a smile.
The big boys are laughing over the spark plugs. Cora glances at them and Tucker feels instinctively protective.
“I bet he’d like a new shirt for school,” Tucker offers.
“That’s quite thoughtful,” Cora says. “I believe he would.”
She hands him the boots and steps around him to the flour sacks. She can’t afford fabric for fabric’s sake, she needs the flour as much if not more than the shirt.
“That one, please,” she says, pointing to the blue-checked sack before moving to the next aisle. A gray tabby mother cat sprawls on top of the sack, nursing four newborn kittens. Tucker looks down at the squirming balls of fur digging into their mother’s belly, the mother dozing with her head thrown back. He squats down and scratches her behind her ear. Gently he nudges, but she doesn’t stir.
“Come on, you,” he says, laughing a little self-consciously.
The kittens go on sucking, the mother widens her gaze to include him in the languor of the midday meal. Cora’s company in the woods and at the cabin had felt natural enough, but now he feels the strain of performing before strangers. Cora, the shopgirl, the two big boys, all are watching. He slips his hands under the mother cat, trying to lift gently, but her kittens drop off with tiny cries, their fat stomachs hitting the ground, too young for the cat trick of landing on all fours. The mother is soft and yielding in his hands like a dead thing and in disgust he drops her, too, watching as she stretches out her paws and yawns, then flops heavily upon her side. Without looking around to see where all the other eyes are, he lifts the sack and drops it on the counter, raising a cloud of white cat dandruff.
“This gentleman is here with the government,” Cora explains to the girl behind the counter. “He’s writing a book about Panther Gap.”
“Well, Mrs. Alley—” he starts, torn between correcting and embarrassing her. “We’re writing a travel guide. We’re hoping Panther Gap will go on the map. It’s not wholly our decision.”
The shopgirl looks up, only mildly interested.
Cora has arranged her purchases neatly in front of her. The shopgirl rings her up and gives the total: $23. It takes Tucker a minute to notice the shopgirl is looking at him expectantly. Cora is suddenly preoccupied with a stain on the wooden floorboard.
Tucker has $30 left in his pocket, all that remains to get them back to the field office and New York. But what choice does he have? Slowly he peels off single dollar bills as Cora’s smile from the car returns.
“And Jeanne, will you tell your grandpa I’d like to trade?”
“I’m sorry, Cora,” says Tucker. “I’m not feeling very well. Will we be much longer?”
Cora looks over, worried. She’d been enjoying herself but now is troubled to see he is not.
“Just another minute,” she says.
From the back, Tucker hears fumbling from a radio, volume turned up loud then down, and then the girl is replaced by her white-bearded grandfather. At least Tucker assumes it is her grandfather. There is little to say he and the girl are related except, Tucker sees through the tear in the old man’s trousers, some small family resemblance of kneecap. The small surge of the Coke has left him and he leans against the counter. The clock on the wall says it’s after three, only a few hours of daylight left. He wishes Sonia had agreed to leave when he asked her.
“You boys buying anything?” the old man asks the two big boys in the back. They have been fingering t
he same oily metal since Tucker and Cora walked in but now they head back out to join their friends. The boy with the big head smells of Lucky Strikes as he sidles past Tucker, his breath is hot as a south-facing ashtray. “Giddyup,” he says, almost in Tucker’s ear. “We’re off.” Tucker watches them go through the wire screen.
“Don’t mind them,” says Cora. “They’re bad boys.”
“What’cha got for me, sis?” the old man asks. Cora slides a white handkerchief across the counter. With shiny red arthritic fingers, he pries the knot.
Last night, when they came home dirty and tired from their hunt, Cora had gently washed the root he found under running water, careful not to damage a single twisted hair. Together they counted forty-two scars where it had pushed up through hard-packed soil, and the years it waited underground, she said, could easily be more than double that. The head branched out to rudimentary arms and legs, and from the notched crotch tiny tributaries wrapped back around its torso like a body evolving its own cage of barbed wire.
The old man lifts the root from its cloth, nodding. “He’s a beaut.”
“Got to be close to a hundred years old,” Cora replies.
“Price is down from what it used to be,” the shopkeeper reminds her.
“I know,” Cora says.
“I’ll give you ten,” he says.
“You can’t do more?” she asks.
The old man shakes his head. These are hard times for all.
Cora takes the ten-dollar bill, turning to Tucker as if she’s struck a great bargain. He wants to be happy for her but he feels, irrationally, as if his pocket has been picked. She never explicitly said the ginseng root was his, but somehow he had assumed it was. He hefts the flour and stands against the screen of the porch door, looking out. The kids have left the front stoop to play on a red terrace up the hill. A dozen have gathered, big and little, faced off against each other in two long lines. He is too far away to hear what they are playing. Dodgeball with no ball? Red Rover, Red Rover? A shout goes up—Watch out!—then all the children scatter, shrieking, a tangle of arms and legs until they’ve exchanged places and one is left out. That’s all he can tell of the rules of their game. The shopkeeper is asking if they need help carrying their purchases. No, says Cora. We have a car.
Tucker opens the trunk and drops her things on the floorboard. Cora hangs on to the black boots and settles in front, letting him close the door behind her. He starts the car without comment, leaving the old man behind, the kids flapping in the field above. Looking both ways, he pulls out onto the road, taking the curves back uphill.
“Is something wrong?” Cora asks at last.
“That was a very valuable root,” he answers.
“It was a lucky find,” she says. Luck, he thinks, had nothing to do with it.
“I don’t know,” he continues. “Maybe I misunderstood. I thought it belonged to me.”
Cora seems surprised at the idea. “Do you want half of the money?” she asks.
“I don’t care about the money,” Tucker quickly dismisses the idea. “It’s just that—” He struggles to articulate why it bothers him.
“You traded away something that we found together. I suppose I’d thought I would keep it, to remember—”
“Like a souvenir?” Cora asks. Tucker is embarrassed.
“Something like that,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It should have meant the same to me.”
Tucker feels sick all over again.
“Of course, you’ll want things to take with you if you go away,” she continues.
“It’s not if, Cora, it’s when,” says Tucker.
“I don’t know, Mr. Hayes,” she answers. “Something tells me the war won’t touch you.”
He can’t ignore it anymore. Tucker pulls the car onto the shoulder of the road, coming to rest in a patch of low grass. Through the open window behind her head, he sees bees staggering fat and drunk against a bank of honeysuckle. He must be losing his mind.
“If anyone should know, it’s you,” he says.
She observes him silently, not denying, letting him think what he likes.
“I know what you are, Cora.”
“What’s that, Tucker?” she says, using his first name for the first time. “What do you think you know?”
Her face is so close and they are once again out of time together, locked in a car, high on a mountain road. Tucker takes her face between his two wide hands and kisses her, hotly and deeply, on the mouth. He parts her lips with his tongue and she tastes like a girl at a soda counter with whom he’s innocently shared a float; but she is no girl, for Cora Alley is kissing him back, ferociously, and he doesn’t taste anything then, just feels the relief surging through him that he wasn’t imagining it, that this was exactly what she was expecting. He had to know he was right and now he knows, but the knowledge doesn’t bring any particular comfort. His hand moves to her black church dress and the modest breast inside it. Cora pulls away and observes him uncertainly.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that, Mr. Hayes,” she says. They are back to Mr. Hayes. “You are a married man.”
“I don’t rightly know, either, Mrs. Alley,” he answers. “I suppose I’m just afraid to die and want to take as much life inside me as I can before I go.”
“We’re all going to die. That’s a fine excuse to do just about anything you please.”
She holds Eddie’s boots in her lap as if to keep them from running away, and returns her attention to the window. She never would have bought those boots if it weren’t for him, Tucker thinks. She would have had to wait until she could have afforded them herself.
“We should be heading back,” she says.
Tucker starts the engine and returns to the road, driving the last miles without looking at her. He wonders if Sonia will know immediately that he has kissed another woman, and if she’ll be mad or secretly pleased that she knew before he did. Cora is sober and distant and he thinks of all the other women he’s kissed who are no longer with him, never where he set them down. They are even this minute moving and speaking and adding to themselves, bathing their children, making love with their husbands, while he is left with only the pain of where they used to be, laughing over chicken fried rice in a back alley of Chinatown or weeping together over the death of a pigeon on the sidewalk.
Tucker pulls the car into the clearing, parking in his old treads. Cora is out before he can open the door for her, and together they start up the path. She carries the coffee beans and the shoes and socks. He hefts the flour. Between them they have nearly an entire wardrobe for Eddie. He wishes now he’d insisted the boy come along. If Eddie had been with them, he wouldn’t be feeling right now like he’d hit someone else with his car.
“Are you hurt?” Cora asks, noticing that he is limping like she is. He shakes his head but her concern gives him the courage to reach out his hand to help her up the steep path. Though they both know she’s walked it alone for years, she takes it and lets herself lean on him, just a little. They pass the fallow tobacco field and follow the path up the incline of the creek bed. They crest the hill that leads to the yard and then—because why wouldn’t it?—time leaps forward by decades, and Tucker hears Eddie laughing in the voice of a grown man come home to brag for his mama. Cora is ordering him about, almost flirtatiously, in the way women do with their grown sons, but no, Cora is standing silently beside him. Stepping into the yard, Tucker sees the laugh belongs to a man in a khaki uniform, leaning on the front porch pillar squinting into the lens of Sonia’s box camera. Sonia has burrowed back under her drop cloth and her voice is muffled and husky as she commands him. Freeze. Cora’s stiffening body tells Tucker all he needs to know.
“That would be Mr. Alley?” Tucker asks.
“That would be Mr. Alley,” Cora replies.
* * *
“I’m ready for another,” Sonia says and Eddie passes her a nail. She is standing on a crate in the darkest corner of the barn
, behind the stall with the restless cow. With one hand, Sonia stretches her spare dropcloth, blocking the light that comes through the slats. With her other, she fixes a nail and hammers it. Eddie fetched water from the spring and she has mixed her stop bath in an old tray. She was feeling fine when she woke but as the morning wore on she began to notice the change. Light hurts her eyes; she feels faint from the vinegary smell of the chemicals, and the manure and mildew of the hay. Each month she marks an X in her leather date book, but she doesn’t need to count back the days to recognize this feeling. It’s not her first time. Or her second. Or even her third.
“Another,” she says, and the boy reaches up. The corner is growing darker with each nail she drives.
It must have been down by the creek before they struck Eddie. Would she know this soon? Maybe it happened at that hotel with the pale blue chenille bedspread when all the knots dug into her back, leaving her looking like a factory punch card when she finally got up. Or maybe it was their very first time, the night he showed her the movie of mothers and dying sons. Whenever it was, she is angry at herself and angry at him. If they hadn’t stayed so long here, she would already be back in the city where she could immediately do something about it. Now it would be next week at the earliest before they could get back to New York and she could see her doctor. Nearly a week to think about it and feel it growing. Alone with it for a week.
“Do you need another one?” Eddie asks, his palms full of nails. The hammer dangles from her hand and the cloth droops. She stretches the fabric as far as it will go and reaches down.
“Yes,” she says.
“This is the last one.”
She holds the nail between her lips before she hammers. It is hot for October and the barn is hotter; her back is running with sweat and her cheeks are sagging and clammy.
Eddie is watching her closely. “Mr. Hayes is sick, too,” he says.
Sonia leans her head against the slats and closes her eyes. It would feel so good never to have to move again. Women do it all the time. They sit still and raise families and make homes and make peace. It is done all over the world. And Tucker is a nice man, no better or worse than the rest of them; more romantic, maybe, more sentimental. She always imagined she’d marry someone useless, have a brilliant decorative husband she could admire but who was fragile so that she’d never be tempted to lean on him. Who puts weight on a china poodle or a failed playwright? A husband she could lean on would be the worst possible thing, because then she might be tempted to relax, to soften, and then she would be lost. Maybe Tucker Hayes is useless enough. He loves her, at least for now, as they all do, at least for now. What more is there ever to go on?