The Long Home

  “I’ll know you want to when I see you coming,” he said. His throat and chest felt tight and constricted. He felt as if he were drowning.

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  He lay on a tabled shelf of limestone and watched the slow, majestic roll of the fall constellations. He realized with something akin to regret that he had no names to affix to them though he’d known them all his life. The stars looked bright and close and earlier an orange harvest moon had cradled up out of the pines so huge he felt he could reach up and touch them. By its light the Mormon Springs branch was frozen motionless and it gleamed like silver, the woods deep and still. It seemed strange to lie here and listen to the sounds of the jukebox filtered up out of the darkness, windbrought and maudlin plaints, but no less real for being maudlin. Once or twice cries of anger or exultation arose and he thought he might go see what prompted them but he did not. He just lay with his coat rolled beneath his head for a pillow and listened to all the sounds of the night, ears attuned for her footfalls.

  He wondered what time it was, felt it must be past midnight. The night wore on and he did not hear the jukebox for long periods of time, nor the cries of drunks, and the occasional car he heard seemed to be leaving rather than arriving. A while longer, he thought. He was keyed up and tense as if expecting something to happen in the next few minutes that would alter his life forever.

  An owl on the wing shuttled across the moon and after a while he heard it or its brother calling from out of the fabled dark of Mormon Springs. Where dwelt the ghosts of murdered Mormons and their convert wives and some of the men who had come down this hillside so long ago, the slayers slain. He wondered had the face of the country changed, perhaps they passed this upheaval of the earth. Had folks learned from history, from the shifting of the seasons?

  She is not coming, he was thinking. At length he rose. It had turned colder and time seemed to be slowing, to be gearing down for the long haul to dawn. He put the jacket on and buttoned it and picked his way through the stark and silver woods. He crossed the stream at its narrowest point and ascended through ironwood and willow until he came out in the field. In the fierce moonlight the field was profoundly still and his squat shadow the only thing in motion, a stygian and perverse version of himself that ran ahead distorting and miming his movements.

  He angled around the hill until he could see the house. He sat on a stone hugging himself against the chill and watched like a thief awaiting an opportunity to steal. After an hour or so a bitter core of anger rose in him and he got up to go but then a figure came out of the house and moved almost instantly into the shadows the woods threw and he could barely watch it progress toward the spring.

  Winer changed course and moved as silently as he could into the thickening brush. Anticipation intense as prayer seized him. Tree to tree stealthily to the edge of the embankment and after a moment he heard a voice that appeared to be in conversation with itself. A stone rolled beneath his feet and splashed into the water and he was looking down at a soldier urinating into the stream. The soldier looked up blearyeyed toward the source of this disturbance and leapt backward fumbling with his clothing. Moonlight winked off his upturned glasses and he looked pale and frightened as if some younger variation of the grim reaper had been visited upon him or a revenant from some old violence played here long ago.

  When Winer did not vanish or leap upon him the soldier steadied himself and staggered back down to the stream. He adjusted his campaign cap. “What outfit you from?” he called to Winer. Winer spat into the listing stream and made no reply save departure.

  She came at midmorning and spoke to him but he was cool and distant and disinclined to conversation. “Be mad then,” she told him. She left but he hardly missed her. Winer’s head hurt from lack of sleep and his arms and legs felt heavy and sluggish and were loath to do his bidding.

  He made it through the long morning and when he broke for lunch she came back. He hadn’t brought any lunch but he had a jar of coffee and he was drinking that when she stepped up onto the subflooring.

  “I can’t stay but a minute and if you’re goin to fight I’ll just go back in.”

  “I never sent for you.”

  “You sent for me last night, whether you know it or not”

  “Yeah. For what good it did.”

  “I wasn’t goin to tell you this but the reason I couldn’t come was he made me set with a man.”

  “Who did?”

  “Hardin. Dallas.”

  “He made you, did he. He hold a gun to you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t guess he had to.”

  “Just shut up. You don’t know anything about anything.”

  “I know I sat up all night in the mouth of that holler like a fool holding the sack on a snipehunt. That’s all I know.”

  “Well. I couldn’t help it.”

  “Sure, you couldn’t. I bet you couldn’t help telling every soldier in there about it too. Well, you better enjoy it because it’s the last laugh you’ll get out on me.”

  “Nathan, I really wanted to. I swear to God I did. His eyes were on me every minute.”

  “How come he made you sit with a man? Who was it anyway?”

  “I don’t know who he was. Some fat farmer. He’d just come back from sellin his cows or somethin. He was waving his money around and Dallas made me set with him till his money was all gone. I thought he never was goin to pass out.”

  “How’d he make you?”

  “I don’t know. He just told me I had to.”

  “What would he do if you didn’t ?”

  “I don’t know.” She fell silent.

  When she had been a little girl she had tried to think of Hardin as her father. A father was strong and Hardin looked as remorseless and implacable as an Old Testament God, there was no give to him. The man whose blood she’d sprung from was flimsy as a paperdoll father you’d cut from a catalog, a father who when the light was behind him looked curiously transparent. No light shone through Hardin and in a moment of insight she thought he had a similar core of stubbornness in Winer. Somehow you knew without showing him that there was no give to him either.

  “You don’t know. How could you not know?”

  She was quiet for a time. She remembered the way Hardin had been looking at her for the last year or so, as though he were deciding what to do with her.

  “Do you always do what people order you to? What if I’d ordered you to meet me? What would you have done then?”

  “Don’t go so fast,” she said. She gave him just a trace of a smile and shrugged. “You’re not quite Dallas Hardin,” she said.

  “Have you ever wondered what he’d do?”

  Whatever it took, she thought, thinking Hardin was bottomless.

  “All this is easy for you to say,” she told him. “You put up your tools every night and go home. I’m already at home. There’s nowhere else for me to go. You don’t know him.”

  “I believe I know him about as well as I need to.”

  He’d been looking into her eyes and for just an instant something flickered there that was older than he, older than anybody, some knowledge that couldn’t be measured in years.

  “You know him better,” she said.

  “I know him well enough to know he’s not paying me to shoot the breeze with you. I’ve got to get to work. This has been a long day anyhow.”

  “I might could get out on a Sunday. There’s nobody much around here then and Dallas don’t pay me much mind.”

  “I’m once a fool,” Winer said. “Twice don’t interest me.”

  “I’ll meet you anywhere you say.”

  She was studying him and something in her face seemed to alter slightly even as she watched him, somehow giving him the feeling that she had divined some quality in him that he wasn’t even aware of.

  He tried to think. His mind was murky and slow, it seemed to be grinding toward an ultimate halt. “All right,” he finally said. “The only place I can think
of where nobody can find us is where Weiss used to live. Meet me there Sunday evening.”

  Paying his debt to Motormouth, Winer had invited him to stay until he found a permanent residence but Motormouth seemed to have passed beyond the need for shelter and he stayed only three days. He found the walls too confining, the house too stationary to suit him. He was too acclimated to the motion of wheels, the random and accessible distances of the riverbank, the precarious existence that shuttled him from Hardin’s to the river, from de Vries’s cabstand to the highway. Some creature of the night halfdomesticated reverting back to wildness, staying out for longer and longer periods then just not coming back at all.

  Then Winer was alone. He put up the winter’s wood and stacked the porch with it. On these first cool evenings he’d build himself a fire and sat before it. He quit worrying and wondering about the future and decided to just let it roll. By lamplight he’d read before the flickering fire and he found the silence not hard to take. He was working hard now trying to beat winter. In bed he would sometimes lie in a halfstupor of weariness before sleep came but he felt that somehow a fair exchange had been made, someone paid him money to endure this exhaustion. I am a carpenter, he thought. He was something, somebody, there was a name he could affix to himself. And there was a routine and an order to these days that endeared them to him, they were long, slow days he would remember in time to come when order and symmetry were things more dreamt than experienced. I am paying my way, he thought, carrying my own weight, and on these last fall days he found something that had always eluded him, a cold solitary peace.

  Having finally gotten her alone, Winer was at some loss as to how to proceed. All the clever conversation he had thought of fled, and such shards as he remembered no longer seemed applicable. Her clean profile roiled his mind and he felt opportunity sliding away while he sat with dry mouth and sweaty palms. “How come you quit school?” he finally fell back on asking.

  “I just got tired of it. Why did you?”

  “I didn’t. I’m goin back next year.”

  “I’m not. I wouldn’t set foot inside that schoolhouse for a thousand-dollar bill.”

  Below them a car appeared on the winding roadway. She fell silent and watched its passage, studied it until it was lost from sight near Oliver’s house. She turned to Winer. “Did you know that car?”

  “Not to speak to,” Winer said.

  She arose, smoothed her skirt. “We’re goin to have to go in the house. If anybody sees me up here they’ll tell Dallas.”

  “For somebody who can hustle a drunk out of his cattle money and never bat an eye you’re awfully concerned with appearances,” Winer said. But he instantly regretted saying it and arose and held the storm door for her and they passed into the semigloom of the living room. They stood uncertainly looking about then Winer suddenly felt uncomfortable in the abandoned house and he caught her arm and led her through the sliding glass door onto a concrete patio.

  “There’s nothin to sit on here,” she complained.

  “We can get a blanket or something out of the house if you want to.”

  “Why don’t we just stay in there?”

  “I just don’t feel right. It’s still Weiss’s house, even if it is up for sale. Besides, it seems like I can hear that old woman breathin in there.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “I guess so.”

  They sat side by side on the edge of the concrete porch with their feet in the uncut grass. Below the long, dark line of the chickenhouses the afternoon sun hung in a sky devoid of clouds.

  “This is a real nice place. I guess Mr. Weiss must’ve have been rich.”

  “I doubt he was rich. I suppose they lived all right though.”

  “It’s the nicest house I was ever in.”

  “I got a cousin lives in Ackerman’s Field,” Winer said. “Lives in a house you wouldn’t believe. There’s velvet wallpaper on the walls and all these fancy chandeliers hanging everywhere. And both of them crazy as bessie bugs.”

  She sat leaning forward with her arms crossed atop her round knees and imbued with the composed air he had become accustomed to. Studying the pristine lines of her profile he was suddenly struck with a sense of inadequacy, he could not imagine what had brought her here to meet him. She could have had her pick of all of them. Yet there was some inevitability about it, as if it all had been ordained long ago, when he was a child, when she was a child. There seemed to be nothing to say, nor any need for it. She felt it too, for when he touched her she turned toward him as if the touch were something she had been waiting for.

  He drew her to him with a kind of constrained urgency until her cheek rested against his shoulder. She remained so for a moment then turned her face up toward him. Her teeth were white against her tanned face. Her eyes looked violet. She closed them when he kissed her, her left hand was a cool and scarcely perceptible weight on the base of his neck, her right hand lay against his stomach.

  When he went for the blanket he got a bottle of Weiss’s homemade strawberry wine from beneath the counter and two glasses and before he remembered the power was off turned on the faucet to rinse them. He settled for wiping the dust off with a towel and canting them against the sun through the window. They looked clean. He found the blankets stacked in a bedroom closet. Passing a mirror he fetched up, startled for a moment by his reflection, he and his mirror image were face to face conspiratorially like cothiefs ransacking a house, their arms caught up with plunder. Both their thin faces looked feral and furtive, harried.

  Amber Rose lay on his left arm, her dress girdled about her waist. Their eyes were closed and he could feel the red weight of the sun through his eyelids. His right hand lay on her abdomen. The flesh of her stomach was cool and soft. He slid his fingers under the elastic of her panties and downward and when she made no objection downward further until he cupped the mound between her legs, the hair there crisp and curled, laid the weight of a finger where her flesh was cleft when she opened her legs. When he kissed her her mouth tasted like the wine and when he opened his eyes she was watching him. She seemed drained of volition, her face looked vacuous and stricken in the sun. Her dress was unbottoned to the waist and her brassiere unhooked and against the brown skin of her belly her breasts looked white and fragile, flowers unused to the sun. She reached a hand down and placed it over his own, guiding him, her hips a gently increasing pressure against the heel of his hand. The she moved the hand away and he felt it at his zipper. She took his erect penis in her hand and began to masturbate him gently. Even as she did so a part of him that stood observing all this wondered at her dexterity but did not dwell on it at any length. She slid her other hand down and clasped him with both hands. Then without saying anything she released him and hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her underwear and slid it down over her hips. He watched as she raised her hips from the blanket and slid the panties off one leg, then the other. She unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down until he arose and shucked out of them, feeling clumsy and absurd standing here in the heat of the day in his shirttail with her watching and he felt that the woods were full of folks crouched laughing behind the bushes but he couldn’t have stopped if they had been. If Hardin had leapt upon him with a hawkbill knife. He pulled the t-shirt off and when he laid it aside she was reaching up towards him.

  “Pull off your dress.”

  “Do it for me if you want to.”

  She raised her arms and he pulled the dress awkwardly over her head and started to fold it but she said, “No, let it go, it don’t matter.” He lay on her balancing his weight on his elbows. “You won’t break me,” she said. “I’m not made of glass.” He could feel her breasts pooled against his chest, the hot length of his sex where their flesh lay as it fused.

  It seemed to him there ought to be something to say but if there was he didn’t know what. For a crazy moment it occurred to him to ask her if she’d rather wait until they were married for in the last quarter hour or so he’d commenced thin
king in just such a fashion. But her breath on his throat forestalled him. “Go on,” she said. “I want you to.” He reached down fumbling between them but after a moment she said, “Here. Let me.” He raised enough to permit her hand and she guided him into her.

  She was hot and wet and tight and entry was harder than he’d expected and he hesitated, unmoving, glancing down to see if he was hurting her, but her eyes were clenched tightly closed and her hands were tightening on his arms.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Go on, I want you to.”

  In the slow, breathless moment of penetration he felt that he had wounded her beyond any restitution he had the power to make and he felt that he had thrown his lot with her forevermore, had in some manner inextricably tied their fate. Whether she wanted it so or not.

  She made ready to go. They had stayed longer than she meant to and the sun was already burning away the timbered horizon in the west and the first bullbats were dropping plumb and sheer as if they moved in fixed isobars or were in some manner gyroscoped.

  “You thought I was a whore, didn’t you?” Her voice through the fabric of her dress was muffled. She pulled the dress down and was arranging her hair, smoothing it backward with both hands.

  “No. I never thought that.”

  “But you thought I’d done it before.”

  “I figured you had.”

  “I guess I’ve heard them talk about everything two people can do to each other but I never did any of it. Mama always watched me like a hawk and Dallas, he’s even worse.” She pulled her panties on, her skirt caught up in them and she freed it. He was staring bemusedly at the hair crinkled against the cloth. “Quit looking like that,” she said. “You know I’ve got to go.” She arose. “I always used to have the idea that Dallas was goin to sell me off, you know, like to the highest bidder. A auction. Sacrificin a virgin.” She smiled ruefully. “I guess this is one time he got beat.”