"I know it is."
"It is. She's already lost one brood, thanks to us tromping around out there."
"I'll be careful," he said. "I'll tiptoe."
He did, apparently. She didn't hear another sound until he came back in and stoked up the fire. She felt the mattress shift when he sat down on it, heard the hiss of the match, and smelled its sulfur when he leaned over to light the kerosene lamp on the table beside the bed. "Roll over, I'll rub your back where it hurts."
"What'd you do, eat some Mr. Nice Guy mushrooms?" She opened her eyes. "How do you know my back hurts?"
"I'm always a nice guy, you just fail to see through my irritating demeanor." He kissed her forehead. "You're coming down with something. The flu or something. You felt hot as a furnace a while ago. Roll over."
"The epizooty," she said. "Nannie used to say that. It's a catchall disease category." She rolled over and lay with her face buried in the pillow, smiling, suffocating with comfort as he massaged her shoulders. "Nannie was my dad's girlfriend," she said into the pillow, which muffled her words completely.
"What?"
She turned over onto her back. "Nannie was my dad's girlfriend."
"Oh. I thought you said, 'Eddie is a mad birdbrain.'"
"Well, yeah. That, too."
"The apple-orchard lady, I know. You got free apples, and old Dad got lucky." His hands moved expertly down her sides, working gently from rib to rib but pausing just under her breasts and finally resting there, distracting her senseless. When she could no longer stand the suspense, he unzipped his jeans and got under the quilts. For a long time he stroked her without speaking.
"So," she said. "You remember this junk I tell you about my life?"
"She had a baby with a hole in her heart. But she wouldn't marry your dad."
"You do remember. I'm never sure if you're listening."
"No future doesn't mean I'm not here now."
She wanted to believe it but couldn't, quite. "I don't know why you'd invest the effort," she said. "If you're just going to have to forget it all later."
"You think I'm going to forget you when we're finished here?"
"Yes."
"No." He kissed her for a long time. She kept her eyes open, watching. Kissing her with his eyes closed, he looked so vulnerable and yielding that it was nearly painful to see it.
"I'll forget you," she lied softly into his mouth. "The minute you're gone."
He pulled away from her a little, looking at her eyes to see what she meant. She couldn't focus as close as he could. That was age, again.
"I'll make sure you don't," he promised, and she shivered, feeling the prescience of some deep change or damage. He would make sure. The coyotes came unbidden to her mind: children in the woods, huddled in their den away from the storm.
But Eddie Bondo's mind seemed to be here, focused on her, making amends for whatever hurt he felt he'd delivered earlier--the Alberta crack, she supposed. This was their strange dance. More than once now she'd flown into a rage at him and then spent days afterward offering food, cutting his hair, washing his socks, her unguents of apology. It made her think of the bobtail cat she'd had in childhood that would sometimes get mean when they played and scratch her, drawing blood; afterward he would always hunt down a mouse and bring her its liver.
Eddie had rolled on his side and propped himself up on one elbow, the better to uncover her body and look at it. It had taken some getting used to, this. She fought the persistent urge to cover herself with the sheet.
"How come they never got hitched up?" he asked, tracing her aureoles with his index finger. "Your dad and his lady friend."
"Nannie never did want to. I'm not sure why. I guess I admired her for it, though, for knowing her mind and wanting to be on her own. The county gossip was always that Dad wouldn't marry her."
"You girls always get the losing end of gossip."
"Oh, you noticed. Yeah. And Nannie was kind of an odd bird. She still is. But he would have married her in a second. He was like that, just a plain honorable guy."
"Unlike me."
"Very. I think it turned him sad in the long run, that she wouldn't marry him. Especially after Rachel turned out so sickly. When she died, it tore everybody up. Dad was losing our farm at the time, and he just fell to pieces drinking. I'm sure it broke Nannie's heart, too, but she wore it better."
"And what about you? She was your sister. Half-sister."
"Yeah, she was. I can't explain it, but I always knew she was going back to Heaven. She'd just come to be my little sister for a while. Rachel was this angel. We'd play pirate ship and I'd be the captain and she'd be the angel. She was happy all the time. She had this kind of creamy skin you could almost see through. It was a local tragedy when she died."
Deanna closed her eyes, feeling weirdly hollow inside from this talk. It might be a fever, making her so loose and dreamy. "Nannie's tough, though; she's carried on all these years. She lives her life how she wants to, no matter what people say."
"So that's where you learned it from."
Deanna laughed. "Oh, boy. You should see what a mess I made out of life. I went to college and proceeded to go to bed with my professors left and right."
He moved his body against hers, all of it, hard and warm and impossible to ignore. "You were pursuing higher learning."
"Low learning. I don't know what I was doing. I think I had this daddy complex. I listened to my instructors. I married one of my instructors. He thought I was brilliant, so I married him. He said I talked like a hillbilly, so I stopped saying 'Hit's purty' and 'Oncet in a while.' He said I should be a teacher, so I got certified and taught school in Knoxville and spent my twenties and half my thirties going out of my gourd."
"What did you teach?"
"Science and math and Please Shut Up, to seventh graders."
While they'd been speaking he had moved on top of her, supporting his weight on his elbows, and gently slid inside her without changing the tone of his voice or the conversation. She inhaled sharply, but he touched a finger to her lips and kept talking. "No, I can't see you with an apple on your desk. I see you throwing chalk."
She lay perfectly still, catching her breath. As if she'd seen a snake.
"Maybe I threw some chalk, I don't remember. I liked the kids sometimes, but mostly I felt like I was under siege." She spoke slowly and calmly, and it all seemed very secret, as if their bodies were hiding from their minds. "I'm an introvert," she continued carefully. "I like being alone. I like being outside in the woods. And there I was. Living in a little brick house in a big-city suburb, spending my days with hundreds of small, unbelievably loud human beings."
He had begun to move inside her, unhurriedly. It took some concentration to keep her voice steady. She felt the corners of her mouth drawing back involuntarily, like the copperhead's smile. "You'd think I could have figured it out, but I was restless for ten years before it dawned on me that I needed to go to graduate school and study wildlife biology and get myself out of there."
"And here you are." He held her eyes, smiling, while he slowly, slowly moved his hips. Her pelvis tilted, reaching for him.
"And here I am."
"And you and the professor never had kids?"
"Oh, that was out of the question. He'd been married before. He had two teenagers already when I met him. The way he did the math, he and his ex-wife had replaced themselves. There was no more room on the earth for him to put another kid."
"Wow. That's some pretty strict math."
"He was like that. German."
"But you hadn't replaced yourself."
"I guess that wasn't his problem. He had a vasectomy."
"And that was that. No regrets?"
"I'm not all that maternal."
He slipped a hand under the small of her back and pushed himself up very far inside her until she began to lose her train of thought. He had a way of reaching against her pelvic bone, creating a kind of pressure in a place no man had found be
fore. Intercourse with Eddie Bondo was a miracle of nature. He held her there, with her back arched, and chuckled softly against her cheek.
"You. You spend more time making sure you don't hurt a spider or a baby bird than most people do taking care of their kids. You're maternal."
He was still listening to her. She couldn't even remember what she'd said.
"Shhh," he said suddenly, tightening his grip on her and going perfectly still. "What is that?"
They listened to the soft sliding noise overhead in the roof boards. It was a dry, rough, papery scrape, almost like sandpaper moving through slow circles over a rough board. The sound had become nearly constant these days, in the evenings, when the rain wasn't drowning it out.
"It's not a mouse," Deanna conceded finally.
"I know it's not a mouse. You always say it's a mouse, but it's not. It's something long and slidey."
"'Slidey'?" she asked. "And you make fun of the way I talk?"
"Long and scaly, then."
"Yeah," she said. "It's a snake. Probably a big old blacksnake that came in out of the rain one day, hit the mouse jackpot, and decided to stay."
Eddie Bondo shivered. She felt him going soft inside her, and she laughed. "Don't tell me you're scared of snakes? You are!"
He rolled off of her, throwing an arm over his face.
"Why, my lands, Eddie Bon do. A brave guy like you."
"I'm not scared of them. I just don't like the idea of one crawling around above me while I sleep."
"Oh, well, don't sleep, then. Just lie here listening for it. Tell me if he's headed down here for the bed. Good night!" She leaned over, feigning to blow out the lamp.
"Don't do that!" He struck a tone of true panic at the combination of snake and darkness. But then he grabbed her pillow and whacked her with it, to cover his embarrassment. She let the lamp burn and fell back on the bed, delighted with herself.
"Lady," he said, "you are one mean son of a gun."
She took the pillow from him and settled it back under her head, relishing the upper hand. All her life in Zebulon County she'd known big, husky men who worked dispassionately with fierce machinery and steers big enough to kill them, but who freely admitted to a terror of snakes of any kind. At nine years of age Deanna Wolfe had made a legend of herself by bringing an eight-foot blacksnake to school.
"It just does not make any sense to despise that snake up there," she told Eddie. "He's on our side. I hate mice, is what I hate--getting into my food. Making their nest in the drawer so my socks stink like mouse pee. Running over my feet in the morning and making me throw my coffee against the wall. If you took all the snakes out of this world, people would be screaming bloody murder at the rodent plague. Not just here. In cities, too."
"Thank you, Miss Science Teacher. Too bad we're not all as logical as you are. You know what?" He rolled over and whispered in her ear, "You're scared of thunder."
"I'm not, either."
"You are. I've seen you jump."
"That's a startle response, not fear. Thunder is nothing but two walls of split-apart air coming back together, which could not hurt a fly."
He lay back against the pillow beside her, grinning fiercely. "Which causes you to jump out of your skin."
"Mice make me jump, too, but that's not fear, that's disgust."
"OK, then. Snakes aren't scary, they're just disgusting."
"Foolish choices, Eddie. People make them every day, but hating predators on principle is like hating the roof over your head on principle. Me, I'll take one snake over fifty mice in my house any day. A snake in every roof."
He shuddered.
"Snakes have manners, at least--they stay out of your way."
"Stay out of my way," Eddie Bondo said to the roof.
"Don't worry." She pulled the covers up and put her head on his shoulder. It was true that she had her own irrational fears. She spoke quietly, stroking the hard, indented midline of his chest and thinking of the cartilage that sheltered his heart. "It's a single-minded predator, and its prey is not us. From a snake's point of view, we don't even exist. We're nothing to him. We're safe."
They lay still for a minute, listening to the cricket music of a midsummer night. From somewhere nearby she heard the quiet little chirping call of a screech owl. It was not the breathy hoot of the great owls but a more private sound, a high-pitched descending chuckle. She listened for the answer and immediately it came, a series of soft, quick barks the little owls use at close range in breeding season. They were finding each other out there in the darkness, making their love right under the window. Deanna grazed the length of Eddie Bondo's collarbone with her lower lip. "So," she said, "could we go back to our previous conversation?"
"I'm not sure." He lifted the blankets and looked. "Yes."
She rolled away from his arms just long enough to blow out the lamp. In a habit carried over from childhood, her mind whispered a prayer of thanks, as small and quick as the extinction of lamplight into darkness: Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
{17}
Old Chestnuts
The bank of Egg Creek was soaked like a sponge with rain. Garnett could only look the hillside up and down and shake his head. The ground had gotten so soft that a fifty-year-old oak growing out of it had leaned over, pulled its roots out of the mud like loose teeth, and fallen over before its time. What a mess. Somebody would have to be called, some young man with a chain saw who could tame this tangle of trunk and branches into a cord of firewood. Oda Black's son, now there was a polite boy who could do it in one morning and not charge a fortune.
The cost wasn't the problem, though. Finding a man to do it wasn't even the problem. This section of Egg Creek stood as the property line dividing Garnett's land from Nannie Rawley's, that was the problem. It was only fair that she pay for half the cleanup--or more, really, since it was her tree that had fallen on him. But they would have to come to some agreement, and for the likes of that no precedent existed in the history of Garnett and Nannie.
He stared at the mess and sighed. If only she would come up here and notice it so he wouldn't have to be the one to take the first step. If Garnett brought it up, she would act like he was asking for a favor. Which of course, he was not. He was calling attention to her negligence, was all. Any farmer worth his salt walked his property lines after every storm to look for damage like this. But then there was Nannie Rawley.
"Oh, me," he declared aloud to the birds, some of whom were merrily singing from the branches of the fallen oak without a care over their world's sudden shift from vertical to horizontal. For that matter, the fallen tree still burgeoned with glossy oak leaves--probably still trying to scatter its pollen to the wind and set acorns as if its roots were not straggling in the breeze and its bulk doomed to firewood.
Birds and oak trees have minds like hers, he thought, surveying this profoundly deluded little world with an odd satisfaction.
He noted that more than half a dozen trees along this bank were leaning precariously downhill from her side toward his. The next storm would likely bring down more. One old cherry seemed particularly threatening, with nearly a forty-five-degree lean to it, right out over the path he used to get up here. He made a mental note to walk fast and not tarry anytime he had to pass under it. "Oh, me," he said again, as he turned back down the path toward his house and whatever he had to do next.
It would have to be face-to-face. Not over the telephone. She was never in her house, and she had one of those confounded machines that beeped at you and expected you to speak your whole mind on the spot without even warming up to the subject. His heart couldn't take those things; whenever one surprised him these days he'd have to go lie down afterward. No, he would walk over there today and get Nannie Rawley over with, like a dose of castor oil. Garnett felt a flutter of anger against his fate. Anytime he thought he'd washed his hands of the woman, she'd turn up again somewhere else nearby. She was worse than mildew. Why did G
od insist on running this woman smack up against him, time and again? He knew the answer, of course: Nannie Rawley was a test of his faith, his cross to bear. But when would enough be enough?
"Haven't I done what I could?" he asked as he walked, raising the palms of his hands and mouthing the words without sound. "I've written letters. I've explained the facts. I've given her scientific advice, and I have given her the Holy Word. Good God, have I not done enough on behalf of that woman's mortal soul?"
One of the leaning trees in the bank shifted hard, with a groan and a crack, causing the old man's heart to leap in his chest like a crazed heifer trapped in the loading chute. He stopped dead on the trail, laying a hand on his chest to calm that poor doomed beast.
"All right," Garnett Walker said to his God. "All right!"
Garnett did admire a well-set orchard, he'd give her that much. He liked the cool, shaded ground spread under the trees like a broad picnic blanket, and he liked how the trunks lined up for your eye as you walked through: first in straight rows and then in diagonals, depending on how you looked. A forest that obeyed the laws of man and geometry, that was the satisfaction. Of course, these trees had been planted by old Mr. Rawley back in 'fifty-one or so, while she was off at her college. If she'd done the planting, why, they'd surely be all higgledy-piggledy like trees in a woodland glade. She'd have some theory about that being better for the apples.
He knew for a fact she was putting in a new section of trees in the field on the other side of her house, though he hadn't been over there, so he couldn't say if they were straight or not. She'd mentioned that they were scions cloned off one of the wildings that had sprung up in the fallow pasture on the hill behind her orchard. That field looked awful, the way she was letting it grow up, but she claimed it was her and the birds' big experiment and that she'd discovered a particularly good accidental cross up there, which she'd patented under the name "Rachel Carson." What did she think she was doing, patenting a breed and grafting out a whole new orchard? Those trees wouldn't start to bear apples for another ten years. Who did she think would be around to pick them?
Garnett's plan today had been to go right up and rap on her screen door, but on his way up the drive he'd spied her ladders and picking paraphernalia scattered around out here in the orchard on the west side. He crossed over just below her big vegetable garden, which looked well tended, he had to admit. By some witchcraft she was getting broccoli and eggplant without spraying. Garnett didn't even plant broccoli anymore--it was just fodder for the looper worms--and his eggplants got so full of flea beetles they looked like they'd taken a round of buckshot. He inspected her corn, which was tasseling nicely, two weeks ahead of his. Did she have corn earworms, at least? He tried not to hope so. He'd gone almost as far as the line fence that separated their fields when he heard her humming up in the foliage and saw her legs on the ladder, sticking out below the ceiling of green leaves overhead. This is how a duck must look to a turtle underwater, he thought wickedly. Then he took a deep breath. He wasn't going to dally around here.