A Parchment of Leaves (20 page)

Aaron got into his truck and drove slowly out of the holler. We run up the path and found Aidia standing on the porch. She was still holding the gun out in front of her but eased it down when we drew near. Curls hung down in her face and were caught in the corners of her mouth, trembling each time she blinked. The baby set on the porch floor beside her, bawling.

“Aidia? What in the world?” I said.

Aidia turned her eyes to me without moving her head. “I never aimed for him,” she said.

“You ought to have,” Serena said, and put her hand on Aidia's face. Her cheek was wet—a single damp line where one tear had fallen.

“I just wanted to scare him, that's all,” Aidia said, looking past us.

“You sure enough did, I reckon,” Serena said. She wrapped her fingers about the barrel of the gun real slow, keeping her eyes on

Aidia's face. She eased it away, and Aidia let her arms fall limp at the sides of her body.

I bent down and picked up the baby. Matracia nuzzled into my neck, little shudders running through her body. That little baby just clung to me, holding on to me with all its might.

“He tried to smother me again. I won't live like this,” Aidia said. “I'll leave him.” Her eyes were big, and when she blinked, tears fell quickly down her cheeks. She didn't wipe them away. “But I never tried to kill him. I just wanted him to leave me alone.”

“We know that,” I said, patting Matracia's back. I thought Aidia might be out of her mind. “But something's got to stop up here. This baby is terrified. Look at her trembling.”

Serena put her arms around Aidia's shoulders and steered her into the house. It was neatly kept and smelled of lemon juice and talcum. Everything was in order except for an overturned chair and a photograph laying face down. Jagged pieces of glass lay strewn about the edges of the picture frame.

“He put his fist into our wedding picture,” Aidia said. “I don't even know why he got so mad. He said he was going to gamble and I went and set on his lap, trying to be good to him. I kissed him on the lips and asked him not to leave me up here by myself tonight. I said, ‘Look at this lonely old night,' but he pushed me off onto the floor and started hollering. Busted our picture, and when I started hollering over it being broke, he jerked me up. And he capped his big hand over my mouth. I thought I would smother to death. I seen stars, I needed air so bad.”

“Ain't no use in taking such as that,” Serena said. She bent and turned the picture over, then laid the broken pieces of glass atop it.

“He finally set me down, just as gentle as anything, and I fell to the floor dying for a breath. I made myself get up. When he turned to go on, I run in there and got the gun and shot it over his head”—Aidia set down and covered her face—“just to let him know I wasn't about to take it no more. Just to scare him.”

“Hush now,” Serena said. “Calm yourself.”

“What will he do when he comes back?” Aidia said, her eyes pleading to me.

I put my knuckle into the baby's mouth to pacify her. Matracia gnawed at my finger, and Birdie tugged at my skirts. I did not answer Aidia, but I thought,
He'll kill you stone-hammer dead. He'll catch you asleep and kill you.

A
aron had been gone three days when he opened my door and come right in without even knocking.

I had just got Birdie to sleep and she still laid across my lap. I had spent the last hour rocking her in front of the fire, running my hand down her face. She was getting to that age where the only time I could really love on her was when she was asleep. It had rained all day—one of them straight-down rains of true autumn—and the night held the chill of cold water.

I looked up from Birdie's face when I heard something on the porch. Before I could even rise, Aaron was inside the house, the cold air coming in behind him. He didn't say a word. The cold steamed off him. He was drunk and his eyes were heavy lidded, dark, as if he had seen something so horrible that he couldn't bear it. He stood at the door with his arms hanging down at his sides, like he was waiting to be asked to step farther in.

“What are you doing, Aaron?” I said, so quietly that I thought he might ask me to speak up. “I don't like you just walking in here like that.”

“I don't want to go home.” He didn't move.

I rose. I tried to act like I wasn't afraid of him, but I was. When his eyes turned this way, I knowed the things he could do. I remembered the way he looked that day in the creek, the way his eyes had burned out of his face the night he had strangled Aidia. I laid Birdie on a little pallet I had fixed on the floor close to the fire.

“You go on home, now,” I said, just like it wasn't a bit strange for him to walk into the house unasked. “Aidia's worried to death over you.”

“Bull,” he said, and his mouth seemed full of spit or dirt. “I ain't going up there.”

“You can't stay here, Aaron. You know that.” I took up the poker and tapped at the logs in the grate. The sparks flew up and popped like rocks hitting tin, and a cloud of ash drifted out.

“Go on to your wife and little baby, Aaron,” I said, just as cool as a cucumber. “Straighten up and start doing right.”

“Don't talk to me like I'm a child,” he said, still standing there like his feet were nailed to the floor, his brow thick and heavy. He kept his eyes on me.

“Don't act like one, then,” I said, and dusted ash off of my skirt.

I went to set back down and he took a big step forward, like he was stepping over a ditch. He grabbed hold of my arm, twisting it around until I had to fall against his chest. His hand was so cold, like there was no blood in him. He stunk. He smelled of dirt and sourness and liquor and smoke. His scent covered my clothes, flew into my mouth. He held my wrist up level with his chin and breathed onto my face. He held me like that for a long minute, it seemed like—just looking down into my eyes. I didn't even feel the pain in my wrist, seeing the way he was looking at me. It felt like I had been attached to him and would never be cut loose. I thought of screaming out, but there was no use in it. Nobody would hear me, and I didn't want to wake up Birdie.

“Aaron, let go of me,” I whispered. All at once I was out of breath. I heard the tremble in my own voice.

At that he clamped his mouth over mine. He held the back of my head with his other hand and pushed himself against me. I tried to pull away but couldn't. His tongue darted into my mouth, his lips seeming to cover half my face. He bit my lip, and his teeth scraped against mine. I sunk my fingernails into his wrist as far as they would go. I dragged them down the side of his hand, and I could feel meat in my nails. He drawed back quick and slapped me with a hand that felt like a paw, so heavy that it didn't so much slap me as knock my face to the side. I could see blood on his shirt cuff where I had scratched him. He put two fingers to the streaks, looking at the redness there.

I moved backward across the room, my hands feeling my way behind me. I was trying to get to the kitchen. I didn't know what I was going to do once I got there. But he caught me by the arm and shoved me down on the floor. He got down on top of me and held both my arms above my head with one hand. He was stronger than normal, fueled by some kind of wild rage.

I could feel him wrestling my skirt up and ripping the waistband out of my shift. I looked around myself, trying to find some way of getting him off of me. But I couldn't see anything clearly. It was as if a quick hand was throwing pictures down on a table that I was expected to take note of. There was a knife on the supper table. There was the shotgun, leaned in the corner of my bedroom. There was a pair of scissors in my sewing basket, catching the glint of firelight on their silver handles. There was the poker, hanging by the fireplace. I should have never hung it back up, should have held on to it, chased him out of the house with it. All of these things were out of my reach.

He ripped my blouse open, and the scent of his greasy hair slipped into my mouth. I twisted my shoulders side to side, trying to buck him off, and when he didn't budge, I said, “Don't.” It was the only word I could cough up.

He rocked his hips against me hard, and then there was a sharpness that stung like fire. His breath come out in great, ragged sighs
from his mouth. If I just laid there, lifeless as a dishrag, it would be over in a minute.

I thought of Redbud, when I was a child. I thought of putting my fingers out to make touch-me-not flowers pop open. I remembered the smell of the earth there, the clatter of the creek running into the river. My braid touching the surface of water when I leaned forward to fish out a shining rock. I recalled sitting there by the creek while the men cleaned squirrels upstream. I saw intestines rolling over on the rushing water, and tufts of fur floating above the creek, as if drawn by water, like feathery bits of dried dandelion.

Then he was still except for his breathing. Laying on top of me like a pile of lumber. I could feel his heart against mine, pumping his blood. I was amazed that he was a living thing, just like me. He was breathing. Soon he would be hungry, his mouth would thirst. He was a person, and this did not seem possible.

I laid so close to Birdie that I could hear her breathing, too. When he finally moved again, running his hand up my thigh, I couldn't help but to cry out. “No!” I squalled, and when I did, Birdie stirred.

He raised his head and held it over my face, staring me in the eye. “Vine,” he said, but it was not me he was talking to. He spoke as if his mouth were full of bile.

Birdie moved again, reached out onto the pallet, feeling for me there. “Mommy?” she said, and by her voice I knowed that she was still asleep. He leaned up then, like he had not even known Birdie was in the room. He looked around crazily for her, although she laid there across from us. She moved once again, rolled over, and he slid over me, his nakedness right against my belly. He leaned down, his face very close to hers. I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn't stand the thought of him being so close to her, maybe even touching her.

I saw all of this in my head and I knowed right then what I had to do.

I shoved my way out from under him. I don't know how. I used
everything I had in me and got out. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the knife off the table, and I could feel him right behind me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him. He walked toward me with his hands held out palm up. His breath come out in a big shudder and he grabbed me again.

I spun around quick and sunk the knife into his neck hard, so hard that I felt the tip hit something solid and ungiving. He fell against the kitchen table, and the chairs rattled around him as he stretched out on the floor. He just laid down, like all the bones in his body had forgot how to work together.

I stood there, looking down at him. Blood come out in big, thin bubbles. It seeped out onto the floor slowly, spreading like dye on fabric. Aaron's left hand moved, rubbing around in a circle.

Everything else was froze. My hand felt numb from having held the knife.

I couldn't watch him anymore. I knowed he was dying, and there was not one thing I could do to change that now. I looked away, looked at anything but him.

There was nothing but the sound of it, anyway.

I kept my eyes on the wall, trying not to listen to the tapering off of his breathing, the sound of his blood spreading out on the floor, his hand stroking the rag rug. He did this for a long time, until his hand slowly come to rest, little by little. I stood there until there were no more sounds.

When I could make myself move again, I went to the fireplace and sunk down on the floor next to the pallet. I gathered Birdie up in my arms and rocked her, thankful she hadn't awoke. She was a sound sleeper. I put my face into her neck, warm and damp, and breathed in her scent. She smelled of sweet milk and the Ivory soap I had bathed her in, not more than two hours ago. Just two hours ago I had been bathing my baby and listening to the crack of the fire. Now I run my hands over her back and her legs and her face. I sat there a long time, holding her. Afraid I might never get to again.

The fire licked against the rocks and was hot on my back. Outside, there was the silence only coldness has—big, covering everything. They was a throbbing in my wrist and in my back, where I had hit the floor. I listened to Birdie breathe and worked my own air until we were in rhythm. This made the silence bearable.

Everything run through my mind. I settled on the one thing that made the most sense for me at the time.

I
wrapped Birdie up in the quilt that had warmed by the fire, covering her face and all. I grabbed my mackinaw and put it on, throwed a scarf around my neck. When I got outside, it was so cold that the air went right through the coat. I tucked my chin into my neck as I run down the road. Cold air whistled into the collar of my coat. Birdie wiggled around under the quilt, and I slowed down to pat her back and coo into her ear. I knowed that I would have to walk to keep from waking her up. I didn't want her to awake and I was terrified that she would. Even though she slept like the dead, the air was cold enough to raise anybody.

“It's all right,” I whispered. “Mommy's got you.”

My footsteps sounded loud on the hard-packed road, and the icy wind roared in my ears. Already my face felt numb. There was no moon and I couldn't have seen anything even if I had looked up, so I just kept my head down. I knowed the way good enough to make it out of God's Creek. Even when I slowed to a steady trot, my footsteps still seemed to crack on the still of night. It was the only sound.

It was as if the creek had stopped running, as if no dogs were barking in America Spurlock's yard. Everything was still and stopped and silent.

It was only a short piece down the main road until I got to the mouth of Free Creek. I run across the footbridge, and then I was in Serena's yard. I stopped for a minute at the porch steps and heard the whinnying and shuffling around of the horse in Serena's lot. The guineas stirred and babbled. Serena would know someone was about. There was a dim light burning in the window, so I knowed she was still up. She had had a long delivery that day and I had doubted she would even be home yet. But she was, and even though I needed her in a desperate sort of way, now I wasn't for certain I could face her.