After Eli (11 page)

“Death’s just God’s way of showin’ His believers what it’s like to be forever achin’ with happiness. O my people, happiness. Happiness in bein’ free of all this old world’s pain. Bein’ free of anger. Bein’ free of fear. Bein’ free of always wantin’ more.”

“
Free, dear Jesus, free.
”

“Death. Death. Old, old Death. Where is he, anyhow? Where’s his hidin’ place? Up in the mountain? Somewhere in town? Down by the river? Where’s his hidin’ place? What is old Death, anyhow?

“Death’s not some ghost, sneakin’ in when it’s pitch-black night.

“O my people, that’s not what old Death is.

“Death’s God’s mercy comin’ on the quiet, swift wings of sweet, sweet angels. O yes, my people. That’s what Death is.”

“
Sweet Jesus.
”

The old minister stepped forward in the aisle. His eyes swept the congregation and he nodded happily. He turned to Floyd.

“Sweet, sweet angels, brother Floyd. Picked by the Almighty God Jehovah, Himself. Gentle angels who hear God’s message
and do God’s will with gladness. Gladness because they know, brother Floyd. O my people, they know.

“They know what’s ahead for the good. The good like Sister Ada. They’ve been on the bosom of God, restin’ their weary heads against His great, wide shoulder, and they’ve felt His blessedness. And they’ve heard the songs God sings like a baby’s lullaby when the fightin’s over and the day’s done.

“O yes, my people. Sister Ada liked singin’. So sing up for her. Not for mournin’, but for praisin’. Sing her to rest. Sing her loose from this place. Sing her on her angel’s trip through the valley of the shadow of Death, up through the Naheela Valley, up over the mountains. Sing her on up until she dwells in the house of the Lord forever and leans her weary face on the great, wide shoulders of the Almighty.”

He was suddenly spent and his voice broke and he struggled for breath. He stepped back and leaned one hand on the coffin and fought the light dots of pain in his brain. Then he looked into the coffin and smiled and whispered, “Ada.”

GARNETT CANNON STOOD aside from the choir of mourners in the June heat—in the cemetery of names he had once touched and squeezed and probed—and he felt a loneliness he had never known. He watched the gravesiders moving among themselves in a daze, tightening the close circle around the deep rectangular hole. It was a tableau of an eternal rite and Garnett knew their most private feelings: Who would be next? He saw their eyes darting about them, searching for the premonition that floated in the air like a specter. There was an eerie sense of expectation, as though a burial bouquet of dark flowers would be flung above their heads and fall into the hands of one of them.

They stood in generations. The toothless old, bent at the neck, frail as twigs. The tiring. The strong, with chesty bodies and burned work faces. The very young, afraid of the singing at the graveside. They were the whole of humanity, thought Garnett. From God’s beginning myth to the last child spewed down the liquid tunnel of its membrane shell, breaking loose from its hot cavity. They were all of all people. They were the royalty and the remnants of a noble mutation caused by accident or God. Garnett was not certain which. God, he supposed. He did not know if he believed in God, but he did believe in the frustration that made his guts, if not his voice, cry out.

He stepped back to the shade of an elm and slipped the knot
of his tie. Perhaps God was just a word, he thought. Perhaps the whole gold-leafed, red-lettered tale was a primeval illusion and Mama Ada would rot like a diseased potato and nothing about her would move a single inch from the oak box with its brass handles and hinges.

He fanned his face with his hat. The crowd was singing “Stand by Me.” He knew he would go early that night to Pullen’s Cafe and drink long and bully the crowd with his view of the world beyond the valley. The men would listen respectfully until he accused Roosevelt of being a Hyde Park demigod, and then they would shake their heads in their disapproving manner and mutter, “Now, wait a minute, Doc. Ain’t no need to go that far.”

But Garnett loved the men of Pullen’s Cafe. He loved their tolerance and their stubbornness. He loved the literature of their stories. He loved the peace they seemed to bring with them like a silent companion. It was a mystery why they enjoyed peace in Pullen’s. Perhaps it was a fraternal thing, but without the Greek or the initiation. Mountain quid pro quo: Something for something, but there was no one who cared to measure or test the something, and that, in its own way, was peace.

* * *

The singing stopped and there was scripture and a prayer and the coffin of Ada Crider was lowered into the grave and the crowd began to walk away.

Garnett saw Rachel standing alone, waiting for Dora and Sarah to join her. He thought of the Irishman. He pulled his hat on his head and walked to her.

“Rachel,” he said in greeting.

“Doctor,” she replied solemnly.

“It hurts to lose her,” he confessed. “Maybe more than anybody since I’ve been here. I loved that old woman.”

“Yes. Me, too.”

“Are you all right?” he asked. He did not care if the question sounded personal. Being personal was his business.

She nodded.

“Just wanted to know,” he replied. “Been a long time since you’ve been in to see me. Not since Sarah was born, I guess.”

“I’ve been well,” Rachel said. “So’s Sarah.”

Garnett looked across the cemetery to where Sarah stood obediently beside Dora and a group of older women.

“She’s grown almost,” he remarked. “A woman now. And pretty. Got Eli’s fairness, but she looks like you just the same.” He removed his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the perspiration from his eyes. “By the way,” he added, “I was glad to meet that O’Rear fellow. You tell him I meant it about coming down to Pullen’s. If he’s Irish—and he is—he’ll like it.”

Rachel looked at him suspiciously, but his eyes were scanning the leaving crowd.

“I’ll tell him,” she said.

“Good.”

Garnett began to walk away. Then he stopped and said, “If you need me, Rachel, let me know.” He turned and left without waiting for a reply.

* * *

The fence stretched like a backward question mark across the field and in a widening semicircle above the house. Michael worked steadily in the heavy, thick heat, but he had changed. He no longer walked the fence line at night with Rachel and Sarah and no longer boasted of his workmanship. His voice had lost its merriment and he often sat for long periods without speaking, absently carving on a block of wood. He seemed distant and solemn and restless, and his silence was as commanding as his bluster had been.

He was a wind that had calmed and his moods affected each of the three women differently.

To Rachel, it was a prelude to his leaving, the last calling of the wanderer’s instinct. It had been so with Eli and Eli had left
many times. She had been controlled around Michael in the days following Mama Ada’s death—never touching, never asking, never signaling. She had lain awake at night and felt the imprint of his body and thought of the short, dark distance between them and she had plotted going to him. But she could not. She could not risk discovery, nor could she risk absolute surrender to him; surrender would have meant the confession that Eli was only part of her, not all. She loved Eli, she repeated to herself again and again, but here was this other man; here was Michael. And she fought his presence with a practiced coolness. She could not go to him and she knew he could not come to her; he was the kind of man who waited, who tortured women with his patience. Still, she yearned to hold his face and bring it to her breasts and feel him thrusting deep within her. She wondered if he thought of leaving because she would not go to him at night.

To Dora, there was warning in Michael’s behavior. He was planning to stay. After the fence, there would be no reason to remain, but Michael would not leave and Dora knew it. He needed to invent an excuse and he would find one. Dora watched him closely. She knew that he would not simply pass among them as a casual visitor would; when he left them, there would be scars.

Sarah was not suspicious. She was in awe of Michael. To her, there was nothing mysterious about his silence. He had grown accustomed to them and to his surroundings and had settled comfortably into an involuntary rhythm, like breathing. Michael belonged. He belonged there, among them. And he was not always quiet. Not with her. He was different when she brought him water in the glass jar and they sat together in the canopy of trees. Then he was relaxed and joyful. He laughed with her and told her colorful stories of his travels and he always kissed her on her forehead and pledged her to secrecy. Michael treated her like a woman, looked at her as a woman, spoke to her as a woman. It was man to woman, not man to
girl. Even in his gentle teasing, his eyes were telling her of urges that swam between them like dreams. And Sarah began to feel their privacy growing inside her, like an internal fitting of a joyful expectation. To Sarah, Michael belonged and he belonged especially to her. It made her angry when she heard her mother or Dora speak of the change that had infected Michael like a disease. She said nothing, but she began to grow apart from her mother and aunt, and at night she sat in her bed and thought of being alone with Michael in another place.

* * *

And then Michael’s somberness vanished as suddenly as it had fallen on him.

“I’ve been long enough in a fit of sorrow,” he announced one morning. “That good lady’s dyin’—Mama Ada—was a hurt-in’ thing. Kept takin’ me back to my own mother’s death, back across to Ireland. Was why I couldn’t go to the wake or the funeral. There’s them that can take dyin’ and understand it and there’s them that draw up like a sleep, but they don’t sleep. I’m that kind. But it’s been long enough. I’m back to thinkin’ about the livin’, not dyin’, and tonight I’ll be takin’ the good doctor up on his invitation for the café.”

His burst of exuberance startled Rachel. She looked automatically to Dora, as though seeking approval of the man sitting across from her.

“Gettin’ away from the work’ll do you good,” she said. “You’ve put in a lot of days.”

“I have, Rachel,” he replied. “But it’s been good for me. Good for my thinkin’. A man needs to leave somethin’ to be proud of and that fence is mine.” He laughed easily and drew butter across a biscuit with his knife. “Not much for a man to brag about leavin’, a fence, but it’s more’n most men I’ve known around the circus. Only thing they leave is sawdust and some broken-hearted ladies wonderin’ whatever happened to all the promises they’ve been told.”

“When’s the cows goin’ in?” Dora asked curtly.

Michael bit from the biscuit and chewed slowly. His eyes danced over Dora with amusement.

“Why, Miss Dora,” he said, teasing. “Sometimes a tiny little bird voice tells me you’ve got your doubts about the finishin’ of that fence.”

She dropped her eyes.

“Ah, now, Miss Dora. Am I right? Could that be a bit of the truth? Why, I don’t blame you. Not in the least. Here’s this braggart of a fellow, always boastin’ about somethin’ or the other, tellin’ stories that’d shame the lies of a sailor, and he’s fussin’ around with a barbed-wire fence that another man could’ve put up in a week. Huh, Miss Dora? Am I right?”

Dora’s lips twitched. Her face reddened in anger.

“Why sure and it’s the truth,” Michael continued lightly. “I’ve done it bit by bit, turtle-slow, so’s I could sit at this fine table and in the company of three handsome ladies, and not have to be roamin’ about the world, steppin’ over elephant droppin’s in some canvas tent.”

Dora’s eyes snapped up.

“Don’t nobody know the truth better’n them that says it,” she said hatefully. “It’s not my house and not my business.”

Michael leaned forward, toward her. The smile was still on his face.

“Miss Dora,” he said softly, “I told you not long ago, it’d be soon. And it will be and then I’ll be off, but when I go I’ll be leavin’ somethin’ that’ll make me remember havin’ been here. That’s the whole of it.”

An awkwardness crowded the room and the table. Sarah slumped in her chair and her eyes darted from Dora to Michael. She saw the intense war between them and for the first time she disliked her aunt.

“Dora don’t mean nothin’,” Rachel said quietly. “Havin’ you around’s been good for us. And it’s not just the fence. It’s all
the other things you’ve done to help out. I guess we needed it more’n we think.”

Michael looked at her, into her, and she was with him again in the barn, with the storm driving them into a fusion of touches.

“It’s a fine thing you’ve said, Rachel,” he replied. “A fine thing. And it does away with whatever gloom I’ve been in.” He turned to Dora. “Miss Dora,” he said, his voice soft and low, “could we be friends? Just for the short time left on the fence? Could we do that?”

Dora had not felt his voice before; she did now. It spread through her and over her. She could sense it rising in her throat and covering her face. There was no portent of danger in him, no reason for suspicion.

“I didn’t mean nothin’,” she whispered.

“I know it, Miss Dora,” he said. “I know it.”

There was a pause. Rachel interrupted it. She said, “That’s better. Much better. And it’ll be good for you to go to town tonight. We all feel that way. Don’t we, Sarah?”

Sarah pushed away from the table and stood. She dropped her face to the dishes before her.