The Bully of Order (13 page)

Later I heard someone on the porch when I was coming from the pantry, and I couldn't help but smile. My body fairly ached for Jacob's return, but the door opened and it was Matius. He stood there blinking, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. When he saw me he took off his hat and sniffed the air.

“Did you fix me dinner? I smell chicken.”

“Why're you here?”

“My house. My homecoming. I don't remember inviting you to stay here, but sometimes I'm forgetful.” He shut the door behind him and dropped his pack and sat down at the table.

“Jacob will be home any time.”

“Good. We need to settle accounts. I believe you owe me rent.”

“We owe you nothing. Get out.”

He smiled. “Go on, fix me a plate.”

When I looked at the shotgun above the door, his eyes followed mine. “Duncan's just outside,” I said.

“No, I saw him through the trees. He looked like he'd been put under a spell, talking to himself and singing. Dim as his father.”

I fixed him a plate. I set it on the table.

He looked at the food and then back at me. He had the same long jaw and crooked eyebrows as Jacob, but his eyes were cold. “I've returned with my son, Jonas,” he said. “But on account of he's a low, sinning scrub like your husband, he's in town with the whores and drunkards.” He held up his hand and rubbed his index finger against his thumb. “We made a fortune in the gold fields of Alaska.”

“Go and spend it then. Anywhere but here.”

“Speaking of prodigals, how is my brother?”

“Doing just fine without you. We don't want you here. You'll finish what's on your plate and go.”

“Once again: my house.”

“Jacob gave you the money to build it.”

“Still mine.” He took up his fork and poked around at the food on the plate and then set it down again without eating anything. “Maybe I'm not hungry. Maybe I need a bath.”

“There's no tub. Not for you there's not.”

“I don't need a tub. Heat me some water, and we'll do it here at the table.” He grabbed himself. “We'll start in the middle where the smell's the strongest and work our way out.”

I looked again at the shotgun, and Matius leaped to his feet and he was on me. I fought him back and pushed him over, and he tripped over the chair he'd toppled when he got up. While he was on the ground I hurried by him and fetched the shotgun and cocked it and leveled it at his chest.

“Here I was thinking you'd be glad to see me. Might even thank me for building you a house. Where would you be now if it weren't for me?”

“That's a question I've often asked myself.”

He used the chair to get to his feet. “You better shoot me, woman.”

“I tried to be kind and give you a meal, but you've refused, so get out.”

“If you don't shoot me, I'll come back here and beat you until my hands break.” He picked up the chair and hurled it at me and knocked the gun sideways, and then he was on me again and he had the gun and he tossed it away. He had his knee between my legs, working them apart. He pressed his palm to my forehead with his thumb in my eye and held me down to the floor.

“I'll kill you,” I said. “Stop. Please.”

“I've been waiting for this day. Last time, remember, that was so sweet. I love you, you know that?”

“You don't. Please. Duncan could come in. Don't do this.”

“He'd be lucky if he had me for a father. Anybody but Jacob. Calm yourself and let me at you.”

“Why do you hate me so much?”

“This isn't hate, darling. This is my love. It can be a bit brusque at times, I'll admit, but for me, oh, I feel rosy. I'm bursting. Be still and love me back.”

I was trying to keep my skirt down when my hand brushed the paring knife in my apron pocket, where I'd left it when I came from the pantry. I put it to his throat.

He froze when he felt the blade. “Two chances,” he said. “Once with a gun and now with a knife. I repeat, you better kill me if you won't submit, because I'll come back here and take everything from you.” His breath caught in his throat. “I love you is why.” He smiled, his eyes lunatic. “I'll kill yer boy.”

I pushed the blade into the skin, and blood began to trickle out. He took his hands off me and sat back and I followed him, never letting the pressure off the blade. “If you come near him, I'll kill myself.”

“Dark talk.”

“It's the truth.” I walked him toward the door and gave him a shove and picked up the shotgun again with the knife in my palm, flat against the forestock. “Get your bag and go.”

“I'll come back.”

“Don't.”

He hoisted his pack onto his shoulder. “Time for some paint in here,” he said. “Yer lucky, I'll let you pick the color.”

The door opened, and Duncan was there. He saw something was wrong and stepped back, and his uncle went by him.

“He's tall,” Matius said.

“He's better than you in every way.”

“Maybe tonight, Nell. Maybe I'll come back tonight.”

“Jacob will be home.”

“Not if I find him first.”

Then he was gone. Duncan shut the door and took the shotgun from me and stood at the window.

“That's my uncle?”

“Yes.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No.” I straightened my dress and smoothed my hair. I still had the paring knife in my hand, and there was blood on the blade. I set it down on the table and picked up the plate I'd fixed and covered it and put it above the stove.

“Should I follow him?” Duncan asked.

I sat down at the table. I felt like if I laid my head down I would fall asleep. “Never,” I told him. “Never follow that man anywhere.”

A
sober morning, and without
warrant I arrived. No thunder ushered me in, no lightning, only a quiet and endless rain. This had been coming. The making of a road ends in the end of it, an ocean voyage, the shore. Fall tumbles to winter. The making of a brute completes in a murder. The ruin of a life; I stand waiting. There's no other place, even if I had strayed. And I had, mostly, I had.

My brother Matius remembers things differently than I do. He broke his foot when we were boys, not me. He swears it was the other way. I can see him now clearly in my mind, as clear as the mud on the ground, crying in the lane at the bottom of the hill, the gray horse twisting under a riderless saddle and disappearing into the fog.

Crying too hard to have cake
. That was the last thing I remembered him saying when we were on the road, before we went in.
Crying too hard to have fucking cake
.

Approaching the house, a velvet night with smooth, oily rain. No matter, faces up to it; we did not care. Three of us: nephew Jonas, brother Matius, and me, the father and husband. Three separate but shared, call them staggering bloodlines; bottles emptied, slung crooked, gargled. We pulled the road beneath our boots, bent at the waist, arms swinging. Mud splattered. The windows were bright and squarely inviting, like hot sun on calm water, on naked flesh. We could've been robbers with knives and clubs. We could've razed the house and pissed on the ashes. Nell was in there unprotected, with only Duncan to watch over her. I left them this way often. We abandon what we cannot protect.

Before the three of us left town, when we were at the tables, after Matius and Jonas found me at the paymaster's, I remember thinking: She loves me still, somehow, of course she does. With the letters it didn't seem far-fetched. If I thought this again before we started home, I don't recall. Don't recall anything but the fucking cake. Happiness is such a strange and illusory contentment; it was yours, and then it left and hid behind the clouds. What was once fleeting soon became imaginary, the ghost of a memory that was itself a ghost, mirrors looking at mirrors: that was joy. Bottled smoke. I couldn't hide from her disappointment, my own failures, the strict privation in her eyes. We sometimes touched, not in greetings or good-byes, but in the night or when Duncan was away at the Parkers'. Upon my return from the camps, it was as if we were feeding our sad memories one by one, like so many misshapen pieces of coke, into the firebox until we were tired and emptied out, but warm.

Matius said he wanted to charge us rent. We were living on his claim in a house I'd paid for, not much to argue over, but argue we did. I gave in. I told him that we'd leave. He said we could stay, we just needed to pay him what he was due.

The light in the windows. I didn't remember anything after, not really. Pieces, imagined scenes: Nell bleeding. I wasn't sure what had happened until after, and Matius told me. She'd not look at me and would not let me help her.

That night at the Lone Jack one of the girls had made her way onto the bar and while dancing for coins she'd kicked over some drinks. She wasn't pretty or graceful, and it made everyone nervous that she was up there making a spectacle of herself. The room was angry and embarrassed for her. Then a man's fist hit the bar top, and worry-faced, she stopped dancing and crawled down, ass out like an alpinist, short thick legs with upturned toe, dolly shoes searching for purchase. She was soused herself. Her little feet kicking, kicking, reaching, and then she kicked over a spittoon and dropped to the ground, unsure of her footing, and discovered the wet and slimy pool she stood in. It was better to watch than the dancing because it had an end; it was over. The man stood over the little woman. She wasn't avoiding anything. His arm came up slowly and dropped fast. Her hands stayed at her sides. The sound was like a leather belt folded over on itself and shucked. It made my teeth ache a little to hear it. She lifted her face, grinning, said: “Hit me again, daddy.” And I laughed, I couldn't help it. I laughed alone and loudly. It was a moment in time, an ugly and sharp little moment, a mean steel sliver, the jag. Then we all laughed, even the men with their drinks on the floor. I laughed until my eyes watered. Later in the night I stood to go outside to piss, and the greasy spit from the spilled spittoon had spread across the floor and was all on my boots. The gelatinous pool made me very angry, but I couldn't say why. I guess it made me feel small, like the woman was small; and it's not like my boots could be harmed or filthier, but I stood there feeling corrupted just the same.

In my drunken dream Nell wouldn't speak, wouldn't say a word. She watched the floorboards, the corners of the room, doorways, watched, it seemed, the places I'd been or the places where I would soon go but not where I was. I'd fallen down there. I'd slept there. I'd eaten there and entered there and opened those cupboards. Mine. And Duncan too, he was awake now, tight-lipped and kaolin pale, a gorgeous, only barely male half piece of his mother.

I wondered if memory could change a person's future.

Matius and I had a dog, Hammer, when we were boys. He was kept in the side yard, picketed to a locust post. He wore a mule-run around it and barked endlessly, each time as if it were the first and he was surprised at the sound coming from his mouth. He drove our father mad. Our mother never said anything about him. The stableman's boy fed him. He'd been named after Thor's hammer. He was to be our hunting dog, and he'd been expensive. Maybe he was chasing something, it's impossible to know, but he tore the post out of the ground, dragged it a fair way, and went onto the porch. From there he wrapped the rope around the table and chairs and finally broke through a loose section of porch rail and hung himself. I'd come home from school to find Matius crouched in front of the hanging dog; its tail was touching the ground and the skirting on the porch was clawed down to raw wood. Nobody had heard anything, not our mother or Matius or anybody that had been at the house working. People were always at the house; it was a busy place. I asked Matius where he'd been when it happened, and he just smiled. He'd finished school the year before and was usually to be found at home during the day. I didn't understand how no one had heard anything. It'd taken some time. I was crying when I hugged Hammer and lifted him up and cut him down with my pocketknife and he fell on me, pinned me to the ground, and I had to wait for Matius to pull him off. Sometimes I imagined Matius watching Hammer die without lifting a finger and wondered what kind of mark that would leave on his soul.

The eve dripped and formed the veil of my arrival, or my departure. We've all done horrible things, but I've done the worst. I'd gone beyond forgiveness and entered a foreign and evil land. It's not that only the strong survive or that the meek shall inherit the earth; it's that there's a middling and lowering in all things. The strong too will die and get sick and weaken, and the strongest of the meek will dominate the weaker. When we cleared the forest the scrub came back first—the alders, ash, willows, vine maple, cascara—and uniformly took over. It choked on itself and never amounted to anything of value but it kept us out didn't it? It kept us away, like a bandage protecting a wound. The giants we fell were gods. What we left behind was mortal. What we left behind was us, but wait a thousand years and you'd see the difference. God would return. We were just trashpickers, beetles and crows, and to the destitute nothing is useless.

Nell, honey, can you see why I failed?

My blood, my family, save Matius, was on the other side of the world from here, the lighted side of the moon as it compared to the Harbor. I thought: They can't know what's happened with me, but could their memory of me lead them here? If they study it closely enough, can they find me? Does a man's history transmit forward depending on how the rope is pulled or slacked, or is it all just a tangle of telegraph wires with most of them out there unattended? What if there is only one wire or route, and that's where you're going? How do you know when you'll find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder with the hangman? Will it be the wires you left untended that hang you? The worst place, this solitary juncture; it came at the end of my arm, the end of my reach. I'd never struck someone, besides Matius, out of anger in my whole life.