ELEVEN

BEN KNEW THE bed was Lottie’s bed. The scent of Lottie, a clean scent, a flower scent, was in the bedclothing and in the pillow, and, Ben believed, he could feel the heat from her body, a lingering, soft heat. It was her bed, and the bed of Little Ben.

He had offered to sleep on a floor pallet in the center room with Foster. Could keep the fire stoked, he had said.

No, Lottie had told him. She and Little Ben would stay in the room with Foster. It was the way she wanted it, and the way Foster wanted it.

“Sometimes he gets a coughing spell at night,” she had quietly explained. “I make him some hot tea and put in some of his drink. Makes him sleep better.”

“I could do it,” Ben had volunteered.

“No,” Lottie had replied.

IT WAS PAST midnight, and still he was awake. There was a chill in the room, surprising to Ben, though he had guessed that nights in the Kentucky mountains would be cooler than in Jericho. In the Lottie-scented bed, he pulled the covering up to his face and lay still in her imagined body heat, and he thought of Foster’s request of him.

Take Lottie home.

“Always promised I’d take her home,” Foster had said. “Can’t now. Not now. You the only one I know I can count on for doing it.”

Ben had protested gently. “You’re going to get better, Foster. You’ll do it.”

“No, Ben, I’m not. No more going. Gone my last place.”

“I just got a few days, Foster.”

“Leave when you got to,” Foster had replied. “They’ll be going with you.”

“We can’t leave you here,” Ben had argued.

Foster had turned his face to Ben. “I got kin. They’ll be looking in on me.”

Lottie had not said anything. She had merely gazed into the fire, holding Little Ben, stroking his hair, and Ben had known that what Foster asked was a frayed agreement between them. Probably something they had talked about, quarreled over. And from the look on her face, Ben had guessed that Lottie had more to say, but would be quiet until she needed to speak.

“Will you do it, Ben?” Foster had asked in his whisper.

And Ben had answered, “Yes.”

It was the only answer he could give.

And in Lottie’s bed, in the ghost space of her body, he could feel the weight of his promise settling on him. He thought of Sally and of his mother. How could he tell them of such promises?

He closed his eyes, determined to dream of Sally. He did not. He dreamed of Lottie. Lottie before him in the tent, amber-pale light on her face and shoulders and breasts. Lottie had his hands in her hands, guided his hands to the nipples of her breasts, leaned to him, kissed him with her fire mouth.

BEN AWOKE TO the touch of Little Ben’s fingers on his face. A horizon of sunlight cut across the bedroom from the window, and Ben realized he had overslept.

“Breakfast,” Little Ben said softly, in a voice that was both baby and boy, the first words Ben had heard him speak.

“Be right there,” Ben said. He could smell the odor of chicory coffee and fatback and biscuits from the kitchen.

“Breakfast,” Little Ben said again.

Ben pulled himself from the bed and dressed quickly in a pair of older trousers and shirt, and he wiggled his feet into the shoes that were comfortable. Little Ben stood at the bed, leaning against the bedpost, and watched.

“Breakfast smells good,” Ben said, tying the laces of his shoes.

Little Ben did not move or speak. His large blue eyes did not wander from Ben.

“Your mama’s a good cook.”

A smile, almost imperceptible, posed on Little Ben’s mouth.

“C’mon, let’s go have some breakfast,” Ben said.

“Breakfast,” Little Ben repeated. The smile broke free, grew into a happy laugh.

BEN WAS STUNNED to find Foster sitting at the kitchen table with a blanket around his shoulders, feeding himself from a gravy-covered biscuit. A shine was in his eyes, his voice stronger: “Well, you look like you slept all right.”

“Sure did,” Ben said. A fire was in the fireplace, warming the room. He could see Lottie in the kitchen.

“Take a chair,” Foster told him. “There’s some of that coffee you brought us. I almost forgot how good coffee was.”

Ben sat at the table. He took the coffee and sipped from it. Stronger than his mother made, he thought, but he liked the taste. And maybe it was the water the coffee was made from, the same water that made the bourbon Foster had bragged about.

“That’s good,” Ben said.

Foster leaned to him, stole a glance over his shoulder toward the kitchen. “Had to show her how I liked it,” he said in a deliberate whisper. “Used to make it weak as well water.” He coughed a laugh, pulled the blanket tight to his shoulders. Under the blanket, he looked diminutive, a draped skeleton.

Lottie came from the kitchen, carrying a plate of food—gravy biscuits, fatback, a hard-fried egg with the yellow yolk broken and spread over the white. “Foster wanted gravy this morning,” she said, placing the plate on the table in front of Ben. “Hope you like it.”

“Sure smells good,” Ben said.

Lottie sat near Foster. “Sometimes that’s all he wants all day—gravy and biscuits.”

Foster coughed again, tucked his head, nodded agreement.

Little Ben slipped near Ben’s chair, watching him curiously.

“You eat?” Ben asked Little Ben.

Little Ben nodded a shy nod.

“Two whole biscuits,” Lottie said proudly. “One with gravy, one with brown sugar.” She motioned Little Ben to her. “Let him eat in peace, honey.”

The breakfast was good and filling, and Ben ate slowly, took a second cup of coffee offered by Lottie, listened to Foster tell of his ancestors who had moved into the Kentucky territory in 1823. His ancestors had fought Indians, Foster vowed. Fought them until they began to marry them. Why, his bloodline was as much redskin as white. Why he had been blessed with such good eyesight for playing baseball.

“Used to dream that’s what I was,” he said. “Indian. Used to dream I could shoot a dove on the fly with a bow and arrow.”

“Don’t overtalk,” Lottie warned him. “You know how tired it makes you.”

Foster ignored her with a shrug of his bone-sharp shoulders. He took more coffee, continued talking.

“One time, Ben, my people owned every inch of land on this mountain.”

“That right?” Ben said.

“Cut my first baseball bat from a ash about a mile from here. Put it by the fireplace and dried it out over the winter and then whittled it out with a draw blade and pocketknife and rasp file. Rubbed it down smooth with a cow bone. Had a handle like a rock.”

“What happened to it?” asked Ben.

Foster sighed, cleared his throat. His voice had become hoarse and he was forcing words. “Batted with it a long time, then broke it in a game we was playing against some team out of Tennessee, just over the line.”

Lottie moved from her chair to Foster. She said gently, “All right, that’s enough talking. You need to crawl back in bed and get some rest.”

Foster did not reply, and he did not resist.

“Ben, you take his other arm,” Lottie said.

“Sure,” Ben said, and he helped Lottie guide Foster back to the bed. Then he stood back and watched as Lottie pulled the covers over Foster, purring to him as a mother would purr to a baby: “You sleep now. You sleep. We’ll keep the fire up. Me and Ben. We’re right here. Me and Ben and Little Ben.”

Foster closed his eyes and in a few moments, his breathing became labored with sleep.

“He got himself all worked up,” Lottie said softly, “but he’ll be all right now.” She turned to Ben. “I got to pick some beans from the garden.”

“Why don’t you let me do it?” Ben said.

“Maybe you can take Little Ben down to the creek and fish for some catfish. Foster loves catfish.”

“Where do you keep the poles?” Ben asked.

“Right inside the barn. There’s a shovel there for digging worms.”

“You think it’s all right to leave Foster?” Ben said.

Lottie looked back at Foster. Her gaze held on him for a moment, then she said in a whisper, “I got to.”

THE GARDEN WAS below the barn, surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. The fence was for deer and bear, Ben reasoned. It was a small garden, hoe-dug instead of plowed. A row of beans, one of squash, two of corn, four hills of cucumber, four of potato, a half-dozen tomato plants, eight of pepper, some flowers Ben did not recognize, a small grouping of herbs—chives and mint and sage and rosemary. Once his father had kept such a garden in the backyard. His father had mastered the growing of tomatoes. Large, brilliantly colored, juice-filled. Too many tomatoes for the needs of the family, and so there were always giveaways to neighbors and friends.

“You stay where Big Ben can see you,” Lottie said to Little Ben.

Little Ben was outside the garden, searching for small stones to throw against the trees.

“You hear me?” Lottie asked.

Little Ben nodded absently.

“When he was little, I used to think he never was going to talk,” Lottie said. “I guess maybe he’s just a little slow at it.”

“I thought it might be because I was around,” Ben said.

“Some, maybe. He don’t see many people. Some of Foster’s people drop by once in a while, but they don’t usually have nobody Ben’s age with them. Just men mostly.”

“Maybe he’s a listener, instead of a talker,” Ben said.

Lottie smiled. “If he is, he gets a earful when all them men show up.”

A SMALL BRANCH of spring-fed water coiled into the creek, sweeping away the sand bottom and leaving a pool that Ben guessed was five feet at its deepest. He had fished with his father and Milo on such creeks and had quickly learned the lesson every fisherman knew—catfish found such spots because the springs and the rain washed in food and the pools held it.

The creek bank around the pool had been walked down and standing places had been fashioned by fishermen patient enough to wait for nibbles to become gobbled-down bites. Ben was surprised by the well-used look of the spot. He knew that Foster was not able to fish, and he doubted that Lottie had been there often. Once or twice, maybe. With Little Ben, maybe. She was not the fishing type. She would not have looked at the water and wondered about the fish; she would have yearned to follow its flow. Must be other cabins nearby, he thought.

He had dug worms at the pasture edge, near a small, wet-weather spring, handing each worm to Little Ben to drop into the can half filled with moist dirt. Little Ben seemed mesmerized by the worms, by the feel of their wiggling over the palms of his hands.

“Worms,” Ben had said.

“Worms,” Little Ben had repeated.

And now he sat with Little Ben on the bank of the creek, their cane poles pushed out over the water, lines hanging limp over cork floats that bobbed playfully on the pool’s dark pewter surface.

“When the cork goes under, you pull it up,” Ben said to Little Ben, because it seemed he should say something.

Little Ben did not reply. He gazed expectantly at the water and at the bobbing cork.

“Like this,” Ben added, and he demonstrated how to jerk on a line, setting the hook in the mouth of a fish.

Little Ben looked at him curiously, with amusement, Ben thought.

“Well, I guess you know how to do it,” Ben mumbled. “Looks like you been here before.”

Little Ben smiled.

“Worms,” said Ben.

“Worms,” echoed Little Ben.

BY ELEVEN-THIRTY on Ben’s pocket watch, they had caught six catfish that were of keeping size.

“Guess that’s enough,” Ben said. “Your mama may be wondering where we are.”

Little Ben looked toward the path leading to his home.

“Maybe we’ll come back later,” Ben said.

Little Ben grinned.

LOTTIE WAS SITTING on the front porch as Ben and Little Ben crossed the pasture from the woods. She held a basket of beans in her lap. Ben lifted up the string of fish, still dripping water. He could see a faint smile flicker in Lottie’s face, then fall away.

“She’s probably wondering why it took so long just to catch a little mess of fish,” Ben said. And then he offered Little Ben some advice: “Seems to me every woman on earth has a different idea of time when it comes to getting something done.” He could feel a flush on his face. It was the first opinion regarding women he had ever given, and he had said it quietly to Little Ben, not wanting it to carry across the pasture to Lottie. Lord, he thought, that’s the way my father used to talk to me, that half-whispering.

Little Ben ran ahead of Ben, reached his mother, wiggled himself up into her lap, put his head against her breasts.

“He’s a good fisherman,” Ben said, approaching. “Caught as many as I did.”

Lottie smiled. She pushed her fingers through Little Ben’s hair, kissed his forehead.

“I’ll get these cleaned,” Ben said.

Lottie looked up. Her eyes were dull. “It’s all right,” she said softly. She pulled Little Ben closer to her, then added, “Foster’s dead.”

THEY CAME SOLEMN-FACED, quietly, to bury Foster, wearing their church-and-funeral clothes. The clothes were scented with the faint odor of cedar from hot irons rested on cedar boughs.

They came bringing food and, with the food, mumbled regrets and low-voiced memories of Foster, who was a legend among them.

They came to see the little that remained of him in his pine-board coffin, but they could not. Lottie had had the coffin closed and nailed.

“No reason to shame him,” she had said.

She had dressed him in the only suit that he owned and had placed his baseball glove into the coffin with him, and when it was known among the mourners what she had done, they bobbed their heads in approval.

“No need to shame him,” they repeated.

Henry Quick and three other men had dug out a grave in the small family cemetery at the sideyard, and in late afternoon on the day after his death, the men set the coffin on ropes and lowered it into the ground.

A thin, back-bent preacher, with white hair that looked wind-whipped by the breath of God, stood at the head of the grave. He was dressed in a dingy black suit, with wool that had been picked by too much wear. His eyes were pale blue and small and carried an expression of sadness, as though sadness was pale blue in color. Yet, his voice was deep and rhythmic from the practice of making sermons, and the words he spoke were more like music than words. He recited the psalm about the valley of death, said that Foster was a gift from God and a man who would cause stories to be told until all life was dust, and then he prayed a gentle prayer of crossing over from world to sky. When he finished, he stepped back as Henry Quick and the other men began scraping dirt over the coffin with the sides of their shovels. A man with a mandolin began to play and sing “Amazing Grace,” and the other mourners began to follow along shyly with the lyrics, and the song rose up into the trees and dangled on limbs like wind chimes.

It was, to Ben, a mysterious and unsettling occasion. Dreamlike. And he found himself wondering if it was a dream, something from a prolonged sleep that was, itself, like death. He was uncomfortable in his train-traveling suit that did not smell of cedar from hot irons.

Only Henry Quick had spoken directly to him. Everyone else backed away in his presence, somehow reducing their bodies with tucked-in arms and hands, keeping their heads dipped, their eyes dancing furtively to him and away from him, and he could sense what they had said among themselves and, having seen him, what they were now sure of: stranger off the train, dressed like a senator full of speech, asking the whereabouts of Foster Lanier, and Foster dead less than a day later. Only an agent of God, or of Satan, had such powers.

They had a right to their suspicions, Ben reasoned. It was odd, Foster dying so soon after his arrival. He, too, had wondered about it, had wondered if Foster’s dying was from the weakness of his body, or from the helping hand of Lottie, the act of an agreement they had struck, an agreement as secret as any whisper ever passed between husband and wife.

He remembered going into the house after Lottie had told him of Foster’s death. The body was covered with a sheet. A pillow was on the corner of the bed and Ben had picked it up. The face of the pillow had seemed moist, like the damp left by steam, and something in the touching of it told Ben that it held the last breath Foster had taken.

He knew he would never ask Lottie about it. If Lottie had stopped his breathing, it was because Foster had begged it, and it would have been done gently, with caring. It would not have been murder. Murder was something cruel.

The mourners seemed only to know that an agent of death had arrived on an afternoon train, and that Foster was dead, and, one day, another agent would arrive for each of them.

Ben watched as they drifted away from the burial plot. Watched as they gathered their leftover food and utensils. Watched them pull themselves up onto wagons and buggies. Watched them disappear around the bends of the road under the cover of tree limbs. Watched them vanish in the purpling of sunset.

Henry Quick had said, “Lottie says you taking her home. I guess you’ll be going out tomorrow.”

“I guess,” Ben had replied.

“Won’t need but two tickets,” Henry had advised. “The boy goes free. Train stops at about two. Come on down in the buggy. I’ll take care of it and the horse.”

“What about this place?” Ben had asked.

“Somebody’ll take it up,” Henry had answered simply.

AT NIGHT, LITTLE Ben fell asleep early and Lottie put him in the bed where Foster had died.

“Do you think he knows what’s happened?” asked Ben.

“I guess,” Lottie said. “He’s been seeing it a long time. I guess he knows.”

“Does he know we’re leaving tomorrow?”

“I told him,” Lottie answered. “He never went anywhere, so maybe he don’t know what it means.”

“Do you have much packing to do?”

“Just one bundle,” Lottle told him. “It’s all done.”

“Guess we’d better get some rest then,” Ben said. “We got a long way to go.”

“I guess,” Lottie whispered.

BEN DID NOT know the hour that he awoke. Late, he guessed. Dark through the windows. He knew only that he had been sleeping soundly by the heaviness of his muscles.

And then he felt Lottie’s body curled against his back, her arm resting on his shoulder, and he could hear her deep, even breathing. Sleep-breathing.

His body tensed, but he did not move. He listened. And the sleep-breathing made him close his eyes.

He was more removed from all that he had ever been than he would ever be again—locked in a cabin in the tree-thick mountains of Kentucky, on a night so dark not even God could see through the blackness of it. And there was something good about it, he thought.

AT DAYBREAK, when Ben awoke, Lottie was gone from the bed. He dressed and went into the middle room, where Little Ben sat in a chair, eating a biscuit.

“Where’s your mother?” asked Ben.

Little Ben looked toward the door.

“She’s outside?”

Little Ben rocked a yes with his head.

She was at the gravesite, tearing apart a rose and dropping its petals over the dirt mound.

“Foster used to take rose petals and fold them up and make a little air pocket in them,” she said without looking at Ben. “Then he’d smash them against his forehead, and if they popped it meant somebody loved you. If it didn’t, it meant you was all alone.”

She folded a petal and held it in front of her face and then, in a sudden, punching move, she hit her forehead with it. The petal popped sharply. She dropped it over the grave and turned to Ben.

“Does somebody love me, Ben Phelps?”

“Foster sure did,” Ben said.

She looked back at the grave. “Yes, he did.”

“And you’ve got a little boy in that house that does,” Ben added.

Lottie smiled and tilted her head. “Do you, Ben?”

Ben thought of Sally Ledford, could see her face, hear her voice, feel her touch.

“Ben, do you?”

“You’re my friend,” Ben said after a moment. “I love you for being my friend, and for all you did for Foster.”

Lottie smiled softly. She said, “Do you know why I got in bed with you last night, Ben Phelps?”

“No,” Ben told her.

“I needed to be up against somebody who was warm. Foster hadn’t been warm in a long time.”

Ben did not reply.

“I just needed to be warm, Ben. That’s all. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“It’s all right,” Ben said.

AT NOON, BEN hitched the horse to the buggy and put his suitcase and the tied sack bundle that Lottie had packed into the carriage space, and then he helped Lottie and Little Ben up to the seat.

“Are you ready?” Ben asked quietly.

Lottie took one gazing look at the cabin and Foster’s gravesite. She nodded, folded her arm around Little Ben.

Ben clucked to the horse, tapped its rump with the line, and the horse strained against the buggy, its head lowered to the work of pulling.

At the road, Ben glanced back. He saw two gaunt, bent figures hobble-rush toward the garden—a woman wearing a ground-long cotton dress and a sunbonnet and a man in a black suit and dull white shirt, his white hair billowing over his head. The man was carrying a bucket.

“Somebody’s at the garden,” he said to Lottie.

She did not look back.

“Want me to go back and run them off?” asked Ben.

She shook her head. “It’s just Miss Polly and the preacher. Their garden didn’t make. I guess they hungry.”