THE BOY WAS SITTING on the back of the moving wagon, slumped forward at the shoulders as an old man would sit. His elbows pushed into his thighs and his fingers laced his hands together like bootstrings. His legs dangled from the bed of the wagon and he wagged them unconsciously in small air steps as he stared between his knees at the grass bridge in the center of the hard dirt road, unrolling in a pale green ribbon beneath the spoked wheels of the wagon. There was no expression on his face.
The boy’s father sat up front on a plank seat hooked to the side gates of the wagon. He had a thin back and he, too, was slumped forward, exactly like the boy, but his feet were propped on the front gate of the body and he held the rope reins of the two mules loosely in his hands. The wagon between the boy and his father, sitting with their backs to one another, was empty except for two axes and a large fertilizer sack filled with sweet potatoes.
* * *
Rachel Pettit stood at the front window of her house and watched the wagon moving slowly along the road. She knew it was Wednesday. Floyd Crider was a calendar. If it did not rain, he arrived always on Wednesday, always in the same hour, always at the same languid pace, always in the same hesitant mood. Floyd intrigued her. She was grateful for his attention and his concern, yet he intrigued her because, of all the men she knew, he was the most guarded and private. He was a male Crider and that was the way of the male Criders, as though it had been bred into them; it was a substance in their blood, passed down from generations in the darkness of mating. If you were a male Crider, you were born to silence and to a hollow, distant face with eyes covered by a dull film of surrender. And if you were a male Crider, you did not change. You lived and died in a monotone that was as empty as a sigh.
But Floyd had been a caring neighbor. Since Eli had disappeared, Rachel had learned to depend on Floyd for the safe man-presence he offered, as well as for the occasional man’s work demanded by the farm. His sense of obligation, sealed by the common borders of their land, was as absolute as an Old Testament law: It was the work of good deeds to watch and to help. And slowly, Rachel had learned Floyd well. She did not impose; she waited. She would not speak until Floyd spoke. She would not ask his advice about the farm until Floyd insisted that he be allowed to help. And she never spoke of Eli. To speak of Eli would have been to whimper and she could not whimper before Floyd.
Each Wednesday, when it did not rain, Floyd escaped the unending oppression of his failing land and made a visit to the town of Yale, and it was his habit to stop at the home of Rachel Pettit. Each Wednesday Rachel would hear the wagon, and she would stand behind the curtain of the window in the front room and watch as Floyd stopped his wagon fifty yards away at the mouth of the road turning into her house. He would sit and observe the house, expecting Rachel, or Dora, or Sarah, to greet him. He would sit and become uncomfortable and remove his hat and fan the air into his face. But he never looked at the boy, though the boy was always with him, always sitting in the back of the wagon, looking down.
And then Floyd would cup his hands to his mouth and call out: “Ho, anybody home?”
Rachel would not answer him at first call. Never at first call.
“Yo-hoo. Anybody home? Rachel? You there?”
In all the years, Rachel had always been there.
* * *
“Yo-hoo. Anybody home? Rachel? You there?”
Rachel stepped to the screen door. She knew Floyd could not see her from the road. She called, “That you, Floyd?”
“Yes’m. It’s Wednesday.”
Rachel pushed open the door and stood beneath the frame of the doorway.
“Mornin’, Floyd. Jack. Come on up. We’re all here,” she replied.
Floyd clucked to the mules and pulled them into the narrow road leading to the house. He stopped the mules at the edge of the yard and tied the rope reins to the hand brake. He then climbed slowly off the wagon, using the front wheel for steps.
“Thought somethin’ might’ve been wrong when you didn’t answer right off,” Floyd drawled, looking beyond Rachel. It was one thing Rachel had long known; Floyd could not look into her eyes when he spoke.
“Nothin’s wrong, Floyd,” replied Rachel. “I was in the back of the house. Didn’t realize it was Wednesday again. Week’s gone fast.”
“Time gets by and you don’t know it, I reckon,” Floyd said. “It sure does. More I live, the faster it goes. A man don’t know how little time he’s got unless he’s got a little age on him.” He nodded authoritatively and mumbled, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Rachel moved to the corner of the porch, above the steps. She leaned against a support post.
“Y’all all right?” she asked. “Mama Ada feelin’ better?”
“Doin’ good. Doin’ good. Have to help Mama around a little bit, but she’s feelin’ good. Sure is. Y’all all right?”
“Fine, Floyd. Fine. Sarah and Dora’s out back, workin’ out there in the garden.”
“Keeps me worried, y’all bein’ up here all alone,” Floyd said.
“Nobody’s bothered us, Floyd.”
“Can’t tell, though. Sure can’t. Times bein’ hard.”
Rachel knew what he wanted to say but could not.
“It’s been two months since the Caufields was found,” she replied patiently. “Whoever done that must’ve passed on through.”
“Could be.”
“Well, we’re fine, Floyd.”
“Uh-huh.”
Floyd stood nervously beside his wagon. His fingers moved absently to the blouse of his overalls and he withdrew a tobacco sack. He began to build a cigarette with the precision of an artist, his long, hard fingers moving gently over the thin paper, cupping it, tapping it full with shredded tobacco leaf, folding it in a single twist. Rachel watched him, fascinated by his skill.
“Me’n the boy’s goin’ to town,” Floyd said as he lit the cigarette. “I heard tell there was a man wanted some oak shingles cut. Thought y’all might be needin’ somethin’. Maybe you got some quilts you want carried to the store.”
Rachel looked at Jack Crider sitting on the back of the wagon. He had not lifted his head. He seemed preoccupied.
“No,” she answered. “Nothin’ today, Floyd. I’m grateful, just the same.”
“Sure wish Dora wadn’t so dead set against lettin’ me and the boy cut up some wood for y’all,” Floyd said slowly. “Wouldn’t take us but a little while.”
Rachel smiled. She said, “Don’t suppose it’s hurtin’ us, Floyd.”
Floyd sucked smoke from his cigarette. He looked around the yard, his eyes carefully examining the buildings. He pinched the cigarette from his lips and dropped it and ground it into the dirt with his shoe heel.
“Almost forgot,” he said quickly. “Got a sack of sweet potatoes in the wagon. Me’n the boy finished cleanin’ out the hill a couple of days ago. Got more’n we can use.” He turned to the wagon before Rachel could reply and effortlessly lifted the heavy sack and shouldered it. Floyd was small and thin, but strong.
“You didn’t have to do that, Floyd,” Rachel protested.
“Wadn’t no need in lettin’ ’em go to waste.”
“I know they’re good. Sarah loves sweet potatoes.”
“We had us a heavy crop last year. Made up the biggest hill we ever had,” Floyd said. “Where you want me to put ’em?”
“You don’t mind, in the storeroom.”
Rachel watched Floyd nod and drop his eyes from her face. She knew him; yes, she knew him well. Part of his caring was overplanting his garden, though his sharing of goods was always spaced and calculated, presented with timid excuses of having more than needed for his own family. It had become a familiar ritual between them: the gift hurriedly offered like an embarrassment, countered by protest, then excuse, then acceptance. The two could have been players in a motion picture, repeating a memorized script. There was never any improvisation or invention; it was always the same.
Floyd followed Rachel to the screen door, waited for her to open it, then entered the house.
The house was wood-warm. Its walls and floors and ceilings had cured into the soft tan of time and use. The smell of wood smoke and cooked foods and cleaning soaps coated the house and expired from the walls like a living thing, a breath. But there was no odor of a man, nothing of the musk of the field laborer, or of the sweat brine of the sawmill hand. The breath of the house was sweeter, more delicate, like evenings of early spring flowers or the perfume of lilac water on hands. It was a house that belonged to three women and contained only their presence.
There were five main rooms to the house—the living room, the kitchen, and three bedrooms, one for each of the women. A narrow corridor led from the kitchen along the back of the house to the small sideroom used for storing canned goods and food supplies, and to Dora and Sarah’s bedrooms. The largest of the rooms, belonging to Rachel, was at the front of the house beside the living room. Rachel’s room was both bedroom and workroom. Two heavy quilt curtains had been tacked to the ceiling, almost precisely dividing the room. One side was for sleeping, the other for sewing and quilting. Most of the hours of Rachel’s life were spent in the divided halves of the room. Once there had been a door leading from her room onto the porch, but Floyd had boarded it, with Rachel’s permission. “Makes me feel some better,” Floyd had said flatly.
* * *
“House looks good,” Floyd said routinely as he walked through the living room into the kitchen and to the sideroom. It was more than a compliment; it was a litany spoken by a man who had helped build the house, had repaired it, tended it with a craftsman’s pride. It was something Floyd always said.
“Dora scrubbed the walls this week,” Rachel replied.
“She’s a worker,” acknowledged Floyd, placing the potatoes against the wall in the sideroom. He added, “Woman like Dora, she’ll scrub the wood off.” He blushed at his weak humor.
“She likes to keep busy,” Rachel said. “She and Sarah’s been out in the garden all mornin’.”
Floyd looked instinctively through the window of the kitchen. He saw Dora and Sarah working in a small, flat field beside the barn.
“Been a lot easier if she’d of let the boy come over and run the middlebuster,” he said. “Would’n’ve took but a couple of hours. Make a better garden, bein’ plowed deep.”
“Dora’s got her ways,” Rachel replied simply.
“Yes’m.”
“I appreciate the potatoes, Floyd. I’ll cook some tonight.”
Floyd shifted nervously on his feet. He said, “Long as I’m here, I might as well take a look at that well pulley. Make sure the boy done it right.” He looked at Rachel and then quickly away. “If it ain’t no trouble,” he added.
“No trouble at all,” Rachel answered. She had forgotten about Jack repairing the well pulley. It had been a month and Floyd had not mentioned it before. “But it’s fine,” she said. “Jack’s handy when it comes to fixin’ things.”
“He’s all right, I reckon.”
“You want to look it over, you can.”
Rachel opened the kitchen door and stepped into the backyard. Floyd followed. She crossed the yard to the well. Dora and Sarah stopped their work in the field and stared. Floyd lifted his hand, a pointed finger, in greeting. Sarah returned the wave timidly; Dora turned to her work with the heavy steel hoe.
“Sarah’s growin’ up,” Floyd said.
“She is,” agreed Rachel. “She’s a woman now. I wadn’t much older when I got married.”
Floyd nodded. He turned to the well and began examining it. He did not know why, but he had always thought of the well as Eli’s single triumph on his farm. Eli had battled for it, cutting through granite and clay, going deeper for water than anyone in the valley. He had used dynamite and a shovel and scoop bucket and had worked tirelessly. He would not listen to advice to move the well, not even a few feet. “This is where Rachel wants it,” he had declared, “and, by God, this is where it’ll be put, if I have to bore a hole to China.” He had persisted and one day his shovel had caved into an underground river as cold as winter. The next day Eli had called in every neighbor within five miles to sample his water.
Floyd had helped Eli cover the mouth of the well with a box of fieldstone, planked across the top by oak shelving. And then the windlass of chestnut, with the winch driven through the tight center eye of the wood’s age circles. The winch had a cog wheel with a drop wedge for locking the windlass and holding the bucket. It was the first windlass lock anyone in the valley had ever seen.
Floyd ran his hand over the lock and the windlass. The chestnut had been burned smooth by the rope. He dropped the bolt and locked the windlass and pulled with his weight against the rope, looped over the repaired pulley. The pulley was attached to a crossbar that Eli had cut from a blackgum and had nailed solidly beneath the roof of the shelter.
“Looks good,” Floyd judged. “I was rememberin’ when Eli dug out this well. Cut through some hard rock, but he done it. Got him the sweetest water in the mountains, to boot. Always like stoppin’ by for a drink.”
Rachel’s face opened quickly, like a blink, then closed. She was surprised. Floyd had not mentioned Eli by name in years, and she had always understood his silence; it was a matter of respect, of avoiding the absence in her life. At least she had always believed that. It could have been that Eli was an absence in Floyd’s life. He had been Floyd’s friend. It did not matter that Eli told other people fantasies to please them, he had always been truthful with Floyd.
“You helped Eli dig it,” she said, deliberately repeating her husband’s name.
Floyd dropped his head. He mumbled, “I was around. Hauled off the dirt over yonder where that fig bush is.”
Rachel stared at the bush. It was in full leaf. She remembered when Eli had planted it and had laughed that it was a stick and would never grow. But he would please her. If it was figs she wanted, it was figs she would have. The bush had survived and had grown an umbrella of limbs and leaves, and each year it pushed figs out of its covering like sweet bronze candy.
“That’s been a few years,” Floyd said, shaking his head philosophically.
“Yes,” whispered Rachel. Then: “Floyd, you worry too much about us.”
Floyd did not answer. He toyed with the bucket on the plank covering of the wellbox.
“Don’t think I’m not grateful, but we can take care,” Rachel added. “We have for a long time.”
Floyd nodded and looked across the yard to Dora and Sarah.
“Be good if y’all had a dog of some kind,” he said seriously. “Them Caufields didn’t have one. It got killed a couple of days earlier, I hear tell. Kicked by the mule.”
“Maybe,” answered Rachel. “But I don’t know what good it’d do. If Sarah didn’t spoil it lazy, Dora’d probably run it off.”
There was a pause, a taut silence stretching between them.
“I remember Eli likin’ dogs,” Floyd said softly.
Rachel was again surprised. Floyd had again spoken of Eli by name.
“You ever want one, let me know,” he added. “We got too many to keep fed, anyhow.”
“I will.”
Floyd wiped the sleeve of his forearm across his face. It was a nervous habit Rachel had recognized for years. It meant Floyd was ready to leave.
“Gettin’ on in the day,” he said. “Me’n the boy got to go on, I reckon. Maybe find that fellow wantin’ some shingles. I got some white oak cured out and a little bit of hickory.”
“I’m glad you stopped by, Floyd. I appreciate it,” Rachel told him.
She walked with him to the wagon. The boy was sitting exactly as he had been. Rachel spoke to him: “Tell your mama I said hello, Jack.” Jack nodded.
“You need anythin’, you send Sarah over,” Floyd said, untying the rope reins from the brake. It was another of their memorized lines.
“I will,” Rachel promised.
* * *
Rachel watched, arms folded, hugging her breasts, until the wagon rolled into the main road and disappeared around the knoll that had once been planted in corn. The sun was on her.
She lifted her face and closed her eyes and stood unmoving in the warmth. Her breasts felt full against her arms and she shuddered at a remembered touch that flashed through her body like a chill. She could see Eli in the translucent screen of her closed eyes, his face burning with laughter, the roar of his voice thundering inside her mind. His fingers were touching her lips, her face, her arms, her back. His mouth pulled from the brown vessels of her nipples and his hair was warm under her chin. Then his face fluttered and was gone and she could sense only the fevered heat of early summer. There were earth sounds around her, swirling in the undetectable rush of time, and she could feel something shrill piercing her, filling her.
* * *
Floyd did not see the man standing inside the gray-green of the wood’s shadows. Floyd’s eyes were fixed ahead, at the tip of the wagon tongue balanced between the two mules. He was thinking of Rachel Pettit. He had said too much to her, had been too insistent. He had spoken of Eli, which was not his right. His duty was as neighbor, but not to give advice. He crouched forward on the wagon seat, feeling the shame that he feared more than any other emotion. It was not right to pry, he told himself bitterly. It was never good to speak more than necessary. And he had. He did not know if he should return to the Pettit house. Or if he could.
* * *
The man stepped into the edge of the road after the wagon had passed, then quickly back into the undergrowth. He was not certain: Perhaps the boy sitting in the back of the wagon had seen him. The boy had looked up, then down again, but if he saw him, he did not react. Even if the boy had seen him, it could not have been clearly, not enough to recognize him again. For days, he had been careful not to be seen. It would be foolish to blunder after being so careful.
“Ah,” he said aloud, “don’t go rushin’ things, Michael O’Rear. You’ve work to do.”
He shrugged the sudden tightness from his shoulders and pulled at the bill of the cap on his head. Then he turned in the woods and started his slow climb back up the mountain. He began whistling. Softly. Gaily.