VANESSA WAS HAVING BREAKFAST. It was around noon. She was chatting with her mother and sister, who had come in from the fields and were relaxing for a few minutes before making lunch, when the front door was flung open without a knock and a stranger entered.
He was a young man in rags and a torn hat. He was dirty and overgrown, missing his teeth and his manners. He stank, and he was in Vanessa’s house.
When Vanessa saw him, she dropped the hot cup of coffee she’d been holding. The cup broke and the coffee splashed over her legs. In her shock, what Vanessa thought was, oh no, I bet the coffee got on my housedress. Dang it, and I just washed it. Now I’ll have to wash it again—but it’s Monday and the washing machine is always backed up after Sunday’s day of rest. Why didn’t they just wash on Sundays? Then her favorite covering wouldn’t remain stained. Could you even get coffee stains out of light cotton fabric? She’d have to ask her mother. Lucy was an expert in getting stains out. Was now a good time to ask?
But Lucy spoke first. “Excuse me,” Lucy said to the intruder. She stood from her chair. “We don’t know who you are. Please leave.”
“Sit down, old woman, and relax,” the man said. “I’m not here for you.” He cast an insolent gaze over the braless Vanessa. “But I would like something to eat, gentle lady.”
Lucy slid back into the chair. Vanessa glanced at the floor. Should she bend down and clean up the coffee mess before people started walking in it? The ceramic shards could cut someone. Good thing she was wearing slippers or she’d be bleeding for sure.
“We have some food on the table near the road,” said Eleanor, who didn’t get up from her chair. “We leave it there for people like you.”
“I’m not a dog,” the man said. “So no thanks.”
“Then go out back and ask the woman there to give you something to eat,” said Vanessa. “There is plenty.”
“It’s too hot out there, and I’ve been walking too long.” In his filthy boots the man strolled into the kitchen area where Vanessa was.
Fear broke through. Where was Finn! Where were her father and Earl! She had just told Junie and Mae to go outside to wash their hands and feet. They would be back any minute. Her children!
“Go out back,” Vanessa repeated, and thought, am I sending him out there where my children are? She peered through the front window but couldn’t see Finn’s truck. He must have gone to town.
“You’re trespassing,” said Eleanor. “You’re on our property without our permission. We do not allow you to be in our house.”
“I am sure I heard you invite me in.” The man smirked, exposing his rotting teeth. “You said you would feed me.”
Vanessa’s eyes darted from the front window to the rear. Her father and Earl were out in the onions. Isabelle was even farther away, fixing the scarecrow in the wheat rows. She was two green fields away, a world away. Monty was by her side. There was no way to alert her.
“We’ll give you some food,” Vanessa said, “but first get out. Step out onto the porch, and I’ll get something for you.”
“I can get food anywhere,” he said.
“You said you wanted food!”
“It’s not just food I want.” He glanced around the room, at Vanessa, at Eleanor, at Lucy. His eyes found a silent Olivia in the corner. She had been reading but now put down the newspaper and sat motionlessly.
“You four lovely ladies live alone in this awfully big place?” he asked. “Doors wide open, no one to protect you.” He tutted. “You ought to be more careful. I’m a nice man, but you get all kinds walking past here. You look like you could really use a male pair of hands.” He leered. Perhaps he thought he was being witty. “It’s plantin’ season.”
“We have all the help we need,” Vanessa said. “My husband will be back any minute.”
“If he was really coming back any minute, y’all wouldn’t be acting like jittery ferrets.” Lewdly he grinned, black holes for teeth in his crumbly mouth.
From the corner of her eye, Vanessa saw her young daughters, bouncy and chatty, begin walking from the water pump to the back door. They were about to come inside!
“Please get out!” Vanessa cried in her loudest, most piercing voice, hoping, praying, her children would hear. “You’re not welcome here! You heard my sister—you’re trespassing! You’re committing a crime!”
Unperturbed, the man shook his head. “I’m not leavin’ till I get done all the things I come to do,” he said. “Food’s well and good, but I need me a few dollars. You got some? I’m trying to get out west.” He snorted. “I been in prison a while and I’m hungerin’ for some fine female company.” He clucked his tongue. “Oh, don’t worry. It was for nothing bad. Some robbing. A little fighting.” He took a step toward Vanessa. “Maybe some other things.”
Isabelle was out in the fields when she saw Junie running flat out, flailing her arms in mute desperation. “Someone’s in the house!” Junie was gasping. “Someone—”
Before June was finished speaking, Isabelle had thrown off her work gloves and was striding with all deliberate speed to the house. Not running. Striding. “Go get your grandfather, Monty,” she said to the boy following her. “Tell him there’s trouble.”
“I want to go with you—”
“Did you hear what I said? Now.”
Without stopping, barely even leaning down, she scooped up the twelve-gauge shotgun standing upright by the back door, checked that it was loaded, and stormed inside. She walked through the kitchen, not slowing, raised her arms above her head, and hit the man on the side of his skull with the butt of her gun.
He staggered, almost losing his balance and falling, but not quite. Righting himself, he sprang to his feet, wiping the blood off his ear. “Ow! Why did you do that?” His back was to the open front door, his malevolent face to Isabelle. He was stupefied, bleeding, but still grinning idiotically. “Look at you, little lady,” he said, edging away—but only a step.
“I’m not little lady,” Isabelle said. “I’m punishment with shotgun.”
Behind her, Eleanor hissed, “Isabelle! Get away from him!”
“Now, now, that’s not very hospitable of you,” the man said. “The lovely woman of the house offered a hungry fella some food, and the ladies and I, we been havin’ us a conversation. They’re much nicer than you.”
“I’ve done enough talking to build barn,” said Isabelle, pointing the muzzle of the shotgun at his face. She depressed the trigger block lever. “There’s only one way this will go. If you want different way, you will turn around and walk out of this house on your own two feet—while you still can. Not sentence from now, not meal from now, not minute from now. Now.”
“Isabelle, stop antagonizing him!” whispered Eleanor from behind her.
“Oh, I ain’t leavin’,” the man said, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a Colt Magnum pistol. Four women gasped, even though no part of the Colt firing mechanism had been engaged. “Not unless you make me. And you don’t want to mess up your shiny floor with dirty old me, do you?”
Isabelle was done talking. Lowering her weapon slightly and aiming at his ribcage, she took two long strides forward and pulled the trigger. She wanted to be as close as possible to him when the shotgun went off.
The chamber had only one slug in it, but the force of the shell, discharged from two meters away, propelled the man out of the house like a projectile through a cannon. He flew backwards through the open door and crashed halfway on the porch, halfway down the steps.
Everybody screamed. Everybody but Isabelle. Monty was jumping up and down, clapping and hollering.
Moments later, Finn pulled up. He bolted toward the house, up the steps past the man’s ruined body and inside. Isabelle was still holding the gun to her shoulder. She sprang the catch, hard-pumped the shotgun to release the expended shell, slammed it shut, and stood it on its muzzle against the dining room chair.
Finn walked straight to her. “What happened?” His voice was calm.
“I asked him to get out. He refused.” Her voice was calm too.
“You didn’t give him a chance!” cried Vanessa. “He was about to leave!”
“I don’t think so,” said Isabelle. “And once he shoots one of us, it’s too late for could’ve, should’ve.”
“He was leaving! He was!”
Walter and Earl rushed through the back door, both panting. Mae and Junie were with them. The family stood in shock in the middle of their living space, Lucy and Eleanor shrieking, Vanessa crying. Earl went to Olivia, Walter to Lucy, the girls to their father and Isabelle.
“Are you all right, Mother?” asked Finn.
“I’m fine, darling,” Olivia said quietly, her hands shaking. She never rose from her reading chair. She took Earl’s hand.
“Mayflower, Junebug, you did well to warn me,” said Isabelle.
Vanessa ran to Finn and buried her face in his chest. Mae and Junie huddled next to Isabelle. “You okay, girls?” Finn said to his daughters. “Go help your grandmothers.”
“Don’t look, darlings, don’t look,” Lucy said. But they were children. All they wanted to do was look. The adults were loud and emotional, asking questions, speaking all at once.
Except Isabelle. She went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of cold orange juice. “Either we clean it up or we get the police,” she said, gulping down the drink. “I have work to do. This is no time for dilly-dally.”
“Dilly-dally! You just shot a man!” Vanessa cried.
“If anyone deserved little shooting, Vanessa, it was him,” said Isabelle.
“Why did you do it!”
“He came in uninvited, demanding your food,” said Isabelle. “You asked him to leave. That should have been enough. Appeasement never solution, trust me.”
“He was turning to go!”
“Is that before or after he pulled out Colt and said he wasn’t leaving? When trespassers with evil intent tell me who they are, I believe them.”
“Vanessa, darling,” Walter said, shaken but calm, “it’s a horror, but Isabelle’s right.”
“You always take her side, Daddy!”
“There was no talking to that man, Vee. If Isabelle wasn’t here, I don’t know what we would’ve done.”
“She killed a man in our house!” Vanessa shrieked.
“Not quite,” Isabelle said, “I made sure he died out of our house.”
“It’s not your house, don’t you dare say our!”
Finn prodded his wife toward the bedroom, “Go lie down, Vee. I will go get the police.”
Vanessa sobbed. “Is he really dead? What if he gets up?”
“I think that’s not very likely,” said Isabelle.
“Don’t leave me, Finn, please!”
“Would you like to come to the police station with me?” Finn said.
“Don’t worry, Aunt Vanessa,” said Monty, “you’ll be safe here. Isabelle will protect you.”
Vanessa wailed.
“We can bury him out back and leave police out of it,” Isabelle said, her arm around Monty’s shoulder. “He didn’t seem like kind of guy other people will miss. Vanessa, would you prefer that?”
“Is that how you do it in your country?” cried Vanessa.
“You don’t want to know how we do it in my country,” replied Isabelle.
“Oh, please let’s bury him!” exclaimed Monty. “We could be like real-life vigilantes! Or let’s burn him on the pyre with the dead raccoons.”
“Monty, pipe down!” snapped Eleanor.
Vanessa ran to her room, sobbing.
“We need to decide,” Isabelle said. “Because you don’t want blood to dry into wood. It’s hard to get stains out once blood dries.”
Finn and Earl left and returned forty minutes later with the police and the coroner’s truck. The cops took a statement, inspected the shotgun and the single shell left on the living room floor, and seemed satisfied. The coroner carted the body away. After they left, Finn, Monty, and Isabelle scrubbed the porch with soap and cold water. Because it had taken over three hours for the body to be removed, the blood did settle into the boards. Isabelle was quite irritated by that.
After she was done with her field work, she used the adze to remove the top layer of discolored wood, and then a plane to level out the slight indentations left on the steps. The smoothed-out porch looked good.
“Look at that—like new,” said a smiling Isabelle that evening, admiring her work. “Maybe we should paint it light blue, glossy. Vanessa, Finn, don’t you think that would look pretty? Glossy blue porch for house?”
The intruder with his sinister intentions may have been dealt with, but Vanessa could not be dealt with. She stayed in her room with the curtains drawn and didn’t come out, not even to eat.
“I feel like a trespasser in my own home,” she said to Finn. “She shot him, but it’s as if I’m the one who was shot.”
He tried to pacify her.
“She committed murder in our home!”
“Not murder, Vanessa, let’s calm—”
“How can you be all right with that?”
“I prefer it to the alternative.”
“Who is she that she can do that and not bat an eyelash?”
“She’s lived through a lot, seen a lot,” Finn said. “Like me, she’s been at war. But what’s really bothering you? That she killed him or that she is all right with it?”
“Where do I start, my darling, to enumerate the things that are really bothering me?”
“At the beginning,” Finn said, his unblinking gaze directly on her. “Tell me the first thing, the last thing, anything. You want a conversation? Let’s have it.”
A daunted Vanessa backed away. “We’re living with someone who can kill a man and mop the porch afterward. Why doesn’t that terrify you?”
“I’m also someone like that,” Finn said.
“You’re a man!”
“I’m unclear—does that mean less is expected of me or more?” said Finn. “And what about you? Because you’re a woman, is less expected of you—or more?”
“This isn’t about me or you! It’s about her!”
“Armed men came inside her home to take away the things she loved most,” Finn said. “This is what happens when you live on the borderlands. You learn to defend yourself.”
“Finn, you sound as if you admire her for this!”
“For being able to defend herself? Who wouldn’t?”
“I wouldn’t! This is not who we are. This is not how we live.”
“It is!” said Finn. “We live on a farm with no close neighbors.”
“You were pulling into the driveway!” Vanessa cried.
“Vanessa, what do you think I would’ve done,” Finn said, “if I’d come in and seen that animal threatening you and my mother and my children? I would’ve killed him too, except I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to blow him out into the yard first. His blood would’ve been seeping into our living room floorboards, not our porch.”
“She didn’t move, Finn!” Vanessa whispered. “She didn’t flinch.”
“Good thing, too.”
“I couldn’t have done it.”
“I guess we all act differently in times of trouble,” Finn said, his voice cold. “But someone has to do what must be done.”
“You want someone like her in your corner?” Vanessa said incredulously.
Finn didn’t reply.
“I’m in prison here, Finn,” she whispered. “Can’t you see I’m in a cage!”
“You’re not the only one,” said Finn. “Every person who tries to help you, who’s rebuffed by you, who begs you to put yourself right is in the cage with you too. You think you’re the only one with no way out?”
A hole opened inside Vanessa and tar poured in. Her mouth opening, her eyes closing, she fell back against the pillows, raking and raking the single thought in her head. She’d been coming at it all wrong.
Finn didn’t want Isabelle in his corner. He wanted to be in hers.
Somewhere in the silence between the words, near the memory of the killing blast and the minutes before and the seconds after, Vanessa came upon a midnight clear, and in the solemn stillness finally grasped good and proper what was wrong in her house.