On Sunday morning, she woke and Orren was still in bed beside her. Her eyes found the clock, there were two hours remaining before the service. She lay still for a few minutes, aware of the sun and its increase and the unfamiliar fact of Orren’s easy sleep beside her. But when she made a move to rise, he startled her, he rolled over and laid his body over hers. His head remained burrowed down in her neck as though he were still asleep, accidentally on top of her. She pushed up once at his chest, but he didn’t move.
Are you going to do something or just trap me? she said.
When they were done, he rolled back to his side and rested again. She looked over at him lying there with one hand on his chest, loose, his eyelashes drifted down.
I don’t think you should go with me to church, she said.
He opened one eye and peered at her. Did it look like I was fixing to go?
Well, I’m just saying, she said. It’d be better if you didn’t.
Why? he said darkly and opened both eyes now.
Don’t be ill, she said. It’s just that they don’t know I live with a man and it’s better if they don’t. The preacher didn’t know it when he got me to do the playing, so it would be better—
I get it, he said.
I’m not mad, she said. It’s nothing about that. It’s just, they don’t need to know.
Well, I don’t go to church.
I noticed, she said disapprovingly.
I don’t need nobody to bitch at me, he said, shutting his eyes and raising his hand to cover them.
Okay, she said and rolled her eyes and sat up in the bed, one arm holding her breasts while she looked around. Her hair stuck up in the back. You knot up my hair, she said. I hate that. He didn’t reply, but a minute later, while she was rooting through the closet for a dress, he said, The singing I don’t mind, but I can’t abide nobody telling me what to do. Shit. I went when Mama made me, but never again. No, buddy.
They’re only just making suggestions, said Aloma with a dress now in her hands.
Orren tented his hand and looked at her. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard you say, he said.
She ignored him. It was Sunday. She hooked her bra and pulled on her dress, turning toward him as she buttoned it over her breasts.
Are you staying in bed? she said.
No, he said. I’m fixing to work. Let those other sonsabitches go to church. I got shit to do.
On the drive down, Aloma’s stomach was drawn tight with the edginess that came before playing, something she had not felt in a long time. Her brow creased and her right hand worried the stick when she wasn’t shifting and when she finally pulled into the church’s gravel lot, she had to sit still for a moment and collect herself, breathing. She’d made a point to arrive thirty minutes before the service began, but the small lot was already milling with people and she could see Bell by the front steps talking with two men. She tried not to feel very girlish and very young when she approached them and said in a voice she barely recognized for its softness, Good morning.
Morning, Miss Aloma, Bell said and the two men turned as one to look at her and she blushed and held up a hand to shield her eyes from theirs and from the morning sun, cut and shafted but not weakened by the shaked church roof.
I thought to come a bit early to practice, but I guess I’m not so early.
I don’t reckon you need to practice at all. She’s good, said Bell. This is Miss Aloma, the new piano player. Aloma waved at them, but did not shake hands and they did not offer. They nodded, smiling, and looking at her sideways without words until Bell said, Oh, I reckon I should tell you what we’re singing.
He led her up the steps and into the church where some of the women and a few of the oldest men were already seated, their Bibles at their sides.
Now, normally I would leave this up to you, he said, but I just gone on ahead and picked them this week. I’ll let you know what I’m fixing to preach on and then you can do it yourself. That’s what Leah always done and it worked fine.
Alright, said Aloma, following close on his heels up the center aisle as she had the other day. A few people turned to mark their passing. She sat on the edge of the piano bench and arranged her skirt so it fell neatly from the shelf of the bench down to the threadworn carpet. Bell, his dark eyes following the movement of her hands, said, Two hundred forty, two hundred and forty-one, and fourteen. I’ll let you know when on all of it. And then he smiled at her, but not long, and he turned on his heel abruptly so that it struck her as almost rude and she looked up, startled. She watched as he walked away. He stopped to pat the knee of his mother, who sat steel-backed, Bible on her lap, in the front row and then he passed on back down the aisle and out the door again to greet.
Aloma sat perfectly still, wondering at her sudden feeling of aloneness and what seemed now the oppressive quiet of the small sanctuary. She felt them watching. She averted her eyes so she could not see them at all and she ran her hands silently over the chord progressions of the hymns, her hands shaking slightly.
At five before the hour Bell came inside and he walked up to her at the piano and he was so tall she had to crane her neck back to see him properly. He said, Why don’t you play a bit, to draw em in.
Oh, she said, yes, and rejolted into action, her hands trembling on the keys. But as she pushed beyond the opening bars, her fingers found their old habit of being, and the memory of her muscles drew her mind into the song. Her breathing slowed and she found once again, as she always did, that she had a fearsome control of herself at the keyboard—if nowhere else in the world. From the invitation, she ran straight into the first singing hymn and the congregation rose beside her. Then came her own shuddering response to the sound of their hollered singing, the mismatched pitches rubbing and abrading against one another, the static of imperfect voices. It was not perfection that moved her, only that rub, what others found ugly. She sought the joy of misshapen things. But too soon the clamor was over and with it the noisy anonymity that cloaked her and Bell introduced her to the curious congregation as Miss Earle. She half rose from her piano bench with a forced smile and a heated face and promptly sat back down again, looking to neither the left nor the right but straight at Bell with such intensity that, in that instant, she memorized him.
Then Bell preached. We are all lonesome men, he said and he turned his head down with its black curls, looking like a sorrowful bird with its beak tucked into its chest. And he stayed there for a moment like that, breathing, before he lifted his head again. I one time heard a man say that the human was the lonesomest thing could be read after in the world, that there’s not a animal in the whole animal kingdom with sadness laid on its heart like ours, and I suspect that’s true. It’s a thing we’re all wearied of, each the one of us, this being amongst all the people and ever being alone. Even Jesus was alone in the desert with not but a fool devil to keep him company. Bell paused, breathed, and fingered at his brow, not looking away but surveying them as he took his time. Aloma saw a brief shadow of thought cross over his features.
I been lonesome too—nobody’s immune after the cradle—but I got wind of God from a good upbringing so I knew, even in my dark hour, to reach out. I called up from my earthly crying, brothers and sisters, I called up from the depths and from the selfishness of my own heart and unto Thee I gave myself, that’s the truth. And grace hammered me, it was like my bones breaking, it broke me up, brothers and sisters, and it hurt. Grace don’t always feel like something good. It cut up my heart. Grace’ll come, but don’t expect pleasure when it does. He looked out at them. See, I gave up and submitted my own self, though I didn’t want it, nobody wants it, nobody wants to be a slave. The whole world is fixing to tell us one thing—Live big in the world, take up all the space a body can, feed the body, love first the body. Well, I gave up the body through grace, I gave up my own grave-drove desires though it’s a constant temptation, Lord, it’s a constant temptation to backslide. You know how it is. And they amened, they did know. He was sweating now, stoked like a stove before them, though there was no wildness in him, only will.
But funny thing was, when I gave up, when I submitted—that thing I wanted most not to do—I found I wasn’t half so alone as I was before, even if I am just alone as ever, so far as the world considers. No, not half so alone, cause my heart was turned out like a shirt wore wrong side out, brothers and sisters, that’s how it was when God turned me, so that my innermost heart was all exposed, facing the world and not my own self. That’s the good thing God did when he made me not what I wanted. But I didn’t do it, God did it. I didn’t say, Come in—God said, I’m coming in. All I did was only let him. Yet I had to give up, I had to submit me to something I didn’t want, to the will of another. That’s the opposite of the world, to rub your own self out. World wants you to take up ever more space, brothers and sisters. But God asks us to be less so that others might be more.
He continued, And don’t you know it, once I shut up, once I got my own voice all stilled, then I heard it. Then I heard what it was God was fixing to get me to do, which is preach, which is give. And I got lighter of the spirit, of the body, and I saw our dreams come with many cares. That’s written. My dreams were heavy on my own back. And here’s the thing about God when he speaks, he—Listen, God don’t sound like no coal train come howling down from the driftmouth, God don’t sound like heavy weather, God don’t sound like God. He paused, eyed them, wiped the sweat rolling now from his brow down the sides of his face, grimaced slightly, and smiled. He said, Small, still voice, a little murmur. He held up his hand, two fingers an inch or so apart. He shrugged. I ain’t made it up, it’s written, he said, shaking smally the Bible. Elijah goeth up unto the mountain and in the cave he heareth the small still voice. And that was the voice of God. Ain’t that just . . . And he laughed to himself, sobered, looked out at them with accusation and a fierce look like love. What do you think that voice says? He waited a moment. Submit, he said, and then a thin woman stood in the center of the church, her flesh whittled by a stingy hand very close to the bone, and she wrapped her knobby hands around the pew in front of her, leaning forward. Her hair fell like a gray curtain over her face. She rocked a little, the man beside her reached up once, patted her on the back, lowered his hands to his own withered lap. Submit unto one another, Bell went on, watching the woman, called her by the name Ellen and she lifted her hands above her head and a few more congregants popped up, hands to their chest or the air. And Aloma found that she could not turn away, not from their standing and undressed emotion or from Bell, who stepped farther out so that he was almost in the first pew and he called more of them in his rising black honey voice, brothered and sistered them by name and held his Bible up higher before him as he called them. And the rolling cadences of his voice urged them on in their own prayers, prayers that leaped from them even as he preached so that their voices joined to his in an upsurging of spoken need, until it became unclear who was preaching and who was listening, but now almost half the congregation stood in an energy she did not recognize and even as it frightened Aloma—their yielding and their babbling—she felt an uneasy joy.
Because she could not help it, she sang all week. She came home from church that first Sunday with a tune in her throat and she carried it with her all day until she lay down with it in bed, though she didn’t realize it until Orren said he couldn’t sleep, she was buzzing like a hornet. But she had put a hand to the piano again and she was glad for it, and if Orren didn’t understand her, she could not make him. What did he care to know of her anyway, with his earthfast disposition, his increasing hours away from her? She petted herself with the idea that she would be fine without his gritting presence. Short of keeping him awake at night, he did not seem to notice the change in her. She had the feeling more and more now that his eyes looked through her, that she was like foxfire, a ghost. And even in bed sometimes she sensed that when he said her name, it was just some strange and misnamed conjuring. When he stiffened inside her and craned his body as if some fever were cresting to break over him and he had to help it or resist it—it seemed like both—with every fiber of his being, she did not always think it was really her he was calling when he called her name. But she held on to him anyway, as if she could save him from his fever by clinging tight, but there was a part of herself now that she kept back.
When she trailed out to the tractor in the afternoon, taking his lunch to him so he would not have to walk in, she hymned as she walked and paced her expirations to the tempo of her feet. Orren would take the food and say thank you and never comment on her newborn singing, only eat quickly and continue on with his day, which was the fertilizing and the watering, fingering the plants with a consternation that grew as he eyed the sky and checked the weather on the radio that he kept on his tractor. He moved now with what had always been the edgy promise of his body. If he said anything at all, it was, It better goddamn rain, or as he did one time, just turning his face up to the sky and charging it with a look of hate and questioning, both.
Orren, she had said then, disapproving. And she looked around as if there were actually someone there to witness his spite, but it was just the two of them and the blue tractor and the barely budded plants and beyond them the buckled ridge of the mountains with its late greens. Orren looked down at her dully for a moment, but she stood her ground against his unnearable gaze and she inspected him. The cap pulled low, deep oval stains of dirt on his thighs and knees, and between his fingers, the ever-present white stalk of a cigarette. None of these things described a change in him, but she wondered when she had last seen him smile. She could not remember, she gave up. There was no point to remembering anymore. She only wanted Orren back, but she was no longer sure that even the rain would bring that.
On Wednesday, after the merest drizzle the night before, they woke to a whitened field. Aloma came down the steps first and almost dropped her coffee mug for the shock of it when she turned in her nightgown and saw the field of green topped with fists of irregular branched flowers, as white as the gown that swirled around her hips and legs when she turned. Orren, she called, but he was silent, still upstairs, and she slipped her bare feet into his work boots, felt the grime and deep press of his wide feet so that she felt herself for a moment to be standing in him, then half ran down the slope in the cool near-morning. The sun had not yet breached the ridge and the light of the air was white overhead, thin and unfinished, yet the coming morning burned a single thin fire line on the black ridgetop, it distended and filled like a blister with the blood of the morning even as she watched. The western fall of the ridge was black, black as its eastern side collected the rising light. The shadowed ridge crested high over the field as she ran down past the willow, its withes bowed oblivious in the still air, to the edge of the field and she stood there to catch her breath. The white bunched blossoms had breasted out of their buds overnight, coming in darkness into sudden blooms the color of morning. They massed in whiteness before her, they topped the bruised and weathered plants. The sky marshaled, deepened even as she stood there breathing and watching in wonder, it lightened as she stepped into the first row, reaching out to find a branched blossom with her open hand, the way it spread orderless and fresh over the uncomely, sticky-haired working tobacco leaves. The dirt under her feet breathed figments of fine dust as the soles of Orren’s boots pressed against it. Any rain of the previous evening had come and gone, as insubstantial as dew, and the soil was dry again. Aloma turned around then, and with her hand still raised to the white tongue petals chest high, she looked back at the house silhouetted against the fading dusk of the night sky. Orren stood in the door, her abandoned coffee cup in his hand. Aloma withdrew her hand from the blossom and returned it to her side. For a long moment she contemplated his figure and the effort required to walk back up the hill and then she succumbed, she left the white field and went to him. The first orange sunray burned the eaves of the house as she stepped beneath it. In a moment, it would burn the white of her gown.
That’s a mess of topping, Orren said when she drew close enough to hear. That’s my task today.
What?
Top that whole field. Succor soon enough.
Aw, she said, childlike, standing beside him and turning so they both looked out over the brightening field. Both their lips twisted down to the far sides of their faces.
Can’t you leave it be just a little while? she said.
Not less you want to starve.
Well, say what you mean, Orren. She sighed.
He blinked at her in surprise a moment, then cleared his throat and said quietly, We was raised to speak our minds. Mama didn’t want no middling boys.
Aloma said nothing in return, only turned to stare balefully out at the field again and he followed her gaze. It is pretty, he conceded.
White as Christmas.
Let’s just make it to the real Christmas.
I never had anybody to do Christmas, she said suddenly.
Well, I don’t got nobody my own self, he said, and as the unintended weight of his words settled on her, she looked at him pointedly so that he couldn’t help but see his own mistake and he said promptly, Now, I ain’t meant it like that. But she was already moving past him into the house and she didn’t see that he turned quickly and followed her jagged movements with his eyes. She kept her back to him, tucked her chin into her neck, cracking eggs in a bowl and refusing to look back at the fields or at him. She did not want to see him against the burst of white. In a few short minutes, the smell of bacon frying drew him slowly in from where he stood sentinel on the steps. He stepped beside her to pour black coffee into his mug, though he didn’t try to say anything else, he moved gentler than his weight accorded. He let her ignore him. Then he took a full plate of food and headed out without a word.
All day he kept to the fields and Aloma watched from the kitchen door as row after row of tobacco plants was shed of its white. She tried to persuade herself to work in the house, but she was driftless, bored with herself, drawn repeatedly against her will to her post at the back door where she monitored the topping. And her spirit fell by increments as the blossoms went to the dust. She picked at her nails, she sweated in the doorway, Orren moved plant to plant under the sun.
When the phone rang in the middle afternoon, she couldn’t say how long she had been standing there, squinting into the field, waiting for something to force her away. She recognized Bell’s voice right away from its depth, its dark and pleasing pitch.
We won’t be needing you tonight, he said and she felt a keening disappointment, wrapped the phone cord around one finger and said, But could I still come? He laughed then, saying, Well sure, of course. I’d not stand in the way of a woman who wants church. So she wandered down past the willow onto the plowed lip of the field where she called out a lie to Orren, said she was needed to play at the church and then she left him where he stood half-turned to hear her with a knife in one hand and sweating in the deepening heat.
In the church, she made a point to sit in the back row where this time she could cast her eyes about, freed from the gaze of others, freed from the piano. Bell wore jeans on this hot night and a short-sleeved shirt and she saw sweat rings in the blue shirt so sheer it was almost white. He towered over everyone else in the church and he drew a gaze by virtue of his height, she wondered if he knew and liked that. He grinned easily at everyone and, because it was Wednesday, spoke loosely as though he were in his own home. Three men led the singing, each with a rosewood dreadnought worn paper-thin where the pickguards once had been, and everyone knew the songs and Aloma did too, not because she had sung them in the school—they’d been disallowed there—but because they’d been bred into her in a time long before school, though they’d been long buried like a seam. She sang softly at first, almost afraid to make her presence known in the church where she felt she did not belong, but then she sang out and by the end of the two hours, that feeling had returned again, the one she’d felt on Sunday morning, a feeling that had nothing to do with God or not God, but only with a sound risen on her breath. She would have felt it if she’d sung in a field or a kitchen or a bed, and she felt it in a church just the same.
When she left, she hummed the old modaling songs until she turned into the gravel drive, long after nightfall. The house and the fields were dark, but as Aloma stood quietly on the back steps peering into the depthless black, she could tell by the uninterrupted shadows that every last white blossom had been cut.
The next Sunday Bell Johnson preached on waking to creation. Aloma played hymns of her own choosing except for “Come My Soul, Thou Must Be Waking,” because he asked for it especially, saying it was a favorite and that it spoke better than he could to how it was to wake and pay right attention. She did not know what he meant by right attention, but when they sang on Sunday morning, she felt their singing was indeed a rendering of all their feeble strength could pay and she could see how even the efforts of the strongest men, the ones who were broad and young, even their strength was feeble against the backdrop of the whole earth. That could not be denied, or at least she thought so in the moment when her hands charged the hymn from the piano and her eyes passed continually from the page to Bell to the people singing. And again, she watched as Bell took up his stance at the lectern, wrapping his hands only momentarily around the pale wood before stepping away again, abandoning his post to stand almost among them in the pews. She noticed again the way he stopped to think while he preached, pausing to look out the window as if the light itself would revelate him. Then when he spoke again, renewed, he moved up and down on the landing as he felt led, pausing occasionally for a word, and the people stayed with him, they fanned themselves or shifted to ease their backs, but all in patience, all in waiting.
At the close of the service, when most of the congregants had wandered out to stand milling in the parking lot, Aloma trailed out of the church. She clutched a hymnal to her chest and as she passed Bell, who stood on the front steps, she waved goodbye. Though he was talking to his mother and another older woman, his eyes found hers and he kept her with a glance. And when he moved away from them, he said, Your playing is mighty fine, mighty fine. Everybody thinks so.
Thank you, she said and wanted to say more, something easy and generous, but was instead struck with the feeling she had whenever she was around him, that she could not find her normal speaking voice. It was not just because she was afraid he would find out she was living with Orren unmarried, but something more, some feeling that her tongue was a limp and useless thing before him. She felt herself almost shied by him. And because of this, she knew he found her nature sweeter than it was and more compliant, but as much as that was not the true state of her—her roughcut life had never afforded her the luxury of mildness—she found herself unable to change it. Or unwilling to try.
Miss Aloma, Bell said, we got a prayer meeting that gets together on Sunday afternoons that you might could be interested to attend. We’d like to see you there.
She thought about that for a second as his face was bent down earnestly toward hers so that she could see the risen color on his cheeks and even the pinhole pores there and she thought how Orren would roll his eyes at this, and that more than any real desire made her say, I don’t mind to, and Bell smiled, Good. But when she was home again, she was careful not to mention it, saying merely that she was needed at the church in the late afternoon. Orren only nodded, unconcerned, and she bristled silently at this. Some part of her wanted him to mind, wanted him to say, But I don’t hardly see you ever, which he might have said once, at least she imagined. Except that she couldn’t know that for certain, there had not been a once upon a time in the big house, only the time before the big house when they lived apart and came together in a way that was more collision than cohabitation. Everything else was conjecture. But Aloma took Orren’s indifference without comment and went back to the church in the late afternoon.
She found a small group of six, all relatively young, but still older than her, sitting on folding chairs in the space between the landing and the first pews. When she came hesitantly up the aisle, Bell sat up straight in his chair and said, Good to see you, Miss Aloma, and they turned to her, three men and two women, and she felt the faint burn of their appraisal as she approached. One of the men stood up and unfolded a chair that was leaning against the pew and he offered it to her. She took it, but set her chair just slightly out of the perfect circle of their chairs. Then Bell was speaking again as he had been before she arrived and she realized suddenly that she had not brought a Bible—not that she had one to bring—and she reached for one, stealthy as she could manage, that lay on the first pew. Bell’s eyes followed her, but he didn’t pause and she parted the book randomly, rested it open-faced on her lap.
It is the wait that eats at us, I think so too, he said, picking up again after the interruption. But I believe that’s what we’re called to do, to keep ourselves as something precious and wait. That don’t mean a prayer gets answered. We can’t know the workings of God. I think we leave that to faith, he said. Leave that to faith and a good conscience, and not be like them that have put away faith and made shipwreck. It’s written.
Aloma had no idea what he was talking about and she looked at the others around her and saw them nodding and she nodded too in a kind of unrealizing sympathy. One of the women saw her and smiled and then put her head down a bit, looked at her own white tennis shoes. The woman’s long hair, thin at the ends, hung below the metal seat of her chair. Bell smiled at Aloma and said, We’re talking about marriage.
Oh, what about it? she said, and then either because she simply realized of her own accord or she saw the halting looks on their faces, her heart sank and she saw it for the singles group that it was.
Waiting for marriage, what we do while choosing to grow in solitude, he said. That’s what we’re talking about.
Uh-huh, she said, yes, and she nodded and then could not help but turn and look at the front door far behind her. She longed suddenly like a house-bound dog to be on the other side of it. Then she forced herself to turn around again, blinked at her companions, and settled in to endure. Only the two women talked, the men mostly sat. Aloma sat motionless in her chair and felt the sun on her back, she flipped the frayed Bible ribbon from place to place. She herself said nothing, but watched them regain their voices once they grew accustomed to her presence. They spoke of their desire for some kind of matching that might be made for them, by God, or by chance, though they believed God. It made her think of Orren back at the farm and she wondered what he was doing while she sat here in this circle of strangers—their unselfconscious longing filling her with a deep unease, almost a spite—and where he was at this moment. She did not know, there was his innerness. It was his land, though he had said, This is ours now, that first day when she had arrived in her truck and saw the peeling house and the fields for the first time. She thought again of the day he had called her after the funeral and said, You’ll come down, and she had said, Yes, yes, without hesitating. It occurred to her now that she should have paused, it would have been wise to think it over, but any hesitation would have been a lie. She did not, could not hesitate. She went down. And now, with the sun on her back and a Bible on her lap, she did not know where he was and she barely knew where she was. She remembered the way he had been when she’d first known him, when he drove her out on the veering roads and they always ended up back at the settlement school and before the night was through, her shirt was ridden up around her neck and it felt like he was trying to push his way inside her without even bothering to take off her jeans. She remembered what it was to be furiously happy like that. She drew up the two halves of the Bible and let it fall open on her lap as happenstance guided it. She read the verse before her: Better to visit the house of mourning than the house of feasting, for to be mourned is the lot of every man and the living should take this to heart. She scowled at the verse, shifted hard in her seat, and snapped the book shut. It was not like one of her scores, she could never find in it what she needed.
The hour drew on into two and more, she watched the deepening yawn of the sun verging on their little circle. Then she noticed the others begin to shift and stretch and when Bell closed his own Bible, leaning back in his seat with his hands over his belly, she darted up from her chair, mouthing to him, I’ve got to go, and then she left the church. She realized once she was out the door that she still had the Bible in her hands, but rather than go back in, she stowed it under her seat on the floorboard of her truck. Then she drove away.
There was no sign of Orren’s truck at the farm when Aloma returned. She wandered around the left side of the house to where the fields opened up below her and stood with one hand shielding her eyes. It was breezeless. She wiped her face with the underside of her shirt, looked out over the bottomland like it was a centerless sea, her eyes settling on nothing. The tobacco plants were already showing new signs of growth after the topping, their leafy stretch widened despite the lack of rain, and they had lost the look of faded old party favors. New green shoots were ready to be suckered.
But nowhere in the midst of all those plants did she see Orren. She decided as she walked to bring in the cows herself, draw them in from the pond so that Orren would not have to do it when he returned. With the rooster killed and Orren assuring her they could do without another so long as the broody’s eggs hatched, she was no longer afraid to venture near the barn and the pasture. She passed the hens all huddled in the shadows, silent and scratchless, struck dumb by the heat. She picked her way across the field, stepping high to avoid cow droppings and the pitching up and down of the natural fall of the ground. Crossing toward the pond she saw instead the cows gazing down at her stilly from the dark closeting shade on the hill and she changed direction, climbed the rise toward them. Once there, she kept going, passed from the warm sunlight into the darkness of the trees past the cows, who turned their solemn heads toward her. On into the cooler, deeper stand of trees. One cow turned slowly and followed her. The others stayed on the perimeter and watched her recede with their wide dispassionate eyes.
Aloma found to her surprise that once she passed the white oaks that lined the outer edge of the hillside, there were pines behind them. Here the needles were littered and piled so deep on the forest floor that a person could lie down and sleep on them. Orren’s grandfather had not set the fence at the edge of the trees, but farther back so it extended—crooked here and there around a tree—thirty feet into the pines. The cows were free to wander back into the woods a ways, which they did during the heat of the day, reemerging toward evening to feed and water again. Aloma walked to the fence and tested it with her hands. Rusted, it streaked her palm a visceral orange. She prodded one of the barbed knots with a thumb and then carefully hoisted herself up, falling back to the ground twice before she managed to clear the fence, grasping a riven post for balance, her skirt snatched up under one arm so it would not snag. She managed to cross it uncut. She smoothed her skirt down and looked back at the cow that had followed. The cow stopped a few feet from the fence and stood gazing steadily at her with its black, mothering eyes. For a moment, Aloma did not move farther but stared back into that depth, which she found to be impossibly dark, a windowless room. Then she turned and passed twenty feet farther where the pines gave way again to white oak and peeling ash, their roots threading the ground beneath her feet. She stood in the flagging light filtered by the trees. Sweat beads cooled on her upper lip and she reached out to touch a tree beside her, and she leaned against it in relief. Her eyes closed and into the vacancy of her thoughts, Bell found his way. She blinked him away, pushed off from the tree with more force than needed, and walked on, half forgetting the cows, wondering if the woods would turn her out at the ridge road or carry her deeper. She felt she would rather stay in the woods, maybe for a long time before ever wishing to return to the house and as she turned to her left found a space that was even cooler, darker, and saw a carving on one tree. The letters E + C chipped into the underbelly beneath the bark. For a moment, she gazed on it in mere curiosity and nothing more, then with a start knew that it must mean Emma and Cassius, Cassius who had been the father of Cash and Orren, and she pressed one finger to her lips as if to still the woods around her and leaned in. The wood sliced for these names had darkened with age so it paled against the bark like the desiccated flesh of a yellow fruit. She ran a finger along the fretted letters, her eyebrows drew together and filled with a stern feeling, she wished suddenly that not a single one of them had ever been born to fit a blade in their hand to make vain impermanent markings on living things.
She straightened up, surprised at herself. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed, then echoed rockily against the ridge wall. She stepped suddenly away from the tree and looked around as if for someone and started back toward the house, disregarding the thickets that stabbed at the edges of her hem. The cow remained standing where she’d left her. When she crossed back over the fence and said, Get, in her voice she recognized some of the flat veneer of Orren’s own voice and reached back to pat the cow on the broad, tufted sworl between her eyes, but the cow did not like this and tossed her head to one side and then walked ahead of Aloma out of the woods into the sun. Aloma shielded her eyes with her hand and followed its swinging backside as she walked slowly down the hillock to the open pasture. The other cows fell into step behind Aloma, the oldest one nearly knocking into her when she stumbled once in a snake hole. The pregnant cow came last, her gravid weight resisting each step with its sheer bulk. Across the low-chewed field, toward the red barn, into the pen, the gate of which Aloma held open for them as they passed one by one. She held the skirt of her dress up above her knees as she waited. When she came down alone around the corner of the barn, she found Orren’s truck parked alongside the barn wall on the far side. With gloved hands, he grabbed bales of hay out of the bed and pitched them with a hard swinging motion against the barn in neat-enough piles to be pulleyed up to the mow. When he saw her, he said, Help me here, but then he took in her dress and he said, Oh, and waved his hand at her so she just stood beside the truck, at first leaning against it, but then not, because it was too hot, and watched him work. He moved quickly, as if any pause at all would destroy his momentum as he swung and swung and swung. It was very late in the day, the sun was shuttered by the house. She stared at Orren. The muscles under his skin were such that she had trouble taking her eyes away from them, not because they were beautiful, which they were, but because they showed her so clearly the ways in which he was not her, could not be like her. She had a sudden urge to reach out and touch the skin that held the rest of him in, but he was working and sweating so she didn’t, she just watched. But she thought, Could I move like him, could my back curve and straighten like that, the ropy muscles like water that runs over rocks but not too quickly, over rocks that are smooth and not sharp. She looked at the red-brown of his darkened skin and then she looked at herself, her own pale skin. It was shocking really, she thought, what all entailed the difference between her and him, as if a whole new person could be made from the sum of that difference.
When he was done, they both climbed into the cab of the truck and he drove it out of the field, opening the gate and then shutting it behind him, something she would have done, but he did not ask her because she was wearing a dress, and drove up along the south side of the house where he shifted into first and cut the motor.
You want something to drink? she said and he nodded, his face looked rained upon from sweat. In the kitchen she made lemonade from a mix, stirring it until the vivid yellow sediment fanned and dissolved. She poured it into a tall glass and with the glass in her hand, she went out back again and found him sitting on the lowered tailgate of his truck, his boots not touching the ground, the triangulated tips pointed down. He made sounds under his breath, inchanting so soft she almost didn’t hear it, almost mistook it for breathing.
What’s that you’re singing? she said. She sat beside him and held the glass in her hand for a moment, the icy wet hoop ice-branding the palm of her hand.
Nothing, he said.
No, what?
He shook his head.
Tell me . . .
He turned his head fractionally away and said, with no tune, When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down. You know it, he said, a sideways glance to see if this was the case, his lip twisted down in apology.
Sing it, she said.
I can’t sing, he said.
No, just sing it more. So he sang in a soft and artless voice, And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on, and when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on. The graveled pitches fought to escape his throat, but they could not rise and the unchurched sound of his voice was thin and breathed through like wind in cane.
Yes, she said and she wagged her finger before him as if she were pulling the words from his mouth with her hand.
And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing and joyful be and—
He could not see that she was smiling at him because he had turned his face again into the falling sunlight on his right side, into the west.
—and through eternity, I’ll sing on.
I’ll sing on, she sang, her voice clear. And through eternity—but he only hummed the rest under his breath.
Yes, she said again. The sound fell away, words fallen short of their pitches, unable to form a melody, and she was left to study that side of his face. His loose curls reddened from the sun and also the granitic edge of his jaw, the hint of paler skin under his jaw and the cording of his neck. She watched the muscles in his throat work as he swallowed once. The edge of his turned face was lit then like the nimbic burning line of a cloud, so fine and bright that she turned her gaze away and saw then a flock of birds, barn swallows from the look of them but too far away to tell for sure, that had risen up in a chorus and taken to the air. They flew out together in what was a strange and shifting shape over the tobacco field, out and up, thinning for a moment so that they were no more than a blade in the sky and then swooping down now, lost in the distant shadow of the mountains. She looked at Orren again and raised her hand to point as if to say, Look what was showed us, but Orren was still turned away, the radiance of his face hidden. Aloma let her hand remain in the air for a moment and when she looked back to the birds, they were gone. She sighed, felt the unmoving weight of Orren beside her. She leaned into him just barely so their shoulders touched.
Sing it again, she said softly.
Come on, now, was his only reply, folding his cracked dry hands, one over the other between his knees, his shoulders hunched. He stayed sitting beside her looking out over the land to the west while she turned her head away with a deeper sigh and squinted into the darkening east as though searching for something. And she thought to herself with a bitterness she did not recognize because she’d not felt its tannins on her heart before, No, I will not tell him about the tree today. And maybe not any day.
After she had been playing at the church for a few weeks, Aloma felt she would be welcome to come in during the weekdays to practice piano. She wanted to leave the big house, its common graceless interior that she’d ordered but no longer wanted to master. She dreamed once or twice that it fell down while they slept and she’d woken with a start, but it was still there all around her, still strange and unchanged. She had not lost the desire to resurrect some of her better pieces to use as audition material to get into a piano program. Just as she’d always planned before she’d followed Orren. Or, if nothing else, just to hear the old music again, to remember what it was like to sit beside Mrs. Boyle with the eye of the woman on her every move, a strict attention. It had stirred her to be seen. So she decided. She abandoned the house—her cleaning, her organizing, her standing at the back door gazing dull and dry-eyed into the fields where Orren might or might not be found—and drove in to practice. The first time she went to the church it was noon. The front door was locked and dark and she stood before the peeling white doors for a few minutes like a child, her back to the road, wondering if Bell Johnson might show up. When he did not, she slouched to her truck and drove home.
She called him that night, when she was sure he would be home, and said, Do you think I might could come by the church to play tomorrow?
Well, he said, we keep it locked up during the day unless Mother’s there cleaning. I run our farm during the day, mostly, but I go in generally from four to six and you’re welcome to come by any time then.
The next day she pulled into the lot exactly at four and Bell Johnson did the same. He waited politely for her to get out of her truck, and when she reached for her box of scores, he took them from her. She did not protest, but followed behind him and was shied slightly by the fact that he wore jeans and an old festival tee shirt and looked younger a bit than he was.
What’s all this in here? he said.
It’s my scores, she said.
Yeah, from when I played all the time at school.
What school was that? he said and put the box down by the piano and turned to her with his hands on his hips.
Just a settlement school east of here, she said and squatted down by the box, her face tilted slightly away to deflect further questions. She took the lid off the box and felt him towering over her, watching her.
You played all that? he said, looking over her shoulder. Mozart, huh. Alright, he said. Well. He took a step away from the piano. I got a little office off the kitchen. If you need a thing, don’t hesitate.
For a moment more, he did not move. She smiled up at him—just for a second—and he, feeling that the conversation could not go further, but not knowing why, left. Then she pulled the first score from the box and spread it on the rack of the piano, her heart beating. She looked up at the door Bell had closed behind him. She hesitated, her hands hovering above the keys. Then she played. And she played, not with the smoothness that she’d possessed two months ago—the last time she’d played from any of the scores—but with a surging and unsteady need that had not been there before. As her fingers found their home, clumsy at first but quick to confidence, her body rocked back and forth unaware on the bench like a child finding its comfort. She played and played.
So she came four times a week to practice, not including Wednesday, and she practiced the old music, the Grieg and Schumann, the Bach she played badly but loved, Beethoven and Liszt, and she thought how much she had missed all this. And she thought too how Orren did not know this part of her, he’d not once seen her play piano, she believed he didn’t know what she was capable of. Who she could be.
Bell met her every day at the front door. He learned quickly that she would always come on time so he was sure never to be late and he waited on the front steps until she turned into the lot and then he stood and tossed his keys lightly in his hand. Once her pattern was established, it was always like this and he was always there. But once he let her into the building and was polite—he was always polite, but nothing more—he disappeared into the back and she played until six when she left without seeing him again. He stayed in his office and she knew he heard her, because her playing crashed through the small sanctuary and the walls were paper-thin. After a week and a half of this, she was restless. So one day, not thinking it unwise, not really thinking anything about it at all, she went to the office and peeked her head around the door, saw him sitting at a desk with his Bible spread open before him, a pen lolled between two thickly made fingers. She said, So this is where you work. She had caught him by surprise and he looked up, startled. Then he sat back on his chair and brought his hands together, clasping the pen over his belly. He smiled, looking up at her face tilting forward and gleaming from the door frame that she gripped. Expectation perched in the set of her lips.
This is it, he said slowly. It ain’t much.
Well, I don’t have an office. I think it’s pretty nice.
He looked at her and measured her words for a moment before he said, So I reckon you’re no secretary if you don’t have a office.
No, she said.
What’s it you do exactly?
Well, this mostly, she said. She picked at nothing on the grain of the wood.
He cocked his head to the side, still smiling. That don’t add up, he said. How do you eat?
Well, I’ve got a little money saved up, she said, which was true. She had exactly sixty dollars saved, which amounted to all the money she had made in one month at the job.
He nodded as if he understood. She turned abruptly and faced the door frame then, tapped her nails against the wood in a confounded rhythm, smiled as if she might laugh and then stopped herself. Looked at him again, looked away, and said, I guess I ought to play some more.
I reckon, he said. And she left. But the next day, after she had been playing for about an hour, he wandered out to the sanctuary, or at least to the door, and stood there and listened as she played and she knew he was there but pretended she didn’t. The next day he came all the way in. He stood by the piano for a moment and then went to the landing and sat down behind the piano a ways so that she could not see him, except for the length of his legs from the knees down. When she finished, she put her hands in her lap and leaned over to peer at him.
That’s some good playing, he said and he was shaking his head. How long you played like that?
Oh, eight or nine years, she said. I learned this piece when I was fifteen.
What is it? he said.
It’s a wedding march, but not the one you always hear, the one they always play. This is one people don’t ever get married to.
No kidding, he said and he laughed. Well, how would I know, I ain’t never been married.
I gathered that.
And now maybe I’m too old, he said and he looked over at her.
No, she said.
Thirty-six, he said. I’m a old man now. He smiled, watching.
That’s not really old, she said, but her denial seemed to confirm something for him and he looked out at the empty pews. They were silent.
You never did come back to the singles meeting, he said suddenly.
Oh, that, she said with a wave of her hand. That cut into my alone time.
He laughed, really laughed, with his head tossed back and she was pleased with herself and played a few trivial notes on the keyboard. When he quieted, he jointed his hands before him, his elbows on the white worn knees of his jeans. No, he said, I never married. Honestly, I don’t think folks care for it that much. But my daddy preached this church and that’s how I came to be here. They tolerate it, I suspect. I do the best I can for them.
Oh, I don’t think they tolerate you. They think you’re good at what you do.
Thank you, he said. I suspect they’d all just feel better if I had a wife.
Well, how come you never got married?
He looked intent on the pews. I guess I just never found that special girl.
Special girl, huh, Aloma said, raising her arched hands to the keys again and finding a few more notes, but still leaning to watch him. Why does she have to be so special? Is that because you think you’re so special?
She’d meant it as a joke, but he didn’t smile. His gaze faltered down and he moved his mouth as if he chewed on something sour, the muscle there belled and sank once. His color rose. Aloma righted quickly in her seat and began to play to cover her own embarrassment. With nothing in mind, she invented on the keys until she settled into G and without really choosing it, she began to play the hymn Orren had been humming the day she brought in the cows. She had not seen the hymn in a long time, but her fingers found the progressions and she closed her eyes and the bars came before her eyes like a scroll.
When the last chord rang out into the silent sanctuary, she opened her eyes and braved a glance at Bell and his face was turned down now, his thumbs pressed like stoppers to the inner corners of his eyes. When he looked up, awoken from himself, she saw the wetness on his cheeks. Aloma shrank behind the piano wall, sat there hunched in her ill ease, unable to reconcile herself to the tenderheartedness of mountain boys, not knowing whether to say something, say nothing, or play. She waited. But when he said nothing, nor moved one inch, and the silence had grown too large for the room, she said, I’m sorry. She did not know what she was sorry for.
No, no, he said, sounding very formal suddenly, his voice thick as if he were speaking through a mouth full of cotton wool.
She peered around the piano again. Did I do something wrong? she said, her hands sliding the dust from the slip below the keys where he could not see them.
He stretched his neck, first to the right, then to the left as though it hurt. That’s a hymn we sang at Daddy’s funeral. He looked at her with a funny little grin. He wanted that one, he said. It was his favorite. I can’t have thought of it in quite a while. You took me by surprise. Ain’t that funny, he said, more to himself than to her. Funny how somebody can pass and be gone a long time and then something . . . happens, you hear a snatch of music and it feels all over again like they can’t be dead. Like their dying was just a mean trick of memory or something like that. But they are really gone from this place, I guess. There’s a resurrection, there’s a time for reuniting. That’s what that feeling is, I guess, knowing it beforehand, disbelieving they’re dead. Your head says they’re dead, but then you feel that they can’t be dead, not really, and it’s the feeling that’s the knowing. I do believe that. He surveyed the small sanctuary. Then he cleared his throat and looked at her and his eyes were very open. Course, you’re very young. I reckon you still got your folks.
No, they’re dead.
He started back. Oh, forgive me. I ought not to a said that.
She shrugged. They’ve been dead since I was three. I don’t remember anything. And it was true. She didn’t remember a kiss or a scent or even any sentiment other than a muted awareness that they were gone to associate with them. As a child, she’d tried to invent the feeling of loss inside her. But like the dead, the feeling simply wasn’t there. It was not that her uncle and aunt filled up the space that her parents vacated; it was just that the empty space was fine as it was and no more hurtful than being born with four fingers on one hand instead of five. It was just a lack she thought didn’t mean anything.
I’m very sorry, Miss Aloma, he said and he looked at her in a steady way with his surprised, almost black eyes and she tossed off, It doesn’t bother me one bit, but in such a blithe manner that it sounded almost cruel—she felt it as soon as she said it—though she couldn’t be sure if it was cruel to Bell, or her dead parents, or only to herself. But she’d balked at his words and the gravity of his look and she had the sour feeling that he was apprehending a grief that wasn’t there. He straightened up from the steps then, sharp and a bit too fast, and he stood stiff so he looked to her eyes like a boy playing soldier. But a very tall one.
Thank you for playing that song, Miss Aloma, he said very carefully, passing a hand down the front of his shirt. Thank you very much. And he turned and passed through the door that led into the back of the building and she was left alone sitting at the piano. She watched the afternoon sun creep across the floor, slow as glass it moved before her eyes. She took up her scores in her arms then. But she laid them down again beside her on the bench, still not taking her gaze from the canted light, and placed her fingers blindly on the keys and she played. Once again, she felt the upswell of pleasure she’d been missing for so long and then a thought crossed her mind, that the preacher might be standing on the other side of the door, that he might be listening, and this gave her a different kind of pleasure, one that was new to her.
She stayed in Hansonville to shop for groceries and when she returned to the house, Orren was standing on the porch. She parked and eyed him as she climbed out of the truck, carrying a brown paper bag, and stopped before him, her feet on the slender skirting of grass. His face was so dark with sun that he did not look the same race as her.
Hello, Orren, she said and as soon as it came out of her mouth, she thought how odd it was, how cold it could sound to call a man by his given name like that. He did not seem to notice.
It’s tricky, he said, not looking at her. He bit his lip and she waited for him to continue, unsure if he would. But he said, It’s hell to tell a ready leaf from just a stressed leaf. He looked plainly at her then, as though waiting for something, and when she said nothing in response, he pulled up his cotton shirt from his waistband and wiped his face with it, letting it fall over his belly again striped with bands of sweat and said, From the drought. The butts look yellow, but it ain’t ready. It’s hard as hell to tell.
Well, can you cut them now and dry them longer?
He did not answer. Instead, he said, You been gone a whole lot.
She hauled the groceries higher on her hip. Only two hours a day.
That’s how I said.
If that’s a lot, you’re crazy, she said and she stepped up onto the porch intending to pass him, but he held out his hand to the side so that he touched her with a single finger, his index finger, very gently, and it stayed her.
And what’s it you do for two hours like that?
She stopped. I’m playing the piano, Orren. God bless.
That’s all, he said.
Her eyes narrowed. Damn, Orren, she said.
Why are you calling me like that?
Cause it’s your name, she said and she scathed him with her eyes top to toe. And sometimes I have to remind myself just who on earth you are. She didn’t blink when she spoke, but leveled his stare with hers.
What’s that supposed to mean?
It means I don’t ever see you no matter that I live with you and then when I do see you, you don’t have anything to say.
Aloma, listen, he said.
Oh, God forbid somebody tells you what to do, she snapped.
You ain’t my mother.
She blinked, her lips parted. No, she said and lower, No, I’m not. And to that he had no response. He just cut his eyes away and in the same instant pulled his hand back to his own person, and folded his arms on his chest, looking away so she could not see his face. She shifted the weight of the bag from one hip to the other like it was a baby and she looked where he looked, out over the front acres dropping away to the trees where she had first seen his truck glinting. Then she turned her back and continued on into the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.
She woke up in the middle of the night and her first thought was that it was cool out of season and that was a relief. She stretched her limbs, but then she realized that the sheets were pushed away from her shoulders and chest and the bed was empty. Aloma started in the bed and looked around her at the darkened room. Orren stood by the window, the moonlight glazing white on the black and blue of his shadowed skin. For a moment she only stared at him, they had not spoken more than mere necessities after their words on the front porch. She thought now about saying nothing out of remnant spite and pretending to still be asleep, but when he did not move and did not even look to be breathing—his chest was still as if he were made of wood—she spoke.
What are you looking at?
He did not seem surprised when her voice broke the stillness of the room, he did not change position and he took his time answering. I don’t know, he said.
You must be looking at something.
He glanced over his shoulder at her and the moonlight lit the left side of his face, cast the right side into strange deep shadow so that he appeared suddenly to have only one eye. She looked away from that, worked out the wrinkles on the sheet beside her with her finger.
Tell me, she said, her eyes cast down.
I can’t see nothing really, he said, turning back around and looking up through the glass. The moon keeps coming and going.
Yeah, she said, sifting through his tone for the tiniest apology.
Then he said, I ever tell you I been down to Mammoth Cave once?
No. She looked up, surprised, and sat up higher on her old feather pillow.
Before Daddy died, he said, we gone down. Before he died . . . It was a vacation or something. We drove down there. And we was in this cave and the tour fellow turned off the flashlight. Orren turned now with his whole body, turned fully into his own shadow so she saw him only as a silhouette and she sensed that his whole body was watching her like a watchful face.
And what happened? she said.
Nothing, he said. It just was dark. But it was dark like you ain’t never seen dark before, like you can’t see your hand in front of your own face and I couldn’t tell where nobody was and you don’t know if there’s a up or down or not. That’s how dark. Not like this dark here—he nodded back out the window toward the grass beyond the windowpane—where you can still see something. It made everything just gone, he said. Then he folded his arms over his chest and said, And then when that flashlight come on, everybody in there just laughed. Even my folks. He stopped suddenly and peered out the window as though his eye had found something there.
They were relieved probably, Aloma said.
Well, he said, I ain’t liked it, I never could reconcile to it. It was like people laughing at a dead dog on the side of the road. Something that just ain’t funny.
She had no response to that. When he spoke again, he said softer, It better rain.
It’s gonna rain, Orren, she said, petting him this time with his name when she spoke it. I won’t let it not.
He snorted and looked out the window again. Well, it best, he said, cause this place is riding to hell quicker than . . . And he struggled for the rest of the sentence, Aloma saw his lips working for a moment more, but his sentence died.
Aloma stretched again, pushed the rest of the tangled sheets away from the twin converging lines of her bare legs. Orren, she said. He took his time turning around again, but then he only stood there reluctant and the moonlight figured around him and the front of him was altogether dark again so she could not see his expression. She laid her hands on her breasts and felt the dilute blue wash of light on her own face. A strange sensation passed over her as Orren walked slowly around the bed to his side and sat down, placing one hand flat against the headboard. My granddaddy built this bed, he said. He built it in the curing barn. Aloma waited for more and then pulled at his elbow with one hand until he turned around and lay down beside her. I wish you’d tell me more things, she said and they kissed and then neither she nor he said anything further. He moved slowly over her, he settled between her legs, and she said his name again, but all the while she was watching his shadow-strange face in the dark, she felt a small dawning fear. She felt she did not know this face, this stranger, not at all, but also she did not care then, stranger or not, as she gripped hard the top rear of his thigh and pressed him into her. His face gasped once for air. Then she was pulling him into his motions and holding him against her. But even as she grasped at him ever tighter with her hands, allowing him no distance at all from her chest, she sensed that she was merely knocking at the door of his flesh, and that even when he cried out and she felt him give up to her, the door did not open.