The smell of the chicken yard wedged into the openings of her nose. It was a hot and cloying smell. She couldn’t get used to it the way she could forget the smell of horse manure. If she stayed in the chicken yard all day, she’d be as choked up at the end of the day as at the beginning.
The décor of the chicken yard was white splatters and black dots on a gray pitted background. The chickens worked hard at their chicken yard, pecking and dropping all their lives long. One end or the other reaching for the gray dust, up and down, up and down.
Chickens were puny. She could step on them and end their senseless industry. She had seen her grandmother do it once, years ago. Gramma had searched out the pick of the lot, a fat, white, single-minded thing, with the red indecency on its head lolling off toward its right eye. Gramma picked it up, its head in her hand, and swung it high in the air, four times around. Then she put the wobbling head on a tree stump and stepped on it. Her brown fingers grasped the three-pronged legs and, with one jerk, the chicken was in two pieces. She let the body part run around a minute to amuse the children. Celia couldn’t remember if there’d been any blood.
She wished she had a cigarette. Dennis, her husband, wasn’t more than thirty feet away, sitting in the side yard, bathed in sunlight and shimmer. The clack of his typewriter came faintly to her, a dead sound on the dead air. His white shirt burned at her eyes. Would he come if she called?
She opened the lid of the wooden bin which was nailed to the fencepost and took out a dried, withered cob of corn. She rolled it around in her hands and a few kernels of yellow gold dropped readily away from the cob.
“Here, chickie,” she said softly, and threw the pellets onto the ground. The chickens squawked and whooped and flapped their wings. They climbed on each other’s backs and pecked at each other’s eyes, then scrabbled in the dust for the golden prize. There was one runt who stayed on the outskirts, pleading to be allowed in. Celia kicked him into the middle of the fray, but he dropped back, unharmed and unfed.
Celia stepped carefully around the fighting hens and went out into the side yard. The farmhouse squatted solidly in the lawn, its back to the chicken yard, and its face averted from the train tracks on the right that paralleled the south line of the farm. The house wore its new white coat of paint uneasily, with here and there the older gray smearing through. Empty windows looked out at her except from the front bedroom where starched, white curtains scratched at the screen. She’d get drapes for all the other windows tomorrow. Shocking pink ones.
Dennis sat just outside the porch, with his back to her, bending over a card table. One of the legs of the card table was slanted inward, and it jiggled to the rhythm of the typewriter beat.
His neck was a pinker white than his shirt. The hairs stood out boldly in the sunlight. She could see the round dome of his pink scalp clearly.
She touched the mole on his neck. He jumped, and a green eraser flew out of his hand.
“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.
“They’re in the house.” He frowned and picked up the eraser.
She sat on the grass by the wobbly table leg. She wrapped her arms around her knees and squinted into the sunlight.
“Talk to me,” she said.
“What about?”
“I don’t care. What we’ll have for dinner, or the price of eggs. You name it, I’ll pursue it.”
Dennis played with the typewriter keys. “Tomorrow is your birthday, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I’ll be thirty-nine. The dangerous age.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s not old, Celia, and besides, you come from a long-lived family.” He looked up at Gramma’s bedroom.
“That’s not what I meant. ‘We live in death, and die not in a moment.’”
“‘With death.’ Sir Thomas Browne,” Dennis said, his eyes shifting from her face to the papers spread before him. He went on. “Now I have a serious problem. I am propounding the theory that the vowel sounds in the words ‘light’ and ‘night’ are different, but my colleagues, I am sure, will say that it is merely a peculiarity of the midwestern dialect.”
Celia considered the problem. “Isn’t all phonetics made up of hearsay evidence, anyway?”
“Please don’t be flip, Celia.” He stared at her a moment, then his eyes went back to the papers. He picked up the green eraser and obliterated a word.
She sat on the grass a while longer. The pecking of the typewriter began again, slowly, then faster and faster.
She got to her feet and stood looking down at his neck for a long time. Then she turned and walked diagonally across the lawn toward the gate to the middle yard, avoiding the quicker path through the chicken pen.
There was a trembling under her feet. It was a noise in her ears. It grew louder and louder and became the 4:20, slashing through the countryside, coming to her. As always, her body inclined toward the monster and at the last possible second, bent backward away from it, like a pendulum which, having gone too far one way must compensate on the other end of its swing. Her fingers yanked at the zipper that ran down the front of her dress.
The last of the muted roar was gone now and the quiet came down around her. She pushed at the gate and it swung right back at her, pulled by the chain with the large round weight at its midsection. The weight was smooth now, all its ridges flattened out by the bottoms of countless swinging children. Her bottom. And her children’s.
She pushed again and slithered through before the gate could smash her. She walked across the middle yard that was a no-man’s-land. A few dispirited blades of gray-green grass, hen scratchings, and horseshoe parentheses.
Over to her right, she could hear the children screaming invective at each other. She could see one pair of bare brown legs through the trees. One of the kids— Janie?—called to her.
The orchard wasn’t really anything so grand as the name implied. Four apple trees in a square, and a knobby old pear tree standing guard to one side were all. It was a “family use” orchard. Nobody ever sprayed the fruit, so nobody but the worms and bugs ate it. But the kids liked to climb the trees.
That was the trouble now. The boys were up in the sturdiest apple tree and every time Janie tried to climb up they stepped on her hands. She was crying and calling them “lousy old bastards” until she saw Celia peering over the fence.
“Mother, they won’t let me come up in the tree!”
“Don’t listen to that cry-baby, Mother,” called Junior. “If we let her up, she’ll just throw apples at us.”
“Janie, if you promise not to throw apples at them, I’ll make them let you go up there,” Celia said.
“I won’t throw apples at the big sissies.”
“Come on up, dear sister,” crooned Brandon.
Janie climbed up unmolested.
“Mother! She’s shaking apples down on us!”
“Hey, quit it, you big fathead!”
“Mother-errr! They’re pushing me!”
Celia turned away. Let them call. They’d settle their argument only if she didn’t interfere. The three of them came down out of the tree. They started to run, their legs going in and out among the trees.
She went to her left, down the cement sidewalk. What a silly place for something so citified as a sidewalk. It was like sandpaper with big pebbles in it. It hurt her feet through the thin shoes.
The sidewalk tilted slowly toward the far end of the middle yard. A broken cultivator lay on its back across the path, its orange-brown talons crooked upward. Celia stepped carefully on a round patch of green—nourished by what?—and reached the safety of the sidewalk on the other side.
The gate here was just a gate, opening into the animal yard. She could go around the barn and on down the dried mud cow walk to the water-filled quarry. She could walk down there, and in the shelter of the trees, take off her clothes and let the icy water close over her. The silence down there at the quarry was palpable. The mud around the spring was yellow and cold and greasy.
She walked up the uneven ramp and into the blackness of the barn. The horses were making munching, whispering noises. Ahead of her she could see the buttocks of Beauty shifting, first one side higher, then the other, like a woman whose feet hurt. Or like a whore’s walk. She went up to him and felt his flanks. It gave her fingertips the same voluptuous feeling that she got from stroking her sealskin coat.
She could saddle Beauty, and sitting astraddle, ride out, creating her own wind, riding out the excitement of the feel and smell of a horse. She could snarl and scream and laugh if she wanted to as they sprang over the dust-gray earth.
She heard a clang and scrape of iron at the darkest end of the barn. Jim. She salivated slightly, and swallowed, and rubbed her open palms down the sides of her hips. She went toward the sound. The darkness was less intense, and with it was going the semblance of coolness. She was growing quite warm, even here, in the barn.
“Hi, Jim,” she said. A finger of light from a knothole somewhere up above struck the white of his right eye, and shone through the hazel iris so it glittered like a chip from a stained-glass window.
He straightened up, crossed his legs, and crossed his arms, leaning against the wagon. His tan shirt was unbuttoned all the way down to his belt buckle of tarnished tin, with the middle button hanging by a torn bit of cloth. His shirts were always unbuttoned.
“You gonna ride today?”
She let that pass. “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked. His fingers were hot as he handed her one. He raised his knee and stroked a kitchen match along the tautened underside of his jeans. He smelled of horses and virility and sweat, or maybe all three smells were a single one.
“Pull up your zipper,” he said.
They gazed at each other for a while. He said, “Here, you can help me.” There was a small smile on his face. He had three teeth missing in a row beside a canine tooth.
The yellow-handled pitchfork was taller than she was, and heavy. They laughed at her efforts to get a forkful of hay up into the trough before it all slithered to the floor. He did it easily, scrunching the fork along the splintering wood, and with one smooth motion, carrying the fork up, up, and over, its load intact.
“What do the words ‘light’ and ‘night’ mean to you?” Celia asked.
Jim grimaced. “Are you nuts?” He thought a moment, then laughed. “I guess ‘light’ means work, and ‘night’ means play. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
Her hands were getting slippery on the handle. She set the pitchfork on the floor of an empty stall, turning the tines downward as she had been taught to do. She sat down on the mound of straw in the stall and watched. Jim turned and looked at her. He leaned his fork against the wall and came to her. His shoes were black and thick and covered his ankles.
He put his hand out to her. She reached out and held it. He sat down, and leaning over, pushed her full length into the straw. It was dusty smelling and dry, and jabbed at her everywhere. He kissed her, with lips that were wet as though he had just licked them. He leaned his body along hers, and she could feel the bumps and hollows. He raised his hand to stroke her, and said, “I know what you want. I can always tell.”
The barn was stinking.
“No,” she said.
“Aw, come on.” His smile was knowing. “I’m not afraid of your husband. I’m no chicken.”
She rolled over and stood up. She rumpled the straw wisps out of her hair, and smoothed her skirt, and rubbed the back of her hand over her mouth.
“No?” she asked. She picked up the pitchfork from its bed of straw. She hefted it and found its center of gravity. She lifted it as far as her arms could reach and, with all her might, she brought the tines down, just so, across the naked white skin of his neck. Now she could remember. There was blood.