TWELVE

Lexi

In the middle of the morning Tilson came and Walter put him to work digging a pit for the chickens. The sweat on his black arms gleamed in the sun.

An ocean breeze blew through the tops of the back-acre pine trees but the hill kept it off the front porch. I sat on the swing with my Bible locked shut on my lap. Poe inside it. And Hawthorne and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and their kind. Their hearts beating fast. As if the Bible was a coffin and I had buried them alive.

Walter loaded an axe and his chainsaw and a can of gas into the wheelbarrow. And pushed it across the yard to the pine woods. Mom and Edgar Allan talked in the front room about lines and palettes and mirrors. I drifted off until Edgar Allan changed the subject.

‘Who is this?’ he asked.

I knew without seeing that he had picked up the one photo that Mom kept of my dad. It was the only picture in the front room. The only thing at all on the shelves by the fireplace.

‘My first husband,’ she said. ‘Amon.’

She took the picture twenty years ago. My dad was in his forties then. Dressed in jeans and a black-and-red-checkered flannel shirt. Sitting at the dinner table. When I was twelve I stole the picture and put it on my dresser in my bedroom. Mom stole it back and put it on its shelf. She dusted it the same way she cleaned the windows.

Edgar Allan asked, ‘If he ran off why do you keep the picture?’

‘That’s what he looked like when I last saw him,’ Mom said. ‘I keep it to help me remember what he did to me.’

‘Your memory can’t do that without it?’ he asked.

‘Some people’s memories harden their experiences,’ Mom said. ‘Mine has always softened them. I don’t want to fall in love with him again even in my memory.’

‘But you did love him?’ he asked.

‘Very much,’ she said. ‘For a time.’

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘We should talk of other things,’ she said.

They were quiet. In the yard Tilson stripped off his shirt. Each time he sank the shovel into the sandy soil the grit scraped against the metal like a sharpening stone. Out in the pine woods Walter’s chainsaw ripped and whined as he touched the blade to a tree.

Then Edgar Allan asked Mom, ‘Did you ever hear from him after he left?’

She said, ‘He’s probably dead by now. I hope.’

‘Why do you keep the rest of the shelves empty?’ Edgar Allan asked.

She said, ‘Does this really have to do with my painting?’

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

She said, ‘Amon kept his books on them.’

‘He took them when he left?’ Edgar Allan asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Walter didn’t like them in the house.’

‘What did he take when he left?’ Edgar Allan asked.

I listened for what Mom would say.

Edgar Allan asked, ‘Another woman?’ Needling her.

Mom had had enough. ‘Let’s go see my paintings,’ she said.

They came out of the house. Crossed the yard to the studio and went inside. They looked like secret lovers. I itched to chase them across the yard and pound on the door until they let me in. Instead I opened the Bible and took Great American Stories from the cut-out. I read ‘Tell-Tale’ again. Thumbing the rough edges of the Bible pages where I had cut them. When I made the hiding place I had burned the insides in the kiln. The blackened paper had crumbled through the holes in the bottom ovens and into the box where Walter was collecting tar to paint the roof of the house. Now the ashes from Deuteronomy to the Book of John kept us dry when it rained.

Mom and Edgar Allan came out of the studio. She carried two of her paintings and he carried a hammer. They went to the side of the house so I locked the Bible and went to see. Edgar Allan hammered nails into the outside wall. Mom hung paintings on them.

‘Why?’ I said.

Mom said, ‘He wants to see them in natural light.’

They went back to the studio and came out with more paintings.

‘You’re wrecking the wall,’ I said.

‘Nonsense,’ Mom said.

Edgar Allan pounded nails. Mom went for paintings.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked him.

He said nothing.

I said, ‘What’s your real name?’

He said, ‘Do you know how many paintings she has crammed into that shed?’

‘Hundreds,’ I said.

‘Thousands. I want to see how they handle the sunlight.’ He stepped back from the wall. ‘If they can’t take it what good are they?’

Mom came back and handed him two self-portraits. He hung them and they went for more.

Tilson stopped digging. Threw the shovel aside. Watched. Then he went into the poultry pen and picked up a chicken. He looked at it nose-to-beak and threw it over the fence into the pit. He picked up two more and threw them also.

Mom and the man laughed inside the studio. Sharing a secret.

Tilson held one of the white hens. He called to me, ‘Miss Lexi.’ Beckoned me with a finger.

When I joined him he said, ‘Look at this.’ He held the white by its neck. Turning its head so that the sun shined in its eyes. He thumbed apart the feathery down. He exposed the rough skin and a little hole which was one of its ears.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Blood,’ he said.

I saw nothing.

‘Look close,’ he said. ‘You miss what need seeing if you keep blinking you eyes like a silly girl.’

I looked again and saw it. A prick of blood. As if a sewing needle had gone into the head through the ear. I asked, ‘Could reserpine do that?’

‘It only one side of the bird,’ he said. He turned the chicken and showed me the other ear. ‘Every bird.’ He threw the white over the fence into the pit. He picked up another and smoothed the down and showed me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

He got mad. ‘What don’t you know?’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ I said.

‘I tell you what don’t happen,’ he said. ‘Accident don’t happen. These bird die because someone want them dead.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘What I look like? I the man that bury the chicken when somebody kill them. Don’t ask me why.’ He picked up a brown campine. Thumbed the feathery down. Showed me a spot of blood. ‘Look.’

‘Who then?’ I said.

He threw the brown over the fence and nodded to where Mom and Edgar Allan were hanging a painting on the wall. ‘You watch out for that boy.’

‘Him?’ I said. ‘Why would he—’

‘He don’t belong here,’ he said. ‘I know that. Not now. Not never. Good man don’t climb over the gate in middle of the afternoon. No he don’t.’

‘He came to see Mom’s paintings,’ I said.

He snorted. ‘Stop blinking, silly girl. You got stones in you eyes?’ He picked up a chicken by the neck. Carried it out of the pen. Dropped it in the hole. Black flies sprayed from the ground. He said, ‘Don’t be surprise if when you done sleeping you open you eyes and see you house knock down.’

As I went back to the porch Walter and Paul the driver came side-by-side across the yard from the pine woods. Walter’s wheelbarrow full of logs. Paul carrying more. Walter had a bloody gash over the bridge of his nose.

They dumped the wood by the kiln. Paul picked up the axe and started chopping and slashing. Walter looked dazed. So he wandered to the wall where Mom and Edgar Allan were hanging Mom’s self-portraits.

Mom saw the cut on Walter’s face and asked what happened. As if his bleeding annoyed her.

He wouldn’t say. He stared at the paintings. Fourteen of them on the wall. ‘What the hell?’ he said. And said to Edgar Allan, ‘You leaving yet?’

Edgar Allan smiled at Mom’s portraits. ‘We’re just getting started,’ he said.

Walter started to argue but Mom said, ‘Edgar is going to stay one more night.’

When Walter called her a fool Mom said, ‘He already paid us. I’m having a good time Walter. For the first time in a long time I’m having a good time.’

Early in the afternoon the first thunderclouds built in the west and Lane Charles came to the screen door. Everyone was inside except Paul the driver who was splitting logs into strips and ribbons and Cristofer who was sitting on the ground watching him. Walter answered the door and Lane Charles pointed his thumb at the poultry pen. ‘Couldn’t help but notice,’ he said.

Walter left the screen closed between them. ‘We’ve got company,’ he said. ‘Decided to butcher them.’

Lane Charles looked in the screen and saw Edgar Allan. ‘Well, goddamn,’ he said.

‘Goddamn what?’ Walter said.

But Lane Charles only laughed and said, ‘You’re eating egg layers? Meat’s bad.’

‘You ever try it?’ Walter asked.

Lane Charles said, ‘Can’t say I ever wanted to.’

‘Don’t criticize then,’ Walter said.

Lane Charles was eighty years old. His glasses were dirty where the lenses touched his nose. Long ago he wrote a book and was a big reporter for one of the magazines. In the nineteen sixties he did stories on civil rights and sit-ins. Then outside his apartment building someone shot and killed the photographer he was sleeping with. The police charged him and kept him in jail for eight months until they figured out that two brothers had been driving around the country in a Dodge station wagon shooting sympathizers. But jail had broken Lane Charles. More or less. So he quit being a reporter and bought a farm that my grandpa carved out of our family land. Before Edgar Allan came only old civil rights workers crossed the bridge to Black Hammock Island. And young reporters writing Whatever Happened to Lane Charles? articles. ‘His own damn fault,’ Walter said when he told the story. ‘Sticking his neck in other people’s business.’

Now Lane Charles grinned through the screen at Edgar Allan and put a hand on the door as if he would let himself in. ‘You cook your chickens by burying them in the ground?’ he asked Walter.

Walter said, ‘You should leave well enough alone.’ He closed the door over the screen. There was a history of meanness behind his advice. Eighteen years ago Lane Charles had reported my dad missing. He hated the police but my dad was his friend and had been helping him put in pipes when he disappeared. And a missing man was a missing man. The police had come and that one policeman had kept coming back until I was six years old. Talking with Lane Charles. Asking Walter questions. Bringing me candy. Walter never forgave Lane Charles for that.

So Walter sat in his green chair and said, ‘The man keeps poking at wasp nests but he’s surprised he gets stung.’

Mom looked like she had something to say to that. But thunder roared out over the ocean. Engine noise chasing a faraway jet. And Mom and Edgar Allan ran outside to move Mom’s paintings back to the studio before the rain.

Walter glared at me. The nose gash he’d gotten in the pine woods was dark and swollen. He said, ‘She thinks hiding them under a roof will save her but it won’t.’

Late in the afternoon the sun split through the clouds and an hour later the sky was hard and blue. But rainwater still glistened on the metal fence around the empty poultry pen. And on the old black tar spills by the kiln.

Then the phone rang.

I picked up and the caller said he was a police detective. And, ‘We’ve had a report of a disturbance.’

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Not here.’ Mom and Edgar Allan were talking in the kitchen. Paul the driver was outside on the porch swing. Cristofer was sitting beside him.

The policeman said, ‘We need to come and check.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. I cupped the phone and told Walter, ‘It’s the police. They’re coming to check on us.’

‘Hell no,’ he said.

I brought the phone back to my mouth. ‘Hell no.’

‘Is this Lexi Jakobson?’ the policeman asked.

I felt the shiver you feel at moments like that. I asked, ‘How did you know?’

‘I used to come out your way,’ he said. ‘You were little. It must be fifteen years since I was last here.’

‘You brought me candy?’

‘Sure.’

‘It was thirteen years,’ I said.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Can you let me in? I’ll see that nothing is wrong and then I’ll be on my way.’

‘Walter says no,’ I said.

‘I don’t want to be a pain,’ he said. ‘But if you don’t let me in my lieutenant will wonder what’s going on. It would be easier if we just did this.’

‘Hold on,’ I said. I dropped the phone on Walter’s lap.

I don’t know what the policeman told him but when Walter hung up he said, ‘He’s calling from the bridge. Go let him in.’

So I ran up the hill. My dress brushing against my thighs.

A Sheriff’s Office car was parked on the road. Windows closed. Engine running. I unlocked the gate and swung it open and the car pulled on to the driveway. The sun bounced off the windshield and blinded me. But when I opened the passenger door I knew him. He was older and heavier. Most of his red hair had fallen out or turned gray. But one side of his mouth curled higher than the other when he smiled and his eyes had a shine to them. Those things don’t change except when you die. A badge said his name was Daniel Turner.

I sat next to him and said, ‘Did you bring me candy?’

He smiled that smile. ‘That would be creepy.’

‘Lane Charles called you?’ I asked.

He flipped down the sun visor. ‘I can’t say.’

‘Who else?’ I said. ‘What did he say was happening here?’

‘How are your chickens?’ he asked.

‘You investigate chickens?’ I said.

‘Not usually.’

‘Cristofer didn’t do it,’ I said.

He took his foot off the gas pedal. Gave me a look.

When he pulled the car next to the front porch Walter came out to the yard. He had picked at the nose gash and made it bloody.

Daniel Turner got out of his car. ‘It’s been a long time Walter,’ he said.

Walter pulled at his beard as if he had spider webs. ‘But now you’re back,’ he said. ‘Like a seventeen-year locust.’

Daniel Turner laughed. ‘Can’t keep me underground forever.’ He leaned a little to the left as he stood.

‘I see that,’ Walter said. He squinted as if the sun was too bright. ‘But will you explain something to me? How does a man who’s been on the homicide squad for – what is it – eighteen or nineteen years?’

‘Twenty this past spring,’ Daniel Turner said. And he crossed his hands over his belly.

Walter said, ‘How does a man who has twenty years get sent out on a call for a little disturbance? Killing business must be slow.’

‘Business is always too good,’ Daniel Turner said. ‘But a nine-one-one operator who has been around for a long time – another locust like me – remembered your name and passed it along.’

‘Because she thought you would be interested?’ Walter said.

‘She knew I would be,’ Daniel Turner said.

Mom and Edgar Allan laughed in the kitchen. The policeman nodded at Paul the driver on the porch swing. ‘Who are your guests?’ he asked.

Walter said, ‘Visitors is all. Is it any of your business?’

‘I mean no disrespect Walter,’ Daniel Turner said.

‘We both know that’s a lie,’ Walter said. ‘You drove through our gate for one reason only and that was disrespect.’

Daniel Turner jingled his keys. ‘Everyone’s all right here then?’ he said. ‘Your wife?’

Mom and Edgar Allan laughed again.

‘You hear her,’ Walter said.

‘And Cristofer?’ Daniel Turner asked.

‘He’s never been right,’ Walter said. ‘But you already knew that.’

‘Looks like you’ve got no problems then,’ Daniel Turner said. He walked back to his car. Favoring his left side. But he stared at Walter before getting in. ‘The years haven’t been good to you Walter,’ he said. ‘You sound as confused as you ever were.’ He frowned at him. ‘What happened to your face?’

Walter touched the gash and brought away blood. He said, ‘I was cutting wood.’

‘Looks like you put your face in front of the log,’ the policeman said.

Walter said, ‘Yep looks like it.’

‘No disrespect,’ Daniel Turner said.

‘Then get off my land,’ Walter said.

Daniel Turner got into the car. Started the engine. Rolled down the window. ‘Stay well Walter,’ he said.

But Walter was already climbing back up the porch steps. He went to the porch swing and glared at Cristofer. Cristofer glared back until Walter lunged at him as if he would bite him. Cristofer keened. Walter laughed. He looked at Daniel Turner. Showing both palms. Like they shared an opinion about Cristofer’s idiocy.

Daniel Turner spun his tires in the wet. Slowed to get traction. Gassed the engine again and sped over the hill and out of sight.

‘Goddamned fool,’ Walter said and went into the house.

Paul the driver said, ‘Come on.’ And Cristofer puppied after him into the yard. Paul picked up Walter’s axe.

When I came back from locking the gate he had given the axe to Cristofer and was teaching him how to split logs. When the axe struck wood Cristofer grunted. Everything else was quiet in the yard. Except for the chopping. And the grunting. And a low buzz by the poultry pen where black flies hovered like they knew there was something good inside the earth.