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Broken Jewel The Betrayal Game The Assassins Gallery Liberation Road Last Citadel Scorched
Earth The End of War War of the Rats Souls to Keep |
CHAPTER ONE The place where they lay making the child is beautiful. They lie on a bed of ferns, which like a cushion of feathers tickles them. Only a few strides off the old dirt road, they are beneath a tall red oak, thick as a chimney, bearded with gray bark; the tree is a gentle old presence. The leaves of the oak bear the first blush of whistling autumn. If they were to stand on that spot they could see the fields. South lay forty acres of beans, leafy and ripe for the harvest machinery resting now after church on this Sunday afternoon. High pines and turning sugar maples make this field a green leafy loch where every breeze riffles. North of the road beyond barbed wire and honeysuckle is a cleared pasture for the cows which are out of sight behind hills that rise and roll down, suggesting by their smooth undulation the couple lying under the oak. He is a black man, blacker than everything, blacker than the soil of the road, everything but the crows. His name is Elijah, named by his mother for the loudest of the Hebrew prophets, though he has not grown into a loud man. He is as silent as his skin, as the dark of a well. Beneath him, wrapping him like roots seeking water, is his wife Clare. Her green eyes are closed behind white, blue-veined lids. Waist-length blonde hair spreads over the ferns and under her back. She kisses him and their tongues twine. A band of starlings crisscrosses the field. The ebon birds strike something invisible in the center of the field and disperse, to clot again and circle some more, somewhat aimlessly. Clare and Elijah, tangled together, white and black, are absolutes, the presence and absence of all colors at once, sharing a smooth perfect motion.
Clare and Elijah Waddell live in a shotgun shack two miles down postal delivery route 310. Their small house stands five miles east of the town of Good Hope, the county seat for Pamunkey County. Local wags call these single-story, slant-roofed homes shotgun shacks because if you stood in the front doorway and fired a shotgun blast, you'd kill everyone through the whole house. Elijah and Clare bought the place last year, just after they married. For five months they sanded the heart-pine floors, put in new kitchen cabinets and painted the clapboards. Clare wanted the exterior painted pink and got dusky rose, their compromise. The house came with ten acres; all of it except Clare's and Elijah's vegetable garden is leased to a corn farmer who cultivates four hundred acres on both sides of the road down to the river. The house and yard and the dusty lane are walled in by rising corn from May through October, until the crop is harvested. Elijah and Clare enjoy the isolation. Coming home once from their jobs at the paper mill, Clare took Elijah's hand and stood beside their mailbox, the silks tassels higher than their heads. She said, "It's like being Hansel and Gretel coming up on the gingerbread house, isn't it?" Elijah is ten years older than Clare; she is twenty-two, but they share the same wiry build and long frame. His is a face of circles, pliant, with wide nostrils, long ear lobes and arching brows over dark pupils. Clare's features are round too, but resemble the roundness of an infant's. When it can be, theirs is a sweaty, dirty love. They groom their big summer garden and work on the house. They bring each other iced tea. They make love in the rope hammock at nightfall in full sight of the road, daring the path to bring them an intruder. In winter they chop and carry wood. Elijah has knocked down a wall to take the space from a closet and add it to a baby's room. Clare carries the detritus outside in a wheelbarrow, shoveling chips and scraps into the pickup to be hauled to the dump. They pull off their clothes to laugh at the dirty regions, hands, arms, necks and faces, her whiteness showing the grit most, his grime blending into his skin. They make love that way too, with the dirt of home chores or the stink of the paper mill in their hair and clothes. Work seems to make them want each other, like thirst. Clare and Elijah have a dog, a gray cocker named Herschel. It is Herschel who in this first year of their marriage shows Clare that her husband contains in him places she has not yet entered. On a summer Saturday Herschel lies heaving on the back stoop of the house. His breath grates in his throat. His tongue lolls from his mouth onto the boards. The dog's neck is swollen terribly, as though bees have built a hive inside it. Elijah finds him on the stoop and shouts for Clare to bring the truck around. Herschel has been bit by a snake. Elijah lays Herschel on the seat, the dog's head in Clare's lap, his tongue on her bare thigh. He drives fast to the vet, who confirms Elijah's diagnosis and gives the dog anti-venom. The vet tells them to leave Herschel overnight. Returning to the house Elijah walks away from the pickup to the backyard shed. Clare remains in the yard. Elijah emerges with his rubber fishing waders over his arm. "There's another pair," he says. "Come if you want." Clare watches him enter the house. In a minute he exits carrying his old side-by-side shotgun and a box of twelve-gauge shells. She runs to the shed for the other rubber coveralls. Elijah slowly drives a quarter mile to the end of the dirt road where he turns left up the farmer's tractor path. He stops the truck at the foot of the trees and looks at Clare. His face is blank as slate, as though all purpose has been drained from it to better fuel his will. He climbs out and Clare follows. The corn field stops here, the rim of it barbered neat. The air tastes musky along the river bank in the shade. These trees were left in place two centuries ago when the land was first put under the plow, to hold the bank together. The roots of the trees closest to the river stick out of the bank, exposed by times of high water. Elijah pulls on his waders, then breaks the shotgun, slips in shells, leaves the barrel open over his arm and clambers down the bank holding on to the roots. Where the roots meet the water, spreading like arteries, is where the copperheads make their nests. Elijah moves into the water as though he were himself reptilian, without ripple or sound. Clare puts on the second pair of rubber bibs, they go on easily because they are too big. She eases herself into the water but still makes a small splash stepping in. Thirty yards ahead Elijah does not turn. He snaps closed the shotgun and raises it. He lets go with one barrel, then another, the branches overhead shake with the report and where he has aimed smoke whorls on the water. Something thrashes. Elijah unsnaps and reloads. He fires again into a cascade of roots, leaving another specter of smoke as a marker. He wades the river the length of the field, almost a half mile, firing the shotgun into the water, against the bank, under roots. Green plastic shells and shredded bits of snakes and bark float past Clare on the slow current. She is surprised the water is not redder with blood. After most of an hour, when an empty cardboard shell box drifts past her. Elijah stops walking, the shotgun under his armpit. He does not turn to Clare but stands watching the current slide past his thighs. Clare clambers out of the river and walks back to the truck. She removes the overalls and sits in the cab. Elijah does not appear. She considers honking the horn but does not. She sits alone for another hour eyeing the yellow palisade of corn. I had no idea, she thinks, no idea how much my husband can love. |
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