Kind One

Kind One - By Laird Hunt


1.





ONCE I LIVED IN A PLACE where demons dwelled. I was one of them. I am old and I was young then, but truth is this was not so long ago, time just took the shackle it had on me and gave it a twist. I live in Indiana now, if you can call these days I spend in this house living. I might as well be hobbled. A thing that lurches across the earth. One bright morning of the world I was in Kentucky. I remember it all. The citizens of the ring of hell I have already planted my flag in do not forget.

Charlotte County. Ninety miles from nowhere. It was four hundred acres, varied as to elevation, with good drainage to a slow-running creek. There was a deep well, fine pasture for the horses. Much of the land never went under cultivation, and there were always frogs and owls for the night and foxes to trot bloody-jawed through the dawn. Birds must have liked its airs, because the airs were full of them. A firearm went off independently and we had half a flock for supper. In season, we had fresh corn and beans and tomatoes and squash. There was a boy who kept it all in shape. Two more looked to the pigs. The girls cooked and kept house and kept me.

It was a pretty country. Greens were greens. There was snow for Christmas and holly bushes to make sure it looked white. Breezes and flowers for the summer. Trees in autumntime stuffed with red and yellow leaves. Bulbs to crack open the earth when it came up on spring. It has been my whole excuse for a life since I held my breath and pointed my back at that place, but my mind has never learned to hold what transpired there against it. The land is the land and the land washes itself clean. I had a father who had been through battles who told me that.

Still, even if they are all gone, even if they are all scattered or dead, I would not want to come over the rise and across the stone bridge and arrive there again. No, I would not want that.





My husband’s name was Linus Lancaster, which made me Ginny Lancaster, but they do not call me that here. I live in a house on a corner of a farm that belongs to the family whose floors I scrubbed for forty years. When they come to call, which some of the younger ones still do, they stand in the yard and holler, “You in there Scary Sue?” I am. I’ve got a view of a barley field and a woods they haven’t taken the axe to yet. I’ve got a little kitchen with its own pump and a place to sit on the front porch when it is too warm. I’ve got a shelf of books they have let me have out of the big house over the years. I’ll read just about any kind of a book you could offer, but it is mostly adventures and romances that sit close to hand. Books in which they die by the cheerful dozen and the knight comes to rescue off the damsel and the good lord of hosts lets it pour down happy ever afters like there wasn’t anything else in his skies. Like he didn’t have any other eventualities squirreled away up there.

Linus Lancaster was my mother’s second cousin. He came to us from Kentucky and grabbed me up when I was just settling into school.

“Would you do me the honor, Ginny?” he said to me.

“Yes I would,” said I.

“Then come along with me and be my fair maiden,” he said.

“I’ll come, I will,” said I.

He told my mother about his piece of paradise, said he’d struck it rich as a king in trade and now was going to let the land care for him. He had good bottom land. A stream. A well with water so kind to the throat that it would never let you drink anything else. Good outbuildings. Sharp ploughs and axes. China and cutlery. Larders full. Healthy stock. People to look to it. He’d had a wife in Louisville, but she was now his dearly departed, and each night his soul would beg him to bring it some Christian company. My father, the same who had been through battles, had a wooden foot and a cane to club on us with. Linus Lancaster told my mother about Charlotte County, but my father was there listening, quiet, the way he liked to. With a pipe at the ready and one eye shut.

There was a good deal to say about that place in Kentucky, and my father took it all in, every word. I mostly looked at him and at Linus Lancaster. I liked how new Linus Lancaster’s shirt was. He had two of them in his valise and ten more just like it, he said, in his fine home. My mother liked to hear him talk. She got that look of hers, like a daisy under a sweet raindrop, when he would open his mouth and dance out at us with his tongue. My father saw that look and he saw Linus Lancaster and he saw me, there in my corner, mooning over it all. When it seemed like Linus Lancaster’s tongue was done with its long dancing, my father straightened up on his chair and hit a little at the floor with his wooden foot. He looked at me, then at Linus Lancaster, then he cleared his throat. In school, the teacher had let me lead the lesson, my father said, opening one eye and shutting the other. The teacher had said one day it could be me to stand in front of the class and hold the chalk, and what, he wondered, did Linus Lancaster think about that. Linus Lancaster said he had heard that about me. He said he liked a woman who knew her letters. Said there was great accommodation in his heart for the delicacies of the mind.

“Do you want to go?” my father asked me later.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“I will ask you again—do you want to go down to Kentucky with this man, cousin to your mother, Linus Lancaster, to be his wife and do his bidding?”

“Yes, Father,” I said.

He did not say a thing until the next day, when I was out in the goose pond with mud and wet feathers up to my elbows and all the geese honking and carrying on like I was the rapture come to smite them. My father quietly considered this carnival for a time, then he kicked at a goose come too close to his wooden foot.

“Go on then,” he said.

We left a fortnight later. There wasn’t much fuss to it. My mother and father, a third cousin and an uncle, a cow, the old mare, and a broken-wing chick. A turkey buzzard, looking for his lunch, haloed the house. My mother waved to her cousin with a cloth she was holding. My father pushed down his hat and held up his hand.





Everything I had fit in one half of the small trunk my father made for me after the wedding out of some wood he’d salvaged from a corn crib. As we made the drive down I would turn often and look at my trunk bouncing there in the back of Linus Lancaster’s wagon and wish that I could take off my new traveling hat with its pink ribbon, open the trunk, wrap my arms around myself, and curl up inside. If I had, maybe my body would have kept some of that which wasn’t books, sturdy notions, or linens from breaking into the little bits of nothing I found after I pulled up the nails when we arrived.

Linus Lancaster had his girls get me settled. His house wasn’t what he had told my mother about. There weren’t any columns or gables or fifty-foot porch to it. It was just a cabin with a long corridor and some extra rooms tacked on. But they kept it well. You could make a breeze run in through the windows and down the hall, and the country when I first came to it was fragrant. That was the thing I liked best in those first days. I liked to stand at a window and bite off pieces of that breeze. That was a breeze to chew on and think about and swallow. Never mind that winter hadn’t come yet to freeze it all until your teeth would snap straight off in your mouth if you smiled. Never mind that there would be more than breezes to trot along that corridor in the jolly days to come.

“Welcome,” those girls said, then each tried their hand at a curtsy. They were just little bitty things then. Ten and twelve. I was fourteen.





In the big house that sits one Christian mile due east of this little house and this scrawly stretch of barley that the rabbits like to visit, there is the big shelf of books that is the mother to the little shelf I have here. It isn’t just my happy books on that big shelf. It is other things. It is the shallow and the deep parts of the pocket both. After I had gotten myself up here and had started in to scrubbing floors, on that shelf I searched every day for the word to say what it was that befell us in that house in Kentucky. I looked in every book for that word, but I did not see it. It wasn’t until a Sunday at the church that I learned what that word was and saw that I had looked at it many times in those books and heard it said every day.

It was a kind of spring morning with a kind of warm sun and we had all spilled ourselves out of the church, and I was waiting for them to finish their quiet talking so we could get home and look to dinner when Mr. Lucious Wilson, my employer and the owner of this little house and this barley field and all that surrounds it and the whole wide world for all I care, called over to me, “Come on out of that shadow and into this sunshine.”

So I thought, yes, shadow is the word and I have seen it and I have heard it before and thought it before but now I know it. It has been said.

Shadow.

Which is where I’ve been and where I am and where I’m wending my sorry way. So if I say I can look now at my earliest days in that place in Kentucky at the home of my husband Linus Lancaster and see the light of a pretty, unhurt place shining on us all, you can know and I can say that this is just tricks from a mind that wants what was to be otherwise but can’t change it.

If I say that in my early days there was a meadow where I would walk with the girls, Cleome and Zinnia, to look out for daisies, and where we would sit together of a morning and make chains that could have stretched all the way to Louisville, you would be right to look me square in my shadowy eye and say you don’t believe me. If I tell you that in those days I would go to look at the colts when they were dripping fresh, with Cleome and Zinnia to my sides or me to theirs, and that we would pick big tomatoes for the table out of little Alcofibras’s gardens and play in the yard at weighing them on the market scales or go together to the woods to look for mushrooms or lie as flat as you like on our backs by the creek or hold hands and skip like faeries and flap our arms together like blue jays or hold our faces up to the falling snow like three fingers of the same fork, you will say, and I will nod, that it cannot have been.

There is a shadow covers it all now.

There was already shadow deep enough to drown in back then.

Drown me and those girls. Drown little Alcofibras. Drown those daisies. That meadow. Those tomatoes. That sun.

Cleome and Zinnia helped me get settled at the home of Linus Lancaster, and they helped me when he commenced to have me into his bedroom.

They helped me, but I never helped them.





That is not true. That is not the truth’s only portion, not the whole of it. I helped them in those years that came by helping them in other ways. I helped them when they had the fever headache or when they had the ague or when they had the festery eye. I helped them when the tobacco grew so thick they cried to contemplate the day that had to be spent in it, or when there were too many hides to tan, or too much corn to put up, or a biting goat that needed chasing, or a pig that was too mean.

Zinnia hated icicles, was afraid they would fall on her hat and pierce through her head, so when they got too big and it was her had been set to knocking them off the eaves, and Cleome and the others were at some other work, it was me went around whacking at them with the broom. I like the sound of an icicle hitting snow. The kind of long cave it will make. How it will keep a week without melting when it lies inside that softer cold.

I helped them with their first girl sicknesses, told them, as my mother had told me, what it was they had to do. They took my hand and thanked me for that. Each one of them in her turn. I think Zinnia’s eye might have sprung a tear. Little bitty thing like a ball of dew. I helped them with that and I helped them sweep and I helped them pluck and I helped them darn and I helped them sew.

I helped them in those ways and in others, and once one rosy summer day when Linus Lancaster was looking for her with a switch in his hand, I didn’t tell him I’d seen Cleome drop the bucket into the well and dangle herself down its rope.

“What did you do?” I said, after Linus Lancaster had got tired of yelling and chasing and dropped his switch and gone off to swear and smoke in the woods. Cleome was deep down in the well, her feet almost tickling the water.

“I spilled coffee on his shoe, then I made him trip when I was cleaning it up,” she said.

“Sounds like maybe you deserved some switching,” I said. I laughed when I said this and added on for merry measure that I thought a switch or two seemed a small thing to make her creep all the way down a well. She did not laugh though, just looked up at me. There was a cold coming up with her eyeballs out of the dark. Cold made me think of one of those icicle caves. After a while, so you can see how truth has its portions, meager may they be, I steadied the rope and helped her climb back up.





I told it earlier that my teacher in Indiana at the little brick school I used to go to before I joined Linus Lancaster in his paradise had let me lead the lesson. She had let me lead the lesson and had invited my parents in to hear it, and my father came and sat in the back and heard the teacher tell the class that at least she had one pupil that had a head and not a stuffed feed sack to do her thinking with. I had written down a story about a princess who came by luck and cunning and other such foolery to be queen of the clouds, and the teacher had me read that after I had led them all through letters and numbers and the naming of the countries of the world. I had written down that story while the others of them had frolicked to no clear purpose, the teacher said. I had sat on my bench and composed that story, and now we had heard it and were the better, every last one.

When we got back home my mother asked my father, “How was the show?”

“That’s about what it was,” my father said. He put his hand a minute on my arm when he said this. Then he let it go.

Often was the time in those early days in Kentucky that I thought about that story I had written and about that day in the school. I told Cleome and Zinnia about it and they made me tell it again and again for the several days after.

“I’d like to live up on one of those clouds,” Cleome said.

“And drink up that lemonade,” said Zinnia.

“We could all live up there together,” I said.

They had me tell it to Alcofibras, but he just shook his head and said clouds were cold places to live.

I also told my husband, Linus Lancaster, who appreciated the delicacies of the mind even as he kept his hand always near a switch, as he was at his supper. He heard it and looked at me twice or thrice, then got up, walked to my trunk, fished the four or five books I had brought up out of it, and heaved them over into the stove.

“No more clouds now, Ginny,” he said. Then he called for his bath, and I knew it was time for me to go and wait for him in the bedroom. When he came into the bedroom, fresh from his bath, my husband made himself ready before me. He liked to stand, at the ready, in his nothings. And he did this for a time that night. Then he drew the covers back and lay down.

“We have the Bible for stories, Mrs. Lancaster,” he said to me after. “Look to those good words and to those good words alone now. There wasn’t any book but the good one for my dearly departed, and there won’t be any other for you.”

But there was no book good or otherwise in that cabin with its long corridor. I looked all the next day for it. The girls said they had never seen any good book in Linus Lancaster’s house and wouldn’t speak a peep to whether or not his dearly departed had had one. When I inquired to him about it he said it was here somewhere, he’d had it out recently, and that if I was too rearward to find it that was none of his affair. Then he had me back into his bed.





When Linus Lancaster was in trade in Louisville and still sharing his table with his dearly departed, he made the money he did make in the barter of livestock, and that was when he started dreaming about his place in paradise that would take care of him like the ancient lands took care of the Israelites. He told me this the first time in his bed with his arms on my shoulders and his face over mine. He also told me that it was after he had started to conjuring this way that he had fallen asleep one night and seen a countryside covered in pigs. The land, he told me, was green and the pigs roamed the land and there in the middle of it stood the shining house he would tell his second cousin, my mother, about as my father listened.

When I first arrived at his home he had not yet made good on his dream. There were chickens and cows and horses but no pigs. Then one afternoon he had a load of lumber and nails in, and the next morning he set Ulysses and Horace to building pens and sheds. One week later they all came, weeping and grunting like babies lost from heaven. The man who had driven them to us stayed for a week to show Linus Lancaster how it was done. They would rise early and go out to the pens and smoke and kick or coo at the pigs. The man ate at our table and winked at me, and one night after Linus Lancaster had retired with a poor tooth took Cleome by the waist and dandled her on his knee and would have done more than dandle, but he had drunk all we had and fell over onto the floor. The next day the man left the pigs he had brought to us behind and headed back down the road with his switch. On taking his leave he told Linus Lancaster that pigs never brought anything but peace to a man, and Linus Lancaster, who that very afternoon would have Ulysses yank that tooth from his mouth with a pair of tongs, said, “We’ll see.”

We did. You could see those pigs turning the greensward to filthy froth from the room where Linus Lancaster kept his bed. He liked to sing a little after he’d been in at me. He didn’t sing loud enough but what you could still hear those pigs snuffling and snoring in their pens. In the morning, maybe after he’d been at me again, he liked to go out and stand at the fences and sing and consider them.





They don’t all call me Scary here. That’s just the younger ones. The name I gave when I came up out of Kentucky and floated my sorry way north was just Sue. I gave them that name, which had been the name of that schoolteacher who had let me lead the lesson, because it was the first thing that came into my head when they asked me what I was called. I had not made any plan. I had not thought it through. My own old name had not come to me when I was asked, and after a minute the other one had. So it was Sue this and Sue that for my first years here, and then one of the little ones had come up on me when I was on my knees scrubbing and had my skirts lifted up over my ankles and saw the dark red ring just above my ankle bone. She saw it and said, “What is that?”

“That is what you call a scar,” I said.

“It looks all scarry,” she said.

“That’s just right, it is all scarry,” I said.

And I thought we had left it there. Only the next time I saw her she called me Scarry Sue, and some other of my employer Lucious Wilson’s children heard it and thought his sister had said Scary or liked it better that way, and then they were all calling me that.

“Tell us a story, Scary Sue,” they would say. “Scary Sue, fetch us some of that popcorn. Scary Sue, give us our bath.”

Lucious Wilson would have put a stop to it, but after the second or third time I heard him scolding I told him it didn’t matter and that I wasn’t hurt by it. He ought to let them call me what they wanted—they didn’t mean any harm. I told him I knew something about what harm was, and it didn’t have anything to do with his children and some name.

He didn’t argue. He knew about the scar on my ankle and he knew that whenever it started to settle I would give it a few fresh licks. He had walked in on me going after it one sunny Saturday not long after I had arrived. Had stood watching me let it bleed into my sock. Stain the bedsheets. Feed the floors. Drip through the tunnels. Head to the underparts of Kentucky. Talk to the worms.

“What are you doing, Sue?” he had asked.

“Traveling, Mr. Lucious Wilson,” I had answered.

“All right,” he had said.

Scary wasn’t wrong.