Kind One

9.





THAT DAY WE SAW OFF Bennett Marsden I went back into the kitchen like I’ve already said. I had on my dress and had my clean hands, and because I thought what we had been cooking up for Bennett Marsden was still sitting on the stove, I stood up straight when I got to the table and I told Zinnia to sit. I told her to sit, and she looked at me like there was lightning and thunder to come, but she sat. Then I told Cleome to walk down the hall to Linus Lancaster’s room and fetch a wallet out of a drawer she would find half hidden in the chifforobe. Cleome said she would not walk into Linus Lancaster’s room, and who was I to be handing out orders. I told her again. Zinnia nodded. Cleome went and fetched it. When she got it to the table I took it from her, told her to sit, and opened it up past its few notions to a portrait in a leather frame. That was a photographic portrait of a lady wearing a hat.

“Linus Lancaster, my late husband who is gone now to his pigs and glory, liked to show us this,” I said. I showed it up to Cleome then to Zinnia. “He liked to hold this up to us like I’m holding this up to you now, and he liked to say everything he’d ever loved in this world and everything he’d ever hoped to bring to his piece of paradise was in this frame. This was usually after his singing nights. When he had been at the jug. Do you remember this?”

“All right,” said Zinnia. She said this without moving her lips, without moving her eyes, which had lingered only a moment on the portrait, from mine. Cleome said nothing.

“All right,” I said, then pulled the first piece of tin up out of the frame and revealed the second behind it and held it up in its turn. Cleome and Zinnia looked at each other then at me.

“I found this second one just this winter,” I said.

Neither one of them said a word. Only looked at me. There was a cold breeze at my ankles. It tickled at the bruises there. Rose up hackles on my neck.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I just wish to say that to you both now. That is what I wish to say.”

“Sorry about what?” said Cleome.

Zinnia reached into her apron, pulled the pig sticker out, and, holding it lengthwise, looked at it close.

“If he was sitting here with us, I would stand and put this right back into his neck,” she said.

“It would slide easy into that neck,” she said.

“Sloooosh now, Mother,” she said.

Cleome gave out a little laugh. There was a tear on her face. One silver drop. We all three of us watched it move down her cheek, around the mole, down her neck. There was a first fly buzzing by the door. It spoke of insects hatching everywhere. Things hidden inching up. Once upon a time the three of us had played a game to see who could spot the first wild crocus, the first mosquito, the first open bud. I almost said “First fly!” even knowing that whatever we had been cooking up for Bennett Marsden, the Draper Man, had gone cold and crumpled like heavy old biscuits to put holes through the floor.

Cleome put a hand on her stomach and looked at me.

“Sorry about what, Mother?” she whispered. “What do you have to be sorry for?”

They fed me awhile then took me back out to the shed.





There was a reverend at the little church here awhile back who taught it that in your beginnings are your endings, and that when you hit your endings you have just begun. He taught it every Sunday like that, twisting it up with David and Moses and Josiah and every one of the apostles, and you should have seen them all scratching their heads and nodding and shaking the reverend’s hand when he was done. Now one of those Sundays while he was telling it about Mary and leaving off her one sorry life to get started on her blessed other, my head lolled, and as he discussed this I chased my way into thinking about my father and how he was in the early days before the war had ravished off his foot. Our little place in Indiana was a sunny place in those days, and my father liked to pick me up and give me a twirl. He had been in battles before and had his marks to prove it, but they hadn’t yet found a way to take away his foot from him, and he liked to tell stories about his wars and the wide world in which he had fought them.

“You think the world is this big,” my father would say and hold his hands one across from the other. “But it’s really this big,” he would say and stretch his hands as far as he could apart. “It’s that big and then some and on across the oceans until you get back to where you set off. We could hitch up that wagon and roll it until the horses died of old age in their harnesses and we wouldn’t have even gotten started. I’ve seen ladies taking their tea in ships in harbors it would take a week to sail across and boys racing up trees they said were a thousand years old. Someday we’re going to ride it on out of here and plant our flag in the Kansas Territories or the Oregon country or sail right off to China. They make maps so we think we can understand the size of it but we can’t.”

My father came into my school where I sat in the front row and wasn’t yet a wife to my mother’s second cousin or an oatmeal scrubber or a pretend teacher or anything at all, and he made a speech about the world to us. The Lord had given us eyes to see with and feet to get us to where it could all be seen, he said. It was up to us to go out and see, to go out and consider. That was our work. We ought to strap up our shoes and set to it. The worst we could do was fail. And all fail meant was we had grit enough to try. We all clapped when he had finished and he gave a bow.

Then my father put on his belt and went off to a battle and took a tomahawk or some such in his foot, and they cut that foot off of him and threw it out into the field for the crows.

“I could see them out there after it from my sickbed,” he said. “It wasn’t even the best of them made off with the biggest part.”

Those last days in the shed my father’s foot came down out of those crows’ stomachs and reconstituted itself and kept me company. Does a foot shorn of its leg sit or stand? I put that query to it, but it didn’t answer. There was more ankle and leg to it than I would have thought. Once or twice it fell over on its side. Its heel was cracked. You could have planted fine rows of seeds in those cracks. Could have watered them and tended them and had a springtime show. I thought this. And I said it aloud. Or thought I did.

Does your father’s lost foot need talking to? Does it require attention? Does it need to be fed? Do you rock your father’s lost foot in your arms. Do you sing it a lullaby? Do you tie it to a tree and take your whip to it? Is your father’s lost foot the beginning or the end?

I’ve had nights lately when it came to me that I had never left that shed. That everything up to that point and everything after it happened in there.

Is happening in there.

Is that my beginning or my ending?

I’ll burn this stack of sheets when I’m done.





As it came to pass they did not put the pig sticker that had been in Linus Lancaster’s neck into my own. This had been the subject of debate and considerable discussion in light of Bennett Marsden’s promised return. I know this because they both of them walked into the shed where I lay shackled in my declivity more than once and then walked back out again. Zinnia came always with the pig sticker. On some occasions she was preceded by Cleome and others she was followed by her. One time she walked all the way up to me and turned me over and put the point of it at the nape under my hair. Then she pulled it back up and walked away and left me lying facedown. Cleome was quiet each time. They both only talked when they were walking away. I could not hear what they said. I knew it was Cleome arguing mercy and Zinnia mercy’s opposite. It had always been this way. Cleome soft. Zinnia hard.

Then they left. They took their leave one bright morning in what I later pieced out was early June. I had been sleeping and then I was awake and saw Zinnia standing out by the well. Cleome was some yards ahead, a sack on her back, big as her front. My old traveling hat with its pink ribbon on her head.

Zinnia said, “Peace on you now, Mother Ginny. We’re done.” As she said this she held up a key. I knew what key that was. She held it up then dropped it down into the well.

“You hear a splash?” Cleome called.

Zinnia didn’t answer her. She looked in at me. I thought she nodded. Nodded with her eyes at me. I’d had nor food nor water for three days. There was none left near me. The key to my shackle was dropped down Linus Lancaster’s well. Cleome had moved out of sight into her tomorrow. Still Zinnia stood. She looked in the direction Cleome had gone, then she looked back at me. Her lips were moving. A song came over to me. It was a song we’d sung. All three of us together. Picking daisies on hell’s front porch in the long ago.





All that last day I looked out through the door. I looked through it all that night, and the night was rich in moon and I could see the well. I’ll come swimming down you, I thought. I will swim the wide dark ways of the earth. I will dive down and swim out into your corridors of water and stone. I will shiver my soul through your rooms draped in midnight fruit and flower and deliver myself dripping unto the fire and take my place at Linus Lancaster’s side. I will stand beside him as that wet sizzles off me, and if they sing in hell I will stand next to my husband and sing, and maybe in hell where they have different ways my small voice will drown his big voice out.

I will do this, I thought. They have thrown my death down into the well and I will follow it. I followed it. The gibbous moon draped itself down over my world, lit my way. There was no splash when I hit water.

It was good into the forenoon of that last morning when I saw what I had not seen all that day and night for following my death: a piece of purple thread strung taut from the beam behind me and out through the motes aswirl in the shed light to the lip of the well and over into that hole. I knew I was dreaming it, but my hand went out and took it and pulled and, dreaming, hauled it hand over hand until the key had come out of its wet and its dark. I dreamed it came down on the yard dirt with a thump of dust and that I pulled it through the shed dirt and into my hand. My dream played dreaming tricks with me and at first wouldn’t let the key into the lock of my shackle. My eyes looked at my hands and my hands at the lock and the key would not enter and after it had entered would not turn. Then it did. I dreamed my way up out of my filth and my shed and walked bloody-ankled to the edge of the well and saw the dream of my face down below amid the dark water. Zinnia or Cleome or both had drunk of that water before they departed and they had left the bucket half-filled on the far side where I had not seen it from the shed. I woke from my dream with that bucket at my lips. I woke and ran.