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MY EYES ARE open. The ceiling above me is black. The air has turned from crisp and cool to dry and cold. The shutter is closed. No light seeps around its edges, which means it’s still dark outside. But the sound of the wind seeps in just fine. There was a time, probably before my mother died, that it was a comforting sound to hear the wind outside and to be safe and warm inside. The fire crackled and sparked. The flue worked as it should. We added blankets on the coldest nights. But the wind is louder now, closer. There are more holes, I suppose, more cracks and crevices.
This time of year, the wind rolls in from the north. It rushes down the hill, wraps around our house, whips us from side to side. Daddy isn’t so handy, and because John Holleran still doesn’t come around, that wind makes a whistling sound when it blows in through the holes in the roof that haven’t been fixed. If something woke me, it was something loud enough to rise above the noise of all of this. I still myself, try not to breathe so I’m sure to hear it, whatever thing woke me.
Juna doesn’t sleep in here anymore. She’s grown too large and says it’s easier to sleep sitting up. Every night, we pull the cushioned chair up to the fire and she props her feet on a wooden box Abraham Pace made for her but wouldn’t deliver himself. He says he can’t see her until there’s a baby too. Like me, he’s caught between wondering if Juna is as evil as folks say or as ordinary as the rest of us. He figures the baby will tell him which to believe.
There it is. An animal maybe, suffering something. Or a moan of some sort, a whimper. I sit up. It’s louder, or I’m hearing it better for having righted myself. It’s a moan, and there’s crying too, and the way the sound is growing louder, the cry will soon become a sob. It’s a strange sound, and crying isn’t altogether strange to me. But that’s the cry of a man.
Ellis Baine is gone. Juna made Cora Baine send him away. Soon the other brothers will go too. Cora Baine came to the house two weeks ago and stood on our porch, a gray scarf covering her hair. When Juna stepped into the doorway, Mrs. Baine stared at the swell in Juna’s stomach. Keeping one hand tucked under the shawl wrapped around her slender shoulders, she reached out with the other as if to lay it on Juna’s stomach.
“She’s my grandbaby,” Mrs. Baine said. “You said so yourself.”
Juna swatted Mrs. Baine’s hand away. “Your boys will kill me,” she said, “and this child too.”
The floor is cold on my feet, even through my wool socks, and the floorboards rattle because the wind crawls through the hollowed-out space under our house. I lift onto my toes as if someone or something might hear my footsteps. The door’s latch is cold in my bare hands, almost too cold. Using a single finger, I push, and the draft rushing through the house is enough to open the door.
Mrs. Baine thinks it was her idea to make her boys go. She must have loved them once. When they were boys, not men. They would have been like Dale. Not so tender and sweet as Dale, but they would have had soft cheeks and slender, smooth lips. They would have hung from her neck like Dale used to hang from mine. Maybe they’ve turned out too much like Cora Baine’s husband, and somewhere during those years of growing up, they stopped being her boys and started being reminders.
Juna’s baby was a way of starting over, and if there was one boy Mrs. Baine still loved, it had been Joseph Carl. She said she’d level a gun at her sons before letting them near Juna or that sweet child. Folks say Ellis was the first to leave. They say he wanted to go, couldn’t stay here knowing he was crossing over his own brother every time he made his way into town. Like Joseph Carl, he took a train. He went away so far, he had to take a train.
“You didn’t really love him anyways,” Juna said to me after Mrs. Baine left that day.
The front room is as dark as my bedroom. The fire has gone out. Since Juna sleeps there now and since she’s all the time up and down throughout the night, it’s her job to tend it. My job is to fill the wood box every night, taking over for Dale.
I still find bits of him around the house. Under his bed, I found a stray sock, the one with a hole in it he was supposed to mend. I told him even a man should know how to do a bit of mending, at least enough to get by. There was also the core of an apple, dried up and left to rot because he never liked the core even though Daddy said that was the best part and would have whipped Dale for throwing it away. I boxed up the most of him—his shirts and britches, boots and coveralls. But the bits of him keep popping up.
The sobbing is steady now but muted as if by a hand over a mouth. I hold the door open so the same draft that pulled at it doesn’t push it closed. There is another sound. Quiet words, loving words. A mother talking to a child. A whisper.