“You didn’t have to hurt him,” I said, near tears myself. “He’s my neighbor.”
John put his arm around me and pulled me close. “I’m jealous-hearted, Myra. I don’t like nobody else touching you. I don’t even like your granny having you all to herself. It don’t seem right for her to be with you more than I am.” He took hold of my chin and tipped my face up to look at him. “I want to marry you,” he said, growing solemn. “But if you’re going to be with me, you belong to me. I can’t have it no other way.”
My heart leapt, what he had done to Mark forgotten. I stared at him, unable to speak. “I belong to you,” I said after a moment. “But it works both ways. I’m jealous-hearted, too. If we get married, you can’t have another woman for as long as we live.”
John leaned over and touched his nose to mine. “Hell, that’s easy,” he said. “You’ve done ruined me. I can’t even stand to think about nobody else.”
Looking back, we would have said anything to possess one another. If we had known we were making promises we couldn’t keep, it wouldn’t have mattered to us.
For two weeks, I walked around with my steps unburdened and light. I didn’t wonder anymore whether John was seeing Ellen Hamilton or any other woman behind my back. But soon after he proposed, just like that night a banshee wind came screaming down Main Street, I had another glimpse of the darkness to come. Near the middle of June, John picked me up and drove me down the mountain to a part of Millertown I’d never seen.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Will you quit asking me that? I said it’s a surprise.” He smiled, white teeth flashing. He twisted at the radio knobs as we passed pawnshops and seedy restaurants and then the junkyard, big hunks of car metal twinkling in the hot summer sun.
“I hate surprises,” I said, studying his profile. It took a second to realize he was turning into a lot by the railroad tracks, gravel crunching under the tires. I looked out the windshield at the tiny, peeling box of a house, the streetlight high on a pole, power lines hanging like black snakes stretched across the yard. I turned to him and waited, thinking he had pulled over to kiss me as he did sometimes, fingers wrestling through my hair.
“What do you think?” he asked, eyes bright.
“About what?”
“The house, goose. I rented us a place.”
I blinked hard, my chest going tight.
“Come on,” he said, getting out of the car. He dug in his pants pocket and produced a greasy-looking key dangling from a dull silver hoop. I stared out the windshield, mouth open. He laughed. “I got you good, didn’t I?”
He came around to open the passenger door and pulled me out, still laughing at my expression. “Let’s look inside. I ain’t even seen it yet. There was a man came in the store, said he had a place for rent cheap if we knew anybody. I said, as a matter of fact I do know somebody and you’re looking at him. He didn’t even ask for a deposit.”
I followed John across the sooty lot, our feet scuffing up grit. It was so hot it seemed I could hear my skin sizzling. It struck me that these were the tracks where my mother was killed. I thought I might faint. There was no color. I was used to the trees setting the mountain on fire in fall and all the blooming bushes in spring and every shade of green in summer. Even the mountain ground was spotted with shade and light, blanketed with moss and deep trenches of fallen leaves, ridged with cool-colored sparkling rock, springing with mottled toadstools. But this was all still and flat and buzzing with flies. The smell of factory chemicals made my head ache.
There was a chipped concrete stoop and a light fixture beside the door covered in sticky webs. John put the key in the lock and I watched as he jiggled it, turned it, and cursed under his breath. We were both caught by surprise when the door swung in with a whine. In those first seconds my eyes played a trick that I kept to myself but never forgot. I saw the dark shape of a woman standing in the front room, tall and bone thin with wild clumps of hair and no discernible
face. I stopped and clutched at the door jamb. John said, “What?” and she was gone. “I thought I saw something,” I said, my voice as creaky as the rusty door hinges. I was still shaking when we went into the hot stink of the house.
But once John was touching me again, his warm hands moving over my skin, it didn’t take long for me to bury my doubts about the place he had rented. I told myself it didn’t matter where we lived, as long as we were together. We got married a few days later in the preacher’s kitchen, a coffeepot slurping on the counter. I could barely wait to kiss him. I smelled his aftershave and his clean black hair even over the coffee. I didn’t realize, putting Granddaddy’s ring on his finger, how fitting it was that Granny had passed it down to me. Like her, I had given in to temptation and done wrong in the name of bloodred love. Outside in the car John and I kissed each other longer and harder before driving away, his flesh hot under the thin white fabric of his dress shirt.
My wedding night was not how I expected. Later on there was pleasure, but that first night alone in our bedroom, it was painful, not just between my legs but in my heart. I would never be Granny’s little girl again. I felt the mountain falling through my fingers, but I was foolish enough to think as I clung to him in the dark that at least we belonged to each other. At least the pact we made by the springhouse was finally sealed.
John took a week off work and we spent most of it at home, leaving only to buy groceries. I came to know his body better than my own, from the peak of his hairline to the arches of his feet. I loved the blue veins of his temples, the tender bracelets of his wrists, the intricate folds of his ears. The house was depressing but I forgot when I saw him sleeping late in a stripe of sun or in the bathtub with his wet knees poking out of soapy water. I worshipped everything about him, even how he took greedy bites at supper and there was always a crumb left on the corner of his mouth. In the night he’d tickle me with the ends of my hair, trailing it up and down my naked arms, along my jaw and chin. Sometimes I read poems to him and I didn’t mind when they put him to sleep. I kept reading after his eyes were closed. All these years later, watching over my twins as they sleep on Granny’s rag rug, I try to remember the first whispers of fear. I try to mark the time when
everything changed. It happened the night I asked about his mother. It was almost dawn and the house was still, no trains rattling the bedroom window as they passed. We were lying curled together under the sheet, my head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder, when I realized we had never discussed the thing we had most in common.
“Tell me something about your mother,” I said.
He was breathing slow, almost asleep. “Huh?”
“We never talk about it.”
“Talk about what?”
“Not having a mother.”
He opened his eyes. “I had a mother.”
“But you were just twelve when she died.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t remember much.”
“How did she die?”
There was a long pause. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what did she die of?”
He paused again. “They said it was a heart attack. But that ain’t what killed her.”
I sat up and pushed back the sheet. The air in the room had changed somehow. Even my legs were sweating in the summer heat. I already knew then that the contented feeling of John and me being the last two people on earth was fading away. I began to wish I’d never brought up his mother, but it seemed too late to turn back. “Then what do you think she died of?”
He looked at the ceiling. “I don’t think. I know. Because I’m the one caused it.”
For a moment I didn’t know how to respond. I leaned over him, trying to see his face in the early morning light falling through the parted curtains, coloring our room the dark blue of an ink stain. “A heart attack is nobody’s fault,” I said at last.
He rolled over to face the wall. “I told you, it wasn’t no heart attack.”
“Whatever it was, it’s not your fault.”
He got quiet again. Then he said, “Tell that to my daddy.”
“He blamed you for your mother dying?”
“No. He never blamed me for it. It’s about the only thing he’s proud of me over.”
“John,” I said, knots forming in my stomach. “What are you talking about?”
A long time passed. I willed him not to go on. Whatever he was trying to tell me, I was afraid to hear it. “Nothing,” he said after a while. “I’m done talking about it.”
I slipped my arms around him. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t know it would bother you. I just never had anybody to talk about my mother with. Even Granny didn’t talk about her much, and she wouldn’t talk about my father at all. If I asked about the Mayeses, she said, ‘Them people wouldn’t piss on you if you was on fire.’ It’s the closest I ever heard Granny come to cussing.” I paused and there was only the sound of his breathing. I rushed on to fill the silence. “I never tried to see them while I was living at home. Now I figure I can go visit them without Granny knowing about it. They might have pictures I haven’t seen, or stories they can tell me. Granny said the Mayeses owned a pool hall around here.” I stopped again and there was still no response. I began to think he had fallen asleep. I nudged his side. “Do you know where it’s at? The pool hall?”
When he finally answered, his voice was cold. “It’s over on Miller Avenue.”
I hesitated. “Will you take me there?”
“No,” he said, in the same harsh voice. “And you might as well get it out of your head. I ain’t having my wife hanging around no pool hall. I’d be the jackass of the town.”
John was never the same after our talk. The next morning he sat up in the tangled sheets with eyes dead as coal. When I saw the emptiness in his face, I had a flash of Granny and me standing beside the wringer washer. Her story of a black-haired Bible salesman flew over my head like a bird I didn’t allow to nest. I draped my arms over his back and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He seemed not to hear. “Fix me some coffee,” he mumbled. I tried to hum as he sat with his cup at the kitchen table. I made small talk as I fried the eggs and hovered over him while he ate breakfast. My palms sweated and I kept wiping them on my nightgown. Then John stood up. “Say you want to go for a ride?”
I released the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and hurried to throw on my clothes. I ran out to the car with him chasing after me,
sure I had imagined whatever cold had crept between us in the night. Riding with the windows down on familiar roads, John began to talk as usual. I thought he would tell one of his funny stories, about pranks he had pulled on his brothers or trouble he got into in grade school. But he looked out the windshield, brow clouded over, and asked, “You ever feel out of place around here?”
I looked at him. “No,” I said. “I never thought about it.”
He lit a cigarette on the glowing end of the car lighter. “Sometimes I listen to them hicks that comes in the store and wonder what in the world I’m still doing here.”
I turned my face to the fields passing by, high with goldenrod and purplish heather, cows grazing behind barbwire fences. “I guess I can’t imagine anywhere else.”
“You’re just like the rest of them, then,” he said. “A body can’t amount to nothing here. What’s a man going to do, if he don’t want to work in a factory or shovel shit on a farm, or do like my daddy and scrape together a business that don’t make enough to live on. All there is to do around here is break your back and not have a thing to show for it.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “I’m stuck in this hole.”
“How come?”
He turned on me with angry eyes. “You think I’d walk away from that store?”
I fidgeted in the car seat, knees drawn up, wind tearing at my dress.
“People think because I’m Frankie Odom’s boy I’m rich, but they don’t know how he is. He works us like mules for next to nothing. When he’s gone, I mean to have my piece of that place. You know, one time this woman came in with her husband and said, ‘Odom’s Hardware is a landmark. Buildings like this are the heart of our town.’ I wanted to say, ‘Why don’t you come in here at the crack of dawn and choke on dust and sell nails and put up with hicks like you all day, then you’d think, heart of our town.’”
I studied his face for traces of the John I had known just the day before. I’d never heard him talk that way. “I’d go anywhere you wanted to,” I said, desperate to fix him.
He smirked. “You think you’d leave here? You couldn’t get along a
day without Granny. You ain’t like I thought. You was the prettiest girl I ever seen. Looked like you didn’t belong around here either. It ain’t took me long to figure you out, though.”
I wiped my sweaty palms on my dress again. “We can leave here anytime you want to,” I said, so low I wondered if he even heard me.
“We ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “You got to have money to go anywhere. What do you think we’d live on?”
I looked down at the floorboard, heart in my throat. “We could find work.”
“I done told you, I ain’t put up with my daddy’s shit all these years for nothing. But I don’t belong around here. You can take one look at my face and see that.”
He drew deep from his cigarette, jetting smoke through his nostrils. There was a long, terrible silence. My chest was so tight I couldn’t breathe. We passed a pond with pollen floating on its surface and I wanted nothing more than to get out of the car and stand beside it. “Can we stop here?” I asked. I was relieved when he pulled over to the shoulder of the road and killed the motor. But he sat with his wrists dangling on the steering wheel looking out the windshield and I didn’t know what to do but sit there with him. After a few minutes he got out of the car and leaned against the hood with his cigarette. I got out and sidled close to him but he didn’t move to touch me. I looked at the pond, feeling frightened and alone. After a while another car pulled alongside us. It was an old man in a junker with mismatching doors. He cranked down his window and called out to John. “Hey there, son.” John turned as if waking up from a dream. I saw his eyes darken and his brows draw together. “Having car trouble?” the old man asked.