H
E WATCHED AS THE MOON
slid into the woods. His father's grave lay beside him. In the last hours he'd wrapped his father in a gum blanket, folded its ends and bound them with twine. He then dug a deep grave, carried his father to its opening, and eased him inside, and around him he placed the sacks of gold and silver, the letters from the dead. He then returned the earth and replaced the sod and broadcast a scattering of twigs and branches that no one should ever find him until someday he might return and take him home.
Done with his work, he saddled and bridled the coal back horse and gathered his kit. He calculated he had but a few hours before sunrise cracked the horizon with its red. There would be heated air and a dense fog that would not burn off until late morning. That was if this day was like the day before it and when it came to weather, he reckoned it usually was.
He walked alone with the coal black horse across the open ground, its size and strength and equanimity becoming his own. He passed the ever-lengthening earthen mounds that had swept over the dead and swallowed them under. He remembered where the bodies lay, the thrown-over, the back-arched, the headless, the drowned, the sundered, the men held
tightly in each other's arms. He did not care that war should be so terrible. He'd had no choice and still he had chosen it. In one hand he held the reins and in the other he carried the capped and loaded six-shot Remington. It was his hand. It was his arm. Should he meet anyone this morning, he knew what he would do.
The cow barn was where she told him she would be. There was no stock, but there was oats and oat hay and straw, and implements were strewn about the ground. The walls had been shot through and at first the bullet holes were not apparent to him as in the darkness they were so like black knots in the rough pine boards. He picked his way through the rubbish and litter, scattered tools, milk cans, stools, buckets, harness, barrels, a dung cart, torn and broken and shattered, the hot sheen of a small dying campfire.
He found the man. He was in one of the stalls sleeping the sleep of the dead. His body was gray and slumped and his mouth sagged open with great exhausts of air and the guttural noise of his breathing. His broad chest moved slowly up and down, lifting the blanket that covered him and the stems of straw he'd tossed over himself in finding his sleepful repose.
He shook out an armful of feed for the horse and then a scoop of oats. The horse had become impatient and ready for flight. It had indulged him long enough. He promised soon and went back to the barn wall where he made his way along its splintered surface.
In the next stall was the blind woman. Her size had increased evermore since last he'd seen her. She lay on her side, her vast belly in front of her and her arms and head and legs
made small by how huge with her belly she had become. Her face was misshapen and bespoke a grave and internal malady. What did the blind see in their sleep, he wondered. He remembered feeling kindly toward the woman before and even after what he'd witnessed in the shell of the burned-out house so many weeks ago, but now she was just another being in the shape of a human. She meant nothing to him and he knew if he allowed himself she would mean less than nothing.
He moved on and when the shadows shifted he could see her. She was in a last keyhole of moonlight that entered through a rent seam in the board wall. She lay under a blanket in a bed of straw in an empty stall. Her loose hair fell ragged across her bare arm. He patiently watched her sleep, waiting for her to awake and look in his direction.
Sensing a presence and still in sleep, she finally did stir and sat up and opened her eyes, the spears of moonlight cutting across her bare neck. She raised a hand that held a knife and slowly it turned with her wrist as if it were the knife turning her wrist and not her arm. She concentrated on the faint sensation that had awakened her. She knew something was outside the wall and close beside it in the darkness, and if it should come inside she would fight it to the death.
He watched her stand, a thin sliver of a girl in a dingy shift. Her hair fell past her shoulders and she held her crossed arms to her chest as if cold, the effect of which was to make the knife seem as if its blade was not attached to a handle but was a blade protruding from her body. She stared at the wall he was looking through but did not seem to understand that someone was actually on the other side. She stood erect and pulled her blanket over her shoulders. She stepped into the
alleyway and after looking at the sleepers in their stalls she went outside where he met her and she was not startled to see him there but rather was as if she expected him. She let the knife slip from her hand, stepped close to him, and when she leaned in to whisper he could feel her warm sleeping breath on his face.
“You were watching me sleep,” she said.
“Yes, I was.”
“I felt you,” she said, her eyes moving over his face, searching out what was wrong, as surely she knew something was.
“Me?”
“Yes. I felt you. I have been waiting for you.”
“You knew I would come?”
“Why the long face?” she said, and then touched her fingers to her lips. Over his shoulder she could see the coal black horse and it was then she knew what it was that had brought him to her.
“My face ain't long,” he said.
“I know why you came.”
“Were you sleeping?” he said.
“I wouldn't call it sleep.”
“My pap died,” he said.
“I am sorry to hear of your loss,” she said, and then she held open the blanket for him to walk into and he did so, without hesitation, and she closed the blanket and her arms around his shoulders. He let his face to her neck, let himself be held inside the blanket, let his body rest against hers. She smelled stale with sleep and sweat and days without bath water. She told him that everything dies and then, in time, it comes back. He felt her breath warm on his neck. Over their
heads was the last slow wheel of the stars. Morning was only a few hours away and he had the sense it was a first morning, the morning of a beginning.
“He's not in this world no more,” she said as if it were a relief and a blessing visited upon him.
“No,” he said. “He ain't.”
“Are you leaving?” she said.
In answer he nodded his head, his cheek to her neck.
“Take me with you,” she said. “I have to leave too.”
“Yes,” he said.
Her arms tightened around his shoulders and he responded by drawing her body more closely to his own. He was here and he was leaving and he would take her with him. She asked that he wait a moment and when she returned she told him the man was asleep drunk. She then found for him a sweet potato buried in the ashes of the campfire. The skin was blackened and crisp, but inside the flesh was orange and still hot and steamed when he broke it open. Overcome with hunger, he could not help himself as he wolfed it down.
“Stay where you are,” she said, pointing at him with her finger as if to fix him to the spot where he stood. When she returned this time she carried whatever kit she owned in a carpetbag and a small tight bundle of clothes tucked under her arm. She set these on the ground and then she held out a pair of scissors. He took the scissors from her, and when he did she bent at the waist, collected her hair in her hands, and held it from her scalp, telling him he should cut it away from her head.
The scissors were sharp. He cut through her hair and she threw it away and then prepared another skein for him to cut
and he cut that one too. Then she stood and he worked his way around, cutting her hair until it was short and tight to her head. She ran her fingers through her scalp and told him it was good enough for now.
Then, standing with her back to him, she let the blanket fall and shed the dingy shift from her shoulders. Underneath the shift she was naked and the white skin of her body was blue in the night. Her body was thin and lithe and built with narrow hips. The bones in her long back were well defined, her shoulders, her ribs, the sunken shapes of her hind end, and there was a space between her legs made by how thinned and stick-like they were and he thought how much better he'd fared with his foraging than she had. But she moved with strength and sureness and without a single wasted gesture.
She wanted to leave as quickly as possible, she told him, and she intended to do just that.
She unrolled the bundle at her feet and it was a pair of boy's trousers wrapped around a linen shirt and a moleskin jacket. There was a wide leather belt and socks and shoes and a forage cap. Before she dressed in the clothes she turned to look at him, her hands on her hips. There was a boldness in her stance, her telling him to take his look if he was going to. It was as if she were challenging him with her body, as if she was asking unspoken questions: What will you do with me? How will you be?
He answered her when he did not move and did not look away. He then looked away to the east where the sun would soon rise and then to the horse which pawed the ground and then back at her as if to say, time is wasting and hurry with yourself and we need to get down the road.
When he turned his look a second time in her direction she was pulling the trousers onto her hips and cinching them with the belt. She was telling him she would from now on not be Rachel to him but a boy just like he was and if it came down to it she was his brother. She would be Ray. It's what her mother used to call her. At least it's what she remembered. Then the shirt and the jacket. With the prospect of escape and her decision made, she now could not move fast enough. She could not stop talking. She insisted that he understand how important this was and he told her he did. He told her he understood.
She sat on the ground and dragged the socks and then the shoes onto her feet and it was when she was tying the laces there was a rustling inside the cow barn and a groan and the man came stumbling out. He was so desperate to relieve himself he did not see them until he'd unbuttoned himself and his piss was steaming on the ground.
“Pay no attention to me,” he said, as if he found the moment amusing.
He then finished his business and buttoned up after wagging himself dry. He approached the girl and when he reached to touch her clipped head she swatted at his hand and backed away from him.
“What happened to your goldilocks?” he said, pretending a posture of meticulousness and refinement, his hand still raised. “You know you don't sell for what you're worth unless you look good.”
Rachel seemed paralyzed by him, her words stolen from her mind, her determination vanished. He felt it himself, the honeyed voice and created gestures. The man's size ran to
proportion that was beyond his physical being. He asserted himself into the world, as if he should possess other human beings and they should willingly submit to him. Somewhere a cock began to crow and the light changed as if a first curtain had been drawn open on the day to come.
“We have to go,” Robey said. He'd already drawn the Remington from his belt and the angle at which he held it, though not pointing at the man, declared his intention to use it.
“Who the hell are you?”
“None of your damn business,” he said. He wanted to tell the man who he was and what he'd seen and what he'd endured and what he'd lost, but he had no reason to be known by him, to be known by anyone.
“But you are going?” the man said to the girl, his voice demonstrating how incredible he thought the idea.
“We're going,” Robey told him.
“I will come for her,” he said. “You know that.”
“It's a big country.”
“It ain't that big.”
“No, I âspect it ain't.”
“Then take the horse,” the man said to her as if he were that generous.
“I don't want your god damn horse,” the girl spat out.
“That isn't Christian,” the man said.
“You shut up your god damn mouth, you old blister.” She held her hands over her ears. She hated him. She did not want to hear what he had to say. “You sinned against my flesh,” she cried.
“Rachel,” he said, her name in a voice sweet as the vine.
“He wears a money belt of stol'd money,” she said, her eyes
closed and her hands still clapped to the sides of her head. “Get it.”
“Where is it?” Robey said.
“Don't be a dunce,” she told him. “It's around his waist.”
“I will find you,” the man said. “You know I will find you.”
“Shut your hole,” she said, and this turned him mean as he understood his hold on her was breaking.
“You will rue this day as long as you live,” he told her. “When I find you, you will regret you ever treated me this way.”
“You did this to me,” she said, “and what did I do to deserve this. You are the one who'll pay in hell.”
The man suddenly went down on his knees in a stylish and practiced gesture. He closed his eyes and clasped his hands to his breast as if in prayer and his pursed lips began to pulse as if his silent prayer was so profound it required release. She paused in her anger for how dramatic an effect this had on her.
“Please forgive me,” he said to her, and then he let his prayers be aloud and they came in a torrent, rote and passionately, about the sins of men and the frailties of human flesh.
She told him to stop, to please stop and then to stop his jabbering, but his fervor increased as he struggled to reach dominion over her mind.
“Don't do that,” she cried, and kicked at him. “God damn you,” she screamed. “I hate you.”
Robey stood witness to them in their opposite struggles, the crying girl who sought escape and the cruel praying man who had harmed her. He knew the scene had been played before in tents and sheds and under the bowers of trees. He could see the past, the power and belligerence of the man's
imprecations. He could see them wearing down the girl and turning her against herself and making her forget her own experience at his very hands and hostile to her own wishes.