After a while he got up and toed a clean place in the scattered hay that
lined the floor of the barn and dropped the cigarette and pressed the butt firmly into the black dirt and made sure that it was out. Then he walked to the back of the barn. There was one stall in the corner where hay was piled up beneath a window set into the rear wall. It looked dirty. It looked damp. He didn't want her to have to lie in that.
He took another look at her and then walked to the ladder, shaking it one more time, and then he put his foot up on it and began to climb, watchful for the little nails that might pull out, and he went up carefully until he came to the top and stopped. He looked out at the floor of the loft. Fifty or sixty bales of hay were up there. The uprights extended five feet above the floor and he climbed on up and stepped off. Old sea grass ropes had been hung from the timbers. He walked to the nearest bale and bent over, grabbed the strings, carried it to the end of the loft. Looking down to judge its impact with a careful eye he turned loose of it and saw it fall in front of the stall. He went back for another one, dropped it, too. He went back for one more. It hit the other two and bounded across the floor, bouncing once on its end and landing near her. He stood looking down. He could see her stretched out on her back. She still had not moved and he began to wonder if he had hit her too hard. But then he realized that she should have thought about that whenever she was fucking his old man and he climbed back down.
He pulled the strings off one of the bales and started taking the charges apart, separating the little blocks of hay and scattering them about, the dusty components of stem and seed floating in the air and settling over the floor. He worked calmly, tearing the hay apart and smelling its clean fragrance, it wafting down around his knees and over his shoes, piling up. He kept working and spreading it and he looked through the dirty window to see her garden and her flowers in the yard, her neat back porch.
When he had all the hay scattered and spread out he bent down to it,
spread his hand out to test its resilience. A nice soft bed to lay her upon. He went back to her and got her by the arms again.
He dragged her into the little stall and he dropped her arms. She lay as before, but now nested in fresh clean hay. It was like something he might have dreamed a long time ago.
There were rags for a blindfold hanging over a brace and he took some of them down and knotted them together and tied them around her head, blinding her eyes so she could not see him. Another trip to the loft brought down bale strings with which to bind her arms. He wrapped them around her wrists but not tightly enough to cut off her circulation. He tied them to the posts that flanked the stall. And then he sat down beside her and waited for her to wake up. He wanted her to know what was happening, and he kept telling himself that he could really do this.
He thought it might rain again, looking out the barn door. And sitting there he saw the overturned wheelbarrow and got up and went out there and righted it. He looked up at the house. Nothing was stirring up there. Not even the wind riffling the leaves in the trees. All was still.
He went back into the gloom beside her and tried to think where he would go when this was over. But he already knew that.
Mable brought his sandwich and Bobby kept working. When Harold finally came in, he got his papers gathered up and stacked on his desk and they got into the cruiser and drove out into the county to meet the coroner and his helpers at a lonely and rain-swept crossroads where the hawks had folded their wings to sit on the fence posts and regard the sky with their cold bright eyes. Shoals of water were riffling off the fields and the day was gray and dark, the creeks rising, foaming, the beavers swimming strongly with sticks in their mouths as the men crossed the little bridges in their cars and cast a glance down into the muddy currents. In a small procession they drove to that place where he had already been and unloaded their shovels, and then they went down through the woods.
The storm had passed and the weeds were wet with that passing. The little pullings of mud at the soles of their boots and the trees dripping water down on them in their sorrow. A small caravan of officials bearing the weight of the law with them. Bobby directed them and at last they stood beside the opened grave with the bones still showing, flies hovering, the short blue flight of a jay over their heads as it dipped and swayed. They started digging the child up and Bobby walked off some distance where he wouldn't see what was going on and smoked a cigarette.
He could hear them talking quietly. He could hear the clay sucking at the blades of the shovels as they pressed their feet down on them. He could remember his mother shushing him and rocking him in her lap one time when he had skinned his knee. He could remember the taste of Jewel's nipples and the sweet smell of her breath. He wondered if she was thinking of him now.
After a while they came back up, the black zippered bag slung between two of them, and they started out of the woods with their little pile of bones seeming so small to Bobby, so insubstantial. He walked quickly, leading them. The sky was still dark and he watched for it to come up blue again, but it never did.
They placed the tiny corpse on the backseat of his car and then single file they drove out to the main road back toward town. Bobby was thinking of the father again across the hood of the car and how the tears had rolled out of him too late. Harold was beside him but they didn't talk. They drove on, through the gray and cloudy day and past the hawks that had not moved.
The sky was still and dark when Virgil walked out on his front porch and sat down in the chair. He was out of cigarettes again and he had to roll one, taking the tobacco from his pocket and getting the papers and working at it, glancing up from time to time to look across the road at the sky and what it was doing. When he had it rolled he stuck it between his lips and lit it, leaning back in the chair and rocking a little, the smoke drifting out across the porch and into the yard where it dissipated. He felt uneasy somehow.
After a while he tossed away the burnt nubbin of it and sat there. There was no traffic on the road and he wished he had his car again. He didn't want to walk all the way over to the store for some more cigarettes. The road was muddy now, and he was still tired.
The puppy came around the end of the porch and angled up the steps, and he stopped near Virgil's knee and wagged his tail.
“Hey little buddy,” Virgil said, and the dog sat. He twisted his head up on one side and sneezed. Then he stretched out beside the chair and closed his eyes. Virgil rocked, watching him. He had some hope that maybe Glen would come by. After a while he folded his hands together and just sat in the chair, waiting for something to tell him to move.
The chair creaked slowly on the boards of the porch. He pushed it
back and forth with a little motion of his knees. The dog slept on his side. The yard was wet and the puddles were visited by drinking birds. It was hushed and quiet. He rocked slowly, sitting on his porch alone except for a dog and watching his world, wishing he could see his son come driving up the road.
Mary smelled hay and knew she was in the barn. She could feel the little sharp points of stems lightly sticking the skin of her arms, the backs of her knees, and as she shifted she could hear it rustle beneath her, could feel the dust rise around her in little clouds that settled in her throat and made her want to cough.
There was a large dull pain over her left eye and her face on that side felt swollen. The thing over her eyes smelled of something like paint thinner, a light odor of petroleum like the faintest whiff of coal oil or lighter fluid. She was afraid to speak. She could tell that she was not alone. Somebody was near, maybe crouched, maybe sitting, listening and watching.
Her wrists were up in the air and she pulled down to see if she could move her arms. She couldn't move them much. She was tied and she could feel something like thin ropes wrapped around her wrists, but not tightly, not painfully.
She was trying to remember what she had been doing. Looking at the little tomato plants, and then she had fallen it seemed. But she couldn't figure out what that had to do with this. It was confusing, and trying to figure it out made her head hurt, so for a while she just lay quietly and listened.
There wasn't any sound. She couldn't tell which part of the barn she was in. It was cool where she was but she had no indication of light or dark, just the clean smell of the hay and the memory of the day she and Bobby had stacked it in the loft. That was June, last year, a day and a half of work in the pasture and the barn, a Friday and a Saturday, Bobby with his work clothes and a baseball cap. She wore her overalls and tennis shoes and her wide straw hat. The old truck grinding through the stubble and how the wind cooled the sweat on her body when they stopped for a break under the trees by the fence. Ice water in a gallon jug kept in a wrinkled paper sack, and iced tea on the back porch still in their work clothes as dusk moved in, a few minutes of rest before she started fixing their supper. That was right after Emma killed herself and she remembered thinking about Virgil and his pain while she drove the truck, and then later, that night, lying forever alone in her bed and not being able to sleep for thinking about him. She didn't go to the funeral. Bobby did. He didn't want to talk about it much when he came back. He just said that Virgil looked bad.
There was a slight rustle in the hay not far away, as if someone had moved his foot or sat up or turned his body in some small way. But nothing after that.
“Who's there?” she said, but there was no answer. Somehow she knew there wouldn't be an answer in the same way she knew that her face was covered so that she wouldn't be able to see who was doing this to her.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
It seemed foolish to listen to her own voice in the quietness of the barn. It was almost as if she were talking to herself. Her mouth was dry. She licked her lips. A little dust had settled in her mouth but she didn't want to spit. She swallowed it and cleared her throat.
When she began to imagine what was going to happen to her, it didn't scare her. Things like this happened, you heard about them, saw them in
the paper. She only hoped that whoever it was wouldn't think it necessary to take her life because there was still too much she had to do. She hated she'd argued with Bobby about Jewel. What did he want but his own family and what did anybody ever want but their own family and love and a safe place to stay. And she'd had almost all of that. She'd had Bobby all this time. She'd watched him grow and become a man and run for office and get elected. She'd watched him act decent all his life and that comforted her even now. If today was the day she had to die, she could at least go knowing that Bobby had turned out okay. She'd worried about him so much. But she didn't have to worry about him now.
She let her head sag back into the hay and she felt it cushioning her. It was hard to breathe in it for the dust but it was a strain to hold her head up with it hurting the way it was. She had no idea how long she'd been lying tied like this. It might have been a long time. She wondered if he was going to say anything. It had to be a man, didn't it? But what man? She tried to think of somebody she had harmed but she couldn't think of anybody. She had no enemies that she knew of. But it seemed unlikely that some stranger had wandered in and found her and watched her and done this to her.
“Is somebody there?” she said. That soft rustle answered again, and it sounded like it was near her right foot. Her wrists were beginning to hurt a little now from the strain, and she could feel pinpoints of pain in her fingertips. Going to sleep. Circulation getting cut off.
“Please talk to me,” she said. “I can't do anything. I'm tied up. You could untie me and I'd keep my face covered up until you could get away. I don't have any way of knowing who you are. I'd promise not to uncover my eyes. I'll swear it on the Bible if you'll go in my house and get it. It's on the coffee table in the living room.”
Still there was no answer, but she heard the click of something metallic, and then a tiny sound like a piece of sandpaper rubbing against
something, and she heard the outrush of breath and knew that somebody had lit a cigarette. She thought about the hay in the barn and the hay she was lying on and fire for a moment, but that was too bad to think on for long. Somebody was watching her and smoking a cigarette. It seemed almost impossible that somebody could do that, that somebody could be calm enough to sit there watching her tied up and blindfolded and ignore her pleading and just light a cigarette. Relax like that.
“Won't you please say something? Are you somebody I know?”
At first she wasn't aware that it was pain, and then she felt the heat on her shin and she screamed and snatched her leg back as the cigarette burned into her skin. She whimpered then. It was going to be worse than she'd thought.
Now there was a louder rustle in the hay, and she drew back as far as she could, not knowing what to expect. Suddenly there was somebody beside her ear bending close and she could smell hair tonic, cigarette smoke, sweat, and whiskey.
“Shut your damn whore's mouth,” a voice said, the lips very close to her ear. The noise, the slow gentle rasp of the whisper, was almost comforting, coming as it did so low and near. But in the voice was a bad memory that had always bothered her, of a dark-haired boy in a classroom who watched her with sullen eyes, insolent and full of contempt, his face filled with hate.
“My mama told me all about you,” the voice said, just before she heard him pull back. She knew who he was then, and she was very afraid.
He tied a rag around her mouth so she couldn't scream anymore. After that he got up and moved away from her, back up to the door of the barn where the light was, looking out to the road to see if anything was coming. He crossed the yard quickly and went up the steps to the back porch and smelled something burning as soon as he opened the door. A skillet full of meat and sauce was smoking on the stove. He stepped over to it, looked around for a pot holder, found one hanging on a hook, and put it around the handle of the skillet. He moved it to a cold eye and cut off the one that was lit. A counter was piled full of tomatoes and okra. He picked up one of the tomatoes and looked at it. It was a pretty nice tomato. He set it down.