“I’ll call you later,” Rose winked. “For the rest of the story.”
“No story to tell.”
“We’ll see. Talk to you later.”
She wasn’t sorry to see Rose’s car fade into the distance, leaving her alone with her thoughts. The day was brilliant. Crisp with a hint of winter yet still held in autumn’s warm hand. An exuberant celebration of color decorated the hills, garlands of red and gold running like ribbons through the black-green spruce in a glorious farewell to fall’s fading days.
Pulling a sweatshirt on, Victoria crossed the rough patch of burnt grass that suggested a yard and made her way over to a slanting gray hovel that doubled for a feed shed. One rusty hinge hung valiantly onto the rough plank door, complaining bitterly as she unhooked the latch and dragged it open. Taking one step into its musty interior, she stopped and waited as the thick blackness transposed the interior first into vague images and finally into muted, though identifiable items.
Reaching down, she picked up the pitchfork that lay in front of her feet, thrown carelessly into the shed during someone’s haste. Setting it securely out of harm’s way, she scraped the lid off the grain barrel. She rummaged for the dented, lidless coffee can within it and scooped it deep, feeling with pleasure the silky smooth grains as they ran over her hands, the nutty fragrance rising up and soothing her like a balm. It was a strange place to find solace, here among the broken cast-offs of life, sitting quiet in the company of her hens, but it was here in this humble place that life seemed to be, for her, most sane.
She started at a noise behind her, twisting quickly to correspond the sharp snap with its source, but the contents of the shed slumped quietly against the creosote-stained walls. Twists of frayed, greasy rope hung from the solid pine beams down to the gray-powdered floor; here and there a piece of long-forgotten treasure was caught up in their sinewy arms. Two ropes, their bottom halves twisted around each other like lanky legs, swayed in the sketchy shadows. Her eyes strained into the dark corners, cautiously sifting through the humps and piles of misshapen junk, sorting fact from fiction in her mind. Slivers of light seeped in from random cracks in the old wood, cutting off the shadows and distorting her view, rearranging stovepipe into necks, gunnysacks into faces. Willing her heart to be still, she fixed her eyes on the door and listened to the quiet straining through her ears. There was no sound. But what she could not hear, could not see, she could definitely feel, its presence riveting her spine in fear. The pitchfork stood not two steps from her, and setting the coffee can softly back into the barrel of grain, she traversed the distance on the silent, fluid step of a dancer and wrapped both hands tightly around its worn handle. Brandishing it before her like a lance, she stepped toward the ropes, grasping one for balance as she stretched forward on tiptoes, peering as far as she dared into the maze of machine parts, worn-out tires, miniature mountains of rusty bolts and greasy, moth-eaten piles of rotting burlap.
Pressing gently, she nudged the sacks, and receiving no reaction, nudged them harder, the spiky tines of the pitchfork sinking into the soft folds. Listening harder, she again turned to inspect the darkness behind her. Most people, with their ill-defined sense of knowing, would have satisfied themselves already that they were a victim of their own paranoia, laughed to make themselves feel braver and rushed off to the safety of other humans. But Victoria, having spent an inordinate amount of time in her own company, knew instinctively when she was not alone, and she knew beyond a doubt she was not alone now.
A scraping, muffled yet frantic, pulled her eyes back toward the corner, the source of the sound now clearly masked under the stack of burlap. Scarcely allowing a breath, she turned toward them, the pitchfork poised in defense as images of scratching clawed hands and Mrs. Spiller’s half-decayed face raged in her mind. Terrified the deranged hag would burst upon her at any moment, she gripped the handle tighter, attempted futilely to steady her voice and ordered too loudly.
“Who’s there? Come out of there right now before you get a pitchfork in your guts.”
Quietness met her order, a billion particles of dust rising lazily in a shaft of light beside her.
“I mean it. Get the hell out of there.”
Her voice rose, a quaver giving away her position and causing her to react with an intensity that she hoped would suffice to cover it.
“Get out!”
She jabbed into the pile sharply, transforming it into a demonic thrash of motion as a blur flew from it, chased by the echo of its own scream. Flinging herself backward, she struck her head hard against a broken pulley, leaving her weapon impaled in the side of the sacks.
“Shit! Shit! You stupid damn thing. Scared the bloody hell out of me. Shit!” she exploded again, a shudder escaping up her body and forcing the words out.
The cat, a barn-born survivor, crouched low in the shadows of a motor-less washing machine as they eyed each other warily. Not wild in the literal sense of the word, the dozen or so cats that lived around the property were, however, about as close to it as a domestic animal could get. She had always liked cats, enjoyed their self-possessed arrogance, but Bobby seemed to find in it a personal statement of rebuke. Cats were good for one thing and one thing only. He’d established that right from the beginning when he forbade her two cats from joining her in her new home, saying he’d married her, not her damn pets. Either her parents could keep them, or she could give them away. Her mother had kept them, but Victoria missed having their purring security curled up in her lap when she sat alone through somber winter days. To compensate, she’d attempted to tame the barn cats, giving up quickly on the older ones but finding success among the kittens, patiently coaxing their trust from them. Turned out it was a trust abused in the end; she’d spent sleepless nights begging herself for forgiveness after Bobby and his friends decided the population was getting out of hand and arrived one day with hungry dogs and shotguns, the curious kittens making an amusing start to the rally.
The cat had finished its assessment, deemed her a minimal threat and had slunk back to its activities. Moving slowly but not stealthily, it allowed her approach as she pressed her cheek against the wall and slid her eyes down between the sacks and the barrel to a soft pocket of rags where she saw what had aroused the cat’s killer instincts in the first place. A nest, plush with insulation, wriggled with a mass of sightless baby mice, like pink-skinned maggots, bumping around in a touch-and-feel search for sustenance. Revulsion clamped her stomach. Mice were a continual problem on the farm; even with a barn full of cats, their copious breeding program seemed to keep them in a plentiful supply.
Disgusted with her discovery, the thought of what she had to do with it revolted her even more. Parking her brain in neutral, she grabbed the barrel with both arms and slowly rocked it away from the wall, undermining the nest’s defenses and exposing it for the cat, who pounced happily, delivering a quick destruction that, although she could not hear, she could still feel as she imagined carnivorous teeth crunching through soft skulls. Wiping her hands on her jeans, even though they had not actually been tainted by the murder, she grabbed her can of grain and stepped back into the sunshine. She paused with blinking eyes to adapt to its brightness, then creaked the door back into place.
A skittish fluster of motion drew her eyes toward the chicken pen, where her hen Tilley performed a jerky dance outside the wire enclosure. Adept at escaping the structure, once having done so, the little banty would pace endlessly and unsuccessfully for hours attempting to find her way back in. Victoria smiled, scooped out a handful of grain and rolled her thumb over the burnished gold husks raining hundreds of tiny pieces onto the ground by her feet. Tilley stopped statue still, cocked her head then scampered over and pecked greedily at the spilled morsels. Victoria stroked a finger over the cool, silky back then gathered the chicken up into both arms and sat down against the feed shed. The bird offered no resistance, held no fear as Victoria had hatched her out from an egg three years previously and from the beginning had nestled her almost daily in her arms. Tilley relaxed against her chest, translucent amber eyes blinking once, twice and then shut.
Victoria pulled in a deep breath, shifted her position slightly and, with care not to disturb the resting hen, closed her eyes. She let the breeze carry her thoughts back over the day’s conversation. In the distance, she could hear the faint, plaintive honking of Canada geese, which had again made their annual pilgrimage to the valley to glean its fields. She wondered about the transgressions Rose had alluded to. She couldn’t imagine Bobby being unfaithful. Sure, he talked big when he got drunk. All the boys did. But that’s all she’d ever thought of it—just drunken talk. Perhaps her assumptions had been wrong. The force of the hurt that accompanied this revelation both surprised and annoyed her in unison. A stream of familiar faces drifted in front of her: blond-brained bartenders and unhappy housewives not unlike herself. She cautioned herself against jumping to conclusions. Rose’s facts were often far from infallible, and Hinckly itself was well versed in misconstruing and distorting innocent events. But she had to concede the possibility of an affair, Bobby having the perfect situation in which to pull one off. A wife who seldom accompanied him anywhere, half the time stranded at home waiting for him to arrive, the other half waiting for him to leave.
She was beginning to feel cramped, the warmth of the hen and the long rays of the sun making her sweat beneath Bobby’s sweatshirt, but she sat still and endured her discomfort, unwilling to alter her position and disturb the sleeping Tilley. Brushing her lips over the banty’s glossy head, she kissed it lightly and smiled. Since she was not permitted to have a conventional pet, the bird had in many ways, become like a treasured friend, providing the calm comfort of another beating heart on lost and lonely days. Bobby laughed at her protective attachment toward the hen, more than a little embarrassed that others might find out his wife had made a pet out of a dumb bird. But eventually he left her alone and more or less forgot about it. And besides, the chickens were useful to him, providing eggs, or at least used to until about a month ago when for some reason they had quit laying. Victoria had taken care that he didn’t find out, though, transferring a weekly dozen from the store into her egg basket.
Tipping her head back against the shed, her eyes rolled across buckskin fields, searching for the farm machine that wearily droned in the distance as it earned its keep. She contemplated briefly whether she should confront Bobby about what she’d heard, then nullified the thought before it was even finished. Whether the words were all true or only partially, he would deny it either way. And then he’d spin the conversation and berate her for being stupid enough to believe Hinckly’s gossip when she herself knew the kind of bullshit it could pull from the sludge of its suspicious minds. And probably he’d be right. But still she ran over the last few weeks, mentally flagging late nights and missed meals that grew in importance when weighed in this new light. Late nights and missed meals that had all been explained away with the excuse of helping JJ with his latest car. With perhaps five absences duly noted, she wondered about him no more and let her thoughts slide to Elliot.
True, she hadn’t seen him since the day he’d offered her a ride home, but it was also true that her mind had been filled with little else. After the first week, she’d had to forbid herself from letting his name cross her lips, finding it constantly pushing into every conversation, Bobby scowling at the mere mention of it. Not because he suspected anything, but rather because he didn’t feel any priss-ass artist from the city had anything worth saying, much less repeating. Now, as she searched her fading memory for his face, the sound of his voice, she knew she had to see him again. Not that it could go anywhere, lead into anything beyond an affair of the mind. She’d already determined that much. Elliot moved through life, someone who coveted his freedom as much as his next breath. Someone who did not want, could not live with the oppressions of responsibility, duty, dependents—the oppressions realized in someone like herself. And she, acrid as the thought was, had to admit that Bobby’s explosive insecurity hung an invisible noose not only around his own neck but around hers as well. If she was very careful, she could still spend time with Elliot. Talk and laugh and linger. What would it hurt, really? She would just play a little bit. Have fun and loosen up like Elliot had said. Not that she could ever let it lead to an affair. She was just so mortally weary of compressing her every feeling.
A vague sound touched her subconscious and drew itself forward into her ear. Straining to hear it, she closed her eyes and held her breath, but it eluded her with faintness. Turning her head slightly toward the trailer, she caught it and jumped up, Tilley scrambling for balance with a perturbed flapping of wings as Victoria flung open the pen door and set her in.
Sure the insistent ranting would quit just before she reached it, she flew into the trailer and literally fell onto the phone, seizing the receiver in her hand.
“Hi! Hello. Still there?”
A fuzzy static answered back.
“Hello . . . anyone there?”
Nothing. Dropping onto the floor, she let the receiver slide into her lap, disappointed she’d missed the call. Spending the better part of most days alone in the trailer, she relished the impromptu interruptions of a phone call, enjoying the company of another human’s voice. Flipping the receiver upside-right, she reluctantly began to replace it on the cradle when an unintelligible mumbling spilled out. Instantly she had it back to her ear.