The Shore (5 page)

She's standing in the doorway, with the rain pouring down behind her. Daddy can barely get a word in, but when he does it's mostly about how I've never been a problem before, always got on with her kids before, he'll talk to me and straighten things out. Her voice is calming down some when I see her eyes lock onto Daddy's hand. It's his little glass pipe; he's turning it over and over in his fingers like he does sometimes without really noticing. Her eyes go back up to his face a moment, and her mouth sets in a thin line. He's still talking, too quick, but then he notices the look on her face and his voice dies away.

“It appears you have the situation under control,” she says.
His hand has clenched around the little pipe, and he moves it back behind him, but it's too late for that. “Thank you for your time.” She turns, and I close the bedroom door without a sound and back away slowly.

The front door bangs shut, and I hear her engine turning over.

“Chloe!”

Our door pops open and cracks against the wall, and I spring away from the bed. In the dark he goes for Renee. I dart around him and up the stairs, scared giggles rising up in me like bubbles in a bottle of soda. Renee shrieks, “Daddy, it's me!” and his footsteps follow me up the stairs. He catches me by the back of the shirt halfway up, and throws me into the kitchen.

“What the fuck, Chloe!” I tuck and roll. “What the fuck, starting a fight so some uptight bitch will show up and call the cops?” He swings at me. I curl up tighter. “You know what they'll do with you if I get put away?” Renee's followed us up: I can see her behind him, kneading the front of her shirt between her hands and all crumpled in on herself. I want to tell her to get back downstairs and hide under the bed like she's supposed to, but I can't. “You think it'll be better, in a foster home with sixty other kids beating your ass every day?” Smack. “I got news for you, princess!” I scrabble to get out of reach, but he swings at me again and I fall against the kitchen dresser. Renee screams, high and shrill, and I look up as she jumps on his back.

Mama said to take care of her.

He claws her off and holds her by one chicken-bone wrist, half off the ground. “And you stay out of this!” he roars in her face. That's more than she can handle, and she pees herself there
on the kitchen floor. I'm all curled up useless against the dresser, wanting so bad to jump back up but my head and the scared in my stomach is weighing me down, and I don't know what to do. He's smacking at her now, and she's making noises like a dying rabbit.

I try to yank myself up, but the dresser-drawer shrieks out and splits open on the floor next to me. The hunting things roll everywhere; I scrabble for the scattered rounds but find the skinning knife, its black leather sheath smooth under my groping fingers.

I fling myself at his back, and bounce off. He's got his hands around Renee's throat, trying to make her stop screaming the way he used to try and make Mama stop screaming. She's gone loose and boneless, and I feel sick like a stomach full of vinegar as I wonder if he's killed her. I kick at his knees, stomp his bare toes under my heels, ram my elbow up into his belly with all my weight behind it, anything to make him let go. He stumbles when I get him in the gut, bellowing at me, but he drops Renee to grab at my hair. He punches me this time, and I reach up.

It's just like cutting a deer, only bristlier. Meat resists a blade in its own way, drags at it like an undertow drags at your feet. The look on his face says he doesn't feel what I've done, and I'm scared what he'll do when he realizes. I can feel his fingers bruising, smell his breath under the sour of his skin, but I can't hear past the sound of water in my ears. His words are bubbling out the slit in his throat, hissing red foam, but the artery matches the beat of his heart. My face is all wet, and my arms. He drops me. Renee isn't moving, but she's curled herself into a ball, so I know she's alive. I try to pull myself over to her, but
I can't move anymore. He slumps forward across my legs and hips, and now I can hear a sound like dry wind and water on stone. Then it stops. The rain comes down.

It's later, but I don't know how much later, that headlights flash through our window as they come down the road to our house, bright enough that I can see gasps of things I don't want to see. There's a pounding on our door. Everything smells like copper. A man's voice shouts, I can't tell what it says. More pounding. The door splinters down. A gun comes up the stairs, with a woman in uniform behind it. She sees me, she sees the blood, she shouts behind her for someone to get a light, and pulls me out from under him. Someone else leans over Renee, but I let them.

“Honey, honey, look at me. What happened?” she asks me. “Where's your mama?”

“In the backyard,” I tell her. She stares at me for a second. “He doesn't know I saw him do it.”

People are running through my house, barking words at each other, looking at things. Looking at me. Looking at Daddy. He's not moving, all blood, facedown. Just like Cabel Bloxom was, after I shot him.

1933

T
HINGS
I C
OULD
T
ELL
Y
OU

L
ate-afternoon sunlight falls in heavy bands through the chinks in the barn walls, like the folds of the red velvet curtain at the Onancock Playhouse. When Mark squints his eyes, the hay dust swimming in the light looks like the mosquito fry in the rain barrel, floating up and down in aimless circles. He can feel the dust more than smell it, prickling thickly in the back of his throat and all behind his eyes. It prickles more than the hay beneath them, covered by the blue cotton tablecloth Letty brought, a smudge of red wine at one corner. It's rucked up a little, and he can feel the hay itself pricking at the back of his head. She's lying next to him, resting with her head on his shoulder, one leg thrown across his hips, and the prickling isn't quite enough to make him move. He hears chickens squabbling and scraping distantly.

The loft smells like long-ago Sundays, full of books and pet mice and wild tumbling games across the springy bales, and sounds like horses eating, so deliciously like the sound of peppercorns in his mother's mortar. It smells earthy now too, a soft damp smell like rising bread and baby's skin, offset by a
sharp muskiness that he can never get enough of, no matter how deeply he breathes.

She stirs and sits up, pulling herself slowly from him, and though the day is hot he immediately misses the warmth of her. In their earlier exuberance her hair had fallen all about her face, and she slowly gathers it up again. He watches her do this, watches the languid movement of her glowing white arms, the trembling rise of her small breasts, the in and out of her softly rounded belly. The bodice of her dress is a pale green puddle around her waist, and he thanks God for dresses. The long filmy skirts catching on even longer legs, the smooth curving buttons up the front, the decorous nature of the garments. His mother says that only fast girls wear trousers, but this he's never understood: skirts seem so much more convenient, for men at least.

He reaches up and cups her breasts, runs his rough fingers over the velvet smoothness of them. They're soft, like the last apples in the back of the root cellar in the early spring, when time and darkness have condensed them into perfect handfuls of yielding sweetness. She sighs, and bends into his hands, and he wraps his arm around her so he can take an entire breast in his mouth and flick his tongue over the rising firmness.

“I should be getting back,” she murmurs. “It wouldn't do for him to find me gone.” He pulls her down on top of him and kisses her slowly, and she lets him. For a moment they lie there together, in their own tiny nucleus of heat and breath.

There was a time when they somersaulted across the springy hay together and made nests in the corners, waiting out rainy days. Their mothers were friends, the two families' homes near to each other and far from anyone else, and they'd been left to amuse each other since before they'd learned to speak. His sisters
never played with them—Mark was the unexpected baby, ten years after Kathy, eleven years after Helen, six after his mother had given up on any more children—so they had
always
had the loft to themselves. Sometimes Letty made him play house with her, stuffing her pullover up under her dress until she looked like her mother in miniature. He had awkwardly mimed whatever it was he had thought men did all day, making long furrows in the hay and dropping in seeds, then let her bully him around their dinner table. He in turn bullied her into being kissed, even though he knew she wanted him to. It was part of the playing.

It had been accepted as fact, or so he had thought, that the game was practice for a nebulous someday, when the lump under her dress would be more than a fleecy red pullover, and he would know what it was that a man did. He had even looked forward to that day, in a sort of half-expectant way, when he would be kissing her gleaming cheek instead of his mother Ruth's steam-reddened jowl when he returned home in the evenings. He had thought that she would wait until he was ready, until he wanted to step into the role of Man. His parents weren't as comfortable as they had been before the Crash of '29, but they were still gentleman farmers, they still had some money, and he was comfortable being their son.

Then Letty had run away.

He had thought to wait until he was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, not because he would have been in any better position then—his uncle, James Day, had promised him the house he'd built in Belle Haven with the heart-of-pine floors and sculpted fireplaces whenever he chose to start a family—but because he wasn't ready to be a man yet, wasn't ready to
shoulder the responsibility. He should have known that she would not wait.

Slowly he pulls the bodice up and helps her guide her hands into the short sleeves. As he begins to do up the glossy buttons he notices, for the first time, the purple shadows up her ribs and across her left breast.

“Did I do that?” he asks.

“No, it was there before,” she says, and hurries the buttons into their slits. There are fingerprints around her wrist, dark ovals like smears of soot. He is ashamed that he didn't notice, that he'd hurried her clothing off so quickly that he hadn't read her body.

“He shouldn't be doing that.”

“No, he shouldn't.”

“I thought he would at least stop when—”

“He doesn't know yet.” She doesn't look at him as she says it.

“Are you going to tell him?” he asks.

“He hasn't touched me in months…”

She sits for a moment, staring at the straw near his knee. He wants to reach out and touch her, but her body has closed in on itself, like a hen setting a clutch of eggs. He knows he should do something, should comfort her, should take charge. She isn't his wife, he doesn't have a right to defend her against her husband, but he knows he should do something to protect their unborn child. He should lay claim to it, face up to the man she married. He cannot.

“I asked Pastor's wife what I should do. She said to aggravate him less, be more obedient, and pray that God will soften his heart.”

“You could leave him.”

“And go where?” she asks bitterly. “Stay here, in this hayloft? Give birth in the stall with the plow horse?” She doesn't know about the house in Belle Haven. Even if she did, she isn't the kind to make demands. She thinks that she should be able to take care of herself. After a moment, she says, “I have nowhere to go. And you have nowhere to put me. And even if you did, I could never marry you—he would never give me a divorce. The court would never give me a divorce.”

It felt like being punched in the stomach when he'd heard about it. It was at church, of course. He hadn't seen her that morning, but there had been many Sundays when he hadn't seen her, so he'd thought nothing of it. Afterward, a neighbor woman had walked briskly up, calling his mother's name until she turned around, then whispered to her, but not so quietly that he couldn't hear, if she hadn't heard that Letty Allan had run off with the slick insurance salesman that had been bumming around town for the past few weeks, her parents' only daughter and him nearly twice her age. Of course they hadn't. The news had elicited the expected reactions from all present, but he'd gone around behind the church and been sick in a ditch.

The couple had come back when her father died, three years later, to care for her mother and run her parents' farm on the far side of the creek. When he first caught sight of her, buying a paper of quilting needles on a leaden summer Saturday, there had been shadows on her neck, and thumbprints on her arms. His stomach had jumped, then plummeted, and he realized that all the filthy dreams he'd had since she left had been about her.

He had thought that it would be the last time he saw her, that day in town. She belonged to someone else. She was beyond his reach.

But some weeks later she had come, stepping neatly over the stile at the bottom of the north field, to ask his mother for her recipe for chicken pudding. She hadn't stopped, hadn't said a word to him, but when she passed him, buried to his shoulders in a litter of half-born pigs, there had been a weight to her glance, a significance, that immediately erased all of the years between them now and those rainy hayloft days.

She had returned the next day, in the late afternoon. His parents had gone to see his mother's mother, Medora, and to drop in on Helen and Katherine and visit with the grandchildren, so he had been alone, lazily mucking out stalls. She had appeared at his side, taken his hand without a word, led him up into the loft and pulled him down into the hay. When they had played before at being adult they had lain close together, kissed hesitantly at each other's cheeks and foreheads, but this was quite a different fruit. Her lips were soft against his, her tongue probing and searching, and when it touched his own it sent chills through his stomach.

A part of his mind had resisted. He wanted to sit back up, hold her and talk about where she'd gone, what she'd done, what they would do now that she was back, but the feather-light pressure of her fingertips drove thought and logic farther and farther from his mind, until he finally surrendered. There would be a better time for talking.

As he watches her now he realizes that, so many months and kisses later, that better time still hasn't come.

She gathers her legs underneath herself, pushes up into the dusty air. He catches hold of her wrist as she rises—it's meant to be a tender gesture, but she stumbles and grabs his shoulder to keep from falling.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean—I want to ask something.”

“Yes?” Her face is open, waiting.

There are so many things he can ask, but what comes to his lips is, “Why did you leave?”

“You know why. I couldn't—”

He knows about her father but that isn't what he means.

“Why didn't you come to me? I could have gotten you away. Not very far, but still away.”

“The way you're going to get me away now, now that I'm carrying your child?” She says it quietly, but the words sting. “The way you did when you found out about…this?” She touches her bruises lightly.

“I loved you, Mark. And I still do. But I know you too. I left because you weren't going to do anything, not yet, and I couldn't wait any longer. And I know you're not going to do anything now, either.”

“But—”

She hushes him with a finger, a look.

“You're not ready. Fair enough. That's your choice to make. But please, don't question my choices.”

She stands slowly, swaying to balance, feet sinking slightly into the hay, then bends to scoop up the tablecloth and fling it over one arm. He doesn't want her to leave on this note, but he doesn't want to provoke her, or give her husband a reason to add to her bruises by keeping her any longer. He scrambles across the loft to retrieve his trousers, and hops back to her to put them on. They stand together, for a moment, breathing in the dust of the loft and listening to the chickens. He leans down and kisses her, cups her belly in one rough palm, the curve of it firmer now than it was the last time. Then they go down.

Light cuts through the trees: the day has nearly gone. She scatters the chickens with her green skirt and climbs the fence crisply. Her home is more than a mile distant, the same white house with the buttery window frames that she grew up in, and he worries that she won't get back before her husband does. He watches until the forest swallows her.

He could follow after her, bring her back and make her stay with him. He could take one of the horses by the road, find her husband on his way back to their home and confront him. He could claim the child only they know she is carrying, drag her marriage into the public eye, heap shame on all three of them but possibly end the mess with her at his side and their baby in his arms.

He will eventually stand up to her husband, hide her from him when she cannot bear any more, take her to speak to the judges and the sheriffs and the marshal, sit with her through the court sessions and comfort her when the gossip gets to be too much. They will survive the shame, marry and live in the red-floored house his uncle built, have a daughter who will leave the same way Letty did, and find one day that they are old and no one alive remembers a time before they were married. But this will not happen until after the baby is born and walking, until after Letty tries to hang herself in the barn where they played, the place she'd run to for safety in childhood and in adulthood, until after he stops her. It will be too late, by then, for some things, but not too late for everything.

But now he turns toward his own home, to wait for his red-jowled mother and silent father, and a watery cabbage-and-potato dinner. The evening smells of woodsmoke and hay, but he carries her smell with him.