Part 23 (2/2)

What needs doing is mine to do.

She would be old in five years from such a load, and recognizing this Inman wished he had not set foot in this house, wished he had kept walking even if it meant falling by the wayside never to rise again. He saw with sorrow that hers was a life he could step right into and keep working at hard from tonight till death. If he allowed himself to ponder it for a minute he saw all the world hanging over the girl like the deadfall to a trap, ready to drop and crush.

It was near dark outside now and the room was murky as a bear den except for the wedge of yellow light cast by the fire. The girl's legs were stretched out before her to the heat. She had on a thick pair of grey men's socks turned down at the ankles and her dress hem had risen so that he could see s.h.i.+ning in the firelight fine gold hairs lying flat and soft against the skin at the sides of her narrow calves. So disordered was his mind from the past days' fasting that he thought to stroke it like the neck of a nervous horse one would seek to calm, for he could see etched in every angle of her body all the lineaments of despair.

-I could help, Inman discovered himself to be saying. It's some early, but this would pa.s.s for hog-killing weather.

-I couldn't ask it.

-You didn't ask it. I offered.

-I'd have to trade you something. I could clean and mend those clothes of yours. It's not like they don't need it. That big rent in the coat could use a wedge sewed over it. Meanwhile, you could put on clothes my man left. He was about as long as you are.

Inman bent and ate some more from the plate in his lap, and shortly he mopped up the last juice with a crust of corn bread and finished it off. Without asking, Sara spooned him up another pile of beans and forked out a wedge of bread. The baby commenced crying. While he worked on the second plate of food she went back into the dim of the room and unb.u.t.toned her dress near to the waist and nursed the baby sitting sideways on the bed to Inman.

He wished not to look but could nevertheless see the round side of her breast, full and luminous white in the grainy light. In awhile she pulled the baby off and a point of firelight caught on the end of her wet nipple.

When she returned to the hearth she carried a stack of folded clothes with a clean pair of good boots standing atop them. He handed her the empty plate and she put the clothes and boots in his lap.

-You can go out on the porch and put these on. And use this.

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She handed him water in a basin made from the bottom of a gourd, a chunk of grey soap, and a rag.

He stepped out into the night. There was a washboard at the end of the porch, and on the post above the board hung a little round mirror of polished metal going to rust. Young John's shaving place.

Fine ice still rattled on the dry leaves clinging yet to the black oaks, but at the open end of the hollow he could see breaking clouds scudding across the face of the moon behind them. Inman thought about the dog the raiders had killed on the porch, the girl watching. He stripped off in the cold, and the clothes he removed were like skinned pelts, wet and heavy and limp. He did not look in the mirror but scrubbed hard at himself with the soap and rag. He poured the remainder of the gourd water over his head and then he dressed. The dead man's clothes were a fair fit, soft and thin from much was.h.i.+ng, and the boots fit like they were cut to his feet, though all in all he felt he had donned the husk of another life. When he reentered the cabin he felt as a ghost must, occupying the shape of the past to little effect. Sara had lit a tallow dip and was at the table was.h.i.+ng dishes in a basin. The air around the light seemed thick. All the bright objects close to it appeared haloed. Everything in the shadows beyond it was extinguished completely, as if never to reappear. The curve of the girl's back as she bent over the table seemed to Inman a shape not to be duplicated in all the time stretched out before him. A thing to fix in mind and hold, so that should he become an old man the memory might be useful, not a remedy against time but nevertheless a consolation.

He sat again at the chair by the hearth. Soon the girl joined him, and they sat quiet, staring into the red fire. She looked up at him, her face an unreadable lovely blank.

-If I had a barn you could sleep there, she said. But I don't now.

-The corncrib will do fine.

She looked back into the fire as if to dismiss him, and Inman walked out onto the porch again and collected his packs and his sodden bedding and walked behind the house to the crib. The clouds were breaking in earnest and the near landscape was gathering and starting to form up under the light of the revealed moon. The air was chilling off toward a hard freeze.

Inman climbed into the crib and burrowed up with his blankets as best he could into the cobs. Up the cove an owl called out a number of times, the calls descending the scale. The hog stirred and snuffled and then fell silent.

Inman figured it to be a bleak and k.n.o.bby night of sleep coming on, but all-in-all favorable in contrast to stretching out on the bare ground. Bars of blue moonlight came in between the crib slats, and Inman could see to take the LeMat's from the haversack and check its ten loads and rub it down with the tail of the dead husband's s.h.i.+rt and set it to half c.o.c.k. He took out his knife and stropped its edge against the clean leather of a boot sole, and then he rolled up in the blankets to sleep.

But he had slept little before he was wakened by footsteps in the leaves. He reached and set his hand on the pistol, moving slowly so as not to rattle the cobs. The steps stopped a dozen feet from the crib.

-Come inside please, Sara said. And she turned and walked away.

Inman clambered out and stood and slid the pistol inside the waist of the pants and cast back his head to survey the narrow slot of sky. Orion was fully risen and seemed to bestride the close ridgelines at either side of the cove with the sure demeanor of one who knows his own mind and follows it. Inman walked on back to the house, and as he approached it he saw that the paper windows glowed like a j.a.panese lantern. Inside he found that the girl had fed the fire with hickory logs and it blazed high and the room was as bright and warm as it would ever be.

She was in bed and had taken the plait out of her hair and it spread thick across her shoulders and 2004-3-6.

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shone in the light. Inman walked to the hearth and set the pistol up on a little shelf that served for mantel. The crib was drawn up near the fire and the baby slept facedown so that all that could be seen was a pale fuzzed orb arising from covers.

-You look like an outlaw with that big pistol, she said.

-I'm not sure there's a thing I am right now that you could set a name to.

-If I was to ask you to do something, would you do it?

Inman considered that he should frame an answer here on the order of Maybe, or If I can, or some like provisional phrase.

What he said was, Yes.

-If I was to ask you to come over here and lay in bed with me but not do a thing else, could you do it?

Inman looked at her there and wondered what she saw looking back. Some dread shape filling the clothes of her husband? A visitation of spirit half desired, half feared? His eyes rested on the quilt over her. Its squares depicted blocky beasts, big-eyed and little-legged, awkward but heraldic. They seemed patched together out of partial remembrances of dream animals. Their shoulders humped with muscle, feet bristling with spikes, howling mouths stretched wide and filled with long teeth.

-Could you? she said.

-Yes.

-I believed you could or I'd never have asked.

He went to the bed and drew off the boots and climbed under the quilts fully clothed and lay under the covers flat on his back. The tick over the rope was filled with fresh straw and smelled dry and autumnal and sweet, and underlying that was the smell of the girl herself, like a stand of wet laurels after their blooms have fallen to the ground.

They both kept as still as if a charged and c.o.c.ked shotgun rested there between them. And then in a few minutes Inman heard her crying great dry sobs.

-I'll go if that would be better, he said.

-Hush.

She cried on awhile and then stopped and sat up and wiped her eyes on the quilt corner and began talking about her husband. She required of Inman only that he bear witness to her tale. Every time he went to speak she said, Hush. There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life. She told the manner in which she and John had met and fallen in love. The building of this cabin and her working like a man beside him, felling the trees and raising the dressed logs and c.h.i.n.king the gaps. The happy life they had planned in this lost place which to Inman seemed so unlikely of sustenance. The hardness of the past four years, John's death, the shortness of food. The only bright spot was John's brief furlough, a time of great happiness which produced the baby sleeping by the fire. Without her, Sara said, there'd be nothing holding me to earth.

The final thing she said was, That will be a good hog out there. It fed on chestnut mast mainly, and I brought it in from the woods and gave it corn for the past two weeks so the lard will render out clear.

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It's so fat its eyes have about swole shut.

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