“You didn’t have to hurt him,” I said, near tears myself. “He’s my neighbor.”
John put his arm around me and pulled me close. “I’m jealous-hearted, Myra. I don’t like nobody else touching you. I don’t even like your granny having you all to herself. It don’t seem right for her to be with you more than I am.” He took hold of my chin and tipped my face up to look at him. “I want to marry you,” he said, growing solemn. “But if you’re going to be with me, you belong to me. I can’t have it no other way.”
My heart leapt, what he had done to Mark forgotten. I stared at him, unable to speak. “I belong to you,” I said after a moment. “But it works both ways. I’m jealous-hearted, too. If we get married, you can’t have another woman for as long as we live.”
John leaned over and touched his nose to mine. “Hell, that’s easy,” he said. “You’ve done ruined me. I can’t even stand to think about nobody else.”
Looking back, we would have said anything to possess one another. If we had known we were making promises we couldn’t keep, it wouldn’t have mattered to us.
For two weeks, I walked around with my steps unburdened and light. I didn’t wonder anymore whether John was seeing Ellen Hamilton or any other woman behind my back. But soon after he proposed, just like that night a banshee wind came screaming down Main Street, I had another glimpse of the darkness to come. Near the middle of June, John picked me up and drove me down the mountain to a part of Millertown I’d never seen.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Will you quit asking me that? I said it’s a surprise.” He smiled, white teeth flashing. He twisted at the radio knobs as we passed pawnshops and seedy restaurants and then the junkyard, big hunks of car metal twinkling in the hot summer sun.
“I hate surprises,” I said, studying his profile. It took a second to realize he was turning into a lot by the railroad tracks, gravel crunching under the tires. I looked out the windshield at the tiny, peeling box of a house, the streetlight high on a pole, power lines hanging like black snakes stretched across the yard. I turned to him and waited, thinking he had pulled over to kiss me as he did sometimes, fingers wrestling through my hair.
“What do you think?” he asked, eyes bright.
“About what?”
“The house, goose. I rented us a place.”
I blinked hard, my chest going tight.
“Come on,” he said, getting out of the car. He dug in his pants pocket and produced a greasy-looking key dangling from a dull silver hoop. I stared out the windshield, mouth open. He laughed. “I got you good, didn’t I?”
He came around to open the passenger door and pulled me out, still laughing at my expression. “Let’s look inside. I ain’t even seen it yet. There was a man came in the store, said he had a place for rent cheap if we knew anybody. I said, as a matter of fact I do know somebody and you’re looking at him. He didn’t even ask for a deposit.”
I followed John across the sooty lot, our feet scuffing up grit. It was so hot it seemed I could hear my skin sizzling. It struck me that these were the tracks where my mother was killed. I thought I might faint. There was no color. I was used to the trees setting the mountain on fire in fall and all the blooming bushes in spring and every shade of green in summer. Even the mountain ground was spotted with shade and light, blanketed with moss and deep trenches of fallen leaves, ridged with cool-colored sparkling rock, springing with mottled toadstools. But this was all still and flat and buzzing with flies. The smell of factory chemicals made my head ache.
There was a chipped concrete stoop and a light fixture beside the door covered in sticky webs. John put the key in the lock and I watched as he jiggled it, turned it, and cursed under his breath. We were both caught by surprise when the door swung in with a whine. In those first seconds my eyes played a trick that I kept to myself but never forgot. I saw the dark shape of a woman standing in the front room, tall and bone thin with wild clumps of hair and no discernible face. I stopped and clutched at the door jamb. John said, “What?” and she was gone. “I thought I saw something,” I said, my voice as creaky as the rusty door hinges. I was still shaking when we went into the hot stink of the house.
But once John was touching me again, his warm hands moving over my skin, it didn’t take long for me to bury my doubts about the place he had rented. I told myself it didn’t matter where we lived, as long as we were together. We got married a few days later in the preacher’s kitchen, a coffeepot slurping on the counter. I could barely wait to kiss him. I smelled his aftershave and his clean black hair even over the coffee. I didn’t realize, putting Granddaddy’s ring on his finger, how fitting it was that Granny had passed it down to me. Like her, I had given in to temptation and done wrong in the name of bloodred love. Outside in the car John and I kissed each other longer and harder before driving away, his flesh hot under the thin white fabric of his dress shirt.
My wedding night was not how I expected. Later on there was pleasure, but that first night alone in our bedroom, it was painful, not just between my legs but in my heart. I would never be Granny’s little girl again. I felt the mountain falling through my fingers, but I was foolish enough to think as I clung to him in the dark that at least we belonged to each other. At least the pact we made by the springhouse was finally sealed.
John took a week off work and we spent most of it at home, leaving only to buy groceries. I came to know his body better than my own, from the peak of his hairline to the arches of his feet. I loved the blue veins of his temples, the tender bracelets of his wrists, the intricate folds of his ears. The house was depressing but I forgot when I saw him sleeping late in a stripe of sun or in the bathtub with his wet knees poking out of soapy water. I worshipped everything about him, even how he took greedy bites at supper and there was always a crumb left on the corner of his mouth. In the night he’d tickle me with the ends of my hair, trailing it up and down my naked arms, along my jaw and chin. Sometimes I read poems to him and I didn’t mind when they put him to sleep. I kept reading after his eyes were closed. All these years later, watching over my twins as they sleep on Granny’s rag rug, I try to remember the first whispers of fear. I try to mark the time when everything changed. It happened the night I asked about his mother. It was almost dawn and the house was still, no trains rattling the bedroom window as they passed. We were lying curled together under the sheet, my head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder, when I realized we had never discussed the thing we had most in common.
“Tell me something about your mother,” I said.
He was breathing slow, almost asleep. “Huh?”
“We never talk about it.”
“Talk about what?”
“Not having a mother.”
He opened his eyes. “I had a mother.”
“But you were just twelve when she died.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t remember much.”
“How did she die?”
There was a long pause. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what did she die of?”
He paused again. “They said it was a heart attack. But that ain’t what killed her.”
I sat up and pushed back the sheet. The air in the room had changed somehow. Even my legs were sweating in the summer heat. I already knew then that the contented feeling of John and me being the last two people on earth was fading away. I began to wish I’d never brought up his mother, but it seemed too late to turn back. “Then what do you think she died of?”
He looked at the ceiling. “I don’t think. I know. Because I’m the one caused it.”
For a moment I didn’t know how to respond. I leaned over him, trying to see his face in the early morning light falling through the parted curtains, coloring our room the dark blue of an ink stain. “A heart attack is nobody’s fault,” I said at last.