“You are innocent,” she said — the same words my grandmother had used, in my dream. “But you knew what I am talking about.”
“Don’t worry. No matter how provocative they get, little girls don’t tempt me. But I don’t get what you mean by innocent.”
“I mean that you expect too much,” she said. “I think I am confusing you. Do you wish more to eat or do you care to help me gather my eggs?”
I remembered her comments about work, and stood. I followed her outside and through the trees down the slope to the henhouse. “Go in quietly,” she said. “These birds can be excited easily, and they might suffocate each other in panic.”
Very gently, she opened the door of the tall red structure. A terrible stench came to me first, like ashes and dung and blood, and then my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw hens sitting on their nests, in tiers and rows like books on a bookshelf. The scene was a parody of my Long Island lecture halls. We stepped inside. A few birds squawked. I was standing in a mess of dirt, sawdust, feathers, a pervasive white substance and eggshells. The smell hung acrid and powerful in the air.
“Watch how I do,” Rinn said. “I can’t see in this light, but I know where they all are.” She approached the nearest nest and inserted her hand between the bird and the straw without at all stirring the hen. It blinked, and continued to stare wildly out from either side of its head. Her hand reappeared with two eggs, and a second later, with another. A few feathers were glued to them with a gray-white fluid. “You start at that end. Miles,” she said, pointing. “There’s a basket on the floor.”
She covered her half before I had coaxed a dozen eggs out of half as many unhappy hens. Duane’s thick bandage made for clumsy work. Then I went up a ladder where the air was even denser and stole more eggs from increasingly agitated birds; one of the last ones pecked me in the hand while I held her three warm products. It was like being stabbed with a spoon.
Finally we were done, and stood outside in the rapidly warming air beneath the looming trees. I inhaled several deep, cleansing breaths. At my side, Rinn said. “Thank you for helping me. You might make a worker some day. Miles.”
I looked down at the thin hunched figure in the outlandish clothes. “Did you mean to tell me that you talk to my grandmother? To Jessie?”
She smiled making her face look Chinese. “I meant that she talks to me. Isn’t that what I said?” But before I could respond, she said, “She is watching you, Miles. Jessie always loved you. She wants to protect you.”
“I guess I’m flattered. Maybe-—” I was going to say, maybe that’s why I dreamed about her, but I was hesitant to describe that dream to Rinn. She would have made too much of it.
“Yes?” The old woman was looking alerted to a current inaudible to me. “Yes? Did you say more? Often I don’t hear properly.”
“Why did you think I would get involved with Alison Updahl? That was a little farfetched even for me, don’t you think?”
Her face shut like a clamp, losing all its luminosity. “I meant Alison Greening. Your cousin, Miles. Your cousin Alison.”
“But—” I was going to say But I love her, but shock choked off the startled admission.
“Excuse me. I can no longer hear.” She began to move away from me, and then stopped to look back. I thought the milky eye was turned toward me. She appeared to be angry and impatient, but inside all those wrinkles she may just have been tired. “You are always welcome here, Miles.” Then she carried her basket and mine back up to the little house darkened by trees. I was already past the church on the way home when I remembered that I had intended to buy a dozen eggs from her.
I parked the car in the gritty driveway and went along the porch and through the front room to the narrow staircase. The house still felt damp and cold, though the temperature was now in the upper seventies. Upstairs I sat at my desk and tried to think. D. H. Lawrence seemed even more foreign than he had the previous day. Auntie Rinn’s final words about my cousin both thrilled and upset me. To hear another person allude to Alison Greening was like hearing someone else recount your dreams as his own. I riffled the pages of The White Peacock, far too nervous to write. Mention of her name had set me on edge. I had used her name as a weapon against Duane, and Rinn had used the same trick on me.
From downstairs I heard a sudden noise: a door slamming, a book dropped? It was followed by a noise of shod feet hushing across the floor. Alison Updahl, I was sure, come around to flirt while expounding her boyfriend’s crazy philosophy. I agreed with Rinn, Alison was a far more agreeable person than she wished anyone to know, but at that moment I could not bear to think of anyone casually usurping my territory.
I thrust my chair away from the desk and went thundering down the narrow steps. I burst into the living room. No one was there. Then I heard a rattling noise from the kitchen, and imagined her nosily exploring the cupboards. “Come on, get out of there.” I called. “You tell me when you want to come over, and maybe I’ll invite you. I’m trying to get some work done.”
The clattering ceased. “Get out of that kitchen right now,” I ordered, striding across the room toward the door.
A large pale flustered-looking woman appeared before me. wiping her hands on a towel. The gesture made her large loose upper arms wobble. Horror showed on her face, and in her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses.
“Oh my God,” I blurted. “Who are you?”
Her mouth worked.
“Oh my God. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“I’m—”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please sit down.”
“I’m Mrs, Sunderson. I thought it would be all right. I came in to do work, the door was open… You’re — you’re Eve’s boy?” She backed away from me, and almost fell as she stepped backwards over the step down into the kitchen.
“Won’t you please sit down? I’m honestly sorry, I didn’t mean to—” She was still retreating from me, holding the dishtowel like a shield. Her eyes goggled, the effect made even worse by her glasses.
“You want cleaning? You want me to clean? Duane said last week I should come today. I didn’t know if I should, what with, I mean since we, since this terrible… but Red said I should, take my mind off, he said.”
“Yes, yes. I do want you to come. Please forgive me. I thought it was someone else. Please sit for a moment.”
She sat heavily in one of the chairs at the table. Her face was going red in blotches.
“You’re very welcome here,” I weakly said. “I trust you understand what I want you to do?”
She nodded, her eyes oily and glazed behind the big lenses.
“I want you to come early enough to make breakfast for me, wash all the dishes, and keep the house clean. At one I’ll want lunch. Is that what you agreed to do? Also, please don’t bother about the room I’m working in. I want that room undisturbed.”
“The room…?”
“Up there.” I pointed. “I’ll be up and working most mornings when you arrive, so just call me when you have breakfast ready. Have you ever done any work like this before?”
Resentment showed in the puffy face for a moment. “I kept house for my husband and son for forty years.”
“Of course I should have thought. I’m sorry.”
“Duane explained about the car? That I can’t drive? You will have to do the shopping.”
“Yes okay I’ll go out this afternoon. I want to see Arden again anyhow.”
She continued to stare dumbly at me. I realized that I was treating her like a servant, but could not stop. Embarrassment and a fictitious dignity made me stiff. If she had been the Woodsman, I could have apologized,