You take care, now, Ed. Living alone, there, you take care not to over-indulge in your favorite vices. I would complain and urge you to work a little bit at marrying again but there is a part of me, as you know, that feels like you have always been the loner kind at heart, and that if you could get a bit of relief from wanton urges now and then you’d be fine. But, I know, small town, etc. etc. I do wish you had some closer poker or drinking buddies than those backwater snobs in your town. Take a vacation and come see us. Or hell, just hide out in a hotel and I’ll take you out on the town incognito.
Yrs.,
Ellis
HE TUCKED THE LETTER into his jacket pocket and took a walk down the path into the woods behind his house. Walking through the yard was like walking through some kind of medieval court, given all the peacocks standing around watching his passage as if he were a strange and sacred cow in their midst.
He’d already persuaded the Chisolms to let him take Jane up to Memphis to be looked over there. Lied and said it wouldn’t cost anything, that they would consider odd cases for the value of learning more about them in order to treat others down the line.
He rounded a corner in the trail and heard something and just did see the spritely forms of half-grown children bounding away through a thicket like so many frightened deer. A rare sighting of the species Urchinus trespassus. Although he knew very well his woods were regularly roamed by boys from nearby farms and even the northernmost neighborhoods in town. He’d seen their roughshod forts and campsites. That was all fine with him. In his better moods he’d pretend they were his own wayward, half-wild children, conceived in a sylvan, satyrical dream, mythical forest creatures not to be tended like the mortal child. He didn’t like knowing the little bastards shot songbirds with their air guns, but he had done the same as a boy. It was rare he heard the rifle or shotgun of a true poacher, and if he’d heard it regular he would’ve called the sheriff, but so far that hadn’t been the case. There were deer and hogs and turkey in here, he knew, and, he suspected, an ivorybill, maybe a pair. He only hoped some fool boy or man would not shoot one or both of those birds. He heard the call of a peacock deeper in the woods and thought, Or them.
He crossed the creek where it was shallow and narrow and walked through a little glade and then up a long, sloping hill. At the top there was the old gazebo he’d built just after he and Lett married. They’d loved to come out here, have a bottle of beer and a picnic. It was high up. You could see out over the woods. Just a glimpse of glinting light on the lake a quarter mile west, at the end of the property. He knew those same boys (and their parents) trespassed to fish there all the time. By now most knew he didn’t spend much time in his own woods. They probably considered it public property, for all they cared. And he practically did, too, he supposed. As long as he knew he himself had access, and no one the right to tell him otherwise.
He sat in the now-neglected gazebo and remembered those Sunday afternoon picnics. No one could reach him there, with her, even if they came calling, even if someone was a-dying and a-crying, Oh, my lord! he would not know it. He put the world out of his mind and enjoyed the time alone in a little paradise with his sweetheart, before she began to go sour on him. On them. Nothing is forever, it was true. He could be sitting alone here now with her alive and no longer even caring to come out here with him, to enjoy such days. Which is better? he wondered. What is the difference, given enough time?
ACROSS THE YARD from the front porch, to the right of the drive that came to the house from the road, was the large shed where her father would do everything from work on farm machinery, to smith horseshoes or mend tools, to grooming the horses or mule before turning them out to graze for the evening if they’d been worked. In the part where he had worked for years on machinery, the earth was red clay discolored and redolent with oil and grease, and packed hard, and the smell of those things combined was for some reason one of the most delicious to her, even more than those in the barn. What she wished almost more than anything was that she could fix a tractor, or repair a broken wheel, or even hammer out a wheel rim or horseshoe on the anvil. That’s what seemed like real work to her, even as a child, not sweeping a porch or churning milk or washing and hanging clothes or cooking over a hot stove. Men’s work seemed like freedom.
Just down the two-track drive, closer to the road, was the one-room general store her father operated for the tenants, sharecroppers, and neighbors who didn’t want to travel to the larger one in Liberty a few miles away. It had a simple board counter where her father set his money box when he went up there, shelves on the walls for dry goods, canned goods, crackers, tobacco and matches, flour and sugar, canned coffee, and such as that. Heavy sacks of feed were stacked in one corner. Leather for tack repair hung on the wall space just behind the board counter. A tall potbellied woodstove sat in the center of the room, placed in a sandbox, and sometimes a customer would sit next to it for a bit sharing a smoke or a sip with her father, usually in the late afternoon. He didn’t keep regular hours there, but people would just walk or ride up and wait outside it till someone saw them there and went to tell her father, who would come serve them if he could get away from work. If he couldn’t get away, her mother or Grace (before she left) would get the key and go tend to it.
Jane had taken to following her father or mother or Grace to the store when someone came up. She stayed quiet and out of the way but she was studying what went on as intently as a bird eyeballing a worm, pulling up close when the money was exchanged, and jumping to get a product when someone asked. And without anyone noticing she had learned not only the inventory but about money and how to count it, too, all from just watching and thinking, and when there was something she didn’t quite understand she would keep her mouth shut and watch more closely the next time. So pretty soon when she would run to get a sack of meal or tobacco or sugar or coffee or what have you, she would plop it onto the counter and call out the price, and when the customer would put down his or her money she would call out that amount and in a flicker call out what change they had coming back, leaving her father or mother shaking their heads in wonder, or Grace glowering at her in irritation. “How’d she figure all that out?” her father would say, and her mother would say, “Well, you know when she gets quiet, watch out, ’cause she’s thinking and she’s going to come up with something to surprise you, I’ll tell you that.”
So when she would see someone coming or pulling up to the store she would run to her father so fast, so light on her feet, it felt like she hardly had to touch the ground to get going, half flying to where the key hung on a nail in the mantel, saying, Customer! At first her father hadn’t wanted her to tend the store by herself, she was too young despite her talents, but soon he gave in and got her an old apple crate to stand on and let her mind the store whenever she wanted. And since she was pretty much the only one who cared anything about it, and who didn’t have anything really to be interrupted by it, she became principal storekeeper. So much so that her father took to just leaving the cash box on the mantel near the key so she could grab it, too.
And when people would come in, black or white, they always greeted her with respect, some with a bit of humor, “Hello, young lady,” or, “Hello, Miss Jane.” And she would pipe up, “What can I get for you, Mr. Everett?”