“It’s Sunday,” he said. “We go home tomorrow.”
Her smile faded. “Yes, uncle. I know.”
On the floor Tim straightened.
“Do you go back to your husband tomorrow?”
Amelia sat up and pushed her hair behind an ear. A log split in the stove and hissed and spit when the flames hit sap. The damper flapped when a gust of wind tangled itself in the chimney. Boughs creaked outside.
“No, uncle,” she said. “I won’t go back to Darren.”
Bill felt Moses stiffen, she thought with momentary surprise, and smiled to herself. “You sound pretty sure of yourself.”
“I am.” She said the words as if she were taking a vow.
It was amazing what four days of tai chi, sweats and fishing would do for the self-confidence, Moses thought complacently. The voices whispered a warning. He ignored them. This time they would be wrong. It had happened before, not often, but often enough to allow him to retain some hope in the face of unrelenting forebodings of death and disaster.
Bug off, he thought, and somewhat to his surprise, they did. And he wasn’t even drunk.
Across the room Moses murmured something in Bill’s ear, and she laughed. “Do you think they know we saw?” Tim whispered.
Amelia looked at the older couple. “I hope not.” But she wondered. She’d seen Bill looking at her with a speculative glint in her eyes, and when she came back from the outhouse this evening her knapsack had been moved and the pills inside had shifted location. She didn’t mind; she didn’t want to be pregnant, either. She didn’t know what she wanted, exactly, but then it had been so long since she had felt the courage to want anything.
Five months ago she had married Darren Gearhart with no desire other than to be a good wife and the mother of his children. She had wanted to sleep with him, too, and she now knew enough to know he had wanted to sleep with her. If he hadn’t, he would never have married her. The realization didn’t hurt as much as it once had.
A good wife, she had thought, meant keeping a clean, neat house, serving good meals on time, keeping the checkbook balanced. The second shock, after her wedding night, came when he told her to close her bank account, one she had been building since she first began to earn money as a baby-sitter at the age of twelve, and deposit its holdings into his own. She asked, timidly, if he would put her name on it, too. That was the first time he had hit her. It didn’t hurt much, not like later, but it was the third shock, and then the shocks piled up so thick and fast that she lost the ability to differentiate between them.
She no longer had money of her own, there was only his money, doled out a few grudging dollars at a time. If she couldn’t stretch them to cover the purchase of food and the maintenance of the trailer they lived in, she had to ask for more, and she learned quickly that she didn’t ever want to ask for more. She learned not to visit her mother, too; he would either accompany her and be so rude that she would leave before she was too embarrassed, or on those few occasions when she managed to slip her leash and go off on her own, he would track her down and take her home.
Her mother knew, though. Amelia remembered her father. Oh yes, her mother knew, all right.
If Darren wasn’t yelling at her, he was hitting her. If he wasn’t hitting her, he was fucking her. It never stopped. She had thought he would be gone fishing most of the summer, but he’d been fired off theWaltzing Matilda practically before the season began. The skipper of theMatilda was Amelia’s uncle’s oldest son, and he had sought her out afterward, to apologize, she thought, but Darren had picked a fight with him and run him off before he could say so.
The five months had seemed like five years, and there had seemed no end to them. She could no longer sleep through the night, starting at noises when he wasn’t next to her, and under constant assault of one kind or another when he was.
She’d been sleeping at fish camp, four dreamless nights of uninterrupted unconsciousness, in a bunk with clean sheets and a soft pillow all her own. She looked at Moses and felt something as close to love as she’d ever felt for a man. She thought how wrong people were who said he was an evil spirit. Even her mother, an elder who should have known better, had warned her children against him.
Tim’s hands stopped shuffling the cards, and she looked up to see him watching her with grave eyes. “Are you okay?” he whispered.
She smiled. “Oh yeah,” she whispered. “I’m perfect.”
You sure are, he thought fervently.
To him, she was beautiful. The bruise on the side of her face had faded to a faint yellow and the dark shadows beneath her eyes were gone. Her hair, which she hadn’t combed until her second day at fish camp, hung in a sleek, shining, black fall. Her olive cheeks were darker after three days spent outside and she moved with a new assurance. She looked him straight in the eye and smiled, and he had a hard time not ducking his head. He couldn’t stop the flush that rose to his own cheeks.
“It was so good,” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said. She stretched a little in memory, her breasts pushing at the front of her shirt. “Yes, it was. The second time especially.”
He swallowed. “Yeah.” He shuffled the cards and they went all over the place. He bent over, picking them up, glad of the opportunity to hide his expression. “Amelia?”
“What?”
He gathered together all his courage and whispered her own question back at her. “Can we do it again?”
He heard her inhale, her involuntary, delighted and slightly surprised chuckle, and then Moses got to his feet, giving Bill a surreptitious tickle on the way up. “Come on, boy, time to bring in some more wood.”
The last thing Tim wanted to do was leave before his question was answered, but he rose obediently and followed Moses into the storm. A gust of wind ripped the door from his hand and slammed it shut. “Moses!”
“What? And come on, let’s get that goddamn wood before we both freeze our nuts off.” He nudged Tim, his grin a white blur in a dark smudge. “Especially now that you know what they’re for.”
Tim was glad the darkness hid his flush. He should have known the old man would see, would know. He turned his head into the wind, feeling drops of moisture cool his cheeks. “Is that snow, Moses?”
“Feels like,” the old man said, allowing the change of subject, much to Tim’s relief. He rooted through the woodpile, going down a layer in search of the dry stuff, and stacked Tim’s arms full.
“It’s too early for snow,” Tim said.
Moses added another piece of wood, and Tim could no longer see the blur. “It’s never too early for snow out here.”
A bird called, barely audible over the wind, a low note, followed by clicking sounds, the sound of bare branches rubbing together.
Moses, his arms full of wood, stood still, looking to the west.
“What?” Tim said.
“I thought I heard-”
“What?” The snow stung Tim’s cheeks and he shivered.
Moses looked at him. “Go on, get back in the house.”
Tim went inside ahead of him. Moses stood on the front porch for a minute longer, listening, but the raven didn’t speak again.
They built up the fire and Amelia made more cocoa, lumpy, just the way Tim liked it. He looked at her with his heart in his eyes.
She looked up and saw him. The color in her cheeks deepened, and her smile was part shyness, part mischief and part warm wealth of shared knowledge.
Moses shoved the table into a corner and tossed blankets and pillows down on the floor. He turned down all the lanterns and opened the fire door. They gathered in a half circle around the flames, light flickering across their faces. “Story time,” Moses said with that evil grin.
Bill settled down next to him. “Which one?”
Moses sampled his cocoa. “No contest. On a night like this, Uuiliriq.”