"I know you're married."
"I aim to stay so."
"I know."
"What else you know?" He puts his forefinger in her navel.
"That I'm way older than you."
He looks up, away from her navel to her eyes, and smiles. "Nobody's older than me."
Consolata laughs.
"Certainly not you," he says. "When's the last time?"
"Before you were born."
"Then you're all mine."
"Oh, yes."
He kisses her lightly, then leans on his elbow. "I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?"
"I'm looking now."
No figs ever appeared on those trees during all the time they met there, but they were grateful for the shade of dusty leaves and the protection of the agonized trunks. The blankets he brought they lay on as much as possible. Later each saw the nicks and bruises the dry creek caused. Consolata was questioned. She refused to answer; diverted the inquiries into lament. "What's going to happen to me when all this is closed? Nobody has said what's going to happen to me."
"Don't be ridiculous. You know we'll take care of you. Always." Consolata pouted, pretending to be wild with worry and therefore unreliable. The more assurance she got, the more she insisted upon wandering off, to "be by myself," she said. An urge that struck her mostly on Fridays. Around noon.
When Mary Magna and Sister Roberta left on business in September, Sister Mary Elizabeth and three, now, feckless students continued to pack, clean, study and maintain prayer. Two of the students, Clarissa and Penny, began to grin when they saw Consolata. They were fourteen years old; small-boned girls with beautiful knowing eyes that could go suddenly blank. They lived to get out of that place, and were in fairly good spirits now that the end was coming.
Recently they had begun to regard Consolata as a confederate rather than one of the enemy out to ruin their lives. And whispering to each other in a language the sisters had forbidden them to use, they covered for her, did the egg gathering that was Consolata's responsibility. The weeding and washing up too. Sometimes they watched from the schoolroom windows, heads touching, eyes aglow, as the woman they believed old enough to be their grandmother stood in all weather waiting for the Chevrolet truck.
"Does anyone know?" Consolata runs her thumbnail around the living man's nipple.
"Wouldn't be surprised," he answers.
"Your wife?"
"No."
"You told somebody?"
"No."
"Someone saw us?"
"Don't think so."
"Then how could anybody know?"
"I have a twin."
Consolata sits up. "There are two of you?"
"No." He closes his eyes. When he opens them he is looking away.
"There's just one of me."
September marched through smearing everything with oil paint: acres of cardamom yellow, burnt orange, miles of sienna, blue ravines both cerulean and midnight, along with heartbreakingly violet skies. When October arrived and gourds were swelling in the places where radishes had been, Mary Magna and Sister Roberta returned, severely irritated by priests, lawyers, clerks and clerics. Their news was no news at all.
Everyone's fate was being resolved in Saint Pere, except her own. That decision would come later. Mary Magna's age, seventy-two, was a consideration, but she refused placement in a quiet home. Also there was the upkeep of the property. The title was in the hands of the benefactress' foundation (which was down to its principal now), so the house and land were not exactly church owned; the argument, therefore, was whether it was subject to current and back taxes. But the real question for the assessor was why in a Protestant state a bevy of strange Catholic women with no male mission to control them was entitled to special treatment. Fortunately or unfortunately, no natural resources had so far been discovered on the land, making it impossible for the foundation to unburden it. They could not simply walk off, could they? Mary Magna called everyone together to explain. Another girl had run away, but the last two, Penny and Clarissa, listened in rapt attention as their future-the next four years of it anyway-which had taken shape in some old man in a suit's hands, was presented to them. They bowed their beautiful heads in solemn acquiescence, certain that the help they needed to get out of the clutch of nuns was on the way. Consolata, however, paid scant attention to Mary Magna's words. She wasn't going anywhere. She would live in the field if she had to, or, better, in the fire-ruined house that had become her mind's home. Three times now she had followed him through it, balancing on buckled floorboards and smelling twelve-year-old smoke. Out there with not even a tree line in view, like a house built on the sand waves of the lonely Sahara, with no one or thing to hinder it, the house had burned freely in the play of wind and its own preen. Had it begun at night, with children asleep? Or was it unoccupied when the flames first seethed? Was the husband sixty acres away, bundling, branding, clearing, sowing? The wife stooped over a washtub in the yard, wisps of hair irritating her forehead? She would have thrown a bucket or two, then, yelling to the children, rushed to collect what she could. Piling everything she could reach, snatch, into the yard. Surely they had a bell, a rusty triangle-something to ring or bang to warn the other of advancing danger. When the husband got there, the smoke would have forced him to cry. But only the smoke, for they were not crying people. He would have worried first about the stock and guided them to safety or set them free, remembering that he had no property insurance. Other than what lay in the yard, all was lost. Even the sunflowers at the northwest corner of the house, near the kitchen, where the wife could see them while stirring hominy.
Consolata ferreted in drawers where field mice had nibbled propane gas receipts. Saw how the wind had smoothed charred furniture to silk. Nether shapes had taken over the space from which humans had fled. A kind of statuary of ash people. A man, eight feet tall, hovered near the fireplace. His legs, sturdy cowboy legs, and the set of his jaw as he faced them answered immediate questions of domain. The finger at the tip of his long black arm pointed left toward sky where a wall had crumbled, demanding quick exit from his premises. Near the pointing man, faintly etched on the ocher wall, was a girl with butterfly wings three feet long. The opposite wall was inhabited by what Consolata thought were fishmen, but the living man said, No, more like Eskimo eyes.
"Eskimo?" she asked, bunching her hair away from her neck.
"What's an Eskimo?"
He laughed and, obeying the cowboy's order, pulled her away, over the rubble of the collapsed wall, back to the gully, where they competed with the fig trees for holding on to one another. Mid-October he skipped a week. A Friday came and Consolata waited for two and a half hours where the dirt road met the tarmac. She would have waited longer, but Penny and Clarissa came and led her away. He must be dead, she thought, and no one to tell her so. All night she fretted-on her pallet in the pantry or hunched in darkness at the kitchen table. Morning found her watching the world of living things dribbling away with his absence. Her heart, clogged with awfulness, weakened. Her veins seemed to have turned into crinkly cellophane tubes. The heaviness in her chest was gaining weight so fast she was unable to breathe properly. Finally she decided to find out or find him. Saturday was a busy day in those parts. The once-a-week bus honked her out of the way as she strode down the middle of the county road. Consolata skittered to the shoulder and kept on, her unbraided hair lifting in the breeze of the tailpipe. A few minutes later an oil truck passed her, its driver yelling something through the window.
Half an hour later there was a glistening in the distance. A car? A truck? Him? Her heart gurgled and began to seep blood back into her cellophane veins. She dared not let the smile growing in her mouth spread to her face. Nor did she dare stop walking while the vehicle came slowly into view. Yes, dear God, a truck. And one person at the wheel, my Jesus. And now it slowed. Consolata turned to watch it come full stop and to feast on the living man's face.