WHEN it was time to start digging, I went to the big house to borrow a shovel.
“Help yourself to anything in the shop,” Wilson told me. It was morning, and Moa and Wilson were on the porch again, a couple taking a moment to enjoy the start of the day.
“Not anything,” Moa added.
“Just a shovel, Moa. I promise.”
The thresher greeted me in the musty shop — intimate, but also distant. I felt nervous, the way I would should Marie appear. I placed my hand on the machine’s metal, cool there in the dark, and I saw it moving with its electric engine, turning power into food into sales into salvation. I should have felt guilt. I should have hated that beast of a machine. But I was still proud. I could still recognize the accomplishment, and I wanted — right then, more than anything — to be acknowledged for the success I’d brought.
I picked out a narrow-bladed shovel with a thin shoulder.
The muscles of my left arm took the bulk of the digging, my bad shoulder weak and useless in this task. The hole needed to be deep. The cloth around my knuckles kept my hands from blistering too badly, but nothing saved my thumbs. They opened into sores before I’d finished, and I had to stop to soak my hands in cold water again. Maggie followed me inside.
I made more bandages from the same shirt, my hands so thick with cloth that I could barely operate my fingers. If my hands would just do this last bit of the first hole, I’d go back inside and eat an entire jar of peaches. I would lie down on the thick mattress and try to sleep. I would give my body anything it wanted.
When I finally finished, I let out a cry that brought Maggie to my side. My thumbs had bled through, and the scabs that had formed on my knuckles were broken open.
Inside, I built a fire and set pots to boiling on the stove. Wilson and Moa must have added the bathing room during their time there, and I gave them my thanks as I lowered myself into the hot water. My hands burned and then went quiet, like the muscles in my arms and legs, my shoulders and neck. The steam from the water felt warm and good in my lungs, and I listened to my breaths, each a Dear Roscoe, the Dear strung longer than the Roscoe. Dear coming in, and Roscoe going out. I could hear Marie’s voice, there in that tub. To Ed she was saying, “Oh? You shared a cell with Roscoe? Come in.” She was saying, “Come.” And to me she said, “Dear Roscoe. Dear, dear Roscoe. I’ve been canning like mad this season. The harvest was grand, and we had money for more peaches than we knew what to do with.”
Then I heard my young Marie come, not in person, but in a voice just slightly off from her older counterpart’s. “Take the blame. Get yourself a permanent place here in Kilby. There’s nothing for you when you get out.”
The water went cold before I left it, my body turned to a shriveled kernel. The cottage towels were on the thin side, but still thicker than anything we saw in Kilby, and I rubbed myself dry before pulling on my same pajamas.
Maggie was by the stove when I came into the main room, her body hot to the touch. Kilby had given her a rusty pen, long hunts in the woods, the onerous strain of whelping, where here she had bones and ham scraps, grass and floors to lie on, stoves, pallets. There was nothing of conflict for her in that new life of ours.
I pulled her a foot away to keep her from catching on fire.
I hung my washed bandages across the back of a chair and blew out the lamps. I went to the thick mattress in the bedroom, but it took only a few minutes of shifting and turning to drive me to the pallet, and then just a few minutes of cold to drive me to the stove. I dragged the thin sleeping pad out, with its sheets and blanket and pillow, and I slept on the floor with my dog.
MAGGIE had curled herself against my legs in the night, her body up on the pad. I reached down to pet her when I woke and then rose to work on my throbbing hands. I was anxious to start the wiring and even more anxious to start the leaving, sure that my time there was temporary, a stopover while I waited to hear my real sentence.
Maggie lay close by in the grass while I worked. Toward evening, she lifted her head at the sound of footsteps as Jenny emerged into our clearing. “Dinner.” The girl lifted the bundle in her hands. “I’ll leave it by the door.” Jenny hadn’t visited before.
“Thank you.”
“Thank my mama.”
“Thank your mama for me, then.”
Maggie wandered over to sniff at the hem of Jenny’s skirt, and the girl crouched down to pet her.
“Mr. Roscoe?”
“Yes?”
“There’s a favor I need to ask of you.”
The sentence startled me. I didn’t seem the type to grant favors. “What can I do?”
“Papa hasn’t told you because he’s ashamed, but Charles was—” She scanned the trees as if looking for words. “He was—incarcerated? Like you were. Sent to prison? And, well, we don’t know where he’s been sent. Papa thought you might have some connections at the prison and could do some asking round. We’d be awful grateful.”
“What did he do?”
Jenny twisted the fabric of her skirt. “He drank too much and he — assaulted a man?”
“Do you know what that means?”
She nodded quickly. She must’ve been twenty, maybe nineteen, and I found myself growing angry with Wilson and Moa for making her deliver this request.
Now, of course, I understand why Jenny was given the job.
“I’m happy to do you the favor, Jenny, but tell your parents they’re welcome to ask anything of me, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir.”
“All right.” She crouched back down to pet Maggie. “I wish people would stop leaving,” she whispered.
“Where’s Henry?”
“He’s married.” She smiled. “And he has a little girl that he named after Mama. She’s six months old and the most beautiful thing. He’s sent a photograph.”
“And where is he?”
Her face returned to its quiet melancholy. “They’re in New York City. Mama and Papa are very proud. Ms. Marie helped him get into college, like Gerry, and he has a real job there as a teacher. Ms. Marie sent us all up on the train to see his graduation.”
That would’ve been about a year before.
“And why haven’t you left, Miss Jenny?”
“I’m not book-smart like Henry. I like this work.” She reached again for Maggie’s ears.
“Listen, next time you bring my supper, bring some paper and a pencil, too. I know who we can write to at the prison to find out about Charles.”
“Thank you, Mr. Roscoe.” She kept herself back for a moment and then stepped over Maggie to give me a wide embrace. I hadn’t held a woman of any color or age or size for nine years, and I didn’t know what to do with my body. She pulled away as quickly as she’d come forward. “I’m sorry,” she said, smoothing out her skirt. “Will you stay? Will you stay here until we find out?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good. I best get back, now. I’ll bring that paper and pencil as soon as I can.”
“Jenny,” I said before she started off, “do you know why I’m here?”
She was quiet as her father had been when I’d asked a similar question, and I expected her reply to be vague and hazy, but instead she said, “I suppose it’s because this is your home, Mr. Roscoe.”
She headed down the trail toward the big house, and just before she vanished, she yelled, “What would you like for supper tomorrow?”
I was thinking about homes. “Anything. Anything you and your mama want to cook.”
INSIDE the cottage, my body was all memory. I couldn’t recollect the specifics of Jenny’s touch, only the roar of it. I wanted that girl’s arms around me again, and then once more every day after. I didn’t know how much I’d needed a simple embrace.