I wanted to stay because they believed I should.
I was freshly bathed and sitting down to breakfast when the knock came on the door. I pictured Jenny out there, my regular visitor. Only a week had passed since the meeting with Robert Hill, and she’d come every day. At first I thought it was out of guilt, but I was growing to see that ours was a friendship. We are currently exchanging lessons — she’s interested in the workings of electricity, and I’m learning how to use the herbs she’s cultivating in the meadow.
“Coming,” I said, pulling a thin undershirt over my head, maneuvering my right arm through the sleeve. I would spare her the sight of my stomach and shoulder.
Jenny wasn’t at the door.
Goddamn it, Marie.
Her dress was blue, like the one her younger self had worn, but the Marie that stood before me wasn’t young. The evidence of her age was everywhere — the thinning and graying of her hair, the webs of lines at the corners of her eyes, the veins and spots on her hands. It could’ve been her mother there in front of me, that long-dead woman I’d never met.
“You have a dog.” Her voice was unchanged.
Wind was in the trees outside, shaking the branches. The leaves slipped together like whispers.
“May I come in?”
I stepped aside, regretting my shirt. Jenny didn’t deserve to see the ruin of my body, but Marie did.
She took a seat at the table, and I closed the door.
I sat down opposite her.
Maggie followed behind, a rumble filling her throat. “Down.” She dropped to the ground, whining once.
“I heard an eastern phoebe on my walk over.”
I didn’t respond.
“Roscoe.”
The woman before me was a mess pieced together from fragments that sat ill and wormy in their current grouping. I couldn’t place her face, at once so familiar and yet completely unknown. She was the young woman I’d met in the village on the Coosa, and she was also the woman who’d sat next to me in my hospital bed asking me to sign away my past. She could have been a teacher coming home from her schoolhouse, and I could’ve been an electrician coming home from my dam. Her belly could’ve been rounding with its second pregnancy, Gerald a sweet toddler nannied by Nettie Williams. But she was also that broken woman, bleeding and pale, on her way to the hospital in Birmingham, where the parts of her that grew babies were removed, along with her compassion and her hope. She was mother to a son who fed on the milk of the woman three doors down. She was the daughter of a dead man who’d left her his land, a landowner who’d given her land away, the mother of a resentful son, a wife no longer married.
The sun had changed its slant outside.
“Roscoe.”
“Why are you here, Marie?”
She cast her eyes around that meager room. She sighed, and the breath was ugly — deeply worried and aged, but familiar. Even when she was young, it held those same tones.
“You’re thin.”
“Prison will do that.”
“It fits you.”
She stared at me, and I made myself focus on her face — the light eyes with their new lines, the graying hair, the thinned lips and widened nostrils, the pronounced cheekbones. Though her body was wider, her face was gaunt and pale.
“I didn’t expect you to be here.”
Again, I didn’t offer her a response.
“I didn’t expect you to get out so soon, and when you were released, I expected you would go someplace new. All this”—she motioned around the room—“surprised me. Gerald let me know you were here. He says you’re going to fight for your rightful share of the property, that you’ve already retained a lawyer. I suppose that’s my main reason for coming. I’ve given the land to Moa and Wilson. It’s theirs, Roscoe, and that’s as it should be. For all we’ve taken from them, it’s only right. It was the only way I could think to start repaying our debt. Wilson suffered all that hardship — his family suffered all that hardship — because of our mistakes.”
“Our mistakes?”
She dropped her gaze and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I have plenty to own, too. You think I’m not willing to admit that?”
“I don’t know what you’re willing to do, Marie.”
She nodded as though I’d asked her a question. Yes, her nod said, that’s right. “Did they tell you?”
“About what?” I wanted her to admit her treachery, her dishonesty and manipulations. She could’ve said so many things.
I’m sorry, Roscoe.
I could nearly see the letter she could’ve written.
Her eyes came to rest on the pallet by the stove. “Are you sleeping there?”
“Sometimes.”
I came round to her side of the table. “Take off my shirt.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Stand up and take off my shirt.”
“Roscoe, I’m not comfortable with that. I— You must not know. It’s—”
“Take off my shirt.”
She took a deep breath, pulled herself free of the bench. Her hands were itchy at her sides, flighty and quick. They moved toward me, then away, and then back to the hem of my shirt. We were in that room together. Put your hands on my body, Marie.
She did, and her fingers were cold where they brushed my skin. I lifted my left arm, but my right wouldn’t rise, and she accommodated it, sliding my shirt free of that low limb.
She stared at my body and brought a finger to the line on my stomach.
Sun was outside the window, trees and sky. Maggie was there, her head on her paws. Marie’s touch was torture against my skin.
She made her voice as small as possible when she said, “We are no longer married, Roscoe.”
That’s right, Marie. We aren’t.
Her hand lingered. “It’s easier for everyone.”
“Easier?” Anger was upon me fearsome and hurried, and with it, the words I’d been willing myself to speak since first recognizing her face at the door. “Is it easier for Gerald? For Moa and Wilson and Jenny? Is it easier for all of them to take on the burden of me?”
My voice brought Maggie up, and she stood behind my knees. I could so easily have torn a piece off the hem of Marie’s dress and held it down for Maggie to smell. Got it? I could have said. This is what we’re after.
Why are you putting that dog on me? Marie would yell.
Maggie here can smell the wrongs in a person.
Or I could have told her she was simply a convict, a criminal, and that we — this dog and I — were in the habit of catching those types.
I could see her climbing a tree, her blue dress snagging on its branches and bark, the hem torn to her knees and then her thighs, her skin seeping small scratches. Maggie would haul me up to the trunk, barking at my ex-wife, treed like any other escapee.
Easy. Easier. There was no such thing.
My hands found themselves on her shoulders, just the height my right arm would allow. The bones of her collar lurked there beneath the layers of fabric and skin. You were once so beautiful, Marie. I pushed her back against the wall, my elbows finding their way to her chest, my forearms on either side of her aged face, my hands in her graying hair. My shoulder fought me, but I forced it to listen.
Tears seeped from her thick-lidded eyes. “Roscoe.”
Her hand was still on my stomach, that long scar.
I pressed against her, against her face, against the trail she’d planted to that spot, and as I pressed, I saw them — my people — Ed and Chaplain, Taylor and the warden, even Beau and the remains of Stevens. They had all built my story, and I followed the routes they’d given me. Even George Haskin was a trap I’d been set to release. I had been Taylor’s dog boy and Chaplain’s reader and Ed’s friend, and before that I had been Marie’s salvation as well as her disappointment, and before that — long before — I had been her husband and an electrician running power from the banks of the Coosa, and a father if only for those few moments I held the infant version of our son, offering him my knuckle to stanch his crying.