The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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СКАЧАТЬ saw her smoothing her apron, pulling hay from her hair. He stood up from his chair. Where had she been? What was she doing in the barn? She was to bring no one no kind of pie, get in that house. And Elma went inside and Juke went to the barn, where he found Genus Jackson sitting on a hay bale, sweaty and satisfied, licking blackberry juice from the tines of a fork. When Juke returned to the house, he said to Elma, “Learned that boy not to come near you again. Don’t make me take the hoe to you too.”

      He had never taken a hoe or a hand to her. She had not known him to take a hand to anyone. So she had said nothing. She had not protested. She had not explained. She did not know how bad a beating it had been. Later, when she suspected how bad, when she began to learn to protest, she would wonder why her father had kept Genus on the farm when he could have had a new man in the shack by dark. If only he had run him off the farm! But Genus woke up same as always and carried on, and so she did too. She believed she must have done wrong, that she had invited Genus’s punishment, and that she must be very careful.

      The following Saturday, there was rain. They were all glad. Genus did not go down to the creek in the middle of the night, or Elma didn’t hear him.

      But the Saturday after that, Elma heard his door open and close. She counted to one hundred, crept into the kitchen, and took the whole blackberry pie from the windowsill, where she’d left it to cool that afternoon. It would be her way of making amends for the hot water she’d put him in. There was no way to talk in the daytime, not with her father’s eyes on them. The moon was brighter tonight, near full, but her bare feet didn’t need it to find their way down the path. She knew which branches to move aside to avoid snapping, which roots and rocks to step over.

      He was humming. She heard it as she came to the edge of the sandhill, before the land sloped down to the shore. Under the lowest-hanging turkey oak, she placed the pie on a flat rock and lay down, pressing her chest to the ground. She watched as Genus shed his union suit, took her soap from the catalpa, and waded into the water.

      She had never seen a man the way the Lord intended. There had been men around her all her life, her father, Nan’s father, the landlord, the field hands from town, the last hired man who had lived in the shack—a scrappy, white-whiskered white man named Jeroboam who as far as Elma could tell didn’t bathe at all. She had seen nothing of them but their sunburnt backs. Now there was her beau Freddie Wilson, the landlord’s grandson, who liked to press his manhood upon her while he taught her to drive his Chevy. “Less go ride,” he’d say, and he’d sit her between his blue-jeaned legs, nearly in his lap, the jar of her daddy’s gin in his hand cool against her thigh through her dress, his left arm hanging a cigarette out the window, and he’d show her how to ease the engine into motion, how to work the pedals and turn the wheel without jerking the truck into next week. “That’s it, that’s it,” he’d say, his arms around hers on the wheel, the heat coming off his body like a sun-warmed shirt straight off the line, his pecker hard as a tree trunk against her tailbone. “Less go park in them trees,” he’d say, kissing behind her ear, his liquor breath thick as a swamp fog, and she’d say, “Freddie, quit,” and he’d say, “Gotdamn, Elma,” and she’d climb out of his reach and he’d drive her home. Goddamn, she allowed herself to say in her head. Goddamn if she didn’t like the way she felt in Freddie Wilson’s lap.

      Under the moon, knee-deep in Lizard Creek, Genus Jackson stood humming. A slim brown branch hung between his legs. He lathered her soap between his hands. He washed his chest, his neck, under his arms. The cricket frogs called to each other from the bank. Gentle as a teapot, Genus poured a stream of piss into the water. She felt her body flush, the blood rushing between her legs.

      It took all her will not to join him in his song, to join him in the water. But then what? She might spook him. He might call out. They might be heard. If her father found them, he’d take a hoe to both their hind sides. She looked at the pie, dark and dumb on its rock. What was she thinking, bringing a pie to a stranger in the middle of the night? Was he meant to eat it there, standing in the creek with his manhood hanging between them?

      Besides, he would know that she’d followed him. What she needed was for him to come upon her. She lifted the pie, crawled out from under the branches, and tiptoed back up the path.

      All week, at school, in the fields, in her bed, she counted the days to Saturday, when she would go down to the creek and wait for him. She imagined floating on her back in the creek, her hair swimming around her face like copper fish. Or she would sit on a rock on the bank, brushing it over her shoulder like a mermaid. Or she would be standing in the water where he had been, washing herself with her soap (that square of soap, the goose bumps of cornmeal, how they would brush against her skin), and he would come upon her. A vision. In her vision, she said, “Genus Jackson, have you been using my soap?”

      Come Saturday, she listened to the sounds of the house settling down. As soon as she was sure her father was asleep, she slipped outside in her nightdress. It was October, and the clay path was cool under her feet. The light of day still paled the edge of the west field. The mules snuffed and snored in the barn.

      Elma knew the sound of Mamie’s snoring, and of Archie’s shitting. She knew the sound a hog made just before it was slain, and the sound a stallion made when it was upon a jenny, and the sound the jenny made, which often as not was no sound at all. This was the sound she heard as she made her way down the path—the sound of one animal and the silence of another. The sound changed as she walked, a grunt, then a moan, and then nearly a hum. By the time Elma reached the end of the path, and the creek came into view, she did not want to look, but she did. She found her place on the sandhill under the skirt of the oak. It was so dark that at first the two silhouettes looked like round rocks in the creek. Then she made out the shoulders and heads above the water—the same shape, shorn of hair. If it hadn’t been for the sounds, Elma might have found beauty in their symmetry, two busts carved of black stone.

      Above, a cloud drifted past the moon, and then the light caught the ripples of the creek and their open mouths, and both mouths now made a certain sound, a tongueless sound, one unlike any Elma had heard on the farm. The sound would stay in her ears for a long time, and later she would have to reckon that it was what the Lord intended, though at that moment it seemed that the two figures in the creek had invented it themselves.

      The next Saturday, when Freddie Wilson directed Elma to drive his Chevy into the canopy of pines twelve miles west of town, she did. It was the place where the Straight dead-ended into scrubgrass, where no passing eyes could find them. Freddie looked as though he could hardly believe his luck, but he didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He shifted her off his lap and unbuckled his belt. Only if he would marry her, Elma said. Would he really marry her? Of course, he said. Of course what? she said, hand on his chest. He said, Of course I’ll marry you. And then Elma heard the sound again, though Freddie sounded more like a horse in a barn. Two months later, in the truck, when she told him her bleeding hadn’t come, he punched the window with his fist. It scared her so much she waited another month to tell her daddy, but her daddy wasn’t even mad, just nodded solemnly over his plate. He’s got to marry you now, he said. Long as he’ll do you right.

      It wasn’t until she was far along, when the newspapers started using the word “Depression,” that Elma thought back to that fall and saw that the Crash had come then, not long after the night she first saw Genus Jackson disappear down the path to Lizard Creek. It was hard not to draw a line between the two, her following him, and what followed. Pregnant as a potbellied pig, she read the newspapers front to back—it was the one luxury her father allowed in those months—and she could feel the hot, inextinguishable flame of her badness, spreading beyond the horizon like fire on a field. Was it her watching, her wanting, that called the devil down to the creek? It seemed that way, even before the babies came. And after they did, and after Genus disappeared for good, it was hard not to feel that she’d СКАЧАТЬ