on, Orren, she said. I live here now, I'm not visiting. I'd like to at least see where I live at.
He looked over at her with his blue eyes and for a second it seemed that he was considering something that was vaguely troubling to him. Then he said, Yes ma'am, and cut the wheel with both hands so the axle complained and the cab tilted like a boat on water. He drove the truck down past the stock barn and the cow pasture. The barn itself, painted a deep and decaying red, looked to be in mid-shudder with its rough boarden sides loosing from its crib frame.
That barn must be about a hundred years old, Aloma said.
No, he said, not near forty. It's a third barn. The first got burnt down by sympathizers that come around the ridge burning crop barns and then my granddaddy tore up the next one when one of the rafters fell in and killed his horse. He built this one all crookwise, put that calf gallery on the early side.
Oh, where are the horses at now? she said, casting back over her shoulder into the shadowy interior of the barn where the stalls were piled with hay or tools but otherwise barren. A few chickens looked drowsy and shipwrecked by the wide door.
I sold em, he said.
What? When?
The day after the funeral.
What for? she said.
For cash, Aloma, he said and he punctuated his words with a hard look. They drove on and the cows turned to watch as the truck passed. One cow, her belly swollen and low, swung a gentle heavy head and stepped once in their direction. Aloma half turned in her seat.
That's the fattest cow I ever saw, she said.
She's pregnant, said Orren. And Aloma barked out pure laughter at herself, but because Orren did not join her—and he once would have, she knew that as she sneaked a sideways glance at him—it sounded hollow, like her mouth was echoing a joy that had already passed. She settled back in her seat and looked away from him and the barn. She tucked her left hand between her legs and pressed her knees tight together. With her right hand, she gripped the door where the window rolled down and touched the dust that sanded the vinyl and the chrome there. When she withdrew her hand and looked into her cupped palm, the dust clung to her. There was dust on her shirt, on her face.
Tobacco, said Orren, looking past her and she followed his gaze.
I know it, she said, her voice husked out in a whisper.
It ain't much, he said as if she had not spoken, but you don't need much. It sells pretty high. Corn out to the ridge, he said and he pointed out past the steering column to the field of corn that touched the skirt of the ridge as it rose out of the tilled bottomland.
She looked over the tobacco. The plants' lower leaves splayed wide from the skinnier tops, but they were not tall and the leaves, though green, depended slightly from the stalk in early, unnatural declension, a weathered anemia she saw when they drew close. Beneath the flagging breadth of the butts lay the tanned face of the soil—not an Indian red, but a pale color paupered by the sun.
They look kinda puny, she said.
It's too goddamn dry, Orren said. If I make a buck this season, I'll transplant into that field next year, and he nodded toward a fallow field that lay to the south, she could just see its bare face beyond the tobacco.
The thing is, I only want … he said, but then his sentence closed down unfinished. He grimaced out at the fields and she saw the deep elevens etched between his eyes, eyes that were the color of the sky and just as distant. He looked to her like a thing seized, as if all his old self had been suckered up from his body proper and forced into the small, staring space of his eyes. She did not like these new blinkless eyes of his and she did not like the way his words all collapsed in his new way of talking. As if his tongue could not bear the weight of words any longer. Or the person beside him were not there.
Orren brought the truck around the far end of the fields, under the upsweep of the rising, wooded ridge and then back around the cornfield so that they came upon the house from the east. They said nothing further and Aloma watched as the house grew larger and whiter, its disuse and age arriving in higher and finer detail as they approached. Orren drove up the slope and parked behind the house so the late-afternoon sun stoked a fire on the windshield and Aloma had to close her eyes before she said, Well, I guess I better cook us something. Orren's only response was to help her carry the box of kitchenware into the house. She didn't know what she was going to cook and she didn't know how to use the mixers and casserole dishes they'd brought up, but she would learn. As she was hanging the pots and pans from the hooks on the walls, Orren set off away from the house, his cigarette answering momentarily for his presence before it too faded, and in a minute or so, she heard the tractor start up and move away out of her hearing. She eyed the empty kitchen and set to work until it was dark.
Aloma had never cooked, but she did not complain. She unearthed a cookbook in the old kitchen pantry, cleared it of its dust, and forged ahead and when she made her first honest meal—the noodles underdone and the chicken tough as jerk— and Orren did not comment, she took it as the compliment it was not. She grimly assumed the duties that were hers, all of which confined her to the house. She had known that this would be part of her life on the farm. She had known without seeing it that when Orren said, I'm taking the farm—and not auctioning it, not selling it off, not even taking anyone on right away but doing it all himself to keep costs low—it would be a great deal for the two of them to handle. And she knew that she would have a house to run, but she'd hoped it would be the smaller house. He had told her of it that very first night when he'd described the farm. He had told her the old house was falling down, the one built by his great-great-grandfather, which his mother had moved out of when Orren was a little boy, only two months after his father died. The house was more than Emma wanted now that she had a farm to run, where before she'd only chased after little boys, and suddenly she was all over the land from the sewing to the bundling, the fencing, the cows and the horses. The only thing she never learned anything about was the machines, and when they broke, she would always shoo the boys away. It was years before Orren realized that she sent them off because she did not want to cry in front of them. Pouring money into machines she ought to know how to fix tore her up. He laughed when he said this, leaned his head back on the seat and looked up at the cone top of Spar Mountain, smiling. She could be right tough, he said. That's about when I quit riding horses.
When? said Aloma.
When I was seven, eight maybe. Right not long after Daddy died.
Why's that? Aloma said.
Two things. One, this old bitch hoss run me out into the pond once, it was pretty deep, and kept me there till after dark and I was too scared to get down and wade my own self out.
Oh no, she laughed.
Alligators. He grinned. But Mama found me. She was mad as hell at me and that horse too. I don't think I never touched that horse again. And two, that's about the time when it was just work. We always done chores before, but when Daddy died, then it was either let the whole thing go to hell or go to work. He shrugged. Mama worked the most, though. I'll give her her due.
Aloma wondered now, Had she ever worked? She had, but it wasn't the same thing, learning to play the piano. She had never been driven by the imminent loss of something like a home. It was more a matter of what she did not have than of what she could not stand to lose. She had wanted to possess something and when she wanted a thing, she wanted it bad. And it was sheer luck that she happened to be good at the one thing she wanted. The fingerwork came easy and so did the memorizing—she did not even have to try, a fact that she liked to show off every week and it both pleased and rankled her teacher, who wanted her to slow down and listen and obey the page, something Aloma could not do when she was young, she whipped the pieces into a wild spirit of her own invention. Mrs. Boyle said Aloma could make people dance at a wake. It was not a compliment. So she reined her in, talked her down, but she never touched the bold part of Aloma's brain that could seize the scores and hold them—sometimes for years without the pieces atrophying—and then release them so a roomful of people were compelled to sit up and listen. Mrs. Boyle was stingy with her compliments, she demanded a great deal, all