carefully the girl who stared fixedly ahead at the piano like a blindered horse. She saw in Aloma a singular want, the fierce driving need of the dispossessed.
But during her first weeks in the house, Aloma did not think about what she wanted, she did not have time to think about the piano or its lack. She strove only to line up her wanting with the same want that sent Orren out of the house each morning and kept him there until the sun fell. She white-knuckle-washed all the windows in the house with ammonia and water mixed in a bucket, and scrubbed on her knees all the wood floors of the house with an old grooming brush she found under the sink. With linseed oil and vinegar, she shined every surface, excepting the piano, which she left to idle in the living room. In the root cellar, where she ventured with a flashlight in her hands, she found an old pie safe with a punched tin front and she was inspecting its backside when she saw the four-foot house snake that sent her scrabbling backward up the cobwebbed wooden steps to the safety of the lawn. She slammed the cellar doors down and stalked there, jittery running her hands through her hair to rid it of remnant cobwebs.
There was no radio in the house to keep her company while she worked, but she tried not to think on it. She did not want to waver. But sometimes when she found herself chopping vegetables at the counter, as the knife tapped home on the wood of the block, her ears caught at the rhythm, or she found herself humming a tune and her fingers jolted for an instant, wanting to stretch on the keys. She would miss it if she let herself, but she was busy in the big house and she vowed to wait until the right time to speak, if her temper did not flare like a match and burn the right opportunity down.
Now in the fading hours of another afternoon, she stood in the kitchen and read the instructions on the back of a bag of rice. She had spent hours bent over the cookbook, learning to slice fatback into her greens and to collect bacon grease in empty glass coffee jars when they ran empty. Her cooking had improved greatly since her first days at the house. The kitchen was her favorite room with its high walls, its white ceiling creeped with discoloration and cracks like old hairs on a skull. The sunlight touched her in this room. Its windows opened to the south, the east, and the north. And when she faced the stove, she could not see the mountains.
With the rice water rolling to a boil, she wandered out of the kitchen through the dining room with its gold pineapple wallpaper, its curio cabinets. She did not go into the front room where the photographs stared out from their wall, she leaned against the door jamb between rooms, uncommitted. Outside, a late light crescendoed to gold over the grasses. Light found the piano, lit its scrolled feet and the swirling and striping of its grain, brown on black-brown. In its splitting and sinking frame she saw the formidable wrack of its previous beauty. She stared at the thing. The house was silent. The crickets had not yet begun to rub. Aloma drummed her fingers onto the wood of the door jamb and thought yet again of Mrs. Boyle and her many hours at the piano. The woman had driven her, drilled her— rapping at Aloma's knuckles with a blue-and-red conducting pencil when she was irritated with Aloma's drumming, as she called it—Are you going to play piano for me or are you going to drum in a rock band? She said the music was found in the silence as much as sound. The pauses birthed the phrase and funeraled it too, the only thing that gave the intervening life of rising and falling pitch any meaning. Without silence there was no respite from the cacophony, the endless chatter and knocking, the clattering pitches. That is what she said, chatter and knocking—though Aloma did not really believe her and she had never learned to take her time or trust to patience. It was Mrs. Boyle, so concerned with sound, who had affected her talk as well. No, Miss Aloma, can't should not sound like paint. Cain't. Can't, like pant. Can't? Can't, exactly. She'd come away from those lessons a bit altered each time—Drop those aitches, said Mrs. Boyle, drop those aitches—less the girl who had left her aunt and uncle's with stinging eyes and more the girl who was always looking outward, getting ready to leave, the girl who dropped her aitches.
She had burned the rice. The black smell reached her and she started up and ran to the kitchen where it was already crisping brown into black on the bottom of the pot. She carried the pot out to the concrete steps and stood before the fan that she'd set on a chair by the open door. The artificial wind tugged her blouse forward around her and flapped the steam from the pot. Aloma could see Orren down in the pasture with his hands up under a cow's udder, doing God knows what, but he would come soon, the westering light was growing red even as she stood, the steam spilling away from her. She had half a mind to throw that rice down to the cows, but Orren would say, Now, why you done that, the way he did every time she wasted. Her eyes narrowed at the thought. She looked down at the rice held out before her, the center was still white as cotton so she kept it.
When Orren came up, his face was rubied from a June sunburn or only the heat of the day even as it was declining away. She saw that the hairs on his arms had been bleached white. His ring finger was naked and there was coal-black dirt edged up under his nails and she couldn't remember if his hands had always been like that when he had driven down from the college in those evenings, freshly showered and shaved. She couldn't remember rightly how his hands looked then when he touched her, because it had always been dark when they bedded down in the back of the truck, or even in the cab when it was too cold to crawl into the back. Too dark to see what was what.
What's for eating? he said.
Rice and chicken.
Well, I'll eat that, he said and nodded.
Damn right, she said and he looked at her then and stepped to her side at the sink and began to slowly lather his hands with her white bar soap, all the while looking at her.
Not that soap, she said. She hunted under the sink with one hand and found a brown soap with chip granules. She handed it to him.
What's wrong with that other one?
That's for me. You touch animals' rear ends all day.
I don't hardly do that at all, he said. And that's what soap's for.
Not that soap. This soap. He looked into her eyes, first one and then the other, and looked at the soap and then took the soap and washed his hands and shook his head, but said nothing. When he was done, he held his hands up before her with one eyebrow cocked just barely, but she was already turning away and said over her shoulder, Let's eat.
She'd set the table in the afternoon as she did each day, waiting for him. He sat down and she served them both. They ate.
Orren took two bites and then he said, Goddamn, Aloma.
What?
This rice tastes like a house on fire.
Orren!
What? His hands up before him, palms out. It does.
Aloma pushed her plate away from her suddenly so that peas and peppers spilled off one side and the peas rolled like pocked green marbles to the center of the table.
What are you so ornery for? he said.
I cooked that for you.
You cooked it for you too.
She said nothing and he folded his arms over his chest and lowered his head fractionally as if he were peering at her over glasses. What, it's only food, he said.
Well, I don't know how to do it, she said. And I think I've done pretty good considering.
Yes, he said.
I'd like some respect, she said.
Well, he said, get you some.
She did not smile. He shook his head then and though he did not smile, he looked like he might and he reached over and poked her hand once with the tines of his fork. She snatched her hand away. He said, They Lord. What is it you want, Aloma?
Whether it was the dirt still under his nails after the washing or the prick of his fork, she wasn't sure, but her tongue loosed itself and she said suddenly, I want you to marry me.
He dropped his fork down and it caught the edge of the plate where it clattered. He stared at her. I intend to marry you, he said. I ain't asked you to come here to … His mouth twisted.
In an instant, the fight went out of her. Well, I know. I was just sort