After Eli Read online

  * * *

  “House looks good,” Floyd said routinely as he walked through the living room into the kitchen and to the sideroom. It was more than a compliment; it was a litany spoken by a man who had helped build the house, had repaired it, tended it with a craftsman’s pride. It was something Floyd always said.

  “Dora scrubbed the walls this week,” Rachel replied.

  “She’s a worker,” acknowledged Floyd, placing the potatoes against the wall in the sideroom. He added, “Woman like Dora, she’ll scrub the wood off.” He blushed at his weak humor.

  “She likes to keep busy,” Rachel said. “She and Sarah’s been out in the garden all mornin’.”

  Floyd looked instinctively through the window of the kitchen. He saw Dora and Sarah working in a small, flat field beside the barn.

  “Been a lot easier if she’d of let the boy come over and run the middlebuster,” he said. “Would’n’ve took but a couple of hours. Make a better garden, bein’ plowed deep.”

  “Dora’s got her ways,” Rachel replied simply.

  “Yes’m.”

  “I appreciate the potatoes, Floyd. I’ll cook some tonight.”

  Floyd shifted nervously on his feet. He said, “Long as I’m here, I might as well take a look at that well pulley. Make sure the boy done it right.” He looked at Rachel and then quickly away. “If it ain’t no trouble,” he added.

  “No trouble at all,” Rachel answered. She had forgotten about Jack repairing the well pulley. It had been a month and Floyd had not mentioned it before. “But it’s fine,” she said. “Jack’s handy when it comes to fixin’ things.”

  “He’s all right, I reckon.”

  “You want to look it over, you can.”

  Rachel opened the kitchen door and stepped into the backyard. Floyd followed. She crossed the yard to the well. Dora and Sarah stopped their work in the field and stared. Floyd lifted his hand, a pointed finger, in greeting. Sarah returned the wave timidly; Dora turned to her work with the heavy steel hoe.

  “Sarah’s growin’ up,” Floyd said.

  “She is,” agreed Rachel. “She’s a woman now. I wadn’t much older when I got married.”

  Floyd nodded. He turned to the well and began examining it. He did not know why, but he had always thought of the well as Eli’s single triumph on his farm. Eli had battled for it, cutting through granite and clay, going deeper for water than anyone in the valley. He had used dynamite and a shovel and scoop bucket and had worked tirelessly. He would not listen to advice to move the well, not even a few feet. “This is where Rachel wants it,” he had declared, “and, by God, this is where it’ll be put, if I have to bore a hole to China.” He had persisted and one day his shovel had caved into an underground river as cold as winter. The next day Eli had called in every neighbor within five miles to sample his water.

  Floyd had helped Eli cover the mouth of the well with a box of fieldstone, planked across the top by oak shelving. And then the windlass of chestnut, with the winch driven through the tight center eye of the wood’s age circles. The winch had a cog wheel with a drop wedge for locking the windlass and holding the bucket. It was the first windlass lock anyone in the valley had ever seen.

  Floyd ran his hand over the lock and the windlass. The chestnut had been burned smooth by the rope. He dropped the bolt and locked the windlass and pulled with his weight against the rope, looped over the repaired pulley. The pulley was attached to a crossbar that Eli had cut from a blackgum and had nailed solidly beneath the roof of the shelter.

  “Looks good,” Floyd judged. “I was rememberin’ when Eli dug out this well. Cut through some hard rock, but he done it. Got him the sweetest water in the mountains, to boot. Always like stoppin’ by for a drink.”

  Rachel’s face opened quickly, like a blink, then closed. She was surprised. Floyd had not mentioned Eli by name in years, and she had always understood his silence; it was a matter of respect, of avoiding the absence in her life. At least she had always believed that. It could have been that Eli was an absence in Floyd’s life. He had been Floyd’s friend. It did not matter that Eli told other people fantasies to please them, he had always been truthful with Floyd.

  “You helped Eli dig it,” she said, deliberately repeating her husband’s name.

  Floyd dropped his head. He mumbled, “I was around. Hauled off the dirt over yonder where that fig bush is.”

  Rachel stared at the bush. It was in full leaf. She remembered when Eli had planted it and had laughed that it was a stick and would never grow. But he would please her. If it was figs she wanted, it was figs she would have. The bush had survived and had grown an umbrella of limbs and leaves, and each year it pushed figs out of its covering like sweet bronze candy.

  “That’s been a few years,” Floyd said, shaking his head philosophically.

  “Yes,” whispered Rachel. Then: “Floyd, you worry too much about us.”

  Floyd did not answer. He toyed with the bucket on the plank covering of the wellbox.

  “Don’t think I’m not grateful, but we can take care,” Rachel added. “We have for a long time.”

  Floyd nodded and looked across the yard to Dora and Sarah.

  “Be good if y’all had a dog of some kind,” he said seriously. “Them Caufields didn’t have one. It got killed a couple of days earlier, I hear tell. Kicked by the mule.”

  “Maybe,” answered Rachel. “But I don’t know what good it’d do. If Sarah didn’t spoil it lazy, Dora’d probably run it off.”

  There was a pause, a taut silence stretching between them.

  “I remember Eli likin’ dogs,” Floyd said softly.

  Rachel was again surprised. Floyd had again spoken of Eli by name.

  “You ever want one, let me know,” he added. “We got too many to keep fed, anyhow.”

  “I will.”

  Floyd wiped the sleeve of his forearm across his face. It was a nervous habit Rachel had recognized for years. It meant Floyd was ready to leave.

  “Gettin’ on in the day,” he said. “Me’n the boy got to go on, I reckon. Maybe find that fellow wantin’ some shingles. I got some white oak cured out and a little bit of hickory.”

  “I’m glad you stopped by, Floyd. I appreciate it,” Rachel told him.

  She walked with him to the wagon. The boy was sitting exactly as he had been. Rachel spoke to him: “Tell your mama I said hello, Jack.” Jack nodded.

  “You need anythin’, you send Sarah over,” Floyd said, untying the rope reins from the brake. It was another of their memorized lines.

  “I will,” Rachel promised.

  * * *

  Rachel watched, arms folded, hugging her breasts, until the wagon rolled into the main road and disappeared around the knoll that had once been planted in corn. The sun was on her.

  She lifted her face and closed her eyes and stood unmoving in the warmth. Her breasts felt full against her arms and she shuddered at a remembered touch that flashed through her body like a chill. She could see Eli in the translucent screen of her closed eyes, his face burning with laughter, the roar of his voice thundering inside her mind. His fingers were touching her lips, her face, her arms, her back. His mouth pulled from the brown vessels of her nipples and his hair was warm under her chin. Then his face fluttered and was gone and she could sense only the fevered heat of early summer. There were earth sounds around her, swirling in the undetectable rush of time, and she could feel something shrill piercing her, filling her.

  * * *

  Floyd did not see the man standing inside the gray-green of the wood’s shadows. Floyd’s eyes were fixed ahead, at the tip of the wagon tongue balanced between the two mules. He was thinking of Rachel Pettit. He had said too much to her, had been too insistent. He had spoken of Eli, which was not his right. His duty was as neighbor, but not to give advice. He crouched forward on the wagon seat, feeling the shame that he feared more than any other emotion. It was not right to pry, he told himself bitterly. It was never good to speak more tha
n necessary. And he had. He did not know if he should return to the Pettit house. Or if he could.

  * * *

  The man stepped into the edge of the road after the wagon had passed, then quickly back into the undergrowth. He was not certain: Perhaps the boy sitting in the back of the wagon had seen him. The boy had looked up, then down again, but if he saw him, he did not react. Even if the boy had seen him, it could not have been clearly, not enough to recognize him again. For days, he had been careful not to be seen. It would be foolish to blunder after being so careful.

  “Ah,” he said aloud, “don’t go rushin’ things, Michael O’Rear. You’ve work to do.”

  He shrugged the sudden tightness from his shoulders and pulled at the bill of the cap on his head. Then he turned in the woods and started his slow climb back up the mountain. He began whistling. Softly. Gaily.

  3

  MICHAEL STOOD WITHOUT moving and watched the rattlesnake.

  He knew the snake could kill him; still, there was something majestic about it. It was coiled into a rope of thick muscle that quivered like a blood pulse and its tail hissed a sickening warning. The whirring of the rattles mesmerized Michael. It was as though the tail performed rites of a ceremony as ancient and dark as time. Circe’s magic, thought Michael. Sweet as death, the rattler’s song. The snake’s head danced against its swollen, dark body. Its mouth opened and closed in a white smile and its teeth glistened. Its red-string tongue slithered like a whip.

  Michael was not afraid of the snake. It was an even match. The snake had quickness and its vial of poison and its Devil’s noise; he had size and strength and a pinning stick. The stick was long—six feet, at least—and Michael had trimmed one end into a fork, where two limbs had branched away.

  He gouged gently at the snake’s head and whispered teasingly as he turned the stick in his hands: “Shhhhh. Be quiet, my little one. You’ll get your bite soon enough. Soon enough.”

  The snake’s body tightened into a hard knot. Its head sank backward like a raised fist. Michael knew the snake would strike soon. He tapped above the snake’s head, then flipped the stick quickly and pushed hard, catching the snake behind the hard bone of its jaws. The snake’s body writhed, turned upside down, uncoiled, convulsed, fought hard to pull its trapped head free, and if not free, then off. The instinct for suicide in trapped animals was great and Michael knew it. He pushed steadily as he eased down the length of the stick to the snake.

  “Easy up, now,” he said to the snake. “No need of fightin’ it. Not now. Not now. You lost it. Fair and square.”

  The snake’s body lashed at the pinning stick, wrapping it in a death choke. Michael reached across the stick and caught the snake behind its flat jaws with his right hand. He squeezed hard with his fingers and the snake’s mouth gaped open and he could feel the long ribbon muscles contracting as the snake swallowed involuntarily. He stood, lifting the snake still coiled to the pinning stick.

  “Ah, you’re a beauty,” Michael said proudly. “A four-footer, I’d wager, and you’ve killed your share, you have, of rats and lizards. Swallowed ’em up whole. And I’ve got another swallow for you.”

  He chewed into the wad of tobacco leaf in his mouth, squashing it flat. He could feel the burn of the leaf against his tongue, and his mouth filled with saliva. Then he turned the snake’s head to him. He pinched the snake’s mouth open against the stick and spit the brown juice of tobacco deep into the snake’s throat. The snake’s head twisted angrily and its venom dripped from the tips of its teeth as the juice slipped into its body.

  “That’s enough,” Michael said gently. “Just enough to calm you down. That’s all.” He waited patiently until the snake’s body began to relax and loosen on the pinning stick. “Don’t go dyin’ on me, now,” Michael coaxed. “You’re not to go dyin’. Not yet.”

  He uncoiled the numbed snake from the stick and dropped it carefully into a thick cloth sack. He tied the top of the sack with a leather strip and looped it around the gargoyle head of his walking stick. Then he shouldered the stick and began walking happily through the woods.

  * * *

  It had been seven days since Michael had begun his surveillance of the house of the three women. The house was an unplanned fortress, standing on the tip of a plateau that rose like a wave against the mountains behind it. It was surrounded by oak and chestnut trees, with a hairline of pines running from the mountain down into the belly of the valley. The trees around the house clustered like sentries, their highest limbs interlocking in fingers of leaves, and the house, as well as its inhabitants, was protected by an isolation that seemed almost mystic. Michael knew of isolation. He understood it. Isolation enforced order and habit, a rhythm of days that rolled into other days until it created a monastic sense of timelessness. And so it was with the house of the three women. Their waking and sleeping ticked slowly on an internal clock of repetition.

  The only intrusion had been the wagon with the man and the boy. Neighbors—the Crider man Lester Caufield had described—Michael judged. He had watched from the woods below the road as the man disappeared into the house with his bundle of goods, reappeared at the well, and then left. And then he had taken the risk of stepping into the road above the creek and having the boy see him. But that had been a small risk. Only, he was intrigued that the boy had not moved from the wagon and that Dora and Sarah—he had easily identified the women on his first day of watching them—had not left their work in the garden to speak to the man with Rachel. There was something to be learned from their behavior. Michael replayed the actions again and again in his mind; intuitively, he knew it was a pinspot of weakness and it would serve him well.

  Each day he had watched and waited and lived comfortably in the lush growth of the mountain. He was not unsure, as he had been when he had camped above Lester Caufield’s house. Lester had told him what he needed to know. Lester had told him of Eli—how he was like Eli—and of the three women, and he had known immediately. He could be patient. He had waited two months since the Caufields. He had traveled up to Knoxville and worked in a tannery before returning to the mountains, and had plotted his drama with exacting detail. For two months he had repeated the names of the women. He had drawn the features of their blank faces in his mind and had heard their voices and cast them in their roles. And now he was ready.

  The mountains had been cold and harsh before, in March; now they were warm by day and cool by night and the air was as sharp and clean as ice. Michael did not mind the waiting. He had learned of the ecstasy of being alone. Each day he worked with his knife, carving a figure from a heart of cedar that he had found in the woods. The carving relaxed him, narrowed his vision to exacting detail. And it satisfied an artistry that often confused him because it seemed to belong to another person. But it was patient work and patience was necessary. Rest. Think. Listen. There could be no blundering. It would be fool’s work to blunder. Fool’s work, and Michael O’Rear was not a fool. When the curtain parted, he would be prepared. He would not be a stammering fool. Rest. Think. Listen.

  * * *

  On the eighth day, in early morning, Michael covered his campsite and packed his knapsack. The snake was in the sack, which was hanging from a limb. He slipped his walking stick through the loop of the leather strip, tied it securely, lifted the sack from the limb, and placed it on the ground. The snake squirmed and rolled weakly. “Soon, my beauty,” Michael whispered. “Soon.” At midmorning he began the long, circling trip around the farm, and at noon stood above the house. Soon Sarah would emerge from the house and drive the cows from the barnyard to graze in the open field below the woods. She would sit in the shade of a great cedar tree and watch over the cows until Dora called her from the house, almost precisely two hours later. It had been the same every day Michael had watched the house. It was the routine he needed, the way of introduction that would take him among the women. He sat in the shadows and waited and ate part of a trout cooked the night before and stared intently at the house below him
, trying to imagine the rooms and the furnishings in them.

  He did not move until he saw Sarah leave the house and cross to the barnyard. Then he untied the sack and eased the snake onto the ground, catching it carefully behind the jaws in the narrow of its throat. He slipped his knife from its sheath with his left hand and forced the blade into the snake’s opened mouth, behind his needle teeth. He began massaging the snake’s head with his right index finger and the milky venom oozed from the snake’s teeth, across the knife blade. “Get it out,” he whispered. “Don’t be leavin’ more’n a drop or two. You wouldn’t want to kill Michael O’Rear, now would you?”

  He looked toward the house and saw the cows plodding up the hill, followed by Sarah. He eased the knife from the snake’s mouth and wiped the blade across the fur back of a moss stand. Then he turned the snake’s head toward him and winked. “Now’s your vengeance, little friend,” he said in a low voice. “Do it well.” He turned the snake’s head quickly and thrust its mouth on his left arm, above the wrist. He could feel the snake vibrate with a sudden life as its teeth sank deep into the muscle of the arm. A hard pain exploded in his body and he yanked viciously at the snake, ripping it away from his arm. The snake hissed and he snapped its head against the ground and then crushed its skull with the heel of his knife. The snake’s dying body rolled in a wrapping motion, like a screw, thrashing in the pine needles. Breathing heavily, Michael caught his arm above the wound and watched the snake die.

  He could hear the cows nearing him. He moved quickly, gathering the snake and rolling it in a loose coil ten feet behind the spot where Sarah always rested. He positioned the snake’s head over a rock and covered the rock with leaves. It would work, he thought. He could slip his hand beneath the crushed head and flip it high, and the snake would appear to be alive. That would be enough. The rest would be convincing. He stepped back and judged his work. He was pleased. He felt the ache grow in his arm and he realized the weak poison was seeping throughout his body.