After Eli Read online

  * * *

  Sarah was happy to be outside. She had worked that morning in the house, across from her mother at the quilting frame. The work was slow and monotonous and her mother had retreated into the silence that often fell over her like a shadow. Once, when she was younger, Sarah had asked her mother about the mood and Rachel had replied, “You’ll learn it soon enough.” Sarah had known this was not an answer, but a warning of something that would sour with the passing of time. It was a fear to be endured, like the stories she had been told by Dora about monthly bleedings when her time for the cycle had begun. Sarah had not questioned her mother again about the aloneness she pulled around her like a garment; afterward—instinctively, in perfect imitation—she, too, had begun to slip into her mother’s silences.

  She walked past the grazing cows to a soft sandbar she had heaped into a cushion beneath the cedar that stood alone in the line of pines lacing the edge of the woods. She sat lazily, her knees up, stretching her body forward to feel the pleasing strain of muscles pulling in her shoulders and back. A very small breeze washed across the side of her face, like a breath. She crossed her arms over her knees and leaned her head against her elbows and listened to the easy beat of her heart echoing in her temples.

  When she heard the man’s voice, her body started violently.

  She rolled forward, to her left, turned on her hands and knees and looked up. He stood not fifteen feet away. His right hand was raised, palm up, toward her. He pointed to the ground with his left hand.

  “Shhhhh,” Michael whispered. “It’s a rattler, long as my leg.”

  A scream exploded from Sarah’s throat. She scrambled awkwardly backward, crawling on her hands and knees.

  Suddenly, the man before her dove to his left, his arms locked in front of him like a shield. She saw his knees hit the ground and his hands fight something before him. She heard him cry, saw his shoulders recoil, then fall forward again. She saw the snake spin through the air and fall heavily, and then the man was over it, swinging a rock. The rock fell again and again against the ground. Sarah could hear the pounding and feel it thundering through her hands.

  Then he slumped back into sitting. He was breathing harshly through his mouth, his head nodding as he inhaled and exhaled. His face was flushed and perspiration dripped from his forehead. He held his left arm stretched out before him.

  It had happened so quickly, in splinters of seconds, faster than Sarah could comprehend. She stood cautiously, staring at the man. Then she turned and began running down the hill.

  Michael smiled as he watched her run. He closed his eyes and replayed the assassination of the snake, and as he did, he could hear a ripple of applause building into a chorus.

  * * *

  Michael was leaning against his knapsack when Sarah arrived with Rachel and Dora. He had tied a handkerchief above the elbow of his left arm and twisted it tight against the artery. The vessels of his forearm bulged in blue cords under his skin and the puncture wounds of the snakebite had blistered into purple dots.

  He raised his face to the women and a feeble smile played across his mouth.

  “You hurt bad?” Rachel asked tentatively, stepping near him.

  “Not hurt, but bit sure enough,” answered Michael.

  Rachel’s eyes flicked to his face, to his voice, to the song of his accent.

  “Let me take a look,” she said. She knelt beside him and took his arm. She touched the outer circle of the festering wound, pressing it gently.

  “We got to cut it,” she told him. “Bleed the poison out.”

  Michael nodded. He rested his head against his knapsack and closed his eyes. His mouth was dry and his face burned with the heat of the mild poison spreading through his body. He had not believed it would affect him, but it did not matter. Perhaps it was better that it had.

  “Won’t take but a minute, but it’s got to be done,” Rachel added.

  He nodded again. He could hear movement about him, could feel other hands on his arm pulling away the handkerchief above his elbow. A stinging rush of blood spread into his forearm. Another woman—Dora—spoke. Her voice was stern and heavy.

  “I’ll do the cuttin’,” she said. “I got the knife.”

  He felt his arm being lifted and balanced across a lap. Then he felt the quick draw of the blade on his skin, over the bite. His body trembled and his fist closed tight. Blood began to seep from the cut, dripping down his arm like a thick paint.

  “We’ll let it bleed a spell and then get you down to the house,” Rachel said bluntly. “You could go into a fever.”

  “Rachel.”

  It was Dora’s voice and it was a warning.

  There was a pause, a silent struggle between the two women that Michael could feel. He opened his eyes and looked at Dora. Her narrow face was cold with contempt.

  “You needn’t go to worryin’,” he whispered. “I’m grateful to you and on the word of them that’s holy, you got no danger to be facin’. I couldn’t do fight with the weakest of God’s creatures right now.”

  “Nobody’s worried,” Rachel assured him calmly. “Not many people come through here we don’t know, that’s all.”

  Michael smiled his understanding. He closed his eyes again and flexed his fist to force the blood out. He could hear footsteps in the leaves around him.

  “Mama, here’s the snake,” Sarah said. “He—he killed it.”

  “It’s big,” replied Rachel. “Must’ve had plenty of poison.”

  “Don’t go touchin’ it,” warned Dora. “Snakes look like they’re dead sometimes when they ain’t.”

  Michael moved against his knapsack. He forced a smile.

  “Sure enough,” he agreed. “That’s the truth of it. Snakes, you can’t tell about. That’s somethin’ I’ve learned travelin’ about, and it’s a strange lesson for an Irishman. There’s not a single snake in Ireland. Not one.”

  “Don’t talk,” Rachel said. “Don’t move around. It’ll just spread the poison that much quicker.”

  “I’m at your mercy and grateful for it,” replied Michael quietly. “Whatever it is you want, I’ll be mindin’, but I don’t like bein’ thought of as a stranger. My name’s Michael. Michael O’Rear.”

  Rachel opened his handkerchief and refolded it into a bandage. She wiped away a string of blood that had matted in the hair of his arm.

  “My name’s Rachel,” she said reluctantly. “Rachel Pettit. The girl, she’s my daughter, Sarah. Dora’s my sister. Dora Rice.”

  “You’re kindly people,” insisted Michael. “It’s providence that puts you here, it is.”

  Rachel did not reply. She pressed the handkerchief over the cut and held it.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon before the women moved Michael from the woods to the house, using a mule and a hauling sled with steel runners. Sarah had returned to the house for water and bandages and a salve to apply to the cut, and Rachel had cleaned and dressed the wound. But the women had said nothing. They had sat away from him in silence, and as he rested, Michael had tried to close the distance of their presence by the telepathy of his imagination, to force the ghost of his inner eye to narrow on their faces, to enter their bodies through their breathing. But he could not. He had thought of them for two months, but still they were far away, removed by a mystique that covered them like a transparent lacquer. He did not know what it was, but he knew the drama was forming and he knew his role.

  * * *

  He was guided by Rachel into her room, through the quilt curtains, and to her bed.

  “Take off your shoes and lay down across the top quilt, Mr. O’Rear,” she told him. “We’ll get you some food and I’ll change the bandage.”

  “It’s Michael, please, and don’t be troublin’ yourself.”

  She looked at him evenly.

  “You got bit helpin’ Sarah,” she said. “We owe watchin’ after you.” She turned and left the room.

  Michael removed his shoes and stretched across th
e bed. The bed was soft and cool and had the clean smell of fresh cloth. He smiled easily and cupped his hands behind his head, pushing against the pillow. It was beginning. His own private Chautauqua. He had made his entrance and met his audience. And he had done it with a prop too daring to disbelieve.

  He wondered if the women had taken the snake’s rattles as a prize.

  4

  RACHEL WALKED OUTSIDE, alone. It was dark, in the early smoke of night, and a chill had fallen over the mountains like a cloud. She thought of the man in her bed. It was not an illusion, not a trick of her mind. It was not restlessness. The man in her bed was very like Eli.

  It was in his manner, in the toss of his head as he talked, in the music of his voice. It was in the bold sculpture of his smile and in the energy that expired from him like heat.

  Eli, she thought. She inhaled deeply and the perfume of the night made her shudder. Eli’s presence had been intoxicating to Rachel, suffocating her with its sweet scent of promise, opening her body as if it were ripe fruit splitting at his touch. He had done so much wrong, had lied so often, had taken from others with such ease and without regret, yet she had not been able to resist his presence and she had forgiven him willingly, eagerly.

  The man in her bed was very like Eli.

  Dora had recognized it also.

  Dora had said, “Send him away. It’ll come to no good.”

  “We can’t,” she had answered her sister. “What he done was for Sarah. We owe him.”

  “Mark me,” Dora had warned. “Mark what I’m tellin’ you. It’ll come to no good.”

  Her caution had frightened Rachel. Dora was older only by six years, yet somehow she seemed eternal, without youth. She had always been sullen and suspicious, as though possessed by a psychic power from some lightless world spinning in her mind. She had come to live with Rachel and Sarah five years earlier and had brought with her an atmosphere of fear and bitterness as deadly as acid.

  Rachel walked slowly in the white sand of the yard. She heard again her sister’s words: “Mark me. It’ll come to no good.” Dora had never trusted Eli. To Dora, Eli had been evil, and now there was another man, very like Eli, and she could sense in him a terrible danger.

  Rachel had said nothing to Dora of the dark message. She knew speaking of it would only free the phantoms in Dora’s mind, and her visions would become more fearful.

  Perhaps Dora was right. It was an odd coincidence. She had been thinking of Eli. Floyd had mentioned his name and she had been thinking of him, and the memories were intimate and hurtful, and she wondered why she could not control his force. Perhaps Dora was right. Perhaps it would come to no good, having someone so like Eli to care for. But if there was a danger, it was a danger to her alone, the danger of memory aroused. The man in her bed would soon recover and be gone and that would be the end of it.

  * * *

  She stood beside the fig bush and looked up along the horizon of mountains that were ink-blue against the gray sheet of night. Her eyes moved carefully over the mountains and her memory separated profiles of bodies and faces hidden in the sagging rim line. Eli had found the profiles for her. He had drawn them with his finger, forcing her eyes to follow as he traced them across the velvet of darkness. “There’s another,” he had said proudly. “You see it? There. Plain as it can be, just like the Indian said.” It was the same as seeing pictures in the stars, he had told her, only better. “Look hard. There’s his face. See it? And there’s his chest. And his legs and feet, toes pointed straight up. Plain as can be. You see it?” Yes. Yes. She had seen the profiles and, yes, it was better than watching stars. Stars were dots that had to be connected with imaginary lines; the profiles of the mountains were full and endless. No one else knew about them, Eli had whispered. No one. It was a lost story told by the old Indian, and it would die in the secrecy that he shared with her. She knew of the old Indian. He had died many years before. He had been gentle but demented, and things that could not be explained were always believed to be the work of the old Indian, because the old Indian could see into time. No one else knew, Eli had said, but the old Indian had told him the faces and bodies of the mountain rim had once belonged to a race of clay giants who ruled the earth, until they began boasting that their monarchy included the heavens also. Then they were made to lie down and stare forever upward into the awful eye of God, and they had become grotesquely disfigured and covered with the feathered hair of trees. That was how the Great Smokies came to be, molded from the bodies of clay giants. And they had names: Hail, Thunder, Rain, Fire. Yes, Eli had said seriously as he laughed, that was why there were such words, because there had been such giants.

  Rachel turned from the fig bush and walked to the well and pulled the heavy wood covering from over the opening of the wellbox. She looked into the black tunnel that Eli had dug into the ground—stubbornly, proudly dug, until he reached a vein of the sweetest water in the valley. She wondered if the man in her bed was as stubborn and proud. She wondered if he could see faces in mountains.

  * * *

  In the night Michael removed the bandages from his arm and peeled open the cut with his fingers. He rubbed the palm of his hand over the lips of the wound, smearing the seeping blood across the razor line of the slit. His arm throbbed from torn tissue and he lay back against the pillow and breathed slowly to quell the nausea. Then he rebandaged his arm and slept.

  By morning the cut was puffy and infected. There was no fever, not to the touch, but Michael lay still in bed, his eyes floating beyond the faces of Rachel and Dora, as though wandering in a semiconscious dream. His breath was shallow, through his mouth. He did not answer Rachel’s questions as she cleaned and wrapped his arm.

  “The fever’s in him,” Dora said, pressing with her hands against his throat. “Could be he’s got a weak heart.”

  “Maybe it’s the snake poison,” replied Rachel.

  Dora did not answer. She stared into the cloud of Michael’s eyes, searching for something she could not see.

  “We better get him covered up. Bring the heat back out,” Rachel added. “Maybe get a spoon of whiskey in him.”

  “Maybe that’s what he wants,” Dora replied cynically.

  They covered him with two quilts and fed him three tablespoons of clear whiskey, and then they left the room.

  He could hear their voices through the walls. The voices were muted, wordless, but he could tell they were arguing. He blinked his eyes rapidly to moisten them, then he adjusted his head against the pillow and a smile danced across his face.

  * * *

  For two days the wound split and bled and the signs of fever rose and fell in him at will and he was careful to maintain the appearance of a coma in the presence of the women. It was a risky performance, yet there was a joy in playing it—the skilled actor against his audience, flashing nuances like card tricks, balancing pauses against the rhythms he could feel pulsating throughout the house. Michael did not know why, but he knew there was someone else about to enter the scene.

  That person was Mama Ada Crider.

  She was a very old woman. Very withered. Very small. Her chest was concave and her back bowed in a cat’s stretch. Her face was emaciated and white as bone, her lips cracked and dry, her eyes deep and dull and covered with cataracts that looked like drops of silver.

  Mama Ada had the power of healing. She could stop bleeding and draw fire and blow away thrash. And she could do something no other person in the mountains was able to do: She could drive poison from people or animals. She used an Old Testament scripture that had been taught in secret by her mother, taught with an exactness that was the perfect print of her mother’s voice in word and intonation. And Mama Ada had never taught the secret to anyone. Her children had been sons, not daughters, and the dominion over poison was a gift of mother to daughter. The scripture and its precise saying was locked in her mind like a God-whisper and its cosmic power would be sealed with her death.

  To the people of the Naheela Valley, it was
not a witch’s power, not a thing of satanic worship that Mama Ada possessed. It was a command that had been poured over her at birth like an anointment. And it was mighty. There were stories about her. She could order snakes to stretch out like sticks and they obeyed. She had blown fire from people whose skin had bubbled in whelps as black as ash, and the burn had dusted away in fine powder. She had cured the thrash in babies too sick to open their eyes, whose parents had given them up for dead.

  Rachel knew of the stories, had been told them as myths, but she knew them to be true. She had seen the power. It had happened when Sarah was a baby. Sarah had fallen and struck her face against a table, and her nose had begun to bleed profusely and would not stop. Eli had wrapped Sarah in a sheet and put her in the wagon and driven to Mama Ada. The sheet was soaked red and Sarah’s body had become limp, but the blood would not stop. It flowed in spurts, gushing with each heart-stroke, and Mama Ada had sat calmly in a chair on the front porch of her home and held Sarah across her lap. She had bent forward over the baby’s face, her eyes closed, and she had whispered something no one heard. Before she opened her eyes again, the bleeding in Sarah had stopped. The only thing Mama Ada had said was, “Wadn’t no need to bring the child out. You could of just told me and it’d been the same.”

  * * *

  And now Mama Ada was in the room with Michael, seated beside the bed in a chair taken from the kitchen. Michael watched the scene from behind the false veil of his unfocused vision. He could smell the musk of death on Mama Ada like a dampness. Rachel and Dora lifted his arm and removed the bandages and placed it on a pillow at the edge of the bed. Then Mama Ada reached for the arm and ran her fingers over the cut. Her fingers were brittle and as cold as the skin of a reptile.