After Eli Read online

  “Only my life,” he interrupted. “Only my life. And it’s Michael. Save the ‘mister’ for the preacher.”

  * * *

  Dora moved noiselessly into Sarah’s bedroom to stare out the side window of the house. Sarah sat on the edge of her bed, listening to the conversation between Michael and her mother.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Sarah asked Dora.

  “Nothin’,” Dora answered.

  “Why’s he up so early?”

  “He had somethin’ to say.”

  “What?” Sarah was confused and sleepy.

  “He’s tellin’ the world that he’s here and that he’s to stay around awhile,” Dora replied bitterly. “As long as he wants. That’s what he’s sayin’.”

  5

  MICHAEL’S FENCE WAS not an ordinary fence.

  He did not build it as other men would have. Other men would have cut and set the posts and then stretched the wire, and the fence would have been completed. Michael built his fence in parts, in spans, posts and wire together. He wrestled it from the ground slowly and deliberately, urging it into shape with a performance that made it seem gravely important. Each post, each stretching of wire, declared the need for the fence and each act of its building was accomplished in festive excitement, like the discovery of an obscure but rare truth.

  In the retiring peace of late afternoons, Michael coaxed Rachel and Sarah to walk the fence line with him as he surveyed his progress with an artist’s anxiety for perfection.

  “That’ll be redone,” he would thunder. “And that. Fool that I am for doin’ such sorry work.”

  The fence would be solid, he vowed to Rachel. It would last longer than any of them.

  It would be what a fence should be: for keeping out as well as keeping in.

  “There’s a tune to it,” he said proudly, plucking at the taut wire. “Listen, Sarah. Listen. You could sing to it, you could. Wait till the wind comes up. It’ll be like a Gypsy band playin’ violins. Wind music like you’ve never heard. You’ll be sleepin’ to it at night. You’ll see.”

  * * *

  The fence seemed to possess him. He poured his energy into it madly. He behaved as though time did not exist, and if he recognized the awkwardness his presence had created, he ignored it. It was the fence that mattered. The fence. It had become a kind of private staking line, like the boundaries of an animal’s roaming. The fence had his scent, his signature, his coded warnings against invasion. The fence was his. And the three women watched him from a distance, each with her own questions. There was a man among them. Nothing was the same. The air sizzled and popped with an electric charge that flowed from him like a storm, and his voice began to hypnotize the space about him with the driving cadence of a march song. And the space about him, and the three women who lived in that space, began to accept him.

  * * *

  “Funny how that fence is in me,” Michael confessed one night. “Like it’s me I’m plantin’ down instead of posts. Like the tighter the wire pulls, the more it holds me in. Here I am, hangin’ around like a stray cat, puzzled at not up and leavin’ like I’ve done lifelong. But it’s a job that’s got a hold on me, ladies. It has at that. And I’m hopin’ my stayin’ to do it hasn’t put a strain on you.”

  “No,” Rachel answered hesitantly. “No. We got our work to do. Nothin’s changed.”

  But there had been changes. Imperceptible changes of mood and habit. Michael filled the eye of their subconscious seeing like an inescapable force. He was in their thinking and in their tensions and there was no way to exorcise him. They could only watch. And wait. There was an unknown and it was gathering beyond them.

  The unknown arrived with Floyd Crider.

  * * *

  On the first Wednesday of his work with the fence, Michael recognized Floyd’s wagon on the road that led into Yale and hurried from the field to meet Floyd at the turnoff leading to the house. Rachel watched from the window as Michael and Floyd talked. She knew Floyd was uncomfortable by the way he sat forward on the wagon, rolling the rope reins in his hands. He would have to be, she thought. Though she had told the two men of one another, Michael was a stranger and Floyd was awkward around strangers. Michael’s voice was strong and his accent confusing and when he spoke he animated his words with bold gestures. Floyd would not know what to say. He would be embarrassed. She watched as Michael pointed to the fence he was building and waved his hand along an imaginary line that circled above the house and skirted the edge of the woods. Then Michael stood quietly beside the wheel of the wagon and listened to something Floyd was saying. After a few minutes, Floyd left and Michael returned to his work. Rachel stood at the window watching him. There was something unusual about Floyd’s visit, she thought. He had talked with Michael more freely than she had believed he would. Maybe Floyd was more comfortable around men, even men like Michael. But that would be expected. Still, there was something missing in the routine of Floyd’s visit. Jack, she thought. Jack was missing. Jack was not with his father. She could not remember when Jack had not been with Floyd. She walked to the kitchen and poured water into a glass fruit jar and carried it across the field to Michael.

  “I saw you talkin’ to Floyd,” she said as he drank from the jar.

  “Ah, he’s a fine man, he is,” Michael acknowledged. “Askin’ if we had any needs, sayin’ he was pleased to see the fence goin’ up. Said he remembered when Eli bought the wire and they’d talked about it, just the place I’m puttin’ it. Even volunteered to bring his boy over and help out, but I told him it was a vow I’d made to do it myself.”

  “He’s been a good neighbor,” replied Rachel.

  Michael nodded.

  “A better man you couldn’t find, I’d wager,” he said. “I asked about his dear mother. Said she wasn’t up to her health and he’d be lookin’ for the doctor to come out and see her.”

  “Mama Ada?” Rachel asked with surprise. “Floyd’s always sent us word when Mama Ada gets sick. We take turns stayin’ with her. Dora even gathers up some herbs she likes takin’.”

  Michael’s face furrowed in worry.

  “Could be askin’ in the doctor’s just a precaution,” he said. “He didn’t seem overdistressed, the way he told it. Said she hadn’t said much since that day she took the poison out of my arm. But he’s a quiet man and I was ravin’ on about the fence. Could be I didn’t hear the fear in him.”

  Rachel looked toward the sun. It was late morning, in the same hour that Floyd always arrived at her home on Wednesdays. It was hot and clear above her, but in the west a line of thunderheads rolled like tall, white bubbles floating on a dark underskin. There would be rain before the day ended.

  “Floyd don’t bring in the doctor unless he’s worried,” Rachel said. She turned to Michael. She saw the flash in his eyes, like a change of light. “We’ll go over,” she added. “Me and Dora and Sarah.”

  “I’d like to be goin’ with you,” he replied.

  “No,” she said sharply. Her voice betrayed her. “It’d—it’d be better if it’s just us this time,” she stammered.

  He said: “That’s a point. Me bein’ a stranger. It could make things ill at ease. Is it a far walk?”

  “A few miles,” Rachel told him. “When Floyd gets back from town, Jack can drive us home in the wagon.”

  “You need two mules, you do,” Michael said. “Just the one for plowin’s not enough. You need to be able to get about, even if it’s just a short way to town or to Floyd’s.”

  “Floyd does for us when it’s needed,” she replied quickly. “Takin’ the quilts in to sell, pickin’ up what we need. Helpin’ out when Mama Ada’s sick is little in return.”

  Michael’s voice was very soft: “Rachel, I understand it. That’s how I been feelin’ about the three of you. What I’m doin’s little enough.”

  She was caught in the force of his gaze and could feel him entering her like a ghost. She stepped back without realizing it and her arms crossed over her breasts in an unfamil
iar reflex.

  “I expect we’ll be back later in the day,” she said weakly. “It’ll depend on how she is.”

  “Stay what’s needed. I’ll be fine.”

  She hurried away. A half-hour later Michael saw the three women leaving the house and walking along the road. He was hidden in the apron of the woods, where he had stacked the young blackgums cut for his fence posts. He leaned against an oak tree and watched them disappear around the bow of the road. A cool, constant breeze flew in from the west, pulling the thunderheads. He felt a calm settle over him, a relief from the fury of his false obsession with the fence. He had calculated well, but there was the price of his energy and it had tired him. Now, at last, he was alone on the farm. He lifted his face to the breeze and began to sing softly to himself as he walked toward the house:

  “I have loved you with poems… I have loved you with daisies… I have loved you with everything but love…”

  * * *

  The house was locked against him. He paced the length of the porch and fought the rage that exploded like pain in his head. This was Dora’s work. Staring, suspicious Dora. Bitch Dora. But it did not matter; it would be simple to pry the lock. It was his anger that bothered him. It would not be good to uncage the anger. He had worked too hard.

  He slipped the lock and searched the house quickly but found no sign of Eli’s treasure. Outside, it was beginning to rain and he left the house and went into the barn. He made a small fire in the iron stove and placed a pan of water on top to boil. He needed to relax, to think. He sat in a chair beside the stove and lit his pipe and watched the film of steam build over the water. He told himself he had not expected to find Eli’s money so easily, that only a fool would hide a great sum in a likely place. And Eli could not have been a fool. Lester Caufield had said as much and he knew it from the behavior of Rachel and Sarah and Dora. Eli would have been shrewd; hiding the money would have been a game with him and it would be found only when the riddle of his plotting was solved. Game against game, thought Michael. Game against game. And Eli was a worthy foe.

  He made a strong tea of sassafras root and stirred in a spoon of honey. The tea was rich and sweet. He lay across his bed and listened as the rain pelted the oak-shingled roof above him. The inside of the barn was dark in the storm and though the room built for Eli’s worker had been partitioned and the iron stove installed and a window cut in the side of the barn, a remote chill still swirled in the corners and over the rough wall planking. Michael placed the cup on the floor beside him and pulled a blanket over his legs. He closed his eyes and listened and his thoughts began to swim with the sounds of the storm. He saw Mama Ada, felt her fingers on his arm and smelled the damp warning of death. Sarah’s laughter. Dora watching him—knowing. Yes, he thought with amusement, Dora knows. Or thinks she knows. Far away, thunder rumbled like a growl and Rachel’s face rose in Michael’s mind, smiled at him, then faded. The fence sang a falsetto whine in the wind. The well bucket blew over and clattered against the rock siding of the wellbox. He was above the house of Lester and Mary Caufield and the stream glittered like a sunflash. The rain fell hard, beating dully against the wood frame of the barn. Mary was under him, screaming. Sick, frightened Mary. So tight she bled and he had bruised himself in the shoving. A brilliant blink of lightning snapped its whiplash in the field below the house and Michael sat up abruptly in bed. He could feel himself growing full against his trousers and the cramped binding made him ache.

  He twisted on the bed and unbuttoned his trousers and freed himself. He lay back, touching himself lightly, and began a slow milking of the flared head. A pleasant, floating sensation grew in his chest. Suddenly, his body froze. A sound that was not a sound, but a prelude, whistled through the room. He buttoned his pants and rolled from the bed and caught the handle of his knife. He could hear the faint straining of chains and the scraping of wagon wheels. He slipped the knife back into its sheath and moved quietly across his room, into the barn and to the barn door.

  The wagon was driven by Floyd Crider. Rachel was with him, huddled under the makeshift tent of a heavy tarpaulin. The rain lashed at them in sheets and Floyd wrestled to control the frightened mules. He pulled the wagon close to the steps of the front porch and Rachel shook free of the tarpaulin and ran into the house. Floyd tapped the reins over the mules and the wagon bolted forward, in a circle, then back to the road.

  From a splintered opening in the barn door Michael could see Rachel through the side window of the house. She closed the front door and stood looking out the window at the barn. Then she pulled something over her head and opened the door and ran into the rain toward the barn.

  Michael stepped away from the door, into the shadows of an empty feed stall. He could hear Rachel’s running steps splattering in the water. The door opened quickly, then closed against the wind. She stepped cautiously toward the room and stopped.

  “Michael?” she called.

  He waited for the echo of his name to die. Then he said, “I’m here.”

  The sound of his voice—not from his room, but from the shadows—startled her. She whirled and cried out and stumbled backward.

  Michael jumped from the stall, catching her. He held her close, gently.

  “Hush, hush,” he whispered. “I’ve put the fright in you, bein’ hid away like that. It’s only me. That’s all. Nothin’ more.”

  Her body shuddered like deep sobbing and then it relaxed.

  “That’s better,” he said quietly. “Fact is, you scared me almost as much, not expectin’ you back in such a storm. That’s why I was hid out in the stall, to see who it might be. Then when I knew it was you and you called out my name, I was in a quandary about lettin’ you know where I was without puttin’ the fear in you.”

  He laughed easily and rubbed her back with his hand.

  “It can’t be done, you know,” he added. “I’ve had many ghosts tell me that. There’s times when you’d be believin’ the very angel of Hell has you in his sight and it could be nothin’ more than a bug lookin’ you over.”

  She pulled away from him.

  “I know,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scream. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what? Well that you did. But you look more like you’ve been drowned. Come along now. I’ve some strong tea and honey and a fire in the stove. You need to warm yourself, unless I’m wrong.”

  She hesitated and looked at the barn door, then back to Michael.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I do. The rain’s cold for summer.”

  He turned and led her into his room.

  “Sit by the stove,” he said. “I’ll put more wood in and get you some tea and you’ll be feelin’ dry inside out in a few minutes.”

  She dropped the shawl from her shoulders and sat close to the stove and watched as he pushed two pieces of wood into the hot coals.

  “Mama Ada’s near to death,” she said at last. “Floyd’s gone back to town to see if the doctor’s come back. He was out this mornin’.”

  Michael shook his head sadly as he poured the tea into a cup.

  “It’s a pity,” he said. “Grand old lady such as she is. Helpin’ out the world and then not havin’ the same kind of help when she most needs it.”

  “Floyd brought me by to find some of Dora’s herbs that Mama Ada’s been askin’ for. He said he’d have the doctor stop by in his car and pick me up.”

  “Bad as it’s stormed, I’d be doubtin’ if a car’d make it over the roads,” replied Michael. He stirred the honey in the tea and handed it to Rachel.

  “Floyd said he’d come back if the doctor couldn’t be found,” she explained. She held the cup in her hands and stared thoughtfully at the deep amber liquid. The rain echoed in the room like a hum.

  Michael could feel the awkwardness of her silence. He knelt before her and gently pushed the cup to her lips. She swallowed without looking at him.

  “What you’re sayin’ is that it won’t matter,” he whispered. “Is that it?”

 
; She nodded.

  “I thought as much,” he said. “The time is on her. I knew it was near when she drove the poison from me. Somehow in that strange other world of bein’ half-alive, I knew it.”

  She began to cry, though without sound or expression.

  “It’s the way of things,” Michael said softly. “She’s lived long and good. Let her go with those memories cheerin’ you.”

  Her hands began to tremble and he took the cup and placed it on the floor. He touched her face and her hair.

  “Did you know?” he whispered. “Your hair’s shinin’ with rain. Clear as a mirror, it is. You can see yourself in hair that’s shinin’ with rain. It’s true. You look hard enough and you can see yourself.”

  She shook her head against his hand.

  “Please,” she mumbled. “Don’t—”

  “Hush, now,” he replied gently. “Cry it out. That’s what you’ve been needin’, Rachel. You’ve been needin’ it for too many years. It’s all dammed up inside, like some terrible river.”

  “No—no, I can’t.”

  “Can’t what? Can’t feel? Is that what you’ve managed to teach yourself, Rachel? Not to feel?” He caught her face and forced it to him. “No matter what you say, I won’t be believin’ that,” he said. “You tell me that and it’s like damnin’ yourself, it is. You ask all the questions you want, make up all the reasons in the world, and you won’t be findin’ anything to hide behind that’s big enough or wide enough to deny feelin’. Ah, Rachel, Rachel, I know. I’ve spent too much of a worthless life learnin’ it the hard way. Maybe that’s why bein’ here, on this place, means so much to me. Knowin’ the feelin’ that’s in you, beggin’ to come out.”

  Rachel dropped her eyes from him and rolled her face in his hand and began to weep openly. He pulled her to him from the chair and held her and took the surrender of her crying until it became an even breathing.

  “It’s a blessin’, it is,” he murmured. “It’s like drinkin’ you in, havin’ you let out the hurt like that. Do you understand, Rachel?”