After the Frost (34 page)

Those years before Lillian married Henry Sault seemed like someone else's life now, and though Belle didn't doubt her mother's story, she also didn't remember it. In some strange way she regretted that. Regretted not remembering the touch of her mother's hands, the roughness of a huckaback towel against her skin. She wondered if Lillian had ever told her stories while she sat in the bath, or if that Saturday-night ritual had held as much cold withdrawal as all the others.

She wished she remembered. Belle thought of it as she lugged in buckets of rainwater from the cistern to heat on the stove and dragged the tub across the floor to sit on a square of oilcloth. She thought of it the way she wanted it to be, with a gentle fire roaring in the background and the touch of scented water on her skin. Thought of her mother's hands, soapy and soft, moving in her hair. The images filled her mind, making Belle feel warm and safe and—oddly—sad when Lillian murmured a good night and disappeared, and Belle heard her mother's footsteps creaking quietly on the stairs.

The hushed evening felt suddenly as if it had a hole in it, as if it weren't quite complete, and Belle knew it wasn't just because of Lillian. She tried to ignore the feeling as she grabbed an apron from the peg on the wall and tied it around her neck and waist.

"Come on, now, Sarah," she said, smiling. "It's time for your bath."

Sarah looked up from the table. "Already?"

"It'll be over before you know it." Belle patted the side of the tub. "Hurry, now, before the water gets cold."

Reluctantly Sarah came over to her. She eyed the tub warily. "Grandma gets soap in my eyes sometimes."

"Well, I'll try not to," Belle said as she unfastened Sarah's many buttons. She lifted the striped calico over Sarah's head, and then she unfastened shoes and pantalettes and stockings until Sarah stood chubby and naked before her. "All right, now, into the water."

Belle lifted Sarah into the tub, waiting until the little girl settled in. "Is it too hot?" she asked, watching Sarah sit gingerly, almost as if she were afraid the water would touch her.

Sarah shook her head. "Huh-uh. Can we play the game now?"

Belle laughed. She grabbed the bar of soft yellow soap and a cotton washrag. "All right." She held up the soap. "Now, don't get scared, but Grandma told me there's a troll in this soap, and his favorite thing to do is tickle little girls."

Sarah's eyes grew round. "It is?"

"Uh-huh." Belle nodded. "I'll try to keep hold of him, but he's real slippery, and if he escapes ..." She shrugged. "Well, you know what'll happen."

"I'll hafta get away."

"You try your best." Belle nodded somberly. She dipped her hand in the water. "Now, give me your foot fir—oh, no! He's escaped! He's comin' after you. . . ." Her hand surged through the water, toward Sarah, who squealed in delight and scrambled back. Water went sloshing all over, splashing onto the oilcloth-covered floor, over Belle's arms, soaking her dress. Belle didn't care. She was too wrapped up in trying to catch Sarah.

And in the laughter on her daughter's face.

H
e stayed in the barn as long as he could, waiting there until long after he had anything left to do, fiddling with a harness he'd fixed yesterday. He twisted it over and over again in his hands, testing its strength, wondering if it needed another stitch here or maybe one there, and knowing it didn't need anything at all.

Still he worked it, because the barn was quiet and safe, the dimness heavy with the rustling of animals and the soft swishing of his own movements. The sounds, the smells—hay and manure, musk and leather—were comforting, a balm to his spirit, and he wished he could stay out here forever, where there was nothing to tempt him, nothing to fill him with a wanting that seared his soul and made him weak with dread.

You should never have danced with her.
No, he should not have. He'd known it even as Sarah asked him, known it when he looked at Belle and saw her wordless protest. But still he'd felt himself reach out for her, heard himself say,
"We need some music,"
before he was even aware of wanting to speak. He'd told himself not to touch her, but he couldn't help touching her. The way her lips felt, the smell of her hair, the feel of her. . . . Those things had tormented him since last night, when he'd kissed her. She had tasted the same— yet not the same. There was a different scent to her hair than he remembered. And the feel of her—
Sweet Christ, the feel . . .

The temptation of her was more than he could bear— or maybe it was just the wary way she looked at him that did it. Maybe it was just the vulnerability he saw in her eyes that made him ache to touch her. To erase it, or ease it, or even just because he hated that look, hated the way it made his heart lonely.

It frightened him, how much that look affected him. How needy it made him. It dissolved all the promises he'd made to himself over the years, scattered them like dust at his feet and left him with nothing but memories of soft, throaty laughter and eyes that lit up when he walked into the room. Nothing but images that shifted before his eyes, just out of reach, too vague and shapeless to grab. Memories, that was all. Memories he'd tried hard to forget.

He felt as if he were on the edge of a bottomless pit, looking down into vast, hollow darkness, and there was nothing there to save him this time if he fell, and he wondered if it was the same kind of darkness his mother had seen before she drove that wagon off the bridge at Rock Mill all those years ago, the same kind of desperate obsession she'd felt for his father, that had sent her into insanity.

He'd always thought it was the same. When he was twenty-two, and possessed by Belle, he'd believed he was looking into the same darkness his mother had. Believed his obsession with Belle was as destructive, as dangerous. He remembered the way his mother had been before she killed herself. The love between her and his father had been a great, enduring one, but in those last years that love had corrupted itself, had become predatory and cruel, had etched itself in her sharp features. Rand had seen the way it suffocated and exhausted his father. Her constant, obsessive watching pushed Henry away; her jealous rages and bitter accusations destroyed them.

Finally it had become uncontrollable. Rand remembered the days he and Cort stayed out in the fields until dark, hoping she would be asleep when they came home so that they wouldn't have to watch the way she tortured their father with her endless questions, her cloying tears. But those days came more and more often until they were all like that, until even the nights screamed with the sound of her angry suspicions and the gloom of her depressions filled the air clear into town, scented the kitchen with the sour odor of sauerkraut.

Rand was ten years old the day she drove away for the last time, and the sky was so gray, it was as if it mirrored her sadness. She left the wash boiling in a kettle in the yard and harnessed the team and left without a backward glance, and the miller said she didn't hesitate when she drove off Rock Mill Road into the millpond below. He said she slapped the reins and forced the horses to go so fast, they couldn't stop. And it was only because there were witnesses that anyone knew what happened to her at all, because they'd never found her body. They'd never found a single thing that told them there was anything but water in that millpond.

She'd been gone eighteen years, but she haunted Rand. She haunted him because her darkness was inside him, because he understood the kind of obsessive emotion that held on so hard, it was impossible to fight or resist. Because there was a time when he felt he would die if he didn't have Belle beside him every moment of every hour, and he knew that was how his mother had felt about his father, knew he was just like her.

He thought he'd destroyed it. During the last six years it had disappeared—or if not that, had at least burrowed deep inside him. But now he was on that precipice again, and it was more dangerous than before. More dangerous because Belle was not the girl he remembered, and he could not get the woman she was out of his mind. More dangerous because it felt as if there had always been an emptiness inside him, and she had filled it just by walking into his arms. Just by being in the room.

Ah, Christ . . .

Rand glanced down at the harness in his hands. His fingers were trembling; his fear was a throbbing, palpable shadow in the pale lamplight. He forced himself to think of tomorrow, of going to church and listening to Reverend Snopes's rhythmic, lulling sermon. He thought of meeting Marie in the churchyard afterward, of her warm smile and pretty face. She could make his fear go away, he told himself, though he knew she couldn't. Last night, driving her home after the singing party, had taught him that. Even now, less than a day later, he couldn't remember what she'd said, couldn't say if he kissed her good night or not.

No, he didn't remember Marie. But he remembered the long, cold drive home alone, climbing the stairs to his room, pulling back the heavy quilt on his bed and sliding naked between the sheets. He remembered hearing the clattering of Charlie Boston's wagon coming up the drive, Belle's laughing good-bye, and her step on the stairs. He heard the closing of her bedroom door, and he'd laid there, stiff, muscles clenched, with darkness all around him, inside him. In his heart and in his mind. It had taken every ounce of his control not to follow her into her room, and it was only fear that held him back, fear that drenched him in sweat when he imagined her movements—imagined her nimble fingers on the buttons of that yellow gown, imagined her stepping out of it, imagined the way her cornsilk hair would cling to the brush when she combed it out, how it would crackle and fall to her face, her shoulders, her breasts. . . .

He'd wanted to bury himself in her, to touch her in places he'd only dreamed about, to make love to her the way he hadn't six years ago. He wanted her wet and pulsing and hot around him, wanted her covered with his scent, branded by his body. He wanted all of it. As much as he had wanted it six years ago. More than that.

And no thought of Marie could make that go away. He wondered if it ever would.

But he tried again anyway. He put aside the harness and closed his eyes and thought of her. Tried to smell the scent of roses and imagine what Marie would feel like in his arms, wondered if she could dance. Probably she could. Probably she was good at it. Not like Belle, who stumbled over his feet nervously, clumsily, who bit her bottom lip when she concentrated, who trembled against his hands. No, Marie would be easy to dance with, smooth and practiced and warm.

He got to his feet, holding on to the image, and went to the barn door. The night was quiet; the house quieter still. There was one light glowing in the kitchen. Lillian, no doubt, reading as she sometimes did after Sarah had her bath. The thought made him tired, and Rand suddenly longed for bed, for sleep too deep for dreams. Carefully he blew out the lamp, sending the barn into darkness, and stepped out into the night, closing the door behind him.

He walked slowly across the yard, keeping his eye on the kitchen, hoping Lillian wouldn't be offended when he didn't sit down to talk with her. He was so damned tired, it was all he could do to drag himself up the back stairs. Maybe she'd be so engrossed in the "Ladies' Department" of
The Ohio Cultivator
that she wouldn't care if he walked straight through. He pulled open the back door, hoping. Maybe a simple good night would be enough—

He stopped short.

It wasn't Lillian in the kitchen.

It was Belle.

She was on her knees, behind the half bath, mopping up spilled water with a towel. Her sleeves were pushed up over her elbows, her back was to him, and her long braid trailed, loose and straggling, over her shoulder, nearly touching the floor. The room was warm and humid, fragrant with the scent of lavender-softened lye soap and water-soaked oilcloth.

The door clicked shut behind him. She glanced over her shoulder at the sound, and when she saw it was him, she jerked up, cracking her shoulder on the rim of the tub.

"Damn." It was a breathless sound, almost inaudible. She scrambled to her feet and turned to face him. "I—I didn't hear you come in," she said, rubbing her shoulder.

He wanted to say something, knew he should say something, but he couldn't. All he could do was stare. The bodice of her dress was dark with water, a stain that trailed down to her waist, fanned over her skirt. Her collar was open, revealing her throat, a pale triangle of flesh, and the striped wool challis of her dress clung to her everywhere else, forming to the soft swell of her breasts, clinging so closely, he could have sworn he saw the beating of her heart. Her skin was rosy from heat, and tendrils of hair curled over her forehead, against her cheeks, dangled to her shoulders. She looked at him uncertainly, with a startled surprise that brought back his hot, dark dreams, and he thought of the press of bodies and the slick heat of skin, thought of her laughing as she wrapped those slender arms around his neck and pulled him close.

She swallowed, gestured limply to the tub. "I was givin' Sarah a bath," she said. She fumbled with the towel, laid it over the edge of the tub, and then she crossed her arms over her chest. "I just put her to bed."

"I see." It was all he could say. Even that seemed weak and strained.

"I'd move the tub back, but—"

"I'll do it."

She nodded. "Well, then," she said, motioning to the stove. "Mama left some stew warm for you if you're hungry." She moved around the far side of the bath, toward the doorway, and he realized with a start that she was moving away, heading for bed. "I guess I'll see you in the—"

"Don't go." The words fell from his mouth, unexpected, unwanted, but once they were said, he realized he couldn't take them back, that he didn't want her to retreat tonight, to run away to separate bedrooms and darkness. His earlier thoughts came rushing back: She was dangerous; he should run away from her. But suddenly the thought of sitting here with her, eating supper, was more seductive than his warnings, and much too tempting to resist.