One Foot in Eden (16 page)

Amy’s blue eyes looked tired, the way they’d been a lot the last couple of months, but she looked pretty, prettier than she’d ever looked, her bosoms and hips fuller, her skin bright and glowing like she’d bathed in a tub of sunshine.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You swear you’ll never be with him again,’ I said.

‘I’ve done told you that,’ Amy said.

‘Swear it then,’ I said.

‘I swear it,’ Amy said.

In bed that night I listened to the cicadas calling for rain. The window was open but the air laid on the night still and stale as stump water. I couldn’t hear the river the way I could any other time of the year. It was easy to believe the dog days had sucked it dry as a snakeskin.

I laid with my chest pressed against Amy’s back, my hand on her stomach. I could feel the baby stir under my palm. As I dozed on and off it seemed I was touching my own belly, the young one inside me, not Amy. I was thinking, the way I often had since seeing Doctor Wilkins, about what my life might could have been without the polio.

Doing that was like mashing your tongue on a sore tooth, something that only gave more pain but you couldn’t keep from doing it.

My thoughts went back twenty years, to the morning I’d stirred awake with my head hot and hurting and my legs not listening when I told them to stand me up. Momma had her fearings what it was and sent Daddy on horseback to Seneca for Doctor Griffen. Momma stayed on her knees while me and her waited through a hard couple of hours.

‘Please, God, don’t take my onliest boy from me,’ Momma said over and over.

She was less than certain to do anything else, even give me a sip of water though my throat was parched as roasted chestnuts.

Doctor Griffen had finally bumped up through our pasture in his big Dodge car. He stepped in the house toting a black doctor’s bag big enough to be a grip. He was old, his hands liver-spotted and shaky, but Momma confidenced him.

‘Can you move your legs?’ he asked.

‘No sir,’ I said.

Doctor Griffen just nodded to that.

‘I’m needful of some water,’ I said.

Doctor Griffen took the stethoscope from his bag.

‘We’ll get you something to drink in a minute, son.’

He poked the stethoscope around my chest, his eyes closed shut and listening. Then he asked had my neck stiffed up. I had to nod because by then I had a thermometer sprouting in my lips. He put his hands on my legs, the softest hands I’d ever known for a man. He took out the thermometer and studied it. Then him and Momma went out on the porch a few minutes. I finally got my glass of water and was asleep quick as it took me to close my eyes.

When I woke Doctor Griffen was gone. Daddy was back, sitting in a dinner chair he’d drawed up to my bed. Him and Momma stayed in that chair every night and day minute for the next week, watching my breath the way Doctor Griffen had warned them to. Every morning Momma sat at the foot of the bed and rubbed my legs and feet.

I’d got healed slow but by Christmas I was back tending my chores.

But my right leg lagged behind and never caught up.

‘You make more notice of that leg than anybody else does, Billy,’ Momma said.

But I was still skittish about it, especially around girls.

Then the time came when the shorter leg, the polio too, no longer seemed worth fretting over. Part of it was Amy. She never made notice of my leg, maybe because she had a brother that limped. But it was more than that. By the time I’d met Amy I’d paid enough of the bank loan to finally call the twenty acres I’d bought from Joshua Winchester my own. That had been a big doing for me. The only land Daddy and my Uncle Joel could claim was what dirt they carried under their fingernails.

‘I’m looking for to sell, not sharecrop,’ Joshua Winchester had said when I came to see him about that land.

‘I ain’t come about no sharecropping,’ I’d said and handed him the check the bank had made out for me.

He’d studied it close, as like he didn’t quite believe it was all on the up and up.

‘All right,’ he had finally said and stuffed the check in his overall pocket. ‘A Holcombe owning land,’ he’d said, then smiled. ‘You’re getting above your raising, boy.’

I’d cleared that twenty acres by myself but for Sam, me and that horse yanking up stumps stubborn to come out as back teeth. It had been a man’s work. You couldn’t call no one a cripple who’d done it and it was like it hadn’t been till then I’d truly got out of that bed I’d laid in so many years ago with my neck stiff as a hoe handle, my legs useless to walk on as two sticks of kindling.

I remembered that first Sunday after Amy had made it known all over the valley that it was me with the problem, not her. The women of the church all made a fuss over her but they had not a word for me. Their eyes was on me though, and those cold stares reminded me of some of the folks who’d showed up at the farm when the worst of the polio was upon me. They came into the room where I laid and counterfeited they was mournful but their eyes made notice. They’d looked at me like I was something in a county fair sideshow, something queer and hardly human.

Now as I laid in bed with Amy, I reckoned there was ways I’d never got up from that sick bed after all. Doctor Wilkins hadn’t said it but he hadn’t had to. That polio had gelded me.

At first light I eased my hand off Amy’s belly and got out of bed quiet as I could. I got me a chunk of cornbread and stepped out on the porch. My eyes lit on the dogwood Amy had planted in the spring, its leaves brown like cured tobacco and no more alive than a iron stab.

A sign of certain bad luck, my Daddy would have claimed, and I recollected how as a chap I’d been schooled by older kin to step lively if you wanted to stay out of bad luck’s way, because it was coming at you from all directions day and night, coming even in your dreams.

If you saw a new moon through the trees or a black cat crossed your path, it was always a sign of coming trouble, the same if you heard a screech owl or rooster at night or you killed a toad-frog or dreamed about near anything from crows to muddy water. And though there was things of good luck such as horseshoes and redbirds and planting your crops on Good Friday, they was reckoned pretty flimsy up against all the bad luck in the world.

‘No good will come from such a sight as that,’ Grandma said when she saw a letter in a writing spider’s web.

‘There’s a death coming soon,’ Uncle Joel said when he heard a whippoorwill before dark set in.

It had vexed me how the older folks always seemed to look for the worst. I’d sworn myself not to do such the same when I grew up but it was coming clear to me now that it all hadn’t been just silly notions. My kinfolks had crosshaired in on the truth of the world.

I thought of the luck I’d had the last few months, how in the first week of June my truck ran hot and when I checked my oil it came out white as milk. I knew right then my engine block had cracked and I’d not be able to fix it without I’d sold my crop. I recollected how the Dog Star showed early this year, just weeks after I put the truck in the barn. That had been more certain trouble.

And now Holland. If I’d had the want, I could have found plenty of signs telling me trouble was coming. Those signs would of proved real as a rock or tree or anything else in the world.

I looked above Amy’s dogwood and saw the Dog Star raising up with the sun. I knew Amy was wrong to ever figure some words would keep Holland from doing as he pleased. I recollected how in eighth grade we all had been cutting up in class and our teacher Mr. Pipkin picked out Holland to punish though he’d been at it no worse than the rest of us. Maybe it was because Holland was the biggest. Mr. Pipkin held up a roll of black electrician’s tape and told Holland he was going to tape Holland’s mouth shut. Holland was stout, six feet tall by then and a sure two hundred pounds but Mr. Pipkin was as tall and outweighted Holland to boot. Holland had stood beside his desk, his hands by his side, fisted and ready.

‘You’ve no cause to punish me and not the others,’ Holland said.

‘You come up here now, boy,’ Mr. Pipkin said to Holland.

‘I’ll not,’ Holland said. ‘You come on and put that tape on me if you reckon you can.’

Mr. Pipkin had muttered some things but all he did in the end was put the tape back in his desk.

If Holland had lived in another county or even another valley, maybe we’d have been shut of him, but not with just some of barbed wire to keep us apart. Him and me and Amy was linked like the Dog Star and the morning sun.

I hitched up Sam and led him down to the cabbage patch. I fetched the .12 gauge to take with me, keeping close to the woods. The groundhog must have spotted me anyway. The only notice of him was two more chewed-up cabbage.

I did find a blacksnake though, quiled like a whip in the middle of a row. The old folks claimed you could kill a blacksnake and lay it on a fence and it would bring rain. I flattened the blacksnake’s head with the gun butt and did that very thing, letting its slick white belly catch the sun. But I felt bad soon as I did it. I knew I wasn’t trying to bring rain. I did it for no more than I was feeling mean. It was something I could hurt that couldn’t hurt me back.

I checked the tobacco and then me and Sam plowed the cabbage. I kept glancing up toward the house and come midmorning I saw what I’d been hoping not to see. Holland Winchester straddled the barbed wire fence beside the white oak and walked into the front yard, the same way he came in April when I’d sighted him from this very field. Even when Holland was having his way with another man’s wife he was too proud to skulk around back like a hound stealing eggs from a hen-house. No, that wasn’t ever his way of doing things.

Amy saw him coming too and stepped out on the porch. She tried to wave him back but he came up the steps anyway. He opened his arms to her but Amy stepped back, slapping at his hands.

Sam stamped his hoof and snorted, ready to work. I stood with the reins around my neck and hoped that Holland would go back over to his side of the fence and leave us alone, because unlike Holland I didn’t know if I was a brave man. I’d gone down to Greenville and they’d turned me down, 4-F. I hadn’t had my grit tested the way Holland had in Korea. I didn’t know what I’d do if Koreans came screaming and running toward me, certain to kill me if I missed or my gun jammed. I didn’t know if I could kill a man. What I did know was if Holland didn’t leave something would have to be settled, one way or another.

Every time Holland moved toward Amy she stepped back but she was almost to the railing. I didn’t reckon at all for Holland to hurt her. I was scared of something else. I walked over to the field’s edge and picked up the .12 gauge. I aimed at the sky and mashed the trigger.

Holland turned and looked down over the shriveled corn and beans to where I stood with the gun still aimed at the sky while I fumbled in my overalls for another shell. I reloaded and grabbed Sam by the reins, not bothering to unhitch the collar and trace chains.

I led Sam straight toward the house, straight toward Holland Winchester. We stumbled across rows of cabbage and then through the beans and corn, the corn stalks rasping and snapping when me and Sam cleared a trail right through them, the plow twisting and grabbing behind like a anchor. My legs felt heavy, like I’d been walking miles. That was the fear weighting down on me.

Holland stepped off the porch and met me in the shade of the white oak, the boundary between what was his and what was mine. My hands was trembly as I raised the .12 gauge, the barrel wavering in the direction of his heart like a compass trying to find true north.

‘I wronged you when I laid down with her but we’re way up the path from right and wrong now,’ Holland said. ‘What’s swelling her belly is mine, not yours.’

I met his eyes, eyes dark as molasses. I didn’t know the exact of what I hoped to find in those eyes, maybe a speckle of fear for the shotgun in my hand, maybe a speckle of pity. But whatever it was I looked for I didn’t find in those dark eyes.

‘Just leave us alone, Holland,’ I said, letting my finger find the trigger.

‘I can’t do that,’ Holland said, his eyes not even blinking when I clicked the safety off.