Laird Hunt - Kind One

“I have come back in hopes of a parlay with your husband,” he said.

“My husband is away again.”

“Ah,” he said.

“And taken Ulysses and Horace away again with him.”

“Ah,” he said again. He looked around. “And that Alcofibras and his onion?”

“Deceased. Last autumn after your leaving.”

“I lost one of mine too. Pox took him during the snows. Did it come here and importune you?”

“Yes it did.”

Bennett Marsden sent his man to the barn and came into the kitchen, and we fetched up food and drink and placed the start of it down before him.

“You have been poorly, Mrs. Lancaster,” he said, looking me up and down.

“I have been unwell, yes,” I said.

“Was it the fever? The fever is a harsh master. It will smite you down.”

“It was an inconvenience, yes. But I’m mending now.”

I had taken my seat at the table and had twice reached for its surface to steady me and twice missed it. What color is the world when you can’t see it any longer? I had thought the second time. What is the smell of lobelia when they have removed your nose? How does a horse flank feel to your fingers when they have chopped off your hand? There was an awkwardness to all three of us. Cleome huffed in a corner and worked at the meat. Zinnia stirred away like she had before, only I knew, because they had told me how it would be, that she had the pig sticker from Linus Lancaster’s neck in her apron pocket. Bennett Marsden had taken his hat off upon entering the kitchen. His hair was greased up from his hat and his dirty fingers so it looked like three quarters of a crow’s wing had fallen out of the blue sky and smacked him on his head.

“Will you favor us with one of your tricks, Mr. Marsden?” I said.

Bennett Marsden smiled and told us he would entertain us presently. He had a tooth or two fewer in his mouth than he’d had before.

“Did you know your husband, Mr. Lancaster, and I were on the stage together in Louisville?” he said.

“I did not know that.”

“He was the center of it. He’d sing out his lines and they’d all sit tight. I got up there afterward and kind of clowned around. Not much talent to it. I’d clown and recite. This was recreational. Not neither one of our central remunerative lines.”

“Is that a fact?” I said.

“We had thoughts about making it otherwise, but they didn’t come to pass.”

“Didn’t they?”

“That one’s expecting,” Bennett Marsden said, holding out his cup to Cleome, who had ceased belaboring the meat and passed it over to Zinnia, who was leaning against the counter looking over at us. She pushed herself off the counter, carried the bottle to Bennett Marsden, and filled his cup.

“She is encumbered, yes,” I said.

“Encumbered,” Bennett Marsden said.

This was the way my father had liked to say it. I had never become encumbered, and Linus Lancaster had put his boot in my back and never had me back into his bed. I could see, from where I sat at the kitchen table, the door to the room where Cleome and Zinnia had received their visits. My own door was somewhere farther off down in the dark.

“Well, nature will find its ways to multiply,” Bennett Marsden said with a fat, wet smack of his lips. Then he finished his cup, called Zinnia over for another, then said we could now have our trick and should prepare ourselves for something with more spectacle to it than the previous time, something that would hold the mind as well as Alcofibras’s story had. He pushed up from the table, smoothed down his crow’s wing, hunched his shoulders over, and turned a handstand right there at my dead husband’s kitchen table. Then he walked around the kitchen, past me, past Cleome, past Zinnia, and then around again and twice more. As he did this, I reflected on Zinnia’s pig sticker and the shallow hole that was waiting for me in my shed. They seemed like one thing in my mind. More and more as the trick went on. While our guest ran upside down around that kitchen he recited.

All the infections that the sun sucks up

From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him

By inch-meal a disease! His spirits hear me,

And yet I needs must curse.

Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me

And after bite me, then like hedgehogs which

Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount

Their pricks at my footfall

After his performance, which I clapped for, Bennett Marsden drank and told me that my husband, Linus Lancaster, owed him enough money to sink a Spanish ship out of the old stories, and that he aimed to have it from him.

“Does that seem inopportune or incourteous to you, madam?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “It seems fair.”

“Fair indeed,” he said. “When do you expect him?”

I watched Zinnia’s back stiffen and Cleome’s swollen midsection rise up and flop when Bennett Marsden asked this.

“My husband, Linus Lancaster, does not tell me such things,” I said.

“Well enough and true enough, I expect,” said Bennett Marsden.

“Yes, it is true,” I said.

After I had said this Zinnia came over to the table with a plate of fried pork swimming in molasses and put it down in front of our guest.

“It’s minutes like these I thank the dear Lord he’s left me teeth enough to chew,” Bennett Marsden said.

“Zinnia’s cooking is truly a blessing,” I said. I said this without any playacting. I’d forgotten for that five seconds who or what I was. I had always commented on Zinnia’s cooking. Even in those days when I was taking the strop to her for no crime but being candy with her sister to that dead husband of mine.

That night I slept in my old room and Cleome and Zinnia in theirs. There were all my things. My chest of notions. My little vase with dead stalks in it. My frocks and dresses hanging like leftover slab meat from pegs on the wall. Bennett Marsden, lying in Linus Lancaster’s old bed, had a snore could crack a coffin lid. A body could offer evil to a man who snored that loud. Whether or not he could turn on his hands and sing out pretty about monkeys and hedgehogs.

But at that moment there wasn’t any evil or much else in my body to offer. So there I lay breathing my breaths. Linus Lancaster came to visit me that night. He stood at the end of my bed with the pig sticker borrowed out of Zinnia’s apron pocket and put back in his neck.

“Have you come to dance for me, Husband?” I said.

He shook his head. His eyes had a glow to them. He looked smaller than he had in life. There were no ears or eyes on his arms. He wore no crimson cape. After a time he cleared his dead throat and said he would tell his side of the tale of the dealings between him and Bennett Marsden and made the following speech:

“We went in halves to build a grand theater, Bennett Marsden and I, but I borrowed my half from him and he borrowed his half from me. We thought there was considerable good jest in this and sat down to our fresh partnership with the laugh of it still on our lips. We had our drink in the good old Louisville Belle, then walked down the street to what he thought we ought to call the Flourish and what I thought we ought to call the World. We stood outside it when it was close to finished, him calling it his name and I calling it mine. There was work aplenty to do before we had to put a name up over the doors, time and more for me to make sure the name to it was mine.

“Well, Wife, we did that work with each of us in his shirtsleeves and sweating the same sweat. We’d each put in two of our creatures to the job, and even though mine were bigger and better in all ways, I couldn’t fault his that they took after him, nor credit mine for taking after me. At the end of the sweeping and the dusting and the breaking down and the building up each day we would drink at the Belle or send out for a bottle. Then, with drink in our bellies, we would throw lines into the evening airs: ‘Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.’ Or: ‘Sure, her offence must be of such unnatural degree that monsters it.’ Or: ‘You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames!’ Or: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes.’ After which, I would to my house and he to his to sup our own suppers and dream the separate parts of our dream.