Laird Hunt - Kind One

“What place?” I said.

“Any place ain’t that place,” Zinnia said.

“Pretty place,” Cleome said.

“Place maybe you been dancing.”

“Place like this.”

So as I lay there twisting old dead daisies and not moving and not lifting a finger and not doing a thing while Linus Lancaster was in there at them, I knew they weren’t in there with him beyond the flesh God had seen fit to drape them in, and that instead they were out twisting their own daisies and turning circles in the fields with me.

Yes, that first night I thought that.

It wasn’t long after those visits started that Linus Lancaster turned his pigs free. He’d had them in their pens and had Horace and Ulysses build them more pens and the herd had flourished, and we had eaten of it until there was pig dripping out of our pores, and there had been the good Lord’s years of that. Then one afternoon he walked out and opened the gates and forbade anyone from closing them up again or slopping the pigs to tempt them to stay, and from that day on we had pigs everywhere.

“I had to be square with my dream,” Linus Lancaster told me after he had done it. “Having the pigs was the smaller portion of it. I needed to see them let loose and people the earth.”

“They are your pigs and this is your land and everything in it is yours, Husband,” I said.

Linus Lancaster turned to me and smiled when I had made this remark. This was at a supper. There was stuck pig spread before us. Pig milk and molasses in our cups. There wasn’t a bit that was lacking. Since he’d been in at them he’d had Cleome and Zinnia sit down to table with us.

“What you say is true, Wife,” he said. He had his bottle beside him. The bottle was filled with what Ulysses made out of a still he kept behind the barn. You could smell the concoction through the bottle glass, and once I saw a sparrow take two wet pecks of it and fall over dead.

“We are a family,” Linus Lancaster said. “We four of us right here and the boys. I am the head of the family, and that is right and proper, but you, Wife, are its mother. The Lord in his mansion above has decreed it that you will not carry for him, not for him nor for me. He has said it that your duty is otherwise. You, Wife, the Lord has written in his tablet, are mother to these girls. You are mother to us all.”

Linus Lancaster took a drink out of his bottle and belched his benediction out at us. Not a one of us said a word. Linus Lancaster had almost put me through the door I was leaning against the day before when I had not greeted him with what he had called the due respect. Cleome and Zinnia had to my knowledge not spoken above a whisper since Linus Lancaster’s visits had commenced, and if they said anything at that moment it was thrown out on their breath to the untouched plates of pork and black-eyed peas that lay fly-worried before them.

Not ten minutes before Linus Lancaster had corrected me about my respect, I had stood by those girls at their bath. Linus Lancaster said that anyone lived in his house would have a regular bath, and here they were at theirs. Zinnia had been pouring the water onto Cleome and the water had streamed off the bubbles Cleome had wiped onto herself. The bubbles had followed the water down Cleome’s back and run white and ropey over her thighs and calves. She was bent and reaching for her towel when I slapped her. Then I slapped Zinnia. They both of them just looked at me. There wasn’t anything beyond the bucket Zinnia was holding or I would have taken it to them. When I slapped Cleome I could feel that the water Zinnia had poured on her was cold. That they had pulled it up from the well. From that dark hole in the earth. When I had my bath the water had been healed of its chill. One of the two of them heated it for me at the stove. One of them poured and the other took a cloth to me. There were bubbles on Cleome’s ankles. She wasn’t shivering. I found myself wanting to slap them again, so I did. I slapped until my hand hurt, and then I ran into the house and Linus Lancaster came down the corridor.

“Wife,” he said.

I didn’t answer. After he had pushed me hard enough that one of the boards in the door cracked he went and stood in the yard and watched Cleome and watched Zinnia who had gone back to their bath. My hand was still wet and soapy from where I had slapped Cleome. Linus Lancaster lit a pipe, looked at the girls, and I looked at my hand glistening and felt it burning in the hall.

None of us looked at Linus Lancaster when he put his spoon into his black-eyed peas and brought it up to his mouth then took a pull out of his bottle and turned and patted my hand and said it to me again. That I was the mother to them. Who would do worse than slap in the coming days. God help us all.

WHEN WE WERE ALL STILL YOUNGin that place in Kentucky, and before the pigs had been set loose and the visits down the hall had commenced and I had become the mother to everyone there, we used to go out to where Alcofibras had his corner in the barn. We would go giggling out into the evening when Linus Lancaster was still at his work, whatever that was, far from the house and not expected back for supper, and we would find Alcofibras, and he would tell us stories that weren’t out of that good book I never had found or out of any book I’ve ever known, and we would listen and sit together and shiver as he told them to us on the straw. Alcofibras had a voice that could churn as deep as a rock hole or high and twisty as a sick redbird, and he had had his stories from a grandmother who had come over in a boat. When he told his stories he never blinked. His eyes just flicked from one of us to the other. When he was finished we went back to whatever it was we had been doing or were supposed to be doing and needed to get done. We didn’t giggle when he had completed his story. We walked quietly. Sometimes Horace or Ulysses had come in with us for the telling. They were each one of them near as big as Linus Lancaster, but there wasn’t any sound to them when they left either.

When they were young, I used to scrawl out stories to the children of my employer, Mr. Lucious Wilson, who had lost his wife when the second of them came into this world and looked to the ladies in his employ to ease the burden on him and his children’s nurse. When it was my turn I would scrawl out stories I remembered from my burnt books about Rumpelstiltskin, that little man who spun gold and tore himself in half, and about Hansel and Gretel, who got themselves in a fix in that wood. I told them those stories and I told them others, but even though they came to call me Scary I never told them any of what we heard out in that barn from Alcofibras.

There was one about black bark and one about wet dough. In the one about black bark a man found a piece of black bark in his coat pocket and threw it away, but the next time he put on his coat it was there again. He threw that bark down a well and it was there again. He threw it into the fire and there it was. When he went to hit it with his hammer the piece of black bark opened its eye and looked at the man. Then it closed its eye, and the man lifted it up careful and put it in his pocket and never went anywhere without it again. In the one about wet dough, a woman was fixing to bake a pie. She got out her necessaries and rolled out her dough and put it into her dish. When she had it into her dish she looked at it and commenced to cry. The tears fell on the dough and the dough drank the tears until it could drink no more, and before long the tears had filled the dish. When they had filled the dish, the woman dried her eyes and took off her apron and walked out of the house and left that place forever. When the people who lived in the house with the woman came home, they found the pie dish and a piece of wet dough all curled up inside it like something drowned.