Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

MAGGIEand I stomped around the cottage in the morning. We were both tired and cautious, neither of us having found much sleep. After nine years of the same noises and perpetual lights, the same smells and rough sheets and rougher blankets, it was hard to sleep in the quiet of a cottage in a stand of pines, with the rattle of broken glass and the shifting of branches, a down pillow and a thick mattress, old and musk soaked as they were. I’d eventually gotten down on the pallet that the children must have used, and on its thin mattress, just inches from the floor, I was able to sleep a bit.

Maggie and I circled out toward the fields to get our bearings, and we came to the power line. It ran straight from the big house, and it stopped just before the pines.

I figured I’d stay long enough to power the cottage, long enough to decide where to go. I’d never believed I would pass up electrical work were it to come my way. I’m sure my parole board didn’t either.

I heel-toed my way back to the cottage, a little less than fifty yards. We’d raised poles every twenty-five yards or so along the roads when I was with Alabama Power, but this line was lower and would benefit from extra support along the way.

“Three poles,” I said to Maggie. “We’ll cut them from around the back of the cottage to let in a bit more light. All right, girl?”

She sat and whined.

“You’re hungry.”

I had no desire to return to the big house, but I knew I would need Wilson and Moa’s help to live in the cottage, even for a short time.

They were on the front porch, sitting in the rockers, drinking from mugs.

“That dog’s not welcome in the house.”

“Wouldn’t think of it, Moa.”

“How’d you sleep?” Wilson asked.

“I didn’t.”

“Took me a full week before I could sleep in a bed at all.”

“More than that,” Moa said. “I’d find him curled up on the floor of the hall more times than not. Went on nearly two months.”

“I’ll see how the floor suits me tonight.” Before the semblance of comfort was completely gone, I said, “I’m going to need a few things for the cottage. Tools, mostly.”

“There’s work for you to do there, sure enough,” Moa replied. “Some of your things are in the closet off the kitchen. You best have a cup of coffee first. There’s ham and biscuits, too.”

“Wait—” But Moa was gone through the screen door, and Maggie was lying on the walkway as though my word were for her.

“There’s all sorts of confusion,” Wilson was saying. “All you can do is make sense of the pieces in front of you. It was the same when I got back.”

“And when was that?”

“A bit ago.”

“Marie was here?”

“Yes.” He held the screen open for me. “Come on in and have some breakfast.”

“Wait,” I said, even though Maggie was already waiting.

The dining room was swept clear of any memory of our dinner, and the door to the kitchen stood open. The worktable was the only thing I recognized, though it was as shiny and polished as the rest of the house. An icebox thrummed loudly against the wall. The sink had a lever and a faucet. The electric cookstove had coiled burners circling round the black dots at their centers. New, white cupboards lined the walls, top and bottom, and several cooking gadgets sat on the countertops. I didn’t even know what they were. Mixers? Grinders?

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Moa said. “Marie had it done over like this for me, seeing as I spend so much time in here. She let me pick the paper.”

There was only one wall of it — a pattern of lacy squares framing miniature men offering miniature women disproportionately large tulips. The women’s faces looked out at the room, surprise on their features, the men in profile, expressionless. That paper still rings desperate to me, and pointedly sad.

“Mr. Roscoe,” Moa said, “the closet is over here.”

I remembered the closet, a narrow shaft of a room used for storage of strange or useless things, often with sentimental value. We’d rarely go in with the mind of taking something out, as opposed to putting something in.

It was packed tight with everything I once owned.

“Wilson’s parked one of the wheelbarrows out the kitchen door for you to use for the hauling. I’ll get you some breakfast. Suppose that dog’ll need to eat, too.” She dropped a pile of meat scraps into a metal bowl. “You can call it round back if you want.”

Maggie and Wilson hadn’t moved from their spots.

“Tried to call her up here, but she’s not interested in listening to me. Figure she’s used to treeing men my color.”

“There weren’t that many men your color at Kilby.”

“Why put a man in prison when you can sell him to the mines for a few bucks.”

I could only look at Wilson, his empty, pinned-up sleeve, the scars on his remaining hand, and imagine myself saying something that righted it.

“Once you take stock of what you have in the closet there, you let me know what else you need.”

“Thank you. Come on, Maggie.” I gave her the bowl to sniff, and she followed eagerly, sticking her nose into my leg a few times, nudging me.

Wilson laughed at us from his height on the porch. “I think that dog’s got a good retirement in front of her.”

I remember chewing on that word— retirement .

MAGGIElay flopped on her side in the grass outside the back door of the big house while I sorted my belongings into piles on the lawn. I imagined Marie collecting the big things first — my toolboxes and my clothing — and the small pieces last. I could see the stages of stashing away. The first layer — the last Marie had added — was made up of items of questionable ownership. I found the ashtray her father gave me one Christmas, one of the only gifts I’d ever received from him. “It was his father’s before it was his,” Marie had told me, and not only had it belonged to her grandfather, it had been made by him, too. Her grandfather had been a silversmith, the house full of his platters and candlesticks, the family silverware, the tea service. Marie had a silver-handled hairbrush and hand mirror that he’d made for her when she was a girl. That ashtray was likely put in the final layer because Marie couldn’t decide whether it was mine.

A framed photo of our wedding was stacked next to a painting done by my mother that Marie had admired, a silhouette in profile of my own head that Marie had commissioned and hung next to a matching one of hers, a small relief map of the state, hand-painted by the cartographer, a friend of Marie’s father. I found a carving knife, also the work of Marie’s grandfather, a silk handkerchief. Toward the back, I would find my electrical texts, but at the front I found an almanac from 1923 and a cookbook. I found a stuffed bear of Gerald’s with blue button eyes and a red plaid jacket. I didn’t know why these things were mine, but I sorted them all the same. Clothing and sitting-room things and trinkets and books. By the time I reached the back wall, I’d uncovered my rifle and three boxes of cartridges, all my tools, several jars of nails and screws, nine long coils of wire, and a remaining box of ceramic insulators.

MAGGIEwas chewing on a bone when I carried out the last items.

“She’s got that face,” Moa said, hanging sheets on the line. “Puts those ears down and she can get ’bout anything she wants, can’t she? Wilson got two deer last week. There’s only so much stock I can make with the bones. Set you a bagful by your boots.”

“Next thing you know, you’ll be letting her in the house.”

“Careful, Mr. Roscoe.”

It was almost nice standing there, my dog gnawing a bone, the hint of humor between Moa and me, the warm sun, the leafy oaks, the fields stretching off behind them.