C. Morgan - All the Living

Orren only stared at the wheel in his hands as he flipped the ignition and pushed it into reverse. Then he glanced back over his shoulder once and when he reached with his free hand for his pocketed cigarettes, Aloma grabbed them from his fingers.

Hey, he said, grasping after them.

Quit, I’m lighting one for you, she said and she worked at his lighter, her finger repeatedly rubbing raw against the roller, but it would not ignite. She snapped the thing until he reached over and sprung the lock and lit it. Looks like I’m lighting it for you, he said and she laughed and waited in vain for him to join her. She took an amateur drag, passed it to him.

We should come up here more often, she said. There’s a lot to see.

Like what, he said.

She turned soldierly to her right and looked for something.

A feed store, she said, but he didn’t laugh.

We’ll come back, she said into the silence.

Orren peeled out onto the sweltering line of the main street so the wind came in a hot roll, plastered her hair to her face. She had no hairband and she made one trial to collect her hair at her nape, but she gave up and leaned back with her eyes closed, her body jostled slightly by the stuttery articulations of the old shockworn truck.

You better drive careful, she said. I hate it when you drive fast. She sneaked a peek at him. He tapped his cigarette and the wind snatched the ash away. His eyes were half-lidded against the wind and sun so that the landscape scumbled before him.

She leaned back and closed her eyes again, saw the pretty girl’s fatted-out lip, her meaningless relation to Orren. And she saw too the frozen turn of Orren’s countenance, but now she also saw the face she carried in her, his face the way it came to her every so often. The sawn lines on either side of his mouth, blue eyes, the redly dark brows. Only this time as she conjured him, some memory came clear of him and she saw him driving shirtless on a hot summer evening. His little bit of belly hung over the buttoned edge of his blue jeans. He slouched against the seat, a cigarette rolling slightly between two fingers of his left hand. She was saying something to him and he was listening, looking out. She could not hear her words any longer and she thought how funny that the first thing you didn’t need was the words you said. But she did remember the slouch of Orren’s spine and the drape of his shoulder, the weight of his right forearm hung easily from the wheel. He kept looking over at her, stealing glances from the road. She pointed at something out the window and then, as her arm extended beyond him but still toward him really, he broke up. Without straightening from his slouch, he tossed his head back just an inch or so and laughed so that she could see his teeth, which were not straight but all fitted perfectly in his head. She saw the knobby ridgeline of his Adam’s apple and his hand stopped moving over his cigarette and was still until he had done laughing and turned his attention back to the road, but with that last little bit of smile still on his face.

When they returned from Hansonville, Orren idled for a moment by the side of the house so she could climb out before he went on down to the fields. She hesitated with her hand on the latch, considering his grave face and then the equally grave wall of the house tinted gray under a cloud. But she chose the house, it was her charge. She climbed out of the cab and went inside to chew that bitter in the privacy of her own mouth.

Inside, she wandered driftlessly, first to the front door where the land graded away under tall windbent grasses until it met the road. But the front of her world was so full of empty her eyes could find no place to rest so she walked to her perch at the back door. She watched as Orren’s truck disappeared around the hillock toward the pond, its axle clanked once as he turned and then nothing.

The clock in the living room churned out its little melody and banged on its bell the hour. Something in the sound snapped Aloma from her stillness and without a second thought, she walked out the back door into the yard away from the house. The willow stood down a ways off to her right, between her and the slope that led to the first skinny rows of tobacco. There was a kind of satisfaction in the smell of the summer air. She looked around her at her new life. Orren never asked her to do a thing. He took care of the fields, managed all the animals and the barn as well, and his refusal to ask for her help rubbed her against the grain. He even collected the eggs in the morning, the simplest task, something she could do. Aloma was stirred by a sudden desire to walk down there and hunt for eggs and see the cows, the ones that hadn’t wandered off into the fields. To maybe run her hands over their hides, which she’d found to be dense like a woolen rug, or to pat them on the broad space where the hair whorled in different directions between their wide settled eyes. She turned down toward the barn, walking fast, and she was light on her feet, pushing up on the balls of her feet with a new and goalless hope. She’d taken no more than twenty steps when she saw the rooster standing in front of her with his wings shouldered off his body. He stood a few meters out with his hateful bead eyes on her.

Oh, she said out loud, stopping abruptly. This rooster had gone after Orren only a week ago and torn into his right calf before Orren kicked him off and swung at him with the shovel he’d happened to be holding in his hand. The rooster had winged up off the ground a few times in spite, but finally let him be, the bird’s neck working convulsively, his wattles shaking like a battle standard. Orren limped into the house, deep spur punctures in his calf, swearing he was going to pop the head off the thing the first chance he got. Well, how are we gonna get chicks? Aloma asked. Bring in a dick that’s more congenial, Orren said.

But now here he was, standing before her, his head still very much attached to his body. Aloma turned around and ran with no thought in her mind but running. Behind her, the rustling wings of the rooster made a rushing sound like a woman giving chase in an old-timey dress with crinolines and hoops, rushing on. When she was almost to the steps, Aloma risked a rearward look and saw he had come too close, launched up with his wings spread and talons out, head reared, his wattle swung like a red ribbon to one side. She kicked out behind her with her right leg and caught him under one wing as he was rising, and the force of her kick scuffed him off to one side. But then she did a foolish thing and tried to jump up to the third step by skipping the first two, only it was too high so her foot tagged the edge of the crumbling step and she fell, her body riding down the height of the three steps on one leg, skin tearing away from her ankle to her thigh. She didn’t have time to cry out. Blood in a rush dotted and gathered in a sudden line down her leg and she leaped up the steps again and flung herself into the house. She slammed the door and a second later felt the lesser weight of the rooster striking the wood.

When Orren came in two hours later, she was still crying, sitting in the kitchen in her underpants, the deep scrapes ribboned with dried blood from her thigh down to her ankle bone. He took one look at her stricken face.

What happened to you? He had never seen her cry.

Your goddamned rooster chased me! she wailed.

Aw, he said, he does that. But when his mouth wrinkled up in an attempt at pity, it stopped somewhere short. She glowered, she was in no mood — and she hadn’t been all day — for any determination other than her own.

It’s not funny.

No, it ain’t funny, he said, flattening. You are right.

Don’t laugh at me then. Her voice was full of threat.

No. He shook his head.