C. Morgan - All the Living

The hour drew on into two and more, she watched the deepening yawn of the sun verging on their little circle. Then she noticed the others begin to shift and stretch and when Bell closed his own Bible, leaning back in his seat with his hands over his belly, she darted up from her chair, mouthing to him, I’ve got to go, and then she left the church. She realized once she was out the door that she still had the Bible in her hands, but rather than go back in, she stowed it under her seat on the floorboard of her truck. Then she drove away.

There was no sign of Orren’s truck at the farm when Aloma returned. She wandered around the left side of the house to where the fields opened up below her and stood with one hand shielding her eyes. It was breezeless. She wiped her face with the underside of her shirt, looked out over the bottomland like it was a centerless sea, her eyes settling on nothing. The tobacco plants were already showing new signs of growth after the topping, their leafy stretch widened despite the lack of rain, and they had lost the look of faded old party favors. New green shoots were ready to be suckered.

But nowhere in the midst of all those plants did she see Orren. She decided as she walked to bring in the cows herself, draw them in from the pond so that Orren would not have to do it when he returned. With the rooster killed and Orren assuring her they could do without another so long as the broody’s eggs hatched, she was no longer afraid to venture near the barn and the pasture. She passed the hens all huddled in the shadows, silent and scratchless, struck dumb by the heat. She picked her way across the field, stepping high to avoid cow droppings and the pitching up and down of the natural fall of the ground. Crossing toward the pond she saw instead the cows gazing down at her stilly from the dark closeting shade on the hill and she changed direction, climbed the rise toward them. Once there, she kept going, passed from the warm sunlight into the darkness of the trees past the cows, who turned their solemn heads toward her. On into the cooler, deeper stand of trees. One cow turned slowly and followed her. The others stayed on the perimeter and watched her recede with their wide dispassionate eyes.

Aloma found to her surprise that once she passed the white oaks that lined the outer edge of the hillside, there were pines behind them. Here the needles were littered and piled so deep on the forest floor that a person could lie down and sleep on them. Orren’s grandfather had not set the fence at the edge of the trees, but farther back so it extended — crooked here and there around a tree — thirty feet into the pines. The cows were free to wander back into the woods a ways, which they did during the heat of the day, reemerging toward evening to feed and water again. Aloma walked to the fence and tested it with her hands. Rusted, it streaked her palm a visceral orange. She prodded one of the barbed knots with a thumb and then carefully hoisted herself up, falling back to the ground twice before she managed to clear the fence, grasping a riven post for balance, her skirt snatched up under one arm so it would not snag. She managed to cross it uncut. She smoothed her skirt down and looked back at the cow that had followed. The cow stopped a few feet from the fence and stood gazing steadily at her with its black, mothering eyes. For a moment, Aloma did not move farther but stared back into that depth, which she found to be impossibly dark, a windowless room. Then she turned and passed twenty feet farther where the pines gave way again to white oak and peeling ash, their roots threading the ground beneath her feet. She stood in the flagging light filtered by the trees. Sweat beads cooled on her upper lip and she reached out to touch a tree beside her, and she leaned against it in relief. Her eyes closed and into the vacancy of her thoughts, Bell found his way. She blinked him away, pushed off from the tree with more force than needed, and walked on, half forgetting the cows, wondering if the woods would turn her out at the ridge road or carry her deeper. She felt she would rather stay in the woods, maybe for a long time before ever wishing to return to the house and as she turned to her left found a space that was even cooler, darker, and saw a carving on one tree. The letters E + C chipped into the underbelly beneath the bark. For a moment, she gazed on it in mere curiosity and nothing more, then with a start knew that it must mean Emma and Cassius, Cassius who had been the father of Cash and Orren, and she pressed one finger to her lips as if to still the woods around her and leaned in. The wood sliced for these names had darkened with age so it paled against the bark like the desiccated flesh of a yellow fruit. She ran a finger along the fretted letters, her eyebrows drew together and filled with a stern feeling, she wished suddenly that not a single one of them had ever been born to fit a blade in their hand to make vain impermanent markings on living things.

She straightened up, surprised at herself. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed, then echoed rockily against the ridge wall. She stepped suddenly away from the tree and looked around as if for someone and started back toward the house, disregarding the thickets that stabbed at the edges of her hem. The cow remained standing where she’d left her. When she crossed back over the fence and said, Get, in her voice she recognized some of the flat veneer of Orren’s own voice and reached back to pat the cow on the broad, tufted sworl between her eyes, but the cow did not like this and tossed her head to one side and then walked ahead of Aloma out of the woods into the sun. Aloma shielded her eyes with her hand and followed its swinging backside as she walked slowly down the hillock to the open pasture. The other cows fell into step behind Aloma, the oldest one nearly knocking into her when she stumbled once in a snake hole. The pregnant cow came last, her gravid weight resisting each step with its sheer bulk. Across the low-chewed field, toward the red barn, into the pen, the gate of which Aloma held open for them as they passed one by one. She held the skirt of her dress up above her knees as she waited. When she came down alone around the corner of the barn, she found Orren’s truck parked alongside the barn wall on the far side. With gloved hands, he grabbed bales of hay out of the bed and pitched them with a hard swinging motion against the barn in neat-enough piles to be pulleyed up to the mow. When he saw her, he said, Help me here, but then he took in her dress and he said, Oh, and waved his hand at her so she just stood beside the truck, at first leaning against it, but then not, because it was too hot, and watched him work. He moved quickly, as if any pause at all would destroy his momentum as he swung and swung and swung. It was very late in the day, the sun was shuttered by the house. She stared at Orren. The muscles under his skin were such that she had trouble taking her eyes away from them, not because they were beautiful, which they were, but because they showed her so clearly the ways in which he was not her, could not be like her. She had a sudden urge to reach out and touch the skin that held the rest of him in, but he was working and sweating so she didn’t, she just watched. But she thought, Could I move like him, could my back curve and straighten like that, the ropy muscles like water that runs over rocks but not too quickly, over rocks that are smooth and not sharp. She looked at the red-brown of his darkened skin and then she looked at herself, her own pale skin. It was shocking really, she thought, what all entailed the difference between her and him, as if a whole new person could be made from the sum of that difference.

When he was done, they both climbed into the cab of the truck and he drove it out of the field, opening the gate and then shutting it behind him, something she would have done, but he did not ask her because she was wearing a dress, and drove up along the south side of the house where he shifted into first and cut the motor.