C. Morgan - All the Living

She stayed in Hansonville to shop for groceries and when she returned to the house, Orren was standing on the porch. She parked and eyed him as she climbed out of the truck, carrying a brown paper bag, and stopped before him, her feet on the slender skirting of grass. His face was so dark with sun that he did not look the same race as her.

Hello, Orren, she said and as soon as it came out of her mouth, she thought how odd it was, how cold it could sound to call a man by his given name like that. He did not seem to notice.

It’s tricky, he said, not looking at her. He bit his lip and she waited for him to continue, unsure if he would. But he said, It’s hell to tell a ready leaf from just a stressed leaf. He looked plainly at her then, as though waiting for something, and when she said nothing in response, he pulled up his cotton shirt from his waistband and wiped his face with it, letting it fall over his belly again striped with bands of sweat and said, From the drought. The butts look yellow, but it ain’t ready. It’s hard as hell to tell.

Well, can you cut them now and dry them longer?

He did not answer. Instead, he said, You been gone a whole lot.

She hauled the groceries higher on her hip. Only two hours a day.

That’s how I said.

If that’s a lot, you’re crazy, she said and she stepped up onto the porch intending to pass him, but he held out his hand to the side so that he touched her with a single finger, his index finger, very gently, and it stayed her.

And what’s it you do for two hours like that?

She stopped. I’m playing the piano, Orren. God bless.

That’s all, he said.

Her eyes narrowed. Damn, Orren, she said.

Why are you calling me like that?

Cause it’s your name, she said and she scathed him with her eyes top to toe. And sometimes I have to remind myself just who on earth you are. She didn’t blink when she spoke, but leveled his stare with hers.

What’s that supposed to mean?

It means I don’t ever see you no matter that I live with you and then when I do see you, you don’t have anything to say.

Aloma, listen, he said.

Oh, God forbid somebody tells you what to do, she snapped.

You ain’t my mother.

She blinked, her lips parted. No, she said and lower, No, I’m not. And to that he had no response. He just cut his eyes away and in the same instant pulled his hand back to his own person, and folded his arms on his chest, looking away so she could not see his face. She shifted the weight of the bag from one hip to the other like it was a baby and she looked where he looked, out over the front acres dropping away to the trees where she had first seen his truck glinting. Then she turned her back and continued on into the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.

She woke up in the middle of the night and her first thought was that it was cool out of season and that was a relief. She stretched her limbs, but then she realized that the sheets were pushed away from her shoulders and chest and the bed was empty. Aloma started in the bed and looked around her at the darkened room. Orren stood by the window, the moonlight glazing white on the black and blue of his shadowed skin. For a moment she only stared at him, they had not spoken more than mere necessities after their words on the front porch. She thought now about saying nothing out of remnant spite and pretending to still be asleep, but when he did not move and did not even look to be breathing — his chest was still as if he were made of wood — she spoke.

What are you looking at?

He did not seem surprised when her voice broke the stillness of the room, he did not change position and he took his time answering. I don’t know, he said.

You must be looking at something.

He glanced over his shoulder at her and the moonlight lit the left side of his face, cast the right side into strange deep shadow so that he appeared suddenly to have only one eye. She looked away from that, worked out the wrinkles on the sheet beside her with her finger.

Tell me, she said, her eyes cast down.

I can’t see nothing really, he said, turning back around and looking up through the glass. The moon keeps coming and going.

Yeah, she said, sifting through his tone for the tiniest apology.

Then he said, I ever tell you I been down to Mammoth Cave once?

No. She looked up, surprised, and sat up higher on her old feather pillow.

Before Daddy died, he said, we gone down. Before he died… It was a vacation or something. We drove down there. And we was in this cave and the tour fellow turned off the flashlight. Orren turned now with his whole body, turned fully into his own shadow so she saw him only as a silhouette and she sensed that his whole body was watching her like a watchful face.

And what happened? she said.

Nothing, he said. It just was dark. But it was dark like you ain’t never seen dark before, like you can’t see your hand in front of your own face and I couldn’t tell where nobody was and you don’t know if there’s a up or down or not. That’s how dark. Not like this dark here — he nodded back out the window toward the grass beyond the windowpane — where you can still see something. It made everything just gone, he said. Then he folded his arms over his chest and said, And then when that flashlight come on, everybody in there just laughed. Even my folks. He stopped suddenly and peered out the window as though his eye had found something there.

They were relieved probably, Aloma said.

Well, he said, I ain’t liked it, I never could reconcile to it. It was like people laughing at a dead dog on the side of the road. Something that just ain’t funny.

She had no response to that. When he spoke again, he said softer, It better rain.

It’s gonna rain, Orren, she said, petting him this time with his name when she spoke it. I won’t let it not.

He snorted and looked out the window again. Well, it best, he said, cause this place is riding to hell quicker than… And he struggled for the rest of the sentence, Aloma saw his lips working for a moment more, but his sentence died.

Aloma stretched again, pushed the rest of the tangled sheets away from the twin converging lines of her bare legs. Orren, she said. He took his time turning around again, but then he only stood there reluctant and the moonlight figured around him and the front of him was altogether dark again so she could not see his expression. She laid her hands on her breasts and felt the dilute blue wash of light on her own face. A strange sensation passed over her as Orren walked slowly around the bed to his side and sat down, placing one hand flat against the headboard. My granddaddy built this bed, he said. He built it in the curing barn. Aloma waited for more and then pulled at his elbow with one hand until he turned around and lay down beside her. I wish you’d tell me more things, she said and they kissed and then neither she nor he said anything further. He moved slowly over her, he settled between her legs, and she said his name again, but all the while she was watching his shadow-strange face in the dark, she felt a small dawning fear. She felt she did not know this face, this stranger, not at all, but also she did not care then, stranger or not, as she gripped hard the top rear of his thigh and pressed him into her. His face gasped once for air. Then she was pulling him into his motions and holding him against her. But even as she grasped at him ever tighter with her hands, allowing him no distance at all from her chest, she sensed that she was merely knocking at the door of his flesh, and that even when he cried out and she felt him give up to her, the door did not open.

* * *

Aloma was restless and unable to account for it. She’d drifted anchorless through the house all day swiping at random surfaces with a polishing rag, talking to herself, standing glassyeyed before the portraits until her own thoughts fell away and she forgot herself and she remembered Orren’s nightwatch at the window. Then, against her will, even as she blamed him for her restlessness, she felt a creeping reluctant desire for the very things he wanted, something for the land itself and the tobacco that meagered its little water from the soil. She found that if she fastened her eyes to the ground at her feet where she could not see the wave of earth beyond the fields, she could hold on to the feeling. So long as she did not look up.