C. Morgan - All the Living

When Orren came up the hill in the late afternoon, the fish and greens were glazed and cooling and Aloma stood waiting for him in the kitchen. He came, holding himself upright by what appeared only a faltering act of will, for two times he stopped as though he had forgotten something and turned around to peer back behind him — at what, Aloma did not know. When he turned back again and came on, he looked drawn as if the daylight that sapped the soil sapped some essential in him as well. Aloma opened the door for him and trailed after him into the dining room, noting the lifeless hang of his hands at his sides and the tired rise of one shoulder, higher than the other, as if it alone could not accept defeat. When he sat back in his chair reaching for his cigarettes, which Aloma snatched off the table because she could not tolerate him to smoke in the house, she said, You do too much.

I do a lot, he conceded. But no need to hire nobody and no money to do it. I got some things to figure out. I just got to get through this season. He pointed at the paperwork at the other end of the table.

Well, I was thinking, Aloma said, I could do more around here, you know. A girl can do more.

I know it, said Orren. Mama done everything. We was just boys when Daddy died. She done it all, she made it run.

Oh, said Aloma, vaguely disappointed by this answer. She looked down at her plate. Well, you might could give the barn over to me. I’ll get the eggs and stuff and feed the chickens.

Now that the rooster’s gone.

She looked up again, narrowed her eyes. Well.

He pondered it for a second and scratched at one reddish sideburn as though it itched. Well, yeah, he said. If you want to. You might could take the chickens. And feed them. Put not too much oyster in it, though. And I want you to stay away from that broody.

She shrugged thinly.

He eyeballed her. You ever done it? he said.

Done what…

Took care of chickens.

What do you think? she said, too sharp. Her cheeks stained with a flush that he saw, he saw as he watched her face. She crossed her arms over her breasts and drew one lip under the line of her teeth. It wasn’t her fault she’d been born into a doublewide of nothing and then spent the better part of her childhood in a school at the sink end of a holler. She’d learned piano. It was something he could never have.

Well, don’t be hateful, he said. Nobody said you can’t do it. I’m only asking.

Well, so learn me it, she said, cocking her head, and he seemed not to catch the hint of mock in her voice.

He walked with her down to the barn and as they approached, the calico cats scattered.

What are the names of those cats? Aloma said.

If they had ones, nobody told it to me. He paused for a moment, watching them flee, and then he walked ahead of her into the dark interior where it smelled like hay and old wood and chicken shit sharpened and made acrid by the heat of the day. The sun, in short shafts, augered the old boards. Light slanted thick and yellow and everything it touched in the barn — the now-empty horse stalls, the bent and broken hay scattered, the backs of their own legs — was heated by it. Orren stood beside her and surveyed the barn interior for a brief moment before he spoke.

That’s the broody and you don’t mess with her, he said. He pointed to a hen he’d situated in her own coop, set apart from the others that stuttered fat and gawky on their yellow roottwist legs, not confined to coops or the boxes on the laying wall. The broody sat russet behind her chicken wire and looked to be asleep or near death from boredom. If we get up those chicks, then we might could do without a rooster a while longer, Orren said. He gave Aloma a look that she refused to acknowledge, looking elsewhere around the barn but listening hard nonetheless. We got plenty of hens and just for laying. So we can do without for a bit. So just leave her be and I’ll feed her so if she’s jumpy, she’s remembered of me. I just don’t want to lose those chicks.

Okay, she said.

Here’s the feed. He reached her the chaff-dusted sack in the corner of an unused stall. Now use about this much and add about this much oyster shell and fill up the trough and then you just scatter it like so, and he scattered it so it fell onto the barn floor near the laying wall, but not before it caught the setting light and shone like brief gold as it fell. Some of the chickens came and pecked. Two ran into each other.

My God, these chickens are stupid, Aloma said.

Yeah, well, he said, nodding, and when he looked at her, she saw in the light very clearly again the increase of age around his eyes, age that had come quick. He dusted his hands off on his jeans and then placed one hand on her shoulder and she felt suddenly that she was his young daughter and not his should-be wife, or his girlfriend, or whatever she was here in this place, his grandfather’s barn.

Mama didn’t know none of it when Daddy died, he said. She just learned it. Then he stepped away from her and made to leave the barn, but stopped instead with his back to her. He gripped the frame of the wide door with his left hand, his fingers brailled the wood for a moment.

Aloma eyed him as the chickens scratched around her, their bobbing bodies polka-dotted with white like bleach spots, and she stepped through them, paddling the air with both hands to shoo them so that they parted like a bobbing stream. She reached for the cribbed top of a stall door and it gave slightly under her hand, swinging into the interior so that she stumbled forward a bit into the palfried air. She stood with one foot in the stall, one out. Against one wall, a half-rotted bridle hung, the cheekpiece torn, its leather pilled with age. Old orange saddle pads lay stacked on the hay in the stall. She imagined they still held the heat of a horse like a sheet come out of a dryer.

I bet you miss the horses sometimes, huh, she said to Orren’s back.

No, he said. Just another body I can’t afford to feed.

I’d miss a horse if I had one.

Goddamn.

What? she said. She let go the gnawn wood.

How can it be so goddamn humid and so goddamn dry, he said questionless out to the day and he held one hand out like an empty dipper.

I don’t know, Orren, she said, stepping out of the stall, moving toward him. But it’ll rain. You just gotta have faith.

He turned then, turned to look at her, and as he did, the small black pupil of his eye expanded suddenly, she saw it grow as he turned away from the light toward the pitching shadows of the barn where she stood, erupting blackly against the thinning blue of his eye. How come’s that, Aloma? he said.

She stopped before him. Because things work out, she said slowly, considering his wide black pupils.

Is that right? he said.

Well, yeah, she said.

He opened his mouth to say something, but then closed it again. The corner of his lip tucked in.

What? she said.

He shook his head as though he were about to turn and leave, but instead he reached out with his hand and took her face. He drew her close. With his thumb against the dimple of her chin, he turned her face first to the left, then to the right as if seeing the architecture of her face for the first time, studying on the prospect of shelter to be found there.

What? she said again, about to pull away.

Mama used to say silly shit like that.

It’s not silly, she said, bristling and straightening away from him. But he followed her, he stepped in, the enormous black of his pupils sweeping by her line of vision as he lowered his head and kissed her once on the spot on her chin where his thumb had been.

It’s worse than silly, he said when he straightened up.

She pulled away in earnest then, accidentally bumping a hen that pecked too close to her heels. She scowled down at it once, but said nothing further.