C. Morgan - All the Living

Aloma turned her face to the passing land and screwed up her lip, didn’t acknowledge him. She thought of the piano, she did not feel generous.

It must be tough not to have your folks, Bell said.

No.

Come on now, Aloma. He smiled. You don’t got to act tough.

No, she said, stiff. I never even think about them. I don’t feel anything about it one way or the other way.

I don’t believe that, he said, not for one blessed minute.

Well, it’s true.

Now, I can’t believe it’s natural to feel that way, Bell said. Hearts don’t do that of their own according, it takes some kind of effort to make them stop behaving properly. I hear you play your piano every day, you know. I trust you got right feeling.

Aloma bit her lip and drew her brows together. She made a face out the window that he couldn’t see, irritated that he had made a press for softness, like a thumb testing fruit. But she felt guilt for her meanness too, she didn’t know what was wrong with her and thought, in her tangled mind, she wasn’t made like other women. There was some softness in her, but it was so deep in a kind of acquired bitter that it took another bitter to divine it, like an auger cuts through solid rock to force the seam.

Well, what if I really don’t have the right feeling? Aloma said then.

Bell laughed, but she didn’t join him. He looked at her.

How do I get that? she said.

Well, he said and cleared his throat. It might sound kinda contrary, but I don’t think looking inside for a feeling is nearly ever the answer. It’s looking out.

What’s that mean? she said, all suspicion.

Well, it seems to me the more attention you spend on the folks around you, the more right feeling you have even for your own self. Seems like the opposite might should be true — turn your mind on your own heart to straighten it out — but that ain’t how I see it. Am I making sense?

She smiled wanly at him, but her smile was troubled by a distrust directed as much at herself as at him.

Hey, he said suddenly. Don’t let’s go to the church just yet. Let me show you something special.

Alright, she agreed, feeling the rub of her conscience, but not caring.

Bell drove toward the eastern side of the county where the flatter sheeting of the bluegrass met the hills. Here Spade’s Knob stood, a steep breast of limestone seduced out from the body of the foothills, it swelled anciently green over limestone over thin coal and fossilized remains. It rose rank-grown and shaggy with thick midsummer vegetation.

It’s just up this east slope, he said and his car whined in first gear along its uprise and the low-lying farms diminished as they ascended, their tree-lined fields flashing green between breaks in the blacker green of the mountain trees. Bell slowed a third of the way up the mountain at a sloping hillside graveyard, its draped graves rioting with color against the unchecked green of the hillside. He parked so the car tilted crazily, half on the road, half on the hill.

This is my favorite place, Bell said. They walked out among the tiny spread of graves, Aloma a few feet ahead of him. Each headstone stood decorated with wreaths of fabric flowers — their cheer artificial beauty fresh and unfaded, notecards and photographs in transparent bags taped to the carved stones. On a date of 1882, a lei. Or a Confederate cavalryman, his furrowed horse with its legs outstretched in a dead run, its pasterns limp as ladyhands. The dead in their graves lay ordered with their soles to the distant ridges, the earth collapsed into the narrow space of their coffin boxes. Aloma thought of them, bodies less substantial than even their names in death, no more animated than a stone. She breathed sharp over them, over those absented bones, and smelled the hot green August on the verge of turning. But the season was not done, the smell of the hillside was redolent with honeysuckle and grass and some of the heavy tartness of ripe pears. She looked around her, saw no pear trees, turned toward the sheer wall of the mountain behind the graves, the oaks blanketed with an impenetrable draping of kudzu, as if they — Aloma and Bell — stood with their feet on the edge of some fantastical evergreen bed. Bell pointed away from the mountain wall to where the distant farms lay between Spade’s Knob and the thick succession of coaled ridges, the buckled-up crust darked by trees. They went on and on without surcease.

That’s about the prettiest thing I ever saw in my life. He sighed. Aloma looked at it balefully, she had borne herself out of its sucking folds. Its beauty was a thing hard to stand. She looked down as far south as she was able, but could not see Orren’s farm.

I mowed all this for the Ather family when I was a just a kid. Easy work. Everybody comes and does their own graves near about every week. Folks are good like that here, still. When I was in Lexington, all the graveyards up there are just empty and gray and not a flower on any stones. That’s shameful, I think.

When were you in Lexington? she said, surprised.

I went up there to college for not too long, six months maybe.

You quit?

Yeah, I did quit.

Why?

He sighed and with both hands wiped the sweat from either side of his broad face. Homesick, I guess.

She smiled.

Not really, he said. Just fancy, silly. Too much learning and not a bit of common sense. I never heard so many people talk so much to say nothing. Got so I couldn’t get out of bed. So I came back home. Never felt no need to go back.

I’d like to go up there someday, she said.

No, you couldn’t have stood it.

How do you know that? she said, sharp. He looked at her in surprise then, eyes outlining the shape of her face and settling on the veiled argument of her eyes. He paused at length before he said, Well, maybe not. He crossed his arms over his chest and contemplated her, and sensing a looming shift, she started to turn aside, but he said first, There’s something funny about you.

No, not really, she said, deflecting.

Yes, he said and he looked out to the mountains and then at her again. You seem real sweet, but sometimes you…

She looked at him, trapped like a horse in its thills, her eyes full of false innocence.

… Sometimes you got a cagey thing about you. Like you can’t decide if you want to run off or get took in.

There was a long moment before she realized that she was released and then she began to laugh, hilarity poised on the pinpoint of her fear. You make me sound like a stray dog, she said when finally she came up for air and he watched her with a confused, unwilling grin growing on his own face.

Well, he said, and then as she started up again, Yeah, but who you got in the world, really? and laughing, she pretended it was a joke and not the serious inquiry it was and impotent in his feeling, he stood beside her and let her lie through her laughter. Not happily, but gently, he stooped and picked up the mown desiccated grasses and threw them at her and she laughed and laughed in relief that he only found her a strange thing, but not deceitful yet.

The next morning when Aloma stepped into the barn she found chickens scattered on the barn floor and thought for a second, irritably, that they must be playing dead. She said, Hey, out loud and none of them moved.

Oh shit, she said. She whirled around to find Orren, who had left the house thirty minutes before her own sleepy shuffle down to the barn. She heard the tractor from where she stood, he was still tilling up the southern end of the fallow field. When she turned back around, she hoped against hope the chickens might be standing up, but they were still dead.

Oh trouble, she said and she ran out of the barn, scaling the pasture fence without bothering for the gate, ran with her arms flailing across the crown of the tobacco field and into the fallow field of damp beds. Orren saw her coming and she raised her hand, but he did not cut the motor. He watched her come running, her shirt coming loose from the waistband of her jeans, her ponytail shaking down.