C. Morgan - All the Living

In the field, Orren ate the three shoddily made sandwiches she handed him, but he did not say thank you, he did not even bother to inspect what he was eating. And she thought him to be like an animal as he ate unthinkingly, she stared at him while he chewed. Her eyes dared him to continue their last night’s argument, but he tolerated her only a short time before he turned around and faced to the east. Then she stared mutely at his back. When he had eaten his full, they set to work again. But unlike the morning, she found that the afternoon under the sun sapped her strength. By two the breeze stilled and the heat swelled up like something dead and she felt her skin burning as she sticked and spread the leaves of the plants. When they moved up a row, they faced the mountains away from the sun and her body complied with her mind’s bidding to stoop, cut, and spear without pausing. But coming down a row, her mind roamed free in a sun-driven fever from her body, she could think of very little but stopping. Each motion to stoop burned her thighs and a hard fiery line traced up her back. Her hands swelled around the haft, her fingers rusted into their grip. She glanced occasionally at the house as she went, but her laboring mind could no longer stir up any kind of feeling for it, not even resentment. It offered its own kind of shade. She looked across the row at Orren, the way his shoulders scissored as he cut and his sweat soaked his shirt against him. What he did, she saw, was tilt his head down like a man in a heavy wind, so that the sun glanced off him, burning the back of his neck only, while he remained tucked into himself, preserving himself. His hands never ceased their motions. He looked only at the plot of earth before him, nothing else. Aloma tucked her own head without realizing it.

When the afternoon wasted toward evening and still they hadn’t spoken a word, she heeled up behind him, half drunk with fatigue, and she kicked out brazenly at his boot so that he turned around and looked up at her, drawing his struck leg under him.

Oh, just say something, she said.

He stared at her, his knife with its sharp lip against the filthy cotton of his pant leg. What? he said.

She groaned and he shrugged. Then she said, I did pretty good work, huh? And he nodded once and went back to cutting. She sighed. She’d worked fast, and for not having known what she was doing, she’d managed the job of a man, bending and stooping until her back was about to break, all without complaining.

I’m hungry. I guess you can clean up, she said. I’m going up to the house.

He narrowed his eyes at her. Alright, I got a cow to check on. She shrugged the way he had and she turned on her heel and left him in the middle of the rows, still kneeling in the dirt and watching her leave him.

But she didn’t make him anything. It was unfitting, she knew, but in her fever she felt the sun had leached the very marrow from her bones and Orren himself had somehow caused the sun to rise. So she left him to his own devices and she knew them to be few. She ate bologna and white bread straight out of the refrigerator and when she saw him coming up past the willow, she abandoned the room, still hungry but resolved not to spend another minute in his presence. He could sleep down at the new house for all she cared, he could sleep with the cows.

She was already upstairs and showered before she realized she had not gone down to the church at all today. With all the cutting and spearing she had completely forgotten to play piano for the first time since she’d taken the job. She stood still in her nightgown when she realized it. It disconcerted her, how it all seemed backward. How she’d worked with Orren all day but wanted to be almost anywhere else in the world, maybe most of all on another drive with Bell, and she’d not even realized it until just this moment. She thought again of what Orren had said last night and she felt suddenly a flower of panic bloom across her chest and she wanted not to escape the house so much as she wanted to escape all of it and mostly herself, a self she found to be increasingly shifty and desirous in ways that frightened her when she looked too closely.

But these thoughts vanished when she heard Orren’s slow naked footfalls on the wooden stairs and she hurried to the bed and pulled the covers over her. She heard him approach the room. Way down on the road, a car passed and a whiter ghost of light flickered momentarily on the still-lit wall. Aloma followed the glimmer with her eyes and strained for the falling sound of its passage.

Don’t come in here if you can’t say a decent word, she said when she judged him to be at the door. But he came in anyway and as she had demanded, he did not say a word. He simply undressed and walked down the hallway to the shower and stood under the water for a long time so she wondered if he was going to go on back down to the new house, but when he came out and dried off, he did not go anywhere else but walked to the bed. She sighed loudly. Twice. Then she rolled onto her side and took most of the sheets with her. He sat down on his side of the bed. She sighed again and looked out the window. She squeezed her eyes shut as he lowered himself to stretch full length on the mattress and thought of how she’d push him away if he tried to touch her and she was still thinking of ways to punish him when she fell asleep.

It was a far reach to find him, he was much taller than her. She felt his breath near her. One hand slid between her legs, she waited and waited for the weight of him on her mouth, her eyes closed, until she realized she was touching herself in a dream of her own making. And when she knew it to be Bell’s face in her mind, her eyes darted open and she gasped out loud. Orren awoke to the sound of her intaken breath, his head rising from the pillow.

What? he said, confused.

She looked at him in fear for a moment, frightened that he would see the dream written on her like so many words. Then, without thinking, she wound herself around him and pulled at his mouth with her own and found him with her hand and he was hard in an instant and inside of her the next. She said his name over and over, concentrating with all her might, as if to reassure herself that it was Orren she wanted and hoping to call her own name out of him until every word he possessed would rise up and spill over her. But no words came. So she scratched at him and grabbed at him until she was striking him, but no matter what she did, he was silent as the grave as he fucked her.

Aloma could not rise the next morning. When the dawn insinuated its bluing white light into the room, she could not face it and so veiled her eyes with the sheet. She told Orren she was ill and he went down to make his own coffee and his own paltry breakfast. She waited for the final sound of the back door opening and closing and in her mind she configured him walking, the sun weaving a living red into the brown of his hair as he walked alone to his work. Aloma moved her legs under the sheet and they resisted her, the enervated muscles hot to the touch and weak. They did not feel like her own. She could not remember ever being so tired, and though her body ached from the cutting, she felt that it was not due only to the work she had done, but that some greater burden was upon her. Her dream hung over in her veins like a liquor, it accused her now in the bald daylight. She screwed her eyes shut. She thought of her small room at the school and how much she had wanted to leave, how she had lain like this and scried her future on the backs of her own eyelids as though they were a crystal ball. She remembered too the black yawn of the driftmouth near her uncle’s trailer, its loose rock like broken teeth, its interior a black shaft to nowhere. She had once been dry-mouthed for the unimpeded morning light beyond the steep holler walls and here she was, on her side under white sheets the open sun lit brilliantly like the sides of a tent in the free light of morning, and still she wanted something, still she was unsatisfied. When had she ever once been full? So that she would not have to answer such an inquiry from herself, she forced her mind back to sleep.