Bill Cheng - Southern Cross the Dog

The cabin was set out on a small clearing, the earth pocked from where the trees used to be. The boards looked blue-black and rotted. Stuckey took me around back where I could make water. He turned his back as I crouched out in the grass, next to a small pump, staring out into the woods. There was a small path that led out behind the scrub to what looked like a henhouse. He waited for me to finish, then he took me into the cabin.

Inside, the junk had come together into piles with only a narrow strip of floor to move around on. There were chairs stacked on top of chairs. An old bureau had been stripped of its doors and heaped up with brass pots, sketches, bundles of old newspapers.

Stuckey set his bag down by the door and made his way to the stove. He lit it, then he picked up an old steel poker with a little hooked head and pushed around the coals, sending up a breath of sparks.

Come here, he said.

I didn’t move.

Don’t make me come to you.

When I wouldn’t move, he grabbed me and yanked me toward him.

He thrashed the poker into the embers and little sparks licked out of the stove. When he took the poker out, the head was all red. He took my leg with his hand and twisted it toward him.

I shut my eyes.

There was the smell of something burning. After a minute, he let go of my leg.

When I opened my eyes, little fat leeches were squirming on the floor.

He put the poker back in its place. He stamped on their fat bodies.

We’re going to have to get you some proper boots, he said.

STUCKEY PUT ME UP IN a cramped room with a mattress and a little bureau pushed against the wall. He changed me out of my clothes and gave me a cotton dress that itched all over and didn’t fit right in parts. He looked me up and down, made me turn for him, and he clicked his teeth and pinched the scrub of hair on his chin.

Pretty as the morning, he said.

He looked me up and down a little bit, then without a word, he left room.

The window was boarded up, but there was space enough between the boards to see through to the outside. On top of the bureau, there were cane poles and little fishhooks. After a while, Stuckey came in again with a plate of biscuits and some cold beans.

Eat and then go to bed, he said. We’ll talk tomorrow.

When he closed the door, I heard it lock behind him.

I ate up the beans and scooped up all the juice with the biscuits. I filled up my mouth faster than I could chew, pushing the food through with my fingers. When I was through, I had licked the plate clean and my stomach was starting to feel a little funny. I left the plate on the floor and tried to sleep.

Before the flood, there was only one bed and it was Uncle Reb’s — a beat-up old thing he traded a Guernsey heifer for. It was all cut up and the stuffing was coming out but Uncle Reb got in a terrible fit if anyone went near it. Me and Nan Peoria had to sleep down on a pallet of crushed hay and dry grass. At night, I could hear it crackle softly under me, and come morning, there’d be little bites all up and down my arm.

Here, there was a mattress and it was strange the way the bed went up against my shoulders and my back. It pressed at you the way nothing else did, rising up to fill the spaces you couldn’t fill yourself. I turned and beat on it for a while, but there wasn’t any way I could get any sleep. Instead, I pulled the sheets down into a pile at the foot of the bureau and curled up against it.

I slept I don’t know how long. The room was all dark and I couldn’t see nothing. There was somebody in there with me.

Nan Peoria put her hand across my mouth.

Don’t breathe, she said.

It took a while for my eyes to get used to the dark. There was a man standing at the foot of the bed. His head was rolled back toward the ceiling.

Don’t wake up, she said.

She said, Do you believe in God?

My mouth was stuffed up with cotton.

Do you believe in the Devil?

COME MORNING, THE LIGHT WASN’T more than a trickle through the boards. There were little motes of dust casting through the air. I rubbed the stiff out of my sides and looked around before I remembered where I was. The door was open and someone had taken out my tray, swapping it for a pair of cotton slippers.

Out in the kitchen, Stuckey was at the stove, turning over a pot of oatmeal. He looked at me and pointed over to the table with his chin.

You slept on the floor last night, he said.

I’m not used to beds, I said.

You’ll learn.

He served up the oats in two bowls. They weren’t boiled up all the way, and there were little mealworms floating in the milk. I picked them off and ate around it.

After this, all the meals, you cook. You know how to cook, don’t you?

I told him I did.

Finish eating and I’ll show you what needs doing.

After breakfast, he took me around to the back and showed me how to pump for water, how to split the firewood. He showed me the chicken coop all twisted up with wire and straw, not far from the cabin. Then he took me inside, showed what needed wiping down. The stove had to be swept out and the floors needed scrubbing. There was the laundry and the dusting and the mending. He showed me his socks that needed darning and the holes in his oilskin coat worn through at the elbows. He talked me through the piles and piles of junk. What to touch. What not to touch.

When he was done, he stooped down and put his face into mine. His eyes were lowered till there was barely any white showing. His face hung there, waiting on something. When nothing happened, he stood up and took his long coat off the hook.

Swamps are full of gators, he said.

He pulled on the sleeves, then checked the chamber of his pistol.

I’ll be back by nightfall, he said.

IT WAS LITTLE THINGS. THINGS I found cleaning. A cut of cloth from the bedspread. A piece of shell out in front of the porch, who knows from where. I took little bits of hay and I tied them together with horsehair. There was a big black button I swept up from under the dresser. It had two little holes in it and was shaped like a little fish.

One time I found a bird skull, sweeping out the stove. It wasn’t no bigger than a lump of coal, eyes filled up with soot. I dusted it off, then ran it out under the pump. The bone was gray and scorched, and the water made the ash muddy. It took a while to clean with me scrubbing it with just my fingers, blowing into the eyes and hearing my breath whistle back through its shell of a head. I kept that too, all tied up and neat, under the bureau.

They were mine. They were no one else’s.

I WAS BEHIND THE HOUSE, chopping wood. A chill had come down on the swamp and tinted the grass blue. I had a hard time working the ax. The weight threw me instead of me throwing it. The swing would always come down crooked, and I didn’t know how to score so that the cut’d go even and clean.

My hand was chafing so I rested awhile on the chopping block.

Then someone said, Black the mirrors.

I turned and there wasn’t no one there.

Nan said, You have to black the mirrors and I will keep you safe.

HE NEVER SAID MUCH ABOUT where he went or what he was doing. Come evening time, just before the dark got settled, he’d come up through the marsh, gunnysack over his shoulder, the fringe of his coat all draggled and muddy. The wood seemed to close behind him, what was left of the daylight shunted out by dogwood and blackgum and cypress. He’d pass beneath their branches, stooping just enough to clear his head.