What bothered him were the questions. That first day, before he’d even got back to camp, Satan had wormed into his head, whining to Brodis that the white light and the angels couldn’t have happened, that it wasn’t realistic. Use common bay-horse sense, boy. You were just scared and excited from the accident, that’s all.
And right then he’d faltered. Already. Not a day had passed, and the devil had succeeded in hardening his heart. Brodis hadn’t rested a moment since. Satan always came in the same sly guise, with lawyerly arguments and rabbit-trap questions, all of which began with the same word: How? How could such-and-such happen, and how did a certain feature make sense, and how come this other had happened? But he’d learned to recognize them for what they were: distraction, illusion, cowardice.
All he had to do was wait until she took the brogans off. Just wait.
In the meantime, fence-mending. It took him hauling the cut planks from the barn and her testing the old ones for rot. Brodis crowbarred the broken palings and kicked them free, surveying the rotten wood for salvage nails. Inside, crabgrass and horsemint feathered across the furrows. Among the weeds, blades of corn furled up stingy as fists.
“Set up that one there,” he told her.
Irenie held the plank against its neighbor and pressed it flat against the weather-gray cross support, leaning in with her full weight. Brodis drove two nails straight in. The top of the plank snugged up against the crossbeam, but the bottom sprang towards them.
Irenie bent and rested her weight on one knee. The sole of her right boot pointed straight out. Now. Brodis stepped back to get a look, but it wasn’t far enough. He stepped again. Irenie glanced over her shoulder at him. “Not straight?” Just then a rabbit bounced out of the furrows, and the dog Stomper erupted into flopping and yelping chase. During all the noise Brodis backed up again.
Ears. The word on the bottom of her right boot was ears. But he hadn’t seen the left one.
Irenie spoke over her shoulder. “Matthew did a good job training them dogs.”
Brodis replied without thinking. “Yep.”
His wife’s too-soon answer: “You were better to tell him that.”
“Did.” But when he tried to lay his mind on the where and when of the conversation, he couldn’t get but so much. He tapped the bottom of the plank. “How about getting lower.”
Now his wife rested on both knees. Both soles pointed at the sky. And there, right there it was: the oval, the backwards Sear, the last s worn away.
Brodis drew up beside her. It made no sense. Her features hadn’t changed: same transparent lashes, same strands of hair loosened from the long braid, same patchwork of freckles easing up the tender skin in front of her ear. And before his brain thought to think on it, his hand went there, his thumb brushing the unblemished skin. Surprise turned her toward him and raised up her features. He didn’t plan to trace the line of her jaw with his index finger, where the skin stretched smooth across the bone. He didn’t plan to ask her the question right then and there. “Tell me what it is that’s got into you.”
Her eyes scouted his, then found a resting place somewhere beyond his shoulder. “Nothing particular.” She pursed the side of her mouth in a way that made it clear there was indeed something very particular. Then she seemed to wrest her attention back towards him as if returning to the world of the here and now from another one peopled by spirits and demons. The transition seemed to pain her. And right then, in place of answering his question she took it into her head to bring up the woman from the extension office again, if you could believe it. “Mrs. Furman says there’s a school in Asheville for very intelligent children. She says the classes are specialized.”
Anger welled inside him. How had they got back to talk of the government? He closed his eyes and breathed slow. It was possible that all boots wore out the same way. It was possible that every woman in the county had a pair with the same pattern on the sole.
Possible. Not likely. His wife was talking now about a new school. Brodis muttered a response and put two nails between his lips. He listened without listening.
The print had been from a small boot. A small foot.
Irenie talked on. Her voice was careful, planned out, and it was this tone more than anything that finally caught his attention. “She says they have scholarships for mountain children. Some of the smartest ones go for free.” She splayed both hands upon the springy wood without looking at him. The veins in her arms testified to the effort involved.
Only then did it occur to Brodis that they were having a conversation about his son’s future. And that his wife was trying to sway him to do something she didn’t think he’d want to do. “How come?” he asked.
“How come what?”
He pinched one of the nails from his mouth and positioned it against the wood. Because of the other one between his lips, his words had to squeeze out sideways, making his voice come terse and low. “How come they to go for free?”
Her voice was casual, falsified. “To get them to stay in school. To get them to a place where they can find jobs as teachers or businessmen or leaders. Someplace where they can use all the parts of their minds.”
“But not working on a farm.”
“No,” she allowed. “Not working on a farm.” Her hands splayed above and below the nail head, long-fingered and slender and traced with a blue-veined filigree that put him in mind of the tiny skeletons the plow turned up in the tousled earth, the white-laced surprise of them.
Brodis grunted. “Charity then.” He bent forward and positioned the nail between her hands. He brought his hammer arm up. Then he stopped. “Nope. Move your hand.”
Her voice came on faster than he expected. “Not charity. Scholarship.” She widened her grip on the chestnut paling, pushing the board flush against the cross timber, close in against the others, the heels of her hands white with the pressure. “So that mountain children can grow up to be leaders in their community.”
It was the first time he knew for certain that the argument wasn’t just a matter between him and her. “Whose words are them?”
Now his wife looked at him full on. Her eyes were belligerent, lawless. “Mine. Those are my words.”
Brodis swung the hammer, and the steel arced strong and true and slammed into the head of the nail, and the chestnut paling cinched up against the cross support. He drew the implement toward his temple for the second stroke. Her words, his left hind foot. They had the mark of the government all over them. Again the hammer dropped. Again it hit the nail true, now flush. He stood, slid the tools into his pocket. “It’s a pretty come-off when a town like Eakin can’t school its own children. There ain’t anything wrong with that boy that he needs a special education from the government.” Behind Irenie, the straw man turned with a whine, his torso impaled upon an axle, each arm a raised wind-paddle. A crow coughed, and the others flurried into the air. It was the only scarecrow in the county that moved. Matthew had conjured and built the thing himself.
Irenie was still talking. “He hates school. He wants to quit.”
Brodis was quiet. His wife didn’t account for the fact that teasing could be good for a boy. Plenty of men had come up stronger for it. “It’s more work here than can be done alone.”
The scarecrow turned back toward them, and the crows scattered like chaff. Brodis picked up the palings and moved down the fence.
Irenie followed. “We could get a hired man.”
Brodis fitted the crowbar behind another damaged paling and put his weight into it. The board moaned toward him. There was a time when his mind had a picture of his