The last part wasn’t entirely a lie, either. We had raked the nuts out the door, lifting the edges of the carpets to find the strays.
“Keep any?” Dale asked, shaking out a purple and blue checked skirt. “You know it’s ‘Momma and I.’ Don’t act ill-bred or you won’t get the right kind of paramour.”
Fooling her was deliciously easy.
“I’d love to hold an electrical nut in my hand, see if it’s still got a jump in it,” I said.
She clicked the trunk shut.
“What do you know about electricity anyway, way out here? We saw electric lights in a drawing of Paris up at school in a lecture about great cities of the world. They make streetcars go without horses. They’re bright as the sun, electric lights. You can’t look right at them or they’ll burn out your eyes. On the avenues of Paris, they burn all day and all night and never go out.”
I didn’t know the first thing about electricity other than what I’d read in the newspaper. The Wizard of Menlo Park was going to do in America what Dale said about Paris. The editor’s column in the Appeal claimed that electricity was an artificial light more brilliant than a thousand suns, and it was dangerous. A person could burn to cinders from touching it. Consider that boy in New York City, fried on a wire.
Propping myself up on my elbows, I waggled my foot at Dale.
“I should have kept one! You’re right, that would have been a thing to own. Hold a nut up to a light in France, maybe it would dance again.”
I would have liked to see an electric light. I hadn’t yet seen one. No one I knew had. Dale alighted on the bed and made the not-listening sound again.
“Do you have my shawl? I’m sure I set it right there on the chair.”
I didn’t say anything about the shawl. Instead, I told her that I’d heard from one of the girls at school that electricity is an example of God’s power on his earth. I’d heard no such thing, it just seemed like what Dale wanted to hear, and I wanted her to not sit so near to me.
The hot dry treetops glared like cut tin. Wind stirred the field across the road, making the trees scrape against each other like giant matchsticks.
“You know that the Devil isn’t far under our feet,” Dale said. “Below this house, below the fields. Mama told me that years ago there was an earthquake in Tennessee, and the newspaper back then said that if the earth did open for good, the Devil would be free to walk among us.”
Dale got up and probed through her stacks of clothing while she talked. Finding no shawl, she fussed with her skirt. A stray lock of hair came loose from the twist at the back of her neck, and she threaded it back into the bundle with the thumb and middle finger of her free hand.
“Uncle Will’s people were from Tennessee, weren’t they?” she asked.
As good a story as the Devil would make, the only thing below my feet was the floor, and below that, another floor, and then earth, and roots. Around the roots, copper and iron threaded through the insides of rocks. Daddy said so and proved it with his cairn of polished stones on the parlor mantel. Veins of copper and iron ore ran through those stones. The copper tugged gently at the iron, and according to him, the iron responded, bowing toward its true mate, copper. These two together, Daddy said, made the power of a magnet.
“Are you listening to me?” Dale asked. “I’ll find the shawl after we eat. We have to go downstairs and help with supper.”
“Did they find him?”
Dale had her hand on the doorknob.
“Find who?”
“The Devil.”
“Hush, you.” She shook her head and shut the door behind her. Her footsteps tapped down the hall and receded down the stairs.
“Well amen, then,” I said, but only to the door. My washrag swung slightly on a peg, mocking Dale’s pull on the handle. I reached into my blouse and extracted the shawl she had been looking for. I shook it out, folded it into a little square, and lay it neatly in the hatbox.
The sky was sickly green by the time we sat down for dinner. My ears popped, even though I worked my jaw and tried to shake my head clear like a rained-on dog. When rain fell while the sun shone, people always said, “the Devil’s beating his wife.” I couldn’t imagine who a Mrs. Devil might be, or how she and the Devil might have courted.
Momma dished up second helpings of ham, squash, bread, beans, and pickled tomatoes, a warning in her smile. Eat all of this. For Dale, we would show no struggle in planting the food or keeping it alive, no strain in portioning it out for the table. When we were alone, Momma tallied up prices like they were my fault. A sack of corn cost one dollar sixty cents, and five pounds of dry beans a quarter. A gallon of kerosene cost the same as five pounds of beans. Money was scarce as blood from a turnip, she said. On a rare night, we ate possum.
“Once you’ve had possum,” my father liked to say when he had his plate, “you won’t go back to squirrel.”
He had it backward: squirrel was all right. Some nights we ate cornbread and syrup, and I gave Leo a sweet rag to suck so he could think his belly was full. He knew better but pretended along with the rest of us.
With Dale at our table, the chat was about a fellow over by Aragon who’d stopped his wagon to have a smoke and burned up his bushels by accident. Daddy was sympathetic to the man’s loss. Momma called the disaster the fellow’s own fault.
Dale cleared her throat and patted her mouth with her napkin.
“Uncle Will, do you plan to open more acreage?” She was breathy and childlike, a fluttery Dale, not the cousin who last year had screamed about a grape.
Please hush, I warned her in my head, but she couldn’t hear me. Sitting across from her, I couldn’t reach under the table to pat her arm and take her attention away from the disaster she was igniting right here at the table.
She wouldn’t make eye contact. I couldn’t get to Dale. I cut into my ham, wishing it were her flesh, or mine.
“I would think by now you’d just go ahead and move back to town. I mean to say that you ought to give up,” Dale said.
My forked shrieked across my plate. My cousin, with her perfect hair and womanly shape, had shot flames from her mouth.
“Living out here while the town’s going on,” she continued. She might as well have spit ash. “Momma says Aunt Sally will fade away from indigence.”
Momma paled and didn’t speak. Rude as anything, Dale pointed to my mother, in case we hadn’t understood who her Aunt Sally might be. Maybe the floor had opened, and Dale was the Devil.
I wiped Leo’s chin and put a sliver of ham into his hand. I was teaching him to eat with his fingers in the interest of dexterity.
“More water, please,” Daddy said, tapping the rim of his glass. He spoke as if Dale hadn’t said a word. Momma stood to get the pitcher from the sideboard. She had to have been relieved to turn away.
Dale had spoiled dinner, and she was pleased. She was so pleased, in fact, that when I sat back from helping Leo with his ham, she looked straight at me, claiming a win. That was my chance, and I took it. I stared right back into her pale eyes. The sounds of Daddy pouring his water, of Leo chewing, of Momma’s anxious picking at the tablecloth faded into a dull hum. Dale wanted to pull away, but I held her like I did that fox and Mr. Campbell. Not until my father safely stood to leave the table, patting his stomach with an elaborate motion, did I let her go.
That night Dale took the pillow, leaving me with the edge of a blanket under my cheek. With her in the bed I couldn’t lie corner-to-corner the way I liked. With her in the bed, my feet hung off the end into the open