“Claire,” he said, his voice low but loud enough for her to hear. She grasped the knob herself now. She saw his hand rise to shade his eyes. He leaned his head close to the glass to peer through. The door shook again, and this time pictures all along the front wall rattled.
Now her mother was at her shoulder.
“Let him in, child,” she said. “Before he pulls the door off the hinges.”
The shape leaned to the glass again.
“Claire, I’m taking the car. I ain’t walking all the way into town every morning.”
“Take it,” Claire said. “Is that what you came for? Then go on.”
“No, that’s not what I came for,” he said. “I…” There was a pause, and then the shape moved away from the window.
When she heard his voice again, it was farther out in the yard. She lifted a curtain and saw Tom talking with him. The boy stood holding the bag of groceries, his father standing over him with hands thrust into pockets, his big shoulders hunched as he talked. Claire started to go out and rescue her son, but something in Tom’s face told her that the boy was taking care of himself. He nodded respectfully, hearing his father out, the tight-lipped expression never leaving his face. When Travis finally went to the car and drove away, Tom watched until he was out of sight and then came to the house. Claire opened the door for him, taking one of the sacks. The boy’s eyes showed strain.
“What did he want?” Claire asked.
“He said that it’s all a big misunderstanding,” the boy said.
“Like hell it is,” Claire said.
After the groceries were put away, Claire left Nan with her mother and followed the path behind the house out into the trees along the ridge. She’d spent half her childhood running around these woods. The trees had grown in the decade she’d missed and the trail had given over to underbrush in places, but she found she still knew her way. The path ended at a bluff that looked over a small valley and she rested herself on an outcropping of rocks. The wind was pushing up the valley. She watched it play over the green tree tops below her, the leaves dancing as the breeze brushed along the bluff face.
She didn’t much care that Travis had taken the car beyond a feeling of disappointment at his selfishness. But beneath that, her anger ran like a strong, black current. It puzzled her how easily love rolled over to become something darker, colder. And beyond the sting was the surprise at how easily it all fell away. Everything that she’d worked toward since she was a girl, finding a man to marry, starting a family, making a home, Travis had soiled with his betrayal, leaving her life split open along the seam that had joined her to him. Her sudden freedom was bewildering and a shock, but pleasing as well, though she couldn’t quite put a name to the sensation.
She knew she’d have to go back to him, for the children’s sake, if not her own. But not yet. Let him stew a while more. Let him drive that car around alone for all the town to see. She knew there’d be gossip, but she was beyond caring about that now.
The days passed as Claire and the children found new patterns to their lives in her mother’s house, then the bulk of a week, the rusted snag in her pelvis her constant companion. On Tuesday morning, she awoke in the dark of the predawn, the covers of her pallet twisted about her on the floor. The heat from the infection was a recurring wave now, washing over her, threatening to submerge her entirely. She sat up and pushed her hair from her eyes. Tom lay quietly on the couch, Nan sprawled full length across Eliza’s chair. Claire rose and made her way out onto the porch, where the morning air was already hot and sticky. When she stood, her legs were unsure beneath her. She found her way to the outhouse.
Though Claire never forgot it was to come, when she let her water go, the burning was a surprise. The initial shock was the worst, and she spasmed, squeezing her bare knees in her hands. Each time she hoped it would be better.
The evening before, Doc Peters had sent word that the sulfas hadn’t shown up yet, that he would write to Memphis again.
When she was finished and stood, Claire had to grip the door as a wave of dizziness took hold of her. She pushed her nightgown back down and padded barefoot into the yard.
She made it as far as the porch before she had to sit down. A truck passed on the road, field workers who watched her intently as they went by. Embarrassed to be seen in her nightgown, she stood up again and a coolness came over her. She pushed her hair back from her eyes and discovered she was sweating freely.
Claire went to the iron stove that squatted in the middle of the kitchen, swung its belly open. She took the ash can from the corner with the small shovel, and she began scooping the cold ashes from the stove. When she had cleared enough, she put the can back in the corner for Tom to take out later and began to bring in wood from the pile outside the back door. The logs were from the big windstorm three years back. Some had sat on the ground for too long and were spongy with rot. As she picked each one up, Claire turned it on end and tapped it against the others to roust the spiders and pill bugs. Twice she was overcome with dizziness and had to drop into the chair next to the stove.
When she had loaded enough wood to get breakfast cooked, she gave the flue handle three cranks to clear it and got the big box of matches from the top shelf. She touched the match to a pile of twigs and leaves. They started up quickly with a quiet crackling, but the smoke pooled around the burning twigs, and the flame faded to nothing.
“Draft,” Claire muttered to herself, and gave the flue handle another few cranks. She went through the front room and into the yard. She looked about for leaves that were dry enough, but could only gather the ones from the top of the piles as those farther down were on their way to becoming dirt again. When she had filled the hem of her nightshirt, she went back to the kitchen and thrust the pile of them into the open mouth of the stove. When she put the match to the leaves, they caught quickly and the fire spread. Claire began to feed twigs into the fire, slowly using larger and larger kindling until she was sure that it had taken and was drawing well. She latched the door closed.
Next she got the big skillet down from the shelf and put it atop the stove. Her mother kept a crock of bacon grease, and Claire put a spoonful into the skillet. It would take nearly an hour for the stove to get hot enough to cook on, and the grease would tell her when it was ready.
Tom hadn’t refilled the cedar bucket of well water that stood to one side of the back door before going to bed, so Claire removed the lid and took the bucket down to the stone well. The worn path through the field grass had been padded smooth by a thousand trips before, and the ground was cool and damp against her feet. The well had its own bucket tied to a lift rope, and Claire dropped it down, feeding out rope until the well took no more and she knew that she’d reached water. Her pa had long ago tacked a horseshoe to one lip so the bucket would turn over. Claire counted to three and then began hauling. As a child, she’d pulled water from the well, and she watched for the old knots that she knew marked the halfway point. The sustained effort of hauling the water made her breath come strangely short, and Claire had to steady herself for fear that she would drop the bucket and have to start over. She counted one knot, then two, then the bucket was at the lip of the well, the water clear and cold. A dipper hung on the well wall and she drank to wet her dry mouth. Then she transferred the water to the cedar bucket and began lugging it back to the house.
She put the cedar bucket back in its place beside the door and covered it once again. In the skillet, the grease’s shape had softened somewhat. Claire took the tin coffee pot and filled it from the cedar bucket, setting it next atop the stove. It would take nearly as long as the skillet. Claire sat once again. When she brought her hand before her face, she saw that it had a mild shake to it that try as she might, she could not still. There were coffee beans to grind, but Claire found that she couldn’t command her legs to stand. She was still sitting there, eyes shut, the coffee pot lid gripped in one hand, when her mother came in an hour later to