the house was that of a bad rumor in the ear.
With so much daylight left, they grounded their packs and began to work. They employed hatchets and hands to get what they could from the timbers of the house and a collapsed outbuilding some fifty yards distant under a wig of kudzu. Winter and Rain drew the nails from the wood and passed them down the line to Wolf, who beat them as straight as they could be beaten. Once they had collected enough salvage from the back end of the house they carried it forward and ripped the decay away, installed the improvised flooring of clapboard, slats flush as the rough hew would allow. By the hour of starshine they had covered the parlor and the front vestibule. They got all their gear off the ground and away from the hazard of snakes and built a cook fire in a hastily scratched hole a few feet beyond the granite stoop.
Their only food was oatmeal boiled in a Coleman skillet. Wolf squatted over it and eyed the burbling fare. A mood of exhaustion had come over him. Speech stopped as they watched the meal, waited for it, unable to talk until they conquered the obligation of their own bellies.
Wolf divvied the portions and they ate, finishing nearly as soon as they commenced and then wiping their fingers into every circle and slight contour of their bowls to glean whatever residue they might. The food was not much but still enough to tend them toward sleep and Wolf was the first to succumb, kissing both his wives goodnight before climbing the steps to the front of the house and collapsing on his sleeping roll.
The two women sat close and held each other. When their voices came they were like something ill-maintained put to use.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“I don’t either, baby. It’s okay.”
“Are you still hungry?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. Real bad.”
The wood fire rollicked and sprawled, flung out a parody of shadows against the brush.
Winter was up before the others the next morning, stoked the flames so they would serve for heating some water she’d fetched from a nearby spring, a thin dance of stream that she hoped was as clean as it appeared. There was only instant coffee to boil and pour out in their tin mugs. Everything else had been eaten to the bottom and the containers burned.
“We’ll need some things from town,” Winter told Wolf as soon as he stumbled into the sun of midmorning, having slept for the better part of twelve hours. He nodded, yawned, called Rain over to him. He looped his arms at her waist and drew her thin body toward him, nuzzled her at the nape of the neck until she began to twist against his hold.
“Hey there, Little Bit. I need you to resupply while me and Mama work on the next room. Think you can handle that?”
She said that she could.
“Good girl. Here, take this and be smart with it, okay?” he said, pressed a greasy roll of cash into her palm, slapped her lightly on the ass.
Rain tucked the money into her rucksack after emptying out her possibles on the floor next to her sleeping roll. She told Winter goodbye before hefting the pack onto her back and setting out toward town.
She walked down through the hardwood brakes until she came to a clearing that bordered a dirt road. Already the cicadas were sounding their tidal clamor. The noise was overwhelming and she imagined she could locate herself in relation to it, entangled but guided by this disaster of sound. She regretted the lack of water as soon as her sandals touched the dust of the road. For so long it had been one road after another. She wondered how many miles she had walked in the time she had been joined to Winter and Wolf. Not just in transit from one camp to the next, one home to another, however short lived, but all the steps in between. The lone hikes through the deep woods in search of a vision. The burning in the legs and the damaged soles of her feet as she walked out to the edge of herself to find the bright rim of pain where truth was purported to lie. How could she calculate and weigh that and what did it signify if she could?
After a while she caught a ride into Newport in the back of a pickup hauling a small tractor in a wagon behind it. She had to make room amid tarp and assorted farmhand tangle, and every bone in her frame rattled as the vehicle gained speed on the rough back road, teaching her gratitude for pavement. Then there were the smells too, of grass and gasoline and horseshit. When the driver turned onto the macadam ten minutes later it all eased and thinned in the quickened slipstream, everything then lost to speed.
She thanked the farmer for the ride at the parking lot of the Food City, offered him a five-dollar bill for the ride, which he refused before he wished her luck in this hot day that promised no respite and was gone on his way. She discreetly counted what Wolf had given her. Forty-six dollars. A strange and painful kind of wealth in itself. In her hand it felt like something ready to detonate.
The air-conditioning attacked her. The coolness was extraordinary, exposing the outdoor heat for the enemy it was. She had to pause to steady herself, understand what it was to be human for a quick moment in this world of controlled climate before she unslung her ruck and stowed it on the bottom rack of the shopping buggy. She strolled forward, her skin raising goosebumps.
The aisles, overburdened with product, were like an accusation. She laughed quietly, knew how absurd that would seem to the people around her that something as simple as twenty variations of bread and bowtie pasta could create panic, but it was true. To reconcile herself to it required everything she could summon. She wished that she had thought to write out a list, give herself a scaffold to build from, but she’d lacked paper or pencil. It was strange that Wolf had entrusted her with this errand. Was he simply disposing of less-efficient help at the homeplace, or was this supposed to be a compliment to her competency, a belief that she was the right person to provide for them all? She liked to think so.
He couldn’t have known, of course, how apt his choice had been, what kind of experience she’d had gathering food with so little in her pocket. She had learned that well as a girl when her mother would be pulled under by one of her depressions and everything about the house would have run to permanent ruin if it hadn’t been for her. All she had then was what could be scrounged or what some man might have left in the cushions of the couch or on her mother’s bedside dresser. Many meals of beans and salted meat cooked down in the Crock-Pot sent one Christmas by her grandparents, a pair of aloof Mississippians who never once deigned to cross any threshold between them and their child and grandchild. Tall and broad Presbyterians who observed the semblance of propriety by sending letters each season on watermarked stationary the color of warm butter, saying nothing really in the correspondence other than the affirmation that they still acknowledged their daughter and her bastard offspring as relation, poor and misbegotten though it may have been.
She threw in a couple of bags of pintos, along with split peas and black bean soup, some yellow grits. She picked up onions, potatoes, and carrots too, knowing that it would be nice to have something to put in the broth. She stood in front of the butcher’s case for a while, weighed the tantalizing promise of red meat before she realized it would be impossible to justify, given the budget. She did get two cases of Natural Light, more for the guarantee of clean water than the negligible alcohol it contained. Once she checked through she had ten dollars left, a good buffer against future privation. Wolf would be pleased with her thrift.
She declined bags when the clerk offered, packing everything into the ruck herself before she cinched and secured the flaps, tossed it over her back, and tightened the straps until the freight rode high across her shoulders. She set out.
Once she cleared town she stuck out her thumb each time she heard the approach of a vehicle. The sun was starting its long afternoon decline, but
