needs tuned up, we might could do that.
I don't think that's enough.
Well, said Orren, and then in a way that didn't sit right with her, That's all I reckon we can do.
I need a real piano, Aloma said, raising herself on one elbow so that he would be forced to see her more clearly.
Last time I checked, Aloma, that was a real piano.
Orren, I'm a pianist, she said, hissing the word. I want to get serious about buying a real piano so I can play. We always planned I'd go on and I still want to. I want to go to school.
Orren shook his head before she even finished her first sentence. He didn't look at her, though her own stare was unbroken. We can't do that, he said, and her ear caught at his long, drawled vowel, the way it swooped in the air, and for a hopeful second she thought he would say we can do that.
Why can't we? she said.
Because, Aloma, we ain't got the money.
Why not? she said.
Are you being dumb with me? He looked at her straight now.
No, she said.
Goddammit, Aloma, he said and he rose up on both elbows to better meet her eyes, we ain't got dick for a nickel. I'm a happy man I can even feed you at night. I can't afford to shit, much less buy you a piano. Be reasonable.
When she made no response, he went on, softer, You know I want you to play your music, but I got to worry this farm right now. This is all I got, right here, right now. I'm fixing to get you a piano, but I need you to be still about it. Just for a while. We'll get this place going and then I don't mind to buy you anything you want. But I need you to set tight. I swear it won't be long. If you can just set tight …
He settled back down onto the mattress and then, as if it were an afterthought, reached out to pull her in close against him so the scent of his sweated daywrung body bit her nostrils. When he turned his face up toward the ceiling, stretching his neck just slightly so his chin jutted and hardened for a moment, she saw the lie in the way he moved, heard it in his overearnest words. He was lying mostly to himself, she was just a secondary casualty.
You thirsty? she said suddenly, rolling out of his grasp, which was too loose to hold her, and stood unsteadily on the floor. Her legs shook a little from holding his body.
Yeah, he said, but don't work the tap up here. It's rusted out.
She padded down the wooden steps into the shadowed living room. Why he wanted to live in this old place and not the new where there was light and linoleum and good well water, she couldn't say. It was as if he were trying to make it clear to a world that wasn't even watching that he was in this thing alone, that there was suffering under way for the one left alive, but that he could endure. Perhaps even endure it better the rougher it was, as if couched in the pain was the secret satisfaction of suffering. He would prolong now the sorrow if that was all there was to prolong. She walked into the kitchen and filled up a glass and, unable to quiet her thoughts, she watched the rings of light spiral the skin of her hand. As she carried the cold glass back through the front room, she stopped suddenly, her heart cramped in her chest, and she looked up. The photographs hung serried frame to frame on the wall and she did not want to walk toward them, but she did. She met their gazes, the ones she could, there were too many to count. Boys, not older than fifteen or sixteen in their uniforms, the butternut color hand-drawn, their small swords gray and toyish. A little boy, his eyes unfocused, with a tall dog beside him. And young and old women with their flat-cheeked faces and knifed middle parts, all in their black dresses. Everywhere she looked, women in black with their hands on their black Bibles or folded on the fabric of their full skirts. And babies too, their dark eyes closed or open, some of them blurred in motion, while the adults simply stood and managed themselves for the long moment of the gaping shutter. And in the middle, she recognized Orren as a little boy with his mother, father, and Cash standing around him. They posed in front of a white clapboard church. Aloma leaned in. The boys and their father were smiling, but Emma appeared to have only just looked up, no certainty of expression to be read on her face. Aloma straightened up. Perhaps it wasn't about a piece of land, it wasn't about what was expected of Orren, and it wasn't about herself, the girl he once said he would marry. A soul loves most what is lost, so it was about all of these here, even the ones long dead, many he'd never met and probably didn't know the names of. It wasn't fair. Here she was in the flesh, her flesh having just ushered his flesh into hers, but he could not rest even in her. He was bound in perpetual motion to all of them. She watched their pitiless eyes and her mouth twisted. She wanted to say, I'm defenseless before you, even if you are dead. And they wanted to say back, Yes, yes, you are.
Aloma. Orren's voice from upstairs. You alright?
She turned toward the sound. Yes, she said, lying to him out loud for the first time.
The days of her life on the farm took on a kind of regularity. After she rose in the morning with Orren and saw him off to the fields and cows, she continued to pick away at the house. She swept the floors and the crumbling back steps every day mopped every other day mostly because Orren left collects of crumbled mud as he came and went. She emptied all the kitchen cabinets, brushed out mouse droppings and set traps, looking first thing every morning for newly dead mice to toss out with the trash. When she found one, she carried it ceremonially to the can and let go the mouse so it fell to the bag's bottom, its neck still pinched under the bow, its tiny lifeless paws curled gentle and loose as a sleeper's hand.
One morning as she carried the trash to the bin on the side of the house, she found the withered remains of Emma's crow-kept garden. It had suffered in the weeks since Emma's death. Black-ribboned worms clung to the remaining beans that drooped down off their short poles, and a great burst of zinnias withered into greige masses, their eyes turned groundward. Only a blue coned flower clung to its color, though the cone had dropped half its tiny petals and browned. Aloma bent down to it, but even as she stooped, a white-bellied bee alighted, its wings quivering madly, taking the last pollen from a miniature yellow heart. Then it flew away and the plant remained, it stood diminished but indifferent. Aloma thought briefly of rebuilding the garden, though she did not know how. But in the end she did not want to tend another woman's garden, she did not want to tend any garden.
Once or twice when she was bored in the evening and supper was already prepared and waiting, she went with Orren to bring in the cows. She trailed after him as he wandered through the pasture, out around the hillock of trees with its purchase of shade to where they could no longer see the house and the ridge loomed high over them, a wooded limestone wall under a rack of clouds. There the cows—the few they had—collected around the pond, most times with their straight legs stock-still in the water like peculiar cumbrous waterbirds. Orren would circle around behind them, Aloma behind him, and up he would come alongside the oldest, with its aged world-weary face situated on its slim head. He touched her behind her shoulder blades, which winged out slightly below her neck, said, Sookcow, and went on walking in the direction of the house and the barn. The cow came along after him, her rump scissoring in measured paces. Aloma kept close to Orren as the others straggled in step behind. She was still wary of such big creatures and she glanced back frequently over the bodies of the cows to make sure they didn't come too close. Sometimes she pressed Orren for information when she judged his face eased up enough to allow for it. She wanted to know how old a cow could get and how much grass it ate, whether it had a bunch of babies or just a few.
Once, after a few of these sessions, she said, And cows and steers are related how?
Walking beside her, Orren made a motion like falling asleep into his hand, tucking his chin and pressing his splayed fingertips to his forehead. But he
