that little one is your husband. It was a question switch-hitting as a statement.
Aloma did not blink this time. You're goddamn right he is, she said evenly and her face did not alter, but a flush ruddied her cheeks before she even finished her sentence. The woman's smile fell by increments until her lips were a little red slash across the bottom half of her face. She uncurled one taloned hand, palm up. Sixteen ninety-five, she said. And instead of using the tab, Aloma paid her cash out of Orren's billfold, then picked up the bags, turned her back on the woman, and left without another word.
She was sent to the mission school the month before she turned a thankless twelve, not because her aunt and uncle couldn't handle her anymore, but because there were nine in the house now—the adults, their five children, one foster child, and Aloma. Her aunt and uncle had always been fine to her, they possessed a kind of hollow-headed decency that couldn't be disparaged. When they told her of the school, they were gentle as doctors, and their voices said, This won't hurt a bit, and in fact, it had not really, at least not that Aloma could recall. Only that first night she found that her eyes stung and to make them stop she turned facedown into her pillow and let them tear with her mouth open ragged against the cotton ticking, but in the morning her eyes were better and she did not cry again, at least not over that.
It was not that her aunt and uncle hadn't cared for her— they had never made her feel guilty for their taking her in when they had no money—but they'd cared in a middling, impersonal way that instinctively reserved their best for their own. During her first year at the school, they made their small familial efforts, they phoned her once a month on Sunday afternoons and sent little cartooned magazines from their church about crossing a wide river in a phalanx of other refugees or about Ruth and her numerous losses. Until she began to play piano, Aloma read these again and again, carefully, stacked them in neat piles under her steel-framed bed. She wondered what it meant to uncover a man's feet, to sleep in his bed, to travel to a far country, to see enemies drowned. She wondered what kind of luck was required to be someone other than the person you were born to be.
The school carried her into a deeper cleavage of the mountains than the one she had known at her uncle's trailer, which jagged out like an aluminum finger from a limestone wall topped by firs, bone out of bone. There the night carried on and on until ten in the morning, then the tip of the finger finally burned with its first sun. When she arrived at the school, Aloma shared a small concrete room with two other girls and here too the mountain walls staggered and threated up over them all. The sun did not appear in the wound of the holler until long past eleven where it remained until Spar Mountain, like a curtain of earth, cut the light before it could naturally sputter out. It was a chasmed world without the twin ceremonies of morning and evening.
Aloma lived in this dark place, a dark county in a dark state, and it pressed on her ceaselessly as a girl until she finally realized in a moment of prescience that someday adulthood would come with its great shuddering release and she would be free. Then she would leave and find a riseless place where nothing impeded the progress of the sun from the moment it rose in the east until it died out easily, dismissed into the west. That was what she wanted. That more than family, that more than friendship, that more than love. Just the kind of day that couldn't be recalled into premature darkness by the land.
The only thing she remembered fondly from her years at her uncle's trailer was a piano, old with a tiger-eye top, its weight causing the linoleum floor to sag. Her aunt played on Sundays after church and the children were made to sit, the restless grappling mass of them, and sing along. But the churchy songs soon bored Aloma, hymns were not enough, they contained the sound in a too-small box of predictable chords. She wanted to see her aunt's fingers spider up and down the length of the keyboard, from the woody lows to the tiny baby sounds of the upper register. She always wanted more than she was given and secretly wished her aunt's hands would slip and press two neighbor keys at once. It was always dissonance that she liked best.
When she learned that the settlement school offered a piano class, Aloma remembered the keys she had never heard struck—their tiny silent voices—and she was choked with desire for it. There were six pianos in the school and there would be six students in the beginning piano class. They let her in because she wrote please in big block letters at the bottom of her application and she pressed so hard with her fist that her pen tore through the paper and marked the laminate top of the desk.
In two years she had thoroughly impressed everyone, most of all herself. She had never been good at anything—not rotten, but not gifted either—so that she was eternally overlooked, and her new skill damped somewhat the sullen disposition her uncle had warned her teachers about. She had exhausted all the piano the school could offer and she was sent twice a week to a woman in Perryville who had a piano degree from up East, but who had married a mine foreman and now played at a Baptist church and took students. The woman, Mrs. Boyle, had given her the Mozart and the Liszt that were now packed carefully away in the few boxes she had brought to the farm. She showed her how to arch her fingers so they fell in a swag from the platform of her hands and how to keep her shoulders down and loose and that yes, she was good, but that was only because she was in a backward place and she had much to learn if she ever wanted to get out and make music in what the woman called the real world. Yes, Aloma thought, that's where she was headed, to the real world. She felt a fierce want at the words. During the long unnatural nights, when the holler lay black under a sky lit far above the mountain walls, she thought about this, about other places. She tried to imagine exactly how leaving would feel. But it was so good, it promised such impossible pleasure, and all her pleasures so far had been such small lusterless things, that she found she could not imagine it all. The closest thing she could conjure was that it would be the exact opposite of lack, but even the hope of it did not feel the way she thought pleasure should, so she counted the nowhere days of her growing up and she waited.
Then after all her dreaming, when her final year arrived, she stared down her future with an unblinking eye. She had no money, no people to speak of. She wanted nothing more than to study the piano in some faraway place, but when the school asked her to continue after graduation and be the staff pianist for their music program, she agreed, because she had nowhere else to go and no way to get there. She ended up staying three years.
Before she knew Orren, she had waited for him. She stood in a line with the older teachers, impatient for the college farm boys to arrive, the assembly was waiting. But the boys were late. It was twenty-five miles as the crow flies, but they had not accounted for Slaughter Creek, its mad mountain-carved curves as it strove down from its headwaters to the larger Bondy River or its switchbacks that laxed the embankments and slapped against the road and the coal towns that hung precarious over its edges. The waters rose and flooded the gullible shantytowns each spring, flung trailers downstream and collected them there in tindered heaps like bleached and broken crayons. The creek churned and broke over rocks as it ran, it ran thick with forgotten things, appliances, hubcaps, dolls, animals, the debris of people who owned little worth remembering so the loss was barely noted. And along its rank spill, the coal trains escaped, black-topped, pollutive. Their hatched tracks crossed and recrossed the road that ate up three counties in its undulations, slowing the boys as they came, Orren at the wheel and driving hard against lost time.
When the boys crossed the last tracks and finally pulled into the school lot, they tumbled from the white van, yanking agricultural placards and pamphlets from the rear seats, and the teachers rushed forward to help them. Aloma followed, ostensibly to carry posters, but really to look at the boys and watch them move about in their Wranglers and boots with their caps pulled low and earnest over their brows. Only the boy who had driven stood still by the front wheel well and leaned against the van, keys dangling from a crooked finger that appeared to have been broken and never properly set. When Aloma stood by the van door waiting to be handed a pile of posters, she stole a look at him, but he was already glancing sideways at her and she thought that was wicked and could not help but like it. When she walked back into the building, a WHERE'S THE BEEF? poster balanced on her forearms, she wondered if he was looking at her from behind
