said, turning toward the hallway again.
Well, the old house is cooler, he said. You'll thank me come July. And then he added, as if in answer to a question, I was born in that house. And Aloma, feeling there was nothing she could really offer in response to that, said only, Oh.
Orren reached over then, and in a gesture that she recognized from the day she arrived, one that was new in its filial reserve, he patted her on the shoulder the way he might touch a stubborn animal, and she pulled away suddenly, turning her face. She blinked away the play of feeling on her features. But his eyes were not on her, they had not left the dim low hallway and the closed doors there. She left him where he stood, staring with his arm still partially raised, and walked out empty-handed into the sunshine. She leaned against the raised tailgate, waiting. Beyond the truck, the cow pasture fence flanked one side of the house. Tall bluegrass bearded the posts of the fence where otherwise the grass was short, mown low on the one side, grazed low on the other. Her nose found the green scent of grass in the midst of the manure, hay, hoof-churned soil, the heated mechanical oiled smell of the old truck—all of that mixed in the nerved air, none of it familiar. She lived in a place where nothing reminded her of anything and all that had come before was unknown. For her, the land was starting. And though she had known Orren for a year and a half, she fidgeted now with the dawning sense that perhaps they were only starting too. She remembered the first time he'd spoken of marriage. He'd said one day, You gonna be my wife or what? and she'd made a joke of it, said, Sure, but don't get too stuck on me—I'm not long for this place. His eyes had danced and then he winked at her and only later it disconcerted her, that wink; it seemed to make a fool of her, or it rendered her a little girl suddenly, all aspiration and no plan. And no will to execute a plan if she had one. She thought back to their late-night rides and she divined now the many unspoken rules of engagement she'd been ignorant of at the time. Perhaps her ignorance had been unremarkable, even common. She chewed her lip.
Orren walked out of the house with the box in his hands and they slid into the truck and as he was cranking the ignition and pushing into first, she looked at him furtively, trying to reconcile the features she saw in front of her with the boy's face from the photograph in his old room, the boy grinning without reserve. He felt her staring at him.
What? he said.
Nothing.
He shrugged and then his hand weighted on the right side of the wheel and the truck carved the dust toward the house.
Hold up a minute, she said and she placed her hand on the wheel lightly to stay him. He braked, looked over at her. I haven't really seen the place yet, she said.
Don't let's do it now, he said. My stomach thinks my throat's cut.
Come on, Orren, she said. I live here now, I'm not visiting. I'd like to at least see where I live at.
He looked over at her with his blue eyes and for a second it seemed that he was considering something that was vaguely troubling to him. Then he said, Yes ma'am, and cut the wheel with both hands so the axle complained and the cab tilted like a boat on water. He drove the truck down past the stock barn and the cow pasture. The barn itself, painted a deep and decaying red, looked to be in mid-shudder with its rough boarden sides loosing from its crib frame.
That barn must be about a hundred years old, Aloma said.
No, he said, not near forty. It's a third barn. The first got burnt down by sympathizers that come around the ridge burning crop barns and then my granddaddy tore up the next one when one of the rafters fell in and killed his horse. He built this one all crookwise, put that calf gallery on the early side.
Oh, where are the horses at now? she said, casting back over her shoulder into the shadowy interior of the barn where the stalls were piled with hay or tools but otherwise barren. A few chickens looked drowsy and shipwrecked by the wide door.
I sold em, he said.
What? When?
The day after the funeral.
What for? she said.
For cash, Aloma, he said and he punctuated his words with a hard look. They drove on and the cows turned to watch as the truck passed. One cow, her belly swollen and low, swung a gentle heavy head and stepped once in their direction. Aloma half turned in her seat.
That's the fattest cow I ever saw, she said.
She's pregnant, said Orren. And Aloma barked out pure laughter at herself, but because Orren did not join her—and he once would have, she knew that as she sneaked a sideways glance at him—it sounded hollow, like her mouth was echoing a joy that had already passed. She settled back in her seat and looked away from him and the barn. She tucked her left hand between her legs and pressed her knees tight together. With her right hand, she gripped the door where the window rolled down and touched the dust that sanded the vinyl and the chrome there. When she withdrew her hand and looked into her cupped palm, the dust clung to her. There was dust on her shirt, on her face.
Tobacco, said Orren, looking past her and she followed his gaze.
I know it, she said, her voice husked out in a whisper.
It ain't much, he said as if she had not spoken, but you don't need much. It sells pretty high. Corn out to the ridge, he said and he pointed out past the steering column to the field of corn that touched the skirt of the ridge as it rose out of the tilled bottomland.
She looked over the tobacco. The plants' lower leaves splayed wide from the skinnier tops, but they were not tall and the leaves, though green, depended slightly from the stalk in early, unnatural declension, a weathered anemia she saw when they drew close. Beneath the flagging breadth of the butts lay the tanned face of the soil—not an Indian red, but a pale color paupered by the sun.
They look kinda puny, she said.
It's too goddamn dry, Orren said. If I make a buck this season, I'll transplant into that field next year, and he nodded toward a fallow field that lay to the south, she could just see its bare face beyond the tobacco.
The thing is, I only want … he said, but then his sentence closed down unfinished. He grimaced out at the fields and she saw the deep elevens etched between his eyes, eyes that were the color of the sky and just as distant. He looked to her like a thing seized, as if all his old self had been suckered up from his body proper and forced into the small, staring space of his eyes. She did not like these new blinkless eyes of his and she did not like the way his words all collapsed in his new way of talking. As if his tongue could not bear the weight of words any longer. Or the person beside him were not there.
Orren brought the truck around the far end of the fields, under the upsweep of the rising, wooded ridge and then back around the cornfield so that they came upon the house from the east. They said nothing further and Aloma watched as the house grew larger and whiter, its disuse and age arriving in higher and finer detail as they approached. Orren drove up the slope and parked behind the house so the late-afternoon sun stoked a fire on the windshield and Aloma had to close her eyes before she said, Well, I guess I better cook us something. Orren's only response was to help her carry the box of kitchenware into the house. She didn't know what she was going to cook and she didn't know how to use the mixers and casserole dishes they'd brought up, but she would learn. As she was hanging the pots and pans from the hooks on the walls, Orren set off away from the house, his cigarette answering momentarily for his presence before it too faded, and in a minute or so, she heard the tractor start up and move away out of her hearing. She eyed the empty kitchen and set to work until it was dark.
Aloma had never
