not complain. She unearthed a cookbook in the old kitchen pantry, cleared it of its dust, and forged ahead and when she made her first honest meal—the noodles underdone and the chicken tough as jerk— and Orren did not comment, she took it as the compliment it was not. She grimly assumed the duties that were hers, all of which confined her to the house. She had known that this would be part of her life on the farm. She had known without seeing it that when Orren said, I'm taking the farm—and not auctioning it, not selling it off, not even taking anyone on right away but doing it all himself to keep costs low—it would be a great deal for the two of them to handle. And she knew that she would have a house to run, but she'd hoped it would be the smaller house. He had told her of it that very first night when he'd described the farm. He had told her the old house was falling down, the one built by his great-great-grandfather, which his mother had moved out of when Orren was a little boy, only two months after his father died. The house was more than Emma wanted now that she had a farm to run, where before she'd only chased after little boys, and suddenly she was all over the land from the sewing to the bundling, the fencing, the cows and the horses. The only thing she never learned anything about was the machines, and when they broke, she would always shoo the boys away. It was years before Orren realized that she sent them off because she did not want to cry in front of them. Pouring money into machines she ought to know how to fix tore her up. He laughed when he said this, leaned his head back on the seat and looked up at the cone top of Spar Mountain, smiling. She could be right tough, he said. That's about when I quit riding horses.
When? said Aloma.
When I was seven, eight maybe. Right not long after Daddy died.
Why's that? Aloma said.
Two things. One, this old bitch hoss run me out into the pond once, it was pretty deep, and kept me there till after dark and I was too scared to get down and wade my own self out.
Oh no, she laughed.
Alligators. He grinned. But Mama found me. She was mad as hell at me and that horse too. I don't think I never touched that horse again. And two, that's about the time when it was just work. We always done chores before, but when Daddy died, then it was either let the whole thing go to hell or go to work. He shrugged. Mama worked the most, though. I'll give her her due.
Aloma wondered now, Had she ever worked? She had, but it wasn't the same thing, learning to play the piano. She had never been driven by the imminent loss of something like a home. It was more a matter of what she did not have than of what she could not stand to lose. She had wanted to possess something and when she wanted a thing, she wanted it bad. And it was sheer luck that she happened to be good at the one thing she wanted. The fingerwork came easy and so did the memorizing—she did not even have to try, a fact that she liked to show off every week and it both pleased and rankled her teacher, who wanted her to slow down and listen and obey the page, something Aloma could not do when she was young, she whipped the pieces into a wild spirit of her own invention. Mrs. Boyle said Aloma could make people dance at a wake. It was not a compliment. So she reined her in, talked her down, but she never touched the bold part of Aloma's brain that could seize the scores and hold them—sometimes for years without the pieces atrophying—and then release them so a roomful of people were compelled to sit up and listen. Mrs. Boyle was stingy with her compliments, she demanded a great deal, all the while watching carefully the girl who stared fixedly ahead at the piano like a blindered horse. She saw in Aloma a singular want, the fierce driving need of the dispossessed.
But during her first weeks in the house, Aloma did not think about what she wanted, she did not have time to think about the piano or its lack. She strove only to line up her wanting with the same want that sent Orren out of the house each morning and kept him there until the sun fell. She white-knuckle-washed all the windows in the house with ammonia and water mixed in a bucket, and scrubbed on her knees all the wood floors of the house with an old grooming brush she found under the sink. With linseed oil and vinegar, she shined every surface, excepting the piano, which she left to idle in the living room. In the root cellar, where she ventured with a flashlight in her hands, she found an old pie safe with a punched tin front and she was inspecting its backside when she saw the four-foot house snake that sent her scrabbling backward up the cobwebbed wooden steps to the safety of the lawn. She slammed the cellar doors down and stalked there, jittery running her hands through her hair to rid it of remnant cobwebs.
There was no radio in the house to keep her company while she worked, but she tried not to think on it. She did not want to waver. But sometimes when she found herself chopping vegetables at the counter, as the knife tapped home on the wood of the block, her ears caught at the rhythm, or she found herself humming a tune and her fingers jolted for an instant, wanting to stretch on the keys. She would miss it if she let herself, but she was busy in the big house and she vowed to wait until the right time to speak, if her temper did not flare like a match and burn the right opportunity down.
Now in the fading hours of another afternoon, she stood in the kitchen and read the instructions on the back of a bag of rice. She had spent hours bent over the cookbook, learning to slice fatback into her greens and to collect bacon grease in empty glass coffee jars when they ran empty. Her cooking had improved greatly since her first days at the house. The kitchen was her favorite room with its high walls, its white ceiling creeped with discoloration and cracks like old hairs on a skull. The sunlight touched her in this room. Its windows opened to the south, the east, and the north. And when she faced the stove, she could not see the mountains.
With the rice water rolling to a boil, she wandered out of the kitchen through the dining room with its gold pineapple wallpaper, its curio cabinets. She did not go into the front room where the photographs stared out from their wall, she leaned against the door jamb between rooms, uncommitted. Outside, a late light crescendoed to gold over the grasses. Light found the piano, lit its scrolled feet and the swirling and striping of its grain, brown on black-brown. In its splitting and sinking frame she saw the formidable wrack of its previous beauty. She stared at the thing. The house was silent. The crickets had not yet begun to rub. Aloma drummed her fingers onto the wood of the door jamb and thought yet again of Mrs. Boyle and her many hours at the piano. The woman had driven her, drilled her— rapping at Aloma's knuckles with a blue-and-red conducting pencil when she was irritated with Aloma's drumming, as she called it—Are you going to play piano for me or are you going to drum in a rock band? She said the music was found in the silence as much as sound. The pauses birthed the phrase and funeraled it too, the only thing that gave the intervening life of rising and falling pitch any meaning. Without silence there was no respite from the cacophony, the endless chatter and knocking, the clattering pitches. That is what she said, chatter and knocking—though Aloma did not really believe her and she had never learned to take her time or trust to patience. It was Mrs. Boyle, so concerned with sound, who had affected her talk as well. No, Miss Aloma, can't should not sound like paint. Cain't. Can't, like pant. Can't? Can't, exactly. She'd come away from those lessons a bit altered each time—Drop those aitches, said Mrs. Boyle, drop those aitches—less the girl who had left her aunt and uncle's with stinging eyes and more the girl who was always looking outward, getting ready to leave, the girl who dropped her aitches.
She had burned the rice. The black smell reached her and she started up and ran to the kitchen where it was already crisping brown into black on the bottom of the pot. She carried the pot out to the concrete steps and stood before the fan that she'd set on a chair by the open door. The artificial wind tugged her blouse forward around her and flapped the steam from the pot. Aloma could see Orren down in the pasture with his hands up under a cow's udder, doing God knows what, but he would come soon, the westering light was growing red even as she stood, the steam spilling away from her. She had half a mind to throw that rice down to the cows, but Orren would say, Now, why you done that, the way he did every time she wasted. Her eyes narrowed at the thought. She looked down at the rice held out before her, the center was still white as cotton so she kept it.
When Orren came up, his face was rubied from a June sunburn or only the heat of the day even as it
