Moa and Jenny arrived through the back door, their faces shiny and their hair woven back. They said their good-mornings, Moa resting a hand on Marie’s shoulder — weighty and kind.
They worked around the butcher-block table in the center of the kitchen, a great expanse of wood that Marie’s father had made for her mother. Marie had grown up on that table, sitting on one of its edges to watch her mother build pies, chop meat, peel innumerable potatoes and carrots and turnips, tear greens, slice apples and peaches, crack pecans. She knew the table’s cuts and burns, the knife marks and stains. Marie gave the table a thorough scrubbing every couple months, and she oiled it heavily after Christmas.
The women worked quietly, which had become their custom since Wilson and Roscoe went away.
The stone of the peach had always pleased Marie, its wrinkles like furrows in a newly plowed pasture or the deeply creased forehead of an old woman — like things soft to the touch. The stone was rough, though, nearly to scratching, and hard. Only a sick peach showed a weak stone, splitting with the flesh when cut, exposing the soft, flat seed inside. The fruit of those peaches clung to the sides of their stones, forcing her to hack away at the flesh in sloppy chunks. When the farm had been at its most prosperous, she’d allowed herself to throw those peaches out.
They filled huge bowls with slices, great heaping mounds of orange and pink and red, and then Marie added spices. She allowed only clove and cinnamon in her peaches — the sweet made subtly sharp in places, a small bite in the back of the throat — and she covered them with a light syrup mixture made from water and cane sugar.
It was hard not to think of Roscoe when she canned. He’d loved her peaches, exclaiming over their unique taste.
“What is that?” he’d asked the first time he tried one, forked from jar to mouth by Marie’s own hand.
“Clove, and cinnamon. More cinnamon than clove.” She’d fed him another.
He didn’t know spices at all — his mother didn’t use such things — and so she’d done something special for him the next Sunday. She’d baked shortbread, each flavored with one spice. They’d stood together in their small kitchen, there in the Lock 12 village, and she’d held a bottle to Roscoe’s nose: “Clove. It has a bit of bite. Now try the shortbread.” He’d grinned, that smile of his breaking his whole face into joy. “Now, compare it to nutmeg.” She’d held the spice jar and then offered the cookie. “Do you taste the difference?”
He did, and there — after only two — he’d pulled her to him, burying his face in her hair, squeezing her back with his great hands. “Thank you.”
“There are more.”
“No. Not just this. It’s more than the cookie lesson.” He’d brought his hands to her face. “Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for living this life.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d said those words, offered the same general gratitude — it wouldn’t be the last either — but Marie conflated every moment into this one. At times he had gotten specific, and so Marie knew the weight his words held, the reach of their meaning. He was grateful for his own profession, his escape from his father’s mines, his chance to pursue electricity, grateful for their house and their conversations and their lovemaking. Roscoe attributed every positive aspect of his life to their marriage, even the ones that had come before. He attributed too much.
But that was before Gerald was born. Afterward, their marriage accounted for little, if any, of his pleasure.
Marie left Moa and Jenny to the slicing so that she could start on the syrup. She preferred to cold-pack her peaches, putting the fruit raw into the sterilized jars, rather than submerging the fruit in the boiling syrup first. The syrup went in once the jars were full, then the lids came, then the rings. The women all took turns during the boiling, spelling each other in exchange for moments outside in the sun, the summer heat cooler than the kitchen steam, drier, even though water held tight to the air, a great humid blanket wrapped round them all season. Marie took deep breaths during her turns on the back stoop, great lungfuls of the scent-tinged air — grass and cornstalks and peanut plants, mulch and dung and mule hide. She’d grown to prefer these smells to the chalk-and-paper scent of a classroom, the tidy cleanliness.
Moa pushed out through the back screen door. She dabbed at her neck with the hem of her apron, light touches up to her jaw and then to her lips and cheeks and forehead: “Hot.”
Marie smiled.
“I’m worried about you, Miss Marie.”
Marie looked up at her. Moa was taller by a good six inches.
“Why?”
“You’re quiet even for you, and what with this electricity coming back — I don’t know. I worry it’s too much. Might spark too great a memory in you. Too much of Mr. Roscoe.” Moa squinted when she said Roscoe’s name.
Marie reached for Moa’s hand. “Don’t you worry about me, Miss Moa. Your boys will know what to do with that power when it comes.”
Moa squeezed. “All right. But you just tell me if there’s something you need.”
Marie nodded. She knew her times of going to Moa with worries were done, as gone as Wilson in his mine somewhere, lost like his paperwork. She could ask nothing of this woman who’d raised her, Moa’s mother role yet one more thing Roscoe had taken.
CHAPTER 18 / ROSCOE
My shoulder has mended the best it can. There was nerve damage, the doctor explained, along with a break in the clavicle. When the doctor finally unbandaged my arm, we discovered that it wouldn’t move much. I can operate my hand, now, in clumsy motions, and I’ve convinced my arm to hang along the side of my body, but the elbow is always bent, and the whole limb no longer moves from the shoulder. The only life in it resides below the elbow, and that life is limited.
In the mornings, I eat quietly in the mess, surrounded by men. They force their way into my silence, still talking about the incident.
“Shit, Martin, I saw Beau take that club to you.”
“And then a stint in the doghouse! Goddamn.”
“I didn’t think the warden let that kind of thing happen to his pets.”
“What’s it like in the infirmary? Got yourself a pretty nurse, didn’t you?”
Dean is nearby, a regular in the library now that he’s reading on his own, exchanging books every week, and he edges his voice louder than the others. “Let him be. Man’s had enough for now.”
Rash says Dean doesn’t come when I’m away, and I don’t know what to make of his loyalty. I help him locate books that fit his interests, but he doesn’t owe me this allegiance in the mess.
“You become a pet without us knowing?” someone asks him, but Dean doesn’t take it up, and the rest of the table lets it alone. I know better than to acknowledge his help here, but I’ll thank him when I see him on Friday.
I drop my tray at the dish line and request the bucket they keep for the dogs. “You back out there, Martin?” the man at the sink says, reaching below the basin to pull out a pail.