Maggie was sniffing at his one hand, unsure. She glanced toward the truck cab, and all I could give her was a nod before I looked back at the shop that held my thresher.
I don’t know how long I sat in the truck, but it stretched long and vindictive like my time in solitary. I got out only when I heard a woman calling my name.
I so wanted it to be Marie. I wanted her to appear before me and tell me she’d needed all that time to think it through — nine years, she needed, all right. But she had realized that I’d acted for her and Gerald, for the farm, even for Moa and Wilson and their children, as much as I’d acted for myself. She realized that I had to have my hands in electricity, that I was driven by all those attractions that lay hidden until ignited. I saw her take me into her arms, letting me bury my face in the thick hair she’d let fall down her back. I could smell the cooking she’d been doing for my return — the maple-and-bacon beans I’d fallen in love with, bread, roast chicken, coffee. I could forgive her silence if she could forgive the work I’d done.
But it was Moa standing near the front door, her hands held tight over her apron. She’d aged more than Wilson — more lines at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth, her hair gone gray along the edges of her face. She was heavier, too, broader.
Maggie rose from where she’d been waiting near the back wheel and followed me to the porch steps.
“I didn’t want him to collect you, you know,” Moa said. “Told him to let you find your own way. Like he did his. Go get yourself a job in a coal mine. See how it suits you.”
“You know I’ve spent time in a coal mine, Moa.”
“With your own daddy as the foreman. You spent most of your time up top.” Moa towered above me. “Wilson has his compassion for you, Mr. Roscoe, but it’s hard for me to see why.” She squeezed her hands tighter, then pulled them apart and slapped them against her thighs. “You took him right down with you, didn’t you? Never even tried to help.”
“I was in prison, Moa. What could I have done?”
“Told them it was your fault.”
“I did that. They didn’t listen.”
Moa lowered her eyes. “He lost his arm, Roscoe.”
“I’d change that if I could.”
“You’ve said your piece, Moa,” we both heard from inside, Wilson’s voice coming through the screen. “Let’s have some supper.”
“That dog’s not welcome in the house.”
“She’s never been in a house.” I put my hand on Maggie’s head as I told her, “Wait.” She lay down on the brick walk, which had been hard-packed dirt before.
The porch was clean and the rockers even shinier up close. Electric lamps graced the sides of the door, and it didn’t squeak when I opened it. Inside, everything was a greater version of itself, too. New wallpaper lined the foyer above the wainscoting, curving vines with starlike leaves and bright orange berries against a pale yellow background. Birds of all colors and shapes sat amid the branches, and in the middle of them, a yellow-orange squirrel held court. The old paper had been dark green and nothing more than an angular pattern.
A new electric chandelier dangled overhead, its crystals bright even when the bulbs weren’t lit. “Marie felt like lightening things up in here,” Moa said. “A while back, we took down all the old paper and put up new. You’ll see on the way to the table. Hang your coat.”
The stand was the same, tall oak with a box for umbrellas and a seat for putting on shoes. Its mirror reflected one of the squirrels just to the right of my head. My face had grown old and thin, and I looked preposterous against that wallpaper, like a tramp brought into a nursery.
“Come on through the sitting room,” Moa said.
I didn’t want to see any more.
The wallpaper in the sitting room was pink and light green, full of flowers and leaves. Gerald’s reading chair in the corner was now rose colored, an electric lamp next to it.
“I would like to sit down.” I went to that chair. I reached instinctively for a small book on the side table, a novel that Rash had forced on the other men, another Melville book about the sea. “It’s about mutiny,” Rash had demanded. “Isn’t that enough to interest them?”
“No.”
“You’ll fall asleep in that chair if you don’t get up,” Moa said. “Come on. There’s food to eat.”
I set the book back on its table and followed them through the wide arch to the dining room. The pink flowers had bled across the walls in there, too.
Moa poured me coffee, which was every bit as good as I wanted it to be. She brought out a whole chicken, then a crock of beans, corn bread, and fresh butter. The canned peaches were brilliant orange in their jar. Moa had cooked up some chard and collards with crisp bits of pork fat. She’d outdone my imaginings, this woman who was not my wife. And on my other side, I didn’t have my son, but rather a man whose arm I had helped to crush and cut loose from his body, whose skin I’d held a flame to in order to stanch the bleeding.
Moa recited from Deuteronomy, one of Chaplain’s favorite passages: “ ‘For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.’ Thank you, Lord, for this food.”
We said “Amen” together and worked through the meal without talking. I ate everything Moa put on my plate. I took second scoops and thirds. More, please. I had missed that food so much, and my mind could fix only on the plate and the fork and the knife, the meat dipped in the sweet-salty syrup of the beans, the moist corn bread spread thick with butter I had not tasted in years. Spices mixed with the peaches, clove and cinnamon, the greens bitter and sharp. The wallpaper didn’t matter, nor the company, the whiteness of the clapboards outside, the absence of the creeper, the new brick walkway, not Maggie lying there, the shop and its thresher, the growing crops. I was just a man eating his dinner.
“Thank you, Moa.”
“You are lucky I am a God-fearing woman, Mr. Roscoe. I’ll get the pie.”
It was peach, and she drizzled it with fresh cream.
“Another?” she asked when I finished my first piece.
“Please.”
Neither Wilson nor Moa had seconds, and they watched me with caution and worry as I finished mine. I wanted to rest a minute more in that food before they told me what was drawing all those lines across their foreheads.
“We’re living in this house now, Roscoe,” Wilson said. Crust was still on my plate, a few slivers of peach, a pool of cream. “Marie set us up here when she went to Mobile.”
It had never been my home — that big house. Not before, not then, certainly not now. “How often does she come back?”
“Infrequently,” Moa answered.
Nothing was left for me to do with the last of my pie but to push it away. “Who’s running the land?”
“We are,” Wilson said.
“Yes, but who’s paying you?”
“We are,” Moa repeated. “It’s been a while now.”
“How long?”
“Five years.”
I didn’t know how to put Moa and Wilson in Marie’s house and Marie in a school in Mobile. Did she have a view of the bay, gulls out the windows distracting her students?
“Where are your children?” This was the question I set upon, though it was the least of my interests.
Moa started gathering plates. “I can’t do any more of this. I’ll go get started on the dishes and send Jenny out for the rest.”
“So Jenny is here?”
Moa huffed and pushed through the door.
“You’ll have to give her some time,” Wilson said.
A beautiful, dark woman came out from the kitchen, hair in braids to her shoulders. She looked like her parents, but only their best parts. “Jenny,” I said, “you were just a little one the last time I saw you.”