She looked to her father.
“It’s all right, honey. Just clear the table.”
It took her three runs to and from the kitchen to get it all.
I didn’t speak again until she was done. “Am I that awful?”
“We aren’t sure.”
I pressed my thumb and finger into my eyes until I saw red sparks against the backs of my lids. The food turned against my insides, and I yearned for Kilby, for the ease of routine, the simplicity of my meals and lodging.
My stomach doubled over itself, and I pushed myself quickly from the table, overturning my chair. I didn’t make it off the porch, but I got to the railing, and I heaved my dinner into the decorative shrubs that now lined the house. Maggie stood at attention on the walkway, unsure what to make of me. My body wouldn’t stop until everything was gone. When I could stand, I headed to the pump by the shop, bringing water up first to wash my face and mouth. Pumping with one hand, I held my head under the spout, the cold water shocking me conscious. Water ran in and out of my mouth, down my cheeks and chin, soaking my collar. I filled a rusted bucket to wash away the mess I’d made of the bushes, and like Jenny and her dishes, it took three trips. Maggie trotted along behind me.
I told myself to write Taylor a letter thanking him for that dog.
Wilson came out on the porch once I’d finished. I was sure he’d watched from a window.
“If it’s all right, I’ll hear the rest tomorrow,” I said. “I’d like to sleep now.”
“Course. Help me pull a few things from the shop.” Inside, Wilson threw a switch to cast the whole space with light, my thresher before us. “We’re still using it. We’ve had electricity a long time now — legally, that is. There was a big push right after we went away to electrify us backcountry folks. They used your same route.”
He was telling me how inequitably priced my project was, how much we’d lost for a gain we would’ve gotten just a little ways down the road.
Wilson pulled two oil lamps from behind a jumble of machine parts. “There’s oil in that can behind you. The lines are in.” I filled the lamps’ bases. “We just haven’t gotten them run through all the buildings. Could be something for you to do, if you want.”
“Where am I sleeping, Wilson?”
He handed me one of the lamps and a box of safety matches, yellow and wooden.
THE trail from the house had grown over, the grass itchy through my trouser legs. I could see that walk I took out to the north field, excited to tell Wilson about my plans to electrify the farm. “I’ll do this thing,” I’d said, “or I’ll leave.” They had seemed exclusive — the doing and the leaving — but I know now that they had always been entwined. The doing set in motion the leaving, which I suppose set in motion the return.
“We’ve not had time to keep it up,” Wilson said, as we emerged into the field where his old house stood. “But it’s yours as long as you want it.”
The brush had crept closer to the cottage, some of the old pines felled by hand or on their own. Creepers had taken over most of the siding, the few exposed planks closer to mulch than wood. New sounds ran their way around us — creaks and rattles, glass gone to shards in several of the windowpanes.
“Too much to do on the land,” Wilson said. “Too much to do at the big house.”
I was glad of the ruin, grateful to see something that had aged as much as I had. “Is there furniture?”
“Table and chairs. I won’t make any claims about the cleanliness, but there are beds to sleep in, plenty to choose from.”
The evening was bringing a chill, and I’d left my jacket in the big house. “There are blankets inside?”
“Plenty.”
“Thank Moa for the meal.”
“I will.”
I watched him walk through the grasses and brush. I should have called out, offered some sentiment about this place where we’d found ourselves. Instead, I went inside the cottage. The door latch was misaligned with the plate, unable to catch and hold. I would straighten it in the morning, drill new holes for the hinges, replace the rotted pieces of the doorframe.
“Come on,” I said to Maggie. “It’s not much more than your shed.”
She curved her spine in nervousness, tucked her ears close to her head, the ends trailing down her neck.
“Come on.”
She wouldn’t come.
The gloom of evening was already thick inside the cottage, and I lit both lamps to fight it off. A long table and benches stood in the center of the main room, cupboards along one wall, a sink with a hand pump, ladder-back chairs, a blackened stove in the corner. Two small bedrooms were on the left — one for the parents and one for the children. The outhouse was around the side.
I hoped for food in the cupboards and was rewarded with a few jars of pickled beets, peaches, and a small sack of dried meat. The sack was mouse chewed, the meat gnawed, but it was enough to coax Maggie in.
Maggie didn’t understand why she was in this house. She wasn’t hunting anyone, wasn’t working. She took the meat and chewed it slowly, her head hung with the effort. I closed the door behind her and sought out a broom in one of the cabinets. A dead mouse was in one of the corners, and when I opened the stove, I found three sparrows. They must’ve come through the chimney and gotten stuck inside, dying of thirst and starvation in that dusty tomb. I scooped them onto the pile I’d gathered and edged it all to the door. I again saw those chalky bodies drop from the hayloft of my parents’ barn, and I thought of the comfort I’d taken in my sister’s company. We’d shared our exile then, just as I was sharing it with Maggie now.
MAGGIE and I stomped around the cottage in the morning. We were both tired and cautious, neither of us having found much sleep. After nine years of the same noises and perpetual lights, the same smells and rough sheets and rougher blankets, it was hard to sleep in the quiet of a cottage in a stand of pines, with the rattle of broken glass and the shifting of branches, a down pillow and a thick mattress, old and musk soaked as they were. I’d eventually gotten down on the pallet that the children must have used, and on its thin mattress, just inches from the floor, I was able to sleep a bit.
Maggie and I circled out toward the fields to get our bearings, and we came to the power line. It ran straight from the big house, and it stopped just before the pines.
I figured I’d stay long enough to power the cottage, long enough to decide where to go. I’d never believed I would pass up electrical work were it to come my way. I’m sure my parole board didn’t either.
I heel-toed my way back to the cottage, a little less than fifty yards. We’d raised poles every twenty-five yards or so along the roads when I was with Alabama Power, but this line was lower and would benefit from extra support along the way.
“Three poles,” I said to Maggie. “We’ll cut them from around the back of the cottage to let in a bit more light. All right, girl?”
She sat and whined.
“You’re hungry.”
I had no desire to return to the big house, but I knew I would need Wilson and Moa’s help to live in the cottage, even for a short time.
They were on the front porch, sitting in the rockers, drinking from mugs.
“That dog’s not welcome in the house.”
“Wouldn’t think of it, Moa.”
“How’d you sleep?” Wilson asked.
“I didn’t.”
“Took me a full week before I could sleep in a bed at all.”
“More than that,” Moa said. “I’d find him curled up on the floor of the hall more times than not. Went on nearly two months.”