Nothing Save the Bones Inside Her Read online

  She understood with clarity. The Lord was specific in his command that though she loved neither, she was to marry Angus Hardgrave, not the other man she knew, lip-biter Brad Chambers.

  The Lord reminded her of His trustworthiness, and told her that because she was a sinner she would doubt. However, by His grace, He would enrich her by deepening her understanding of His ways. In the end, her knowledge of good would be as deep as her experience of evil.

  She knocked dirt and dried grass from her knees and turned toward her house on the bottom of the slope below. So many questions. It was her house now that her father was gone, and the Lord was telling her to marry Angus Hardgrave. She stopped.

  Lord, what do I do with the house? I don’t understand how this solves anything. And what about Brad Chambers? Is Angus going to take care of him?

  She walked stiffly, knees unwilling to bend. She didn’t need the Lord to answer.

  He said she would doubt.

  He said she would fear.

  Two

  The walnut tree told me when Emeline Margulies turned eighteen. Law-wise in Pennsylvania, a girl burns her ships at eighteen. Her daddy was dead and she was alone, so I bound her with spells, talk of blue spruce situated off the front porch, small-mouth bass jumping bugs at the lake, and how sunshine bounces from the water to the orchard and turns pear blossoms gold. She bought every word and wiggled close. I took her wrist and got my hand on her neck and I couldn’t think of nothing save the bones inside her.

  I stand with her in a stone church a block from Madison. Pastor Denny thumbs to a folded page and Emeline presses a fistful of daisies to her heart. I look at the white petals and she looks at me. My eye patch still throws her. She pretends, but she sees it first and switches to my left eye. She blinks three times. Rubs her hand down her side.

  Pastor Denny says, “From Ephesians we are told, ‘Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.’” Denny faces Emeline and says, “That means you got to do as he says. Angus—you got a ring?”

  I drop my hand to my pocket. Emeline’s face is pale.

  Denny says, “…to be your lawful, wedded wife, until by death do you part?”

  “Yes sir,” I say. “’Til one of us is dead.”

  Denny repeats the oath to Emeline. She peers hard into my eye. Movement flickers at my extreme peripheral, but I don’t turn my head.

  Emeline gulps air. “I do.”

  I ease the band onto her finger. She lowers her arm and curls her hand. I’ll see a jeweler at some point, get the ring resized.

  “You can kiss her now.”

  I take her elbows, press my face to hers. She ain’t been kissed much, I suspect. Every time I get a grip on her skinny arms my mind goes elsewhere and I see things I want to take right now. I don’t close my eye, and she don’t close hers, and maybe she understands and maybe she don’t. I glance back and a fella I don’t know leans against the wall by the entrance with his leg hiked up like James Dean. He slips out and next I look at Emeline her eyes are closed.

  Pastor Denny nods; I take Emeline by the hand and face the witnesses. Her older sister Martha, in town to collect inheritance. George, summoned from the barbershop with shaving cream on his ear. The pastor’s wife Nancy, dense as a sack of soggy cowshit but topheavy enough it don’t matter what she says.

  I step from the platform, Emeline in tow. As we pass Martha shakes her head and Nancy Denny says, “It ain’t right, Emeline. Think what you’re doing.”

  My fingers tremble and I clamp my hand to the door jamb.

  “Don’t worry about them.” Emeline shades her eyes, faces north and south, then lingers a moment on a new 1957 red and white Fairlane gleaming at the curb. “What’d you expect from a pair of hens but a bunch of clucking?”

  I spit on the church steps. “Not much.”

  She looks at the spit puddle, blank. Then, “How old are you, Angus?”

  “Forty-six, I think.” I check my pocket watch and lead her across the macadam road to the First National Bank of Walnut, Pennsylvania. We step onto the speckled stone floor. The door swings closed and I release her wrist. She trails me to the lone teller and our footsteps echo from the marble walls. I push my passbook below the brass grill.

  “Move her money to my account,” I say. “We’re married.”

  “All right,” says the teller.

  Emeline pulls my sleeve like a small bird might, if it wanted my attention. “Angus, I don’t have my pass book.”

  “They don’t need it. You come in here just yesterday.”

  She leans to me. “We didn’t talk about this.”

  “Everything?” the teller says.

  “Close the account.”

  He notes a ledger. “I’ll just need Missus Hardgrave’s signature.” He passes a slip through the slot and I scribble, “Emeline Hardgrave.”

  “But—” She clenches fists at her sides and her brow is jetted up like a mad blue jay’s.

  “We got to put her name on this account,” I say. “Make it joint.”

  “I’ll draw up the papers. Money’s moved, account’s closed. And congratulations on the wedding.”

  “Gimme a ten spot.”

  “Ten?”

  I wink—looks like a regular blink, I suppose. “We got to celebrate.”

  Emeline watches me fold the ten. I take her hand and lead her to my truck, open the door for her. She stands outside and I walk to the other side, swing under the steering wheel. She climbs in, slams the door, plants her hands on her lap.

  “I don’t brook sass in public,” I say.

  She waits.

  “I apologize,” she says. “I haven’t had a man in my corner since Papa... I apologize.”

  I start the F-100. “Not in public, not nowhere.” My temple aches and I press it. She rolls down the window. Her head tilts toward her knees and her lips move. In the weeks I’ve known her she’s prayed five hundred times and that’s good. More she talks to him, less she talks to me.

  The church stands a block removed from Madison, the only through-street in town. A mile in either direction, Madison becomes State Road Sixty-Four. Eight miles south sits the Hardgrave Estate. She wanted to talk poetry, so I told her about the wet warm feel of a Holstein milker’s nose. I talked about the hearth. The sanctity of a woman’s womb. Her pap had died a month past and the cycle that closed with him would renew with us.

  We courted a week and I learned how she tended her father and scribbled poems at night before bed. She’s got secrets, that one. But the walnut tree on Devil’s Elbow—a spur peninsula on Lake Oniasont, right below the house—showed me an image of me telling her about the land and Emeline’s eyes swelling and her lips pursing, so I talked ‘til I run out of lies. Rich brown soil, hunting game, fruit trees and the smell of corn dripping with butter. I slipped my arm around her back, felt her heat, and promised ducks floating on the lake under white clouds.

  She seized my hands when I said we should marry, and a light crossed behind her eyes. Marrying was the last thing she’d thought of, she said, except the lord put the idea to her first.

  We pass a silent moment outside the church, sitting in my F-100. “Who’s that Fairlane belong to?” I shift the truck into gear. “See it around more and more.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Forgot something.” I kill the engine and cross the street to the state store, and return with two paper bags. I stow one behind the truck seat, slip a fifth of Wild Turkey from the other, and crack the seal. After a quick gurgle I rest the bottle between us. Emeline leans closer to the open window.

  The F-100 chugs along. I steer with my knees, fish a tin of Copenhagen and offer her a pinch.

  Emeline wrinkles her nose.

  I thump the tin, look through the side view mirror. Down by the Fairlane, the fella from the church stands with his hands at his side like he’s used to hefting a pipe. I pack my lip full of snuff.

  “If I
asked,” she says, “would you give up tobacco?”

  These kinds of questions don’t mean shit on their own, but add twenty together, you get boxed in. Then hell breaks loose.

  “Our love would suffer.”

  “Papa… used tobacco.”

  “Your Pap gave me my first chew.”

  “What?”

  “Sure did. Never touched it ‘til I sold him a mess of walnut logs. Must’ve been in what, forty-seven?”

  “You knew Papa?”

  “Just enough. Worked with him over a weekend, sawing a big old walnut tree on my land. Said he was setting up a wood shop for his golden years. He offered his tin and I took it, and ain’t quit yet.”

  “This is my driveway coming up.”

  I look at her. Turn.

  The gravel leads through a shaded grove of eastern hemlock that smells like black earth. Forty yards from the road, the driveway loops to the milk house and rounds within a dozen feet of the farmhouse front porch.

  We’re here to fetch her honeymoon suitcase, and we’ll return for the rest of her things. Two hours ago, she left this house an unwed woman; now she’s owned.

  “Ever since Papa died, I’ve remembered a single stanza. I memorized the whole poem, of course, but all I recall is four lines.” Her voice goes soft. “I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships, Change as the winds change, veer in the tide; My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips, I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside… While my father withered away upstairs, I hid from his moans in the living room. I wrote silly poems and compared them to Swinburne’s. But now I’m so happy I don’t need poems any more.”

  I study the house from lightning rods to stone foundation. A paper flag sticks between door and jamb.

  Emeline touches my shoulder. “I’ll be right along.” She climbs out of the truck. “My bag isn’t heavy.”

  Wondering about the note stuck in the door, I say, “I’ll fetch it.”

  “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Emeline runs up the steps. I work a stray grain of Copenhagen back to the pouch of my lip. She hides the folded paper with her body and snatches it when she opens the door.

  I sit in the truck and spit at the grass. Time to see the old man’s tools. At the barn I drag open the twelve-foot sliding door.

  Secrets.

  In 1947 when I was three years back from the war and Emeline was tall as a tomato plant, I sold a lightning blasted walnut to Old Man Margulies. The tree reached deep into Hardgrave history, but I was hard up and helped saw ten-foot logs and load them onto Margulies’ truck. The crotch took a tractor, a giant tripod we made of three oak trees, and a horse to maneuver it to the truck bed. Margulies busted a leaf spring hauling it out. He paid a sawmill to cut eight, six, and four-quarter boards that he’d turn into fine furniture once he sold the Farmall dealership and retired. I’d have to stop by one day and see the shop.

  Indeed.

  The sun lights a broad shaft of dust at the barn entrance. I run my fingers across the tacky cast iron top of a DeWalt table saw, then scrape the metal with my fingernails. Paste wax curls under, like it was put on heavy to protect. I buff the metal with my shirttail and the iron gleams. A few feet away stands a Rockwell shaper, a drill press and an edge belt sander. Tools on the walls, and everything maintained. No corrosion. The rafters support maple and walnut—the same walnut I sold Margulies—maybe four hundred board feet.

  I spot a white Farmall A, parked against the—

  “Angus? Where are you?” Emeline’s voice drifts into the barn.

  I glance through the open door and nod. She heaves her suitcase to the truck bed and joins me.

  “I’ve been keeping these tools for two years. The last time Papa stepped outside the house he showed me where to rub the wax. He taught me to turn on the motors and let them exercise, is what he called it.”

  I drop to my haunches and study the base of the table saw. “You got your gear?”

  “In the truck.” She stands with hands clasped. “I thought we were leaving for Pittsburgh straight off.”

  I lead her out and close the sliding door.

  “I didn’t see your bag in the truck,” she says. She reaches for my arm. “We are going to Pittsburgh?”

  “Changed my mind. You got things to do.”

  I open the passenger side truck door.

  Emeline braces a palm on the bed. “You promised, Angus. I’ve never been to the city. Last night you promised.” Her brow wrinkles. “What things have I to do?”

  I cross to the driver’s side. “You got to get that house ready to sell, for one.”

  “That house hasn’t been mine but for two weeks. I’m not selling it.”

  I clean the chew from my mouth with a hooked index finger. She raises her hand to her breast and scratches, probly where she tucked the paper note.

  We trade stares a long minute. She lifts her hand to her breast again and stops, and turns part sideways and meditates on the house. Her lips move silent again. I think of the walnut and the tools and how hot her skin was when I touched it last night, and I got to own this woman right now. I got to drag her somewhere. I can almost feel her neck in my hand.

  At last she faces me. “Maybe we could picnic at the lake? You described it so beautifully.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  Driving with the Wild Turkey bottle between my legs, I pull onto Road 64. To the left, a breeze roils a wheat field. Miles come and go. A forest borders the field. We approach a house set twenty feet from the road. Mrs. McClellan sits on a porch swing eyeballing me. Got so many wrinkles it’d take two square feet of face to pull her skin taut. Sheriff’s car is in the drive, part on the grass. The driver door hangs open.

  “What do you suppose is going on?” Emeline says.

  I slow the truck, enter McClellan’s driveway. My land sits adjacent and I prefer the law to stay off it.

  “We might be able to help,” Emeline says.

  I step out of the truck and recall the past.

  I came home from France in forty-five and visited a cemetery memorial the McClellans set up because their son Larry never came home. This was the first I paid respects since trying to push his guts back in his belly on the beach, and I’m still getting used to my eye patch. Mrs. McClellan sneaks to my blind side, beats my shoulders with balled up hands, saying, “You did this!”

  I back away and her husband Mitch is behind her. She charges me and I’m looking at Mitch to control his woman. Larry was almost a brother, and I could just as easy been saying she got Larry killed by raising him a coward. Finally, Mitch says, ‘Leave the bastard alone. He ain’t worth it.’

  Since then Mitch has had the general good sense to keep clear of me but I caught him a half dozen times stealing walnuts from the tree on Devil’s Elbow. Years back his family disputed the property lines, and though the courthouse shows I own the cussed land and the tree sitting on it, Mitch McClellan for years went around telling folk it was his birthright. When I sawed and sold the older, bigger walnut in 1947, it was partly for spite.

  I blink a stiff long blink and the memories float off through the corn field.

  I’m two feet beyond the truck when I hear Emeline open her door. She’s quick to my side and takes my hand.

  “What you want?” Mrs. McClellan says.

  “Something going on?”

  “Bugger off.”

  “Sheriff Heilbrun here?”

  “Ain’t it plain?”

  I look to the woods around the house. “Where’s Mitch?”

  “That’s the question,” she says, and her bottom lip quivers. “Be gone!”

  I take Emeline by the elbow and she tugs away and kneels beside the old woman. “Can we help you?” Emeline says.

  “See if you can help yourself.” The old woman eyes me. “Be gone.” McClellan sniffles, rocks back and forth on the swing. Emeline rests her hand on top of McClellan’s before walking away.

  I back out of McClellan’s driveway.
/>   We pass a quarter mile of cornfield. I slow. Courting Emeline I told her my house was perched on a knoll above Lake Oniasont. Apple and pear trees dot the slope on the left, and to the right, a hardwood forest spans miles, all the way to the big lines running from the Warren power plant. When storms come, six inch waves lap the pebbled beach and in summer heat you can look across the water and the whole thing is glass-flat, except an occasional small mouth bass jumping at a bug. Yellow butterflies float like bubbles of sunlight and at dusk, fireflies glitter green across the fields.

  I downshift and take the driveway. Emeline catches her breath. There’s corn on our right and a forest that gives way to pasture and barn on the left. We putt over ruts that jar the bone. Small in the distance, the house stands proud of the horizon, and a hodge-podge of brown Jersey and black and white Holstein cows graze by the barn. Rust-pocked hull of a pickup seems to float on weeds beside the barn, then beyond, a slope-sided chicken coop comes into view. A dozen birds strut and peck the ground.

  Everything I billed, and then some.

  I park and Emeline steps out. She looks across the orchard, the lake, the house. Blue spruce trees stand like sentries off each porch corner. The lowest limbs brush the ground and frost-colored needles extend to the top whorl, half again higher than the two-story house. A blue jay studies Emeline with a beady black eye and welcomes her with a jeer.

  I yank her suitcase from the truck bed. She stands on the porch, looking around. The lawn grows more ragged as it reaches the lake. She turns, taking in the apple and pear trees. Her eyes follow the porch rail, the flaking paint, and the dry rot where posts meet boards. Under her feet, the grey paint is worn to the wood. She looks inside the house through a window needs washed.

  “What’s that from?” She nods at a chestnut smudge on the wall.

  “Ike. Most useless dog ever was. Just laid there all day long.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Put him down a few months back.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible... I’d like a dog.”