Follow Me to Ground(10)

–Mrs Claudette, who do you think I’m going to tell?

Once they start talking heart and mind, you ask to be paid. So Father always said of Cures who thought us akin to their priests and in the habit of undoing such things as guilt and unseemly longing.

Her face softened and her mouth started moving with quick, unthinking laughter.

–Oh I know, I know! I’m all worked up – my brother says my hair will fall out if I keep doing the thinking for everyone around me.

–Will your brother be helping you with the baby?

Her eyes darting around my face.

–With your husband gone? Will your brother help you with the baby?

–Oh yes – yes yes. He has always taken the best care of me.

I made the shape of a smile. Wondered when she’d leave.

–He came here not so long ago. You’ve a very close scent. Usually takes twinning for siblings to have a scent so close.

But this was too much for her, as allusions to our strangeness often were. She was moving away from me now – carefully, like she’d just seen a spider, or something hungry peering at her from the woods. In my head I saw her hand as she’d have liked to hold it: sheltering her stomach with the fingers flared wide and the skin around the knuckles whitening. She spoke again in a tight little whisper: –I can’t remember a time when we were apart.

By now I was weary of her moods, hopping on the left foot and then back to the right. Father had come out of the kitchen. He looked at me and I nodded and Olivia started asking how we wanted to be paid.

I went outside. A heavy rain had started. I held my elbows and looked out toward the woods from the porch. The rain was coming in straight lines over the edge of the roof and the smell of it soothed me. I could taste the wet bark, the sodden loam.

After a few minutes she came outside, walked down the steps, said some more nonsense I didn’t take heed of, turned one more time to wave. She eased herself into the truck, her belly high behind the steering wheel. I watched her drive away, feeling tired and squirmy.

When she was gone I stepped out from under the porch – just enough to feel the water – soft as milk – run down my neck.

In the pantry, picking out leaves to make tea, I found the clot on the third shelf. Shrunken into itself like a kicked cat. Had I been less distracted I’d have buried it properly, rather than taking it outside and simply dropping it on the grass.

Something for The Ground to gnaw on, I said to myself, watching it disappear into the hungry soil.

The next time we lay down together, Samson was not quite himself. His vest hung wide around his shoulders in a way that made me think he’d slept inside it. The sprawling hair of his armpits was snaky and wet, and his insides were all scented with liquor. I could taste it in the damp of his neck.

He was heavy on top of me, begging me turn over and put my belly in the dirt. He said he wanted to lick my back and I let him, my eyes on the thick bristle-brush.

When he started to sober I could tell his thoughts were full of Olivia, of her thin wrists and her pursing mouth. I said

–You mustn’t sicken yourself with worry for your sister.

He was squeezing the flesh on my hips. It hurt and I squirmed, his coarse palms chafing me.

–It’ll be an easy birth.

–I know you think the child is healthy.

Feeling the breath of his words where my buttocks met my spine, and then he was leaning back on his heels.

–It is. Healthy.

The bracken dug into my skin. A small spider distinguished itself from the black of the soil.

–You’re wrong sometimes.

–When?

He didn’t answer. The spider fell to one side, tripped up by a leaf.

–When have I ever been wrong?

I imagined the dim, idle speak of Cures; some insistence that No, the joint was still not quite right.

I twisted further to look at him and saw that his eyes, which had been all afternoon edged with a sore-looking red, had filled with a weak film of water.

–Samson, when have I been wrong?

He swallowed though his mouth was dry.

–With me.

He still held me tight, around my hips, and I thought, vaguely, of later hiding the bruises from Father.

–There’s something wrong with me.

–I listened to you closely, Samson. There’s nothing wrong.

–I wish that you’d look.

–I can’t, not without a reason.

My own pleasure not being reason enough.

–But I’ve asked you.

Which he had, thinking it simply a matter of permission.

His jaw tightened, and the sheen between his lids fractured and spilled.

–Samson, you are well.

Still locked between his legs I had rolled onto my back and reached up, laying a hand flat on his stomach.

–There’s no reason for me to lie.

He thought something slippery had gone wrong with him, I could tell that much. Something he knew by feeling but wasn’t sure how to say, something he felt certain would show up in the organs and muscles beneath his flesh.

He nodded and took a long breath. Lying down over me again and putting his face in my neck, sleeping.

It’s The Ground that brought Father here. There are only so many patches of earth like it. This is one of the reasons we couldn’t leave; we couldn’t work anywhere else. When I was young and the summer days felt long we’d sit outside and I’d ask him questions he’d already answered: –Why’d The Burial Patch take so long to tame?