Follow Me to Ground(31)

–How’d you do it? Get him down there?

–It was just the rain. When the storm came. I just …

And I made a motion with my hand.

–But this—?

Staring at Lorraine’s hurt body. Her mouth slack and an oily film escaping her eyes.

–That he’s done alone.

Her spittle tapping onto the floor.

–We can’t fix her?

–No. There’s too much here I haven’t seen.

His hands on his hips. His body so large.

–Besides. If she remembered any of this, ever said anything about any of this … they’d burn us down.

An ache shooting in quick red lines up my spine.

–So we carry her upstairs, let her die in her own time?

He snorted.

–Little late to be treating Lorraine kindly.

He was walking around her, looking at her from every side.

–All we can do is put her to ground and let her go quietly.

–After we put her to sleep?

–She is sleeping, Ada, look at her.

Lorraine’s eyes thick with water, neither open nor closed.

–Can’t we leave her in one of the rooms?

–No. The Ground.

Looking down, speaking into his chest,

–He’ll have been worked upon, you know. Down there.

I looked at him with my eyes, careful not to move my face.

–That’s the point.

Looking over my head and into the garden.

–You don’t know what you’ve done, Ada.

–I’m not all to blame.

–You ready to say something about him? A man so good and wholesome you had to sink him in The Ground?

–Not him.

My hands, where he couldn’t see them, inside of my pockets, pinching my thighs. I said

–You must’ve known I’d get lonely.

He looked at me and his whole face went soft, so soft he might have started laughing.

–Not likely what comes back up will give a damn if you’re lonely, Ada.

Lifting Lorraine up easily, muttering to himself

–Lonely. Lonely. Need to have a heart, to be lonely.

That night we buried Lorraine. Father came out of the house and the patio door whinnied shut behind him. His shoulders shone heavily, their smooth skin catching the white glare of the moon.

Lorraine: humming in her sleep.

I moved my toes against the side of her head which was silhouetted and obscured with the swinging light at the patio door. Father came closer and Lorraine began to move against my foot in the way a stray cat might scratch its back against the rough bark of a tree.

–Leave her be, Ada.

Sinking the shovel into The Ground. It smacked like a thirsty mouth, though we’d had much rain. I was surprised it didn’t give off steam.

I looked at her hard, sniffed at the air.

He started digging.

I squatted next to Lorraine and the mud licked up toward my knees. My dress dipped deeper into the wet dirt.

Clung to me.

Stocking.

Pouch.

Glove.

From Lorraine’s open mouth came a sound like a lone dove’s coo and then she tried to roll onto her side, making swivel the slack rings of fat around her belly.

I stood up and felt her face with my foot and pushed down on the flat expanse of cheek, where the hard bars of her jaw clenched under the skin.

Father said nothing but lifted her up and carried her to the hole he’d made, saying it would be a long time before we could make use of that piece of ground again. Lorraine sagged heavily, filling up the angles of his arms while the cloth of her nightdress crinkled at her elbows and knees.

Once she’d been covered and Father had patted smooth the soil it kept on moving, catching on her roving hips.

Back in the kitchen even the mismatched buttons of my dress seemed scalded by the heat as I brought them through their cat-eye holes. I let the patterned cloth hang from my fist and watched its slow twirl, sodden and limp, dropping it in the milky-watered basin. It made a thirsty, gulping sound, diminishing for a moment the soapy swirls that had formed so thickly over Father’s shirt and my smock from the day before. It would take hours for the chalk-coloured pattern to settle again and work on this fresh batch of stains.

I took the towel from its hook on the back of the kitchen door and rubbed it over my legs, but in bed I still felt the crumbling of dried soil run over my feet when I kicked at the sheets.

My cheek on the pillow, I closed my eyes and said I’m sorry Lorraine, you had a few more years, and that night and for two nights thereafter I heard her squirming around in the earth, her head rolling across her collar and the thin bones cracking in the tunnel of her neck.

Father, very pointedly, spent time only at the front of the house.

–You might say sorry, Ada, for the trouble you’ve caused.

–Do you remember when I took you out of The Ground? How happy I was to meet you?

When, at last, Lorraine abated, I heard her chest lower and stay there. The Ground had seen her expire, and now our days would fall back to their old rhythm and I could plan for my time with Samson. That faraway time.

I did wonder how we’d the three of us live in the same house, but then I’d years and years to think of a way. I hoped once Father met Samson again, risen up and altered, he’d forget his dislike and his distrust. See that he’d become like us and didn’t have to be handled like a Cure.