Send Down the Rain(11)

I stood along the tree line, listening, staring back at the cabin. I couldn’t remember the last time I had visitors. If ever. The snowfall had tapered off, leaving our footprints half full. Bread crumbs. Whoever he was would have seen my larger footprints as well as theirs. That meant he knew about me. I closed my eyes and listened for the quiet crunch of snow beneath careful feet.

It didn’t take long.





6

An hour after daylight I washed my hands in the snow and knocked gently, standing off to one side. Out of the line of fire. The blast wouldn’t penetrate the cabin wall but it’d blow right through the door. I slid open the door and was met by a growling Rosco, baring his teeth and standing between me and them. Beyond him I saw the barrel end of my shotgun. I knew my blackened face would scare everyone, so I showed them my hands and said, “It’s just me.”

The woman sat, exhausted. Evidently she’d not slept. The gun rested across a chair in front of her where she’d kept the muzzle pointed at the door. Five shells were laid out in front of her. She leaned back, separating her shoulder from the stock of the shotgun. She had only one question.

The boy sat up, the girl lay sleeping. I washed my face and hands, trimmed the lantern wicks, and then sat on the hearth. I reached into my back pocket, pulled out a worn beef butcher’s knife in a sheath, and set it on the ground in front of the boy. He stared at it, afraid to touch it. As if it might wield itself. Slowly he reached for it and took hold, then laid it flat across his palm and stared at it. The woman’s mouth cracked open just slightly and her eyes turned slowly to me. The boy just sat there. Holding the knife like a bomb. The woman stared from it to me, back to it and back to me.

She pulled the boy to her chest, and tears streaked down her face. Tears without sadness. She wrapped her arms around the children and began shaking.

The boy spoke with his face pressed against her bosom. “Mama?”

“Yes.”

The little girl was awake now, and sitting up. “Is Juan Pedro going to find us?” she asked.

Her mother looked at me. “I don’t think so, baby.”

“Looks like you three had quite the hike.” I tried to smile at the children. “You are two of the toughest kids I’ve ever met. Most folks can’t do what you did in summertime with a pack full of food and water. You hungry?”

Their blank faces told me they hadn’t thought about it.

“Let me get cleaned up. I can scramble a mean egg. Just ask Rosco.”

My cabin doesn’t have running water, so I take bucket showers with room temp water. Given that my cabin was one room, and that I lived alone, I’d never made concessions for privacy. With six curious eyes watching my every move, I hung a wool blanket in the corner, creating a divider, and then stripped and stepped into the tub. Pretty quickly the water started turning red. My fingers found the source, I dressed the wound, and then I started stitching up the cut in the fat just below my left rib cage. The absence of a mirror and the location of the cut made it difficult to work on, so I pulled on my pants and poked my head around the blanket.

“Could I trouble you?”

The woman rose, almost obediently, and stood at the blanket. Head bowed. I pulled back slightly on the blanket, allowing her to see what I didn’t want the kids to see. She quickly stepped behind the curtain, knelt next to the tub, and began carefully bathing the skin in peroxide and then stitching the skin together. Her precision told me that she’d had either some medical training or some prior experience.

When she finished, she stood, waiting for me to dismiss her. But there was a second emotion. There was shame. Along with a growing posture of servitude. Since I’d mastered her master.

I pointed toward the kitchen side of the room. “There’s food. Whatever you like. The matches are sitting on a shelf above the stovetop.”

She shot a quick glance at my stitches.

“It’s nothing. Rosco scratches me worse when we wrestle.” A forced chuckle. She looked at me briefly, then turned and exited through the side of the blanket. When I walked out, dressed and having put on deodorant for the first time in years, she had fried bacon, scrambled eggs, cooked some grits, browned some toast, and brewed a fresh pot of coffee.

The kids were sitting at my table watching their food get cold. I gestured. “Please. Eat.” Having been released from their cages, they pounced. They inhaled their food more than chewed it, putting down a dozen eggs, six pieces of toast, half a jar of jelly, nearly a pound of bacon, and the entire pot of grits.

While the kids ate, the woman and I sat near the fire. “Did he bring you across the border?”

“Yes.”

“How long ago?”

She shrugged. “Maybe five years.”

“You got any family in the States?”

“A brother in Florida. Maybe more.”

“You want to see them?”

I don’t think she had thought past the next five minutes, because planning requires freedom. “I don’t know exactly where they are or how we’d get there. I have . . . nothing.”

“I can put you on a bus.”

She paused, afraid to make eye contact. “I can’t pay you.”

There were two conversations going on here. The one we were having on the surface, about my having money. And the one we were having beneath the surface—about her being a vulnerable woman, with a woman’s body, who needed money. I studied her expression, wondering if something about me made her feel this way or if she was so accustomed to having life taken from her that she was unable to think otherwise. It was as if her soul had been tattooed and she’d not asked for the ink.