Valentine(6)

What is your name?

Glory. Can I have some ice water?

Imagine the girl might be asking after my okra patch, calm as she seems, remote, and it is this horror hiding behind indifference that finally causes something to tear loose, to break apart from the rest of me. In a few years, when I think she’s old enough to hear it, I will tell my daughter that my lower belly cramped and went cold as a block of ice. A steady hum started in my ears, faint but growing louder, and I remembered a few lines of a rhyme I had read back in high school, the winter before I left school and married Robert—I heard a fly buzz—when I died—and for a few cramping, cold and miserable seconds, until I felt the unmistakable kick, I thought I was losing the baby. My vision dimmed and I remembered another verse, stray and unconnected to anything. How strange it was to be thinking of poems now, when I had not given them so much as a passing thought all these years since I had become a grown woman, a wife and mother, but now I recalled: This is the Hour of Lead—Remembered, if outlived.

I stood up straight and shook my head gently, as if doing so might help me clear away all that was happening right in front of me, as if I could clear away the terrible fact of this child and whatever hell she had endured, as if I could step back into my living room and tell my daughter, It’s just the wind, honey. Don’t pay any attention, it’s not calling our name today. How about another game of gin? You want to learn how to play Hold’em?

Instead, I leaned heavily on the rifle and rested my other hand on my belly. I am going to get you a glass of ice water, I said to her, and then we’ll call your mama.

The girl gently shifted from side to side, a halo of sand and dirt rising up around her face and hair. For a few seconds, she was a dust cloud, a sandstorm asking for help, the wind begging for a little mercy. My hand reached out to her, as the other stretched behind me to lean the rifle against the doorframe. She leaned hard to one side, a reed in the wind, and when I turned back to grab her—to keep her from falling off the porch or maybe just trying to keep myself upright, I will never be able to say for sure—she ducked her head slightly. Dust filled the sky behind her.

A pickup truck had turned off the ranch road and was starting toward our house. When it passed our mailbox, the driver swerved suddenly, as if briefly distracted by a quail darting across the dirt road. The vehicle skidded toward our stock tank, then straightened out and kept on. The driver was still at least a mile off, rumbling steadily up our road, kicking up dirt and ruddying the air. Whoever he was, he drove like he knew exactly where he was going, and he was in no real hurry to get there.

*

These were my mistakes: When I saw the truck coming up the road, I did not allow the child to look behind her so I couldn’t ask, Have you ever seen that truck before? Is that him?

Instead, I scooted her inside and handed her a glass of ice water. Drink it slow, I told her, or you’ll throw up. Aimee Jo stepped into the kitchen, her eyes growing big as silver dollars when the girl began quietly to say over and over, I want my mom, I want my mom, I want my mom.

I chewed a couple of saltine crackers and drank a glass of water, then bent over the kitchen sink and splashed my face for long enough that the pump switched on and the odor of sulfur filled the basin. Y’all stay right here, I told them. I’ve got to take care of something outside. When I come back, we’ll call your mama.

My stomach hurts, the girl cried. I want my mom. And my anger was sudden, filled with bile that burned my throat and, later, made me feel ashamed of myself. Shut up, I yelled at her. I sat both girls down at the kitchen table and told them not to move. But I never asked my daughter if she had called the sheriff. My second mistake. And when I stepped outside and picked up my rifle, when I carried it to the edge of the porch and readied myself to meet whoever was coming up our road, I did not check to make sure it was loaded. My third mistake.

Now. Come and stand with me at the edge of my porch. Watch him drive slowly into my yard and park not even twenty feet from my house. Watch him slide out from behind the steering wheel and look around our dirt lot with a long, low whistle. The truck’s door slams closed behind him and he leans against the hood, looking around as if he might like to buy the place. The sun and air pluck gently at him, lighting the freckles on his arms, riffling his hay-colored hair. Late-morning sunshine turns him gold as a topaz, but even from where I am standing I can see the bruises on his hands and face, the red borders around his pale blue eyes. When a gust of wind passes through the yard, he crosses his arms and shrugs, looking around with an easy smile, like the day has just become too good to believe. He is barely past being a boy.

Morning—he glances at his watch—or I guess it’s afternoon, just about.

I stand there clutching the rifle stock like it is the hand of my dearest old friend. I do not know him, but I understand right away that he is too young to be one of the surveyors who sometimes drives out to make sure we’re keeping the access road open and clear, or a wildcatter who has stopped by to shoot the shit and see if we might be interested in selling our land. He looks too young to be a deputy volunteer either, and that’s when it occurs to me that I did not ask Aimee if she called the sheriff’s office.

What can I do for you? I say.

You must be Mrs. Whitehead. This is a real pretty place y’all have out here.

It’s all right. Dusty, same as always. I keep my voice steady, but I am wondering how he knows my name.