“Come here, Alma. You can see the bear,” he says.
And Alma walks over, stands in front of him. He puts his arm around her, and together they lean out the window. Wall-Eye has ducked back inside—Nettie, too. And there is a shining lump in the yard, black and wet-looking in the moonlight. The trunk exists. Their trunk, and now they will hurtle toward it. He wraps his arms around her waist, pulls her back inside, but doesn’t turn her around. He tips her up off the ground. He rubs his face in her curly long hair, kisses her neck. She can feel the thick rise of his cock on her backside. He whispers, “Things are going to change for us. I can feel it.”
And she says, “My heart’s an engine.”
But he doesn’t say anything to this. His hands ride up to her breasts. She recalls the factory doors swinging open, the bright sun, the bouncing bet’s smaller buds, their twisting tongues. She repeats it: “My heart is an engine.”
3
The kitchen is blue, a dim milky light filtering in through the curtains. Alma finds herself dressed, wearing her one and only hat, usually reserved for funerals. She feels stiff but pretty. Dressed, like some women dress every day. She feels nearly dainty. She’s wearing gloves and has written the note for the boarders in her best handwriting, neat, tidy, self-assured with no extra frills or curlicues. It sits propped by a half-fold on the table. She imagines Wall-Eye will read it first because he’s the earliest riser. His one steady eye will glide over her words, and she doesn’t want to be embarrassed by cross-outs and false starts. She worked hard on the letter, touches it now, scooting it just a bit so it’s centered on the table.
Outside, Henry starts up the faulty engine, which revs, sputters, dies, then revs again. She opens the cupboard, moves the flour sifter—its curved metal wire grating against the cupped screen, just an inch, just enough to loosen a dusting of flour on the counter—and picks up the sugar canister. She pops it open and roots through the loose, sticky grains for the narrow cardboard tubes of liver-oil pill bottles. She lays them out one by one on the counter. She rinses her hand under the cold sink water, then taps each pill bottle on the table so the extra sugar drops off, and shoves them one by one down into her purse, all but the last one, which she clenches in her fist.
Henry calls out, “Alma! What are you doing in there? It’s time to go!” He doesn’t worry about the boarders waking up. They’re a lazy bunch; even Wall-Eye stays in bed till ten in the morning, often later.
Alma caps the sugar, puts it back in the cupboard behind the flour sifter. The house feels resolutely empty now that she’s taken her money. She feels conscious of her money, as if she’s carrying a full pitcher of milk that she doesn’t want to spill a drop of. She slides the straps of her pocketbook over her fist, her wrist, and down her arm till it’s locked by the clamp of her elbow. She touches the note on the table again, wonders about the boarders. It will do them good, she thinks. They’ve taken her for granted for too long. Haven’t they seen how hard she works? Haven’t they seen her drag herself home from the hosiery factory to tend not only to her children but to all of their needs? And never once have any of them offered to help, not once. The bear was at least polite enough to sniff at her sometimes, to inquire how she was doing. She says it out loud: “It will be good for them.” And she lets this conviction slip over to include not only the boarders but also Willard, Lettie, and Irving. She tries the thought on, that her children will learn something from being away from her, that it will help them grow up stronger. She likes it and nearly convinces herself that she’s doing something useful by letting Irving fend for himself for a while and by leaving Willard and Lettie with her mother. Hopefully, with her mother. She sees the old woman’s tensing jaw, the tight circular motion of her teeth grinding, even when she isn’t chewing food. Her mother is a fractious knot of a woman, but fragile, too, broken and mended fiercely. She doubts that Henry will have the strength to take her on, and Alma will go with him to the door. She and her mother don’t have that kind of arrangement. They only speak to each other when it’s necessary, not to show affection, only to exchange information, because her mother has come to dismiss emotion as extra at best and dangerous at worst. And Alma despises being in her mother’s house—monastic, whittled to essentials: peeling knife, thimble, ladle. But she’ll insist on walking up. It will be harder for her mother to say no to her. It won’t stop her, necessarily, but it will make it harder. Alma’s thoughts turn to the orphanage, its dark doors and fenced-in dirt square for playing. The rowed children, a line of boys, a line of girls filing in from the yard, and the nuns, grim and pale, their bloodless faces clamped by the bite of their wimples.
Now she feels shaken. Her stomach upset, she wonders if she should try to go to the bathroom again. But she’s already gone. She decides not to. It’s nerves, that’s all. She won’t give in to it. She notices mud tracks on the floor. She keeps her pocketbook clenched in her elbow’s hold, takes a thin tea towel, gets down on her knees, careful not to get her dress hem dirty, and she wipes up the dirt. When she lifts her toweled hand, she sees it printed there—the hollow of her cupped palm, fingers, thick pad of thumb, the absence of knuckles. It is a dingy outline of what has touched down and what hasn’t. Filth and vacancy. She wants to be filled, suddenly, to eat, to have Henry inside of her, to roar like the hosiery mill. Change is not something distant like air vibrating around her. It’s here, now, and her heart is pumping, the heady strum of pistons in her chest. She stands up, drops the tea towel on the table next to the note, the white note, the white cloth with her dirty hand print.
She walks out of the kitchen, through the parlor to the front porch. Irving is leaning over the porch rail. He straightens when he sees her, as if she’s caught him up to something, perhaps some apprehension, some fear that he thinks he’s too grown for.
“Well, I suppose it’s good-bye for now,” Alma says.
“I’ll be all right.”
She takes his hand and presses the liver-pill bottle into it. “It’s got money in it.” She hugs him around the neck, and then pulls back to look at him. He shoves it into his pants pocket, taking her word for it, and looks out across the yard, to the far end where there’s a mound of dirt displaced on top of the bear’s grave. Irving’s being tough, but there’s a quickness in his eyes, and she can tell he wants her to leave before he starts to cry. “Well, now, all grown up. Take good care of yourself and go to the farm if you find that you need something.”
“I won’t need anything,” he says.
“Alma,” Henry shouts out, “you are slow as molasses in winter. Good lord and Judas priest!” He’s got his elbow hanging out the window like the nose of an idle hound.
She steps off the porch and walks quickly to the car. Willard and Lettie are pressed together in the backseat, their sacks taking up much of the room. They’re quiet, sullen—washed, combed, preened, and quieted by the process, humiliated, maybe, like shampooed dogs. They’re scared, two small boxed-up versions of themselves. Lettie, especially, her face has closed up, sewn and stitched, unreadable.
The earth is dry, the dirt loose. When they drive away, Alma loses Irving in an immediate cloud of dust kicked up by the tires. His body disappears first, then his long, bony arm, until all that’s left to see is his pink hand waving over his head, and then that’s gone, too.
The mill road is lined now with yellow bedstraw, purple loosestrife, tall, strong, wind-swayed. Each bushy head—the color hushed by the dusting of soot—rounded by lush petals, becomes a smear of muted color in the roadside grass, revolting against the gray anonymity.
Henry isn’t giving notice at the railroad. Alma told him to write a formal letter so that if things don’t work out, he can get his job back. “How could you think like that, Alma?” he asked her. “It’s just that kind of thinking that holds people back.”
Alma, on the other hand, wants to give notice at the mill, and so that’s the first stop. Ahead, she can see the mill, the hum of it rising. She braces herself; her innards
tighten. Henry pulls up to it, and the whole building seems to be shuddering from the roar inside.
Alma gets out by herself. Henry keeps the car idling. He guns the engine now and then so its putter won’t die. She doesn’t use the two wide doors, but a smaller side one that leads to the office. The room is little, cluttered. It’s hotter than the mill, which is kept much too hot, and it’s as if this room is the heat source, not the machines and pumped-in steam, just this little room with its angry furnace of a woman, Mrs. Bass, whittled and exacting, at a desk stacked with papers.
Alma pushes gingerly on the cracked door. “Mrs. Bass? Excuse me for interrupting you.” It smells of the mill—oils, cotton, dye—but also of Mrs. Bass, her own sweat, a deep, rank humidity gartering moisture, and the faint stench of something recently singed.
Mrs. Bass looks up. She motions Alma to come in with a sharp twitch of her head and snap of her buckteeth. Her eyes are dark, and she looks at Alma over a pair of circular glasses that sit too close to her eyes, magnifying them like fish in a bowl.
“It’s not your shift, not yet. It’s early. What do you want?” She speaks too loudly.
It’s strange to think that Mrs. Bass could place her. She’s never thought before that Mrs. Bass knew one person from another. She never called anyone by name. “I’m not coming into work. I won’t be working for some time. Maybe not ever again.” This last sentence is for Henry’s sake, although he isn’t present to hear it.
“Is that so?” Mrs. Bass says. “Is that so?”
“Yes. My husband and I are going to Florida to get something that will”—she paused to think just how to say it—“help us with our money.”
“Your husband’s idea, I take it?”
“Well, kind of someone else’s idea, but he thinks it’s a fine one.”
Mrs. Bass is a small, whipcordy woman. She takes off her glasses. Her eyes shrink. She squints at Alma, making her eyes reduce even farther to sharp, dark points. “Let me tell you something. Men are full of ideas. Their heads are filled up with ideas. Women live in reality, Miss Alma. Do you know what that is? The real world. How many children you birth?”
“Four,” Alma says. She could feel a trickle of sweat crawl down her back. She knows it’s catching on the cloth, staining the back of her nice dress. “One dead.”
“Do you know how many children your husband’s got?”
“Yes, three. Just our three.”
“No. He has no children. He has only the idea of children.”
Alma stiffens. “My husband is good to our children. He’s not but once or twice even taken a hand to them.” She’s angry now. She lifts her chin.
“I didn’t want children and so I didn’t have them.”
She wants to tell her about the whispery blonde who calls Mr. Bass Willy, and that perhaps she shouldn’t be such a hard-edged woman. But she stops herself. It’s none of her business.
As if reading her disapproval, Mrs. Bass answers, “Mr. Bass doesn’t know anything. He only has ideas. Haven’t you been listening, my girl?”
Alma takes two steps for the door and then turns. “I won’t be working. That’s what I come to say.”
But Mrs. Bass has already put her glasses back on and is bent to her papers, showing only the crisp part in her black hair and the tight twist of her bun.
Back in the car, Alma shakes her head and says, “Now, now. How do you like that?”
But Henry doesn’t ask her anything about what went on in the office. He pulls the car out and drives on down the road. He says, “You know it’s all business, Alma. We’re two businessmen, is all, doing business. I’m going in by myself.”
She sighs, nods. She can smell the mill, its harsh dye vats and clouds of rising cotton dust. They keep heading away from the hosiery mill and end up passing the American, which smells, too, the heaviness of liquid metal, poured tin, smoke rolling out of its tall chimneys. Two men walk out in their cloth caps, their grease-stained towels draped around their necks, holding their long, thin tongs. They stare at Alma because she’s a woman, dressed fine, passing by in a car midday. She refuses to look down. She meets their eyes because she should be allowed to be dressed and out in the world, pretty, without having to look down, shy. She isn’t a girl anymore, but still she feels a nervousness just in staring at the two men, a small quickening in her stomach that recedes a little once they’ve passed them.
“Willard doesn’t ever have a shit-tail anymore,” Lettie says, from the backseat. “He keeps himself real clean. Does Gramma know that?”
“That’s good, Willard,” Alma says, distractedly. “That’s real good.”
Willard says, “I hear the dirty women drop their kids off to be orphans when they go off with their men and then come pick them up after the men are done with them, and the orphans get sponge cake.”
Alma turns quickly. “Where did you hear such a thing?”
Lettie says, “Irving told us that. Because he said he heard you talking about an orphanage, through your door. He’s a sneak. Is it true?”
Alma fixes her attention on the road ahead. “No one said anything about an orphanage, now. It’s only if it becomes necessary. Only if necessary.” The children know to be quiet now. The car bumps along the road, and Alma braces. She doesn’t let her body jostle and rock. She stiffens. The air from the window hits her face in hot gusts.
Sir Lee lives on a switchback road, winding its way up the mountain. Henry’s been to Sir Lee’s a few times before, but not Alma. She’s heard that the house next door lost its hold in the early spring rains and slid downhill, landing on the road beneath it, and, sure enough, there it is. A little box, one intact edge hedging out into the street, but most of it chopped up and left as rubble by the roadside. Alma wonders whether the people were inside at the time, if they rode it all the way down until it came to its shivering halt. And where are they now? Alma imagines them in one of the old flour mills or abandoned barns in Dellslow. She’s always heard of the people who huddle up in the drafty, rat-skittering rooms. She feared as a girl that the farmhouse would burn to the ground, and then they, too, would have joined up, cooking over the open-barrel fires in damp, crumbling buildings.
Henry pulls up to Sir Lee’s run-down cabin, parks amid chicken-wire rolls and jowering dogs, nipping each other. Sir Lee’s shiny black car is parked in front of the door. She wants to tell Henry not to go in. The dogs make her remember the cat Sir Lee struck with a rock for his dogs to pull apart, the blood trickling from its tiny nostrils, its slack body no more than a sack. She puts her hand under her pocket book’s cloth bottom. She can feel the outlines of money-filled liver-pill bottles. Henry steps out of the car, pushing the dogs back with his boots. He slams the door.
“Where’s he going?” Lettie asks.
Willard pipes up, “Florida! Ain’t that right, Momma? He’s going to Florida.”
“No,” Lettie says. “Right now. Where’s he going? What’s he going to do?”
Alma watches him knock at the door. Delphine opens it, pulling a robe around herself. She’s slatternly, her hair a frowzy mess, her makeup faded so that she looks like she’s been soaking, an exaggerated blue-black of outlined eyes and puffed red circle of lips.
“Sir Lee is a cutpurse,” Alma says. “Your father’s going to get money from a cutpurse. You need money in this life. It’s your protection. You remember that, Lettie. A woman needs her own money to protect herself.”
They sit in the quiet car. Willard’s breathing is always a bit labored in his thick chest, like that of someone not quite snoring but sound asleep. The dogs, fur-matted and beastly, settle, curl up on dirt patches by the front door. Henry walks out of the house now, smiling broadly. Sir Lee is at the door, shoulders as wide as the opening, wearing only a T-shirt that shows his massive, fatty arms that narrow into wrists, then narrow again, almost delicately, into small, pale hands, tidy and white as if stuffed into women’s tailored gloves—his trousers zipped but not buttoned, his face cast over in shadows. H
enry walks to the car with his elbows up so the dogs don’t bite his sleeves. One snags his cuff, though, and he drags it a bit, laughing before he shakes it loose and hops in the driver’s seat, breathless at the wheel.
“Not a problem,” he tells Alma. “Just two men conducting business.”
Sir Lee grins in his doorway, rubs his belly. Henry waves, but Sir Lee doesn’t see him. A bird has just shit on the hood of Sir Lee’s car, a great white splotch.
“God almighty!” Sir Lee turns on his heels, back into the house, and then charges into the yard with a shotgun. He shoots it off up into the trees, up into the sky. Henry’s body jerks at the crack of each shot. He puts the car in reverse and jiggers out to the road, the engine a high-pitched whine. The whole thing reminds Alma of Henry’s daddy with the shotgun laid across his lap at the dinner table. She wonders if Henry doesn’t think of Sir Lee as some kind of daddy. He is so big, so forbidding.
“Business,” Henry says again, to himself now more than to her. “Two men doing business.” Alma knows how much he likes the idea of being a businessman with things to attend to, finances, and he’s trying to hold onto it, shaken as he is by the gunfire. She wonders, too, if we aren’t all looking for our fathers after they’re gone, and our mothers, too. She looks back at her children, just a quick glance over her shoulder. Willard, his broad face calm and round as a pie, and Lettie, with her cheeks already tear-streaked. It’ll be good for them, Alma tells herself, to practice having me gone, because mothers and fathers disappear. Sometimes they die; sometimes this life wears on them until they are no longer the same. One day I won’t be here for them, Alma thinks. That’s the way it is. She plays this sentence out in her mind until it loses its sluggishness, until it purrs as easily as gossip.