All the Living. C. E. Morgan
truck wobbled as Orren pulled it out onto the relative safety of the blacktop. Then he proceeded to set his blinkers and jack up the frame to change the tire. He lit a cigarette and knelt at the wheel well, glancing up once and again in hope no one would come wilding around the bend. When eventually a car did come, he stood up and held out his hand to wave them on, and Aloma saw him lit up by the briefest swinging stage lights, his shadow cast like a giant behind him. From where she sat up the little hillock, she could just barely see in the distance the dim lights of a house behind her, too far to matter. Below her, the road curved away to the left and right, swallowed by the black gaping of clustered trees. The horizon was close. Two hundred yards away, the earth draped down sheer from the hills to the water's edge. The hills choked out the eerie lightness of the night sky that lay beyond. But up above the highest line of trees she could see, on this chilly and very clear night, Orion in his slow-motion fall to earth. She looked down at Orren, at his curved back and the cigarette smoke that curled darkly away from his figure, and she thought how beautiful he looked, and how permanent.
Orren! she called.
Huh, he answered back.
Someday I'm gonna be a great piano player and we're gonna get out of here, she said. One finger pointed down at the earth beneath her as she said this.
He looked back over his shoulder at her and she could see the small red spark of his cigarette, but neither his eyes nor his expression. He only nodded and then turned back to the tire, and the force of his hands and the force of his young body jolted it into place.
Aloma wore a long white nightgown, one she bought from the pages of a catalog when she learned she would be coming to the farm. She stepped out of the bathroom and walked down the hall, but hesitated at the bedroom door. Orren lay in the bed facing the window, beyond it stretched a long black pasture of sky. When he heard her at the door, he rolled onto his back and gazed at her. They had never slept in a proper bed together in all the time they had known each other, a year and a half. The back of the truck on top of scattered bits of hay and crumbled dirt was the closest they ever came to stretching their bodies full length.
You look good, Aloma, Orren said.
Instead of moving, she rested one hand on the risen plane of the door jamb and placed one foot on top of the other, the dust of one sole colored the other. She looked at him on the bed, no shirt and just his jeans. She couldn't say now why she'd thought him diminished in his body when it was clear he'd gained weight working outside. Now his darkness contradicted the white sheets. She looked away from him watching her.
Was this your room? she asked, looking from side to side.
It was theirs, Mama and Daddy's.
Oh. It was a silly question, she saw that now. Lace curtains hung on either side of the eight-paned window, the skinny moon situated in one wavy-glassed pane. And though the furniture was old and heavy—walnut greasy and black with age— small crystal and glass baubles dotted the room, knickknacks only a woman would have chosen, someone who wanted to turn a hard thing soft. Caught in the moonlight, a small glass horse reared its lambent head on the dresser, one leg forward, cantering. When Aloma moved her head slightly, the light stuttered on its hard mane and flared.
Come over here, girl, Orren said, patting the bed beside him.
She trailed forward into the room then, but stopped once more by the dresser where the horse gleamed. A photograph of Emma with Orren's father stood on the dresser top along with old receipts and Orren's keys and billfold.
Your mother was pretty, she said. Emma was smiling, her orange lipstick matched her lily-printed shirt. Her eyebrows were arched and perfectly penciled.
I should've met her. Cash too, Aloma said. I wish you'd brought me up here before now. Her fingers passed over the glass, momentarily obscuring the rounded lineaments of Emma's face. When Aloma looked back up, Orren had laid his head down, facing the window again. She stood, chewed her lip, and took one more long look at the picture. She padded over to the side of the bed and sat down and the mattress gave under her. She sat transfixed for a moment, looking down at the wooden floor as if there were something written on it that she was trying to cipher, then she lifted her nightgown over her head and lay down naked on her back. The air was cool on her skin. When Orren didn't move, she said, Do you think she would mind us sleeping in here? She braved a glance at him then. He was looking past her face out the window. And on his face was a poverty of expression that caused her pulse to quicken and she wished suddenly that she had not taken her nightgown off and actually thought to put it back on, but instead she rolled over on her side, in the same position as Orren, and looked out the window into the dark. There were at least six inches between them.
That moon is barely there at all, she said. He said nothing, he just lay there. She wanted to reach back her hand, but she only pressed it to her clavicle. Something unfamiliar rose up in her and it stuck in her throat like a homesickness, but she had no home, it was a longing that referred to nothing in the world. With a start she reached back then and grabbed his hand and brought it to her left breast so that the nipple rested in the crook of the first two fingers on his clay-brown hand. There they lay for more than a minute, breathing, the space preserved between them. Then he slid up against her, barely moving at first like someone waking from sleep and then arranging her legs around his and pushing into her from behind and pressing her down into the mattress so that she took all of his weight and it was hard for her to breathe. To be under him hurt her breasts so that she almost spoke up, but then thought better of it and reached around to gather him in, and she shut her mouth.
She walked naked from the bathroom in the morning, down the hall into the room now bright with the day. Orren had risen and left with the first sun. She'd gone back to sleep and only thought later that she should have gotten up with him and made him coffee and breakfast, because that's what a wife would do, though she was not his wife.
She sat naked on the edge of the bed for a moment and pattered her feet, mulled what she should do. Her big toes left a row of wet thumbprints on the floor. When she looked up, Emma was still smiling from her photograph with a curious power, her eyebrows arched, but whether in question or happiness Aloma could not say. She stood abruptly and pushed the curtains wide. Dust piled on the sills, dust that clung to the bubbled pane that flowed thick to the sash. Grassed land waved beyond it. Light refracted across her breasts and lit the rhinestone droplets of water on her legs and again she felt the small alien power of the photograph and thought to cover herself. She dressed quickly.
Aloma made her way to the hall where she found, in the closet, a few buckets and a broom, a mop, sponges curled and grayed with dirt. She kicked the braided rugs from the bedroom into the hall and with the broom she cut great swaths and arcs across the dusty floor. To the picture, she said, I am here now, like it or not. But she polished that too with the hem of her cotton blouse. She peeked inside the bedroom closet, but all that remained were old shoes. She considered throwing them out, but she remembered the emptied look on Orren's face the night before when he had gazed out past her into the dark as though she had been only accidentally there. It pricked at her mind and she left the shoes where they lay in crackled useless pairs and shut the door. She stripped the linens from the bed, noting the whitish marks that they had made last night, and she had a low, queer feeling that she had spent her wedding night without a wedding. It gave her pause, she stared down at the bed, but then she balled up the sheets and threw them aside and abandoned her campaign in the bedroom for another room in the house.
The next door in the hallway was a linen closet, empty. Then a bedroom with two twin beds, the boys' room. She hesitated for a moment at the threshold and then stepped inside and the floorboards groaned. The room had been closed for a long time, she inhaled the talcy scent of old wallpaper glue. The walls were ringed in pennants from the central college where both the boys had gone, Cash five years before Orren, so that he was back on the farm and in fact the one driving that day when the truck in front of theirs broadsided a station wagon and flung its load of sheet metal with all the force of a train into the cab of the truck so that he was crushed and Emma decapitated all in an instant. He had been an Aggie too and their miniature John Deere tractors stood parked, their tops floured with dust, sides aged blackish green on the two dressers that