All the Living. C. E. Morgan
the narrow beds. The beds were made and tightly cornered, the wool blankets sunbleached near the window. Aloma coughed and the dust motes circled in a wake. She crossed the room to the window, and after she unlatched the hasp, she still had to pound the frame with the butt of her hand before the old window loosed in its casings and gave grudgingly up. The outside air was warm and sudden and it startled the room with the smell of living things.
Out the window, far down in the lowest field, she saw Orren. His smallness surprised her, he was just a speck in the cup of the bottomland. It was not really a large farm, but it was a great deal of space for one man to possess.
As she leaned down to peer through the screen, her hand came to rest on a photograph in a frame balanced on the little bed stand. Orren, seven or eight at the time of its taking. She held it up to the light. Water had found its way inside the photo and rumpled its glossy front. It was taken in this room, the boy Orren sitting on the bed and grinning like a savage, one front tooth missing, the other chipped.
She looked around at the foreign artifacts of the room— tobacco leaf posters, puzzle dinosaurs, horses and trucks forlorn on a shelf—and all of it struck her as strange, the tokens of an unknown boyhood. She herself had no proof of having been a child, nothing imbued with the patina of age. She had packed up her life into two boxes the size of egg crates and they held mostly her scores. She looked again at the picture of him as she replaced it on the bed stand, the small flush unlined face smooth as an ironed sheet, keenless eyes. In that face gathered the nascent force of his life, his other life, constituted mostly of the time before her. She backed out of the room that belonged to a boy she didn't know and in her mind it became tangled—what she did and did not know about the man or the boy called Orren—so that when she shut the door, she did so with a brute clap.
She hurried down the stairs into the open space of the main room. But here the piano waited for her. She touched the top with one finger, careful, as if it could crumble under the force of her small hand. She opened the cover and pressed a white bone key. There was no sound, just a sponging broken depression. She pushed down the neighboring keys and the pitches yawed out, one string buzzed hideously. She stepped away suddenly and looked around herself as if seeing the room, the house, for the first time.
Shit, she said and put a hand up to her mouth to cover it and keep it from uttering another word. She was alone in a strange house that did not belong to her. For a long time, she could not bring herself to uncover her mouth. She blinked a few times. She put her hands on her hips and resolved silently that she would say nothing about the piano, that she would not be foolish, not be lost. Then she began to clean in earnest, and once she started, she could not bring herself to stop for three days.
On the third day, when she'd grown sick of the smell of linseed oil on her hands and even sicker of the meals she'd made in a single skillet using the foodstuffs from her one trip to the grocery, she caught Orren late in the afternoon. He had just come around the front of the house with an auger flighting up in one hand and chicken wire in the other, rolled and tied. He did not look up until he almost ran into her. She said, I need things from that other house, Orren.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and looked down the slope at the small house, the chicken wire graded so it rested on the ground between them. How come's that, he said. He did not look pleased.
There's not hardly anything to cook with, she said. How do you expect me to feed you if there's nothing to work with? Why don't you drive me down there.
He shrugged once, but he nodded. Yeah, he said and continued on around the back of the house where he laid his tool in the bed of his truck and the chicken wire at once sprung loose from his hand and uncurled itself. Orren pressed up the tailgate until it caught and he pulled his keys from his rear pocket.
But he did not come into the house with her. When she slid out her side of the cab, he remained where he was behind the wheel. He took his cigarettes from his pocket, thumbed the lid free. Take what you want, he said. It's unlocked. His finger tapped the white butt end of a cigarette.
The door gave way to the smell of must. The house had not been opened at all, at least she had never seen Orren down here. He was in the fields whenever she looked out the back door for him, or by the barn in the morning scattering scratch for the chickens, letting loose the cows from the rood pen. But this dank little house, into which she walked with its low fluorescent lighting and cracked louvered blinds, this he had not touched. The windows were all closed, they had died on a cool day. One by one, Aloma unhasped the windowpanes and pressed them up as high as they would slide in their painted frames. It was better for a house to smell like cow shit than like something forgotten. Then she drew open the kitchen cupboards and in their recesses found all the utensils Emma had used for her cooking. Aloma discovered a box under the sink and she piled in everything she could use until it brimmed over with skillets and cutting boards, spatulas with the tiniest fragments of unwashed egg adhering, glasses with blue roosters on them. She looked behind her at the darkened hallway that led to the bedrooms. She raised the hem of her shirt to wipe her upper lip and took unfeeling stock.
As she stood there, Orren came up behind her. What do you want me to carry? he said.
She pointed to the box, but looked at him. He stood beside her, straight and plain as a cooling board.
I do like this house, Aloma said.
Orren shrugged. Small, he said.
But it's so much nicer down here. It's modern, she said, turning toward the hallway again.
Well, the old house is cooler, he said. You'll thank me come July. And then he added, as if in answer to a question, I was born in that house. And Aloma, feeling there was nothing she could really offer in response to that, said only, Oh.
Orren reached over then, and in a gesture that she recognized from the day she arrived, one that was new in its filial reserve, he patted her on the shoulder the way he might touch a stubborn animal, and she pulled away suddenly, turning her face. She blinked away the play of feeling on her features. But his eyes were not on her, they had not left the dim low hallway and the closed doors there. She left him where he stood, staring with his arm still partially raised, and walked out empty-handed into the sunshine. She leaned against the raised tailgate, waiting. Beyond the truck, the cow pasture fence flanked one side of the house. Tall bluegrass bearded the posts of the fence where otherwise the grass was short, mown low on the one side, grazed low on the other. Her nose found the green scent of grass in the midst of the manure, hay, hoof-churned soil, the heated mechanical oiled smell of the old truck—all of that mixed in the nerved air, none of it familiar. She lived in a place where nothing reminded her of anything and all that had come before was unknown. For her, the land was starting. And though she had known Orren for a year and a half, she fidgeted now with the dawning sense that perhaps they were only starting too. She remembered the first time he'd spoken of marriage. He'd said one day, You gonna be my wife or what? and she'd made a joke of it, said, Sure, but don't get too stuck on me—I'm not long for this place. His eyes had danced and then he winked at her and only later it disconcerted her, that wink; it seemed to make a fool of her, or it rendered her a little girl suddenly, all aspiration and no plan. And no will to execute a plan if she had one. She thought back to their late-night rides and she divined now the many unspoken rules of engagement she'd been ignorant of at the time. Perhaps her ignorance had been unremarkable, even common. She chewed her lip.
Orren walked out of the house with the box in his hands and they slid into the truck and as he was cranking the ignition and pushing into first, she looked at him furtively, trying to reconcile the features she saw in front of her with the boy's face from the photograph in his old room, the boy grinning without reserve. He felt her staring at him.
What? he said.
Nothing.
He shrugged and then his hand weighted on the right side of the wheel and the truck carved the dust toward the house.
Hold up a minute, she said and she placed her hand on the wheel lightly to stay him. He braked, looked over at her. I haven't really seen the place yet, she said.
Don't let's do it now, he said. My stomach thinks my throat's cut.
Come