Ours, p.20
Ours, page 20
“No help,” he creaked when she finished, “but to leave.” She asked why he couldn’t speak. Aba looked at the floor as he closed the door between them. The hinges replied, “Guess.”
[4]
Usually discerning to a fault, Joy was so distracted by figuring out what was wrong with Frances that she didn’t notice people watching her. Each time she stopped by Aba’s, the town went stationary around her, its clockwork habits jammed by her visiting the man who had no more words after burning down Saint’s house. Did she know he had done that? Surely, Saint had told her. She must have. They also noticed how the naked branches of the large weeds in front of his house leant in a little toward Joy when she visited. ‘Both must have surely lost they mind,’ some thought, while others believed the leaning branches and the squeaking door were both a token for something. For what, who could tell so soon? But a token for sure.
Their odd behavior caught Franklin’s attention as he made his way to Mr. Wife’s. He remembered dropping off Joy and the man she accompanied over a month ago at Creek’s Bridge and thought it nice to see her visiting town to get to know folks. But seemed like she only took interest in Aba, who had stopped picking berries years ago and let his porch that once doubled as a fruit market fall prey to spiderwebs. How could he haggle over fruit with no voice to negotiate and charm his way into the best sell?
Mr. Wife used to sit with him on the porch, but that, too, stopped soon after Saint reappeared carrying all-of-a-sudden twins on her bosom. Mr. Wife would come knocking on Aba’s door while Aba sat somewhere in the house ignoring him. After a week of being disregarded, Mr. Wife stopped trying.
“All it took was a week?” Franklin had asked, but Mr. Wife wasn’t about to take another loss in stride. “Lost my woman, almost lost my son; it seems that way to me with all these snakes crawling about. Lost my friend. Who else want to make me mayor of losses? You?” Mr. Wife said, and Franklin shook his head and changed the subject. This was when the boys were still boys. Now, eight years later, Franklin wondered again if Mr. Wife had given up too soon while he himself never took to Aba’s porch to keep the man company. Though he didn’t think of himself as a hypocrite, he did feel a gnawing in his gut for which he had no name when he walked by Joy as she stood in the cold, speaking to a no-talking man.
Franklin wanted peers. Restless for male energy, he took to the roads to find folks to play a little bid whist for a sip of whiskey, but most of the men had grown as old as or older than him and were nestled up with the remainder of their lives, while the married men raised families, distracted by small feet and cries for milk.
Some of the older boys were off in the woods looking for winter game or up in Delacroix finishing last-minute work before the weather got too bad for travel. Franklin reminisced on days when the younger men stopped by his porch to talk and wondered when it was that they had all decided he was too old to drink with. As years passed, his life wisdom bored those who had been discovering their own adulthood: learning the scent of a lover intoxicated more than whiskey and learning how to let the burn of whiskey train them into pleasure. Franklin wanted to impart values of manhood and play games, something denied him in his own childhood, but the young men of Ours lived a life without much wonder or wander, and their restlessness demanded quenching. Ours’s isolation had intensified their longing, and though sometimes the young men would come seeking advice or just to check in on Franklin, never did they stay long, which left room for the dead fox boy of his past to roll from the depths of his memory and stare at him from a near distance. He would blink and the ghastly image would roll into itself like a curl of smoke and vanish.
Franklin avoided the young boys completely, swallowed lumps in his throat when he heard their bright voices. He kept his head low and waved without proper acknowledgment, his heart pounding, his mind cloudy with a fear that made his eyes throb. No, he would be play uncle no more, Luther-Philip the first and last of that improvisational family that, had it lasted beyond its time, would’ve flattened beneath the weight of his history as the image of the dead fox boy slowly and eventually took over the faces of the boys that came near him.
He thought of the company of one man he had met in the forest and mistook for a deer. Had he been hunting, he might’ve killed him, the man’s naked skin brown and shiny as a wet doe’s. But that meeting happened over a year ago, and the shame of returning to those piercing eyes, those hands hard from carpentry, and that mouth that he decided to abandon because in it he found no future, kept him immured in Ours.
The one man in Ours he could’ve been close to, Aba, he never really spoke to and had no idea why. They weren’t close in age, Aba either in or nearing his sixties, and Franklin believing he was somewhere in his late forties by now. But Aba reminded Franklin of the best parts of his father. This disarmed him, he who had accumulated much armor yet hid the hiding to make peace with himself and those around him. Truth was, men frightened Franklin, but over the years he had seen what brotherhood could look like by watching how the men in Ours handled each other. The longer he witnessed this, the more he wanted to take part, though his body quaked with fear. ‘Maybe that’s why they stopped coming by like they did,’ Franklin thought, believing they saw his hands trembling and thought him strange.
What he had known of men was violence so careless it ruined a whole crop of boys. But Franklin’s father, particularly after Franklin had seen a dead body up close, was kind to him till the end of his life. Franklin only wished that his father had stepped in and stopped what those men did to him, to stop the fight so the boy who cared for foxes wouldn’t have been killed. Maybe then his yearning for and dread of those who should’ve been his brothers wouldn’t overpower him.
Aba was kind to the boys, sweet to the women, and minded his business unless absolutely needed. Franklin had witnessed how he broke up fistfights, then fed the fighters on his porch while telling them cuss-filled stories that made no sense. Yes, Franklin should’ve gone to the man earlier on because now Aba had stopped speaking altogether. It seemed like such a waste. Heading to visit Mr. Wife, he began to feel angry and the new pain in his head swelled.
When he made it to Mr. Wife’s, the place reeked of iron and musk. “Open the damn windows,” he said to Mr. Wife, who begrudgingly did as he was told, then went back to work on a pound cake. “Nothing worse than a house full of menfolk,” Franklin said, loud enough for Luther-Philip and Justice to hear, both sitting off to the side: Justice reading an old Delacroix newspaper while Luther-Philip scrubbed a pair of pants with soap in a tin tub. Franklin wanted them to know that they needed their own. Their own house, horse, business (to mind), and women. He believed more fiercely each day that Mr. Wife could move on and find for himself a new wife if he had no more children to raise. Justice and Luther-Philip, one seventeen and the other eighteen, should’ve been gone out the house years ago, married or making bed and working some job somewhere, perhaps for Franklin, who desperately needed repairs that he couldn’t do alone and that Thylias wasn’t interested in doing.
“Mind yours, Franklin, and I’ll mind mine,” Mr. Wife said. “If you had some your own, you wouldn’t be so worried over this way.” He laughed.
Franklin scowled, lingered a bit, said it smelled like menfolk who needed to get married, then headed on out, back to his unwanted solitude where the voices of snickering boys panicked him into a brisk escape.
Years ago, after Mr. Wife had started bathing again but before Justice moved in, the house had another smell that needed handling. The back room where Mr. Wife, Mrs. Wife, and Luther-Philip had slept still smelled like Mrs. Wife. Mr. Wife smelled it, too, and no matter how much he washed the floor with that tiny bottle of oil Saint had given him, the scent of his dead wife refused to leave.
He installed three windows in that room and painted over them so no one could look in or out while they were shut. He only wanted to release his dead wife completely from the house with a breeze, not remove his much-wanted privacy, but she insisted on staying and chased the wind out instead of leaving. It took Franklin to intervene yet again on behalf of the town and yet again over something not smelling quite right in the Wife home.
“You need to go to your woman’s grave and cry. If you don’t, she never find rest. Just watch. You wake up one morning and she cozy on your porch. Then how you gone get her back in the ground?” he said, and Mr. Wife, that very day, visited the small cemetery and noticed the smell strengthened the closer he got to the grave. What he found alarmed him. Mrs. Wife’s hand reached straight up from the earth and perfumed the air with rot and a flowery sweetness. The salt had not stopped her from coming back and his unspoken grief for her broke the hold the afterlife had on her. Mr. Wife sat there all night, crying and reminiscing to Mrs. Wife’s hand until it returned into the ground, taking the smell with it.
A decade after, Mr. Wife was mostly a man freed from his mourning but who, according to Franklin, had been kept hostage by two boy-men who didn’t have sense enough to go be full men. Franklin could see if they were daughters, him believing women were more subject to harm from the elements than any man. Hence him treating Thylias like he would a boy as if to inoculate her from what he believed were the weaknesses of her sex, though that didn’t appease him completely and, in his eyes, had made her irrevocably unmarriable. Had he asked her, Thylias would’ve told him that she didn’t ever want to marry, only to remain in their earned peace. Contrary to Franklin’s belief, men had asked to court her, and she rejected them all to maintain mental clarity and retreat. Their stability together spoiled her for marriage more than anything else.
* * *
Franklin returned to the bakery house a few days later and asked, “What you two do all day?” to Luther-Philip and Justice. Justice said reading and Luther-Philip said he had been cleaning everybody clothes, the same as they had been the last time he had visited. ‘Dear Lord,’ Franklin thought, ‘they done made Luther-Philip the new wife.’ He didn’t know that they took turns cleaning each other’s clothes and this just so happened to be Luther-Philip’s week.
When Franklin pulled Mr. Wife into the back room, closed the door, and confronted him about the “boy-wife,” Mr. Wife laughed in his face. “Nothing funny about it,” Franklin said, and the gravity of his concern moved Mr. Wife from awkward humor to patient warning.
“Not in this house. I open the window when you say so. I listen to everything you had to say but not about my boys,” Mr. Wife said. He spoke louder than he had wanted to. In the other room, Luther-Philip smiled. Justice folded the newspaper.
“You letting them run you, Mr.”
“And you trying to run me. What sense you make? You want me ran or not?”
“We know each other, back-of-the-hand know. Skin close. We both men here.”
“Which is why you know better than anybody not to tell a man about his house.”
“Now listen—”
Mr. Wife placed his hand on Franklin’s shoulders and said, “No. You said what you think needed saying and I respect you for that gift. But that’s enough.”
“You just gone let them sit around and live under you like pigs?”
“You watch your mouth, Franklin. Not long ago you was a pig on a plantation.”
“Worked harder as a slave than these boys do as free.”
“You better watch your damn mouth,” Mr. Wife said, his finger in Franklin’s face. “If they want to sit under a tree and pleasure they self all damn day, then that’s just what the hell they gone do. They gone do with they freedom what they want.”
Franklin smacked Mr. Wife’s hand away. “They both gone play wife for you, Mr.?” he said.
Had there not been any air in the room, Mr. Wife wouldn’t have noticed. He had been holding his breath. His body tightened. He was getting ready.
The dim light coming through the open windows hardly reached them. A draft coursed through the room, but Mr. Wife felt hot and when he finally unclenched his fists, he said, “I reckon Thylias mighty good, the way she hold that rifle.” He smiled and Franklin hit Mr. Wife square in the jaw, knocking the man onto the floor. Mr. Wife laughed. “You the one want the company of men so bad,” he said, holding his jaw. “Oowee! What make you so better being all your life married-like to your damn play-daughter but always looking for men to be up under.” He held his chest and cackled when Franklin spat at his feet and kicked him in the shin, all while Franklin stormed out of the house and as Justice held a rag stuffed with packed snow on Mr. Wife’s cheek.
Justice said he would kill Franklin, and Mr. Wife cackled once more.
“He a dollar there already,” Mr. Wife said. “That punch had the last of his life in it.”
* * *
A week earlier, on an evening too warm for the season, Luther-Philip and Justice took one of their trips to the lake. They had fallen into the habit of not carrying lanterns, having learned the land so well they threaded through the bushes better than the dark itself.
Upon reaching the water, Luther-Philip undressed and jumped in. Justice took off his shoes and sat off to the side, letting the small waves chill the heels of his feet. He watched Luther-Philip take on the sunlight with the same shimmer as the lake water and nearly lost him when the sun halved low behind the bladed treetops across the way. The dipping sunlight carried with it all manner of sound, so a brief hush fell over the sunset-rusted water. Only the lake gulping down Luther-Philip’s body sang in Justice’s ears, until the night creatures burst into chorus.
The water was too cold for Justice, but Luther-Philip liked it just as he did during the warmer months. He swam up to Justice and splashed him. Justice tried to hide behind his arm, but Luther-Philip kept at it. His laughter cut through the dark, laughter nearly indistinguishable from the plashes, except for the blade-tipped apex of his voice when the laughter got good to him.
“Get in, Justice. Water’s good as always,” Luther-Philip said, and splashed Justice again, but Justice just observed what little he could make out of his friend, for the near-gone sun made Luther-Philip into a lean silhouette against the shadowy water. It took the moon’s and stars’ slow eruption for Luther-Philip’s face to have its features returned to it just enough to reveal to Justice that his own face could also be seen, so he looked away, but Luther-Philip had already caught that last glimmer of sadness.
Luther-Philip waded out of the water and sat dripping wet next to Justice. It had been this way for a few nights, where an unnatural silence abused the curated silence between them. Justice tossed Luther-Philip a rag to dry off with, but Luther-Philip let the jewels of water slide down his taut skin illuminated beneath the bold full moon. At eighteen, Luther-Philip’s leanness filled in with enough muscle to not think him unfed and the furious and sudden curves of his body made him appear hard to the touch, even in the dark that muted the edges of things, made errors of lines and soft cream of hard stones.
The night, too, had a way with Justice, who couldn’t hide his bulk, which he carried with an ambling shame. He pivoted frequently to avoid colliding into others, paused, lifted himself up to get his chest and stomach out of the way of passersby, and treaded with a keen aptitude for invisibility. But with Luther-Philip, he spilled out of his body and allowed himself to fill in whatever space he wanted. He swiped cold sweat from his brow, he gnashed his teeth against short gusts of wind, he stretched his arms above his head and refused to carry his weight, which made him less agile but frighteningly fast. So fast that Luther-Philip lost his breath when Justice pulled him into his lap and embraced him.
“You gone get sick,” Justice said, and, grabbing the rag, began drying off Luther-Philip’s head. He dug in his ears, twisting the rag inside the damp canals. He wiped behind the ears, then asked Luther-Philip to lean forward so that he could dry off his back. Justice wiped each spine knob individually before wiping under the shoulder blades. It was like polishing stone, only the shine went away too soon.
Justice passed Luther-Philip the rag and told him to dry off his legs. Luther-Philip turned around in Justice’s lap and laid out. His back arched across Justice’s thigh and his left arm dangled onto the muddy bay, making a living pietà of himself and Justice. Justice laughed and held Luther-Philip up with his arm and dried his legs for him.
Justice froze when he heard a rustle in the bushes behind them. Luther-Philip asked what was wrong and Justice covered Luther-Philip’s mouth with his hand. They stayed that way for a while until Luther-Philip fell asleep and started to snore in Justice’s arms. Justice turned toward the thick bushes behind them, but he couldn’t decipher the darkness. He tightened his hold on Luther-Philip. He stared, listened, and waited.
Now, Justice watched Mr. Wife hold the snow-cold towel to his own face to relieve the swelling from Franklin’s punch. Justice thought back to that night alone with Luther-Philip at the lake and how from then on, Mr. Wife made sure to keep the aspiring suitors at bay by asking the women to make their purchases so that others could get in. “Line getting long,” Mr. Wife said, grinning though his eyes calcified against any compassion. Justice remembered and wanted to hide what to him was an unbearable vulnerability, to be seen without knowing one has seen you.
While Luther-Philip paced away his anger against Franklin outside, Justice asked, “How you keep people from leaving, sir?”
“Now where this come from? I’m bruised, not dying,” Mr. Wife said.
“It come to me just now.”
“You don’t keep nobody. Ain’t no masters left on this earth, boy. If somebody want to go, you can’t keep them from going,” Mr. Wife said.
“What if you end up with nobody else?”
“You always have yourself.”
“I can’t touch myself,” Justice said.
