The place where they lie making the child is beautiful. They lie on a bed
of ferns, which like a cushion of feathers tickles them. Only a few
strides off the old dirt road, they are beneath a tall red oak, thick as a
chimney, bearded with gray bark; the tree is a gentle old presence. The
leaves of the oak bear the first blush of whistling autumn.
If they were to stand on that spot they could see the fields. South lie
forty acres of beans, leafy and ripe for the harvest machinery resting now
after church on this Sunday afternoon. High pines and turning sugar maples
make this field a green leafy loch where every breeze riffles. North of
the road, beyond barbed wire and honeysuckle, is a cleared pasture for the
cows, which are out of sight behind hills that rise and roll down,
suggesting by their smooth undulation the couple lying under the oak.
He is a black man, blacker than everything, blacker than the soil of the
road, everything but the crows. His name is Elijah, named by his mother
for the loudest of the Hebrew prophets, though he has not grown into a
loud man. He is as silent as his skin, as the dark of a well.
Beneath him, wrapping him like roots seeking water, is his wife, Clare.
Her green eyes are closed behind white, blue-veined lids. Waist-length
blond hair spreads over the ferns and under her back. She kisses him and
their tongues twine.
A band of starlings crisscrosses the field. The ebon birds strike
something invisible in the center of the field and disperse, to clot again
and circle some more, somewhat aimlessly. Clare and Elijah, tangled
together, white and black, are absolutes, the presence and absence of all
colors at once, sharing a smooth, perfect motion.
Two
Clare and Elijah Waddell live in a shotgun shack two miles down Postal
Delivery Route 310. Their small house stands five miles east of the town
of Good Hope, the county seat for Pamunkey County. Local wags call these
single-story, slant-roofed homes shotgun shacks because if you stood in
the front doorway and fired a shotgun blast, you'd kill everyone through
the whole house. Elijah and Clare bought the place last year, just after
they married. For five months they sanded the heart-pine floors, put in
new kitchen cabinets, and painted the clapboards. Clare wanted the
exterior painted pink and got dusky rose, their compromise. The house came
with ten acres; all of it except Clare and Elijah's vegetable garden is
leased to a corn farmer who cultivates four hundred acres on both sides of
the road down to the river. The house and yard and the dusty lane are
walled in by rising corn from May through October, until the crop is
harvested. Elijah and Clare enjoy the isolation. Coming home once from
their jobs at the paper mill, Clare took Elijah's hand and stood beside
their mailbox, the silks' tassels higher than their heads.
She said, "It's like being Hansel and Gretel coming up on the
gingerbread house, isn't it?”
Elijah is ten years older than Clare; she is twenty-two, but they share
the same wiry build and long frame. His is a face of circles, pliant, with
wide nostrils, long earlobes, and arching brows over dark pupils. Clare's
features are round too, but resemble the roundness of an infant's.
When it can be, theirs is a sweaty, dirty love. They groom their big
summer garden and work on the house. They bring each other iced tea. They
make love in the rope hammock at nightfall in full sight of the road,
daring the path to bring them an intruder. In winter they chop and carry
wood. Elijah has knocked down a wall to take the space from a closet and
add it to a baby's room. Clare carries the detritus outside in a
wheelbarrow, shoveling chips and scraps into the pickup to be hauled to
the dump. They pull off their clothes to laugh at the dirty regions,
hands, arms, necks, and faces, her whiteness showing the grit most, his
grime blending into his skin. They make love that way too, with the dirt
of home chores or the stink of the paper mill in their hair and clothes.
Work seems to make them want each other, like thirst.
Excerpted from Scorched Earth by David L. Robbins.
Copyright 2002
by David L. Robbins. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
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