The man by the window of the old farm didn't think there was rope enough in the world to let him have his wish. Henry and the vet leaned on the fence gabbing, the mare toyed with some feed in a bucket Henry'd hung on the fence. Beyond them, in the far paddock, the stallion raced around his small domain, challenging the world, the wicked blackness of him sharp and clear from that side window.
The window where he'd spent so much time, leaning against the window frame and peering out over the little valley, trying to figure out why he kept on.
Against all better judgment, the man's hand went to the roughened edge of the window trim.
He'd had to do something while he fought with himself. The molding around the window, throughout the house, all gleamed golden where he'd painstakingly stripped away paint to get back to warm old pine. Darker golden was the floor's shine. And when he'd had to stop moving, he'd stood there by that window watching the little pocket out of time.
Even then, only luck had let him see something different there. See that roughened stretch and where it smoothed out again, above and below. Only an inability to let things alone, as any sane man would have, had let that rough place gnaw at him till one bad afternoon, he'd pushed on one end and the other had swung out smoothly and he'd seen the narrow roll of papers.
Seven pieces of paper, rolled into a cylinder. Seven small pieces of a man's life.
Removing the cylinder again, he unrolled the papers and as usual, when they tried to return to their long held position, one ended up outside the others. This time it was the letter some long dead man had written on the death of his mother. Like the others, the same heavy yellowed paper, same broad black stroke, old formal calligraphy...
God help me, she died today. And I hide out here in the barn because my relief shames me. My S. has not needed the hate that marrying me brought her. That that can now ease - it is a burden lifted from my shoulders.
But she was my mother. And before she yielded to hate - she too came to this place, these secrets, after everything had been long done and past fixing. She too paid for what others had done. But if she came innocent, she did not die so. I cannot but feel relief for that lifting of the weight of her blame and resentment of us all.
I cannot lie to myself and say I am not gladdened for one debt to be removed from us.
If she came to this place innocent, so did my S. And she too has been made to pay, has paid and God help me, will go on paying, for things she had no hand in.
All things cost. No man would expect otherwise. But some things...
The price I paid for her, I would pay ten times over. The one she has to pay - if it took my life, I would pay for her, if I could.
I confess to thinking at the beginning that my love itself could tip the scales, heal something in the past that had gone so far wrong. But things are not so simple. There are moments, so many moments, where we escape, each into the other. Magical moments that make everything worth any price.
Even those other times when I think I only add to her burden.
Carefully, he rolled the seven sheets into their narrow cylinder and replaced them in their dark slot, the sliver of wood sliding smooth back, his mind determinedly seeking meaningless bits.
A pin. The man had inserted some kind of pin. That was why the wood could not be completely removed. It pivoted around some pin in the center.
As far as he was concerned, the price for most things was too high and the wrong people generally paid. It was safer thinking of some unknown man who'd been clever and handy enough to do such fine work with crude tools. For a second, he felt sad for what the man had missed, before remembering what he'd had.
A man who'd gone to all that work in order to hide small bits of himself, and those all centering around a beloved wife. He doubted he'd have wanted to trade any of what he'd had, good and bad, for power tools.
Sara reached the white house before the moving van. Turning off the main street into the first leg of the cul de sac, she felt the houses on either side close shelteringly around her. Again it surprised her that she felt sheltered instead of threatened as she would have expected. Relief that her instincts had not chosen this time to betray her let her relax another fraction.
It would have been a costly error to find out the house now repelled her. Whatever insane balance her bank books held, old habits would have made that a hard mistake to swallow.
A block on that narrow street and another right hand turn. The sides of the street took a step nearer the center of the street and there were the cobblestone-edged drains, and at the corner where the street curved around to the left and started winding its way back to the main street, sat that white cape.
Small, symmetrical, old. Tidy. However little sense it made to her, everything about the place had a rightness to her eye. And it was way too late in the day to be questioning her instincts.
There was a notch in the fence, large enough, if both drivers were very careful, for maybe two cars, if neither of them were large. She parked in the middle of that space, ignoring the protests of the black cat crouched in his carrier with tail snapping.
Maybe twenty feet of grass rimmed the front and sides within the white iron fence, split by the stone path to the oak door. Past the house, she could see a wider expanse of green stretching out to a narrow green hedge between lawn and cove. A hedge thicker at the corners and fading away in the center, making a green frame for sunlit water.
The last full moon in May was two weeks past. It was past perfect planting, but not that far past. But before she worried about gardens, there was the house.
The keys she pulled from her pocket were an odd pair. A modern key, probably for whatever door opened off the back. And a three inch long brass key, with the end all curved and scrolled.
With a quick glance at the street still empty of the moving truck, Sara turned the key and let the door swing slowly open.
At eight-thirty that night, Sara leaned her shovel, hoe and rake against the wall beside the back door and sat on the back step.
Jericho howled through the bushes in search of things to kill. When she'd opened the cat carrier just inside the front door, the big black cat had streaked in the front door and out the back. Leaving the perfect, immaculate, frightening house to the movers, Sara had followed him.
The two bags she'd brought from the car sat in the back hallway. The simple dark blue cotton skirt and blouse she'd chosen for the day clung damply to her skin. She'd pulled the blouse out of the skirt waistband, removed her bra and tied the ends of the shirt up around her ribs, rolled up the sleeves, because she hadn't wanted to go back into the house while strangers were there.
She hadn't been back inside since she'd told the movers where she wanted things. Ten minutes inside the house she'd rented, sight unseen, and she'd known each piece of her furniture would slide into place in that old house like they'd always been there. The ease of it had just added to her uneasiness and kept her out there. But now it was going to full dark and she'd finally stopped and the house waited for her.
Her heavy black hair slowly slithered free of the quick careless braid she'd managed.
Pushing back the long strands curling damply around her face added another streak of grime across her cheek, but dirt didn't bother her. Her people had been farmers. Work was dirty, dirt washed off. Wiping her sweaty hands on her skirt, she stilled again and stared out over the open space behind her new house.
Next to what she'd known, it was tiny, maybe eighty feet wide by a hundred feet from house to waterline. She'd spent a few minutes at the foot of the garden, watching the mostly tamed water curling around the dark pebbly shore, but the cove was an oddity she'd save and dole out at odd moments. Instead, she'd turned over and raked a plot maybe ten feet wide by twenty feet long before the light had completely failed her. Her newly broken earth made a dark stripe down one side of the yard.
Cooling air raised goose bumps across her bare ribs till she tugged at the knot below her breasts and let the shirt slowly unfold. She figured the temperature was just dropping near sixty degrees, but an odd squeaking sound caught her attention...
Looking up, she frowned for a second and then smiled, the charcoal brows smoothing and winging up at the corners and the dark eyes warming to rich chestnut.
Bats - making strafing runs over her new yard, looking for flying insects... The smile shivered and evaporated. What a silly way to be reminded she was, after all, home. Bats.
Sighing, she went back to her planning. In the morning, she'd lengthen her plot, go get her seeds and plants, get everything into the ground. Maybe work in some manure, a bit of lime. Then, when she'd gotten everything planted, then she'd go inside and set up the house. After the garden was in.
But there was still sleeping to be considered. It was full dark when she went inside. Locking the back door, she groped her way past her bags and around to the front door and turned the key in the lock.
Then she lugged both bags up the narrow stairs and into the room on the left that she'd decided on. Fumbling for a light switch, the blaze of light instantly made her cringe, but there was no getting around some things. Even things like seeing her own possessions already far too much at home in a strange house.
The moving crew had been a gift. They'd set up the heavy four poster bed and mattress, placed it against the west wall where it crouched comfortably, even opened the small multi paned windows on either side of the posts.
Opening the box marked linen, she saw her dirty hands and found a towel first, making a side trip to the bathroom across the hall.
Small, white and tiled, clean - everything more than broom clean - with WHERE she was, she fought to find pluses, any pluses.
A smaller box marked bathroom held the basics. A new shower curtain, toilet paper and Kleenex, shampoo, barsoap, a smaller bag of cleaning supplies that went straight into the cabinet under the sink, a mat for the floor beside the tub and another for in front of the toilet.
Ten minutes later, showered, wrapped in a large copper colored towel, Sara stepped over her dirty clothes, turned off the bathroom light and went back across the hall.
In the box she'd opened were thick cotton sheets, a light blanket and her quilt. Her pillows were at the bottom. In ten minutes, the bed was made up. Pushing the empty box away with one bare foot, Sara switched off the wall light, before she could be tricked into thinking about anything more for that day. Groping her way back to the bed and dropping the towel to the floor, she crawled between familiar sheets and stretching out on a bed in which she'd slept for more years than she wanted to count, she closed her eyes and with the skill born of long practice, willed herself into stillness.
Again, she dreamed.
This time, somehow anchored in this new-old place, the smoke that was her stretched into fingers curling through the green itself, grabbing onto invisible currents humming between root and sky.
Intoxicated, she wrapped herself around those humming lines, drunk with - connection.
Faster, farther, freer, she moved, gone mad with the wild freedom of BEING and being UNBOUND...
Another memory shredding when she came awake, stranded between midnight and dawn.
The gray mare foaled that night. He hadn't thought he could still get wound up about much, but between Henry up making coffee and the older kids hovering around the barn door and waiting for the vet who was tied up on another call, the whole valley was pretty much awake.
It was nearly two weeks ahead of time. Probably because of the accident that afternoon. Kicking himself for not having paid better attention to the stallion kept him going for a while, until he found other stuff to kick himself for. Anything but admit to worrying about the pretty little mare kept as a rich man's toy. To the ugliness of anything seen like that.
Perched atop the next stall, he watched the vet and Henry doing the little they could while his bruised shoulder screamed away, ignored. There wasn't much he could have done anyway, but he kicked himself for having started all this. For not knowing more. For having to depend so heavily on Henry.
The fact that there seemed to be no clean and simple way to get through life without risking and harming other people or things was an old wound, the scar tissue around it thick and rough.
By the time he'd worked his way past that, Henry and the vet were chuckling about something and then laughing. A soaked, pathetic knobby legged creature sprawled upon the straw. The mare was lunging to her feet, and he'd been reprieved, at least for the moment.
Sliding down from the side of the stall, he waited to make the social gestures with the vet, sent Henry home without insulting him by asking how he'd handle work when he'd had no sleep, and headed up to the house.
On the porch, he turned and looked back. The valley was really a big tree ringed meadow, with two houses both facing the barn at one side of the meadow and fenced pastures mapping out the rest. Dawn made the rim over the treetops lighter now than the valley, or the dark valley darker, except for the lights on in that other house across the way.
Friendly lights. He never liked thinking of what he'd have done if he hadn't stumbled over Henry. Henry would have done fine. He was a social creature, who hadn't needed to be taught how to 'network' and whose old fashioned values had earned a lot of respect for a rough edged man. No, Henry would have been fine. But between the pay and house and place, he'd still made sure the man benefited by having gone in this direction.
In the dawn, the valley grew a shade darker. Most days, he'd already have been at work by that time. He got more done when he got started before everyone and everything around him came to life at that job he should never have taken. The job that was an excuse he hadn't needed and now had too much pride to walk away from on a sour note...
He did the unthinkable for him. He called in and took the day off.
Somehow, Sara's garden chores stretched into the afternoon. Dirt and plants, sun on her back... A seventy degree day in the sun with unfamiliar water chuckling in the cove nearby and far enough from the main street for traffic to be only a distant mutter let things swung nearer sanity. Jericho was a boneless ebony puddle under the nearby bushes. Under her bare feet, new grass and damp soil hooked her back into what was real. She didn't stop until fatigue bit into her bones.
Dropping onto the wide wooden back step, she sat for a while and let herself connect to the place. Then, sometime near four in the afternoon, she leaned her tools beside the back step and went inside.
First was a shower, without looking to right or left. From the suitcase lying open on the floor beside the bed, she dug out another cotton skirt, something black with coin gold design and a short amber top that came almost to her waist.
The bed had been remade that morning. That was too old a habit to break and the handmade quilt covering the bed deserved always to be smoothed before the sheets had cooled from her skin.
She'd moved enough times. Set up house again enough times. However much she hated it, once it was done she would relax, or at least in that place, come close. Jericho was hiding. The big black cat knew better than be underfoot at first. And for something she always put off, it really wouldn't take all that long. It was going on five. By nine or ten, things should be settled.
The problem was that, against wide board golden oak floors, white painted trim and papered walls, her things looked so at home.
All the furniture had been put in place. The moving company foreman had had common sense and a good eye and before she'd escaped into the backyard, she'd seen them place the couch precisely where she would have placed it, so it wasn't really a surprise to see that the big pieces in her room had also been well placed, centered in their respective spaces - the carved four poster bed, a huge chiffonier and wide bureau.
Her clothes were still in the drawers and chiffonier. The rugs had been rolled and labeled. There was only cutting the string on the rose and chocolate and indigo braided rugs and laying them out to flatten, one on either side of the bed.
Since there was room for it in the bathroom, the wicker basket she used as a hamper went there.
Setting the two empty boxes in the hall with the empty from the bathroom, she entered the smaller bedroom across the hall where a low string bed, a big chest on chest, bureau, blanket chest and chair had already been placed.
From the single big box in there, she took linens and made up that bed, covering it with a very old quilt of faded rose, mauve and indigo. Cutting the string on the rolled up rugs there, rose and gold braided rugs slowly uncoiled on either side of the bed.
In the blanket chest, if she needed them, were enough unbleached muslin curtains to drape more windows than most houses held. Her preference was for light and when she could, she left the windows open, at least at first, but they were there.
She didn't need to look at what the chest on chest held. Besides extra linens, anything in those drawers had been there for a long time and was just where it belonged.
From the bureau's drawers she removed shapes wrapped in newspaper. A china basin and pitcher set painted with cabbage roses went in the middle of that bureau. A basin and pitcher painted with pansies went across the hall to take its place on her bureau. With those easy rooms done, she headed downstairs.
There too the golden oak floors sang to her belongings. In the front room two big armchairs framed the windows overlooking the back yard. The flip top table sat between them. Against the long side wall was the leather couch with the lamp table behind it, a small wood and leather trunk in front of it and in the middle of the front wall, its matching leather chair, flanked by two old trunks.
From cardboard shipping drums, she lifted out an electrified oil lamp with ruby glass base and huge ruby shade, and a white and brass oil lamp, also converted, with an equally large white shade also covered with painted pansies. The white lamp went on the table behind the couch.
Flipping down and latching the table top between the chairs and in front of the back windows, the ruby lamp went there. From a wide shallow box between two cushions, she took a large, simply framed painting of a meadow, ringed around with evergreens and one old lone oak in its center.
The long wall behind the couch even had a nail in the right place. Hanging the painting, the cushions went onto the two trunks and a carved brass box went on the table behind the couch.
The living room carpet roll held three braided rugs for that room, two of shades of blue, one fronting the arm chairs, one fronting the couch with the trunk sitting in the exact center and one of blue and green for the front hall.
In the dining room across the hall sat a big roll top desk and matching oak chair and five tall sets of book shelves. Three boxes sat in front of each. Even the bookcases had been well placed, three centered on one wall, one each on the other two walls, and again she gave thanks that she'd given them a good bonus.
An hour and a half's mindless work refilled the bookcases exactly as they'd been. She'd unloaded the shelves from the top down, she unloaded the boxes onto the bottom shelves first and worked up.
The single cardboard drum held a big brass footed lamp, an elephant's foot umbrella stand holding an assortment of carved walking sticks and a round oak framed, domed glass painting of an older man with a grizzled, quizzical face.
With that in her hands, the frantic activity faltered for the first time, but only momentarily. On the pine kitchen table, the black cat slept curled around a small tool box. It was the matter of a moment to drive a nail in the wall over the roll top desk and hang the picture.
Rolling the desk top up, she removed the newspaper padding around a portable CD player, a relatively recent purchase. The middle left hand drawer held CD's. The lower draw held older cassettes. Snaking the cord around the side of the desk, she plugged the radio in.
Stepping back again, she hesitated again, longer this time. There was one rug to untie and unroll in there, which left one long wide open topped box from which she took a huge ivy plant in a earthenware pot that went on that table beside the ruby lamp. A big spider plant went on the pine kitchen table, disturbing Jericho who decided it was time for him to take his usual place amongst the ivy anyway. One of the ferns went on the roll top desk, one on the table behind the couch.
Seeing the tremble of her hands as she placed that plant, Sara frowned and forced herself toward the kitchen. She couldn't be letting the place get to her like that, wear her down before she'd even started.
A cardboard drum like the one from which she'd taken her garden tools held broom, mop, carpet sweeper. All went into a utility closet at the back of the kitchen beside the door leading to the back hallway. Over and under stairs, leading up from the back door and down into a cellar at the front, neatly bisected the house, a division she already liked for its neatness and order.
And going down into the cellar and finding it clean and dry and empty, she dragged boxes and cardboard drums from the first floor down there. Two more trips got the upstairs empties down and out of the way. Then she went back to the kitchen.
Blue willow dishes went into one cabinet, along with glasses and a couple of serving dishes. Crockery mixing bowls went into another cabinet. Heavy cast iron pots and pans went into a lower cabinet and utensils were divided evenly between two drawers with the third drawer for silverware. In a wider lower drawer went dish towels and such, spare box matches, candles, an extra flashlight. The toolbox went under the sink along with a bag of cleaning supplies.
She found herself looking stupidly for the next box for a few moments before realizing there were no more. Just a bag on the counter with a box of crackers, a bottle of water and a couple of cans of cat food for days Jericho's hunting was slow.
The empty boxes joined the others in the cellar. Wiping down the counters, she folded the cloth neatly and left it beside the sink before carrying a glass of cold water into the front room.
The ruby lamp on the table warmed the room almost like firelight.
She sank tiredly into the left hand chair and felt herself sink deep into the cushions. There. It was done. Again.
Jericho rose and stretched and stepped from table to chair arm to her lap, where he curled nose to tail and went back to sleep, while his mistress looked out across the dark back garden.
The following day was still sunny, even warmer and sweeter. She raked around the garden, neatened the pile of sod scraps, found an old reel lawnmower in a tiny shed. At midday, she drove to the nearest market and stocked up on a few basics along with a paperback book. And by late afternoon, showered and curled up in one of the arm chairs, the book lying discarded on her lap, her house set up and out of delays, the reason she was there snarled at her from the shadowy corners.
If this tenant could only have let things be, he could have stayed there forever and she wouldn't have cared. Wouldn't have raised the rent Wouldn't have bothered him. He'd just had to push, had to find the one thing she couldn't let happen, had to make her come back there.
If the lawyer had managed to do one thing right, she'd be taking a job just to get near enough to get an idea of how to persuade him to back off - this stranger who hadn't left well enough alone.
The lawyer's call had hooked her up to an over friendly type, whose first words refused to fade from her mind. From what he, "Call me Jim..." said, Sara was going to be working as an assistant for some temperamental engineer-designer. And peering past "call me Jim"'s buddy act, she smelled something far less friendly. Far less clear. Smelled something quite different from the pressure of too much work and too little time he described.
Some basic office chores, papers for state agencies, bookkeeping, maybe some drawing - all of them things she could honestly say she'd dealt with, to a degree. But the implication of turning her hand to whichever area some warped mind felt to be the greater emergency of the moment - for that to work would have required she be an expert in at least one, if not more of those fields, which she clearly wasn't and this man clearly knew. From the money being offered, he also clearly wasn't about to pay for someone who WAS what he needed.
Politics and infighting. She smelled it before he'd gotten halfway through his pitch.
She filled out the required papers, remembering at the last moment to use the social security card that Andrew had gotten for her. His name would catch her attention better than her own, so at least she could be comfortable that she'd respond to it. Probably the ONLY comfort she'd wrest from the situation.
Consulting, that's what the people she'd be working for were doing. Resident consultants, on site, for an addition being made to a moderate sized company. A job for which they were no doubt being well paid, which meant that management on both sides would be yapping at their heels.
Too many people and from the sounds, all at each other's throats, working against time and in awkward setups on someone else's turf. It was hard to see what could be added to worsen the situation, other than a plant wide social disease.
She was so busy depressing herself over seeing the minuses, the man waiting for her had to speak twice to get her attention.
"Sorry," she said, laying her pencil down.
"You did say you'd done some work with state agencies," he said again. She guessed that one bit was the hook by which he intended to justify her hiring.
"I worked for a legal group dealing with them," she said cautiously.
"If he wants you to do any drawing work, there are a couple of computer programs around. I can give you some pointers on one of them."
This unknown guy was getting sand-bagged. If they were half as busy as her interviewer said, he needed somebody who didn't need to be taught anything and it still wouldn't be enough.
A guarantee that whatever she did couldn't be enough - there was her answer to what problem could have been missing.
A six month consult, half way through. Two engineers, three designers and a general secretary made up the group on site, most of them tucked away in odd corners wherever there'd been a bit of quiet, hookups for computers, room for desks.
'Call me Jim' had to be one of the engineers. He, one designer, and the secretary were all camped out in the far back corner of the plant. Two designers shared an office with the plant engineering staff. And the other engineer - her prospective boss - had found a loft space over some other offices, an isolation that, from the sounds, probably suited everybody.
Even when he put out his cigarette and got to his feet to lead her toward her new home, the mildly damning, negative generalities about her prospective boss didn't end. Jim kept on talking as he walked and she saw that, on top of everything else, this Jim was fishing to hook her allegiance before she had a chance to assess someone she hadn't yet met. Sara wondered that they let this other engineer wander about without a 'leper, unclean' sign around his neck.
As far as the job, she'd done enough kinds of things to figure she could catch onto most anything, faster than most people. But the place was one big maze. She'd have to get a map to find her way out, or leave bread crumb trails.
Stepping through swinging doors that cut the noise dramatically, he nodded to two men working at machines and then at narrow railed stairs. Once at the top, he opened the door and stood back to let her precede him. After the areas through which Sara had been lead, the silence around her echoed to her heartbeat.
It beat so loudly through her, that it was a moment before she saw they weren't alone. From behind a wide desk where piled high papers waited, a big black man glanced up and then rose to his feet.
"Here's your helper," Jim said cheerfully. "Sara Beldon - Michael Reneault."
Black.
Something in her had known blackness. Someone - someone before her, someone connected to her, someone whose blood ran in her had known blackness. Had EMBRACED the blackness...
Black or white, light or dark, red or brown - there was no difference. Not on the outside.
Not in the world.
But there could be beauty. And mind blinding passion that stopped one's heart and stilled one's breath and let time slow and freeze around one - trapping all in glorious golden amber for that one second...
One second in amber.
There had been those who'd counted the world well lost for such a second...
With or without that glimpse into a better place, all passed away in the end. As whoever in her line who'd responded to blackness - as they were long gone...
As all were gone...
Sara shook her head hard, and that unfamiliar office and two men drove off the fog of otherness. Not even a footprint remained behind to speak of strangers having passed...