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Today the sun did not burn up through the street into the 469 sole's of her shoes as she walked to the fields, and she was happy to walk in the rain. It fell light and cool on her, like praise. The train tracks ran east and west where the road slipped over the horizon and the trees were indigo and giant in the coal colored morning. She loved to walk in a storm. It gave her the feeling she used to have when she was a young girl, before any man had touched her, when she was strong and kicking like a flame, and the ground under her feet seemed to turn to glass as she walked. She remembered days sure and endless, coming home tired from swimming all day in the creek to lie in her bed, safe in the cool of her grandmother's house, knowing that the world would return tomorrow unchanged by sleep. Now the clouds slid together as the wind ripped through her dress and hair and she was sure and happy once again. She felt serene and unafraid as she walked with the rain dripping into her eyes along the border of the cotton fields where the street lamps shone through the mist like green apples in dark orchards. Further down the road there was a single dead cedar tree. She turned by it and wound her way into the cotton, thinking of Wallace.
Wallace's father, who had once owned all the fields, had ordered him to take down the tree, but when he arrived to knock it down he had seen her. That was when they were both thirteen. It was a smooth, strait male tree, broken and faded like the back of a dove, and she had liked to lean against it sometimes, hiding in its narrow shade. He met her there and by fifteen she had gladly surrendered the fast days of carelessness and play for nights with him. She lay with him every night, while her grandmother and grandfather slept unaware, and in the early mornings she returned home remembering him as if he were a song.
Now as she worked she wished she had Gypsy with her. Her old cross- eyed coon chasing dog who was always skinny and sweet and followed her everywhere she went. She remembered summers when she was young, finding Gypsy early in the morning so they could spend the day swimming. Once, before she was old enough to know anything, she found her with their old hound Dagwood, screwing behind the chicken coop. Gypsy had run across the yard to her dragging Dagwood behind her. Then her Grandmother had come out of the house laughing and swearing, and poured cold water over them. She'd fed Gypsy cold corn pones and they'd run a mile or so to the creek to play.
One morning after a rain, they had found a nest of water moccasins floating in the creek, writhing around each other in a wet, black, poisonous mass that had made her think of 'sex' and the word buck'. She was never supposed to say that word. Even now it only whispered in her ears.
Gypsy had cried beside her because she couldn't go swimming .
"Don't worry, Gyps. We'll take care of 'em." she'd said.
Her grandfather kept a can of tar in his tool shed for patching the roof and she and Gypsy had run home to steel some. She'd smeared an old dress in the reeking tar as Gypsy watched. That afternoon the locusts were roasting alive under the sun as she shinnied up the live oak that draped over the creek. Gypsy had watched her from the bank and barked as she dangled upside down a few feet over the nest of moccasins.
"Stay Gypsy! I'll get 'em."
Her braid had hung down into the nest like a red rope and she'd seen her face reflected in the water. She could see all the way to the bottom, seventeen feet below, and a fish had watched her and then disappeared in a silver flash like a comet.
Thinking herself a snake charmer she'd held her dress out over the Moccasins, lit the tar with a stolen match and then dropped her burning dress into the center of the nest. The moccasins' had exploded, leaping and crackling in agony as the tar shrieked and smoked and the water burned. She'd remembered her braid and tried frantically to jerk her hair out of the nest, sending herself crashing down into the creek among the burning snakes .
She'd fallen head first into the creek with the silver fish, struggling and twisting to turn herself around. The weight of the water bore down on her face as she swam to the top and above her the surface had burned like an Armageddon sky. The long, pale belly of a moccasin passed over her and she'd raised a hand to him. She touched his body while he still lived, wet and shockingly rough it had been, then he'd escaped her and died. She'd come up gasping, thinking "I touched him! I touched him!" But she wasn't sure if that was good or bad.
Then Gypsy had collided with her in a panic in the middle of the creek, and about thirty snakes burned all around them and the sound of the flames hovered on the water. She'd thought they were crazy and brave. They could do anything they wanted.
After that day they swam all summer long without fear of moccasins, until Gypsy got hit by a truck full of frozen chickens that September and they had to put her to sleep because her back was broken.
The lightening flashed in the clouds and she was tired of working. Her shadow still fell before her, faint on a rain lit day but still darkening the green of the cotton plants. Darkening too her hand as she reached out to pick the sharp, white clusters, curling her long fingers around them and dropping them into the bag at her hip, then gathering another boll into her hand as quickly as the first could fall until the rain was gone, leaving the earth cool and listless and at last the day was nearly over.
On the far away highway she saw a county sheriff's patrol car come to a halt. Jim Gardener, her grandfather's old friend climbed out and took off his hat. He held it in his hands in front of him and she thought absently of his fat pale fingers and gentle handshake. She waved to him.
" Hello, Jim! "
He waved solemnly back to her.
"Something wrong?"
"Sherri," he said, breathing hard when he reached her "I don't know how to tell you, honey, but Wallace Mason died this mornin ' . "
He'd expected her to start crying but she didn't so he kept talking, plunging in to a story he hadn't meant to tell her.
"They found him too late, you see, 'cause the whole thing happened at night. So by the time they found him, he'd lost so much blood they just couldn't do a thing about it. Not a thing. They tried one of them intraveneous blood transfixions but he didn't hardly have no blood pressure by the time they brought him in and well, you know. I know yawl was real close so I came to tell you myself. I wish we could of kept him here, Sherri. It's bad up in Huntsville. It's real bad up there. Some boys you know, they got mad at him for whatever reason. Perverts I suppose, but I guess it'd better not go into that, it being nothin' for a young lady to hear. It's real ugly. But they beat him up 'til he's near dead."
He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and looked back at his patrol car.
"Well," he said finally, "Funeral's on Wednesday. Paid for by the state an' all. Since he's got no family left it'll probably be just you an' me an' the warden. It's at the Wilkey- Amey- Clay at noon. You think you can make it?"
"Yeah," she said.
"Good. Well, I'll be on my way then."
She watched him plodding slowly back through the cotton.
In the evening she sat on the porch, blue in the near night and the cement was cool and smooth as porcelain beneath her thighs. The rain had fallen hard on her all the way home but was over now and the twilight smothered her with the smell of honeysuckle and oil washed off the highway. She took a deep breath and a drink of beer, thinking of the empty house behind her creaking with age and rain swollen joints, its shadowy rooms calling her to bed. The fields were barely visible from her house, something she had always liked when Wallace was around. Her Grandparent's house was hers now and the cotton was just a little money for her, a day's work for food and books. When Wallace used to sit with her in the evenings she had liked to see the fields faint in the distance because they comforted her. Now she would not look at them.
"I'll see them tomorrow, anyhow," she realized, "and everyday after."
She thought about how he used to come walking towards her out of the tall trees behind her house every night and sit by her, smelling of both cleanness and sweat. He'd worked all day with his father's horses and had brought peaches wrapped in a paper bag for her. They were sweet from drought and they'd eaten them while the portulaca bloomed madly in the yard like dim colored stars. Later he would slip between her cool, pink sheets with her and his skin would be wet from a shower and pleasingly rough against her. For an instant her memory brought a strong stirring in her chest and thighs, making her breath fast, making her feel fierce and brave again. She felt like she did in the creek, when she'd touched the burning snake.
"I touched him!" she thought. Then the feeling was gone. She let her ideas of him fall to the ground, and solemnly dumped the dust out of her old shoes. It poured as if it measured the time, as if it measured her.
Now the evening was deep and she had lost him. She let him go. There was sleep in her own house, and tomorrow would bring work in the heat and dust. Tonight and always though, there was the memory of her burning dress, like a song she had heard once and could not forget.
