After Eli Read Free Page B

music—“ I have loved you with poems… I have loved you with daisies… I have loved you with everything but love… ” The music was a serenade of joyful sadness and it filled Michael with memories. His skin tingled with a rush of excitement. He stood at the bedroom door and stepped lightly to the foot of the bed. Lester was asleep on his left side, his right arm tucked against his chest. Mary lay beside. She was awake. She stared at Michael in horror, unable to move or to make a sound. Michael winked and warned her with a low, hissing “Shhhhh.” He bent to Lester, catching him on the shoulder with his left hand, rolling him quickly, the knife in his right hand flashing in one clean stroke through Lester’s throat. Lester’s body quivered. The blood gurgled and spewed as Michael rolled him onto the floor. He turned to Mary, whose open mouth was frozen in a mute scream, and the Irish melody in his own throat escaped in a hum.
    “Well, now, you’re a lovely sight, close up, you are,” Michael said softly, easing onto the bed with his knees. “Young as the mornin’, you are. Just the thing a man would be needin’ before he’s up and off.”
    He moved effortlessly across the bed, singing quietly to himself as he worked, casually pulling away the bedcovers with his left hand, playing with her flannel nightgown with the tip of the knife blade. He was unhurried, almost gentle, as he slipped the blade into the gown and slit it open.
    The smile in his face faded as he looked at Mary’s body.
    “You’re a sickly one,” he said bluntly. “Not tit enough to feed a sparrow.” He smiled again as his left hand swept lightly over her breasts, tipping the tiny pink nipples. “But it’s not tit I’m in favor of,” he added. “Not when there’s more for the havin’.” His hand dropped to Mary’s underpants and he tore at them roughly, lifting her from the bed. The knife whipped quickly, slashing at the garment, and then his hand was on the soft feather hair and his fingers were gouging at the tight opening.
    Mary cried at last.

2
    THE BOY WAS SITTING on the back of the moving wagon, slumped forward at the shoulders as an old man would sit. His elbows pushed into his thighs and his fingers laced his hands together like bootstrings. His legs dangled from the bed of the wagon and he wagged them unconsciously in small air steps as he stared between his knees at the grass bridge in the center of the hard dirt road, unrolling in a pale green ribbon beneath the spoked wheels of the wagon. There was no expression on his face.
    The boy’s father sat up front on a plank seat hooked to the side gates of the wagon. He had a thin back and he, too, was slumped forward, exactly like the boy, but his feet were propped on the front gate of the body and he held the rope reins of the two mules loosely in his hands. The wagon between the boy and his father, sitting with their backs to one another, was empty except for two axes and a large fertilizer sack filled with sweet potatoes.
    * * *
    Rachel Pettit stood at the front window of her house and watched the wagon moving slowly along the road. She knew it was Wednesday. Floyd Crider was a calendar. If it did not rain, he arrived always on Wednesday, always in the same hour, always at the same languid pace, always in the same hesitant mood. Floyd intrigued her. She was grateful for his attention and his concern, yet he intrigued her because, of all the men she knew, he was the most guarded and private. He was a male Crider and that was the way of the male Criders, as though it had been bred into them; it was a substance in their blood, passed down from generations in the darkness of mating. If you were a male Crider, you were born to silence and to a hollow, distant face with eyes covered by a dull film of surrender. And if you were a male Crider, you did not change. You lived and died in a monotone that was as empty as a sigh.
    But Floyd had been a caring neighbor. Since Eli had