Chapter 3: The Strap

The Strap

The strap came down across her arm before she had her eyes open.

It split the skin open on her right arm below the elbow, and the blood came up through the sleeve and over her hand and down onto the washhouse step. She got one knee under her. The next one put her flat again.

“You’d steal.”

Ida had the harness strap doubled in her fist and she was breathing hard with the work of it, the way a woman breathes at a pump handle.

“You eat cornmeal and the boy eats flour, Nell, and you’d take his biscuits.”

The strap came down across the backs of her legs. She got her arms over her head and stayed down and took it. It was the only thing the body knew how to do about it.

“Girl, you’re not worth the feed you stand in.” Ida spat in the dirt beside her. “And you’re her all over again. That mother of yours never told me no in her life. Go on, then. Be her. The two of you can go in the ground together.”

The arm went up over her head one more time, and it did no good, and then it stopped doing anything at all, because the girl who had been putting that arm up for fifteen years was gone out of the body.

Somebody else opened the eyes.

Her hand came up and took the strap out of the air and pulled.

Ida came off her feet and down on her hip in the dirt, and the strap hung slack out of her hand. She lay there with her mouth open before anything came out of it.

“You—“ She got up on one elbow. “You put your hands on me.”

Nell stood over her and said nothing. She had not used this voice yet, and she was not going to find out what it did with the old woman watching her.

“You’ll stand where you’re put,” Ida said, “and you’ll take what’s coming to you, or your daddy hears about this the minute he’s through that gate.”

She could have done it. The neck was right there, and this body had nothing to it, but the hands knew their work, and it would have taken one hand and about four seconds.

She did the arithmetic instead.

A dead woman in this yard would bring the county out before dark, and the county would come with questions. She had been in this body less than an hour. She had not learned the voice yet, so a lie in it would come out wrong, and the truth was not a thing she could stand in this yard and say over a dead woman.

Ida got up. She came off the ground with the strap doubled and her free hand out for hair, and she came the last two steps at a run.

Nell stepped out of the line of it, caught the knot of hair at the back of the old woman’s head, turned her, and dropped her.

The back of her head hit the dirt. After that she was quiet.

She listened. The chest was going up and down. She went down on one knee and turned the head a little with two fingers to see the back of it, and set it down the way she had found it.

Nothing broken that she could find. The old woman would come to with the headache of her life and nothing to say with.

Three days, she thought, before the old woman got her tongue back. Maybe more. Three days with nobody in this yard asking her anything.

She stood up and looked at where she was.

The yard ran back to a wire fence and a gate, and past the gate the road went by, cut up with wheel tracks. There was a pump with the handle laid over and a trough under it, and hens working the dirt by the shed. The house was sided in boards gone the color of a nickel, and where two rows of them had come off the tarpaper showed.

Somebody had nailed a calendar up beside the door, a feed-store calendar by the look of it. There was a red barn on it, and under the barn the year, 1978, in the same red.

1978. She put that away with everything else the body had come with, which was more than she had any right to: this yard, that door, the pump, the name, the woman in the dirt. It came the way a smell comes with a coat.

The body started shaking. Not the shaking that comes after a fight — she knew that one and this was not it. It was hunger. There was no meat anywhere on this body and it had been run on cornmeal and work.

She stepped over the old woman and walked around the side of the house toward the kitchen. Her arm had quit bleeding. The sleeve had stuck to it.