Chapter 4: The Right Hand

The kitchen door had dropped on its hinges and she had to lift it to get it open. It came down behind her with a knock she felt in her teeth.

She stood still and listened to the house.

Nothing in it answered her.

The floor was scrubbed gray down the middle where feet went. The wall behind the stove was black up past her head, and it had taken years of fires to get it that way, not one. There was a table under the window with oilcloth on it, a shelf with three jars on it, a dishpan hung on a nail, and on the front of the stove a plate with a bowl turned upside down over it.

This body had been in this room a thousand times and knew where everything was, and she used that.

She lifted the bowl.

Two biscuits and a boiled egg.

The biscuits had been cut out with the rim of a glass — she could see the round of it on their sides — and there was still flour on the tops. Somebody had set them on the plate warm and put the bowl over them to keep them that way, and under the bowl they had gone soft at the edges.

Flour, and an egg. In this house that food belonged to the boy, and the boy had not come in for it yet.

She ate standing up.

The first biscuit went down with nothing to show for it. The second one she ate with the egg, and the egg had been boiled hard and the yolk was dry, and halfway through, her throat closed on her and she had to hold the edge of the stove with her free hand until it let go again.

Nobody came in. Nobody was going to. The one who did the talking in this house was out in the yard with her mouth shut, and she would be for a while yet, and nobody else in this family walked into a kitchen to ask the oldest girl what she thought she was doing.

She finished the second biscuit down to the crumbs, then wiped the plate with her thumb and ate what came up on it. When she was done she set the bowl back over the plate, so that the plate and the bowl sitting there looked exactly like the plate and the bowl that had been sitting there all morning.

The strap had come down on her that morning over one mouthful of the boy’s food. She had eaten all of it.

Her mouth was dry all the way back into her jaw. The water in the blue-and-white pot on the table had been poured that morning and had gone the temperature of the room, and she drank from the spout, standing.

It was the second or third swallow before she noticed her right hand was warm.

Warm was the wrong word. The pot went back onto the oilcloth and the heat went out of her hand before it touched the wood. She picked it up again and it came back into the palm and up through the fingers — stove-lid heat, with nothing between her hand and it.

Down again. Nothing. She waited, counted, picked it up. Heat.

Four times over, in case the answer changed, and it didn’t.

On the last of them she stood holding the pot and looked at the hand. Four scars on it, all old, and she could have told the story of every one of them. There was nothing else to see. It was the same hand that had lifted biscuits off a plate five minutes ago.

The dishpan came down off its nail, the water went into it, and she turned the pot over.

The bottom had a mark in it. Not painted on — pressed into the clay before the thing was fired: a word in a circle and another one under it, and the glaze had run down into the pressed places so the letters came up milkier than the blue around them.

She could read it. Nobody had ever stood her in front of a mark like that and told her what one was for, and she read this one the way she read the printing on a feed sack, without going through anything to get there. That was one of the things the body had come with. It was not the only one, and she had decided out in the yard not to spend any time being surprised about it.

Whoever made this pot had put his name where a name would last. Nobody cuts a name into the bottom of something that gets thrown out with the dishwater.

How old it was, she could not have said. Not the year, not the decade. But it had not come home from the store in town in a paper sack. It had come out of some big house that went under, the way good dishes came into houses around here, and nobody in this family had ever known what they were holding. That was the only reason it was still on the table.

She turned the pot back over and set it down on the oilcloth.

She wanted another one.

The want came on like thirst and she did not examine it. There was a pot on this table worth something, and a heat in her hand that said so, and if one thing out of that house had landed in this one, there was no reason another couldn’t have. This was a thin house. Everything on the shelf was tin, or chipped, or both.

But some of what had come out of that big house was still in this house. She knew it the way she knew the pump and the gate and where the woman in the dirt kept her money: not as a thought she’d had, but as a thing that had arrived with the furniture.

She started for the front room, and her eyes were on the place before she got there.

Out in the yard, a heel went into the dirt, once, and then nothing. She stopped and listened.

Nothing else. The hens were still doing what hens did.

Out at the gate, the wire dragged over the dirt, and then there was the click when it came up over the worn place where it always caught. The body knew that sound before her ears did.

She was behind the door with her back on the wall before the wire had stopped swinging.

From there she could see a slice of the yard through the crack between the door and the frame. The pump. The corner of the shed. The back end of a hen. And not the ground where the woman in the dirt was lying, which was the part she needed to see.

Her arm had stiffened while she ate, and the sleeve had dried stiff where the blood had gone through it. There was a plate with a bowl turned over it on the table, and a woman lying in the dirt outside, and no money in this house she could put a hand on, and whoever was on the other side of that gate was going to find one of those things before Nell found out who they were.

She kept her back flat to the wall and her hand on it and waited for somebody to come around the side of the house.