Chapter 5: Ground's Soft Out Back

The rain quit a little before midnight. Elliot lay on his back in the room at the back of the house and listened to it quit.

He had a list. He had been going down it every hour since he came to himself in the mud.

Hands: steady. He lifted one and held it up against the gray of the window and turned it over. Cold, but steady, and it had stopped shaking since the cup from the clinic that morning, and he had stopped waiting for it to start again.

Feet: cold. The rest of him: cold too, and he had stopped trying to tell how cold.

Room: one window over the yard. A bed, a chair, a washstand with a pitcher in it, the water gone flat. His coat over the back of the chair, damp at the hem, still smelling of the street. Wet brick. Gutter water. Under that, something sweeter he could not place.

Then the two things he had to hold apart.

He was twenty-eight years old. He had spent nine years learning how to get a room full of people to look at one spot at the same time, and he had been good at it, and then a pipe had come down on the back of his head and that was the last of that life he could vouch for.

And he was in a bed at 128 Winter Street, in a body that knew how many stairs there were between this room and the kitchen.

Eleven. The fourth one from the bottom would tell the whole house it had been stepped on.

He had found that out that morning.

Downstairs, a chair moved.

Not scraped. Lifted and set back down, the way you move a chair when you do not want the house to know where you are in it.

Elliot turned his head on the pillow and looked at the bottom of his door. No light under it.

The faucet ran in the kitchen, short, and stopped. A cabinet. Gerald’s voice, two words, too low to make out. Flat. The way a man says a thing out loud once, to hear how it sounds, after he has already decided it.

Then nothing for a while.

Lorraine, longer, and her voice went up at the end. Gerald answered. If it was an answer, it was a short one.

The front door.

It did not slam. It opened and stayed open a moment, and then it came to with a hand held against it, and the latch went over with a sound like a coin set down on a table.

Boots on the porch. Off the porch. The front walk. The gate had a hinge that said the same word every time, and it said it.

There was no more of them, and Winter Street was just a street.

Elliot counted to two hundred.

Then he got up.

The floor was cold. He was used to that. He put his coat on because it was on the chair, and went out onto the landing, and stood at the top of the stairs and looked at the front door.

The hall was the darkest part of the house. There was a fan of glass over the door and the street gave it just enough to see by: the hook with the hats on it, the bowl with the keys, the side table, the chain hanging slack against the frame.

Nobody had put the chain on.

He went down.

Eleven stairs. He skipped the fourth from the bottom without having to think about it, which did not make it better, and stood in the kitchen with one hand on the stove. The stove was cold.

The back door was not shut. There was a quarter inch of dark down one side of it, and the yard out there being a yard.

He put his hand flat on the door and pushed it until it caught, and dropped the bolt across.

Then he stood in the dark kitchen and listened to the house. The pipes knocked once in the wall and settled. The icebox ticked. Outside, a dog got up and turned around twice and lay back down.

He got a glass of water from the faucet and did not drink it and set it down on the counter.

On the way back, Milo’s door stood open a hand’s width, and there was no light in there and no sound, and Elliot went past it and up the last four steps and sat down on the top one with his hands on his knees.

They had told him twice at that table that nobody in this house went out after dark.

The chain was hanging slack. The yard door had been open an inch. And the two of them had gone up Winter Street in the dark after saying at their own table that they did not.

He could have gone after them. The gate would have said its word, the front walk was twenty feet, and his feet knew the way down that street in the dark exactly the way they knew the fourth step.

Going out that door at midnight meant being seen out that door at midnight, in a city where the Wardens wrote down who was on the street after dark, under a name that belonged to a boy from the coast who had never existed. He could see how that ended. It ended with a man on a porch with a daybook.

That was the part he did not like. Not that he was lost. That he wasn’t.

He stayed where he was.

He tried to build it once, sitting there. Two people and a wet night. He got as far as a bucket, and the rest of it would not go, and he knew better than to shove at a thing he had no pieces for.

The cold came up through the floor into the seat of his pants and stopped being information and became a fact he sat in. He counted to six hundred, and then to six hundred again, and the second time he lost his place and had to start over.

The gate said its word.

Boots on the front walk. On the porch. The door opened, and they came in and did not put a light on. One pair of boots came off at the door and stayed there. The other set went past the stairs, along the hall, into the back of the house, out through the kitchen and the yard door.

The stove clicked and caught, and the small roar of the gas came up the stairwell, and the kettle went on it.

The yard door again, and boots on the step and off it, and something set down on the porch. Not dropped. Set. Something with a weight to it and a handle, and the porch boards took it.

The faucet in the kitchen. Not the kettle. The faucet, running, and running.

A brush. Stiff bristles, wet, going back and forth on wood. It went on long enough that he lost count of it, and it kept going, and it was not a sound he could ask about in the morning.

The soap came up the stairs.

Then quiet, and in the quiet his hands had not shaken, and he looked at them, and they did not shake.

One set of feet came up, and stopped on the landing, and it was Lorraine.

Her sleeves were pushed up past the elbow and her forearms were wet to the wrist, and her hands were red, and the rain had been over for hours.

She looked at him sitting on the step in his coat.

He looked back. He had four or five questions. He was not going to spend tonight asking them.

“Go to bed,” she said.

“All right.”

He got up. One of his knees had stiffened and made a small noise, and he went up past her and along the landing into his room and shut the door, and after a while her feet went along the landing and another door closed.

After that, quiet, and then, at some point, the yard door again, and then nothing.

He woke with his coat on and the light in the room the color of dishwater.

Downstairs the kitchen smelled of soap and coffee and, under that, of the clay they turn up when they put a pipe in the road.

He stopped in the doorway.

He read the room the way he read any room, because it was what he had instead of an answer. The light came from the window over the sink, gray, going yellow at the edge. The front door was behind him. The back door in front of him, with a bucket of gray water on the floor beside it and a brush standing in the bucket with the bristles down. Lorraine was at the stove with her back to him, a scarf already on, and she did not turn around.

“Sit down,” she said.

He pulled out a chair.

“Where I can see you.”

He moved the chair to the end of the table and sat in it.

The table had been scrubbed. There was a pale patch at one end where somebody had gone at it and taken the finish off, and the rest of the table was the color it had been.

The floor between the table and the back door was dark, and dry at the edges, and not dry in the middle.

The cleaver lay on the cutting board by the stove, clean and dry, on its side with the blade turned to the wall. There was a nail in the wall three feet up where it hung.

Lorraine brought the pot over and poured, and her cuff slipped down over her wrist, and she set the pot down and pulled the cuff back up again, one side and then the other.

Her wrist was red to the hand.

Gerald’s boots stood by the door where he had stepped out of them the night before. The mud on them had dried in ridges and it was not the color of the yard. The yard was gray clay that came up when it rained. This was darker, and Elliot did not know where in Meridian it came from.

Milo came down with his hair wet and sat down across from him with his cup.

“You slept in that,” he said.

“I did.”

Milo looked at the coat for a moment. Then he pushed the bread across the table and said, “There’s jam in the cabinet.”

Nobody in the house called him Wes. He had noticed it the night before, and he noticed it again now, and it went in with the cold and the steady hands and everything else he was keeping account of.

When Milo came around the end of the table, Elliot’s chair slid aside before he had told it to, and Milo went past without looking, and neither of them said anything about it.

The back door opened and Gerald came in from the yard with the shovel.

He was in his socks and the socks were wet to the ankle. He stood the shovel up in the corner by the door, and the handle was wet halfway up. Then he went to the sink and ran the water and washed his hands to the wrist, and dried them on the towel, and hung the towel back on the nail.

Then he turned around.

“Ground’s soft out back,” he said. “Stay off it.”