thing. He was a farmer and a hog raiser and a drunk. You done good by me.”
“Thanks again for helpin’.”
“I wanted to help out. Didn’t have no trouble doin’ it.”
“You got a family of your own now, I reckon.”
“Not yet. I break horses and run me a few cows and hogs and chickens, grow me a pretty good-size garden, but I ain’t growin’ a family. Not yet. I hear from Mary Lou you need a plow mule and some seed.”
Deel looked at her. She had told him all that in the short time she had walked beside his horse. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to know what he needed or didn’t need.
“Yeah. I want to buy a mule and some seed.”
“Well, now. I got a horse that’s broke to plow. He ain’t as good as a mule, but I could let him go cheap, real cheap. And I got more seed than I know what to do with. It would save you a trip into town.”
“I sort of thought I might like to go to town,” Deel said.
“Yeah, well, sure. But I can get those things for you.”
“I wanted to take Winston here to the store and get him some candy.”
Tom grinned. “Now, that is a good idea, but so happens, I was in town this mornin’, and-”
Tom produced a brown paper from his shirt pocket and laid it out on the table and carefully pulled the paper loose, revealing two short pieces of peppermint.
Winston looked at Tom. “Is that for me?”
“It is.”
“You just take one now, Winston, and have it after dinner,” Mary Lou said. “You save that other piece for tomorrow. It’ll give you somethin’ to look forward to.”
“That was mighty nice of you, Tom,” Deel said.
“You should stay for lunch,” Mary Lou said. “Deel and Winston caught a couple of fish, and I got some potatoes. I can fry them up.”
“Why that’s a nice offer,” Tom said. “And on account of it, I’ll clean the fish.”
THE NEXT FEW DAYS passed with Tom coming out to bring the horse and the seed, and coming back the next day with some plow parts Deel needed. Deel began to think he would never get to town, and now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to go. Tom was far more comfortable with his family than he was and he was jealous of that and wanted to stay with them and find his place. Tom and Mary Lou talked about all manner of things, and quite comfortably, and the boy had lost all interest in the bow. In fact, Deel had found it and the arrows out under a tree near where the woods firmed up. He took it and put it in the smokehouse. The air was dry in there and it would cure better, though he was uncertain the boy would ever have anything to do with it.
Deel plowed a half-dozen acres of the flowers under, and the next day Tom came out with a wagonload of cured chicken shit, and helped him shovel it across the broken ground. Deel plowed it under and Tom helped Deel plant peas and beans for the fall crop, some hills of yellow crookneck squash, and a few mounds of watermelon and cantaloupe seed.
That evening they were sitting out in front of the house, Deel in the cane rocker and Tom in a kitchen chair. The boy sat on the ground near Tom and twisted a stick in the dirt. The only light came from the open door of the house, from the lamp inside. When Deel looked over his shoulder, he saw Mary Lou at the washbasin again, doing the dishes, wiggling her ass. Tom looked in that direction once, then looked at Deel, then looked away at the sky, as if memorizing the positions of the stars.
Tom said, “You and me ain’t been huntin’ since well before you left.”
“You came around a lot then, didn’t you?” Deel said.
Tom nodded. “I always felt better here than at home. Mama and Daddy fought all the time.”
“I’m sorry about your parents.”
“Well,” Tom said, “everyone’s got a time to die, you know. It can be in all kinds of ways, but sometimes it’s just time and you just got to embrace it.”
“I reckon that’s true.”
“What say you and me go huntin’?” Tom said, “I ain’t had any possum meat in ages.”
“I never did like possum,” Deel said. “Too greasy.”
“You ain’t fixed ’em right. That’s one thing I can do, fix up a possum good. ’Course, best way is catch one and pen it and feed it corn for a week or so, then kill it. Meat’s better that way, firmer. But I’d settle for shootin’ one, showin’ you how to get rid of that gamey taste with some vinegar and such, cook it up with some sweet potatoes. I got more sweet potatoes than I know what to do with.”
“Deel likes sweet potatoes,” Mary Lou said.
Deel turned. She stood in the doorway drying her hands on a dish towel. She said, “That ought to be a good idea, Deel. Goin’ huntin’. I wouldn’t mind learnin’ how to cook up a possum right. You and Tom ought to go, like the old days.”
“I ain’t had no sweet potatoes in years,” Deel said.
“All the more reason,” Tom said.
The boy said, “I want to go.”
“That’d be all right,” Tom said, “but you know, I think this time I’d like for just me and Deel to go. When I was a kid, he taught me about them woods, and I’d like to go with him, for old time’s sake. That all right with you, Winston?”
Winston didn’t act like it was all right, but he said, “I guess.”
THAT NIGHT DEEL LAY beside Mary Lou and said, “I like Tom, but I was thinkin’ maybe we could somehow get it so he don’t come around so much.”
“Oh?”
“I know Winston looks up to him, and I don’t mind that, but I need to get to know Winston again…Hell, I didn’t ever know him. And I need to get to know you…I owe you some time, Mary Lou. The right kind of time.”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Deel. The right kind of time?”
Deel thought for a while, tried to find the right phrasing. He knew what he felt, but saying it was a different matter. “I know you ended up with me because I seemed better than some was askin’. Turned out I wasn’t quite the catch you thought. But we got to find what we need, Mary Lou.”
“What we need?”
“Love. We ain’t never found love.”
She lay silent.
“I just think,” Deel said, “we ought to have our own time together before we start havin’ Tom around so much. You understand what I’m sayin’, right?”
“I guess so.”
“I don’t even feel like I’m proper home yet. I ain’t been to town or told nobody I’m back.”
“Who you missin’?”
Deel thought about that for a long time. “Ain’t nobody but you and Winston that I missed, but I need to get some things back to normal…I need to make connections so I can set up some credit at the store, maybe some farm trade for things we need next year. But mostly, I just want to be here with you so we can talk. You and Tom talk a lot. I wish we could talk like that. We need to learn how to talk.”
“Tom’s easy to talk to. He’s a talker. He can talk about anything and make it seem like somethin’, but when he’s through, he ain’t said nothin’…You never was a talker before, Deel, so why now?”
“I want to hear what you got to say, and I want you to hear what I got to say, even if we ain’t talkin’ about nothin’ but seed catalogs or pass the beans, or I need some more firewood or stop snoring. Most anything that’s got normal about it. So, thing is, I don’t want Tom around so much. I want us to have some time with just you and me and Winston, that’s all I’m sayin’.”
Deel felt the bed move. He turned to look, and in the dark he saw that Mary Lou was pulling her gown up above her breasts. Her pubic hair looked thick in the dark and her breasts were full and round and inviting.
She said, “Maybe tonight we could get started on knowing each other better.”
His mouth was dry. All he could say was, “All right.”
His hands trembled as he unbuttoned his union suit at the crotch and she spread her legs and he climbed on top of her. It only took a moment before he exploded.
“Oh, God,” he said, and collapsed on her, trying to support his weight on his elbows.
