I feel her searching for me before I hear her voice. A tug that starts in the web between my fingers and settles in my wrists. There’s a scent to it as well, sweet almonds and tomato leaves, the smell of how she feels but not actually how she smells. Pea always speaks of the hands as though they were a separate entity, a spirit whom she no longer trusts. But I know that they are me, as much as any part of the meat of my body can be. I was ten when my dream came down, an ecstasy of holy voices raised in song, and of holy hands, soft as chrysanthemum petals, pushing me up and up to meet the godhead. My father sent me back to my grandmother’s farm for the year. My grandmother told me that they were a gift, a tiny spark of divine Shiva bestowed upon me for selfless deeds in a past life. They were mine, she said, but they were mine to use well.
I have failed as thoroughly as possible the charge laid upon me. My karmic load cannot be expiated in this lifetime. What good could I do now equal to my decade of silence? To the stink and slip as another dying man cursed me, and I took it willingly, to spare my lover?
I fold the letter into thirds and stuff it into my pocket.
“There you are,” she calls from the top of the hill. She slides on the gravel as she jogs down and laughs as she keeps her balance. “Any mail? More advice from Mother?”
“Neither.” I lift her hand to kiss it. “You’re clean.”
“Dirt does wash off.”
“Unlike—” I begin, and her smile doesn’t slip, but still I sense her anticipation as I turn her out for the spin, “the greenflies on your tomatoes.”
“You can clean anything if you try hard enough.” She takes my elbow. We settle together into the silence that follows, a deepness strung with tension, perversely comforting. River Road is a half-hour walk, but we prefer that to the car.
The silence keeps for more than a mile, all the way to the abandoned Lutheran church on the edge of town. It held its last Sunday service on the eve of the Depression, shortly after my father’s death. Now, only Craver seems to remember the cracked and falling stones of that old churchyard. Warped clapboard and blown-out glass is all that’s left of the second-oldest German Lutheran church in the Hudson Valley. Craver showed me, once, the plot destined for his bones, at the foot of his parents’ and grandparents’ graves. All I can remember of it now is its austerity, two thin, lichen-crusted slabs that even then seemed cowed by the surrounding vegetation.
“They’re going to build a hotel there,” Pea says.
“You heard that?”
“Ellen told me.”
I shrugged. “The Bobbys are always threatening the riverfront property on this side of town. Probably nothing will come of it.”
“The Bobbys? You mean Mayor Bell?”
“And his son.” I look away and start walking again. “Bobby Bell, the Junior and Senior. There’s been a Bell in the River House since the Civil War.”
Pea shakes her head. “You’ve never mentioned the son before.”
“No.” That would cut too close. She already knows about one of the deaths on my shoulders. No need to tell her of the other.
A deer buck and two does graze by the fence at the northern edge of the churchyard. The buck raises its head, heavy with late-summer antlers, when we pass. I feel the heat of its attention, smell the tender grass sweetness of its curiosity and the banked charcoal of its aggression. But I don’t fear the skewering points of those antlers any more than Pea does. Not with her beside me. She pauses for a moment to meet its eyes and her look is pure Bleecker Street. The constellation of features that I would study from shadowed corners when she spoke to Victor or Walter, and that would scare me, and that I would love. A killer. I had known precisely what she was from the moment I saw her in that Hell’s Kitchen alley. It was the blood, I know that now; not despite it, but because of it.
Pea turns from the buck and rubs her thumb across my forehead. I hadn’t known I was frowning. She observes me, but we are as incomprehensible to one another as we are to those deer by the graveyard.
The distant report of a hunting rifle cracks our tableau. The buck and the does jump the rotting fence and vanish behind the church.
“Is it awful to hope that no one gets venison for dinner tonight?”
My laugh cracks the air as unexpectedly as that gun. “Only venison?”
“It’s a sin to eat something so beautiful. Did you see his eyes?”
“So it’s only beauty that arouses your pity?”
“Lucky for you! Don’t make me lose all my vices. I might die from the shock.”
“I’m using your zucchini for dinner.”
“Are you? And what if I happened to find some steak on our way back?”
“I would watch you cook it with a great deal of disapproval.”
“It wouldn’t be home without it. Darling. Dev. You know I would give up meat tomorrow if you wanted—”
I put my finger to her lips, pull us back. “Not today?”
She closes her eyes. “Not all my vices.”
“Nor mine.”
It’s never far away, the smell of blood. Beneath her skin, and beneath mine. Nothing is more beautiful than what spills out of us when we have nothing else left.
She twitches away from me. “What’s that in your pocket?” The folded envelope has shifted on our walk, so that a corner of crisp white paper pokes out. I shrug and push it back down.
“A letter from the president,” I say.
She laughs. “Tell him that whenever he’s finished with Hitler, I could use some help with my aphids.”
I cant a smile at her and walk ahead. I don’t take her hand, because she would feel my pulse.
2
The general store
