Over the Plain Houses. Julia Franks

Lord asks you to do something difficult? You’re gonna start asking Him about the particulars?”

      Matthew said nothing. These were not questions for answering.

      But Brodis seemed to want to hear the answers anyway. He set them out without apology. “You’ll never become a firm kind of man, that’s what. You’ll be one of those fellows who can never decide. And no one will ever trust you to make a hard choice.”

      Irenie turned back to the sink, slid the scraped dishes into the dishpan without making a sound, poured the bucket of cold well water into the dishpan. The steam dissipated instantly.

      The linseed-oiled desks seemed a long way away.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      THE FIRST TIME BRODIS CLUCKED THE MULE, IT snorted white breath into the morning and took a reluctant step, just enough to tighten the traces between it and the plow. On the second cluck, it commenced to tramp forward grudge-slow. One step, then two. The spewed frost crunched under hoof, the plowshare bit into the earth and inched forward, and the soil parted, turned, rose up and rolled over the dust of white in a soft brown ridge. Brodis swung his crippled foot around and up the new-turned furrow, and then again, and again, and it wasn’t long before sweat damped his collar and slid down his spine. He leaned on the hickory grips, and the dense grain of the wood told him of the rip of the share, and the upboil of earth, and how the soil resisted a man’s effort until it had no choice but to yield with a sigh of mud and mold and rot.

      He’d been at it since ’24, the year he’d quit the logging drives. He’d had a permanent limp after the accident but also a bank account at Asheville Savings and the profits of fourteen years on the river, to say nothing of his new soul. He’d considered himself a rich man, so rich that he’d ignored the feeling that Irenie Raines wasn’t meant to be his. They’d married and set to farming, and he’d learned to plow a straight furrow in the static earth and to clear a stump with a plug of dynamite, to salt his stock in the summer and gather them in winter. There was a repetition to it that river work didn’t have. But it was heavy. A piece of land could never do anything but wait dumb and fallow for the imprint of a man. But his wife moved along it like she’d been born for it, like she had a direction, away and away, and a fellow had to be nimble to stay with the flow of her. And in the evening, she was there, coming out of the spring house or bending to feed the fire in the cook stove, a damp patch of sweat at the small of her back and the cotton fabric clinging to her body, in the house that he’d reframed, on the land they’d sown, and he felt he’d discovered an unclaimed world and made it his own.

      But now she’d become a fittified spring that dried up and disappeared on you. Two days ago she’d chose to sit among the sinners. Just sitting with her mama for a change was what she’d said at supper, and he’d let it lay. Let it lay because he was full of good will and Mrs. Dawson’s fried chicken and Mrs. McCurdy’s pie and a dozen congratulations.

      Just then the grips of the plow kicked him in the ribs. The blade had caught. The mule stopped, stiff-necked and bored. Brodis pulled up and heard the gray slide of steel on granite. He reached under the share to prise up the stone. The soil was moist and cold, the rock immovable and fair-size enough to need the shovel. He lifted out the blade and stepped past the steaming mule toward the barn. Inside, among the post-hole diggers and fence-stretchers and wire cutters, hung a long handled shovel. The implement was as tall as his chest, and he swung it forward like a limb and planted it in the ground with each step, noting the halo of light at the top of the mountain that meant the rising of the sun. Step, plant. Step, plant.

      His eye might have seen it first, but his mind didn’t record it right off. Then it did: an oval print amongst the spears of frost.

      He stopped. For a moment he considered going back to the plow, returning to this spot only after the sun had burned the mark away. Ten minutes was all it would take. By then warmth would settle across the field, and the white-cauled earth would brown again. Just walk away.

      But no. That wasn’t the promise he’d made to himself whenever he’d taken up with the Lord. He’d sworn to confront the truth head-on. Brodis shifted his weight and swung the bad foot around.

      The print was smaller than his fist, too small to be from his own boot. Next to it the heel mark was shallow, hurried. Inside the oval was the word Sear, backwards, no final s.

      For some reason he thought of the lady agent. No, not for some reason. For a very particular reason. For the reason that here came a woman driving an automobile up somewhere she didn’t belong and not two days later he, Brodis, was finding the footprint of a woman where it didn’t belong. The closest homeplace was Irenie’s parents, two miles distant by the drovers’ road.

      The only woman for miles was his wife. And right now Irenie was washing up the dishes. She hadn’t been out but to go to the privy. There was no way she’d trudged up to this field in the pre-dawn. No way at all. There was no reason on earth for her to be up here.

      But why had she sat with the sinners on Sunday? And how was it he’d let it go as if it was nothing?

      Somehow he’d let his guard drop. He’d done the same thing he’d done every spring before. He’d gotten comfortable and then he’d gotten old.

      But Irenie wasn’t old. She didn’t have a gray hair on her head. And what was it had passed between her and the Furman woman? And why was the Department of Agriculture sending the wives of its agents up into mountain churches?

      Every day the outside world crowded further into the valley, and with it forces that were bound and determined to steal away the God-fearing thoughts of right and true people. Every day the devil rallied his legions.

      He swung the shovel up above his head until his whole body extended toward the coming day, and the effort of it increased and livened him. Then he bent at the waist and whipped the blade straight down. It slammed into the furrow, incising straight and deep. He left it upright and shuddering.

      In a previous life, he’d wanted for resolve. That was a different time, before trains and trucks had replaced the last of the river men. Back then the drives always ended in music and cards and drinking and sworping, and even though he’d sometimes been in outfits that set up revivals and prayer meetings, none of the preaching had ever hit, even after he’d been in the business for ten years. True, the knowledge rode heavy on his mind, always there, along with the sense that there was a thing that needed doing, that was indeed imperative above all else, but that somehow was too distant to actually do. For more than a decade he hadn’t been adequate to it. But after the accident, his life had changed. Lyman and Colter were the ones to find him, naked and facedown at the edge of the water. Brodis remembered being rolled over, the weight of his body a thousand pounds against the dirt of the shredded bank. The only thing he recalled with certainty was a moment when the earth became so white that he was looking at a burned spectacle of the log boom and the river crew, like a photographic plate, the human figures glowing against the blackened sky. Colter loomed over him with fear-struck eyes, and Brodis knew the man then for what he’d always been. He was an angel. Even Lyman, who he hated, looked like an angel. The next seconds changed his life. The concern in the two men’s faces became a visible light, then a bodily sensation, then a fire that burned from the inside.

      His body too. His torso that had a moment before been heavy against the earth now weighed nothing at all. He leapt to his feet, vaguely marking that his foot wasn’t behaving the way it ought. But there wasn’t any pain. He shouted with glee, and it was as if all the energy and love he’d ever produced in a quarter century of living were erupting without his consent. Later, the drivers told the story of how he’d run up the bank naked as a baby, waving his arms and shouting to beat the band, embracing anyone who’d let him. No limp.

      But Brodis didn’t remember. What he did recall was the sense that a lifetime of pride and hiding-away had vanished, that his heart had broke open, making room at last for that which was bigger than itself. It had taken a near-killing, but something inside him