This is red clay country, and when it rains the hills seep and run like open sores. The rain falls slantwise through the East Texas pines, gathers in temporary rivers that run nowhere but won't stop moving. The rain is heavy with sulfur and salt. It dirties everything it touches.
The old house is lashed with nettles, battered by limbs. It receives a new collection of scars and does not care if it stands or not. It is not stubborn, or proud, or particularly well made. It endures in spite of itself because the winds have not yet snuffed it out. Its time has not yet come. That's all.
A live flame ghosts through the house, window to window, a gas lantern carried by anxious hands. It is early yet, but the storm has brought down night onto the house, and a little fire is comforting.
She sets the lantern down on the little dining table and returns to her seat across from his. It is an old chair. It leans and creaks as she settles into it. The storm growls and hisses and spits. It is a crowd of widows and matrons falling past her windows. She feels its disapproval keenly.
"The attic will be full tonight," she says. A weak laugh and she picks up her fork, surveys the remains of her meal. "There'll be fighting I guess." He says nothing.
"I might've set more traps. Had I known." She smoothes her skirt down, considers a potato. "Could have stew again. I know how you like that."
She eats the food, not because there is any pleasure in it, but because it would be wasteful not to. She tucks her hair behind her ear. Bites her lip. Raises her eyes to look him in the chest. This is how she looks at him, the frayed and patch-worked denim of his shirt. Little tears where hay pokes through, in need of mending. His tablecloth neckerchief, checkered red and white. A ruff of straw where the burlap face tucks in and she drops her wandering eyes. Studies his untouched dinner instead.
She touches her throat, coughs a little cough.
He says nothing.
She finishes her meal, lays the fork atop her plate, and sits quietly for a long while. She drinks her water, all but the last two sips where the rust settles. The storm has made her slow, and deliberate, and wistful. She faces the windows, watches the rain cut dirty channels across the glass.
"I wish I had a dream," she says after a long while. "I think I used to. When I was young. Children dream a lot, don't they? I remember they do."
She looks at his hands, the mismatched fabric of the gloves fat with stiff tufts of fiber. The tips of fingers frayed and stained yellow-brown. The fingers jut, rigid and tumorous. The wrists tied down with twine.
"I think I used to dream about this house. I really do. But not like this. Not all worn out and used. It was clean. It... smelled nice. Like baking and fresh linen. Sweet grass.
"The doors opened easy, and you didn't have to slam them closed. There was sunlight in the windows, like the glass itself was glowing, so clear and bright. And nice big rugs, soft on bare feet. Quiet footsteps.
"The walls were straight and so, so tall. They felt safe. And if you leaned into them, rested your face against them and breathed... You could smell the forest where they came from. Like they carried its memory in the grain."
The storm outside leaned into the house, and the house groaned and shrieked and shuddered.
"In my dreams, you never could have imagined that the house might someday fall. It was unthinkable."
He says nothing.
She does not know that she sighs when she stands. It would have made her cry to know that she had. She steps carefully across the bowed and splintered floor to stand at his side. Though the storm has disguised the coming of night, she feels it in her blood, in the way it slows and cools. Somewhere to the west, hidden by heavy clouds, the day has met its end.
"Well," she says and reaches for his hand. "What do children know, anyway?"
She lays her hand in his and the weariness settles onto her like a second skin. She feels faint, but steadies herself as his fingers close on her hand.
He stands. With a great crackling and rustling, he stands. A pall of desiccate plant matter shakes loose to drift around him, settles slowly. He turns with her and follows like someone waking from sleep. He totters and stumbles, leaves a trail of straw-dust in his footsteps.
She leads him to the foot of the bed, and lets her hand fall away from his. She turns away and works out the buttons of her blouse, shrugs it off onto the floor. She does not look at him, but she can hear his head turning to watch. His dander drifts towards her, settles onto her skin, but she is too tired to brush it away. She finishes undressing and falls naked into the bed.
She turns herself towards him, and opens her legs. He is a silhouette, black against the brown light of the lamp. He sways a little, raising a busy haze of dry dust listing in the lamplight. He kneels into the bed, and then crouches at her, makes his way unsteadily on hands and knees to cover her over with his silent presence.
She is so sleepy now, but she makes herself look into his face as he works his way inside her. The burlap head sags and lolls, seems to search. In the dim light she can trace the crooked line of mouth sewn across the jaw, forever closed, forever silent.
The coarse denim of his jeans scrapes against her thighs with every push of his hips. One of his hands, thick and slack, paws stupidly at her breasts. The straw scratches at her skin, the dander stings her eyes and brings sticky tears.
She searches his face and finds his mismatched button eyes. The black one is plastic, small and terrible. The other is wooden, large and mad. They frighten her, but she makes herself look so that he can see her seeing him. She places her hand aside his face and the burlap gives and crackles.
Her eyes are growing dim now, filling up with sleep.
"Don't stop," she says. "If I fall asleep. Don't stop."
His face lowers to her, covers her mouth with a dry kiss, and for a moment she cannot breathe. Then she can hold on no longer, and the sleep takes her.
He does stop. When her eyes close, and her hand falls away from his head, he stops. He settles onto the bed beside her and draws her asleep into the crook of his arm, rests her head on his patchwork shoulder.
Lost in dark eddies of oblivion, she does not stir, but all the night long he whispers to her dreams of long ago, when the house was new and fresh and strong. When it was still possible to believe that it might stand forever.
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