sweat from my brow. I closed my eyes. I took in several long, slow breaths.
“Hiram?”
I opened my eyes, to see Thena standing there. I wobbled to my feet and felt the sweat now running down my face.
“Oh my,” she said and then put her hand to my brow. “What are you doing, boy?”
I felt faint. I could not speak. Thena threw my arm over her shoulder and began walking me back to the fields. I was aware that we were moving, but through my fever, everything seemed a rush of autumnal brown and red. The smell of Lockless, the fetid stables, the burning of brush, the orchards we now shuffled past, even the sweet sweat of Thena, were suddenly acute and overpowering. I remember seeing the tunnel into the Warrens flitter before me in a haze, and then I was doubled over, retching into a basin. Thena waited for me to recover.
“All right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
Back in my quarters, Thena helped me take off my outer garments. Then she handed me a fresh pair of drawers and stepped outside. When she returned, I was lying on my rope bed with the blanket pulled up to my shoulders. Thena took the stone jar from over my mantel and walked out to the well. When she came back, she set the jar on the table, took a glass from the mantel, poured water into it, and then handed the glass to me.
“You gotta rest,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“If you know, what was you doing out there?”
“I just…how’d you find me?”
“Hiram, I will always find you,” she said. “Taking these clothes for the washing. I’ll have them back to you by the Monday next.”
Thena stood and walked to the door.
“I gotta get back to it,” she said. “Rest. Don’t be no fool.”
I fell quickly into sleep, and into a dream world, but one of memory. I was once again out in the stables, my mother just lost to me. I peered into the eyes of the Tennessee Pacer, peered until I disappeared into them and came out in that loft where I had so often played among my young childhood thoughts.
* * *
—
The next morning, Roscoe came to my quarters. “Take it light,” he said. “They’ll be working you hard in time. Rest yourself now.”
But lying there, all I found were questions and paranoias that rattled around in my head—the deceptions of Hawkins, my dancing mother on the bridge. Work was the only escape. I dressed and walked out of the tunnel, rounded the house, only to be greeted by Corrine Quinn’s chaise crawling up the main road. This had become a regular occurrence since Maynard’s passing. Corrine would arrive with Hawkins and her maid Amy, and then spend an afternoon leading my father through prayer. There had never before been anything observant about the house. My father was Virginian, and like the relics of his Revolutionary fathers, a certain godlessness testified to the old days when everything seemed in question. But now he had lost his only heir, his legacy to the world, and his Christian god seemed all that was left. I backed into the tunnel a bit and watched as Hawkins helped his mistress out of the chaise, and then her maid, and the three walked up to the house. I did not then know why I found them so forbidding. All I knew was in their presence I felt something more terrible than any Holy Spirit.
I thought to return to my childhood habit of trying to fit in where I might be needed. But as I walked from kitchen to smokehouse, then from smokehouse to stable, then from stable to orchard, I was greeted with woeful looks, and it was clear that someone—Thena, Roscoe, or both—had dictated that I not be put to labor. So I resolved to find work myself. I returned to my quarters and changed out of my suit of house clothes into a pair of overalls and brogans. Then I walked out to a brick shed at the start of the woods just west of the main house, where my father kept a collection of lounges, footstools, bureaus, roll-top desks, and other old furnishings awaiting restoration. It was late morning. The air was cold and damp. Fallen leaves clung to the bottom of my brogans. I opened the shed. A block of light cut through a small square window, shining on the collection. I saw an Adams secretary, a camelback sofa, a