Chapter Eleven · Sienna
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SIENNA
The second Thursday, they came early.
That is a thing about men in a club that nobody tells you: they will be late to their own weddings and they will be twenty minutes early to a thing they have decided is theirs.
By six-forty there were nine of them in my lot with the cuts already coming off before they hit the door, and Mater had brought a folding table out of somebody’s truck because he had noticed the week before that I was short one, and set it up where I would have put it, and then stood back from it looking at the barn wall so nobody would thank him.
Rae got there at ten till and took one look at the lot.
“Well,” she said. “You’ve got a program.”
“I’ve got a Thursday.”
“Honey, that’s how programs start. That’s the whole mechanism.
” She hauled the trauma kits out of my truck bed.
“I put in for the county to buy the consumables, by the way. Evelyn Harrow sent me the grant line and the form was four questions long. Four questions. I’ve been in this service eleven years and nobody told me that money existed. ”
Tonight was gunshot and puncture, which I had not planned for week two and had moved up for one reason, and the reason was sitting by the door in a folding chair with his color back in his face.
“Trip’s going to help me teach the first part,” I said, when they’d settled. “He’s going to do it because he asked to, and because there’s not a mannequin in Virginia that can tell you what it feels like. He’ll stop when he wants to stop. Nobody asks him a follow-up he doesn’t offer. Am I clear.”
Nine men said yes ma’am in a barn like a church.
He did it standing, one hand on the chair back, and showed them the entrance and then the exit and let them see the difference in size. He told them what he remembered, which was not much, and then he said the thing I had hoped he would say and had not asked him to.
“The part that saved me wasn’t fancy,” he said. “It was somebody put a seal on it and stopped me drowning in my own chest. That’s a thing on a shelf that costs eleven dollars. Y’all can learn that in twenty minutes.”
Then he sat down hard, and Scout got him water and did not make a joke about it, which for Scout is a eulogy.
I taught chest seals after that. Where the lung actually is. The four signs. Why you never plug a hole in a chest with a shirt. Nine men learned a thing in twenty minutes that costs eleven dollars, and Rook wrote the four signs on his forearm in ink.
Cutter worked in the corner with Mater and did every drill twice without being asked, forty-one seconds on the timed one.
I did not look over more than four times. I counted.
They left at nine. He stayed, because I had asked him to at seven when I gave him the clipboard, in a voice I had spent all afternoon getting flat.
“There’s beer in the house,” I said, “which I’m not offering you, and there’s a tailgate, which I am.”
“Tailgate’s fine.”
“It’s not hospitality. It’s that I have three questions and I’d rather ask them outside.”
We sat on the tailgate with three feet between us and the ridge going black behind the barn, and the whippoorwill got started, and up on the county road a car went by with a bad belt.
“Friday’s set,” he said finally. “Grace has the room at six. She’ll meet you in the office first and go over what’s privileged and what isn’t. Diesel wants you to know the vote comes after you leave, not while you’re standing there, so nobody can say you were in it.”
“That’s decent of him.”
“That’s Grace, actually. Diesel would have had you stay. Grace says a woman standing in the room during a vote is a woman who gets asked ten years from now whether she was in the room during the vote.”
“Grace is right.”
“Grace is generally right. It’s her worst quality.”
I laughed before I could decide not to. It came out rough from being unused in this particular direction.
Then I said the thing I had been carrying up the road for two weeks, because there was never going to be a better set of circumstances and because I am too old to wait for a good moment.
“Four years,” I said. “I want to know about the four years.”
He went still, the way he does.
“That’s not on the clipboard,” he said.
“No. It’s not a rule and you don’t owe me an answer.
But I’ve had a story in my head for ten years and I’ve never had a single fact in it, and I’ve built a whole life on that story, and here lately I’ve started to wonder if the story’s any good.
” I looked out at the ridge instead of at him. “So. Four years.”
He was quiet long enough that I thought he’d say no.
“Nobody’s asked me that,” he said. “In ten years. Not my mother, not Diesel. Men here treat it like a war. You don’t ask a man about his war, you just hand him a beer and let him be quiet about it, and I have accepted about nine hundred beers on those terms.”
“I’m not handing you a beer.”
“I noticed.” He shifted on the tailgate.
“The first year I was angry,” he said. “Every day. At the county, at the lawyer, at Diesel for not being the president yet, at the man who put me there. I did a lot of push-ups. Second year I stopped being angry and got scared, which is worse, because anger’s a fuel and fear’s a leak.
Third year I got quiet. Fourth year I got useful.
There was a fella in there teaching a GED class who was sixty years old and had killed a man in 1981, and I sat in that class for eleven months and helped him teach fractions to twenty-two-year-olds, and that is the only thing I did in four years that I would tell a child about. ”
“Fractions.”
“Fractions.” A shrug in his voice. “You’d be amazed what a man will hold still for if you show him a pizza cut in eight.”
The whippoorwill went on about it.
“And the room,” I said.
“You want to do that tonight?”
“No,” I said. “But I want to know if you’ll do it at all, ever, because I need to know whether I’m sitting on a tailgate with a man or with a locked shed.”
He took a while with that.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Not tonight. Not because I’m hiding, because I’m not, I’ve had ten years to write it out and I could say it to you in four sentences right now and you would hate every one of them.
I’d rather say it when you’ve got somewhere to go afterward that isn’t your own kitchen at midnight. ”
“That’s very managed.”
“It is,” he said. “You want to know the truth, it’s the only decent thing I know how to do, and it is also the exact thing I did to you in the first place, so you tell me. You want the four sentences now?”
And here is what surprised me: I did not.
I sat on my own tailgate in my own yard and found out that I did not want it tonight, and that the wanting-it-later was somehow worse and better at the same time.
I understood something about myself that I did not care for, which is that I had spent a decade insisting I wanted the truth while arranging a life in which nobody could ever hand it to me.
“No,” I said. “Not tonight.”
“All right.”
“But not never, Cutter.”
“Not never,” he said.
We sat there a while longer. It was full dark and the ridge was just a place where the stars stopped.
“Can I ask you one,” he said.
“You can ask.”
“The green dress. The peach on the fender.” He was looking straight ahead. “Do you think about that day, or is that just mine?”
I thought about lying. It would have been easy and he would have let me have it.
“I’ve thought about that day,” I said, “on purpose, eleven times.”
“On purpose.”
“There’s a difference. There’s the times it comes at you in a Kroger parking lot because somebody’s got the same laugh, and there’s no counting those, that’s weather. And then there’s the times you sit down and choose to go back there.”
“Eleven of those.”
“Eleven,” I said. “That’s not a figure of speech. I counted, because after the fourth time I got scared of it and started keeping track, which tells you everything about the last ten years of my life that you’d want to know.”
He nodded slowly at the dark.
“Eleven’s a lot,” he said.
“Eleven is nothing. Eleven is four times a year.”
I slid off the tailgate because my hands had started wanting something to do and there was nothing on that truck bed to hold.
That was the mistake. Standing put me a foot and a half from him, face level with his for the first time all night, and I had spent five weeks engineering my life so that would not happen.
“Go home,” I said.
He came off the tailgate.
Not fast. He got down the way that man does everything, which is deliberately, and it put him close enough that I had to tip my head, and neither one of us moved for about four seconds.
“Say it again,” he said. “And I’ll go.”
“Cutter.”
“Say go home, Sienna, and I’ll get on that bike.”
And I stood in my own lot with a hundred and thirteen reasons in my mouth and could not produce one of them.
I have put a needle between a man’s ribs in a ditch by feel. And I stood in front of Cutter Reeves at nine-forty at night in August and my hands did not know one thing.
So he took them.
Both of them, one at a time, off my crossed arms, and turned them over and put his thumbs flat in my palms, and that is the closest thing to violence anybody has ever done to me.
“Rule six,” I said.
“You wrote it. You’d have to be the one to move it.”
“That is a coward’s answer.”
“Yes ma’am,” Cutter said. “It’s also the only one I’ve got, and I’d say it again tomorrow.”
Ten years.
Ten years of a bolted table and a parking lot in Craig County and a green dress I gave to the church, and every one of those years was standing in that lot with us, and I understood in about a half second that I could keep them or I could put my mouth on his, and that there was not going to be a version where I got both.
“Move,” I said.
“Say what and where.”
“Move six inches, Cutter, and let me do this, because I have been the one who leaves and I would like one time in my life to be the one who ...”
I did not finish it.
I got a fist in the front of his shirt and I pulled, and he came, and ten years came with him.
It was not a crash and it was not gentle.
He put one hand at the back of my head, in my hair, the way you hold something you have been careful about for a long time, and the other one stayed exactly where I had put it, palm open at my waist, not going anywhere I had not authorized, and that restraint did more damage to me than any grab in the world would have.
I made a sound. I am not going to pretend I did not.
He answered it, low, into my mouth, and his hand at my back closed in my shirt and let go and closed again, and I felt every one of those four years and every one of those six, and I understood that this man had been standing six feet away from me since July on nothing but discipline.
I do not know how long. I know that at some point I had a fistful of his hair and my back against the fender of my own truck and one of his boots between mine, and I know that he broke it first, with his forehead against mine, breathing like a man who had run up a hill.
“Sienna.”
“Don’t apologize. If you apologize I will put you in the creek.”
“I wasn’t going to apologize.” His hand was still in my hair. “I was going to ask what the rule is now.”
And that. That, right there, at nine-forty at night with my heart going like a hammer.
Any other man in this county would have taken that as a yes to everything. He stood in my lot with his mouth an inch off mine and asked what the rule was.
“The rule is I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s a fine rule.”
“It’s a terrible rule.”
“It’s yours.” He let go of me. He stepped back to about three feet, which cost him something, and I watched it cost him. “And it’ll hold till you say different, and I’ll not ask you again, and Thursday I’ll be in your barn with my cut on a peg like the rest of them.”
“Don’t be reasonable at me right now.”
“I’m not being reasonable,” Cutter said. “I’m going to go home and be extremely unreasonable in my own house. But I’m going to do it there.”
He got his cut off the peg and put it on one shoulder and then the other, and I watched a student turn back into a vice president in about two seconds.
At the edge of the lamplight he stopped and turned around, and he did not come back toward me, which I want written down.
“Friday,” he said. “When you’re standing in front of that table.”
“Cutter, if you tell me you’re going to look at the wood the whole time to protect my reputation, I will throw something at you.”
He almost smiled. In the dark it was mostly a shape.
“I was going to,” he said.
“I know you were.”
“Then what do you want.”
I stood in my own gravel with my mouth still stinging and eleven years of professional judgment lying in pieces around my boots, and told him the truth.
“I want you to look at me,” I said. “Once. In front of all sixteen of them. And I want it to be your idea.”
He got on the bike.
“Yes ma’am,” he said.
And I stood there and listened to him go down the grade with the fireflies coming up out of the wet grass, and then I went in and stood in my kitchen with my hands flat on the counter for a good while, because I had a shift at six and a chapel on Friday and I had just handed a Copperhead officer permission to claim me in front of his entire club.