The Line

The Line by Richard Hague The child lay in a plain box lined with quilt scraps. The skin of its face and hands was pearly, though there was no depth to its luminescence. The gray noon light that entered the open door and explored the farthest corners of the room lit, exactly as it did the child, the broken radio, the piles of clothes, the drawerless bureau stuffed with pots and boxes, the random bundles of kindling. The mother sat in the doorway connecting the front room and the kitchen. The box containing the child lay across the seat of a wooden chair in the middle of the room. A straight line could have been drawn between the first branch of the dead oak visible across the road, through the open front door, across the folded hands of the child in the box, directly through the heart of the mother sitting just before the kitchen entrance, and on out the kitchen window behind her into the desperate rampage of the woods and beyond. In fact there was such a line; though invisible, it connected all these things and more, and along it ran a slightly vibrating darkness, a troubled dusk that lived, alien and unexpected , despite the time of day. As the younger boy came in, he instinctively avoided this line, stepping sideways through the door and then sneaking along the piles of oil cans and motor parts that lay heaped against the eastern wall. He marked the gaze of his mother, whose stare seemed frozen to the line. He knew it as a gaze to be avoided, for it was relentless, dangerous somehow. He moved slowly, trying not to draw attention to himself, hunching his shoulders until he found a niche in the piles. Then he squatted, silently, his back to the wall. Later, the older boy came in. He too sidestepped the mother's staring down the line, and clapped earth angrily from his gloves. The mother suddenly looked at him. "Shush!" she cried. Then her gray eyes settled and fixed again on the hne. The older boy stepped past the younger, and into the kitcnen, where he sat to one side of the line in a broken chair. Soon his eyes closed, though he sat straight-backed, and his breathing mixed with the rustling of leaves in the woods outside the open window. The mother tried not to remember. That was trouble: mines, falling wellcasings , the old car that caught fire on the road to Forrest, the two dead at birth. 53 But memories paced the edges of her mind like skinny coon dogs with the mange, woods-hounds, lean and whining , with dull copper eyes. She could smell them there, at the edge, and she hated again the smell. To get rid of it she gripped the line tighter. Down Broomstick, the husband dug the grave. He had sent the older boy home. Why, he didn't know. Things happen. He dug next to the two stones of the others. They were small stones, sad. He did not turn from them. The price to pay, he thought. His spade rang against a rock, then slipped off into clay. He leaned on it, pushing, and the earth wedged out and he piled it next to the hole. He looked up from his work now and then to see the creek through the quaking aspens and poplars, and then down again, to the darkness that squared and deepened before him. The price to The mother, still holding the line with her mind, thought of her father. He had worn the green pants the day he died. She had hung them over the rail behind the barn a hundred washing days. Her mother had sewn them from some heavy cloth she'd bought at Sistersville, and he had worn them on important days. He had voted in them. He had worn them the day she was born. He had applied for the job with the well rigging company in them. And then he had worn them to town that day. There had been no blood on them. The bullet had pierced cleanly to the heart and he had fallen...