The Dark Corner: A Novel

V.

V. After the rains the summer grew shaggy with heat and in the evenings Malcolm sat alone on the porch while Jordan meditated upstairs. Three weeks had passed since she moved her scant belongings into the Winter House, and they settled into a life, an easy routine of working in the yard and eating dinner on the back porch. She had cleared and tilled the gardens once tended by Malcolm’smother,andthoughitwaslateintheseasonwhensheplanted,green shoots climbed from the churned earth. Jordan quit her job at the fish camp. Malcolm worked a few days a week for Dallas, but there was little to do until Dallas’s appearance back in court. There was no need to be elsewhere. There was some money, a little but enough, and there was the large empty house that cost nothing to embody. And there was work here. Soon they would can beans and corn and peppers, and as the days progressed and the shoots spiraled and lengthened to tendrils, Malcolm began to perceive the contours of a new life. They would buy a milk cow and chickens, chop wood for the winter. They would live quietly and simply , tending their house and land. He imagined the future’s shape as existing behind some transparent screen, a possibility, a shy magic yet to be conjured. If he squinted just enough, if he ignored just enough of those moments when she locked herself in the bathroom, or the way she looked at him, lips formed around a question she would not ask, if only he accepted their shared life as a series of slippery glances, then he could believe in it. 162 The Dark Corner Mornings, he still rose early to walk the river and fields, returning to find Jordan pruning the fruit trees. While she worked, he began the restoration of his sprawling diorama of Fort Wagner. In part, it was an act of completion, but perhaps more than that it was the need to impose order on all aspects of his life, to make the crooked straight. In the evenings, he waited on the porch and watched the thunderheads cross the sky, the eaves strung with Tibetan flags meant to lift their prayers. Slivers of stained glass in the gingko trees wheeled triangles of light across the yard. Tonight, it was not yet raining, but it was warm and humid, and in the distance heat lightning broke, vast sheets that illuminated the surrounding fields. The wind blew and the flowers in the beds feathered and ticked. He leaned back in his chair. You could go crazy this time of year. The thought splintered in his mind, and for a moment he felt ridiculous even though he knew it was true. It was that desperate time, violent and unpredictable . The season of wet heat and hair that matted against damp necks. It was the time of year when people snapped. He looked out at the asphalt, heard the weathercock on the roof spin, pushed down the thought. Despite everything, he was happy, waiting to walk upstairs to make love to a woman he was beginning to believe he loved, willfully ignoring her manic fits and bleeding nose, the complications gathered around and against him. Such ignorance had not been necessary the first week. The first week had been bliss. The second week certain issues had emerged, bright triangles that flamed in some ancillary space, the mind’s trapdoor swung open on a dark corner . By the third week he’d learned when to walk out of the room. But most days things were good. Most days, he ate lunch in the kitchen with Jordan, then followed her upstairs where they made a fierce and silent love. Afterward, they would lie twined, the windows up and the room dull with heat, sticking to the wet sheets that peeled from the mattress. He liked to watch her when she rose from the bed. He liked to watch her move across the room, the brief moment she paused in front of the mirrored closet door. The white sheets and the hourglass stain of their lovemaking. If it was hot enough they showered together, and on these days Malcolm thought: this is heaven, the Kingdom of God within me and all around me. He 163 The Dark Corner stood behind her and lathered her back and shoulders, reached around to soap her stomach and breasts, let his hands slide...