A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher

Author:Karen Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307430496
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

THERE WAS an actual piano.

He’d drifted on its sound into a crowd of misty women, a trussed and innocent chorus and the captain’s wife, draped as Lady Liberty, leaning in her paper crown, the piano unboxed in her high wagon bed.

Loyal sentiment rang down in untuned hammer blows. MacLaren angled away through knots of people on the grass. The bonfire roiled a watery heat and drew him. Scrub pine and bayonet. He found a keg of cherry shrub the drivers had been drinking. Watched Don Polk pick up a chair and throw it on the flames. Red skeletons of limbs exploded. The shrub was very sweet. Chips of ice flew through the air from buckets. Then Emma Ruth, beside his elbow, had something in a bowl.

“I saved you roly-poly.” She’d tied ribbons on herself. “I forgot the spoon,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

“No.” He could hear fiddles now.

But she had galloped off somewhere. So he proceeded. Past the captain, in silk hat and tails, the better class here in the middle, between the fire and the dance. Olmstead with his empty plate. Mitchell stood by, smiling.

He nodded, carefully, with his pudding.

Near the fiddlers, he saw Lucy Mitchell with the baby on her hip, Nancy Richardson leaning close to speak, both smiling with cups in their free hands, and he was jealous, and the fiddles sawed, and then swirling bonnets and hats consumed her.

She was dancing when he saw her next, the baby’s arm held high in hers like a tiny beau, wild sticky curls, both laughing.

Back at the bonfire, he found an empty chair and sat, and Patton was further gone than he, if that was possible, and started talking, but across the ground MacLaren could hear her voice against the fiddles, above the roaring men, she was singing.

Then someone said, “You goddamn son of a bitch,” and hit him in the jaw.

He went over with the chair and rose to his knees, reeling. Pudding all over his hand and something shouted about a goddamn dog. It was John Kingery. So he got up to fight, but there were hands all over him. Someone fired a pistol, and he bulled around and saw, sweeping toward him, a stump of silver pine as thick as an ox leg. It burst against his neck, in a shattering of slivers and punky dust; it was Tupper, and Patton hitting Tupper and Kingery down in the general roar. He turned his back, hand up, dismissing them, listing away.

Mitchell’s camp was empty. MacLaren poured cold coffee from the wobbling pot, washed his hand in the cup, drank. The bonfire lit even these bushes. He rested his head against the chair’s tall back and felt the dark glide through him. Well, it would lay him out in time and he’d be bigger than God and be Nothing.

So he was sitting with his eyes closed when she passed.

She must have been up in the wagon. He knew her even in the dark by these small sounds alone: her stride, her skirt.

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