The Known World - Edward P. Jones [110]
“What? What you want?” Counsel said. He tried to make out her face in the dark, tried to remember what little of it he had seen during the evening, but all he could pull forward was the face of a woman in Alabama who passed him in her wagon with her belongings and her family.
Back on her knees, Meg raised the blanket and came in with him and began kissing his face. She pulled up her dress and put his hand between her legs. He wondered if the boy had come out of her. Finally, he laid her down and they continued kissing and he could hear the mule still pacing. His horse was silent. The woman pulled him on top of her and opened her legs wider, never once taking her lips from his. He was surprised to be inside her, as if all the touching and the kissing were not supposed to lead to that but to something quite innocent, something they could do at the table in front of the boy. In all the time she was there, the “Oh” was the only thing she said.
In the morning he lay awake for some time to get himself together. He heard the mule peeing in its stall. He knew right away that Meg coming to him was not a dream. That had sometimes been his problem with events since leaving North Carolina, the sense upon awaking that where he was was no more than a dream, that North Carolina was the real and nothing after that could be trusted. He looked over at his horse. It was staring out the broken barn door. If he lay for a while, Counsel had discovered, the world would right itself and he would know where he was and that it was North Carolina that couldn’t be trusted.
As he came out of the barn, he looked at the side of the house and discerned that the dimensions were far smaller than the actual inside of the house. What he saw outside—the wall of no more than twenty feet—could not possibly hold all that he had seen inside last night. And the front of the house was no more than fifteen feet. The inside last night was easily seventy-five feet by fifty feet. Counsel thought he should go back to the barn and try to start the day all over again, but the thought of the boy made him want to get away.
He stood at the door to the house before knocking. He counted on the woman to keep their business to the two of them. She seemed the kind to know how to do that. He was still standing when the door opened and one of the little girls told him good morning. He said good morning and she said there was a little something to eat at the table.
Inside he saw the same seventy-five feet by fifty feet of the night before. The two Hirams were eating at the table and Meg stood behind the man. “Have a bit to chew,” the father said and pointed at a pan across from him. Counsel took the same seat as the evening before. There was a lump of scrambled eggs and a slab of hard-cooked bacon sharing the pan with two large biscuits. Counsel sat and only then saw the gun beside the man’s pan. It was about equal distance between the man’s pan and the boy’s pan, so it was difficult to tell who the gun belonged to. But to make it plain, the man put the gun in his lap and sucked once on his teeth.
“Sleep well?” the boy asked Counsel.
“It was better than most places,” he said. “And I thank you for it.” He had left his own gun out with the horse in the barn, and though he had walked in hungry, the food before him began to turn his stomach. He wondered: Does a bullet in the gut hurt more when the bullet doesn’t have to mix it up with eggs and bacon and biscuits? Does it take longer to die on an empty stomach?
He had a good look at the woman. A dark blue knot sat right next to her left eye.
“We ain’t got hotel