The Body More Than Raiment
In the high, clear daylight, Liza Dixfield stood staring at the sunken row where her carrots had been. She calculated, from the dimpled hill, that she had lost at least a hundred carrots from this side of the garden.
“This here, this is my wit’s end,” she muttered as she knelt to put her dirt in order once more. The peppers were gone as well, five yards of healthy red and orange and green bells snapped clean off the bushes. “Everything else may have been my fault, but not this.”
She sifted through what was left of the beets, plucked from their beds too soon. The peas and asparagus were safe in the cellar, but even so, she had less than half what she was normally able to put away. “Miss Liza, you have gone to skin and bones,” Clara Finch told her when she went to town for yeast and the butter she could no longer make. She had grown a little fatter in the summer when food was easy to find, but if this crop was all she had for the dark winter, she wouldn’t see another summer. And wouldn’t Clara be smug then, with her double chin and porch swing.
The vegetable garden was all that was left of the once-prosperous Dixfield farm. All but one acre was sold to pay off the bank men, and what was left could scarcely be maintained by herself and Mr. Button, the only help who stayed out of the fifty men who worked the farm when Mr. Dixfield was still alive. She knew she sinned with pride, but when the sold land crumbled to dust and yielded only small, mealy corn and stunted wheat, while her small plot throve thick and green, untouched by blight, it gave her the only pleasure she’d had in years.
Next to the half-clipped parsley there was a print—too small to be made by her own foot, as Miss Liza was a tall, hale woman. When she had calculated all that was stolen, she sat neatly on her heels. “Thy will be done through children,” she said. “Not men. Children always catch you out.”
In the northwestern quarter of the garden there had been tomatoes. Her Peter had loved them, and one year she tried to put them away for the winter as well. Her mother always warned her against it, but she was a better housekeeper than her mother had been. Her strawberry pies were famous countywide and her lawn clean of branches and dandelions. But Mama’s wisdom was there to make her foolish well beyond the grave. The tomatoes went, and so Peter Dixfield went with them.
Now rhubarb grew there instead, the miserable beauty of the garden. She could make nothing with it, though it grew shiny red and leafy and splendid.
“Be infants in your evil, but in your thinking be mature,” Miss Liza said, standing and brushing dirt from her apron.
There were two families nearby with children old enough to thieve from a starving widow woman. The Jackson Tylers had one son, Frank, who was a great favorite of Miss Liza’s. He was young enough to be sweet still but old enough to talk sense. He brought her flowers, or sometimes a pie after church when she couldn’t attend. The Billy Pelletiers had five boys, each sour-rotten as a wormy apple. Billy Jr., the eldest, said nothing. Manny and Bertram, the twins, spat sullenly on the stringy grass when she walked by after mass. Zebadiah—Mrs. Pelletier having run out of family names by that time and turned to the Bible—was infamous for having stolen his father’s Tin Lizzie and gone joy-riding at the tender age of seven. He was also infamous for trying to drown the youngest boy, christened Malachi but called Baby, in the hog’s water. Zebadiah said he’d heard murderers had no conscience, and wanted to get rid of his so he could kill a man if necessary. Murder, he believed, was a fairly lucrative industry.
Of these, Miss Liza thought Zebadiah and Baby the most likely suspects, as their feet were small enough to make the print beside the mangled parsley. Zebadiah, however, would not have been content to simply steal. In his solemn moon face, Miss Liza read the need to rend things into small strips of meat. That was his way. He would have killed the chickens and left the heads on her step like a cat bearing a gift. So it was Baby, then, who must be the culprit.
There was a time when she had felt sorry for the Pelletier boys. When the nights were still, people miles away could hear Billy Sr. and Mrs. Pelletier screaming and throwing bottles at one another. As the boys got older they pitched in, and on the rare occasion the sheriff got out to the country, he had to bring some of the local men with him to restrain all the members of the Pelletier household. Baby, who had never been the same since his drowning, was the only one who would not join the fighting. He simply sat in the trees and watched, a small smile on his fat, otherwise expressionless face.
“Wicked disturbing, that young one,” the sheriff had told Miss Liza once after church. She lent him a hanky so he could dab his upper lip, and so she could ask him how long Billy Sr. would be in jail. “I’d put him in jail if I could, watchin’ us wallop his pa like it was the circus.”
Privately, Miss Liza had agreed with Baby, and hoped Billy Pelletier would stay in jail forever.
It was little Frank Taylor who changed her mind about the Pelletier boys, without even meaning to. He’d come to visit her one afternoon with his mother’s peach pecan pie. Miss Liza allowed herself one slice––any less would be an insult, any more and it would be all around the town by supper that she was desperate for charity––and watched Frank eat three slices with her stomach aching. She darned stockings as he chattered, occasionally slipping out with gossip she was surprised he cottoned onto. He was a smart, cheerful little boy, helping out on the Taylor farm even though, as he confessed, he’d rather be a pilot like his daddy had been during the war. Miss Liza liked to think that if she and her Peter had ever been blessed with children, they might have been like Frank.
“My daddy said you’re friends with Mr. Billy Pelletier,” Frank said after a time, sipping his tea.
The rhythm of her rocker stumbled for a moment, but she forced it to continue even as her heart bumped a riot in her chest. “Whatever gave him that idea?” she asked.
“He said Mr. Pelletier comes to see you at night sometimes,” Frank said, blithely cutting himself another slice of pie. “Mama says you’re not friends with him at all, but Daddy says he seen you open your door to him.”
She darned without minding what her fingers were doing, and had to undo the entire thing later and begin again. “No, I’m not friends with that man.”
“Then why do you let him in?”
“He comes in whether I let him or not,” she said.
Frank kicked his feet against the chair legs and poured himself another glass of tea. “Why don’t you let them boys in too?”
She hardly dared ask, but– “What boys?”
“All his boys stand outside and watch, Daddy said.” Frank smacked his lips over the sweetness of the tea. “This is real good, Miss Liza, thank you.”
Weeks later, the vegetables began to disappear.
“I understand now,” she told the hens as she gathered the few eggs in the coop. “Suffer and repent, that ain’t all. Confess—I confessed a hundred times, a thousand. Father George is tired of my prayers. But I ain’t had the body and the blood since Peter died.”
Mr. Dixfield had an old trench gun from his days at the front, and Miss Liza knew how to use it well. But tonight she didn’t bring it down from the cabinet beside her bed. Gunshot would echo over the calm hills. She wanted to bring no one to her door. Instead, she dragged the rocking chair out to the far northwest corner of the garden, where the bitter rhubarb grew, and sat waiting.
It was October. There was a fine film of dew over her lap when she first heard the sly rustling in the brush. Her eyes, which had adjusted to the moonless night, followed the small figure on its path from the line of magnolias dividing her property from the Taylors’. She watched as it reached the garden, unaware of her still presence. It feverishly grasped at whatever its hands could find, pulling at the remainder of her carrots, her lettuce, her spinach.
When its back was turned to her she stood. She held a hammer in her right hand. It was rusty; Mr. Dixfield had not been a handy man. But it was perfectly heavy like a stone in her hand. It took only one well-placed stroke of the hammer to bring the boy down. He fell like a sack of grain, and she waited until he stopped twitching to bend and turn him over.
The young face staring up at her, blue in the faint light provided by the stars, was not the pockmarked face of either Zebadiah or Baby Pelletier.
“Frank,” Miss Liza sighed, pushing his dark hair from his forehead. His eyes were open and unblinking, and she knew at last what was meant for her.
She stood and lifted the boy who, though young, was heavy. Miss Liza was a strong woman, but hunger made her arms tremble as she carried her burden to the house and then to the kitchen.
“I do this in remembrance of you,” she said.
That winter, Clara Finch told her girlfriends that Liza Dixfield had perked up something wicked. She looked like a different woman, almost.
MF Macpherson is the prose editor of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, and Prose. Her work appears in The Coachella Review as well as the anthology Love Rise Up, published by Benu Press. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi, and enjoys crime shows, Candy Crush, and Tumblr a little too much.
