When Darkness Loves Us

She hefted her sack and set it on the corner of the bar and said to him, “Bathroom.”

“Follow me, Martha.” The smiling man with the white apron like Mr. McRae took her to the back of the room and pointed at a door.

When she came out, the three men were sitting on the tall stools. They watched her approach with greedy enthusiasm. One of them stopped her with a big rough hand. “Can I buy you a drink, Martha?”

“Drink?” She looked up into the cold blue eyes. Each tooth of his fierce smile was rimmed in gold, and a toothpick protruded from the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah. You thirsty?” He turned and winked at his friends. The three of them looked at her, smiling expectantly.

She smiled her crooked smile, trying to understand. “Thirsty. Okay.”

“Draw her a brew, Mike.”

“Come on, guys, leave the lady alone.”

The smile faded, the toothpick trembled. “She said she’s thirsty, Mike. I’m buying.”

The bartender leaned over the counter at Martha. He looked menacing, coming at her like that. “Wouldn’t you rather have a soda, Martha?”

She cowered behind the one who cared about her thirst. “No,” she said.

Mike set the tall mug of beer on the bar, while the one helped her up to a stool. She sipped the beer and made a face.

“You have to drink it fast, Martha,” he said to her with a wink at his comrades. “Like this.” He picked his beer up and chugged half of it down.

“Fast?”

“Um-hmmm.”

She picked up the beer and drank three swallows before coughing and choking. The toothpick man patted her on the back.

“That’s a good girl. Take a couple more swallows. It’ll go down easier.”

She did as she was told.

Mike watched all this with a wary eye. These guys were troublemakers. Poor old Martha, she didn’t hurt anybody; she was just a poor lost soul. These guys got no right to get her drunk. When she had finished her beer, a white mustache rimming her smeared upper lip, he said to them, “Okay. You’ve had your fun. Now get out of here.”

But Martha, with a new feeling growing inside of her, put her hands up to the bartender’s face and simply said, “Stop.” The bar was unearthly quiet, with just the ticking of the clock in the background, while she tried to concentrate, wrestling with this new feeling, a new concept. It was a new idea, it was just out of reach, please, where did it go? Her eyes started to bulge a little bit, and perspiration stood out on her powdered forehead as she worked so very hard to grasp that one thing, but like a fine wire, it had sprung from her mind. It was lost.

“Lost,” she said, slumping a little.

“C’mon, Mike,” said the one missing a front tooth. “She just needs a little fun. Retards are entitled.”

“Retard?” Martha picked up her head and examined each of the faces. “Daddy?”

“Oh, Christ. Come on, Martha, maybe you better be getting on home.”

She remembered. “Chickens gotta eat,” she said.

Mike smiled and handed her the sack. She left the bar, her feet unsteady, strange thoughts confusing her as she walked home. She walked toward her tiny little house with weeds up to the windows and scrawny chickens picking at beetles. She felt the warm places where the man had touched her arm and then her back. She walked toward the faded memories of shame and disgust and tears and sorrow, and suddenly she remembered the thread of her thought. She let it come, let it find its own way through the crevices of her mind, tried not to block the path of new understanding, tried to remember her mother’s words. “Just relax, honey. It’ll come. Be patient.”

There it was, but not an idea—an overpowering feeling, a flooding of emotion, of understanding. The companionship in the bar, the nice Mr. McRae offering to buy her bread. Her breath came in short gulps. She wanted more of it; she wanted more people, more talk, more laughter. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t keep up. She knew she couldn’t. A hot, solitary tear of loneliness squeezed out the corner of her eye.

The moment passed. Martha swiped at the tear with the back of her hand as she trudged home. “Dust,” she said to herself.

CHAPTER 2

Fern Cook and Harry Mannes were married on Fern’s seventeenth birthday. Immediately after the intimate ceremony in Fern’s white house on the tree-lined street, the newlyweds took the train to the farm Harry had inherited from his parents. They had died of flu while he was in school, and without the minor support money they sent every month, he was forced to drop out and return to Morgan, Illinois, and the farm of his childhood.