A Cry From the Ground is a sort of Maine retelling of the Cain and Abel myth. The following excerpt occurs after the heroine, Elvina Denny, has arrived in Wiscasset from New Orleans to live with her dour, taciturn father. The year is 1921. Elvina is the Eve in this novel; here she meets her eventual snake.
From Chapter II, A Cry From the Ground
Wiscasset, the seat of Lincoln County, was settled in 1663 and incorporated in 1760 as the twelfth town of the District (sixty years later the State) of Maine. Its population in 1921 is 1126, including now Elvina herself. She has come to live three miles southwest of its center at her father’s small farm, on which he plants vegetables and harvests rocks. He also hires out as a carpenter.
By this time – some three months arrived in Wiscasset – she no longer remembers New Orleans in any positive way, but only the opposite of everything presently surrounding her: it was big and noisy, this is small and silent; colorful and warm and feminine versus monochromatic and cold and unrelentingly male. None of these observations surprises her. Elvina has always had a gift for a sort of prescience, knowing beforehand not so much what will happen but how she will feel about it when it does. Even before she set eyes on her father, for example, she knew he would be a cold turd.
At this minute she is standing beside him inside Chase’s General Store on Main Street, wrapped in a coarse brown blanket. “I want a coat,” says her father. “For the girl.”
The store is longer than it is wide, dim and gray, its merchandise piled in lumps and mounds and stacks on counters, on shelves along the walls up to the ceiling, behind and atop glass-fronted cases. Four globes of electric light are aligned above her head from back to front. They seem to lose candlepower as they move forward toward what is left of the bleak day coming through the front windows. There is nothing in this store that she wants.
Woody Chase, the proprietor, speaks earnestly in a thin tenor with a slight stammer. “I got a, a fine piece of work right here, Mr. Denny. If you’d like to give her a look.” He has sharp thin lips, but a string of spittle connects the top one to the bottom like a filament of spiderweb. It expands and contracts as he speaks, sometimes quivering fatly, sometimes spinning thinner and thinner, toward invisibility, whenever he opens his mouth. Elvina wonders how wide he can yawn without snapping it all over his chin.
“I don’t want it,” she says.
“My goodness. You must come from the, the South. We don’t get your kind of accent much at all in Wiscasset. I hope you ain’t freezing to death up here. Been cold enough, I, I guess, for December. I imagine a, a nice warm coat would feel quite pleasant.” He comes around the counter and heads toward a rack of dark woolly things.
She doesn’t move, but her father follows. She watches him dispassionately. He is tall and shuffling, as if his joints are joined by rubber. Gray hair pokes out from beneath his cap. His mackinaw was once red, his overalls blue; but now age and dim light have reduced them both to nearly the color of mud. With his pantlegs hanging over his boots and dragging on the floor, his feet look like those an elephant.
“Here’s one.”
Her father holds it up, a drab dark olive even in this light, reminding her of the coats of soldiers.
“I don’t want it,” she says again and turns toward the front door just in time to see it fly open. A tall longhaired figure bursts in, wrapped in an orange-striped housecoat, bright as fire. Immediately it drops out of sight behind one of the tables, even before Woody Chase or her father can turn around to see who it is.
“God damn it, Elvina.”
“Goodness, young lady. You can’t get through a Maine winter with, with only a blanket.”
Through the window she sees a man running down the Main Street hill toward the river, waving his arms. Shouts from outside reach them faintly. “What’s that?” asks Woody Chase. The two men move to the front of the store.
“Ask her,” says Elvina.
“Who?”
“Her.” And slowly the tall figure in orange rises from behind its counter, silhouetted for Elvina by the gray light of the window, light that drains even that bright orange of its hue and value, sucking color the way a leech does blood.
“My Jesus, it’s, it’s Shirley Moody,” says Woody Chase.
A profound silence suddenly illuminates the space separating them all, a gray energy dancing within a triangle – the two men, the orange-striped figure, and at the apex the girl – as if Woody Chase’s disgust has somehow flipped a switch, pouring electricity into the air around them. Even so, or perhaps as a consequence, Elvina has already realized that this Shirley Moody is a man. Looking closer, she sees that he wears no shirt beneath the housecoat, possibly no trousers either.
At last Shirley Moody speaks. “God, Woody, am I glad to see you. I thought I’d pick up a new shirt and some pants.” He is eagerly apologetic. The housecoat is flapping around him, much too small to close over his chest.
Woody Chase studies him, pursing sour, bespittled lips. “Looks like you might need ‘em. Also looks like you might, ah, might have forgot your wallet.”
Her father stomps to Elvina’s side, his long creased face a dull purple. He has fleshy ears with long lobes like the wattles of a turkey; these are now gone red. “We will come back later.”
“God damn it, Woody, I left the house without it. Can’t you put me in your books? Don’t my brother have an account?”
“I want to stay.”
“Roland pays cash. Always. For gorry’s sake, Shirley – Mrs. Johnson. I sold that very bathrobe to her.”
Shirley lifts a folded pair over overalls from the counter in front of him. “Here. These’ll do me perfect.” He bends down out of Elvina’s sight and steps into them; when he straightens, he is slipping his bare arms and shoulders under the straps. Then the orange housecoat sails through the air and lands on the floor between Elvina and Woody Chase. “There you go, Woody. Maybe she’ll come in and buy it off you a second time.”
“You come, now.”
Elvina pulls away from her father, picks up a flannel shirt, and carries it directly to the man. “Here, Mister. Try this on. I expect it’s a warm one.”
Her father stands in rigid fury.
“Why, thankee, missy. Let me see. Just my size.” He drops the overall straps from his shoulders and wrestles his way into the shirt. Elvina’s eyes miss no bit of him – ropy muscles on his arms, broad chest and back, hard cracked hands and fingers.
A rough hand grabs her arm, wrenching it back, but she never looks away from this Shirley Moody, whose large brown eyes stare unwaveringly back at her. Finally he speaks. “Well, I got to go. I be in to settle up with you, Woody. Nice to see you.” He addresses this last to Elvina and pushes gently by her, disappearing into the back room. They can hear the clomping of his footsteps and then the banging of a door.
“Jesus,” says Woody Chase. “At least he got away with his boots.”
Elvina’s father’s eyes are closed, and his breath is growing softer. He is like a skiff settling into backwash after being pitched around by, say, the wake of a large trawler. Gradually he gathers his self-possession, but when he opens his eyes he sees his daughter wrapped in the orange-striped housecoat. Her arms are folded across her chest, her hands under her armpits, and she is breathing in the odors of the sleeves, smells of perfume and sweat and concupiscence.
“Take that off!” he roars.
In answer she pirouettes gracefully away from him toward the front of the store.
“God damn it, Elvina! You take that off!” And he bounds at her and catches her, lifting her up to shake her; then he sets her down and rips the housecoat down her back, stripping the sleeves from her arms. The orange fabric flutters in his hands. “Now, listen. You are getting a winter coat,” he pants. “Not this.” Woody Chase’s jaw is agape.
Behind the old man the door opens. “You skunk-sucking bastid,” says a raspy voice. “Where did you find that housecoat?” And Denny is whirled right out of the door into the gravel street and into a fight, twisting, swirling fragments of anger and heat: legs and heads, fists and feet, rolling entire with a sort of slow dignity down the hill, while Elvina dances around them like a whirlwind, her long dark hair streaming behind her, coatless, shrieking, every now and then darting in to kick one or the other of them, while from the darkening sky snow spits over them and the onlookers.
A small man in khaki, a star on his chest and a pistol on his hip, rushes through the crowd at the top of his voice. “Quit it! Quit it, you God-damned idiots!”
Neither man is making any noise save the thuds of boots and bodies against the frozen ground, but the girl’s cries rise over them high and clear through the cold air, not so much excited as strident and vengeful: “Get him! Give it to him good!”
“Quit it, I said!”
“Rahh! You Christless bastid!” One of the heads begins to shake, all the fists still flailing; and blood spatters the sheriff’s trousers with bright drops.
He looks down. “Oh, hell.”
“Yay! You got him! Go on. Get him again!”
The sheriff pulls his revolver from its holster. It is huge in his hand, as big as his forearm, a pre-War Colt that might blow off the head of a rabbit if it could hit it, pointed at the leaden sky over the river. “God damn it!” he shouts, but still they pay no heed.
BANG!!!
Instantly everything stops – the men, the crowd, even the girl – as if all of them have been themselves shot dead. The report sweeps down the street and out over the Sheepscot, where it can be heard echoing faintly against the far banks. Then everything is quiet. The sheriff reholsters the Colt, his face tight.
“Why’d you have to go and stop them?”
The crowd gawks at the drawl and then at her – an exotic, an alien: gray eyes, perfectly black hair that falls to her waist, a child’s boniness that already is beginning to soften into curves beneath her cotton dress. Both men struggle to their feet, still panting, still furious, blood oozing from her father’s ear. The sheriff steps between them. “All right, fellas. Maybe you would like to come along and treat me to an explanation.”
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