Free Kind One by Laird Hunt Page A

my fingers will fall off, then my hands, then my wrists, then my elbows, then the rest of my arms.”
    “And you will still keep digging.”
    “Yes.”
    For her part, Cleome got quieter as her time passed. Her small face grew wider and her eyes larger, and her hair fell with fresh oils that caught the sunlight.
    I would tell Linus Lancaster about all this at our breakfasts together. I would eat pork and mush and look at his dead forehead and talk at him about how the angel he had carried on his shoulder sat on Zinnia’s shoulder now and about how quiet Cleome was and how there was a sweetness somewhere sipping at that quiet and how far she had gotten along.
    Sometimes I picked up my talking at the end of the day when I was lying on the dirt floor of the shed. It wasn’t unusual that my lips were too cracked to move nice enough for real talk, so I would just run it in my head. Linus Lancaster, you are dead and I am lying out here with a shackle on my ankle, and Cleome is grown bigger and bigger, and Zinnia is fixing to strike me down so I won’t come up again. The rats are in there at you, and then they’ll come out and look to me, and everything they ever sang in those old songs about the hard places a body can come to are true.
    But the cold dark is a fretful place to pose a colloquy, even if it is just in your head. So mostly I just lay there. Waiting for my breakfast. Looking out for the rats. Without any more dainties about outings and candy and Chinamen in barrels and daisies and such. My arms still digging into the black and rock of the earth, even though it had been hours since they had in the actuality stopped. Counting, as my arms still dug, as I waited for them to fall off, on the pig sticker or any one of its evil cousins to come for me and swallow me up.

6.

WHEN LUCIOUS WILSON’S WOMAN had me out of the cold frame behind the outhouse and into the light, she did not lift the heavy stick she had taken up at me and she did not ask me any question about how I had come to be there. She was an old woman and had an eye to see through things, and she saw through my skin where it had healed or it hadn’t to the wounds I had lately had, and through those to the wounds I had offered unto others, and through those to that four-square kingdom in Kentucky and the woods that surrounded it and the thundering tunnel of my days that led up to my father’s house in Indiana where I had started out from. She looked at me and she blinked her crop-colored eyes and dropped her heavy stick and told me wherever I’d been, I couldn’t live in Lucious Wilson’s cold frame and I’d better come on.
    Lucious Wilson didn’t have that old woman’s eye, but he had that old woman, and after she had nodded, he told me there was a place for me in his employ if I knew how to work and wanted it, and I told him I did. He did not ask me where I had come from. I expect that after she had gotten me bathed and settled the old woman had told him. Whether or not her seeing extended to the naming part of things, she told me that first night they would need to know what to call me. I thought of my old teacher and told her that my name was Sue.
    “Well, Sue, you aren’t sleeping in a cold frame tonight or any night after if that’s the way you want it,” she said.
    “That’s the way I want it,” I said.
    The next weekend they had me over to a revival outside of town where there was a line-up for dunking, and that old woman had me take my place. The minister spoke and dunked and spoke again. It was a pretty place, and they had set up garlands on the bushes. The spot they were in was next to a short bridge and the little ones had their legs dangling off it. Lucious Wilson went in the front of us. He had on a fine suit and waded right out into the water and let the minister speak his words and dunk him down. There were some of his other folk in the line, men and women, then there was me. I had on some Sunday clothes they’d given me. There