slumming
Adelaide lived on the river, where it bends south of town. Sometimes I’d watch from the back steps as the loggers drove long trains of timber rafts around the turn. I was always curious to see if they’d get jammed up in that bend, but the raftsmen with deft with their oars and pikes. Hundreds of shorn logs went floating by. I waved to the raftsmen. They never returned the greeting.
I never lived with Adelaide. Only knew her for a few short months, as it happened. She had me over every few days. If she hadn’t lived in that miserable shack but in the town proper, we might have courted controversy. But as it was, there were none but the crows and the indifferent loggers to turn up an eyebrow. Miles of heather and barley surrounded us, and a gravel pit across the dirt lane.
Adelaide didn’t do kisses. She didn’t hug or take hands or accepted having her hand taken. She reminded me of a neighborhood dog I’d seen as a child in Braxton. Starved and kicked, uncertain if an extended palm would pet or smack it. It took me time, too long, to rein those impulses back. We only touched in bed, and afterwards she made herself small and unreachable from the opposite side of the sheets.
Winter came, and always I had the sense that we, and whatever we pretended this muted coupling was, were in our twilight. The shack was always dark when I arrived, and there was never a fire in the hearth. Adelaide was too thin, drinking cold tea and pacing from room to room.
On our last night together, I remarked on the bone she had placed above the mantle. It was as long as my forearm but twice as thick, making it look squat. Into the side that faced out a small frieze had been carved. The scene depicted seemed to be Adam and Eve before the Tree of Knowledge; or, at least, two naked figures, one with boyish hips and the other with womanly swells, before a tree. The craftsmanship was crude but careful, what a child might do with a whittling knife and a strong vision but half of the skill to make it come alive. Beside it, carefully beveled, was the artist’s name: emerson.
‘It’s a horse’s femur,’ said Adelaide. I could hear the absence in her voice. It made her sound weary. Old. ‘I’ve left them all behind,’ she said then, but not to me.
In the morning, I woke to an empty bed and ashes in the hearth. Her one drawer of clothing was open and empty, her meager bookcase cleaned. I found her footprints left across the dusty floorboards. They led to the front door and continued through the snow, though the fresh powder falling was already obscuring the trail. I could only stand on the stoop, wrapped in that thin sheet. I felt older than my years. I felt every day of winter at once. Snow collected in the hollows of my collar.
(Photo: fyryylikka)
