Mr. Tall by Tony Earley Page B

smelled like piss and old man. Mr. Tall stayed drunk all the time. He sat in a horsehair chair in the parlor and watched dust float in the single, scrawny sunbeam that sneaked in past the boxwoods. There was a clock on the mantel but he never wound it. He had dribbled canned soup and tobacco juice down the front of his shirt but he didn’t care. Cats jumped in through the windows and ate out of the nasty pans on the stove. Mice nested in the stuffing of the cushions on the love seat. His sheets hadn’t been changed in years. Plutina almost made herself gag thinking about the sheets. Upstairs behind a closed door was a room with a crib in it. Mr. Tall never opened that door. Plutina didn’t have a crib yet. (She knew she needed to tell Charlie she was having a baby, but for some reason enjoyed the secret, her knowing and his not knowing.) She wondered if it was bad luck to put your baby in a dead baby’s crib. Mr. Tall, she imagined asking him, what would you take for that crib upstairs? He looked up miserably from the horsehair chair. He waved his hand. The dust swirled. Go ahead and take it, he said. I don’t need it no more. Plutina put her hand over her mouth and giggled. “Lord,” she whispered, “Charlie would have a fit if he knew what I was thinking about.”
    The next day she almost had to crawl through the laurel to get to the top of the ridge, and once there couldn’t see a thing. When she made her way down the other side she found her view blocked by a cornfield. She stomped her foot. She didn’t know how wide the field was, or how close she would be to Mr. Tall’s house when she came out the other side, so she just went home, where she pouted but did not enjoy it because there was nobody there to notice. The day after that she took a deep breath and plowed into the corn. The middles of Mr. Tall’s corn rows were cleaner than the middles of her corn rows, which stung her a little, but the stalks themselves didn’t seem to be any higher, or the ears any further along. She was as afraid as she had been on any of her first nights alone, but unlike the fear she had experienced then, this new fear somehow felt good around its edges, kind of like a sex feeling. Her heart thrummed almost painfully in her chest, but she had to clamp her hand tightly over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. She suddenly had to pee and squatted in the middle of the field to keep from wetting herself. She bit on her knuckle and sniggered the whole time. As she approached the end of the corn row she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled the last several yards. When she peeked out she discovered a pasture bisected by a small, muddy branch. A fresh Guernsey cow and a slick black mule cropped at the grass. Beyond the pasture lay a barn and a chicken coop—both as sound as she had imagined they would be—and a pigpen and a corncrib and a smokehouse and a shed covering a wagon and several other small buildings she couldn’t identify, all of them upright and square, their roofs intact. Even Mr. Tall’s toilet looked solid. Across the farmyard stood a two-story log house, as fine as any in Weald, with long windows and whitewashed window frames and a covered porch wrapping around the three sides she could see. The lower slope of App Mountain swept away from the backyard, and the orchard she had heard about rose in terraced avenues for some distance up the mountainside. The trees were neatly pruned, their limbs drooping and heavy with apples just beginning to color. Plutina dropped back onto her heels and shook her head with wonder. “Oh, Mr. Tall,” she whispered. “You have a beautiful farm.”
    For the next couple of weeks she rushed through her work in the mornings so she could spend at least part of the afternoon peeking out of the corn at Mr. Tall’s immaculate farm. (When Charlie came home weekends she now had two secrets she didn’t tell