Kind One by Laird Hunt Page B

a-comin’, girls, I thought. I might even have said it aloud. Linus Lancaster said it once in Kentucky as he passed my shut door and went toward the other. So I might have said it too.
    One night when I had only made it half the way and was back in my bed and under the covers, Lucious Wilson knocked on my door. He had followed me, he said. He had heard me coming and had had his heart quickened and had had to come after me when I had turned around. He lit the candle and sat down on my bed and pulled the covers down off of my face.
    “I’ll take that knife you got under there too,” he said.
    I gave it to him. He was a good man. He had that kindness in his eyes and hands and was as soft as a box of baby chicks in his bedroom ways. Lucious Wilson set the knife aside and laid himself down gentle next to me and we both lay there and looked up at the ceiling with our arms crossed over our chests and he said we were lying there like a king and queen of olden days, and I asked him if the olden days were better than the days we had, and he said who could know such a thing?
    “I would have rescued you up out of whatever situation it was, Sue,” he said. “I would have brought my rifle and stiffed my jaw and marched into whatever it was and got you out,” he said.
    We used a kind of lavender on his shirt linens. I could smell that when he talked to me. You could smell it drifting through that whole house of his. That’s what heaven in the hereafter smells like, I thought, as he laid there next to me and talked.
    “Yes, I expect you would have tried, I can see that,” I said. “Only there was no way to know where I was. No road through the woods to find me. Only breadcrumbs to lay on the ground and birds weighting down all the branches above.”
    He was quiet after I’d said this and even quieter after what I said next. “And if you had found me, it might not have been me you chose to help.”
    The next day in the forenoon he asked me to clasp hands in the parlor with him and pray. Then he asked me to be his wife. Those and their cousins, said right and by the right body, are kind words. I don’t know any kinder. And I told my employer Lucious Wilson that. Then I told him no. I could not stand by him as he had asked. I told him I had been down in hell and that hell was not a place you left no matter how far you hauled your bones away from it. It had found me in his school shed and it had found me in the passage of his house and it would find me again. I was not fit to be his or anyone else’s wife, I told him. I looked him all the time in the eye as I said this. Then I went to pack my bag. Lucious Wilson came and stood in the doorway a long while watching me. He lit his pipe and breathed of it and the smoke came out into the room.
    If I could have gathered myself up and turned into smoke then I would have. I would have joined my smoke to his and drifted on out the window and stuck for a while to the floors Lucious Wilson walked on and to the walls where he leaned his hands. There is a fragrance to a good pipe smoke I have always been partial to.
    There is a pipe here in this very room I will sometimes pull out and take a chew on. I do not light my pipe. I do not chuck it full of tobacco. I think of the smoke Lucious Wilson put out into the room, even all those years ago now, and how I stood there and worked over my few things and my bag. Some of the times as I chew on my pipe I bite down hard and play it that I did gather myself up that day and did turn to smoke, and that as I drifted he breathed me in then blew me out fresh into his arms. He carried me away then down the hall and out of this world to another where you can put all that you’ve hurt and all that’s hurt you behind like an old cracked honey jar. I expect I was already dreaming some of that as I stood there at my bed. Where would that place be and who would have arms strong enough to carry you there? I expect I thought.
    He spoke his soft, good things to me