Fish. Fishin? You ain’t got a pole.
Got one over there, he told her.
Hid. You don’t carry your pole with you?
Nah.
She giggled.
They were walking along slow, much slower than he walked. After a while when she didn’t say anything he asked her where she was going.
Me? she said. I ain’t goin nowhere. Jest messin around. Who you goin to mess around with?
Hmph, she laughed. You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?
Nah. I don’t care who you mess with.
He walked on, looking up at the trees, the sky.
You carry your fish in that?
What’s that?
She was pointing at the croker seine. That, she said.
Oh. Naw, that’s a seine. I got to seine me some minners first afore I go to the pond.
She didn’t leave. Wading up the creek poking the pole of the seine up under the banks he would see her walking along or standing and watching. Where the honeysuckles thinned at one place she came up to the bank and took off her shoes and kicked at the water with her toes as he went by. When he looked back she was in the creek to her knees with her skirt hiked up and tucked under in the waist of her bloomers and her thighs were incredibly white against the surge of brown water where she walked unsteadily into the current, leaning, her breasts swinging. She caught up to him and splashed water at him. She said:
You don’t know my name, do you?
All right, he said. What’s your name?
What do you care?
I don’t care, you jest…
What’d you ast me for then?
You … I never … He stopped. You was the one ast me if …
Wanita, she said. If you jest got to know. Wanita Tipton. I live over yander. She motioned vaguely beyond the creek, across the late summer ruins of a cornfield, a stand of walnut trees surrounding a stained house with a green tin roof. He nodded, fell to seining again. He didn’t have enough floats and the minnows kept going over the back. Still he had half a dozen in the can tied to his belt.
You like to do this? she asked over his shoulder.
He turned around and looked at her. She was standing on a rock with her legs together. The back of her dress had come down and was dark and wet.
You got a leech, he said.
I got to what?
Leech, he said. You got one on your leg.
She looked down; it didn’t take her long to find it, a fat brown one just below her knee with a thin ribbon of blood going pink on the wetness of her shin. She put her hand to her mouth and just stood there looking at it. It was a pretty good-sized leech for the creek although the pond leeches came much bigger. She just kept looking at it and after a while he said:
Ain’t you goin to take him off?
That moved her. She looked up at him and her face went red. Goddamn you, she said. Goddamn you for a … a … Goddamn you anyway.
Hell, I never put him there.
Take it off! Damn you! God … will you take it off?
He sloshed over to where she was. Standing like that in water halfway to his waist and her up on the rock he could see up her thighs to where the skirt was tucked into her bloomers. He got hold of the leech, trying to look up and not to at the same time, and feeling giddy, shaky, and pulled it loose and flipped it past her onto the bank. He said: You ought not to wade barefooted.
He had felt for a minute that he wasn’t even afraid of her any more and all he could remember now was running. The huge expanse of flesh and the bloomers and her holding him by the collar with her feet somehow in the water on either side of him until he jerked away with his shirt ripping loudly and splashed back through the creek to the bank and out and across Saunders’ field shedding water and minnows from his bucket with the foolish little seine still in his hand and water squishing in his shoes, running.
She said something to the other one and they giggled again. He went on with his bread, home, his face burning in the chill of the low October sun. When he came in through the porch he saw that his bed was gone. She was in the kitchen. He put the bread on the table and went up to the loft, his tread hollow on the boxed steps, up to the cobwebby gloom under the slanting eaves where the bed had been set and made with fresh linen.
By now in the early mornings the pond was steeped in mist, thick and coldly swirling, out of which sounded the gabble of phantom ducks. At sunrise the whole valley would be glazed white and crystal and the air smoked and tangy from the stoves and later from the open fires where women gathered about the kettles with long wooden paddles, elvish-looking in their shawls and bonnets, a clutch of trolls at their potions. First days of frost, cold smoky days with hogs screaming and now and again the distant hound-calls of geese howling down the south in thin V’s flattening on the horizon to a line and then gone. He cut wood, went out early to the rising stacks of new pine kindling rimed and shining in the morning frost like wedges of frozen honey. He worked hard at it and the days went. For that much time he would have buried the yard house-high in stovewood.