When it couldn’t grow any hotter, the day did. Charlotte took off her skirt and all but one petticoat and threw them in the back of the wagon. “Apologies,” she said again. Chace didn’t ever seem to take issue with heat or cold or discomfort or to notice, at least this time maybe purposefully, what she was wearing. She took a bucket down to the creek and dumped cold water over her head. Any hotter and she would have to go in.
In the shade of the tree, she tried to concentrate on her book. Chace came and lay down beside her.
“What are you reading?”
“It’s Moby-Dick.”
“The book?”
“Yes. It’s the name of a whale.”
“It’s a book about a whale named Moby-Dick.”
“It’s a whale that’s been hunted, has all these harpoons stuck in him. He got back at the captain of a whaling boat who harpooned him, the captain’s name is Ahab, by taking his leg and sinking his boat. Now Ahab is obsessed with getting revenge on the whale even if he destroys everybody else, his whole crew, and dies himself in order to do it.”
“I’m having trouble seeing a buffalo with a lance still in his shoulder coming back for the one who stuck it in him.”
“That’s why it’s just a book. It’s hard going though.”
“Seems like it would be.”
“I’ll read some of it to you. Do you want the beginning, the middle or the end?”
“I don’t care. You choose.”
“I’ll start at the beginning like I have four other times.” She turned back to the first page. “Call me Ishmael,” she read.
“I thought this was about Moby-Dick. Who’s Ishmael?”
“He’s a young schoolteacher but he’s not happy with his life, he’s in a ‘November of the soul’ he says, and he’s been out to sea before so he signs up to go out on this whaling boat but he doesn’t know yet that Ahab is the captain and he’s insane.”
“I see, I guess.”
Charlotte continued to read. Heat rose off her skin. The birds grew silent, no sparrows chittering, no hawk screeching, not even the lonely sound of a mourning dove. Cicadas kept up their rhythmic chorus that came to be one with the heavy air. When she turned the page and looked over, Chace was sound asleep.
She’d become as familiar with the smooth warm planes of his face as she was with her own face in the mirror, but now she noticed something she’d never quite thought about before. His hair. Cut at some point with a dull knife is what occurred to her that first time. Chopped off is what came to her now. My people do it in grief, he’d said. Tears came to her eyes again.