The Quickening (10 page)

Beneath the roar of the motor, I heard a small voice. I blinked against the light from the open door—there was my youngest. He bit the tip of his finger, stumbling forward on his newfound feet. How he had grown, his eyes black and sharp, his hair dark and skimming his shoulders—the way he stood seemed more like a boy than any infant. How many months had it been?

Kyle wobbled and fell to his knees and I swept him up, out of the barn, and coughed in the open air while the motor burned. Outside, Jack had heard the noise and come running, but now he stopped and watched me as I stepped out of the smoke. Seeing the way I clutched Kyle to my chest, Jack bit his cheek, and everything that had been cold and
dark in my husband seemed to break. I had done it. I had skinned the beast and left him naked, for surely Jack knew what had happened with the Samuels and what I intended—the way a simple chore could prove itself worse. He touched Kyle’s head as it rested against my chest, his fingertips rough, catching strands of the boy’s hair where they stood from the back of his neck. The grinder squealed and Jack’s shoulders twitched, but my husband stayed holding on to Kyle just where he was.

VII
Enidina

(Spring–Fall 1920)

After I lost the second one, I was bedridden for a time. It wasn’t that I was too tired to work or too pained to lift my legs. Something in me wasn’t right. Some sadness I couldn’t undo. The women in town did their best to show me how wrong I was to pay so much attention to what I’d lost. I guess in a way I knew I should listen.

They came every day for a while, bringing books and new linens, a change of clothes. As if I had none of these in my house. I thought of my brother’s wives and how little I knew of them. How little they cared to know of me. These women weren’t much different. They seemed bound by duty, sharp in their ways. I must have appeared peculiar to them. I didn’t gather in the shops to talk. Didn’t find the reason. When once I baked a pie for the church sale, they threw it out believing it burnt. I had a husband but no children, and that made me odder still. “Get up, this is no way,” they said. I couldn’t tell one voice from the next, only that what they said was true.

It was Frank who had taken up my dress to wash it and Frank who had thrown out the plates and cleaned the floor. When I woke to find him missing from the room, I sat up in our bed. “We sent him off,” the women explained, lifting a gown from around my shoulders and putting on another
one. Their faces changed from one day to the next. It took me days to understand they were different women altogether. Members of the church, wives of the men who owned businesses in town. The farm women nearest couldn’t have spared the time. Save for Mary. But I never saw her once.

When Minister Borden came, the women left us alone in my room. He stood over the bed, his fingers pressed together like a tent. The quiet in him seemed a relief from the women and all their rush. When he drew up a chair, I realized how the years had tired him. The cuffs of his shirt were yellowed and worn, his chin dark with stubble, and he had a cut on his cheek. He smelled of soap and polished wood and looked as pale as a ghost. “Eddie,” he started. The last time I’d seen him, it was weeks before Kyle was born. I’d found Borden in the church kneeling in front of the pews. He pressed his forehead to his knees, his hands clenched over the crown of his head. His knees on the floor looked pained, bony as they were in loose flannel pants, and he made no sound, only a labored sort of breathing. The kind when grief takes hold of a person and shakes him through. He’s just a man, I thought. At a loss like the rest of us. I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him, private as his grief was. Now at my bedside, he sat with his eyes closed, and I remembered how I’d left him to himself. How sorry I felt for doing so. That day in the church, I doubt he even knew I was there.

“Have you ever lost a child?” I asked.

Borden blinked. “No,” he said at last. “But I do believe there’s meaning in what happens to us. There’s a reason.”

“You think?”

“There are times …,” he said, but left off. “After we came here, I asked my father the same thing. We had almost finished the church by then, but my father was restless. Looking back I should have seen he wasn’t well. He was sitting in his chair where we stayed then in the back rooms and he folded his newspaper to see me. ‘God makes mistakes,’ he said. He didn’t bother to explain. He just sat there with the paper in his lap, not reading. I’ve always thought of that when something happens. ‘God makes mistakes.’ It’s little comfort, I know, but it’s a reason. My father died a few months later. I have no other family. Not compared with yours at least. I’m afraid I’m useless in that.”

“No one?”

He shook his head.

“Must be hard off alone. Out there, I mean.”

Borden took out his Bible, as if he was through with talking. The pages were tattered and he clung to them eagerly, reading to me in a quiet voice. It was a story I didn’t know, but there was a rhythm to it. His voice brought some comfort. I thought of him in that church without his father, nothing but air between him and that ceiling. How do you comfort a man who speaks to spirits? He seemed more of a child to me now than anyone and I tried to keep myself awake and listen.

Finally Frank was with me again and the rest were gone. He squeezed a towel over the washstand and washed my arms and legs. Soaking the towel again, he let the water
spill from his hands. He washed my cheeks then, my throat and chest, and I swallowed under his touch. When he was finished, he wrung that towel out well and laid it on the stand to dry.

Next to our bed, a handful of daisies stood in a jar. The blanket under my chin smelled fresh, and my dress hung on the closet door. How Frank must have scrubbed it, for it was thin and almost no color now. But it was clean. It was respectable at least. Still, I would never wear it again. Not even for him.

I’d been thirty the day I met him, late in a woman’s life for marrying. Even now I remember the afternoon in all its heat. I’d started out to my eldest brother’s to spend the night, more than five miles by foot, and stopped in town along the way to get a drink of water. In the country store was a young man, tall and very thin, the look in his eyes as soft as cotton. He was there to visit cousins, or so he said. The merchant introduced him as he would any stranger in town.

He was just old-fashioned enough to shake hands. I nodded and drank my water. The men went about their business. But every time I looked up, I found this stranger’s gaze on me. I didn’t know if it was because of my roughness or the red of my hair, the heaviness I carried. I’d never drawn much attention from a man before. Nothing that was kind.

Finally he asked, “How is walking?”

I was timid and backward then. No better now I suppose. With the water on my tongue, I kept my mouth shut.

“Speechless,” he laughed. “Well now, I never would have thought. Still, a person only has so many words in him. A person has to be careful. Otherwise, he might just run out by the time he’s old, and there’s no helping a man who can’t speak his mind. I know for myself this is the most I’ve said in a very long while and I’m just about spent.” He clutched his throat, pretended a look of pain. “I’ve seen it happen. My uncle, his jaw hanging but not a word, and nobody knew what to do with him. They said when he was young he was always just yammering on …” He scratched at his ear and grinned, blood rising to his cheeks. I just about spit that water out. He reached out his hand, wiped a drop from my chin. It was then I learned his name. Frank, he said.

My boy, you may think it girlish, but that’s what I’d always believed my husband’s name would be. Frank. A name that promised someone good and decent. Someone who might not mind a woman who said her piece when she thought it useful and otherwise said little at all. A man honest more than proud. At the time, I thought this Frank might be him.

You must understand what a shock it was for my family, their aging daughter, as strong as any of the boys and without a delicate bone to speak of. Frank brought me to my eldest brother’s in his wagon, and my brother wondered at him in silence as he took us into the house. We sat together in the kitchen, the table bare between us. All of us were worn with travel or work. The evening had grown to dusk. Upstairs, my brother’s wife paced the hall. After greetings on the porch, she had left us alone. The kitchen itself was quiet, save for a loose window that rattled in its sill. Finally,
my brother spoke. “Frank,” he said, “you ever drive a four-horse team?”

“Since I could tug a rope,” Frank said.

My brother clapped his hand on the table and looked outside. “Well then, it’s too late in the day for travel. It’s not even day any more.” His wife’s footsteps had stopped and he leaned in to speak to us. “We’ve got a cot out back. Would you be needing a place to sleep?”

“I would,” Frank answered.

“Well, there you are then,” my brother said. “It’s yours.”

I don’t remember much of that night once I closed my door to sleep. I’ve never been one for dreaming. Never seen the use of it. But I knew a man slept near me in my brother’s house and that seemed important. Early the next morning, I woke to help my brother with the milking, and there was Frank. He waited out back in the yard, fixing a hat on his head to join us.

We walked out in the darkness and didn’t speak. Mornings like that have a quiet a person doesn’t want to break. There’s something precious in it, precious too in how close to sleep it seems. The light when it comes shows the richness of the soil under your feet. The cows are close with the scent of milk, their eyes dark and lush. We brought them in from the outdoor pens and lined them up, keeping our tongues except to whistle at the animals when needed. After steadying a cow in its catch, we straddled our stools and pulled the buckets between our legs. Frank worked as well as my brother did, though he didn’t know which of the
cows had a temper or were slow to milk. He sat with his hat low on his head, his hands in an easy rhythm. He worked those cows as if he’d known them his whole life.

I probably did the same. I’ve always had a way with animals, or so others have said. It’s sympathy, I guess. I take what I need. No more. No less. I treat them as creatures that know pain and stillness and the pleasure of a stomach when it’s full. Just the same as us. That morning at my brother’s place, I drew up my skirts to fit the bucket between my knees and pressed my forehead against the animal’s flank. I could feel her breathing, knew she was nervous by the way her ribs shuddered. Those cows smelled good and warm, the smell of hay and something sharp enough it makes your eyes water. Some might call it a stink, but that smell has always been home to me. It’s the same as the smell of my skirts after a good day’s work, the heat of my lap. As I milked, I talked to the animal hushed-like. Nonsense it was, but calming. My brother did the same. Then I heard it. Someone was humming. I’d worked in barns most of my life and never known such a sound.

I turned my head and saw Frank. He pressed close to his cow, straining his neck so he could see me where he sat. He hummed as he worked, and the cow chewed at her hay without a twitch. That humming was low and clear. A song I didn’t know, but familiar all the same. Not calling attention to itself and quiet, barely more than whispering. That’s when, you see. You might not understand how your grandmother would go with a man who was little more than a stranger. You might think it was handy for us or that our families wished it. But really, it was the way that sound
filled a dark place and stayed with me for weeks. Even now I can hear it. A kind of brightness. And Frank, he seemed to think a woman with such a soft touch on an animal was worth watching. A woman who’d never lost a bucket, who didn’t mind the itch of a cow’s hide against her cheek. He seemed to think that was something. And I suppose it was.

It was later that morning after breakfast that Frank shook my brother’s hand and brought me home in his wagon. The air was cooler that day as we went. It promised rain. When we turned onto the road where I’d always lived, it looked like a foreign place. The gravel beneath us lay rutted with wet. The grasses were a strange silvery green. This was the beginning, I thought. This shrinking of all I’d known, it promised a new life. The trees stirred and I stretched my limbs. The ground beneath our wagon leveled off. We stopped just far enough from the house so Frank could tie the horses, and there was my mother. She must have heard the jolt of the wagon wheels, for she stood in the yard out front, squinting under her hand.

“Mother,” I called. “This is Frank.”

“Well, now. Look at that,” she said. She studied him as he fed the horses. “Just wait for your father,” she said and turned back to the house. When she came out again, she held two glasses of lemonade. She pressed one into Frank’s open hand and stayed to watch him drink it. After that, she brought him a second glass and hurried us to the porch where my father waited.

“Let him be,” he started before my mother got another
word out. “Eddie isn’t the kind to sit in the kitchen and be still,” he said to Frank. He had already grown ill, my father, though we didn’t know it. He’d aged a great deal in the last few months, heavier in his steps and late to rise, the hair at his temples white. My mother often found him asleep in his chair. She had to call his name more than once to wake him. My father had lived in this house since the day he was born, my mother joining him when she was seventeen. Now they had four grandchildren, two more on the way. With Frank next to me, I couldn’t think they’d ever been strangers to each other. “Eddie has a hand in everything on this farm,” my father went on. “She can heft the grain and birth a calf, lead a plow with the best of them.” Hat in his hands, Frank listened with the new glass of lemonade empty at his feet. “She’s a different kind of girl,” my father said. “She won’t be spending a lot of time in front of the mirror with curlers and what not.”