The Quickening (11 page)

Frank scratched his ear after my father finished and seemed to stew awhile. Through the screen, our grandfather clock chimed the hour. The sun fell behind the clouds. My mother and father looked at him, expectant. “That’s just fine,” Frank said at last. “That’s all the better.” He opened his hands and shrugged. It was then I saw that easy way in him that made marrying and all the rest as simple as closing your eyes when you grew tired or eating when you felt the hunger for it. “I must say I’m partial to her,” he added. My parents had to lean in to hear him.

My boy, you may not believe it, but the second time I thought I found you in town, I remembered my Frank the way he’d
been that morning in the barn. There you were, trailing after some woman, and she kept reaching back to take your hand. You would give it to her for a moment, but slowly let your hand slip. You would have been eight then. This boy must have been close to the age himself.
Mountains!
your mother wrote in another of her letters, from Colorado this time.
So high a person gets headaches walking the streets. There are plains too, but they’re nothing like home. Too dry for growing much
. November fifteenth. I have marked the day your mother was due on my calendar for years. When you turned seven, I went so far as to fix you pancakes for your birthday dinner, just as your mother liked. I used plenty of butter in the pan so the edges would crisp. I kept them in the oven, piled on a warm plate. Waiting for you, I must have fallen asleep in our sofa chair. When I woke, it was early morning and the sweet smell had turned sickly. I opened the oven and the edges of the cakes were dry as boards, the middles a soggy white. Still, I thought those middles must be worth saving and I ate them myself. Fifteen cakes as wide around as the reach of my pinky and thumb. I’ve never liked food to go to waste, but those cakes put me in a bad way for a week.

But birthdays aren’t what I wanted to write about. At least not yet. When I saw that boy in town, I thought he could be you. You, if only he’d been longer in the legs and narrower in the mouth. Breaking from the woman’s hand, he scrambled after a dog in the street. He never knew it, but he ran right past me, pressed close as I was to the side of the old meeting hall. When the dog got away, the boy stopped close enough for me to hear him humming. It wasn’t even a tune. No melody I could follow at least. But there he was,
breathing hard through his nose to get the notes, making them up as he went. For a moment, I was back in my brother’s barn. I was with Frank, with his slow gaze and his easiness, the way nothing seemed to rumple him or take that grin off his face. And I believed that I might be more than imagining. That the boy I saw before me might just be you. But when I looked again, he was gone.

I spent many a rag cleaning the floor of that kitchen once I was out of bed. I could never quite trust it. For months, Frank worried about my taking on heavier work, and the days turned long and terrible. When once he found me nodding off with a pair of his good trousers over my knees, needle in hand, he took me by the arm. There was a revival, he said. Outside under a large open tent, no less. He knew I didn’t care for sermons. Too much chatter. But he believed there would be a great many people gathered there, enough maybe for me to forget myself for a while.

In the morning we set off on foot. Frank talked as we went, taking my hand if I fell behind. He said when the ministers grew hoarse, the musicians would bring out their instruments. Then, Frank said, how the people would sing. It would be good to hear after what I’d just lost. At the time, I saw no more children to come. We traveled the gravel road for miles and crossed fields. In the sun, my hand sweated in his. Stepping out across the tracks, Frank came at last to a stop, though we hadn’t yet reached it. “Look Eddie,” he said, his arms drawn out. “Look over there.” And there it was.

The tent was taller than this house and covered most of a field. Around it were smaller tents, the color of burlap. The canvas was brown with dirt and heavy with rain from the night before, the grass gone to muddy footprints. The tents stirred in the low wind, the ropes straining to hold them. People stood by the hundreds inside.

We slipped through a gap at the back of the larger tent and others made room for us. They were strangers, most of them. Folks who’d traveled more miles than we had walked. Borden stood in front, hands above his head. When he saw us, he broke from his sermon as if surprised. Borden wasn’t the long-winded kind. He didn’t belong with the red-faced men and their starched collars who sat in a long row behind him, waiting their turn. When he started again, I can’t say I listened. I was too tired to stand for much. “He’ll be done soon,” Frank said. “Look at him. He’s already running out of steam.” I wanted them to sing.

It was then I saw Mary. She stood at the front with her new boy in her arms. Her skirt hung loose from her waist and seemed to have lost a stitch, her hair pinned so the skin at her temples stretched. I hadn’t seen her for months, not since she’d come to our house with Kyle. After only an hour, she had fallen asleep in my kitchen and I couldn’t do anything but watch. That’s how tired she was of mothering. That’s how tired we all were, I suppose. I’d held her boy’s thumb as her head nodded and dropped. I didn’t think once of letting go. When finally she stirred, I left her to wake as she would. I didn’t want to hurry her. I still had the milky scent of that boy’s thumb in my hand, one I could keep with me for weeks. I thought then that
Mary and I might become more than neighbors. That we might be friendly for once.

Now Mary turned and saw us. She dropped her chin against her boy’s head and breathed in. Borden kept on. “What are you saved from?” he was saying. “Are you saved from pride? Are you saved from longing?” Around us, men and women clapped their thighs and called out to each other when they agreed. When they had committed some terrible sin or hadn’t done a thing and still they felt ashamed. I held my tongue. The woman beside me kept her hymnal closed around her middle finger. Others used ribbon or scrap to mark a favorite page, but soon all of them had opened their books. At last, the noise of their restlessness made Borden stumble, dropping his hands. You would know it then. The people were ready. They were ready even before the music began.

That’s when I heard it, the like of which I hadn’t known since I’d stood by Mother’s piano when I was young and listened to her at the keys. Since I’d watched my brothers sing with their guitars. There were guitars here too and horns, even fiddles. The women tilted their heads to reach the higher notes. The men sang into their chests. No one stayed still but rocked on their feet, and the children played in the dirt beneath us. I could hear Frank then, the way he always sang, but more. The sound of him warm and deep. It was a song I knew. Something ordinary for churches and plainer places. Something good and plain and loud. I sang low as was my voice and it was easy, this singing. This wasn’t preachers telling us what to do. It
was something inside us, rising. It opened inside my chest, a tremor to wake my sleepy head.

My boy, I hope you are never in as dark a place as mine was then. But with that singing, I imagined enough wind to lift the tent. If we could have seen it again from the road or from farther down the field, what a wonder it would have been. The hundreds of us. The quiet of the field wrested from it. We had made it. As Frank had promised. We had come just for this. What a noise we put out.

VIII
Mary

(Spring 1923–Fall 1925)

“I’ve spoken of sin before,” Borden began. “But when you think of sin, I believe most of you see it as something you can touch. You can point to it, smell it, sense it. It is something you can find evidence for in the physical world. But I tell you, sin is much more difficult to grasp.” The congregation stirred, feeling Borden’s finger on them—I crossed my legs on the piano bench. I had expected the church to be half empty, but after the fire outside town, the chapel seemed to rise out of the fields like a beacon, and a line of carriages stood in the yard. There was something in this man now that caught our attention—with the dark of his eyes and the pallor of his cheeks, his hands seemed to hold all of us in his grip.

“As the Proverbs tell us,” he went on, “the very thought of folly is an offense.
The very thought
. Sin is something far more than we can touch. For God, to even think of a sinful act is the same as having done it.” A woman stood from her pew and sat weakly again—a few of the men dropped their mouths to their fists and grudged against something deep in their throats. My hands felt thin and limp where they rested in my lap. Borden went on, but I saw only his fingers as they struck the air, and the opening and closing of his lips. When finally he had finished, he closed his book, and
those hands in my lap seemed as frail as paper. In their pew, Jack and my eldest sons sat tanned by their hours in the fields, as if they had carried the earth and stink of our farm in with them, while Kyle remained pale between them—but it was Jack who signaled to me with the drop of his chin. I took a breath.

Clumsy at first I played what I could, though the surfaces of the keys were slick to the touch. The piano droned, the strings struck dully in their case—where were all those years when I had balanced that board on my knees? With the thud of my fingertips and my mother’s humming, how brilliant I had sounded then. Borden stood at his pulpit, gripping the wood. He had never been a man who showed himself well, staying closed off as he did behind his robes and the walls of his room. I felt for him, as I often had, for his strangeness in this place, his loneliness, and all that he kept hidden.

A slow thing happened then—a man cleared his throat behind me and I knew the sound, that low guttural rumbling, as well as I knew the shape of the bones in my wrists. My husband was watching me, like a furnace I felt him, and as I stretched my arms they became fine and delicate again, almost weightless. I closed my eyes and my hands grew swift, all of my husband’s wildness rising out of me. How clear and light it seemed, the sound under my fingertips quivering into the room. It turned and echoed, keeping them all at attention. With Borden holding on to the pulpit and the heat of my husband at my back, I had never before felt so grand. I played on, moving from one hymn to the next, never breaking. Behind me, the congregation shifted
in their pews—but I did not want to finish, not yet. I was not ready to give up this new place I had found, a place where I never had to choose and had done nothing wrong. At last, the groaning of the wooden seats grated against my every note, and with a final chord, I lifted my hands.

The chapel was quiet save for the piano as it hummed. The air stood on end, the congregation in their seats. Borden raised an arm to begin the prayer, but no one lifted a finger to their books. When I turned my head, Jack clapped his hands until the noise echoed in the hall. He was the only one. He stood in the pew and brought our sons to their feet, and in their fear of him they clapped as well as they could. Jack never did seem bothered by what was appropriate, and the congregation stared at him as if at a defiant child. But he was that large of a man, he could do what he wanted, and what he wanted was this—to be the one who made a fuss because he thought it was right, he thought his wife deserved it, and he wanted everyone to know that this wife was his. The others rose to their feet with the look of animals herded in their pens. Jack stood with his back straight, nothing like the beast who had kept himself hidden for so long. Here was my husband, the same man I had found outside the store with that terrible voice ringing out. I choose him, I thought—after all these years, after three sons and my fingers wearied from the work—I choose him, and I would, again and again.

It was the height of summer later that year when my husband gripped my shoulders where I worked in the garden and told me to sit.

“What for?” I asked.

“Not telling.”

“But it’s dirt here. I’m just about covered, and you know this seed won’t hold another week …”

He put a finger to my lips. “Stand then,” he answered, and from his pocket he took a bright handkerchief and covered my eyes, tying a knot at the back of my head. “For being the most difficult woman I’ve ever met, that’s what for,” and when he closed his hand over mine, it pinched. “Don’t you look. I warn you.” He led me up the steps to our house, so quickly I almost fell, and stood me in the doorway to our parlor—in that room, I heard a boy laugh out loud and then another, boys I knew.

Jack undid the knot behind my ears. “Look.”

My eldest sons pressed close together with Kyle caught between them, a blanket raised behind their heads and the end draping the floor. They dropped the blanket with a flourish and only then did I know why they were laughing—in our living room stood a piano, one of my very own. It was a solid oak upright, newly polished, with pink ribbons tied around the legs and a large bow on top.

“What’s this?” I gasped.

My sons ran to the instrument and tore open the lid, banging at the keys. The ribbons fell and tore under their feet, and they pushed at one another on the piano bench.