The Quickening (13 page)

This was the day of my youngest’s baptism and the first Sunday we did not trek off to the lake to have it done. At the front of the chapel hung a velvet curtain with a small room behind it and a pool waist deep, as wide as three bathtubs. Jack and I stood in the front pew with Kyle between us while Borden read the prayers. Jack had worn a suit for the occasion, his only one. He tugged at the throat and stood his full height, nodding along with Borden’s words as if they meant something to him—maybe they did. For such a man, I knew words had never carried much weight. If anything, that was the difference between them—Borden with his books, and Jack fighting to count, to speak, stumbling until he used a fist instead.

When the time came, Jack gripped Kyle’s shoulder and steered him out of the pew, but Borden met him in the aisle face-to-face. This was the first the two men had stood so close. Behind us, a woman in the balcony sang a low, awful hymn. Two other boys waited in their robes at the edge of the pool, their hands folded at their waists. Borden
took Kyle’s hand, but Jack kept hold of the boy’s shoulder, and my son twisted between them, looking from one man to the next, neither giving in. The woman lingered on the last note, the song ending in a dying hum. Finally Jack let go.

“We are here together to welcome these boys into our congregation,” Borden began. He dropped a robe over Kyle’s head and it gathered on the floor. “Washed from the sin of their birth,” Borden went on, “these boys will soon be ready for God to receive them.” I closed my eyes and took Jack’s hand—his grip was hard and he held his arm straight so I had to bend my knees to reach him. “Jack,” I whispered, but already Kyle was wading down the steps to join Borden in the pool, the boy’s robe rising in the water as if to swallow him. Borden reached an arm around the boy’s shoulders, Jack twitched, and I wished that terrible woman would sing again. At last Borden drew him back and the boy went limp. The water rose over Kyle’s face, and the pool grew still, Kyle disappearing under Borden’s robes for too long a time. Something deep grumbled in Jack’s chest and he twitched again. Borden shook himself as if caught in a dream and pulled Kyle up at once, but the boy was gasping, water running from his shoulders, his hair—he seemed about drowned.

“He shouldn’t have done that,” Jack whispered. Borden rested his palm on the boy’s head as if to settle him, but he seemed nearly drowned himself, his hands shaking. Like cousins, the two looked, or more—cold and pale, their hair wet, and Kyle with those black eyes of his, filling. Jack tore his hand from mine and bounded to the pool, taking the
steps two at a time. “You shouldn’t have done that, Borden,” he yelled.

Borden stood out of the water as if he had been hit. “You can’t—”

“You’re the one who can’t,” Jack said. He shoved Borden back and hoisted Kyle from the water, tucking the boy under his arm. When Jack faced front again, he looked out at the pews. The sun from the southeast windows made him squint, and he must have seen what Borden had every Sunday for years—that line of faces, silently watching as if they had come for something special, when Jack must have thought there was nothing special about it, just a boy nearly drowned and work to do at home, the day already late for beginning. Dozens of men rested back in the hard wooden seats as if they had never been farmers, could not even hear their own animals bleating in the barns a few miles away. How did they have time for sitting? Then Jack was running. He pushed past me where I stood in the aisle and rushed between the pews, the doors swinging after he left.

I raised my head. The others strained to see the back of the church where Jack had gone and crowded the aisle. When they heard my heels on the floor, they turned to let me pass, watching for what I might do next. “A shame,” a woman said. Though no one spoke a word more, I heard them all saying it, one after another, and I followed my husband out through the double doors. Those good years, I should never have trusted them—that violence in Jack, it was always waiting. I should never have thought my playing for him that day in the church had lessened it, or any
of the days since. I stood on the chapel steps and Jack was running far off down the path with the boy in his arms. He stopped and set Kyle on his feet and rushed on, leaving the boy behind. I called Kyle’s name, but he was running along himself now, trying to keep up with Jack no matter what the man had done. All the way home Kyle would do that, but Jack never did wait, not for either of us.

IX
Enidina

(Fall 1925–Spring 1933)

Those twins had been my first. The first that lived. I remember how Kyle had come in after the doctor and the way his mother tried to keep him out. After they were born, that boy stood watch while I slept with a newborn under each arm. When both the twins fussed, he touched a finger to their lips and looked as if he might cry himself. How strange they must have seemed to him, red and small and still smelling of the bed with everything I’d pushed out. He was just a little thing himself, with the boyish scent of sweat and spit. But ever since, Kyle watched over my own as well as any mother might.

I should have known they were coming. In the months before, I’d taken a liking to the feel of dirt on my tongue. With my first child, the dirt had tasted of metal and snow. With the second it was almost sweet, filled with leaves and twigs. Before the twins, the earth seemed grainy, like bread. I’d heard of such cravings in women. No one looked on them kindly. But out in the fields, already covered with the stuff, tasting the earth I sweated over seemed right. A kind of nesting. Borden had said we were made of so much, after all.

After the twins were born, I was uneasy with them and seldom left them alone for long. Frank said I should be sure of them, these sudden children. But I didn’t know what
had been right in me to bear them out. I found some old gunnysacks that seemed good and sturdy and fitted them so I might have a hole for my head and a seat for the twins to kick their legs. Outside while I worked, one child hung to my front and the other to my back. “The Hunchback,” Frank called us, grinning. “The Terrible Three.” I waved him off. This place and what we’d raised on it, it was suddenly my own. I felt a comfort from their weight. A steady strength. As long as I carried them both, the twins never fussed.

I’d never known what it was like to have a part of you looking back. That birthing meant you carried that child with you for the rest of your life. As they slept, I held my hand above their mouths to feel the warmth of their living. Their need of me, I was embarrassed by it. Never before had I been the object of such attention, as if I deserved it simply by bearing them out. Maybe I did. My boy, I don’t know how any woman makes sense of what she’s carrying, before or after a birth. It took me a while myself to understand.

It was before the twins were born, before I even knew I was expecting, that Jack raised his barn. From our yard, I heard him drive the nails and split the wood. It would take a year and more of careful work, as Mary wouldn’t let their boys help him much. Holding the twins in my arms, I watched Jack build it after they were born. Over the fields the frame of that barn stood in the distance, and one at a time the walls went up and stayed. Jack finished the roof of that barn, painted the sides a dark red. Those twins of mine
grew. They dropped from my hold on them and learned to walk, learned to speak their minds and carry out their chores better than any mother could expect. But what Jack did. Nothing seemed so great in front of it, so terrible, as the red on that barn from so far away.

The years after he finished it were the worst years we’d seen. The price of farm products went to nothing. A bushel of wheat cost a dollar to harvest, but sold for less than half. Corn was ten cents, hogs three dollars a hundredweight. Barely a third of what we got more than ten years back. We burned grain for heat in the winters. It was cheaper than coal. When the banks closed, they raised the interest on our mortgages and most of the farmers couldn’t pay. Just imagine it. A man works a piece of land all his life. Then he loses it. It is stolen away from him. So desperate did some of them become, they decided to take things in their own hands. Up north, the farmers blocked highways, wouldn’t let a neighbor from the next town pass for trading. They dumped his cream in the ditches, his butter and eggs. They wanted to force the market, keep the produce from moving. On the railroad, they burned a truss bridge to stop the freight. I couldn’t imagine taking up such violence. It seemed as much against the government as against our own kind. But I knew the way they felt, cornered into saving themselves like that. They didn’t find such actions easy. I knew that too. All of us, we lived good safe lives. We watched over our own. We didn’t ask for much except to be left to ourselves. And we weren’t the only ones.

This was the time the tramps appeared on our roads. They wore burlap on their feet. Carried a pack of clothes
and keepsakes, if they carried that much. They were from the south and west, most of them, states where the droughts had struck. They looked for work, and if they couldn’t get it, begged for food and water. Sometimes a barn for sleeping. In the mud in front of our house, they marked our path with a circle and a cross, so small a carving that I didn’t see it for months. Still, I understood what it meant. Ours was a safe house. We would open our door. Give them what we could from our pantry. In those years, we were never that far from needing the same ourselves.

“They’re covered in dust in the west,” the tramps told us. “Black blizzards. There’s a long dry spell coming.” The way they said it made us lean in to listen. They cradled their arms against the rain as if they carried a child, as later they would carry our food.

Frank listened without a word. He seemed to be listening even after the men were gone.

“They had mud on their feet, Frank,” I reminded him. “Didn’t you see? There’s so much mud here they can’t walk in the ditches. Dry spells, they’re saying, but they keep to the middle of the road.”

“There’s women with them now.”

“Well, so, there’s women.”

Frank looked down the road to where one of the men sat, hunched over and chewing a bit of our bread. Sitting on the ground, the man had soaked his pants through, but he didn’t seem to know it or care. He turned his head to the sky and tore at the bread with his teeth.

“Something else bothers me,” Frank said at last. “That new agriculture man in Washington. Secretary Wallace.
He’s got the government ready to buy and slaughter all the young pigs and sows set to farrow.”

“At the end of the season?”

“Wallace came too late. Couldn’t get the bill signed before the pigs got pregnant, but he wanted it through anyway. Jack says it’ll raise prices. A lowering of production, he says. And it’s legal this time. None of that mischief like we heard of up north. They’ll even send the extra meat to the people who’re hungry for it.”

“Legal doesn’t make it right.”

“No,” Frank answered. “And the way I hear it they don’t have enough men to process what all they’ve got. The packinghouses can’t handle the smaller pigs, so they turn them to grease, if they use them at all. There’s not enough places to store the meat, either. So now there’s people starving and it’s rotting somewhere. Down in St. Louis, I heard they threw thousands of those pigs in the Missouri River. But the local association, they still want us to sell. They say anyone who doesn’t would be taking advantage, getting the raised prices off the backs of the ones who sacrifice now. And Jack, he’s all for what the association wants.”

“Since when?”

“Since he needed the money, I guess. Of course, that’s not what Jack says. He says he doesn’t want to be a traitor. Against the government, maybe, but not against his own. ‘It’s done,’ he told me. Like I didn’t have a choice.”

Frank grew quiet and I took a step back, thinking about this killing. A knife across their throats and the young ones not yet grown. That was the terrible thing. Those newborns didn’t have an ounce of meat on them. And they
wanted the sows too, just because they were pregnant. It would ruin us. The kitchen empty. Frank forever thin. No sounds from the barn except its settling and the rot of what we’d taken too soon.

“I’ll not have you do it.”

“No,” he let out. I stood listening for more from him but none came. Such a wonder, the way this man could move in and out from me. But in this he was certain. “How are you going to keep them?” I asked, but I didn’t care much about the way he did it. He would figure out something. That husband of mine, he was a fine smart man. I’d known it all along. Now when he set off for the barn, I followed.

The rain of that fall closed us off from the outdoors. It kept us in the house, sleepy in the low light and bound to the stories we told. We heard more about the drought in other states. That summer we had been more than dry ourselves. But the rain had come again with a vengeance and it hadn’t stopped. Donny and Adaline, our two dark-haired children, marveled at everything. Why the rain came. When it would end. Why the floors of our house were damp, and what we kept inside the barn. We took pleasure in telling them the time of day when they asked, showed them how to count their numbers and spell out their names. We explained hot and cold, good and bad, with all the lines children want in between. In our stories we described a place we saw fit to live in, an order of things we felt to be right. Being alone, being far out in the countryside, we created
the world as we wanted it, and we made ourselves the makers of everything.