The Quickening (15 page)

But Jack was quicker than me. He saw us coming. When he ducked into the barn, the hogs squealed and I knew he was at the little ones. Inside, the light was full of chaff and scurry. The horses threw their weight against the stall doors, their heads twisted to see the back wall. Jack crouched in the shadows, sweat-soaked and rising out of the pen. “Eddie,” he said, as if he’d never expected I might be the one to stop him. He held one of the babies squirming in his hands, red-faced as he was and trembling. So full of fury he didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do or how. I believed he’d always been that way, clenched against that tireless blood in him. He closed his eyes and cut into the animal, cutting his own fingers, and he threw the animal down. Then he was off again, his face streaming and a low
howl in the back of his throat, ducking through the pen to get at another one. I grabbed him as he chased and he fell under me, cutting my arms with his knife. Behind us Frank yelled and the air cracked with gunshot.

Jack stiffened and let go. For a moment I believed Frank had done it. He’d shot the man. Sitting up, I held my arms close and bleeding. Jack lay on his back, his eyes swollen and red, but there wasn’t a wound on him. The fight had left him empty, and he lifted his head to see us both.

“I’m keeping them, Jack,” Frank shouted. He was breathing hard. The shotgun was heavy in his arms but he kept it aimed, ready to fire.

“No you’re not,” Jack let out. His voice was little more than a whisper now. “Not any more.”

Frank could hear the pigs before he opened the pen. He saw the dead one first and the rest, nine babies, cut up and whining. At the far end, the sow ran untouched, flies humming at her flanks. With his mouth set, Frank gave me the gun and grabbed Jack’s knife. One by one, Frank took up the babies and cut their throats to quiet them. The sow ran in circles against the wall, mad with grief and worry. Her quickness had saved her, but her shoulder was still bloody from bashing the wood, the gate shivering and about to crack as she hit it.

Frank crouched in the dirt and swept his hands over his face, watching the sow. She was tiring and soon lay down. Jack slapped his hat against his knee and groaned, the rain coming off him. Frank caught him by the throat. “If you tell anybody about that sow,” he said.

“What?”

Frank pointed Jack’s knife at him. “Don’t tempt me. It doesn’t make a difference. Pigs or Morrows. It’s all a waste and it’s killing for no reason.”

Jack hit at him and Frank let go. “What does it matter now?” Jack said. He was on his feet, wiping at his eyes and shaking. “I did what you couldn’t,” he said. “And you’ll always owe me for it. You best hurry now and take those pigs to town before they rot.”

X
Mary

(Spring 1933)

He was my husband, but I never thought I would see a man in such a fury, and see him with all that was good and constant drained out of him, and doubt him for that, be scared of him for that, and it was never his choosing, but what the government decided that led him to it, that made me love him less.

“It’s done,” he said when he returned from the Currents’ farm. He held his hands at his sides, palms open, as if repentant.

“What’s done?” I asked.

“We’re ready now,” he said. “We can go ahead with our own.” He wiped his mouth against his sleeve, and I could not imagine what he had done, his coat ruined and such a stink. “God help you,” I said, taking his hands, but he wrenched them away. For days then, Jack’s eyes were red-rimmed and brimming, never letting go of how ready he had said he was, how much it would take out of him to finish it, but he did not touch those hogs of ours for weeks, for no better reason than he never could bring himself to waste so much.

He would kill the hogs with a club—that was the first idea that burned through him, beating down on something. He never thought of a quick way of doing it. He never thought of knives, not now. Blades were for meat, but this
was just killing—“Got to remember that,” he said, as if making it harder on himself, making it feel more like work, could somehow give that money we got more meaning in the end. He tested the strength of the club in his fist, and I saw how he would strike with it, and how I would lose him to it. The club’s weight took his whole being, his back, his shoulders, splinters in his hands.

I went out to the Currents’ farm myself to see what it was all about. No matter how ugly the thing Jack might have done, what we had to do would be worse. Enidina was carrying empty feed buckets from their barn, but when she saw me on the road, she stopped and the buckets clanged against her thighs. She studied me, chewing the corner of her lip, but at last she nodded and invited me in.

“Terrible,” I said to her, sitting in her kitchen.

“Yes.” She nodded and tried to smile, her fingertips drumming the table between us. “It’s good to see you, Mary,” she offered after a time, though she seemed strained to say it. “I worried we might not, after all.” She swung out her arm as if to indicate the room, though the house was empty of anyone but us. Remorse, I thought—it was making her quiet, though something in her eyes hummed. “What with Kyle coming here before. With the trouble he’s got, and you being neighbors. It would be a shame, that’s all.”

I cleared my throat. Trouble, she talked about, but Kyle had no trouble, not the kind a mother could not take care of. “I wouldn’t want you to think we hold a grudge,” I started and settled in my chair. This is a woman I have known for
years, I reminded myself, a woman who gave birth in my own house, who ran through the rain and chose our door to knock on, scared and shivering and sick of herself—Kyle was not the one with trouble if he could help a woman like that. “Jack wouldn’t want you to think it either. You were just slow, that’s all.”

Her fingers stopped. Fine red gashes crossed her forearms and I wondered about them. She saw me looking and sniffed, not bothering to cover the gashes with her sleeves. “Jack hasn’t done his own, has he?”

“It’s a sacrifice,” I said. “But it’s a sacrifice we all have to make.”

“That man, he couldn’t do it knowing ours were alive. And he pretends to be so hard. All his noble reasons. You should have seen him when he left.”

“That’s what neighbors are for, for helping. That’s why he came here in the first place. Doing for a person what a person can’t.”

“Help?” she said. Enidina’s fingers struck the table again, as if I was telling her something new. “And see here I thought you might be coming to say you were sorry.”

“Jack’s upset about what happened,” I offered. “You know the way he gets.” I thought about those arms of hers still, ten or more gashes altogether and each of them as straight and thin as a blade. “I can only think there must be something I can tell him to calm him down, some words of thanks on your part, that might set things right.”

Enidina sniffed again and stood. “You should talk to Jack about that,” she said, and she said it with the same look on her face I had seen from her years before in her
field, studying me like a stranger without so much as a glass of water to cool my throat. “I suppose Jack’s mad about something and it wasn’t any of our doing. I believe he’s been mad about something on that farm of yours for a long while.” That look of hers, how long ago was it?—when I was so tired from walking and could feel the cut of every stone under my shoes, and I almost lay down in that field as she worked, I almost did, that woman on her knees and wiping her hands while I closed my eyes to rest.

“Enidina,” I said, though her name caught in my throat. Jack had been mad a long while before this. I was just about to explain again, get her to understand how easy it would be to ask for forgiveness, but already she held the door open to let me out—as if Jack and I were the ones to do her wrong. I sat for several minutes ignoring her, and at last the door fell shut.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “I’m not one for forcing. Not here we aren’t,” and she left me for her chores. Outside in the wet air, the twins ran from their work in the barn, covered in chaff and dung and looking little better than orphans, dressed as they were in patched denim and cotton undershirts, even the girl. They were good-sized children, already eight by then, but each could squat in the crook of one of their mother’s elbows, wrapping their arms around her neck. Enidina marched out into the fields like that, a large, lumbering beast with her brood, letting the mist cling to them as if it was no different than sunshine. As I watched Enidina go, that house of hers seemed full of wind, the door still banging and not another living soul to tighten
the window screens—not even Frank. When I returned home, Jack was squatting in the dirt outside and kneading that club between his hands.

The local man had said the packers had more meat than they knew what to do with, and keeping the meat ourselves would only turn the others against us. “Slaughter the pigs yourselves and bury them,” he said. “It’s your only choice now.”

I stood over the sink at my kitchen window, watching my sons and their father make their way out to the barn. They looked like fierce gray animals, my husband marching through the mud and my sons running after him. The older boys, they were men now—large and plodding, almost indistinguishable from the young Jack as I had known him, though they lacked his warmth. They had stayed at the farm during those early Depression years, when there was nothing else to leave for, though by now they both should have had wives and farms of their own. Now all four of them crouched together as they went through the rain—Jack in a rage knowing he had waited too long. The barn was theirs, a place for men, as certainly as I had my own room in our house, where I could keep some semblance of tidiness and right-minded living, while the barn darkened and grew, as virile as the animals inside. But as I watched them go, I knew I would have to follow them, however much Jack would not like it. If it was happening, I would need to witness it, just as God would witness it, so I could fix it in
my mind and understand it and know where best to lay the blame.

I stole out to the cover of the barn, hidden by the rush of the rain. My sons stood outside with their father and beat the hogs in turns, Kyle holding the animals so they would not struggle too much or slip away, so it would not take too long—but no matter how he held them, his brothers beat down and missed, for the little ones refused to be still. The club rushed close to Kyle’s face, stirring the hair on his head, his father’s hand bloody with splinters. With that club, Jack never bothered to look at what he hit, the animal or the ground.

They would bury the hogs in different places around the farm so none of us could remember where they were or remember doing it at all. The government man had driven in and closed the check in my husband’s hand. “It’s a good thing,” the man had said. He wore a tan suit, thinning at the elbows, and his paunch strained his belt, the little hair left on his head oiled and combed, but his face was young, not a line in it. “For all of us.”

“Good,” Jack echoed.

The man wiped the sweat from his neck—a boy’s face, I thought, but the man smelled nothing like a boy, not even when he turned to me and smiled. “Sorry to interrupt your dinner,” he said. He put on his hat with a long look, and his hand left its print on our glass doorknob. At the window, Jack crushed the check in his fist and watched the
government car slide onto the road. The car alone made the man different.

“It’s enough,” Jack whispered when I asked how much the check was.

“For what?”

He dropped his chin, the check falling to the floor. “We could have taken in boarders, but you said no,” he started, clearing the table, the plates small in his hands and the silverware smaller still. He seemed to weigh them in his fingers. “We could have had one or two. That might’ve made a difference.”

“And make your wife a servant?”

Jack looked at me, and those plates and silver flew, a fork clipping my ear. He fell into his chair and dropped his forehead hard against the window, gazing at the road, but outside the man was gone. “It’s enough,” I whispered, cupping my mouth. Bits of egg and grease clung to my hair. “It’s plenty now.” A different kind of life, I thought, but not with that man and his car—I could not even imagine it. I was done with thinking of other lives for myself.

“Look what you made me do,” Jack said under his breath. “Nothing to feel sorry about.” I lowered my head—this was the man I married, the stone on my finger and the heavy band. I had made my choice. Still, those gashes on Eddie’s arms troubled me as did the rest of it, like a fly buzzing in my ear, a furred and ugly insect, too quick to catch and get a good look. Knives, that was what Jack had said he used on their hogs. Now where he sat, Jack seemed to shrink into himself—how little strength he really had, too little when
he needed it. Finally he rose from his chair and kicked it from under him and walked out the back door. After I was sure he was gone, I found that check in a ball under the table and ironed it flat.

With that rain falling against the barn, my boys bent close together and never looked up—a father and three sons. Their boots were the color of mud, their hands, their shoulders, their shirts hanging loose. The sow was the last one. They had kept her after they finished the others because she was stout and pregnant, she would be easier to hold—because after they buried her, they knew they could never be who they thought they should any more.