The Quickening (18 page)

But on that day the horse went wild, Kyle was already half gone. When he came in, he was coated in dust, his hands
bleeding and eyes like stones. Without a word, he fell into a chair in a dark corner of my kitchen, head to his knees.

After a time, he said, “Mother, I did something.”

“You did nothing,” I answered, drying my hands at the sink. “What did you do?”

He shuddered in the chair, the towel twisting in my fingers. Outside, a constant churning of hoofs sounded in the yard and the rush of my husband’s footsteps as he yanked open the door.

“Kyle!” Jack called out, as if slapping at the boy’s name, but he never did see him huddled in the corner as he was. Without an answer and without seeming to want one, Jack grabbed his shotgun from the wall and went out the way he came. I ran through the door to follow him—even before I knew the reason, he was out in the corral, the horse making desperate circles in the dirt. The fence was down, splintered, a deep, ruddy stain on the wood. The horse struck itself against the far wall, its bony hide red and lathered. With three shots from the gun, the animal fell to the ground.

Inside, I took Kyle’s hands and felt the shiver that ran through him before he yanked his hands away. “Where’s Dad?” he said.

I shook my head. “You didn’t do anything,” I whispered to him and whispered it again before Jack was in the room.

“The Current boy,” Jack said coming in. I imagined Donny dwarfed in his overalls and hat, twisting his mouth as if riding the horse were a matter of will. I knew that face from his mother, knew it too well. Jack did not offer a word more, but I understood. That horse seemed terribly high next to the boy and still he had ridden it, his hands torn
from trying to hold on—I sat on the floor and dropped my head. In the darkness between my knees, my eyes ached. My husband stood above me with his head back, the tanned skin of his neck clutching whenever he swallowed. The gun rested against the table, the smell of burning metal. A groan rose from Kyle’s throat and Jack stared.

“It wasn’t his doing,” I said.

“What?” Jack answered.

“It wasn’t him.”

“You should have seen it. Jesus, the way Eddie was carrying him.” Jack stopped and wiped his mouth. “There’ll be talk. If Kyle hadn’t let that boy ride it. Hadn’t pushed the animal the way he did.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing he ever does—”

“Don’t you say it. You know very well why me and that boy have the trouble we do.”

Kyle lifted his head and went still, watching us. “It wasn’t Kyle,” I answered. “Donny wanted to ride the horse, that’s all, and that’s what we’ll say if anyone asks.”

Jack’s eyes grazed the gun, the table, and the sweating floorboards between us. “You’d do that, wouldn’t you?” he started. “You and that church you were always going off to, acting like the good girl.” He stopped as if he wanted to say more, but let out a laugh—a low, pained sound, dropping his hands open and slapping his legs. As he left the room, he squeezed Kyle hard on his shoulder before tearing himself away, stomping up the stairs and through the darkness above us. Kyle trembled, looking at the place his father had left. No matter how many times I called his name, the boy never so much as turned his head. So I raised
myself from that floor and wiped my cheeks. I rested that gun back on the wall where it belonged—and in the morning before Jack had stirred, before it was quite light, I woke my son from where he had slept the night in that chair and we were gone.

We went straight to the Currents’, Kyle lagging so behind that I had to reach back and hurry him, but the boy ignored my hand. He moved as if asleep, quiet and stumbling over the grass. His clothes hung like a scarecrow’s from his hips, his arms thin as rails. He had grown far too quickly, without an ounce of fat or muscle—a boy who had seldom heard a kind word from a father in his life. Still Kyle forgave Jack everything, no matter what that man did, while with me he had turned as sullen as his brothers, as if I was the one who had turned Jack against him. Now my eyes watered and I tasted smoke—before us the sky had darkened and just beneath grew a wavering light. The air smelled burnt, a bright flickering where there should have been only corn and beans. Kyle stopped and stared over the plain.

“There’s a fire,” he shouted. “That’s the Currents’ fields.”

“Kyle?” I yelled out, but the boy had set off. I needed only to talk to Enidina before she saw him again, to convince her that the horse was an accident—but Kyle would make a mess of it, showing himself so recklessly before I even got the chance. Off he went, as if their house still held anything for him, and I could only follow.

It had been seventeen years since I had seen the like, but this fire was different—this I believed was man-made. We hid ourselves from the front of the house, but I could make out Enidina as she crouched in the yard rocking on her knees and Frank standing just behind. The fire was spreading, the corn so dry the leaves shriveled under it, as quick to light as matchsticks. Already the neighboring farmers had driven in. They waited inside their wagons and cars with their doors open, gazing at the corn. It was then I saw the dark bundle on the ground, wrapped as it was in a shawl that burned and smoked after the grass around it had gone out—what had Eddie done? Burnt matches lay scattered around her knees, the earth black. Kyle saw it too and his face broke until he was heaving in the weeds. “Adaline,” he muttered and started off, but I caught his arm.

“You’ve seen enough of that girl,” I said.

The heat gusted now against our skin, the fire making us sweat though we stood some distance from it. Enidina clutched her arms to her chest, her eyes shut, indifferent to Frank’s hands on her shoulders and the men who had left their wagons now and called to each other for water and sand to put the fire out.

Then Jack was with them—already his face was wet and dark with smoke, signaling the others to work, though they were slow to follow. “What’s wrong with you all?” Jack yelled. “Smoke in your ears?” The men broke off from each other and bent to work, steering clear of the large heated man in the middle of them—they would listen to him, their faces said, but they would not like it, glancing off as they
did from time to time at the bundle on the ground. Enidina must have heard Jack cursing at them, for she opened her eyes and stood, swaying heavily on her feet. She rushed toward him as if falling, taking him down and striking him weakly with her fists until he yelled and twisted beneath her. Frank gripped her waist and tried to pull her back. “Get her in,” the other men were yelling, running toward the scene, but she hauled herself up before they could reach her and they stood back.

It was then she saw Kyle where he hid with me next to the house. She watched him for a time, wavering—there was something in the way she looked, some hungry and half-crazed tremor in her eye. The fire burned behind her, her dress black with soot. She lurched toward us, but I stepped in front of Kyle and slapped her face.

“What’s wrong with you, Eddie? Have you gone mad?”

Enidina stopped, holding a fist to her ribs.

“It was an accident, Eddie. That’s all. Kyle had nothing to do with it.”

“It’s always you,” she said. “You and yours. You’re the ones.”

Enidina sank to her knees, and the men pushed me aside and carried her into the house. Jack lay on the ground, watching us, and Frank helped him up. “That wife of yours,” Jack spit, but Frank stared at him and Jack put up his hands. There were others around us now—the women fleshy and worn with their hair pulled back in handkerchiefs and their eyes red, children squirming in their arms. Their men were squat, ruddy creatures, walking back for buckets and frowning at the rest. Behind them, Borden stepped
down from a carriage and a farmer carrying water struck him on the shoulder as he hurried to the fields. “That horse of theirs,” the women were saying. “Wild enough to throw a grown man, let alone a boy.” Borden stood back, his trousers soaked from the man’s buckets. With a sickened look, he turned his head to see the fields and slouched against the carriage wheel. I remembered Kyle behind me and reached back my hand—but when I turned, he was gone.

The door to the house gaped after the men had carried Enidina in. The smoke from the fire darkened the side of the house, but Kyle was nowhere to be found. In the yard, Borden crouched next to the bundle and pulled back the shawl. His hand came away black with char and he stumbled to his feet. Without a glimpse, he rushed past me and caught himself on the porch, wiping his hand against the rail and straightening his jacket before hurrying in. The crowd of neighbors soon lost their interest in me, though they would talk enough in the weeks that followed, saying out loud what they had always wanted to, what they had always thought. “That horse,” they would begin. “They should have known. Look at them, always carrying on behind people’s backs.” I would hear it in the market aisles when none of them thought I was listening and in slips of gossip at church, as if they never had anything better to do with their tongues—and in that talk the horse would become terrible, and my son along with it.

I walked home alone, though I could not help but think of the place where I had borne my son and how we had
always been strangers here, what with all their gossip. It had gotten them nothing. Now after the accident, they would study whatever we said or did—if Kyle came back, if he ever showed his face again. But he would never abandon his mother. He would never be so unkind. Over the plain, the wind had grown. An animal bayed in a far-off field and another answered it, the sounds like the calling of a child.

The accident—how could I have forgotten? The fear of it had been sitting just under my skin since Kyle had come into my kitchen, since Jack shot the horse with his gun. I could name it now as I remembered my father’s face when he found me, raw-eyed and trembling as I rushed out of the woods. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” the boy had said. “Knowing who my father is. Knowing your father works for him.” But my mother never could keep her tongue. The boy’s family had been a good deal richer than our own, and she asked them a favor in exchange—a sum to comfort her daughter, a promise of marriage. But the boy’s mother had her own way of setting things right—it was entirely my fault, she made clear, inviting the boys out with me in the forest as I did, with a blanket no less. The townspeople turned their backs on us. We were a family of tramps and liars, they said, slandering their community with gossip. Soon they pretended we had never existed at all. That pain between my legs, for so many years it had never left me, and the way those people watched us in Enidina’s yard, shunning anything they did not understand. “You and yours,” Enidina had said.

Behind me the fire was lessening, the wind grew quiet as the heat died, but not a soul worried the horizon, not even an animal in its pasture. A dust rose up ahead and I
imagined Enidina running toward that horse with Donny on its back, the way it bucked against that look on her face. I could pretend I had seen it myself, from my place at the window where I so often looked out. And if I repeated the story often enough, if I imagined every part, I might begin to remember it just that way—not an accident at all, but a part of Enidina’s carelessness, how she had rushed at that horse with her fists and spooked it, sending the poor animal off in a wild run around the yard and throwing the boy in fear for itself. There were far more terrible things than pretending, I knew that much—far more terrible than telling something different. Enidina had been the one to make the horse buck, not my son. And with such a story, I could stop Kyle from running, as his own brothers had run before him. I could find some way to quiet people’s tongues and keep him safe—but Kyle would have to help. I would need to convince him myself when I returned home.

The house was the same as I had left it, the gun on the wall, the towel by the sink, the chair pulled into the dark corner of my kitchen, but the chair was empty now, as was the house. The gaping ship glared back at me as I walked the rooms. Even Jack was gone—I would find him later in the early morning, lying straight on his back in the barn, breathing as he did when he was asleep, that great rumbling that ran through him. My husband slept like a man who no longer enjoyed sleeping, who found no release in it, and lately he had lived like a beast tossing in circles in its stall—he would not return to our bed until the night he died.

I found Kyle’s door shut the next evening and turned the knob. “Kyle,” I called. He sat on his bed, head in his hands, and I lifted his chin—his cheeks were bloodied and dark.

“What did they do?”

He dropped his head.

“Kyle, things like this can be terrible for a family. There are consequences. You don’t understand what people are capable of.”

“He died,” he said. Delicate as he was, he sat with his knees nearly to his ears in a mess of sheets.

“Donny,” I said.

“He’s dead.”

“You don’t have to keep repeating it.”

“But that’s all I am. To her, that’s it.”

I stood from the bed and straightened my skirts. I did not know this “her” he spoke of—I thought he might even have meant me. Outside his window, the Currents’ house was a white-headed pin, the fields surrounding it black and crushed like a piece of coal. “That poor boy isn’t all there is,” I said. “There are others to think about. Your father and your brothers, for one. Me.”

Kyle made a strange, sobbing sound and dropped back in his bed, covering his face. “What did he mean? That thing Dad said. ‘You know very well.’”

“He didn’t know what he was saying, Kyle. He was in one of his fits.”

“This was different.”

“It was worse, that’s all. Your father takes no pleasure in shooting a horse.”

Kyle went quiet.

“Listen, there’s no way to undo what happened, but you should consider your family now. There are things we need to make happen. People we have to convince. Our way of seeing it, that’s what matters …”

“All right, Mother,” he whispered between his teeth.

“But you have to agree …”

“I said all right.”

He lay on the bed and his chest rose and fell, his lip swollen as if he had been punched and his hands raw with scratches. I closed his door behind me but listened for him through the wall. I would have to speak to him again—I would have to be more forceful. Kyle had always been so restless, the thought of keeping still like death to him, as if he hoped the truth of this world would not reveal itself as long as he kept going. “Mother?” he called from the other side of the door, and I took my ear away. “What are you going to do?” But I was not ready for explanations—not then. I made my way down the stairs and could still hear him at my back, opening his door and asking questions.
What did he mean?
It was the way he had said it, as if I kept some secret about Jack from him—but I never did, not anything I cared then or later to tell him. And until this day, I have never said a word.