The Quickening (3 page)

“Starving’s not hard? I’ll give him some meat.”

Frank called my name then. I let her go and sat to take his hand. Frank was the one I worried about. His fingers were white in mine, his face thin. After a while he opened his light-colored eyes. The wind outside swept the house, and our roof shifted beneath it. When at last Mary reappeared from our kitchen, she held a cold leg of chicken on a fork and snapped her fingers at me.

“I don’t want him to have any of that,” I said at once.

“What now? After all my trouble?”

“That’s trouble of your own choosing.”

Frank stirred and I thought of my father when he grew ill, laid out in our home where we’d tried to tend to him. For weeks he shivered under every blanket we owned, coughed up the tonics we gave him and refused more. Nothing we did seemed enough.

“Look at him,” Mary said. “My cousin was sick like this. You should have seen his wife’s face when the doctor claimed she’d tried to kill him. For days she hadn’t fed him anything more than broth.”

I didn’t answer. I could imagine the look on that wife’s face as clearly as my own. I didn’t know about doctoring. And I didn’t know what would be worse for a man, a bite of chicken or two women in a quarrel over his bed. My father had refused doctors himself, leaving us at his bedside with our hands in our laps. Before I could even raise my head, Mary had dropped a piece of chicken into Frank’s open mouth. “There,” she said. “The meat will give you strength.”

There wasn’t much use in doubting her now. Frank slept after he ate, and Mary and I sat in our corners, impatient in the silence between us as we watched over my husband. It was a while he slept. We spoke about the rain, about the animals and our chores, our voices low as if in some holy place. “Never seen a storm like this,” Mary said. “Why, I almost didn’t come. Where would you have been then?”

“I suppose I’d be in the same place,” I answered. “Though Frank would be without his chicken. That would be the difference.”

Mary made a kind of hiccup at that, but I knelt beside Frank and pretended not to hear. Even in his sleep, Frank seemed calm and distant.

“Mary,” I said. “He won’t wake.”

“He’s sleeping.”

“He’s not.”

“But he’s breathing.” She went to slap his cheek.

“You’ve done enough,” I said, catching her hand, and she winced. I wrapped my shawl over my head, found my boots
and coat, and layered on what else I could before turning for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“For the doctor.”

“You can’t carry a baby through this.”

I looked at her. Her hair had stuck to her forehead in drying and her dress was stained with mud and grass. “You could come with me,” I said.

“But somebody’s got to stay here. Somebody should.”

“And that would be you?”

Mary backed away from me then, rubbing her arms. I shook my head at such a woman, keeping to her place in the warm, dry room she’d always hated. It had been building in us, this tugging at each other, sitting so still as we waited beneath the rain for Frank to wake. As I opened the door, the rain wet my hands and I stepped into the storm.

It would be six miles to town. I pushed through the mud and tried to keep myself steady, listening to the wind as it whipped about and blew the shawl from around my head. With the shawl gone, I felt full out in the storm. The rain burned my cheeks. It stung through the gaps of my coat. With my hands raw and numb, I held on to the fence posts where they lined the road and I crouched beneath the weather, one arm over my face and the other beneath my stomach for warmth. It was luck that kept me to that road when I was pushed from it by the wind. When gusts turned me in circles and ran me into the fields. I was bleary with mud, thick with the stuff where I wiped my face, sweeping my hair back so I could see. When finally I found the
doctor’s door, I could only lean against it and rattle the knob, hoping the doctor would hear.

I’d spent the rest of the daylight and more in that struggle to town, but it took only an hour to reach home again. As I stepped in, the noises in my head confused many things: the length of our return, the doctor and I, my journey through the storm and back. When finally I’d reached him, the doctor was tired and angry. The tail of his coat whipped behind him as he stood in the rain, cranking his car until the engine turned. I’d never before ridden in a car myself. When the mud caught the wheels, we left it behind and walked the last mile. In that mile we saw the worst of the storm, the way it tricked us. It drove us to our knees in the mud before the wind and rain delivered us into the house.

In the time since I’d left, the house had again grown quiet. Mary sat with her eyes on the door, her hands folded in a blanket as if she’d wrung the blanket in waiting. I dropped into our bed next to Frank and heard Mary speak at last to the doctor, explaining my husband’s fever and what we’d done. The doctor scolded me for the chicken. Mary hovered near, her hands cupped over her mouth and whispering to herself. Often in the years to come, I would see her when she thought I wasn’t looking, whispering just like that. A whole book of whispering whenever her luck ran dry, as if God Himself listened at her feet. I tried to keep my eyes open and heard my husband stir against his pillow, the sharp words of the doctor, and Mary’s nervous tongue. As
I fell asleep, it was this that filled my head, empty of Mary’s speeches now, her watery gods, her assurances. She agreed with the doctor’s opinions against me as if she’d entirely forgotten her part. I was too beaten with rain to say anything in my defense.

The rest was sleep for a while. The doctor moved about us, it seemed, for weeks. Frank and I traded our sicknesses, and I stayed in bed after Frank grew well. My dreams were rain and wind, spinning me where I slept. The baby was born still.

II
Mary

(Fall 1909–Fall 1913)

This could not be the place my new husband had brought me, it could not be where Jack meant us to live. This man who enclosed my hand in his and sent a shiver straight to my veins, he could never sink so low as to think this house could be our home.

Still there he was, full of his green-eyed mischief. Something warm curled inside my chest. He bounded through the entrance, bent to his knee, and when he opened his arms I let myself cross that threshold and fall in—because that was the way it was back then, Jack with his wide, sturdy hands, his stubbornness, his strength, a burning in him that made me soft, magnificent, believing there was only talk and waiting in this world unless I was with him.

So I worked at this house to make it my own—a gaping ship of a place, with two floors and more space than we could ever hope to fill. The rooms above me whined in the silence and heat. I spent mornings on my knees, scraping at the filth that blackened the floors, and learned in all my labor about the family that squandered their luck here at the turn of the century, having overbuilt, overplanted, and abandoned the house after seven years—I swore the same would never happen to us. After I scrubbed the windows and stripped the curtains, I left my rags and rubbish in a
pile outside for Jack to burn. He carried in buckets of water before he set off for the barn, tossed the gray runoff when he returned home. Sweeping off his hat, he wondered at the rooms I had made, bright and smelling of soap, and at the state of my dress, my hunger for something clean. I kept at this house with a heavy hand the first years we stayed, shook the outdoors from the rugs and bolted the windows. When my sons were born, when they grew to stand and watch their father cutting like a knife through the fields, I kept them in too—because if anything, I wanted to hold them in that lifted-up place I believed was promised us, in that place where we were better than all the rest and more deserving, and with my sons it would not just be a far-off belief or a kind of pretending. It would be.

But there is only so much a person can do beyond wishing. In my mother’s house, I was taught to walk in heels and carry cups of tea, though guests were rare back then. I sat alone in our parlor with my legs crossed, hands in my lap, and spoke only when spoken to. Beyond our windows, neighbors passed with their heads turned or crossed to the far side of the street. They no longer came to our door for my father’s woodwork, let alone for company. On a long, flat board, I learned to play my scales on keys my father had etched with his knife into the wood—because even if we did not have a piano, my mother was determined that her daughter with her long fingers would be able to play in any house in town that did.

“The accident,” my parents called it, though my father said little if he could. It had happened just after I turned twelve, remaining with me like a dull haze through my teenage years. All I knew was how strange I felt one morning, sick to my stomach with an aching in my legs and just under my chin. This was not the way it had been, my parents seemed to be saying, the quietness of our house and our neighbors who kept their watch over us. After the accident, everything had changed and I was somehow the reason.

“Practice every day,” my mother instructed. When I ran my fingers over the board my father had given me, she hummed the tune, stumbling whenever she believed I had struck the wrong key. What little my mother remembered from her childhood lessons, she remembered fiercely—to keep time, she beat a wooden ruler against my arm until the skin burned.

“It will never be enough, will it?” she said, stopping the thump of that stick. I lifted my fingers from practicing while my mother gazed at the wall over my head. The ruler cut into her fist and a scar showed jagged along her knuckles—the scar invisible except when she grew nervous and her hands blushed. A boy with a temper had been jealous with her, she had told me, long before she met my father. I had to be careful of such boys, she said. Now with her standing so still, I thought I might reach out to touch her—there where that long, hot slice broke her skin—and its warmth would share itself with me and be mine for a while. When I was younger, before the accident, it had been different—my mother’s palm warm against the middle of
my back whenever we were close enough to touch. Now she shook her head and I dropped my hands to the wooden keys. “No, it will,” she said. “It will be if we want it. We can have everything again as long as we are good and persevering. Mary, you just have to believe what I tell you. Never let anyone get in your way.”

We were no longer considered a fine family, but in her every hour, my mother relied a great deal on seeming.

“Someday you’ll know better,” my father told me. He was a quiet man, already stooped, spending his waking hours in the shed where he worked. I thought then my father’s words were offering me a better kind of living, but later I knew he had meant how gray those days would seem, the polite and constant practicing, when what I wanted was something glowing and passionate and strange.

When first I met Jack, it was his voice that shook me, echoing out of a storefront where he argued with the owner inside—I stopped at once, wondering what kind of man could have a voice like that, as large as daylight. He cursed and a case in the store broke, knuckles into glass. He rushed out the door with the owner yelling and I saw him then, turning one way and the next, not knowing what to do with himself. “I’ll pay for it all right,” he yelled back. He leaned against the porch rail an arm’s reach from me and stared at the ground. I scratched my foot against the dirt until he looked up, his green eyes rising over my face without expression. When his mouth opened without a word, I felt swallowed up whole.

Later I would learn that Jack was the youngest in a family of men, that his mother had died a year after he was born. They were only a father and five brothers, the father lost to work and drink and the sons all born into a four-room farmhouse far in the East where they sweated for women in their bunks. His brothers had raised him with their fists and jokes, my husband nodding without a word whenever I asked to know more. But I could imagine the way that house had been, the heat of all those boys as they worked the farm and cooked their meals, a charred crust of fat and bloody meat in the saucepan. It was a place of temper and few words, the taste of smoke and salt—boys playing mother to each other, their feet muddy in the kitchen. Because that was the kind of place where Jack must have been born, the hard muscle of a man that he was and still so much a boy.

Jack stood against the rail, his overalls wind-whipped and dull, breaking at the seams. The straps hung loose at his thighs and his thighs were thick and muscled under the denim. The skin of his knuckles had broken into bloody streaks and he bound his hand in his shirt.

“You’ll never get your price like that,” I said.

For a moment he only stared. I took a step back, the store’s brick front hard against my spine.

“I know it,” he swore, sweeping off his cap and twisting it between his fingers. “I was never much the bartering kind.” He shrugged with a smile and dropped his head. It was then that what had seemed devilish in Jack fell away, as if he were a child—his face streaked by the sun, his eyes green and squinting, and the crown of his hair standing on end.
What a wonder, I thought, the way such a man could hold both at once, all that rage and innocence, and I had been the one to bring that innocence out.