The Quickening (6 page)

Mary took a step back, wiping her eyes. “I baked these biscuits,” she started.

“Oh now.” Jack grinned at her. The early morning had been quiet. Close to stillness. The work had been easy with three of us at hand. Now Jack seemed to liven at the sight of his wife and the filth she hated, and he caught her against his chest. “Jack,” Frank said. Mary cried out herself, trying to wrench away. Jack wouldn’t let go, drawing her face against his neck and spinning her about, as if dancing. I remembered how he’d clutched his knife earlier in the morning, how swiftly he’d cut, his eyes on the hogs as they bled out. It went on too long, the way he held Mary with the same strength. She beat him with her fists.

Finally Jack stepped away. Mary’s dress and hair were covered with waste. It clung to her wetly. She spit grease from her lips and straightened the apron over her skirt. “I brought these,” she sputtered. “They’re fresh.” I thought well of her for trying to take it as she did, her chin quivering. “Oh now,” Jack said. He rubbed his neck as we stared at him and then he turned away. I took one of the napkins Mary had brought, dunked it in our water bucket, and set to washing her face. Mary keened, bending at the waist and holding out her arms.

“Hush,” I said. “We’ll get it off.” I found Jack out of the corner of my eye and he mumbled, stamping back to his place. Soon he was bent against the skins again and cleaning them with his knife. I licked my thumb and washed the most stubborn stains from Mary’s cheeks. Still she shuddered. Her bruise had darkened since the early morning, the size of a fist. I would not touch it. “Hush now,” I said again,
tender this time. In my hands she felt as soft and frail as a child.

“That wasn’t right of him. Not at all,” Frank said. Now in the evening, he had walked into the kitchen smelling of soap, his back sloped, eyeing the stove where I worked. I shut my eyes and tried to shake away the thought. Frank’s skin was red from scrubbing, the kitchen full with me and my work to feed him. My hands felt swollen and heavy, my figure too large in that place with the night coming in, the fire from the stove and a single lantern on the table. Frank kept his gaze on the frying pan where the sausages smoked.

“What do you think causes a man to do such a thing?”

“Meanness,” I said. “Plain meanness.”

Frank hummed in agreement and drew a chair from the table, sitting hard. We shook our heads. It was so strange a deed we couldn’t think to say more. The heat from the sausages rose from the pan, the spicy scent turning through the room. For days that smell would be inside our clothes. Frank didn’t move. When I turned from the pan, he looked through me, hungry for the tender meat in my hands.

I placed three large sausages on each of our plates and spooned gravy along their lengths. We sat with our heads bowed, the smoke warming our faces. Frank whispered to his breast. “Amen.”

We ate quickly. Our jaws sore, our mouths rarely closing, licking our lips. We sat bowed over our plates across from each other with few words between us. I thought of
Mary and that bruise on her cheek, the way she’d tried to quiet herself. She’d lifted her tray from the ground after I’d cleaned her, scowled at the lemonade that drifted with dirt and grass. Finally she pushed the tray into my arms and walked off home. When I came back into the house, I saw she’d scrubbed our kitchen clean, and I hadn’t had the time to thank her for it. The rest of the biscuits sat on my counter. None of us could eat them. Not yet. When Jack went after her, he walked clear of her swinging arms and didn’t say a word. I worried about her with that husband. I worried a great deal.

“Finished?” I asked. We sat at the table with our plates empty between us. The windows looked solid with darkness and I felt I knew nothing beyond that door and never would. The weather that moved over us came from a distant place. We couldn’t expect much good from it. And the good man across from me, he was the only man I believed I’d truly known. Frank shook his head and stood to help himself to more sausages from the skillet and started on these before he sat, intent on his chewing. He stared at the table before him as his fork struck his plate, slipped into his mouth, and struck again. Shutting his eyes, he kept on, striking down, his hand tight in holding his fork and trembling. At last he scraped up the rest of the grease.

Frank squeezed the tips of my fingers and sat back in his chair with a slow smile. In his tiredness, he walked to the bed and stretched himself out. I sank into the mattress beside him and listened, his arms quivering as he slept. After all those years I knew the look of him at least. Knew his smell. And I knew he would never do what Jack had done,
not for the world. I rested but felt my fingers labor on as they turned against my stomach. That afternoon I’d worked for hours at the sausages while Frank delivered the meat to the butcher in the next town. Bent over near the barn, I sat on a small stool and lifted my eyes to see the quiet of our house. Far off, the trees broke the horizon, the fields gray and unplanted. It would rain soon, I’d thought, and the rain might turn to snow. The house sat between the fields and the coming weather, the place seeming distant from me and far, far from the living. Birds circled the sky above my head and begged for scraps. I couldn’t see the families who lived nearest us, not even the Morrows down the road.

That night as I fell asleep, I worked at the sausages if only in my head and heard the rainstorm set in. The wind and rain settled me. My hands stretched the entrails again, tied one end of each length and held the skin open. The skins were frail and clear, sticking to my fingers. I pushed the ground meat through to make a stout sausage link, tied it swiftly at the end and put it aside. Another empty skin then, the mound of spiced meat lessening. My arms grew tired as they held the work up close to see. Pieces of meat fell and stained my lap. When finally my hands grew quiet, they rested on my stomach and I felt a fullness there. A quickening to accompany me.

IV
Mary

(Winter 1919)

Just a few weeks into winter, the afternoons grew heavy, my work faded to a list of chores, and I walked alone every day to the chapel through the snow. That fall the church had received a piano of its own—a gift from a wealthy family in town. When I opened the lid, the strings shuddered in the frame, the keys cool to the touch, but when I pressed my fingers down, they sang. What would my father have thought? He had been one for simple living, for the time of day when the sun had fallen, still hours before dusk, and he could note the difference. My father had left the board he carved for my first piano at the foot of my bed, a poor replica wrapped in brown paper and string. That summer in 1919, we had buried him on the south side of a hill facing a stand of trees, my mother clutching a blue handkerchief to her mouth. The stone held both his and my mother’s names, and this proved best as my mother would follow him within a year.

Now as I sat in the chapel again, the fields outside were a dull white plain. The snow showed little save the shadows of birds—but in these walls I had to close my eyes to hear so much. No one listened as I played. Even Minister Borden kept to his rooms, taken I suppose with his books and papers. Still the keys of that piano hummed, one note
following another—all that time playing that board my father had given me and I never imagined such a sound.

“Hello?” I called out. I stopped my playing and listened. Footsteps echoed in the back hall. As it grew late, the afternoon had turned into evening, the candles I had lit on the piano dimmed until I could no longer see the page.

“I’d hoped to hear you play,” Borden said, his voice faint. At the back of the chapel, he stood very still in the dark with only the white of his shirt showing, a draft from the doors behind him making a low whistling. “You didn’t stop because of me, did you?” he asked. I shook my head, though he could not see me well enough to know it. The bench felt suddenly warm beneath my dress, the blood pulsing in my fingertips, and the whistling too grew quiet. I did not dare move until his footsteps faded away. The light was gone then and I played what I could from memory, the hair on my arms raised by the cold—if not for the darkness, I could have seen my breath.

“The way to goodness,” Borden had said, “is one of sacrifice. He who sacrifices will have it a hundred times returned.” He stood at the pulpit looking down at the meager gathering, old and young but mostly old, twenty in all scattered in the pews. Still, he seemed pleased with the attention, though I am certain no one understood a word he said—no one did, but for me. The others sat with their hands in their laps, the old ones with their chins to their chests, asleep in the wooden seats until the music began. I never looked anywhere but up. Every week Borden hesitated less, seemed
less uncertain, and soon the pews filled. That is what the expression on Borden’s face was, really—the way he nodded at his words and turned the page with the tips of his fingers—the radiance he wore was a mirror of my own, seeing him.

A week before Christmas, I crouched with Borden and the other wives in the church basement and for hours we fixed evergreens into yards of garlands and wreaths. Sacrifice, I thought, and the wreaths grew in a pile around my feet while theirs remained scattered with loose pinecones and needles, what with all their talk. “How are the boys?” they asked. They were plump about the ankles, their voices dense as cream.

“Your youngest, he’s four, isn’t he? That’s a long while between them. I would think you’d want more for the farm.”

I studied the one who had spoken. She lived in town, a wife of the man who owned the market, stiff and gawky as her name was—Mrs. Reed. She had pinned a flower of silk too close to her face, her hair a bush. I knew she had felt many a coin in her palm, the ring on her finger a prize. More children. But how could we? My husband came in late to our bed and lifted the blankets, his hand on my hip, but soon enough it slipped off as he fell asleep.

“My husband works very hard.”

The woman smiled. “But still …”

“Still?”

“He’s still your husband.”

“Mrs. Reed,” Borden said.

The woman let out a shout and stood, gripping her skirt. She had done nothing but hold the pine branches as she talked and the sap had gathered on her lap in a sticky pool.

“You’ll need a good soap for that,” I said.

Mrs. Reed looked at me. “Yes, I know dear. I know.”

Borden dropped his head, reading from his book, and the others grew quiet. Mrs. Reed scrubbed at her skirt with her fingers until they turned the color of the wool, a sickly yellow-green, and she threw her hands in the air. “Are you coming?” she said to the others, gathering her belongings. The women gazed at her for a moment—with a quick nod they abandoned their work, stuffed their purses with needles and scarves, and tossed their coats over their shoulders—then they were gone. Save for the two of us, the church was empty then, a cold wind batting the window panes. I had no desire to join that wind any time soon, no matter what needed me at home—with Borden’s quiet presence in the room, my fingers worked at fastening the pine needles with thread. He had seen, I knew, and he had come between me and those women.

“I thought you might play,” he said after a time. “Since you’re staying, I mean.”

“What would you like to hear?”

“Don’t ask,” he said. “Everyone with their questions. Just this morning, old Craeger wanted to know what he should do with his chickens. They’d gotten out of their pen into Peterson’s corn. I tried to send him to the deputy in town, but the law, he said, he didn’t trust it. ‘What greater law was there than God’s?’” Borden laughed, dropping his head.

“He’s right.”

“Who?”

“Craeger.”

Borden studied me and stood from his chair. “Mary,” he said. “You should have worn gloves.” I looked down at my hands—my fingers were red and wet with cuts. Borden crouched next to me with a wince and took a handkerchief from his pocket, holding my fingertips tight. When he closed his eyes, I looked down at the top of his head where the part in his hair showed a delicate line of skin, my hands caught between his. The handkerchief was spotted with blood when he took it back.

I had seldom in my life known such ecstasy and fear, and never both at once, but as I made my way home through the high snow and wind, I did not feel a touch of that cold—how could this be anything but the work of a higher presence? I walked with my coat open and swinging around my legs, my scarf in my hand. The moon was high by the time I left him, the sky black as midnight, and snow drifted through the fences while the grasses hummed. Across the frozen plain, the earth woke to my footsteps. When at last I reached the door to my house, I believed I was as bright and clear as the snow itself, touching ground.

Over the next few weeks I woke to a certain kind of dullness. In the morning light, our room was narrow and pale. Jack set out early for his shift at the mill, work that put food on our table in the winter months, and I lay in our bed
listening to the clock on the wall and the sounds of daybreak. I felt an ache in every part of my person and was sick of my own skin, how faded and thin and all-encompassing it was, like a dress I could never take off. Outside the door, my sons sulked for their mother, whispering just loud enough for me to wake, and I smelled the sweat on my husband’s pillow. The morning after my visit to the church, Jack had come in for his breakfast and found me at the stove, looking out our kitchen window. The barn stood dark against the early light and a mist clung to the grass, easing toward the house. “Mary!” Jack yelled—beneath my hand the sausages on the stove hissed with a heavy smoke, the pan gone dry. Jack shoved the pan at me as I tried to push him away. For days, a burn shone red in the tender skin between my forefinger and thumb. Ever since, Jack had often lost his patience with me, suspending a fist just before my face with only weariness to hold him back. Lying in our bed, I shuddered to think just how long it would be before he struck me again, and a blast sounded like a train coming at us, so loud it shook the house.