The Quickening (9 page)

“Awake?” My husband crouched over me and I felt the darkness shift—even in his sleep, his size took up our bed,
his shoulders and chest so heavy the mattress sank beneath his weight. At night the noise of his breathing grated on me, and when I closed my eyes the way the world seemed to tremble and dim seemed entirely his doing. When he eased himself against me, my stomach clenched. So soon?—my new boy was barely months in our bed. My husband raised himself up, the ache of his work releasing itself into me until my breath stirred, my hips rising as if remembering another life—it was another face I saw then, another skin, though I would not name it, could not let myself remember beyond a few weeks. My husband called my name, and when at last he burrowed his head into my neck, I brushed my fingers across his back, settling him.

When next I woke, Jack was quiet in our bed. The absence of his heavy breathing had brought me back to our room. My new boy lay asleep at my side, Jack rested on the other, but when I opened my eyes, I found my husband raised on his elbow, his head cocked in his hand. In the silence, he studied the both of us as if we were strangers in his bed.

That summer after I turned twelve, I went to the woods near my home nearly every afternoon to escape my mother’s house. In that small space surrounded by trees, I plucked the grass around my feet and made a level plot for a blanket. The space was no larger than two sheds put together, the sun reaching the grass for an hour or more just after noon, and one day I found a scattering of animal bones in the brush. The animal was long-limbed with a heavy skull, all
but the bone eaten away. It was simple-looking enough, no more than a pile of sticks, and I imagined piecing it together again until the animal lay fixed and whole on the grass. Who ever thought the making of life was such a complicated thing? For months my mother had warned me about the wrong kinds of dresses, dancing with a boy’s hands on your hips, and the company I might keep, life leaping into me at a snap of a finger. “It happens easier than you suppose,” she said.

In the woods I smelled smoke and turned on my stomach—a boy stood in the shadows behind the trees, watching me. He was from our school but several years older, lanky and muscle-thin, the smoke smell coming from his fingers. When he saw me looking, he raised a hand to me and walked off. Over the next few weeks, I caught the same smell, different from a fire, but close enough that I thought someone might be burning leaves in a nearby yard, and when I looked, the boy was there again, watching, leaving just as quickly. “Are you supposed to be out here, all on your own?” he called out at last. “You’re in the sixth class, aren’t you? The smart girl. But you’re not so smart you don’t look like something. Mary, right?” It was hot and the light shifted, the woods abuzz. This boy smelled the way the older ones sometimes did to a girl, musk and salt and cigarettes—an awful smell I have thought ever since. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” he said. “The way you’re always out here, like you’re looking for something on that blanket of yours. Anyway, you’d better not. Knowing who my father is. Knowing your father works for him.” He stepped out from the trees and into my circle of sun, his
boot kicking my blanket. When I reached out to straighten it, he caught hold of my arm and did not let go.

“My God,” Jack had said the first night of our marriage. Lying together, he had lifted the quilt from my legs, and I snatched it back. Under the light of the lamp, the sheets looked spotless. Jack put his face in his hands and turned away.

“It’s not the same with everyone,” I said, steadying myself before I reached for him. “It doesn’t mean—”

“I know what it means.”

“But it’s not—”

“It’s plenty.”

I sat up against my pillow and looked down at my lap, wet and sore as it was. My cheeks burned, and I lifted the sheet again, pinching the skin of my thighs until they turned red. I remembered the day I had met him and the violence in his voice, the way it thrummed inside me like a finger plucking a string. If I had a knife at hand, I might have cut myself just to give him that bloody stain he wanted, but it was too late. That boy in the forest with me, with his smoky weight and the crush of his legs—he had made it too late for a long time. I was the worst a woman could be and now my husband believed it too.

Over the next few years, Jack worked with a kind of desperation I had rarely seen in him. In the afternoon, I kept an eye on him in the fields, Kyle heavy in my arms. Already
Jack had cleared a broader patch of land to the east with the plow, but late one morning he decided to work back through with only his fingers and a rake, clawing up what the machine had missed. “Slow,” he spat, watching our boys where they crouched in the rows behind him. “You’re not to leave a single twig.” Beneath the sun, the fields were deeply furrowed and wavering—my sons worked listlessly, close to the ground and trailing after their father. When finally Jack seemed to forget them, they stole back to the house and closed themselves in their rooms. They would not appear again until dinnertime, not a word in the kitchen as we ate. Still Jack worked on, breaking the skin of his knuckles against pebbles and sticks, his back bent, pouring himself out until he had left the soil gutted after him. There was a fever in the way he took to the land, and I watched and waited, unsure how long he would take to work it out.

When Jack came in at last to the kitchen, it was already dark and his hands were ragged. I took them in mine and hurried him to the wash bucket for soaking, fetching a roll of bandages I had waiting. In the corner, my youngest fretted in his basket.

“That boy,” my husband whispered.

“What boy?”

“He’s strange to me.”

I kept at the bandages, wrapping them around my husband’s fingers though my own felt faint. “What now? All that work has gone to your head. Kyle’s still new to you, that’s all. It doesn’t make a stranger out of him.”

I shook my head and tied the bandages, turning his hands so I could see them—they lay large and wounded in mine,
trembling. Looking down at me, Jack stayed quiet, though his pulse raced. The room was still, that motor in Jack raging to a pitch—he tore his hands from my grip and I fell, catching hold of the table. The bones in my wrist cracked. “Jack,” I called out, but he kept his back to me. Alone on the far side of the room, he stood red-skinned and bristling, the table sprawled on its side between us.

“So Eddie lost it,” he spit out at last, hiding his face. “Frank says she’s had an awful time. Sounds to me like she’s doing things a person shouldn’t do. Crazy things, sounds like.” He stopped, righted the table, and swept his hands across the surface, wincing at the touch. “Best you go see her,” he said. “At a time like this, women need women. Isn’t that right?”

I rubbed at the pain in my wrist, and he wiped his mouth and went out. I thought of our boys, how they bounded down the stairs for their supper, all of them limbs and restlessness—so like their father. Kyle cried from his basket and my breasts ached. Out the window, Jack walked across the yard, lit now only by the lantern he carried, and he disappeared from me into the barn.

Up ahead, Enidina’s house was quiet. Three Jerseys sat together in the grass against the barn fence, their tails kicking, and a cat dropped off the porch and chased an insect over the walk. Inside, the house was dark and still and smelled of sickness, but soon a wet metallic ticking sounded from the kitchen.

I found Enidina scrubbing the kitchen floor by hand. A pail of water sat at her hip, the water gray with mud and
grass, but the floor was clean, the rag worn to threads. Enidina stayed on her knees, her face flushed. “Eddie,” I whispered—only when Kyle let out a cry from my arms did she drop her rag and look up, blinking against the light of the open door.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

She sat back on her shins, brushing her skirt. “All right,” she said, eying the stiffness of my wrist as I held Kyle. Without another word, she drew herself to her feet and reaching into her cabinets took down two teacups and set the kettle to the stove.

“I have some crackers,” she said without looking at me. “Something he can suck on.” She dampened a towel with the kettle water when it warmed and laid the towel over my wrist, tying it close. I flinched but the towel numbed the pain and held my wrist tight. “I hope it’ll do,” she said.

We sat at their table and Enidina closed her hands around her cup and seemed to breathe it in, the steam wetting her cheeks—her knuckles were red and swollen, her fingertips puckered. I rested Kyle on my knee and she gazed at him with her eyes closing.

“Eddie …”

“Did you hear about Marla Samuels? How she almost got herself killed?”

“What now?”

“Grinding feed for their poultry, she got her skirts mixed up with the belts. When she tried to get them loose, the machine threw her into the motor. She struck a big iron kettle when she fell. If her daughter hadn’t been there with her,
who knows? She broke five of her ribs, and that husband of hers hasn’t left her alone since.”

Kyle squirmed and I set him to my breast, imagining it—Marla was a mousy woman, the whole lot of the Samuels seemed shrunken and skittish and far too easy to please. Eddie cleared our dishes and stood for a time, watching us. “He’s a good boy.”

“He is.”

“Doesn’t take much after Jack, now, does he?”

I looked at her and Enidina gave a quick nod and turned her back to me, washing the tea from our cups. “All this waiting,” she started. “It teaches you something.” Her voice was low, her hands working, and I knew she was talking about what Jack had sent me for, though Enidina would never admit she was telling it to me. “Patience,” she said, as if reminding herself. “When it comes right down to it, I suppose it doesn’t matter where a child comes from or why. I suppose it never does.”

I shifted Kyle uneasily, and he began to doze as he fed. The air in the room was heavy and dull and soon the sound of water in the sink set me to dreaming—I shut my eyes. Enidina gripped my shoulder and I let her hand stay, though the weight of it was painful in its grief. As Kyle slipped from me in my weariness, she took him up and settled him against my chest. When at last I woke, I was alone in the dark kitchen, Enidina hovering somewhere in the house behind me. Kyle rested in my lap and I heard Frank come in, his singing from the other room echoing like a hymn—I listened, not knowing what made this house so easy and
full, no matter how poor it seemed, and why I always came to it, why it was so different from my own.

When the days grew dark again, I made my way to the chapel, freeing the piano from under its heavy cloth—I had not played since Kyle was born, had not attended services since I was well and pregnant. Now I sat on the piano bench with an ear to the room behind me, Kyle asleep in the basket at my feet. Trees whined against the windowpanes, the wind heavy over the fields, but inside the air was hushed. I struck the keys—the room echoed, and I struck again, making little that could be called music. Kyle stirred without a cry, without even a whimper, as if he knew my reasons. Borden stayed in his rooms, head in his sermons I guessed, and at last my fingers tired. I rested my hands in my lap, my chin to my chest. I had not prayed for a long while, fearing God himself might have turned his back on me—now no matter how I called Him, that lifted-up feeling in my chest never came. What an empty place, this cold, pitiless room without even a voice to listen to, without a hand to take—when I ran my fingers over the keys again, it seemed I hit every note at once.

Borden opened his door and I stopped my playing and listened. The day was bright, the sun through the windows lit the room with stains, reddening my music on the stand. At the back of the chapel, Borden stood with his legs wide, his shoulders hunched, as if braced against something. “Are you finished?” he said.

I did not answer, my eyes turned to my lap.

“I said are you finished?”

I shook my head, my hair loose against my shoulders and neck, and my skin seemed to stand at attention. I pressed my hand into the seat next to me, expectant, but when I looked for him, I heard only the door to his room fall shut—the light through the windows shook, the red on that page falling to my stomach. On the floor at my feet, Kyle opened his eyes.

In the months after I brought Kyle to the church, I could not sleep more than an hour without waking, could not be bothered to eat but a few bites from my plate. I stood on the rug in our front parlor with a broom in hand and forgot what I had wanted with it. My own husband was lost to me, gone it seemed for weeks to the fields and the weather. I tried to keep up with my chores, bleaching our linens and washing grease from our plates, the front of our shirts, but the work seemed different, cheerless—the mere ironing of a sheet undid itself as soon as it was finished and had to be done again.

Inside our barn, I ground feed for our chickens, the belts stretching and pulling at the grain. Grinders were ill-tempered machines—it never took much for the motor to stick, throwing sparks. I shoveled in more grain, enough for the grinder to choke, and thought about Marla Samuels and her skirts—the way she had been thrown at such a speed and how hard she hit that kettle to break her ribs. What would it take? For months Borden had acted like a stranger to me, and my husband came in like a bear to my kitchen, that
wildness in him hidden beneath a dark pelt. When Marla was finally well enough to walk, she held on to her husband’s arm as she strolled through town, that bandage of hers high across her middle. The townspeople worried over her, endlessly, and her husband refused to drop her hand.

The smell of burning filled the barn, the grinder whining against the feed. The air was thick with dust, and the motor spat and pitched, my eyes watering from the smoke. Bending closer to the noise, I imagined myself caught, my skirts like feathers and the floor trembling with the force when I was thrown—what would it take? I gripped the fabric of my dress, thought about the break of bone and muscle, how quickly that pain might diminish if a wife was determined enough, if she could feel the heat of a man’s hand against her cheek—and in this town, she would be treated like a queen. The grinder was less than inch from my hip, the wind of its belts tickling the hairs on my arm.