Fast Lanes (17 page)

If you lose a child, the women of the town told me, it flattens you; you never get over it. But some women endured it
repeatedly. I never knew my grandmother. But once I asked if she hadn’t been angry at the woman who made the butter, the contaminated butter sold to those eight or nine houses, and her house was one.
How could she be angry? That woman didn’t know, and she lost two children, her youngest baby and her older girl, too, the one who delivered the butter and helped her so. When Mother repeated that phrase she would weep, as though Callie had been her help. And he was. Until you came, she’d tell me
.

People don’t always understand how babies can be a help, why seemingly beleaguered women might want another child, and another. If they can have them, if they can nurse them through what was once called childbed, and raise them. People forget, even women forget, how mothers fall in love with their babies. My grandmother’s marriage was already a trial; her husband drank and philandered, and his business had begun to fail. The twin sons she’d lost a few years before were dead at birth; she never knew them. But she adored Callie. He looked like her own brother, Calvin, blond and fair as china, but his nature was his own. When she said he was her best, she meant that he was happy. One of those babies who is interested and alert but doesn’t seem to resist the world, who seems delighted. He was peaceful, my mother was told, and his smile, the look of his eyes, lit up so.
The night he died he relaxed into Mother’s arms and his little face turned resolute. His lips were blistered as though clear beads of water sat along his mouth. She’d tried so hard to save him
. The Bellington graveyard was a rolling meadow, tamed and mown, fenced in Victorian black iron. Every spring they planted sweet peas and white impatiens at the smallest gravestones in the family plot. Two of the stones were sleeping lambs; one was a lamb that stood.

My mother learned vigilance from her mother. She wrapped her children up against the cold and never let them go out with their heads wet or too soon after a bath. She never let them sit on the ground, except at the height of
summer; she said the ground was cold. She’d grown up alone with her mother, the other siblings having left home, the money gone. Her dissolute father was gone, committed to an asylum when she was sixteen, when the two women could no longer manage his moods and rages. They turned their big home into a rooming house and managed to keep the antiques, the silver, the dishes, the pewter. My mother taught me to value these things the family had touched and used; every holiday she set a festive, gracious table with the Haviland and the Baltimore pear.

I take the butter plate and its beautiful globe from my own shelves and think of my grandmother on a long-ago Easter, in another place and time. The girl has delivered the butter and my grandmother holds its pale color in her palms. She presses it into the mold by hand, flattening the top with a wooden spatula. When she turns it out onto the round butter plate it forms a flower shape nearly white, cool and creamy; the shape is round and compact as a girl’s breast—a young girl, a girl the age of that twelve-year-old who just now finishes her rounds, having walked the last set of steps in her buttoned boots and collected the last of the money into her chambray clerk’s apron. There is a dull throb in her head and her fingers tingle. It is April in the mountains and spring has just come. The air is crisp but the light has begun to change and the sky is breathy and blue. She woke even earlier than usual today, just after dawn, because her mother’s babies were fussy and crying, because all the customers needed bigger orders than usual, in time for guests and Easter luncheons. Now the lurch of the wagon and the creaking of the big wheels begin to assert their dragging lull. She looks out into the road over the broad back of the harnessed mare and sees how the air seems to move and shimmer, as though it were a hot, hot day. She is warm and her face is moist. The ache in her head feels distant but more constant, a weight and a terrible pressure, as though a color of such density spreads through her. The horse knows the way, and so she closes her eyes.

Y
ou have to imagine: this was sixty, seventy, eighty years ago, more than the lifetimes allotted most persons.
Lord save us
, is what we used to say—we younger ones—as an expression, sometimes in jest. Later I said it in earnest, in the long winters, light in the rooms so dim and the rooms themselves like shadowy caves. Some months we children took lessons at home, as Coalton was thirty minutes wagon ride and snow too deep for the wheels; drifts on the road were waist-high. Pa did have a sledge but traveled any distance only in emergency. A few times, in a snap freeze, the snow grew shiny and hard, gleaming as though a mirror were shattered across its whole surface. Pa marked a track with sticks and bundled us in furs. We rode round, runners of the sledge tracing a circle past the house and the naked oaks. The belled harness jingled and beyond the oaks were fields on all sides, sloping flat to the woods. We were warned not to go out of track. Further out the snow was soft in spots and would swallow us
right up, Pa said. This was probably only a story, though we lost an animal nearly every winter, in just that way—goats or hogs lost in a drift, frozen perfectly until a thaw revealed them.

From the age of eight or nine, my brother Warwick drove the sledge. We sisters sat wrapped together in blankets and the bear rug, our faces covered except for our eyes. Warwick sat forward with the whip and reins, making the horse step quickly to stay warm. Pa followed on snowshoes; behind us he looked like a bulky troll against the white, which fairly glinted like a glassy sea with slopes. The circle, round the big house and the empty guesthouse, was perhaps a half-mile. Warwick whistled and shouted to the horse, his voice high-pitched, a child’s voice floating out and freezing. It was like flying, slicing through the wind with air so cold we couldn’t see into it.

Finally Warwick let us off by the big porch that was heaped with snow, then drove the sledge to the barn where Pa met him. We sisters went in to the fire, all of us shining with cold, and the fire warmed us, turned us one by one to our winter selves, dim in the dim house, the windows all shuttered against the cold, the lamps throwing off small glows.

Our parents joked about their two families, first the six sons, one after the other; then a few years later the four daughters, Warwick, and me. Another daughter after the boy was a bad sign, Pa said; there were enough children. I was the last, youngest of twelve Hampsons, and just thirteen months younger than Warwick. Since we were born on each other’s heels, Mam said, we would have to raise each other.

Warwick, Ava, and I shared one room, the three other sisters another. In winter only the big kitchen was kept truly warm. It was considered dangerous to have wood stoves or coal burners in children’s bedrooms; we slept under feather
comforters, close to each other. Ava was four years older and often appointed to watch Warwick and me. She longed for the company of the older sisters and yet took a kind of pride in her responsibility. I remember her teaching us, with chalks on a slate, gravely, the letter
S
. I was not even talking yet; she taught me to hiss, then drew one line and changed the
S
to an
8. S, 8
. Something was flickering all around us. Doubtless it was the fire, lit on a winter evening when the dark came so early. I remember no one’s face, but I see her hand on the slate beside the magic form. Those long winters inside were not bad times at first, but in later weeks a strange loneliness came—late in the cold, the last few weeks before it broke, we seldom talked or read aloud or argued anymore, or played games. We lived instead in silence, only doing what we were told to do, and waiting.

We could see no other farms from our house, not a habitation or the smoke of someone’s chimney; we could not see the borders of the road anymore but only the cover of snow, the white fields, and mountains beyond. The mountains were an awesome height; you could not see where the sky began. The house in this whiteness seemed small, alien, as though we might be covered up and vanish; no one would know. Sounds were so muffled; except for the wind, one could have fantasies of deafness. The power of the Scriptures in such a setting was great and we heard the Bible aloud nearly every evening. Twilight, because the valley was deep, came as early as three or four in the afternoon; the world, the snow, seemed to fly in the face of the Word.
Remove not the old landmarks, venture not into the fields of the fatherless;
yet the snow still fell.

Winters frightened me, but it was summers I should have feared. Summers, when the house was large and full, the work out-of-doors so it seemed no work at all, everything done in company. Summers all the men were home, the farm was crowded, lively; it seemed nothing could go wrong then.

The six elder brothers had all left home at sixteen to homestead somewhere on the land, each going first to live with the brother established before him. They worked mines or cut timber for money to start farms and had an eye for women who were not delicate. Once each spring they were all back to plant garden with Pa, and the sisters talked amongst themselves about each one. All older than the girls and distant enough to be mysteries, they were comely men and this week alone appeared all together without their wives, filling the house after the long silent winter and taking hours to eat big suppers the sisters served after nightfall.

Noons we took turns carrying water to them on horseback, corked bottles we’d filled in the cold creek. We sat astride and they drank at our knees. Each had a favorite sister; they were a bit shy when alone with the one they liked most. Sometimes there was an awkward silence while they drank. They were strong men; they were all alive then. To think of them, drinking cold water and sweating, squinting against the sun at a face.

By late June the brothers had brought their families, each a wife and several children. All the rooms in the big house were used, the guesthouse as well, swept and cleaned. There was always enough space because each family lived in two big rooms, one given to parents and youngest baby and the other left for older children to sleep together, all fallen uncovered across a wide cob-stuffed mattress. Within those houses were many children, fifteen, twenty, more. I am speaking now of the summer I was twelve, the summer Warwick got sick and everything changed.

He was nearly fourteen. We slept in the big house in our same room but chose favorite cousins to share the space, as the four elder sisters in summer had their own two rooms over the sun porch, open to river breeze; they were all young ladies now and I had little to do with them. Ava told me I was more a boy than a girl. I didn’t care; the young cousins
all wanted to be chosen, as our room was bay-windowed, very large, and directly above the parlor, the huge oak tree lifting so close our window it was possible to climb out at night and sit hidden on the branches. Adults on the porch were different from high up, the porch lit in the dark and chairs creaking as the men leaned and rocked, murmuring, drinking homemade beer kept cool in cellar crocks.

Late one night that summer, Warwick woke me, pinched my arms inside my cotton shift and held his hand across my mouth. He walked like a shadow in his white nightclothes, motioning I should follow him outside; I could see his clothes and not his body in the dark. Warwick was quickly through and I was slower, my weight still on the sill as he settled himself, then lifted me over when I grabbed a higher branch, my feet on his chest and shoulders. We climbed into the top branches that grew next the third floor of the house and sat cradled where three branches sloped; Warwick whispered not to move, stay behind the leaves in case they look. We were outside Claude’s window, seeing into the dim room.

Claude was youngest of the older brothers and his wife was hugely with child, standing like a white column in the middle of the floor. Her white chemise hung wide round her like a tent and her sleeves were long and belled; she stood, both hands pressed to the small of her back, leaning as though to help the weight at her front. Then I saw Claude kneeling, darker than she because he wasn’t wearing clothes. He touched her feet and I thought at first he was helping her take off her shoes, as I helped the young children in the evenings. But he had nothing in his hands and was lifting the thin chemise above her knees, higher to her thighs, then above her hips as she was twisting away but stopped and moved more toward him, only holding the cloth bunched to conceal her belly. She pressed his head away from her, the chemise pulled to her waist in back and his one hand there trying to hold her. Then he backed her three steps to the foot of the bed and she half leaned, knees just bent; he knelt
down again, his face almost at her feet and his mouth moving like he was biting her along her legs. She held him just away with her hands and he touched over and over the big globed belly, stroking it long and deeply like you would stroke a scared animal. Suddenly he held her at her knees and tipped her whole body back, moved her thighs apart, and was right up against her with his face, eating: it looked backwards and terrible, like a big crouched cat suckling its smaller mother—she leaning back totally now with both hands over her mouth. Then he stood quickly and turned her so her belly was against the heaped sheets. She grasped the bed frame with both hands so when he pulled her hips close she was bent prone forward from the waist; now her hands were occupied and he uncovered all of her, pushing the chemise to her shoulders and past her breasts in front; the filmy cloth hid her head and face, falling even off her shoulders so it hung halfway down her arms. She was all naked globes and curves, headless and wide-hipped with the swollen belly big and pale beneath her like a moon; standing that way she looked all dumb and animal like our white mare before she foaled. All this time she was whimpering, Claude looking at her. We saw him, he started to prod himself inside her very slow, tilting his head and listening.… I put my cool hands over my eyes then, hearing their sounds until Warwick pulled my arms down and made me look. Claude was tight behind her, pushing in and flinching like he couldn’t get out of her; she bawled once. He let her go, stumbling; they staggered onto the bed, she lying on her back away from him with the bunched chemise in her mouth. He pulled her to him and took the cloth from her lips and wiped her face.