The Quickening (19 page)

XIII
Enidina

(Summer 1936–Spring 1937)

They brought me to my mother’s after the fire. I’d asked Frank for this while I lay in my bed that afternoon, listening to the fire outside dampen and the calls of the men. Frank was sweating as he held my hand. He said our house would be safe, the fire had turned and was heading down the field. Outside, the men worked to remedy what I’d begun. The doctor claimed me cured of my fevers. He told Frank, “Take her to her mother’s. It’s all she wants.”

In a borrowed car, Frank drove me to her home and my Adaline came with me. I felt sick with moving so fast, used as I was to wagons even then. I tried to think of something slow and remembered leaning against my mother’s leg as a child. Back then, at the turn of the century, all the world seemed to be breaking apart. Many were looking for the Second Coming. Some even took their own lives. In the summer of 1899, our town seemed to close up altogether. Houses emptied or fell silent, the people inside losing themselves one way or another. Poisons, rope, blades, or drowning. But never the grandmothers, it seemed. Never the old. Then the last of it, the wife who’d lost three children to fevers from the winter before. Without a penny in her pocket or so much as a loaf of bread in a paper sack, she left town on foot. The ones who saw her go said she
walked without hurry, as if she had a destination well in mind. She kept her eyes on the horizon. She never wavered. Never looked back. When they found her weeks later, she had gone more than a hundred miles and dropped to her knees when she grew tired. She had died like that.

My father was done with religion then and kept us from church, but my mother read her Bible when she wanted. Sitting on the floor at her feet, I could smell her lap, warm and damp under her dress. I’d rarely been so close. What I’d heard about the woman who walked away and all the rest troubled me, and I asked her would He come.

My mother answered by stopping her work and tapping her Bible on the table next to her chair. “Nothing like that’s to happen to us,” she said. “Not anytime before the year 1939.” She looked up through the ceiling and I couldn’t see her face. Her neck was marbled with veins. “And you have to believe that, Enidina. It’s written down and has been for some time.” My mother grew quiet then and went back to her stitching. She had saved her rags and the rags of her neighbors in a basket at her side. Now she smoothed them into strips and pieced them together. Those rugs she made, they were just like my grandmother’s. Like the ones my mother tried to teach me. Braiding them, it’s how women told each other things. She started with something old, something others thought rubbish, but what she stitched spilled out from her neat and warm and wanting of a house. When I saw each rug she made, with no holes or loose stitching, I believed she knew of such matters. She knew the ways of a thing breaking apart and she knew how to fix it and she was holding the Coming off from our house until the year 1939.

But in the days after the fire, I had my doubts. Nineteen thirty-nine was only three years off. My dress was dark with smoke and still reeked of it. In our yard I’d waited too close to see how my son went. Walking into my mother’s house, I carried his smoke in with me. My mother sat stitching in her chair, but Adaline pulled at her until the rags she worked slipped out of her hands.

“Where’s the other one?” my mother asked.

It was Frank who answered, standing at the door as he was. “There was a fire,” he said. Without a sound, he had come in and dropped our bags on the floor. I never thought a person could grieve in so much quiet. My boy, I feared I’d lost him with what I’d done. But when Frank touched my arm in my mother’s house, he let his hand rest there for a while and warm the both of us. Finally he said he had to go.

I stood in the light of the doorway as the car pulled onto the road. Looking back, Frank lifted his hand to me and let it fall. My mother caught hold of Adaline and tried to settle her, but she only loosened the rags from my daughter’s grip. The girl tore around the room, upsetting the piano bench, and my mother took the rags in her fists and kissed them, pressing them roughly against her cheeks. Up the stairs Adaline went, roaring above us and banging every door. Outside the sun was setting and the house felt close in the coming darkness. Night would be a relief to me. That morning I’d seen such a bright hot thing in the field. I didn’t know what I’d done or what would come of it. I only knew it came from me.

I sat on my mother’s floor again and leaned against her legs. She went back to her stitching, though her hands shook
with grief. She was going blind, my mother. The neighbors no longer wanted the rugs they’d paid for, the colors now a bright and curious mix of her own choosing. They had to give them away. Still, they were fine pieces of work. Smooth and careful in their stitching. “Is it now?” I asked as her fingers turned. I was sleepy and in the dark room what I believed of any Second Coming seemed fit for the morning. I coughed with the smoke still clinging to me and reached around my shoulders, but the shawl was no longer there.

My mother kept at her rags, clearing her throat as if to convince herself. “Children die, Eddie. It’s not God who does it.” Her eyes grew wet and she blinked. Taking hold of my hands, she kissed them, and I wondered if she could taste the salt that stained my cheeks. Above us, Adaline ran in a fury down the hall. I remembered how I’d felt for the matches in my apron early that morning. It was fire I’d been dreaming of, keeping vigil as I did that night outside with my son. I dropped one match and the ground took the flame, the stalks going with it. In my fever, the fire spread faster than I could have imagined. When finally I turned back to the house, there was your mother at her window, gripping the sill. How I’d hoped to save her from that sight. How sure I was that no other burial would do for my son. But Donny had always been more his sister’s child than my own.

“You’ve got to watch out for her now,” my mother said. “She’ll slip away from you quick as rain. Keep her close.” She looked at her stitching again and measured the rug against her chest. “This is for you, Eddie,” she said, folding the rug across my knees. “For when you go home.”

•  •  •

Two days later the trucks still lined the road in front of our house, our neighbors crowding in. They were curious to see the fields and to see where the fire had stopped at the ditches along the road. It didn’t spread to anyone else’s land. None of them had suffered a loss to complain about. Leaning out their husbands’ windows, the women hooked their elbows over the doors, and the children peeked through the passengers’ sides, sometimes three heads together. The men waited by their tires or gathered in a circle, watching as we passed by. I suppose that was what they’d come for.

Most of our crop was gone. The stalks stood like spent torches or lay broken in the soil. The trucks crowded each other, but now none of the men would set foot in the fields, afraid whatever fever had caused the fire might spread to wives of their own. We pulled into our yard and I touched my feet to the ground. I could smell it again, the fire, the burnt-up corn, and the animals, safe in the barn. They were quiet now. Though their pails were full, Frank said they wouldn’t eat. In time, he figured, they would grow hungry enough. All at once the trucks started their engines. The roar echoed against our house, all of it noise.

When we stepped in, Mary was there again and I wasn’t surprised to see her. She stood over the stove wearing my apron, a towel in her hand and her hair tucked behind her ears. I watched her warily. When she opened the stove, it sent out such a heat that we all fell into place at the table and didn’t speak. For the first time in days, even Adaline was quiet. She rested her head against her father’s chest and
he drew his arm around her, his mouth working at something he was holding back. Since the drive from my mother’s place, he hadn’t yet said a word.

Mary set out our plates and left a pile of forks and knives between us. She poked her fork into a potato on the stove and the fork went easily through. Her face was red with the heat and fallen. Her cheeks, her mouth. She seemed older now, and the corner of her eye twitched. My face still stung from Mary’s hand. I’d said something cruel and meant it. “You and yours,” I’d said. But except for that twitch Mary seemed too wearied now to do anything at all. She rolled the potatoes onto our plates and we stared at them between our empty hands. When finally she bowed her head to bless the meal, I couldn’t even close my eyes.

“Nice of you,” I said when she’d finished. She was a mother too, I reminded myself.

“Yes,” Mary answered.

“Nice this.” My potato steamed as I broke the skin, and Mary watched us as we ate, fork in hand. “Your middle son,” I tried again. “I heard he went west.”

“My son?”

“Yes.”

“Well, yes he did.” Mary lifted her chin. “And the other one. The oldest. You should see him. He’s in Chicago now. There are bread lines, you know. But Chicago …”

“So far off.”

“He says it’s the place to be.”

I lifted a piece of potato, blew on it, and took a bite. Before the fire, it’d been a long time since I’d spoken to Mary. Longer than I’d realized. But the Morrows were different from
us. I still had the scars from Jack’s knife and the way he’d shown up in our fields after the fire, as if he owned the place.

“Kyle send that animal off yet?” Frank said. “Like I told him?” He kept his eyes on his plate, his mouth full.

“Jack took care of it days ago. He’s quick with his gun.”

Frank swallowed and sat back. “That wasn’t called for. That wasn’t called for at all.” Mary salted her potato as if she didn’t hear and Frank went back to his meal, working his jaw. We were quiet, scraping food from our plates. Mary set a pitcher of water on the table and we drank fast from our cups. It was too hot an afternoon for baking, but the potatoes settled us. It was the first time in days I’d had an appetite myself.

“I don’t know what he told you,” Mary started. “Borden, he went to you first.”

“That’s what ministers are for,” Frank told her.

“He didn’t say much,” I added. Or I didn’t remember what he said, I thought. The twins, that’s what I had my mind on then. Borden seemed too nervous a man to do much of anything useful.

“He almost died himself when he was that age. That’s what he said,” Frank explained. “He didn’t understand it. Why one and not the other. There had to be a way to make it right, he thought.”

Mary held on to her water glass though it was empty, that twitch again at the corner of her eye. I thought of the twins when they were younger and how we’d raked leaves in the fall. We swept them into piles that Adaline and Donny couldn’t help themselves from jumping in. When at last we had one great pile together, we set it on fire. Frank stood
watch, digging into the fire with his rake. At the sink inside, I washed potatoes and could see him out there, spare and long-limbed, the air about him wavering. I gave four potatoes each to the children, grinning. “Throw them on top of the leaves,” I said.

Donny and Adaline ran with their arms full to the fire. But when they reached it, they held those potatoes tight. They must have thought it was burning up food to do such a thing. I stepped out into the yard and yelled, “Go on.” They threw the potatoes then with both hands, jumping with the effort, their arms high over their heads. The potatoes flew. I thought they’d miss the pile entirely, but they landed in the middle with a thump.

“You’re leaving,” Mary announced. “You have to.” She had both her elbows on the table, pointing her fork. “It will be easy for you. We can buy the fields.”

You can leave potatoes in a fire like that until the fire has died. Until there is a black circle in the grass and the potatoes sit inside like coals. Brush the ashes off and the potatoes will taste like the grass and soil they come from. Like the good smell of the fire you try to keep inside your clothes. But this you can eat. You can hold it in your mouth as if you are holding on to everything at once. When you swallow it, you belong to that place and that fire. My boy, you have it in you always.

“Eddie,” Mary snapped. “It would be good of you at least to apologize for what you’ve done. You don’t know what they’re saying.”

I rested my hands in my lap and thought about that, Mary speaking with her knife. I should have found a way
to keep my son a little. But it was a relief, that fire. It took him straight away. There wouldn’t be any work to bury him. There wouldn’t be a mound in the yard marked by a stone. I felt an awful rush in my head. Mary was on her feet. That twitch. Whether we left or not, she’d already made her mind up about what she’d do next. I remembered that slap again. Cruel, what I’d said. But I doubted I was wrong.

“Why’d you come, Mary?”

“I wanted to tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because I know what they’ll do and I can’t stop it. People think you’ve gone near crazy and they want to make sure nothing like this happens again.”

Frank stood and the table jumped an inch across the floor. Pulling at Mary’s arm, he took her straight out of our house to where her car waited in the road. He sat her in it and shut the door behind her, catching the end of her skirt. When she opened the door again, her mouth was quivering, and she snatched at her hem. “Just you think about it,” she called out. “Before someone takes advantage.”