The Quickening (23 page)

“With Frank, we had our disagreements,” he started again. “But he was a good worker. He was true to himself. I admired that.”

“Yes, he was.”

Jack looked at his glass. “It wasn’t right what she did.” He brought out a check from his back pocket and flattened
it with his fingers. “Frank deserved better. I just wanted to say that.”

I got up from the table and opened our kitchen drawer for the deed. I stood at the drawer for a while, my back turned, until I could catch my breath.

“It’s a fair price,” he said after a while.

“I hope so,” I let out. When I gave it to him, he folded the deed in half and half again and tucked it into his pocket. He put on his hat then and left the check on the table, lifting his brim to me before he left. In less than a year’s time, that man too would be gone. He went quiet, or so I heard. Unlike the way he did his living. But sitting at that table, I knew what he would and wouldn’t do. He would leave the house alone.

The nurse turns me on my side, but the sponge breaks in her hands. She has to start again with a towel she finds in my kitchen. For days now, she hasn’t left me in peace. She sleeps in the chair when she grows tired and rests her feet on my bed. I believe she fears I’ll soon be leaving this life.

“There must be something in those letters,” she starts again, the towel circling in her hand. “An address on the envelope, a stamp.”

“Haven’t you already asked?”

“Not today,” she says.

“No, not today,” I mumble. The water drips down my spine, but that old skin is so far away. The cold and wet seem years from me now. “Rhode Island,” I say.

She stops her hand. “When?”

“Just before his birthday.”

“Kyle was born in summer.”

“The boy’s birthday,” I say.

She starts with the towel again, but her hand jerks. I don’t think she’s paying attention. I wonder again how I let this nurse in. With all her busyness, she has left me time at least to think.

“Eddie,” she says at last. “You know full well there isn’t any boy. She lost that child when he was born. It was the last letter Kyle sent.”

“Eddie,” I say, and grab hold of her arm. “That’s what Frank always called me. Only him.” This nurse, she doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself but bother me in my own house, speaking about boys she shouldn’t know and using their names. “Look at you,” I tell her, gripping her arm. Her face draws close to mine, wincing. But I don’t have the energy any more. “I know you,” I say as my eyes fall shut. “I know who you are.”

For months after Frank’s passing, Adaline chose our bed for her own and rarely left it. In the daytime if I made too much noise as I worked, she watched me with a dull look. Her hips carried a new weight. Her belly thick, her ankles swollen. She let one arm drop from the warmth of the covers and worried at the floor with her fingers, tugging at the braided rugs. I wondered if Adaline could feel my mother with her eyes closed.

My girl was leaving, I could tell. She had been leaving ever since Donny fell under that horse. In a single bed we
lay at night next to one another, but Adaline slept with her back turned. I thought of the way Donny went and how she had watched that fire out her window. I wondered what she thought of me, her mother, after what I’d done. Laying a hand on her shoulder, I felt the down of her skin standing on end. I drew my fingers through her hair, that wild nest the same black as her father’s. She never stirred.

I was the only one to call after Adaline when she left. She had come back to the house while I was out settling the last of the crops and I found her standing on our front porch. She had already packed. Frank’s car waited in the yard, the engine running. Adaline strained with the weight of the suitcases in her hands, her belly full. Eight months pregnant she was, and she kissed my cheek. I could say nothing, knowing how strong-headed my daughter had always been. Kyle himself sat in the driver’s seat. He offered me a smile and popped open his door, but with one look from Adaline he shut it again. That boy had been like one of my own. Now he was taking what I didn’t want to give. If he came to talk to me at all, they might never get going. All three of us knew that.

“Well,” I said, wiping the dirt from my hands. “I don’t like it.”

Adaline’s eyes filled and she set the suitcases down.

“But I understand,” I went on. “I left my own mother, but she had warning. I gave her time to offer me something before I went at least.”

“I’ll write. I promise.”

“You do that,” I said. “Now wait a minute.”

“Wait,” she called back, but already I was in the house. Before I could run out again, the passenger door slammed shut. The wheels turned in the dirt. I stood on the porch with a stack of money in my hand, not much more than a hundred dollars, but it was something. From the passenger’s side, Adaline waved the tips of her fingers, her forehead pressed against the glass. She rolled the window down and the car slowed. “Don’t,” Adaline said, wiping her face. The car started up again and turned the corner out of the yard. Adaline twisted around to watch me, and Kyle strained his head to look back, but she was telling him “Don’t” again. I could see her mouth saying it. She’d waited for me long enough on our porch to say something, but she couldn’t have gone with me standing there. Not as a mother-to-be, she couldn’t. The look on her face told me that much.

You are no longer welcome
, they wrote in that letter, and Adaline heard it well. Mary made certain of it. But I don’t believe she imagined her own boy might leave along with the girl. Mary, you don’t need to bother me with your questions. Kyle wasn’t yours alone. You should know that by now. No matter what that boy did, I never would have said a word against him. That story you told the church, whatever it was, it only did you worse. As far as I would guess, address or no, Adaline and Kyle are never coming back. If what you say about their boy is true, they have nothing to come back for.

•  •  •

It was late last night when I first dreamt it, that mother walking off from her home after losing one child after the other, just before the turn of the century. In the last few months I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about her. She wore the thinnest of shoes, her shoulders bare. She didn’t have an apple in her hand to keep her going, not even a jug of water. Three children she’d lost that winter, and it wasn’t difficult for me to imagine her leaving. She untied her apron, hung it in the pantry for the moths. When she walked down that road, she moved as easily as if off to visit a friend. Only the heat hurried her steps. She had a quiet look on her face, like she knew what she wanted, knew right well how she might find it. Wherever she was going, she was never coming back.

I awoke in the darkness to an empty house. Now the blankets on my bed feel heavy as wood, and my legs seem little more than sticks. I am an old woman wiping my cheeks. This room, it’s a small haunted place. At times, I believe even the floors speak to me with all their settling. If anything now, I know I’m done. I’ve worked these fields until I rubbed myself raw, sold them without so much thought. The weather here I know like the veins in my wrists. The cicadas that rise in the summer months, the snow that clings to the sills. There are no more surprises. Nothing more to hold on to.

I’ve looked for you many a time, my boy. This notebook should bear that out. But if there’s any strength left to me, I plan to go on looking still, in this world or the next. I’ll
carry little with me. Leave these words behind. It’s a better thing, I’ve decided, to have written this life and abandon it now, as much good as these pages have done in saving anything at all. I’ve got my mind set for the morning, as early as I can manage. The doors I’ll leave unlocked, the windows open. With the wind, these walls probably won’t last for long. But should I keep my wits about me, should these feet of mine bear me out, I will find my way to you no matter how far.

“I have such dreams,” Adaline said once. This was days before she left, before you were born. “Awful things. I never would have thought.” She worried at her middle with her fingers. Her cheeks burned the way they had when she was a child.

“Once I dreamed you wouldn’t have feet,” I said.

“You did?”

“No feet. And you never left this house. Back then, I thought it would be terrible for a child to never leave.”

She drew a breath. “Look,” she said and took my hand, holding it to her stomach. There you were. Kicking as if all the world depended on the ruckus you could turn out. Adaline dropped her head and raised her blouse so the both of us could see the rippling under her skin. She pressed my hand to her stomach again, bare as it was and warm to the touch. Her hand on mine had such a grip, my knuckles burrowing into the soft underside of her own. We stayed together like that. A long while.

“I don’t think I could stand it,” she said.

“Hush.”

“If I ever lost him.”

“Hush now. You’ll wear yourself out. Why, that boy will be good and strong, running so fast you’ll never keep up.”

Adaline dropped her blouse but kept my hand well inside her own, so fierce a hold I felt the blood drain from my skin. Her face looked like her father’s did when he was thinking, her eyes quiet, readying herself. She pressed my knuckles under her own so she might always keep them, no matter how far she went. At last she tapped her thumb against mine and let me go, shrugging with that smile of hers. I suppose your mother might not remember so much. But for my part, I never will forget the heat of her fingers and the fear in them. That quickening under her skin, it’s the closest to you I’ve ever come.

XVI
Mary

(Winter 1950)

“Kyle’s heading home, Eddie,” I had told her. “It will be soon now. You just have to hold on.” But she never even tried. I walked down our road and saw a scrub of white in the distance, tripping, falling, going off—Enidina, she seemed like a wild animal, her hair white and loose around her shoulders and her housedress faded and worn through the back. She caught her foot on a stone and crouched to rub away the pain, dropping to her knees, but quickly enough she was off. When I called out to her, she turned and looked back, and in that look I saw a light in her eyes and that old terrible strength—her size, her very stubbornness that made her everything at once. Her mouth hung open as if she might speak, her cheeks shivering. “You,” the look said, and she shook herself with a sudden rage and was off. “Eddie,” I called out again, but she was going so hard and fast now I had no hope of chasing her down. She could walk for miles if she went on like that, the sun rising in a haze and her figure dark against the brightness, such a sight I could imagine her forty years younger, that fiery hair on her head a signal for all the world—she was going. She was finished with this place. That neighbor of mine, she was done.

Where I sit now in her bed, I wait for any of them to return. The house is plain, ugly even, but I no longer care—the
mattress feels so old it cradles me as if I have been here all along. I have the place to myself now, and I pull Eddie’s blanket over my chest to keep from getting cold. I have a bite to eat in the kitchen and the old outhouse out back should the water stop. I have Kyle’s picture on the bureau and my Bible at my side. But it is that notebook of hers I open, that wiry thing she kept to herself. Scribbles it seems and impossible to read, full of lies no doubt—not an address anywhere, though I can make out my name on nearly every line. Enidina has some nerve to leave me here like this, without so much as a word, without a thank you for all my visits—but I have faith I will not be alone for long. Already I can imagine Kyle walking down that road, Jack’s hat on his head. I can hear him on the porch out front, scraping his shoes on the mat. He will come in with that boyish look on his face and reach out his hands, promise he is home for good. Now that I am alone, he would never run off again. God himself would not abandon me, not like the rest—as if I deserved it—as if I had never done a good thing for anyone in my life.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank early mentors of this book, including John Edgar Wideman, Noy Holland, and Ursula Hegi, as well as my UMass “fiction chicks” group—Bess Fairfield Stokes, Kate Southwood, Michelle Valois, Patti Horvath, Jane Rosenberg, Jeanie Tietjen, and Deb McCutchen. I would also like to thank my Boston fiction group—Karen Halil, Kande Culver, Stan Yarbo, Roy Ahn, and Sumita Mukherji—and other Boston readers and friends—Daphne Kalotay, Lara Wilson, Margot Livesey, Kim Shuckra Gomez, Maria Gapotchenko, and Laura Harrison. Thanks also for the support of Megan Thomas Paulson and Mary Wright, longtime friends.

Thanks to my agent, Esmond Harmsworth, for sticking with me, and my publisher, Other Press, for offering such a professional, supportive, and rewarding publishing experience. Many thanks to my editor, Corinna Barsan; my tireless publisher, Judith Gurewich; my publicist, Terrie Akers; and their marketing guru, Paul Kozlowski, as well as to the entire Other Press staff. Thanks also to the Random House sales team for their energy and commitment.