The Quickening (7 page)

I threw on my shawl and ran out to the road. A steam boiler had once burst in the mill the next county over and killed five of the men where they stood. Had Jack gone to work as he did every morning? Was he there still? Despite everything, it was Jack who kept our farm from starving—and without him, the house would rot on its perch, the land crawling out from under us, and my sons too young and nearly useless at saving the place from the fate of the family that had owned it before. “You’ll be lost in such country,” my mother had said on first seeing it. “It’ll eat you alive
before you even know what living is.” Now the birds overhead were calling, and the cold of the night weeks before returned to me, my visit to the church and back again—I had never in my life known such pleasure in the aching of my limbs. It was rising in me again, the hard beating in my chest and the feeling of deliverance—so relentless and shocking in its presence that I found myself running to the mill to escape it. I was no proper wife, I never had been, and now I hardly had the sense to stop moving, so sure was I in the churning of my stomach that something terrible had come to us and I was somehow to blame.

When at last I reached the mill, the saws had started up again and the walls shuddered. The men worked in overalls and goggles, indistinguishable in the half-light and coated in sawdust. They had heard it too, the crash breaking like thunder overhead. Shutting down the saws, they had stripped off their hats and stepped out to see—but the noise was gone, the fields unchanged. The foreman had insisted they start to work again, and the men shouldered the heavy logs. When they saw me standing there with my wet face and shaking, one of them signaled his hand in the air and the saws stopped at once. Out of the dimness, Jack pushed through the line of men and caught hold of my shoulders as if I might faint.

My husband may have seemed a brute, taller by a head and thicker than most, but in his size there was a hollow space just below his ribs that felt to the touch like tenderness. “Mary,” he had said, and this only months after my second was born. “The house is something, isn’t it?” He had said it with a look of wonder on his face, standing just
across the yard in the night and staring up, his palms open. He wore the stench of a day’s work on him, his shirtsleeves soggy in the heat and a streak of dirt across his forehead. I knew then I had done what he could never leave behind—I had filled this house for him, that was what he meant, and in that darkness, the house seemed a bright and restful place, if only for a while.

Now at the mill I clung to my husband and glimpsed that tenderness in him again, knowing at once he would never disappear from me in any kind of accident. “Go home,” he whispered. “That noise isn’t about us.” Jack’s breath was hot and sure against my skin, but it was not relief I felt—not yet. I could not for the life of me forget what had sent me running, but not even my fear of losing him would make sense of the dread that held more tightly to me now. So I left him to his work. I turned straight away from the mill with only a nod. Walking aimlessly in the open air, I thought about judgment, and soon I found myself running again, heading down the path I had beaten all those years between the Currents’ house and our own.

Outside their barn, Enidina slouched against one of their horses, smoothing the animal’s back. When the horse shook and ducked at my footsteps, her heavy hand seemed to quiet it, both of them raising their heads.

“I suppose you heard it too,” she said.

“I thought we might take the wagon. Find out what it was all about.”

The horse swung its neck, sinking its muzzle in Enidina’s palm and snatching at a handful of grass. Enidina squinted
at me and wiped her hand against her dress. “I suppose we should,” she said.

We took their wagon and Enidina steered the horses in the direction the noise had come from. For miles we rode without a word and the wagon lurched and rolled, the wheels slipping on the icy road, but every once in a while she would twist her head and study me. “You’re quiet,” she said.

“Can’t I have a little quiet for once?”

“Sure.”

“Does it always have to be me talking? Every single time?”

Enidina faced front again, shaking her head. “That horse,” she said at last and pointed her chin. “She’s been strange for weeks now. Restless. I think one of the males’ been at her. Act the same as people, they do.” Enidina left off, and only then did I notice how the horse before us swayed and strained as she pulled.

“If you know animals, you can always tell,” she went on. “At least I could. What do you think?”

“The horse?” I started. “She seems well enough.” Enidina squinted at me again and I tightened my coat.

“Well, I’ll be,” Enidina swore. From the fields ahead of us, a smell of burning drifted and smoke rose from the prairie, the air wavering over a wide strip of land. Enidina snapped the reins until the horses burst into a gallop and I covered my nose. The windows of the houses we passed lay shattered on the ground, their curtains blowing outside the sills. From an empty door, a smoke-colored mutt sprang as if rabid,
barking at us from the ditches. The road had filled—wagons and men hurried along on foot, eager for a ride, all of them heading toward the smoke and heat with fear in their eyes.

Then it was before us. The prairie was afire—a good acre or more of it, without source it seemed, for the land itself was isolated and barren, without a single building or tree that could have burst and ignited the ground. The snow had melted a good distance, but the grass around the fire remained untouched, as if the flames had dropped from the sky. Enidina tied the horses and we ran out to see. Along the outskirts, a crowd stood, blackened with ash from head to toe. Others sat on the ground, having watched for hours while the seats of their trousers grew wet with snowmelt.

That was the way it was, the old watchers quiet with waves of newcomers coming in—and with them, rumors spread like a fever, so while the fire cooled, the crowd heated. It was a boy’s trick, some said. It was an accident, said others. “I saw it myself,” a man yelled. “A rock fell from the sky. It burst in the air.” Others cried in agreement, said they had seen it too—it broke the glass in their windows for miles around. The crowd jeered, chattering nonsense. In their midst, a woman still heavy with birth and milk stood dumb with her infant, ignoring its wails. Her face was colorless, her shoulder soaked with drivel. The child itself was red-skinned and crying, a furious body in its mother’s arms—its cries shivered through the air. At last a voice shouted, “It was a sign from God.”

I looked up into the sky. My tongue tasted sour and black, the smell of burning meadow. Next to me, Enidina
stood with her legs wide, watching the others more than the charred prairie itself and me more than anyone else. When a sob rose from my throat, she took my arm in her terrible grip. “This here is nothing,” she whispered. “This is just natural. Best we don’t look for reasons at all.”

I wrenched my arm away. The baby’s wail grew. All around us were farmers and wives staring into the blackness, and I knew God had come. I saw His face looking down at me from the very clouds. There was no place He wasn’t—and worst of all there were places He was without question, and no heavy hand was going to keep the world from trembling. I left Enidina where she stood and I stumbled forward into the backs of strangers—they parted like grass to let me go on. Before me the land had been touched by greatness and I threw myself into it, surrendering myself to that fertile ground. The arms of forgiveness gathered me in, a warmth rising from the cold, and I let myself go numb.

It was then I slept—and in that sleep I imagined myself sitting in an empty pew at the back of the chapel. The air shone through the windows with a yellow haze that warmed my lap, so different from the light that left the fields in their pale coating of dust. The rest of the chapel had fallen into darkness, not a sound from the back hall, and I pressed my forehead into my hands. Out of the shadows a boy came and stood at my feet, blocking out the light. He was restless and smelled of smoke, all muscle and bone as some boys are just before they turn men, and in his fist he held a bloody
handkerchief—as I watched, that handkerchief grew to the size of a sheet and I shielded my eyes.

When I was young, I had found such a light in an opening of the woods. The trees broke, leaving a wide stretch of grass where I could lie on my back and let the narrow shaft of sun hold me in its grip. I had escaped my mother’s house for a few moments of peace and found this place where I was hot-skinned and drowsy, the center of all I could see. Lying there, I believed something was beginning—it was something I believed I should feel ashamed for, but didn’t, and as I slept after that fire I felt that beginning again. The boy stood in the chapel at my feet, but now such a pleasure rose in the core of my stomach—quick as a liquid that would keep me swollen for months—and I knew I could hold on to that feeling as if holding on to a very bright light.

When I woke, I lay in the same narrow bed where the day had first found me. The windows were dark with evening and a doctor held my wrist. Jack paced the far end of the room, and I felt a sudden affection for him, for the weight of his shoulders and his sullen footsteps, the fear I could see in his dirt-stained fingernails as he swept back his hair—how long had it been since I had done the same? My run from earlier in the afternoon seemed strange to me now—I had never disappointed him, never in our marriage had I imagined another life.

But there was Enidina. She stood in the corner with that same maddening look of patience she always wore, and the muscles in my legs ached, a knot in the back of my neck. I
knew what had happened then, with a pinch in my chest I knew it—I had fainted on that ground and Enidina had carried me home. Only when Jack bent to touch my cheek did my calm return, his heat and size so easily obliterating her presence. “What’s wrong with her?” Jack asked the doctor, but the doctor only shook his head. The light shifted. Enidina’s face appeared above my husband’s shoulder and she opened her mouth. “She’s carrying,” she answered. “And who knows what else.”

V
Enidina

(Winter 1919–Spring 1920)

A full house
, my mother wrote of her Christmas.
The little ones played in the yard while Sarah helped me with the meal. Eight they number in all with this new one. I never thought I could survive grandmothering alone, but I dare say I see your father’s face in every one. Try to forget is what they tell the mothers who lose them. Now every one is carrying a young thing on her shoulders, though she’d never have dreamt it. Enidina, you’ve got to have faith in that if you’re ever to have another child
. I finished my mother’s letter and read it again, the paper worn. My boy, if I could tell my mother now what losing is, she’d never have thought a person could be so easily replaced. Not at my age, at least. In those early years, I kept my mother’s letters in a bundle beneath our mattress, tied with a string, and I read each one through again until I received the next. I missed my brothers. Hadn’t seen the new niece, though she was several months old. At Thanksgiving, we’d sat around as we once did and told stories, the men with guitars on their hips. We weren’t the most religious of families. Save for holidays we didn’t go to church. Still, we had a hold on right and wrong, one that had been passed down to us over the years. We had faith in humility and kindness, and when we sang the Lord’s Prayer we knew every part. Hearing that, it was the fullest I’d felt in some
while. But the distance wasn’t such a little thing then. More than eight hours it took by wagon, and one way at that. It was too long to leave the cows without hiring help. Just before Christmas, the smell of the air warned of snow, making the trip longer still.

I’d picked a stranger for a husband, someone from outside the neighboring towns, but he seemed to know me the first day we met. Mind you, I never did wish for anyone different. Even so, those wagon rides between my home with Frank and the place I was born left us sore, so stiff was the board we sat on and the wheels ill suited to the broken tracks. It was hard for either of us to sit in one place for long. We were used to work. Used to a warmer kind of ache when we went to bed. We had to mind the weather, for fear the wheels might stick or the horse sicken herself with damp. We carried blankets to keep us from the cold. When at last we came to my mother’s house, my brothers rushed to meet us, gripping the tender bones in our backs. We had changed in our looks and ways more than the children, they said. In that place, I felt like a child again myself.

With that letter once more in my hand, it was now well after New Year’s and I was growing big again. Already I planned to write my mother that she should have another grandchild in mind. I’d gotten sick on so many mornings, but was set on keeping myself full with any ready food. For Christmas, Frank had bought us fancy plates, plates for more visitors than we would ever need. They were a delicate gift, packaged in dusty newspapers. The papers spoke of the war though the war was a year over. When I tore them away, the plates underneath were the brightest yellow I’d seen.
Finer than anything I’d held before in my hands. I’d wrapped them up quickly, storing them in the pantry for a time when I wasn’t afraid of using them. Now with a bucket of water hot on the stove, I soaked the new dishes.