The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (4 page)

I reached into his loose trousers and gave his manhood a crank. "Bodies are made for a lot of things," I said. We had hardly talked about the baby beyond my telling him that it would come in early fall, although he kept asking questions about whether it was kicking—wanting, probably, to know whether it was a boy. Everybody knew boys kicked. I didn't want his thoughts all over the child, smudging it before it arrived, so I created stories, telling Jack that it had a fondness for his mother's pot roast and didn't care for late-night conversations. The stories were harmless, wrapped around the child, a quilt made out of words and partial truths. The baby was the first new thing to arrive in my life, and I aimed to keep it safe from Jack's rough interest.

Despite my best efforts to contain it, my excitement started to build months before the baby was due. Throwing off my normal caution like a coat, I slipped into a kind of rapture, defined mostly by all it did not hold. No words. No pictures. I did not imagine a boy or a girl, and I did not wonder who the child would favor. I felt as if I were carrying a beam of pure light, and when Addie Clough came over to deliver eggs and told me I glowed, I wasn't surprised, though my mother-in-law later chided me for preening.

I understood Jack's role in this baby. Of course I did. But he wasn't the one to feel the thrilling flutter that gave way to kicks and jabs, actions whose cranky impatience delighted me—here was flesh of my flesh, all right. My life had been a long string of shared rooms and nights and memories. Now a baby thrashed inside me alone, and no one could know anything I didn't choose to tell. The exclusiveness, like a long-overdue payment, made me giddy. My mind dwelled on bright things—the dazzle of light on water, cottonwood leaves shiny as dimes turning in the wind, my mother-in-law's snowy pillowcase that sometimes she consented to let me wash for her.

For the only time in my life, fierce in all my appetites, I put on some flesh. At night Jack laughed uneasily when I lunged for him. He held his hand over my mouth and reminded me for God's sake that I was not a banshee, people could hear. He could have saved his breath. I knew good and well that his mother was listening to us, rigid as a lodge pole, and I knew that the horses were stirring softly. I knew that Jack did not spend time, day or night, thinking about showing a child the play of sunlight over wheat growing paler as it ripened, until we were surrounded by long fields of undulating white. Jack was learning to see the patches where the weeds had come in, the poor seed. He wanted to see the things a man should see. There was nothing wrong with those things, but I had no desire to share his view, just when I was finally marking something different.

Two people put together their bodies and minds to build a new creation to show for their time on earth. But something was not right about how Jack and I put ourselves together. Even on the nights he was kind and asked what I had done that day, I didn't know how to answer him. "Chores," I said, not wanting to start a conversation I didn't know how to finish. I could see from his face he understood, though I wished he didn't.

We were conducting our marriage as if we were walking along the top of my new garden fence, checking every step for balance. Sixteen years old, he was still struggling to decide whether to wear a belt or galluses. What did he know about a wife? Or I a husband? In the morning, his mother was waiting for me after I vomited in the slop bowl. "That can wait to clean until later," she said, not unkindly. Jack was the one who said that the bowl attracted flies. He was right, but a kinder man would have emptied it, which I told him.

In other circumstances, the effort of fretting about him would have left me tired, but carrying my firstborn I had the strength of ten. I scrubbed and blacked the cookstove twice in a week. I polished shoes for the whole family, starting with Jack's father. After weeding the garden, I found a can of whitewash in the barn and set at my new garden fence.

"It's your nesting impulse," Jack's mother said as she watched me. Then, "You could be neater."

"Rain'll carry whitewash off the grass," I said. One of my handkerchiefs, its edge rolled tight as a ruler and finished in navy blue thread, was peeking out of her apron pocket.

"The child is learning from you. You should take care."

"It's learning that it doesn't much care to whitewash."

"You're the one that took on the task. Tell the baby that nobody asked you to do it."

"The baby knows who's asking what."

As long as she kept watching me, I worked slowly, angling the tip of the brush into the wood's grooves and going over the top in smooth, long strokes. For two slats, the fence looked as if it had been painted by some other hand, one that didn't spatter the weeds underneath with bursts of whitewash, as if the brush had sneezed. Then my mother-in-law went back to the kitchen, and I slopped again.

That night Jack slipped out to the barn as soon as supper was finished. I didn't pay him mind. In the barn were blades to be sharpened, leather straps needing mended, always work. When he entered the bedroom hours later with an expression tight at the eyes and mouth, I was trying to nudge the baby off my bladder and hardly looked at him.

"Fence needs painting," he said.

"I just did it."

"Looks like you used a horsetail. More on the ground than on the wood."

"Guess you'd better hire some better labor."

His expression winched tighter, and he raised his hand. The second Jack's fist landed on my shoulder, my first reaction was to be mad at Pa. He knew every man in the county who took a drink. He could have told me about Jack.

"Hit me here," I said, thrusting up my little mound of belly. "Your mother says the child will learn from us. It might as well start learning now what to expect."

Jack dropped his hand. His face was still tight, but exasperated, too, the face he often showed me. "A natural mother wants to protect her child."

"A natural mother doesn't want to see you in this bedroom again with whiskey on your breath."

"I guess you've decided to follow Carry Nation."

"I should have started years ago. Then I'd have known to bring a hatchet to bed with me." This time his fist glanced off my arm, not hurting anything. I picked up the counterpane from the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders and mountainous teats. He watched me take up the lamp and go to the door, then followed me.

"Don't wake the household. This is between us," he said.

"Don't imagine you're keeping any secrets."

Outside, cool autumn air sharpened the edges of our breath, but the barn was almost hot with the sweet, hay-fed scent of big animals and warm manure. I made my way down the stalls: King, Rufus, Daisy. Old blind Zeus was at the end, away from the others. Hearing us, he banged his muzzle against the trough. I slipped to the far side of his stall, where his dull black back rested between my husband and me.

"Be careful. He can kill you."

"He likes me."

"He's a devil. Like calls to like." Jack was peering at me, trying to figure out just what he had married. I was doing the same thing, assessing his stumpy legs and his beard that could be carded and spun into a blanket. Everyone always called him a gentle fellow. Maybe he wanted to change that. If this was what Mama meant when she said people could surprise you, she should have been clearer.

"It's not like you haven't felt a slap before," he said.

"When I married you I wasn't looking for more of the same."

"If you could just cook a little," Jack said. "If you were just tidy." His eyes had the look of shallow water. I moved a step closer to Zeus, who snorted.

"I carry my part of the load." I brushed my hand over my belly.

"That baby's all yours," he said. "I know about women. Some of them birth their husbands' children, and some of them birth their own." He gestured at me, a flipping motion. "That baby is all Nell."

"I guess you think that makes sense," I said unsteadily. I was near enough to the irritable horse to touch him if I needed to. If I touched him, he would kick.

"Some wives aim to build something lasting. You can see it from the way they look at things. They pay attention. But the only thing you ever look at is the door."

"The latch is loose." It could have been a joke, but Jack was in no frame of mind for jokes. "If you're fixing to replace me, there aren't a lot of girls left," I said. "The Cobb twins are already spoken for, and you'll be waiting a while if you want to marry Josie Marsh. Even Annalee says she has a beau. Lose me and you'll have to go to Wichita to find a new bride."

"You're talking craziness. Come in the house."

"I can stay out here with Zeus tonight and go back home tomorrow. There's a lean-to where my auntie used to live."

He paused a long time, steadying himself against King's stall. "You'd be lonely, hearing about me and my new family."

"I'll have a child. A boy. Rides low, a sure sign." Anyone who'd ever sat in a sewing circle knew the things to say.

"Oh, for pity's sake, Nell. Let's go to bed."

"You started something."

"Did I? Seems to me I was just answering a few things. You haven't been the brightest sunbeam to bring into the house. You quarrel with Mama. At the feed store Ersel said, 'Folks say you married a bobcat.' It's not what a man likes to hear." He scrubbed his cheek with his knuckles. If he was like Pa, he'd drop soon. "Come on, now." Jack took one step toward me, and Zeus backed up hard. He didn't like sudden movements, and to be honest, he didn't like Jack.

"This is no way to woo me."

"I wooed you already. Now it's time for sleep. There's work in the morning."

"There's always work. If you want me to come back to bed with you, you'd better give me a reason."

"You're carrying it."

"You already told me: this is mine, not yours."

"Why," he said, and then, with drunken self-importance, he went on, "it's a new life you're bringing into this world. You should be thanking me." He leaned over the horse's huge backside until he was breathing roughly into my face. I could see the tiny pocks on his nose. "Give me one thing, Nell. Thank me."

"If you lay a hand on me again, I'll scream so loud folks will think there's a real bobcat in here."

"I gave you a place. I gave you a baby."

"You've been thinking on this a while, haven't you?"

He said, "Go out and ride fence a day or two. Look at the wheat, and watch for rain. Look for the patch where the weeds took over. You have plenty of time to think about things. I gave you a new name, a new home, a whole new life."

"Feels a little used around the edges, you want to know the truth."

"Sweet Christ almighty, where are you going to find better?" Some of the whiskey had dropped from his voice, and he sounded true now—truly frustrated, and truly outraged with this demanding girl standing on the other side of a mean horse. "What else is there, Nell? What is it you're after?"

"A sewing machine," I said. "Using Mama's clunker was better than trying to patch overalls with a damn thimble."

He blinked, and I watched his soggy brain work to sort through my words. "If I give you a sewing machine, will you come to bed?"

"Give me a pledge."

There wasn't much in the barn aside from tack and hay. He picked up a stiff piece of straw, stuck the end of it in Zeus's fresh manure, and drew on the stall door a rectangle—a bobbin, maybe, or a clumsy treadle. "Your father won't care to see manure on his clean door," I said.

"You can whitewash it later. That will be your pledge back to me."

I picked up the lamp and edged toward him, keeping an eye on Zeus, fully awake now. He took one hard kick, slashing through the air, before my husband and I picked our way back to the house. There was still plenty of time before dawn.

Everyone said that Lucille was Jack's child, right down to the ground. She had his curly hair, his little bandy legs, his temperament that flashed from rare glee to rage. She had a mind of her own, though. The daily, fretful crying, as maddening as a low wind, was her invention. Likewise the ferocious greed she aimed at anything she could grasp—my hair, most often, or her grandmama's glass-topped hat pin. She screamed when we pulled things out of her hand, and sometimes the screaming went straight through the night. Nothing I gave her was ever what she wanted, or enough. Never had I disappointed anyone so wholly. Of course, she disappointed me, too.

At three months, when most babies looked awestruck or sleepy, her face was stern, letting us know how thoroughly the world was not to her liking. The first time I saw that expression, I was shocked, and then I made the hard little laugh I had learned since she was born. I carried the baby in to Jack's mother. She glanced at Lucille's tiny frown and said, "There's Jack, all right. Maybe the next one will be yours."

"He says she looks just like me," I said, leaving pitiless Lucille in her grandmama's arms. Striding away from the house and outbuildings and laundry piled up waiting for me, I skirted the pastures and headed toward the end of Plat land and the farther reach of the county. If I walked fast enough between the cultivated rows, I could outwalk the thoughts that were trying to take residence in me, thoughts as shapeless and usual as clouds. I was not yet thinking. I was trying very hard not to think. Every time I entered my house, an oppression settled on me so heavy that I had to stand for minutes at a time in the doorway, gathering what strength I could find. My mother-in-law objected to the flies I let in, and she was right, of course. I knew all of this but did not care to consider it. Other people did not have to dawdle at an open door, as if it took courage to walk into a room. I knew that, too.

Jack and I were scarcely talking, which was our best way of keeping peace. Very little, I had discovered, needed to be said. Anyone with eyes could see the fire basket that needed filling, the dishes in the sink. To talk only added to the general load. It was for this reason I hadn't yet told him that I was already carrying the next child. Everyone said that nursing one baby delayed the making of the next, but everybody, it turned out, was wrong. Already I could feel the faint tightening, not quite a cramp, that had signaled the beginning of Lucille, and I pictured tiny, sticky hands like a salamander's pressing into me. I was impatient all the time, furious over nothing, and could only soothe my spirits by walking.