The Quickening Read online

  Additional Praise for The Quickening

  ————

  “The Quickening is a rare jewel of a novel: an elegantly structured page-turner driven as much by its exquisite lyricism as by the gripping story at its core. It wondrously weaves a riveting half century of American Midwestern history through the sensual, intimate, often strange details that make up a life. Michelle Hoover is a stunning writer, and this is a fierce and beautiful book.”

  —MAUD CASEY, author of Genealogy

  “The Quickening, through its carefully wrought, precise prose, builds with a heartrending power that lingers long after the final page. Michelle Hoover is a writer to watch.”

  —DON LEE, author of Wrack and Ruin

  “From the opening pages of this beautiful novel, I found myself immersed in the lives of these two farm women between the wars and their struggles with their families, themselves, the land, and each other. The Quickening is such a fully realized, sensually vivid, psychologically intelligent novel that it’s hard to believe it is a debut, but it is, and a sparkling one.”

  —MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The House on Fortune Street

  “Just as the women and men in this strikingly assured debut novel wrest life out of the land they work, Michelle Hoover wrests from her characters’ hearts, and from this heart-touching story, understandings rich in complexity and compassion. She paints the intricacies of their interiors as skillfully as she does the details of the world that surrounds them. What a gift she has given us in this wise book that lets us so vividly experience both.”

  —JOSH WEIL, author of The New Valle

  For my mother, Loren,

  her mother, Angelie,

  and her mother, Melva

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I. Enidina (Summer 1913–Spring 1914)

  II. Mary (Fall 1909–Fall 1913)

  III. Enidina (Fall 1918–Fall 1919)

  IV. Mary (Winter 1919)

  V. Enidina (Winter 1919–Spring 1920)

  VI. Mary (Summer 1920–Spring 1922)

  VIII. Mary (Spring 1923–Fall 1925)

  IX. Enidina (Fall 1925–Spring 1933)

  X. Mary (Spring 1933)

  XI. Enidina (Spring–Summer 1936)

  XIII. Enidina (Summer 1936–Spring 1937)

  XIV. Mary (Summer 1936)

  XVI. Mary (Winter 1950)

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  I

  Enidina

  (Summer 1913–Spring 1914)

  My boy, you might think an old woman hasn’t much to say about the living, but your grandmother knows when a person does right by her and when they don’t. In this bed, I have little else to do but scratch my life down with this pencil. And I have little left to me but the thought of you my grandchild who I’ve known only in the warmth of your mother’s belly under my hand. Even if you never come home, you should understand the way our life once was, your grandfather, your mother, and I, and all the little things that make its loss so very terrible in my mind. The Morrow family, they were a worry to ours from day one. And once you know what they took from us, you might just understand the kind of people you come from.

  It wasn’t until late in the summer of 1913 that your grandfather and I began to work this farm from the acres of weeds and grasses it was to a fine place. A place where we could earn a living. That’s what a beginning is. My father and his father and his father before that had lived within the same ten square miles of land. Even after I married, I didn’t move farther from home than a day’s wagon ride. I’d seen no other landscape as a child. Had never dreamt of it. A farm is where I was born. Where I would always live. I’d known it from the day my mother walked me through the fields and rubbed her fingers in the dirt, putting her thumb to my mouth so I could taste the dust and seed we lived on. She said this was home. When I asked her if there was anything else, she shook her head. “Nowhere you need pay any mind to,” she said. “Not for the likes of us.”

  It was only a month after I’d lost my father that Frank and I first came to this place. We married on a Sunday, as Frank thought right, the chapel holding only our families and a few friends. There we stood, both in our thirties, Frank the older by eight years and graying at the temples. He wore a borrowed suit that showed his ankles and wrists, I in a dove-colored dress, my red hair combed smooth to lessen my height. Afterward we ate cake and berries and they tasted too sweet. We opened our gifts. My mother swept a spot of frosting from my chin and drew out my arms to look at the fit of my dress. I’d always been a big woman, suited more for the farm than for marrying, an old bride as I was back then. My cousins had to squint to find the ring on my hand.

  Only late did we return to what Frank had made our home. This same house, with borrowed furniture in the rooms. The house smelled of earth and smoke. Frank had polished the wood and swept the floors, leaving the broom to rest on the front porch. He’d spent most of his years working to buy the house and land, much of it still in sorry condition. Though he didn’t speak of it, his family were croppers. He’d seldom had a thing of his own. Now the both of us had a fair bit, and after the loss of my father, I was as determined as Frank to keep it. When I hurried in, Frank took that broom under his arm and strummed me a song, a sorry frown on his face when he pretended the broom had snapped a string. I grinned, dropping a penny at his feet. This was my husband, a string of a man himself with a good bit of humor in him. He was fair-skinned with black hair and long limbs, his eyes fainter than any blue I’d ever seen. If anything, I knew him to be kind and hardworking, and that was enough. Behind a curtain of chintz was the bed he’d made. The sheets were white and damp with the weather, and in the night they proved little warmth. Outside, the animals in the barn were still. I could smell them through the window. But inside, this was what marriage was.

  I’d left those ten square miles and moved to the next county over, a place that looked and smelled the same as my father’s land. The difference was my part in this place. I was a wife, and not until that night did I know what the word meant.

  It was still dark the next morning when I carried water back from the well, wearing the whitest skirts I owned. I filled a large basin in the smokehouse, dunked the bed sheets in. The water in the basin reddened. The stain on the sheets loosened and spread. It was the same that had stained me in the early morning and sent Frank hurrying away to milk. My mother had told me if a husband was easy, if he was a good man, the first night wouldn’t be trouble. “Maybe it will be better,” she’d said. But she hadn’t said a word about this. In the smokehouse, my hands puckered from the long time I scrubbed. The sheets turned a muddy pink, my chest and arms wet. The light of my kerosene lamp fell against the skin of hogs hung to smoke, a gift to us, their torsos stripped and twisting slow on the hooks caught in their spines.

  Outside I kicked the basin over, let the bloody water sink into the dirt. There were fewer trees around the house then. They did not make much noise in the wind. Gnats and midges circled my feet, a knocking in my chest. A good man, I thought. But Frank was nearly a stranger to me, as I was to him. Beyond that stain, a mist crept over the fields. The land seemed barren in the early morning, not another living creature. In only two months was the harvest and we would be planting late. We wouldn’t have much to keep us through winter. The night before had given me a full-up feeling, a kind of lightness and pain. But with the smell of meat from the smokehouse and the dark-wetted dirt, that feeling turned into misgiving. When finally I’d gathered myself, I pinned those sheets to the line where they whipped together and I left them for the sun.

  In the kitchen I fixed a pot of oats and filled a pan with milk, the milk trembling around my spoon as I stirred. At the door of my pa
rents’ house, my mother had waited only days before with a jar of jam under her arm, raising her chin to see us go off. With my father gone, she rented out the land and kept the house to herself, an arrangement that would agree with her for many years more. She was a small woman, my mother. Her skirts she hemmed nearly twice as high as my own and still they grew ragged from the ground. But she had a steadiness to her and a strength that made her larger in that doorway than most men. My mother wouldn’t speak of her worries about me. She wasn’t the kind. Still, that jar of rhubarb jam seemed as red as her cheeks just then, and the sky, she said, it didn’t look right. When I took it from her, the jar was warm, but as I held it close to me in the wagon, it cooled. I had my bedclothes and pillows with me. I had a trunk full of notions. But with that jam, I knew I could carry my mother for only a short while. Now opening the jar again, my eyes teared as I brushed my thumb through. The jam tasted grainy and thick. When I let it hang on the tip of my thumb and tasted it again, it soothed the cracks of my skin and filled my mouth with sweetness.

  Outside, the sheets clapped together. If I squinted right, I could imagine a child playing between them. In the wind, the sheets caught the child up and lifted him giggling from the dirt. If I could have squinted well enough, I’d have brought that child straight into this house. I’d have heard him stepping in, boots on his feet. With Frank’s black hair and blue eyes I imagined him, and the heavy hands that were his mother’s, suited more to a boy than any young woman. Children are a way of keeping things, or so I once believed. They plant you to this earth, give you roots to stay a while. Now in the kitchen, I wondered just how long it would be until I had one of my own. With that boy stamping his feet on our floor, I’d have asked if he wanted some jam. If he opened his mouth, I would have held my finger out.

  The wind rose. Like a clock the sheets ticked against their line, counting the time I would sit and wait for Frank to return.

  In the fall we spent mornings in the barn. Back then we had a dozen cows, sixteen hogs, four hens, and two horses. We had a few tons of hay and fifty bushels of corn. When the light came, we worked the fields and saved what we’d planted from rot, late in the season as our planting was. Our farm was a hundred and eighty acres, straight and fine as you could want with hardly a tree or stone to break it, as most of it was bottomland. The sky here was low and wide. A place you could spy the weather from a good ways off. Our house sat like a small wooden marker in the countryside. Stooped and curiously held together, hidden by the shade of trees. The porches lay level to the dust and fields. Acres of farmland stretched in every direction, gray-green and buzzing. The gravel road that cuts across our yard, it did so even then. Most of it was mud and stones and suited more for horses than the trucks that rumble past now. The sharp, sweet stink of mud and pigs rode the wind, our barn alone against the distance. Splitting the chores between us, Frank and I often worked without sight of the other until evening. That’s where I was then, out weeding the rows by hand with the shoots I pulled my only company. The Morrows were our only neighbors for miles.

  “Hard work,” a voice called out. I turned my head. A woman stood stalk-straight in my field. She was nearly my own age but pale-skinned. The shawl over her shoulders was the color of gold. Our house lay at her back, a path between her and it, as if she’d just walked from the place herself. A spirit, I thought, drifting as she seemed and too delicate for such country. The way she twitched reminded me of a bird.

  “Wouldn’t be work if it wasn’t,” I answered.

  “But it’s awful hard, isn’t it? And hot as a buzzard. I don’t think I’ve ever seen dust like this. Like it’ll never wash off.”

  That’s the way she went, you see, talking as if she was thirsty, but not for anything I felt good enough to offer. She talked as if she had never talked to another person in her life. “Those potatoes won’t be good for much,” she went on. “Not this late, I mean. Not unless you boil them. Of course, if you don’t plant the right kind, boiling will turn them to mush. Maybe it’s best you throw them away.”

  I studied her then. She was speaking rubbish, throwing good food away. On closer look, with that shawl over her like a garland and so early in the daytime, I guessed she might do such a thing. “I don’t suppose that’d be right,” I said. My hands were raw from pulling weeds. Three hours at the work and the soil covered me head to toe. “Enidina,” I offered at last, sitting up on my knees. “Though my husband calls me Eddie. Only him.” I wiped my hand from the sweat and dirt and held it out.

  “Mary Morrow,” she said with a grimace. My hand nearly swallowed her own. “We’re neighbors,” she said. “Over there, less than half a mile. Ours is an even longer trip to town.” With a lift of her chin, she showed me her house in the distance, a hard brick face against the fields. What with that look of hers, I knew we were farther from each other than that run of dirt road between us.

  You may think me unfriendly, but I have trouble remembering Mary without uneasiness. Even then, I was wary of strangers, and I believed women were especially difficult. I had no sisters to speak of. Had only my mother now and three brothers, gone off to have families of their own. Though I’d tried for friendship, their wives never much cared for the youngest sister who worked with the men in the barn. But women had never liked the look of me. Saw something fierce in my size and roughness. Mary seemed no different. That grimace of hers, it was just the start.

  “The big place,” she said. She turned to look at our own and tugged that shawl close to her chest. Next to hers, our house seemed a low stack of wood, but an honest one. The kind people could grow into. The afternoon had hushed and the soil was sticky in my palms. As I stood, I wondered just what she wanted with us. “Now, look at you,” she said. “Just look.” Her eyes narrowed and a smile came to her lips. “We have two boys ourselves and I knew with both of them. In only weeks, I knew it.” She reached out to touch my dress. “You’re carrying.”

  I stepped away from her and looked down at my stomach and feet. I was black with dirt and had wiped my hands on my middle so many times that I’d stained my dress with fingerprints. “Isn’t that a wonder,” I said. I didn’t know until then, you see. I’d felt something coming. Like a rainstorm I’d felt it, but burrowing inside me. I’d been sick for so many months, sick too after my father’s death. I hadn’t bothered to pay attention to the weight I’d taken on in our bed or any child it might promise. Mary said her piece and I believed it then, reddening at the thought that this woman had known before me. In her fancy shawl and curious ways, she’d taken the surprise that was mine alone.

  I bent to my work to answer her, hoping to end the visit as fast as it’d begun. “It’s not so terrible to know before your time,” she said. But I would have none of it. Her voice was sharp and all too sure of itself. She looked mighty pleased. I kept my back to her, and her feet scratched at the ground like one of our chickens. Finally she walked away.

  A sour taste rose at the back of my throat as I watched her go, but the sourness was different now. It had its reasons. “Carrying,” she’d said. With my brothers’ wives, I’d stayed outside in the parlor with the men. In the barn, birthing was a dark, bloody business. The last I’d seen left the cow panting on her knees. We buried her afterward in the snow. Mary stumbled as she went, that gold glinting in her shawl, and I felt the emptiness of this place. The dirt in the fields stirred with insects and wind. The sun was an awful brightness. This woman had carried two children herself. Despite her looks, she’d done that. Against all I’d heard of the ways of strangers, I called after her to welcome her again, and she offered a wave back. She has never left us quite alone since.

  We had the rest of the fall to ourselves before Mary came with her family, the first real visitors to our place. Walking into the corner of my kitchen, she studied the weight of my chest and stomach. Her eyes passed over our countertops like a finger feeling for dust. We had but four plates and these my mother had spared us. Surprised by their arrival at dinnertime, Frank
and I had to share a plate between us, as did Mary and her youngest. I opened a jar of meat and boiled some noodles, warmed a sugar dressing for our lettuce. The bread I’d baked during the week I hoped might fill the meal, a cup of broth to soften the crust. I laid out the meat and noodles in my roasting pan, as I had no other dishes, and I kept our only apples for dessert. When Frank set the last plate in front of Mary’s husband, Jack looked at Frank’s hand and wondered at it. Jack’s own was scarred and wide and never much for serving, or so I guessed. Taking hold of the plate himself, Jack righted it at a proper distance for his fork and knife, but Frank didn’t seem to mind. Quiet as he was before a meal, Frank took his seat, his eyes closed and hands on the table. Mary did the same. In the silence, Mary’s youngest knocked over his water glass.

  “Are you done?” Mary asked, studying the boy.

  Her youngest turned quiet. Mary stood and gave him a cool pinch on the cheek. When she went to clear the mess, the napkin in her hand came away darkly stained. “Well,” she said, “this table needs a wash.”

  My fork struck our plate.

  “Don’t you worry,” Frank let out. His eyes were open now and bright. With a glance, I knew he was talking to me and the boy both. “I must do that every day myself,” Frank said. “In fact, I did it just this morning, with a bowl of oatmeal. What do you think of that?” Frank took the boy’s chin between finger and thumb. The boy buckled and grinned. He wasn’t much more than two, and shied from his mother’s arm as she scrubbed.

  “Interrupting your mother’s prayers …,” Mary said. “And this man, he was praying too.” The cuffs of Mary’s blouse looked neat against her wrists, her nails trimmed. The way she’d sat so stiffly at our table, I knew she kept herself separate from our place. Her boys were pale too, raised soft by their mother and flushed in the heat of the kitchen. But in a few years they were to be farmer’s sons.