The Quickening Page 12

  I stole out to the cover of the barn, hidden by the rush of the rain. My sons stood outside with their father and beat the hogs in turns, Kyle holding the animals so they would not struggle too much or slip away, so it would not take too long—but no matter how he held them, his brothers beat down and missed, for the little ones refused to be still. The club rushed close to Kyle’s face, stirring the hair on his head, his father’s hand bloody with splinters. With that club, Jack never bothered to look at what he hit, the animal or the ground.

  They would bury the hogs in different places around the farm so none of us could remember where they were or remember doing it at all. The government man had driven in and closed the check in my husband’s hand. “It’s a good thing,” the man had said. He wore a tan suit, thinning at the elbows, and his paunch strained his belt, the little hair left on his head oiled and combed, but his face was young, not a line in it. “For all of us.”

  “Good,” Jack echoed.

  The man wiped the sweat from his neck—a boy’s face, I thought, but the man smelled nothing like a boy, not even when he turned to me and smiled. “Sorry to interrupt your dinner,” he said. He put on his hat with a long look, and his hand left its print on our glass doorknob. At the window, Jack crushed the check in his fist and watched the government car slide onto the road. The car alone made the man different.

  “It’s enough,” Jack whispered when I asked how much the check was.

  “For what?”

  He dropped his chin, the check falling to the floor. “We could have taken in boarders, but you said no,” he started, clearing the table, the plates small in his hands and the silverware smaller still. He seemed to weigh them in his fingers. “We could have had one or two. That might’ve made a difference.”

  “And make your wife a servant?”

  Jack looked at me, and those plates and silver flew, a fork clipping my ear. He fell into his chair and dropped his forehead hard against the window, gazing at the road, but outside the man was gone. “It’s enough,” I whispered, cupping my mouth. Bits of egg and grease clung to my hair. “It’s plenty now.” A different kind of life, I thought, but not with that man and his car—I could not even imagine it. I was done with thinking of other lives for myself.

  “Look what you made me do,” Jack said under his breath. “Nothing to feel sorry about.” I lowered my head—this was the man I married, the stone on my finger and the heavy band. I had made my choice. Still, those gashes on Eddie’s arms troubled me as did the rest of it, like a fly buzzing in my ear, a furred and ugly insect, too quick to catch and get a good look. Knives, that was what Jack had said he used on their hogs. Now where he sat, Jack seemed to shrink into himself—how little strength he really had, too little when he needed it. Finally he rose from his chair and kicked it from under him and walked out the back door. After I was sure he was gone, I found that check in a ball under the table and ironed it flat.

  With that rain falling against the barn, my boys bent close together and never looked up—a father and three sons. Their boots were the color of mud, their hands, their shoulders, their shirts hanging loose. The sow was the last one. They had kept her after they finished the others because she was stout and pregnant, she would be easier to hold—because after they buried her, they knew they could never be who they thought they should any more.

  And their mother, what would I be then? Because it had taken such a long, hard while for me to make this a good place, a place where goodness could be done. Jack had such a fever in him now and did every time he looked at the wiry build of my youngest, but I had done what I could to set things straight—I had washed my hands from the dust and stink, worked to make the best of appearances, and tried to keep Kyle from running off down the road to save himself from his father’s hand. Now this butchering was soaked so deeply in our soil I had to run out and see it, to witness it and carry the terrible waste it was in my breast, and I did not think God or anyone else would be able to look on us as a high-standing family ever again.

  My husband held on to that club while my sons gripped the sow, and I wondered why she had to jump around so, why she never simply lay still and suffered it like the ground—suffered it like that, the way the ground never resists a person’s trampling on it. The club beat down and broke her, my sons wrestling to keep hold. When finally she stopped her jumping, I could see how she was swollen in all the wrong places, and I tried to think there was nothing else in her, nothing any of us should feel sorry about.

  They carried her through the storm and I followed, taking little care in hiding myself now—I was a shadow to them, if anything, almost invisible in the rain. The sow’s stomach sagged between them and they fumbled and cursed, the ground loose under their feet. When finally they dropped her, Jack yelled that he would go back to get the shovel. Together my sons stood with the sow between them and watched their father stagger home, going slow, unable to get his footing. The rain hissed and grew, making rivers in the mud, and my sons squinted under their hats and tried to find their father through the storm.

  But none of us could see him now. That was the way he went, walking off through the mud, the last I saw of the man I married, the man I knew—he would always be gone after that, a man of fog and temper, he would never come back, not for the six more years that I would live with him and scrub his shirts and cook his meals. Those Currents had trapped him. They had promised they would do what they should and sent him off to have to finish it, or so he said, coming home with stains so dark on his sleeves that I had to turn that shirt to rags. After he walked off in that rain, you could not say we were husband and wife—we were little more than strangers. Later when the body of that man went, his passing was quick, without a shiver, without absolution. After years of keeping to his own, I found him again in our bed, stiff and cold where I woke in the morning next to him, my hand clutched in his. He must have come in during the night, so quietly I never felt the mattress shift, but it was the rush of blood in my hand that woke me when he released it. Still nothing more than a stone sat inside my chest, because my husband had already disappeared from me years ago in that storm.

  Now my oldest son cursed him. “He’s not coming,” he said. “He’s not coming back.” He kicked the ground, and the mud and rain flew as high as his head.

  Kyle wiped his eyes. Together his brothers looked at him as if the boy was the worst thing their father ever did. “You can bury her, Kyle,” the younger one said. “All by yourself. Dad would want you to, wouldn’t he?” Kyle wondered at them, but his brothers had already turned back to the house, their shoulders bent under the rain, their hands reaching as if they wanted to catch hold of something and wring it out. In less than a year, both would leave our farm for good, without warning, without even pressing their lips to my cheek—going off to the cities where they could get away from mud and pigs.

  My youngest spit into the rain and studied the sow at his feet, tapping her with his boot. I reached out my arm, but he flinched. The storm swept down, the mud rising with it. It came over the toes of our boots, tugging at our heels. It ran deeper than our ankles where we stood, the sow sinking under it and the mud rising enough to bury her, if only by inches. Kyle fell to his knees and started digging, crying now and digging with his bare hands. There was no stopping him. He lunged and dug up to his shoulders, the hole falling in and the weight of the dead sow shifting. All at once, the water in the hole drained and took the sow with it, covering her until only the pink nipples showed along her belly. Kyle gathered mounds of mud against his chest and threw it over her with a desperate heave. Finally, he swept the mud flat with the palm of his hand and stood as if wild.

  That rain, it was gaining on us. It fell and washed the mud from beneath our feet, rushing out until we had no choice but to crawl our way home—and for years that rain never came back.

  XI

  Enidina

  (Spring–Summer 1936)

  The way I heard it told you have to burn it out of you. You h
ave to be strict about it. Consistent. The doctor had given me only months as I had the consumption, and I took to keeping turpentine and grease on my chest. Around my neck I wore a shawl covered with the stuff. Later, when my breathing grew difficult, I spent my nights sleeping in the fields. The summer of ’36 was hot and dry, almost as bad as ’34. The stalks of corn broke at a touch, the leaves yellow and bitten through. The daytime passed without a wind, the corn falling, but I was bent on saving it, my hands brushed with dirt for luck. I could taste the turpentine every time I coughed.

  It had been three years since I’d had much to do with our neighbors. Three since Jack had come with his knife. Though we were slow in using it, we kept the money we got for the hogs he’d killed. Frank never let out what that man did. He himself had been the one, Frank said, who’d finished them off. Not Jack. I kept my opinions to myself.

  Of any of that family only Kyle walked the distance between our farms. Every other day he came, and my Donny trailed after him as if the way that Morrow boy spoke, the fear and hunger in him, were the very qualities he wanted for himself. They went hiding out in the fields on “missions.” Took to the lake for fishing, though neither seemed able to hold a line. As Kyle grew older, I’m sure he shared with Donny a word or two about drink and girls. I doubted Kyle knew much about them himself. Still, those bruises on Kyle, they must have given him a great deal of mystery, at least for my son. Time and again, I took Kyle by the arm and made him sit in my kitchen where I could doctor to him.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Kyle shrugged. “Not any more.” The boy looked starved and fragile as a hatchling. I made a poultice and held him still until it set. “Does your mother know?” I asked.

  “It’s not Dad’s fault,” Kyle said.

  “It isn’t?”

  “He gets mad, is all.”

  “But Kyle …”

  The boy looked away. “Where’s Addie?” he asked. He winced when he tried to talk.

  “Upstairs,” I said.

  I took hold of his chin, moving his head back and forth to see the cut on his lip. He strained against my hand, trying to look up, and I looked up with him. Adaline jumped from her bed above us and slammed her door. I clicked my tongue, but Kyle wouldn’t take his eyes off that ceiling.

  “She’s a spitfire, that girl.”

  He nodded.

  “Going to be a handful. For any man she marries, I mean.”

  Kyle looked at me and reddened. “Gotta go, Mrs. Current,” he said. “Gotta find Donny.” He backed out of the kitchen, skinny and pale and limping. My fingers were sticky with paste.

  It had been Donny’s idea to learn the horse. He’d heard from Kyle about the animal’s speed. Said the boy had showed him with his hand how high he’d sit on its back, how well he’d ride it. But I’d seen them walk home after only the first try, Adaline, Donny, and their father to keep them in line. With dust on his skin and clothes, head to toe, Donny looked anything but pleased about the way it went.

  “You should have been there, Mother,” Adaline started.

  “The horse reared,” Frank said.

  “When he was riding it?”

  “No, not riding it. Not yet.”

  Donny hid his hands behind his back, but already I’d seen how raw they were.

  “Donny had just taken hold of the rope when the horse reared, almost dragged him under. That’s what happened to his hands.” Frank slapped Donny’s shoulder, forcing a grin. “You know, Donny. That rope is there to keep the horse down. On the ground, I mean. It’s not for flying.” Frank tried to laugh, but Adaline stood from her chair, her eyes wet. “Now there,” Frank said to Adaline. “It’ll be all right. He just has to be careful.”

  “Addie,” I said.

  Frank reached for her, but the girl rushed up the stairs. “Adaline,” I called. Her bed creaked above our heads as if she’d thrown herself into it. Frank drew a nervous hand through his hair.

  I nodded to Frank to ease him and brought out a can of lard to rub into Donny’s skin. I knew no amount of mothering could calm that girl. Not for a while at least. Even as they came in, the three had watched me, the shawl I wore carrying such a stench. They had a way of cupping their noses, breathing through their mouths. All of them were afraid, you could see it. Donny and Adaline stepped away whenever I came near. They bothered me if I stayed outside for long. The sun was too hot, they complained, or too bright. As if the light and heat could set the shawl afire.

  I held my son’s hands in mine, small as they were and bleeding. The lard would cool his skin, but peroxide might keep him from infection. Donny was tough and broad even as a boy, a bear of a child with my own build and temperament. But baby fat still clung to his fingers. The doughy cheeks he’d been born with, they hadn’t yet left him. He showed the same bruises now as our neighbor down the road, but from an entirely different animal.

  That horse. I could imagine it well enough. Imagine the way Donny could walk under the animal’s flank without even having to bend. “Enough now,” I said to him, though I couldn’t be sure the boy listened. “Your father says you have to be careful. It’s a horse, but it’s a wild one. Keep your sense.” I imagined the horse kicking him. One strike could send my son to the ground and then the speed of its legs as it ran. Donny pulled away from me. I’d been holding his hands too tightly, what with his sore skin. He stood from the table, twisting out of my arms, and I opened my fingers and let go.

  “Don’t mind him,” Frank said, and clapped his hands on the table to be done with it. But I knew it wasn’t done. It might never be. With such an animal, I knew that at least.

  We’d had a hard few years after the rains, as had everyone. In the summer of ’34 we planted crops as usual, but with the drought we didn’t raise a bite. The stock were starving for feed and water. It was almost too hot to breathe. From the nineties in the shade, the temperature climbed above a hundred and ten and stayed for fifteen days. Frank dragged a mattress out to the back porch and took to sleeping there at night with the twins. In the middle of August, a breeze came through my bedroom window about midnight and it sprinkled rain. I ran to tell them, but Frank didn’t trust the weather enough to move his mattress. Still, from that day on it felt close to livable again.

  Nineteen thirty-five was a poor crop year just the same, but we did raise a little something. Still, our shade trees finished dying from the burn-up they got the year before. The bank raised the interest on our loan and we had to let eighty acres go, but agreeing to bankruptcy saved the rest. This was almost unheard of then, shameful as it seemed to most. We knew other farmers talked about it whenever they met in town. It was the same as accepting charity. Taking something that wasn’t yours to begin with and not paying what was owed, from the government no less. But we didn’t have five hundred men to keep the state from bothering us, as they did over in Cedar County when the governor tried to test milk. And our neighbors wouldn’t crowd out buyers from an auction at any foreclosure. After the trouble with the hogs, after keeping our sow, we’d lost quite a bit of trust with the town. Bankruptcy, it was different than the money we’d gotten from Wallace. It paid for failure, or so they saw it. Helping only the ones who asked. With the hogs, we at least had to do something hard, something like work. With bankruptcy, we didn’t raise a sweat. And we’d benefited well from it, keeping over half our land while the others turned up their noses at any kind of handout. Still they lost everything they had. For weeks, Frank and I struggled over the decision. The land was ours. It was who we were. Those acres, they were our very life together. Some twenty-odd years of marriage and work.

  It was the next summer that my lungs started to fill. The doctor listened to the liquid in my chest and ordered me to bed. At night I made myself a pallet of wood and blankets and slept outside near the fields. This did me some good. There was a slight wind, the smell of the ground. I breathed it in, wrapped my shawl close. During those nights, Adaline brought a blanket for herself and laid it out at some distance to watch me sleep.
I kept my eyes shut, though I was well awake. Only when she believed I wasn’t listening would she talk. “I’ve decided on it, Mother,” she said. “I’m going to marry Stan Wilson. He’s skinny, but Dad says boys change plenty by the time they grow, and his folks live in town. That’s what I like.” She was quiet for a while and I heard her rustle in her blanket. The moon was high and bright. She could have seen the shawl around my chest without even squinting. “You’ve got to be careful,” she said at last. That rustling sound, she was biting her fingers like she did when she worried. In the last year of my sickness, she was often biting them, so much I thought I’d have to bandage her hands. “That awful thing you wear.”

  I raised my head, shrugged the shawl from my shoulders, and the rustling stopped. “What about Kyle?” I asked. Adaline didn’t speak after that, but still she stayed. After a time, I turned as if falling asleep again, and she let out a breath. It was a safe time for her to be with me. At night, the fires in her head seemed to lessen.