The Quickening Read online

  We were no longer considered a fine family, but in her every hour, my mother relied a great deal on seeming.

  “Someday you’ll know better,” my father told me. He was a quiet man, already stooped, spending his waking hours in the shed where he worked. I thought then my father’s words were offering me a better kind of living, but later I knew he had meant how gray those days would seem, the polite and constant practicing, when what I wanted was something glowing and passionate and strange.

  When first I met Jack, it was his voice that shook me, echoing out of a storefront where he argued with the owner inside—I stopped at once, wondering what kind of man could have a voice like that, as large as daylight. He cursed and a case in the store broke, knuckles into glass. He rushed out the door with the owner yelling and I saw him then, turning one way and the next, not knowing what to do with himself. “I’ll pay for it all right,” he yelled back. He leaned against the porch rail an arm’s reach from me and stared at the ground. I scratched my foot against the dirt until he looked up, his green eyes rising over my face without expression. When his mouth opened without a word, I felt swallowed up whole.

  Later I would learn that Jack was the youngest in a family of men, that his mother had died a year after he was born. They were only a father and five brothers, the father lost to work and drink and the sons all born into a four-room farmhouse far in the East where they sweated for women in their bunks. His brothers had raised him with their fists and jokes, my husband nodding without a word whenever I asked to know more. But I could imagine the way that house had been, the heat of all those boys as they worked the farm and cooked their meals, a charred crust of fat and bloody meat in the saucepan. It was a place of temper and few words, the taste of smoke and salt—boys playing mother to each other, their feet muddy in the kitchen. Because that was the kind of place where Jack must have been born, the hard muscle of a man that he was and still so much a boy.

  Jack stood against the rail, his overalls wind-whipped and dull, breaking at the seams. The straps hung loose at his thighs and his thighs were thick and muscled under the denim. The skin of his knuckles had broken into bloody streaks and he bound his hand in his shirt.

  “You’ll never get your price like that,” I said.

  For a moment he only stared. I took a step back, the store’s brick front hard against my spine.

  “I know it,” he swore, sweeping off his cap and twisting it between his fingers. “I was never much the bartering kind.” He shrugged with a smile and dropped his head. It was then that what had seemed devilish in Jack fell away, as if he were a child—his face streaked by the sun, his eyes green and squinting, and the crown of his hair standing on end. What a wonder, I thought, the way such a man could hold both at once, all that rage and innocence, and I had been the one to bring that innocence out.

  I was twenty-two years old the day we met, Jack over thirty—we would marry later that year at my mother’s house with only my parents to witness the event. He was born a wanderer, my Jack—he had no family or friends of his own nearby to invite. Ever since he was young, he had worked to get as far as possible from that four-room farmhouse, and by the time I met him, he had traveled a great deal, from the dark, narrow countryside of the East, little more than a nickel in his pocket. But that husband of mine had cunning. He could smell the stench of a family’s foolishness from a distance, so our farm he got for a dime, troubled as the place had been and abandoned for over a year. I was the one who had stopped him in his traveling, or so he said, the one who had made him want to think about building a home. Carrying me off as he did more than a week’s ride from my parents, Jack found a ground he could root his fevers in, and I knew with those green eyes of his that I had traveled and stopped as well—all before I got the chance to do otherwise.

  For the first four years, our house never did lose that ache to fall back into the wreck it had been. I kept at my work to clean it, and my husband returned only at dusk, bringing in the weather on his boots and the barn stink—a wildness, despite all that could be steady in him and warm. Upstairs my sons grew and fidgeted in their beds, drooling on the sheets with wide, hungry mouths—always wanting. Yet if I should want to hold them, they wearied and twisted their limbs like animals out of my grip.

  I had a gold-threaded shawl of silk my mother had given me for our wedding, and late in the afternoons I took to sitting when I could in an empty room on the second floor and wrapped the shawl around me. The windows looked out over the fields, the trees bent and withered against the dust. There was the grayness again—earth, brush, and wind—not even birds rested for long on that ground. If I said Jack’s name aloud in that room, it would sound as hard as metal, and if I opened the windows, the sound would travel over the fields without so much as a tree or hill large enough to break it, without anyone to hear save for the animals wrenching the grass with their teeth. When it circled back again, I imagined it running against this house with its hard brick front. I imagined it finding me again in this room, echoing where I sat for hours with that shawl knotted around my neck.

  It was only when I turned to face the windows to the west that I saw a difference—a small house that stood on the horizon like a stone. I watched it for a whole year until one day smoke came rushing from the chimney.

  “You’re hiding,” my husband whispered. He stood in the doorway, gripping the frame. I turned back to my window and the smoke. There it is at last, I wanted to say, a sign of the living. My husband rested his hands on my shoulders and I realized how much I was in need of company, something feminine and soft.

  “See that?” I tapped my finger on the windowpane. Inside the house, I imagined a woman sat at her own window after the afternoon chores, looking out and seeing us, a large place less than a mile out. She was a young wife herself, and she tucked her hands into her lap to keep warm in the winters or turned a fan in front of her face against the heat. Her children were already in their beds, that slow time of day when a woman has a chance to think—and what she thought was this: there must be more in this place if a person goes far enough. Jack crouched to look out, his hands weighing into my shoulders, all that was hungry in me still rising to his presence. Upstairs, my sons woke from their nap and bounded down the steps, their voices pitched, calling for supper. I saw myself knocking on the woman’s door, the hearth inside and a meal with tomatoes and fresh cream, a clean tablecloth. In the mornings, we would press bread together and work our gardens, and in the afternoons I would help the woman bleach her linens and can fruit and meats. Girls she would have, two of them, and they would make my own boys quiet and thoughtful, good to their mother. Jack cleared his throat and kissed me quickly on the cheek—but when I looked in the glass, his face was silent and dark. Ever since our first night in the house, Jack had studied me the way a mother studies a child with its hands behind its back. Sometimes even children are innocent, I wanted to say, but Jack never would let me forget—the sheets appeared clean and white that first morning when we woke, though we had become a husband and wife in every sense.

  “The old Bowers place,” he said at last. “They should have a hard time of it.” He clapped me on the shoulder and walked out. I could still smell the work on him, felt it sink into my skin with all its sweat and noise and dirt. My fingers moved lightly over the pane, my hands feeling for the notes. Girls, I thought, and the woman sang while I played her piano, her hair tied back with pins. My husband had left me alone in my room, but I could sense him still watching for me from the hall. My sons were in the kitchen, their hands I imagined too close to the stove, red and blistering, waiting for me to snatch them back. The house itself ached for my attention—even in my sleep I heard it suffer in the wind. When I looked out the window again, I caught my breath—the afternoon had darkened, my reflection suddenly bone-thin, and I feared everything in me that had been bright and young could die in this place before I ever turned thirty.

  It took weeks until I finally set out on foot, walking toward the
house I had seen because the horizon held little else. I carried nothing with me, wore only a housedress and easy shoes, wrapping my mother’s shawl around my shoulders in case of wind. How far I would go I left to hunger, weariness, or chance—but surely there was a place where the sun did not shine so brightly, where I could stand against the trunk of a tree and listen to the creak of its limbs, not have to worry about the weather or the state of the soil beneath my feet. The back of my neck grew wet from walking, the fields liquid under the sun. Insects clung to the stalks with a humming that covered my skin with dust. I still had that neighbor woman at her window well in mind, and if she could lead a horse, I thought, we might go as a pair to the market in town. We might meet other women there, a whole group of them—and together we could make this place bigger than it was. Nearer to the house, I saw a woman working in the fields. She was large and sturdy, not much older than myself, with fire-colored hair and a dress that stretched like a rag over her hips. Wiping her hands from the dirt, she left prints on her lap, so often she seemed covered with her work—a stone of a woman, her hands sun-spotted and rough, her fingers short, nothing delicate, much like the house.

  “Hard work,” I called out.

  “Always is.” She raised her head, studying the shawl around my shoulders before she pulled back her chin.

  “We’re neighbors,” I said. “First time in three years I’ve seen someone in this house. Our place is just over there.”

  “I’ve seen it,” she said. “A big place.” She lowered her head again.

  I rubbed my neck. Inside that dim little cabin, I imagined her holding out a cup of water that sweated against its glass, cold as I believed I had not tasted for months, and offering the last piece of fruit from her pantry. I waited for her to invite me in, searching down the road for any kind of distraction—for miles there was little more than corn and beans.

  Finally the woman straightened. “Enidina,” she said. “We’ve been here only a few weeks. Haven’t had the time to meet neighbors.”

  She was clearer to me when she stood, heavier and taller than I might have guessed, her speech coarse, impatient, but there was a carefulness in the way she moved. Dirt stained her stomach more than the rest of her dress, as if she could not help but touch the place again and again—there it was, I thought, a second life, something I often sensed in women before they even knew it themselves. I wanted only to cross that distance, to touch a bit of that softness and have it for my own. I reached out my hand, but it dropped dumbly between us. “Why, you’re carrying,” I gasped.

  Enidina grimaced. She brushed her hand over her stomach again, as if to sweep away the dirt and everything with it. For decency’s sake and luck’s, I should never have let the words out. Later, I would think of what I said when Frank grew sick, when Enidina abandoned herself with such recklessness to the storm. What kind of woman was she after all—bent to the ground, her fingers thick as rope? I would never be as marked by this place or as raw, and even then I believed such a woman could never carry a child for long.

  “My first,” Enidina offered, though she seemed pained to say it. “I wouldn’t be out walking for too long in this weather. It’ll cook you through. That house of yours, it looks big enough to keep a woman busy I’d think. I’d think with a house like that, a person wouldn’t have much time for visiting at all.”

  I opened my mouth, but already she had bent to her work, tearing weeds from the soil. What new low had this woman driven me to? I turned at once, heading in the opposite direction from home. When I looked back, she stood as if abandoned in her field, her hand on her forehead to hold off the sun as she watched me go, and I was not surprised when she called out. “I suppose I’ll be seeing you,” she said.

  The road ahead was empty and behind me were only men and work closed off in a too large house I could never keep clean. My mother would arrive to care for the boys, chores would be taken care of for at least a day or so, and I could be gone, if only I could keep walking. The farmland was plain and forbidding—up ahead, not a living soul waited for me. What I wanted felt like a hunger, rising from my ribs, my throat, starved for something immense, golden. Jack was greater than many a man, but he could give me only sons and mud and butchered meat—I wanted something clean.

  Enidina’s house had disappeared behind me, but a small white chapel rose ahead out of the fields. I had lived in this place for years, but the chapel seemed new, standing as it did over the flat, graying bottomland and pointing upward, endlessly—as if it had nothing to do with this place and never would.

  I moved in a daze by the time I opened the doors to that church. The very creaks in the floor welcomed me, the light through the windows stained and surreal, with a life and color all its own. Aisles of red carpet led like arrows to the pulpit, the wood painted white, and a heavy cross hung from above, glinting. I closed a communion glass in my hand and felt its cool weight, no chips, no stains—it shone with the candles that adorned the altar, all of them flickering under some unknown breath. The chapel resounded with footsteps. A tall, very pale young man in a dull gray suit walked down the center aisle, a limp in his stride, but the name I thought I heard from his mouth was my own. “Mary,” he said.

  I dropped the glass, but it did not break. It did not utter a sound when it fell. A cry escaped my throat, my name echoing against the walls in the voice of this stranger, and I felt myself lift. Here was a room of surrender and warmth. In this chapel I could do nothing wrong—and this man with his gentle limp, he was a part of it. A presence opened inside my chest, as if I were attended by thousands, and I knew at once I could carry this lifted-up feeling even if I returned home. I could keep this strength, drift above the rest. I could do my work without dirtying a finger, shake my husband’s wildness out of him, and if I cared, if I was good enough—and I was determined to be—I could make that Enidina into the woman I had once imagined she was.

  The man stood, waiting, and I wondered where I might have met him before or whether the sound of my name had come from some other place or time. “Miss?” he said. With his hands clasped against his stomach, he seemed the very picture of patience. Long and thin his hands were, like a woman’s, but tufts of hair darkened his knuckles. He took my arm and sat me in a pew, his suit worn at the knees and his belt missing a loop, though his shirt was clean and white and tucked at his waist. “This is my father’s church,” he said at last, but I did not see a father about. It did not seem the place for fathers or old men, as his father would have to be—it did not seem the place for relations at all.

  “My father built this church,” he said.

  “You don’t have anyone else? A wife? A child?”

  He looked at me puzzled. “No,” he said. He sat very still then with his hand on my arm and did not speak. I could not remember when he had placed his hand there, but it was firm and hummed with a kind of electricity. I had never known a man to be so quiet, so closed in on himself, and I listened to him breathe. “Are you all right?” he said at last.

  “It’s your church,” I announced. I had meant it as a question, but I wanted to believe it myself so let the end of my sentence drop. The man shifted his weight to see me—there in the slow turn of his mouth, in the rush of blood to his cheeks, he showed such a wonder at my presence that I felt reborn. He seemed a man who needed taking care of, and in the months and years that followed I would learn this was what drove his church members to him, slowly at first and then by the dozens. When after minutes he removed his grip from my sleeve, it left a damp stain. Later, when I would see him lift Enidina and the others from the lake, when he would bless them with a touch of his palm, I would recognize a different kind of strength.

  This is what I’m trying to say, that goodness has its fire too. There are those who work for a living, who milk and slaughter and plow, and those who ready themselves for a different life—I was to be the second kind.

  III

  Enidina

  (Fall 1918–Fall 1919)

  Th
e war’s end found us in our bed. It was just before sunrise on the eleventh of November, 1918. We heard the whistles blowing in town, six miles away. With his eyes open to the ceiling, Frank lay awake and whispered. “I just bet it’s the war. The war is over.”

  But the fields were the same. The houses and town, little changed. It was an easier season than we’d had in years past, but not easier by much. My brothers had escaped the call, and the local boys they’d lost were few and unknown to us. Their pictures hung in the town market, stiff in their uniforms. You may not understand, but an ocean lay between us and that war. We had sensed a kind of trouble. But with our work from the early morning dark until evening, we couldn’t give it much thought unless we went to town. The shops played Wilson’s speeches on the radio, and we listened with our neighbors. Still, we couldn’t imagine such distance, couldn’t believe how men survived it in their ships.

  “We’re not from over there any more. None of us,” my mother had said once. “All of you have been born right here. We’re from nowhere but this place.”

  That spring and summer we grew apples, peaches, and strawberries as we’d always done and ate much of what we picked before dark, canning the rest. We worked from hand to mouth, never letting what we had grown fall to the ground or be eaten by dirt. In the early morning, the chicken whose neck I broke with a snap of my wrist I would clean and dress for supper that very night. We often ate in the daylight then, the last of the sun grazing our plates. At the end of those months, the bacon and beef we’d dried were already gone. That chicken became a pale cut of meat between our teeth, as dull to the taste as cotton. When finally the corn and potatoes came, late as they were in the season, they were sweet and crisp and filled us while they lasted.