The Quickening Read online

  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.

  I’d spent the early hours bringing wood into the kitchen and piling it by the stove. The walls of the kitchen crowded in as I fed the fire, but soon it burned well enough alone. The house at my back seemed hollowed out, the cold breaking against the windowpanes. The child I carried strained with the work in my hands. I took the plates out of the water and they seemed far too delicate, the twelve of them thinner than my fist when stacked together. Having those plates, I thought our life might be growing toward something, being of use as they were and beautiful too. How both came about at once, I didn’t know. The plates steamed as they dried on the table, but still there was dinner to make. A meal for Frank when he returned from work of his own. I dropped in the last of the wood and my stomach turned, an ache in my chest and throat. A wave of dizziness took me. As I gathered the plates together, they chattered and dripped. When I tried to lift the stack, they slipped from me and a wetness broke from between my legs. The kitchen table rose above my head, the fire in the stove blazing. The plates shattered, the floor beneath me suddenly wet and my skirts soaked as I fell into the mess.

  I could not think to stand but stayed on the floor, sick of myself. My legs lay heavy in front of me, my red, wearied hands in my lap. I wasn’t enough of a woman to carry a child, not enough of one to do what was most natural. Next to me the wood popped in the stove. I thought of the fire I’d seen in the fields, the way it seemed to drop out of nowhere. I’d already felt the sickness of this child in my stomach then, but I’d had my doubts. I lifted the stove’s lid to brighten the room, and the iron burned my skin. I wondered at the floor, the soiled insides of our house. Our boots had brought the mud in and now there was the sickly sweetness. There was no good time for cleaning it. The little sun in our rooms and the heavy work had helped keep the dirt hidden from us. But as I rested there, it was plain to see. I didn’t have the life in me to scrub the floor as I should. I knew only the shame of it and the reddish stain that grew in my lap, knowing what that stain was.

  It was then I imagined Mary. At our kitchen window she stood looking out, rubbing her knuckles into the small of her back. Bent under her own weight, her stomach swelled inside her dress. When she stepped over me to reach the stove, her skirt swept my face. She washed her hands in the bucket and it was a long time she was washing them, her ankles bloated and her heel close to my wrist. I laid my finger on the crown of her foot and felt the fine bones there.

  “Mary,” I said, looking up. “You have such easy children. So many.” She answered by lifting her hands and flicking her fingers until my cheeks burned with the drops. When she stepped off, out of the kitchen, I was left. The bucket atop the stove was boiling, spitting water on my face. My finger rubbed at notches in the floor.

  Outside, the animals in the barn were calling for their meal and I knew I was late for them. I feared I would be late several hours more. I imagined myself at my regular chores, carrying buckets. The feedings were a gray time, in the early morning and the hours just before dusk. The animals would rush me, their whiskers wet. If I wanted, I could pour one of the buckets in the trough and leave the other in a closed-off stall for the weaker ones. When I was tired, I tended to do such a thing. They had a way of marking time, those feedings. I’d broken a path from the house to the barn with all my walks between.

  So many days I worked in the house and felt the animals in the rooms behind me. In the kitchen, I heard them cry, imagined them breaking through the roof overhead. If I’d pressed my hands into the corners of our house, the sound of all their wanting came in. Their smell. The chaff on their skin. They wanted to eat from us, the animals. They wanted always to eat and they were eating us. My hands ached from carrying buckets. My days were taken up with the work.

  “We can’t be drowned,” my mother had said to Frank. “None of us.” This I’d heard after the loss of our first child. I could hardly believe it even then. “We crossed the ocean for this land,” she said. “We were born, every one of us, with the caul over our heads.”

  My boy, this place isn’t what it used to be. It was always difficult, but still it bore some life. No old women in their beds. I was always the hearty kind. I thought I could live alone for years more than that woman down the road. It’s the thought of seeing your face that keeps me writing. Still, it pains my hand to give out so much.

  Without knocking, the nurse invites herself in with her black leather bag and her hair pulled back with pins. She is thin and pale and walks as if she knows this house, her voice much too quick. There’s something in her seriousness, in the way she seems ready to jump out of her skin.

  “Who sent you?” I ask.

  “County services,” she says, but she’s slow in saying it. I know her voice, but I can’t place it.

  “Whose?”

  “The county.”

  “Services for what?”

  She wears a smile like your mother’s, cocked at the corner of her mouth. I’ve asked her this same question every day n
ow and I’ll keep on asking it until she gives an answer that makes sense. “Why don’t you let me worry about what services, Mrs. Current?” she says. “Why don’t you just let me get started.”

  I study her, but let her be. I don’t have energy for visitors. As much time as these pages are taking, today and the day after that are the least of my worries. The nurse carries in buckets of water from the kitchen and strips the sheets. I know the song she hums. A lullaby. The same Mary and I once sang to our own. When she rolls me on my side, my breasts and belly drop like sacks of grain and I’m not so sick I can’t smell the difference. I was never proud of my own skin, but it didn’t used to look so mean. My ribs show and the flesh hangs from my hips. The water is warm. That sponge in her hand pulls at me until I wince. Not since I suffered baths as a child in my mother’s kitchen have I let another person do what I’ve done my whole life. “You know,” the nurse says. “You could get out of this bed if you wanted. You’ve got nothing wrong with you except being good and tired.” Her voice moves the way of her hand, warm like that and circling. But the air after she’s finished bites.

  I pull the blankets to my chin, but she tells me to wait. I remember my hand wet on the small of your mother’s back, trying to keep her still in our washbasin. Such a wail she put out, that curly hair of hers a nest. Got work canning in a factory, your mother would later write, from Des Moines that time. Men’s work, but so many have gone to war, I don’t mind it a bit. Out of the sun all day and such a din. Your mother and her letters. She wrote only a handful for me to keep under my mattress all these years. Never so much as I wrote my own. When she was young, your mother once came in with a ruddy dust on her hands and feet, holding up those hands as if she carried something delicate, so red I thought they were bleeding. I asked her where she’d gone. “The railway,” she said, looking at her skin. “What kind of place has dirt like this?” Those trains, I knew, they must have carried that strange soil in with them. But I didn’t know what those places were myself. For weeks after, Adaline talked about red-colored grass and the children who might play in it, their skin flushed as if they’d been out in the sun too long. A different kind of life, she must have thought.

  I let the blankets go and the nurse gives her crooked smile. When she starts to work again, her touch is faint enough, I can almost keep my eyes from tearing. It was more than a week ago when she first came, and I woke to find her in my chair. When I opened my eyes, she held up her hand as if to ward me off and she called me by my name.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t take to strangers. Especially the kind who make themselves at home.”

  “All right,” she answered, dropping her hand.

  “No it’s not all right. Not in my house.” The words caught in my throat, a fog over my eyes. I reached out to clear it, but the woman never went away.

  “So,” she said, looking around the room. Her nose twitched. She didn’t seem to know what to do with herself. “If that’s the way you’re going to be.” She clapped her hands and went off at once to my kitchen, marching back with a mop and duster under her arm. I have a small room in the front of this house. The bed takes up most of it. I’ve lined family photographs five deep in front of my dresser mirror, all facing my pillow. The nurse must have polished every frame, studying her face in the mirror as she did. Sometimes I found her studying me. When finally she left, the picture of Mary’s youngest stood alone out front, as if that child were one of ours. Years ago, I’d thought he was.

  My boy, I may tell you things that are difficult to know. I am not always proud. There are times in this life when a person suffers from the ways of others. And there are times when a person does a terrible wrong, if only because she can’t see through to anything else. I’ll try to remember what I can, but I fear I’m writing to ghosts. I used to believe I might find you. I wandered the streets of town hoping just that. This was harder to do once the town had grown. With all the houses on Main, we might be up to a few hundred now, if not more. I don’t know the use in so many of us living so close. And I don’t trust the way I can stand in the square and not smell the cattle, even when the wind is up. Fair and black-haired, I believed you must be, like your mother and grandfather both. The year you must have turned five, I saw just such a child in town, an ice cream cone in his hand. “Come now,” his mother scolded him. “It’s going to waste.” But that boy wouldn’t take a lick, and he ducked from his mother when she tried to take it from him. I know how it is, I wanted to say. Trying to save what you cherish as much as that. And there he was, holding on to that cone while the chocolate ran in rivers down his arm. There was nothing he could do but watch.

  I woke on that floor in a chill. The fire in the stove was close to dying, the room nearly black. I sat as if I’d always been sitting there. As if I’d been born in the place, feeling the break of that birth, the crying I must have done, and the shock of air against my skin. The animals sounded desperate in their stalls and I believed they would soon break out. They would be in the house soon, in the kitchen even. They would eat off me whatever they found.

  I drew myself up and leaned against the stove, layering in what wood I could reach. Soon it was warm and light in the kitchen, and I dropped rags on the floor to scrub up the mess with my foot. I swept the shards of plates far into the corner and picked up the one plate that hadn’t broken, darkly stained as it was and crusted now like my dress. Outside, footsteps crushed the gravel and I knew Frank had come. He would be wanting dinner. Something hot I could set out for him and take my place across the table, watch him eat while his day fell away.

  In the evenings after helping his cousin, Frank came home quiet. He didn’t much like the work at the mill. Still, we needed the pay and his cousin needed the extra man, if only two days a week. Often the sawdust so stung Frank’s eyes that he came home near to blind. He missed the way our farm grew. The sound of being called for. Every farmer I knew felt the same, Jack and all the rest, but Frank felt it more.

  I heard him then on the steps though I didn’t want to. I had nothing for him. When he walked through the door, he brought in another layer of mud. He lifted a chair from our table, eased himself into it. I laid out a knife and fork, gave him a cloth to wipe his mouth, a toothpick for his teeth. I hadn’t the time, you see. Not for any proper meal. I’d listened all day to the animals calling for food and my head was fevered. I held my stomach to rub away the cramps, felt I was rotting in my insides. Frank stared at the table before him, his eyes sore and lids heavy, close to sleep. The room was almost too dark for him to see. The animals too were quiet now and unforgiving. I laid the unbroken plate on the table and left him to his meal.

  Sitting on our bed, I thought about cleaning. My dress was sour, the skirt still damp and sticking to my legs. I tried to listen to him and wondered if Frank was a lonely man. I wondered if he worried about me. From the kitchen, he let out a shout and his chair fell. This life I loved, it’d given me nothing to keep. I was sick of myself, sick of my good husband who I knew should expect more of me. The curtain that made for the door between the kitchen and our bedroom trembled. Frank stood on the other side, looking in. “Eddie,” he whispered. Lying back, I knew I’d made a good mess of it. We are drowning, Frank, I thought. No children. Nothing for years.

  VI

  Mary

  (Summer 1920–Spring 1922)

  My youngest came easy in the end, though carrying him was difficult, with all the dreams and pain that I had. This was my last—I knew it then—I had reached the age to put such things behind. When he was free of me, I let myself drift, broken only by his cries and feeding, a sleep that must have lasted for days.

  I had seldom before so lost track of time, but in that sleep a certain shifting seemed natural, and any hold on the hour or day of the week has remained loose in me ever since. I could remember the warmth of my mother’s hand holding me when I was young and even the shape of it, blunted and thin and already veined. What a strange sort of skin we grow as we age, one tha
t never forgets a single gash or pinch or season out in the sun. My mother’s hand was worn along the knuckles, a nervous habit she had of rubbing them. My own had already grown swollen from scrubbing, my fingertips dull from playing my imagined piano along any stretch of wood. Every misstep, it makes its mark. I touched my son’s cheek and it felt as smooth and clean as an egg—whatever doubts and accidents would later trouble him did not reveal themselves, not yet.

  “Awake?” My husband crouched over me and I felt the darkness shift—even in his sleep, his size took up our bed, his shoulders and chest so heavy the mattress sank beneath his weight. At night the noise of his breathing grated on me, and when I closed my eyes the way the world seemed to tremble and dim seemed entirely his doing. When he eased himself against me, my stomach clenched. So soon?—my new boy was barely months in our bed. My husband raised himself up, the ache of his work releasing itself into me until my breath stirred, my hips rising as if remembering another life—it was another face I saw then, another skin, though I would not name it, could not let myself remember beyond a few weeks. My husband called my name, and when at last he burrowed his head into my neck, I brushed my fingers across his back, settling him.

  When next I woke, Jack was quiet in our bed. The absence of his heavy breathing had brought me back to our room. My new boy lay asleep at my side, Jack rested on the other, but when I opened my eyes, I found my husband raised on his elbow, his head cocked in his hand. In the silence, he studied the both of us as if we were strangers in his bed.

  That summer after I turned twelve, I went to the woods near my home nearly every afternoon to escape my mother’s house. In that small space surrounded by trees, I plucked the grass around my feet and made a level plot for a blanket. The space was no larger than two sheds put together, the sun reaching the grass for an hour or more just after noon, and one day I found a scattering of animal bones in the brush. The animal was long-limbed with a heavy skull, all but the bone eaten away. It was simple-looking enough, no more than a pile of sticks, and I imagined piecing it together again until the animal lay fixed and whole on the grass. Who ever thought the making of life was such a complicated thing? For months my mother had warned me about the wrong kinds of dresses, dancing with a boy’s hands on your hips, and the company I might keep, life leaping into me at a snap of a finger. “It happens easier than you suppose,” she said.