The Quickening Read online

  The chapel was quiet save for the piano as it hummed. The air stood on end, the congregation in their seats. Borden raised an arm to begin the prayer, but no one lifted a finger to their books. When I turned my head, Jack clapped his hands until the noise echoed in the hall. He was the only one. He stood in the pew and brought our sons to their feet, and in their fear of him they clapped as well as they could. Jack never did seem bothered by what was appropriate, and the congregation stared at him as if at a defiant child. But he was that large of a man, he could do what he wanted, and what he wanted was this—to be the one who made a fuss because he thought it was right, he thought his wife deserved it, and he wanted everyone to know that this wife was his. The others rose to their feet with the look of animals herded in their pens. Jack stood with his back straight, nothing like the beast who had kept himself hidden for so long. Here was my husband, the same man I had found outside the store with that terrible voice ringing out. I choose him, I thought—after all these years, after three sons and my fingers wearied from the work—I choose him, and I would, again and again.

  It was the height of summer later that year when my husband gripped my shoulders where I worked in the garden and told me to sit.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Not telling.”

  “But it’s dirt here. I’m just about covered, and you know this seed won’t hold another week …”

  He put a finger to my lips. “Stand then,” he answered, and from his pocket he took a bright handkerchief and covered my eyes, tying a knot at the back of my head. “For being the most difficult woman I’ve ever met, that’s what for,” and when he closed his hand over mine, it pinched. “Don’t you look. I warn you.” He led me up the steps to our house, so quickly I almost fell, and stood me in the doorway to our parlor—in that room, I heard a boy laugh out loud and then another, boys I knew.

  Jack undid the knot behind my ears. “Look.”

  My eldest sons pressed close together with Kyle caught between them, a blanket raised behind their heads and the end draping the floor. They dropped the blanket with a flourish and only then did I know why they were laughing—in our living room stood a piano, one of my very own. It was a solid oak upright, newly polished, with pink ribbons tied around the legs and a large bow on top.

  “What’s this?” I gasped.

  My sons ran to the instrument and tore open the lid, banging at the keys. The ribbons fell and tore under their feet, and they pushed at one another on the piano bench.

  “Boys,” I called out.

  “This is for you,” Jack said. He said it so loudly the boys stopped as if struck and slipped from the bench, trying to set the ribbons right. Jack put his arm around my shoulder and pressed his lips to my ear. “This is to keep you home,” he said.

  • • •

  Over the next few months, I practiced every afternoon until I almost forgot there was planting to do and bread to bake. But no matter how often I played, I could not return to that feeling I had found in the chapel. Outside, the spring became summer and summer turned to fall, the rain bringing the cold again—for a week now it had driven so hard I could barely hear the notes under my hands. When someone knocked on our door, I stopped my playing and listened—the knock came again.

  “Eddie?”

  Enidina stood on our steps, spitting rain. When I reached for her arm, she stayed as heavy on that step as a stone.

  “I heard you play,” she said. “I forgot about that. Is it all right?”

  I looked her over—such a strange way she stood, crouching beneath the weather with her red hair dark and slicked back from her forehead, her skirt heavy against her thighs. She kept her arms bound about her waist, moving like a ship. All those years with my walks across their fields, she had rarely come to our own. “Such a house,” she said, stepping in. “I’m always surprised by how big it is.” But it was not the house that worried her—it was something she had carried in with her, her hands cupped against her stomach as if nestling a sick bird.

  In the parlor, I motioned her to a chair, but she sat herself at my piano bench. “I never learned to play,” she said, her eyes on the keyboard. “My mother did.” When she touched the keys, the sound stung.

  “Your mother?”

  “She wanted to teach me. But milking makes your fingers rough. I didn’t have the hands for it.”

  “You had a piano growing up?”

  She stood from the bench without a word and walked to the other end of the room, scooping up a small piece of knitting on the table and dropping it at once.

  “Jack got me that piano,” I said. “Next time you hear me at church …”

  “Next time?”

  “I’ll sound like Brahms. That’s why Jack got me the piano. For practice.”

  But Enidina was no longer listening. She had circled back around, wandering the room like a child, fingering doilies and bits of paper, her cheeks heated and her hands rubbing at her spine. I thought of her slogging all that way through the weather—she had not worn a coat, not even a hat to keep the wet from her eyes. “Mary,” she said at last. “I felt something.” She slumped on my bench again and spread her fingers over her stomach. “Sometimes you wish for something so hard you think it’s true, and maybe I’m just wishing. Maybe I didn’t feel anything at all.”

  She looked up at me then, her eyes shining. “There,” she said, pressing her stomach. “I felt it in the house and came over as fast as I could.” She bit her lip, but I knew she would never ask anything from me outright.

  I stood next to her and reached out my hand, her fingers parting from her waist as she drew in her chin. Her stomach felt heavy and thick, the dress she wore too rough, but underneath, her skin was taut as a balloon. When I pressed my palm down, her breath rushed and I could smell the rain on her. Underneath, her heart beat through her skin and the skin jumped, the hard bone of a child’s elbow or knee in its womb—there it was. Enidina sat on that bench like a queen. She seemed as large as a house, as large as the weather coming down—she took up everything.

  “Eddie,” I said.

  Enidina sank back in a sweat. I should have known with the way she came into this house, as if walking on glass.

  “Sometimes you wish,” she said.

  “For heaven’s sakes, Eddie. This isn’t your first time. How long has it been?”

  She sagged on that bench as if sleepy, though her face held a powerful light.

  “This is more than wishing,” I said. “You shouldn’t be out in such weather. Not in your condition. You know you never should.” I thought of the rain from all those years before and the afternoon I had sat alone with Frank as he slept—he was little more than a stranger and there I was, miles of mud and wind our only company. Back then, I believed if I touched his skin it might have already grown cold, and then I would carry that coldness home with me, I would bring it into the very rooms where I cooked our food and laid our sheets, and even my husband’s heat could never undo such a touch. “Be careful,” I said to her, if only to fill the silence, but as I said it, I knew I wanted it to be true—what would she become if she lost another child?

  Enidina shivered, her clothes soaked through to the skin. When I tried to speak to her, she took to her feet. “It’s good of you,” she said and swayed where she stood, her stomach in her hands. The front of her skirt was stained with wet, different from the rain, and a puddle ran from between her legs.

  It was hours before Jack and the boys would return from the auction house in the next county, and now I realized that Frank must have gone with them—that was why Enidina was alone in her house and why she had come to our own. There was no one else for miles. She fell against the bench again and rocked in a daze. I tried to lift her, but she was far too heavy, and we slid to the floor. “Eddie?” I said, shaking her. “You’ve got to help me. At least try.”

  “Mama?” My youngest stood at the top of the stairwell, rubbing sleep from his eyes, the hair wild on his head.

&nbs
p; “Stay upstairs, do you hear, Kyle?”

  But already he was running down the steps, his bare feet slapping the wood. When he reached the parlor, he clung to the door and stared.

  “She’s having trouble, Kyle. That’s all. Nothing to worry about.”

  Tugging at the corner of his mouth, Kyle padded to my side and rested his hand on my arm, but when Enidina groaned, he jumped. “I’m going to need your help, Kyle. I have to get her upstairs and I want you to run to the kitchen. Fill a bowl of water from the pump. Be sure it’s clean and get some clean cloths. Stand on a chair if you have to. It’s all right.”

  He scampered down the hall, and I eased Enidina up until she was sitting. “Come now, Eddie. Can’t you stand?” She sweated and heaved as she lifted herself up.

  “I should get on home,” she whispered. “I can do fine. It won’t be for a while.” But I was not so sure about that, leaning on me as she did while I took her up the stairs. I marveled at my son, clattering about in the kitchen beneath us and the weight of that bowl as he carried it up. I put Enidina in bed and she smiled at me before wincing again. When Kyle came in, his eyes were wide, his arms straining, but he carried that bowl better than I would have expected—he did so without complaint or question, just as I had asked.

  Enidina cried out and I lifted her higher on the pillows behind her back. Kyle set the bowl at my side and stood on his toes to see. “Take that other cloth and wipe her forehead with it,” I said. “We need to keep her cool, just like I do when you’re sick.”

  Kyle pressed the cloth to her forehead and Enidina opened her eyes. His hand brushed her hair and he hushed her like I often did with him, singing at the back of his throat as if trying to sing her to sleep. Enidina quieted. “Well aren’t you a sweet boy?” she said. “Aren’t you the one?”

  “Don’t look now,” I told him and lifted her skirts to wash her legs—Enidina cringed at the touch. When I pulled the cloth away, it was heavy with blood.

  “I don’t want to lose this one, Mary,” she said under her breath, her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Kyle,” I started, trying to keep my voice steady, and the boy came to my side. “I want you to do something. Something you’ve done before, but not alone. Do you think you can?”

  Kyle gazed at me in his sleepiness, his shirt twisted around his belly and arms. I pulled him out of the room. “Get your shoes and coat and run to town,” I whispered to him. “As fast as you can. Don’t stop for anyone, you hear? When you reach the market, I want you to ask for Dr. Stephens and they’ll take you to him. He’s got to come fast.” I pushed the boy down the hall, squeezing his shoulder before he went. He slid across the floor, his arms raised from his sides as if trying to keep balance. Leaning against the wall and sick to my stomach, I pressed my nails into the soft underside of my hand until my dizziness was gone.

  “I like that one,” Enidina said when I came back, the air in the room already sour. “He can stay here if he wants. He doesn’t have to keep out.”

  “Kyle’s not like his brothers,” I offered. “Not at all.”

  “No,” she said. The front door opened and shut and I listened for my son’s footsteps in the yard. The rain had ended—it would be light for another hour or more and warm enough. It was quiet then and we stayed together, Enidina breathing and me willing Kyle down the road as fast as I could without trouble, without so much as a scab on his knee should he fall.

  “Kyle was always different,” I said after a time. I thought about this room I had laid her in, how I had birthed my oldest boys in this same bed, with only the coarse hand of my husband for comfort and a midwife at the end—I never would have imagined so much blood. In little more than a month, those boys clutched my skin so fiercely that I could only think, let go.

  “I waited too long,” Enidina said under her breath. “I should have come right over. It was hours ago, just when I woke. I thought I was imagining.”

  “Don’t you worry about that now,” I answered. Down the road, I believed I could hear my youngest scraping his feet over the mud, his heart beating beneath his shirt. When I was pregnant with him, I dreamt such terrible dreams. Walking to his crib in my sleep, I would pull back the blankets, and there was no child but only a part of one, squirming on its back without arms or legs or a head to let it cry, but cry it did all the same—I could hear it again now, that same muffled wailing, and I imagined him fallen in a ditch or worse.

  “Thank you,” Enidina said.

  “For what?”

  “For trying. Even if I lose it.”

  “None of that. I’ve known women who’ve had it worse. For myself, I thought I’d lose every one, and I only had Jack.”

  “Three of them,” Enidina said. “I don’t know how you did it.”

  “You keep them living, that’s all. And when you get to sleep, you’re so tired you can’t even think.” Enidina had seen only the birth of animals—from the sickened look on her face, I knew it—the nights in the barn with only the light of a lantern, and the hot smell of the cow bellowing, men rolling up their sleeves in case they needed to pull the calf out.

  “I can’t imagine even one,” she said.

  “You will.”

  “All I’m saying …”

  “Listen, there’s no use talking like that.”

  “All the same.”

  I told her how fast my oldest boys had grown and how wild they were, how I used to watch them play in our yard, a stick in hand, always beating at the ground. The day my eldest turned nine, they left a rabbit close to dead on the front porch and asked if I could cure or cook it—as if they never knew the difference. I pressed the rabbit against my chest and pushed my fingers into the fur—such a soft thing, and just above its belly, its heart beat like a bird’s. My sons stared up at me with a look of wonder, and the rabbit’s eyes blackened as I held it close. From the day Kyle was born, I knew he was different from my eldest two, but Kyle was the one I had to send off. Watch it, I would say. Be gentle. I coaxed his brothers to stroke a cow’s hide as if it were silk, but their fingers gnarled the fur, and there they went, running off like bandits through the fields while the poor beast was stricken with knots, too nervous to let a small hand touch its side again.

  Enidina closed her eyes and a contraction ran through her, her hands on her hips as if trying to hold it back. Over the fields the wind pitched and fell, and I squinted to hear any other sound.

  “You did your best,” Enidina said at last. I hushed her and stood. Not far down the road, gravel scattered and a heavy motor ground its way toward the house. The sound came again, louder this time, and the motor stopped. I ran to the window and looked out—in the growing darkness, my son was not even shivering as he walked up the drive, looking taller than his five years and somehow having lost the stumble in his legs. He pulled the doctor by the arm, the man in a dark coat with his head down beneath the weather, drops of rain spilling from his wide-brimmed hat. The downpour had started again through the mist, the doctor’s car smoking like some hot-blooded creature behind them. With his chin high and his face streaming with wet, my son walked along as if he had birthed Enidina’s child himself, as if he had washed and swaddled it and already named the child his own, and when he opened the door of our house, he led the doctor up the stairs and down the hall to us, all the while telling the man how she was.

  I did not see Enidina again for weeks, not until they let her come home for good. Twins, they said—such was her luck. They were small and weak and stayed with the doctor for longer than any mother should bear. Enidina sat with Frank in the back row of the church, holding on to herself. Her cheeks were doughy and full, her mouth showed hints of a smile, but in her eyes was an inward look that said she was trying not to think of anything at all—not of how she could lose them, not of how something might still go wrong. She sat in the church and held her own, wishing the time would soon pass for any such thinking to be possible.

  “Best stay home after this,” I told her.

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p; Enidina relaxed into her seat, and that inwardness in her eyes lifted. “I’ll stay home when I’m ready,” she said, without a hint of bitterness. She took my hand and squeezed it in both her own until my knuckles cracked.

  In the months to come, I would see her holding her new boy and girl in that back pew, one in each arm. They had Frank’s black hair, but otherwise looked as different as their own parents—the girl thin and fair-skinned like her father and the boy a meaty bundle with Enidina’s powerful limbs. Who would have known Enidina could be a mother to so much? She held on to those twins as if keeping the world upright, and when they grew to stand and fret at her feet, her hands kept them close. There was something in Enidina’s strength and stubbornness, in her very size—with her tight hold on those children, she alone seemed to be holding off the terrible events that were to come to us.

  This was the day of my youngest’s baptism and the first Sunday we did not trek off to the lake to have it done. At the front of the chapel hung a velvet curtain with a small room behind it and a pool waist deep, as wide as three bathtubs. Jack and I stood in the front pew with Kyle between us while Borden read the prayers. Jack had worn a suit for the occasion, his only one. He tugged at the throat and stood his full height, nodding along with Borden’s words as if they meant something to him—maybe they did. For such a man, I knew words had never carried much weight. If anything, that was the difference between them—Borden with his books, and Jack fighting to count, to speak, stumbling until he used a fist instead.