by David Bergen
Lily held Mrs. Gerbrandt’s elbows and looked her directly in the eyes and said, “I am no different than before. There is no tribulation.”
The elders paid Lily a visit on a Sunday afternoon. They spoke to her of her duties as a wife and as a member of the church, which was the bride of Christ. They read Bible verses to her and they prayed with her. They did not ask for permission, they just said that they would now pray, and they did. She kept her eyes open as they prayed and she looked at their hands and their bearded faces and she looked at their black shoes, which needed polishing, and she studied their slacks and their pressed shirts with no ties, and she found that she was cold and indifferent.
Rumours arrived that Lily Gerbrandt, née Isaac, would be excommunicated from the Brethren Church. And then one day the rumours came true, and the elders again arrived and told her that because she was no longer attending church, and because she was reading secular novels, and because she was acting out of rebellious pride, she would be dismissed from the church. She would no longer be allowed to eat with her husband, and she would no longer be allowed intimacies with her husband. If she should repent of her sins she would be allowed back into the church. Until that time, all rules of excommunication would apply.
When the men were done talking she asked them if Johan was in agreement. They said that they had spoken with Johan and he was aware. She was ashamed, for she had thought that Johan would be against this type of meeting, and these kinds of words. She lifted her head and said that she had done nothing wrong. There was nothing to repent.
The last word was left to one of the men, a younger fellow called Raymond, with a sparse beard and very red lips who when he spoke spit out his words as if those same words had left a bad taste in his mouth. He said that pride was the ultimate sin, and that she, Lily, suffered from a vast and unholy pride that would be her downfall. And then the men left.
That night she made homemade noodles and farmer sausage and she made Johan’s favourite gravy, drippings of the sausage mixed with heavy cream, and she boiled carrots and added butter and brown sugar. When Johan came in, he looked at the table and the two settings, and he went into the mud room and came back with a smaller table and he set that table next to the kitchen table, making sure that the tables were not touching. One for him, the other for her. He ate in silence. She did not. She talked about her shame, not for herself, but for the two of them, and she said that nothing should come between them, not even the church. He did not respond. He finished eating and he rose and went upstairs. She cleaned up and did the dishes and when she climbed the stairs to go to bed, she saw that Johan had made for her a bed in one of the empty bedrooms. He had put on clean sheets, and there was a clean down comforter, and two pillows, and there were towels laid out at the foot of the bed, and she was aware that he had never before made a bed or put on sheets or smoothed a comforter. He did not do domestic things. And yet, here he was, tenderly preparing a bed for her, and it was as if she were a guest in her own house.
She was lonely. Her mother and father were required to stop talking to her, and the only way they communicated was through Marcie’s mother, Aunt Dolores, who, because she was not a member of the church, was allowed full access to the shunned Lily. Aunt Dolores arrived one day with a bag of Liquorice All Sorts, and they sat in the kitchen that no longer felt like Lily’s kitchen and they drank tea and ate the sweets and Aunt Dolores said that Lily’s mother still loved her, and even though they could not speak, she spoke to her in her head all the time. “Your mother said that you should straighten your ways, Lily. She said that you have a stubborn heart. That your head is wobbly.”
“Ha,” Lily said. “That is the thistle calling the dandelion a weed.”
Aunt Dolores smiled.
“What do you think, Aunt Dolores?” Lily asked.
Her aunt sighed. She said that it was all very sad, and that there were too many rules, and the rules had replaced any semblance of love.
Lily heard the word semblance, and this revived her for some reason, as if a single word could lift her up.
Aunt Dolores said, “Marcie, by the way, thinks that you should leave. I told her that it was impossible. What would you do? Where would you go? She said that you could live with her, in the city. I said that you wouldn’t. I said that you were married.”
Lily said that she wasn’t allowed to eat with Johan. Or to speak to him. Nor were they allowed to sleep together.
“He’s a man. I can’t imagine him lasting very long,” Aunt Dolores said, and laughed, as if the ways of men and boys were simple and straightforward.
Lily said that Johan was incredibly stubborn. And that he could be mean in his withholding. And that his mother and sisters were equally stingy and mean, and wouldn’t even look at her, let alone talk. To all of this Aunt Dolores said little. She simply sighed and said that it was all too mad.
And then one evening at supper Johan spoke to her. It was the first time in weeks, and when she heard his voice she trembled and tears came to her eyes and she thought that it was over. But it wasn’t. He simply announced that she wasn’t to use the pickup or the Camaro. They were no longer hers to drive. She asked how she would get milk and groceries from town. He said that his mother would buy the groceries. He said that if she needed something, anything, she should write a list and leave it on the kitchen counter and he would pass it on to his mother.
She was mute.
And then she asked if he missed her. “I miss you,” she said.
He shook his head and said that the talking was done.
She said that he might be done talking, but she wasn’t. And she said that she had married him because she loved him. She still loved him. She missed him. She said that she missed having sex with him. She used the word sex and she saw that he lifted his head to look at her and then he turned away. She said that the church was wrong to come between them. “That is not the way of love,” she said. “That is not the way of kindness. This is the way of darkness.”
He said that it was she who had chosen the darkness. It was she who had sinned. He had simply wanted to be with her in a normal way, as his mother and father had lived, as her mother and father had lived. He had no longings. No wishes. No desires but the simple and plain ones he had been raised with. “It is you who wants more. Not me.”
She did not answer for a long time. And then she said, “But what if there is more? What if this life here, our life, is only half a life?”
“It isn’t. It is a full and correct life. And this is your sin, not mine.”
She said his name then, and reached for his hand, and he let her hold it.
That night, she moved from her own bed in the guest room and crawled into Johan’s bed, the bed that used to be both of theirs. He woke. He asked what she was doing. She was naked and she let him know this. He did not speak, and when she touched him he turned towards her and pushed his hands up along her ears so that his fingers were tangled in her hair. He moaned and said that this was wrong. And then they had love. She slept with him that night, throwing her leg over his hot body and clamping him to the bed. They had love again in the morning. She talked to him at breakfast. And he talked back. They laughed together. They were laughing and talking when his mother walked into the kitchen. When he saw her he went silent. His mother turned and left the house.
For supper she made beef borscht and angel biscuits and a gingerbread cake for dessert that she would serve with whipping cream. When he came in from the barn he washed his hands at the kitchen sink and dried them with a tea towel and he sat down. When she sat down across from him he got up and moved to the second table. She asked him how his day was but he did not answer. She knew that his fierce and formidable mother had spoken to him. Lily, in order to match that fierceness, ignored Johan’s silence and she talked about her day, of which there was little to say, but regardless, she still talked. She said that she had used the last of the ground beef
from the freezer, and they would have to buy more. She said that the potatoes in the cellar were growing eyes and those at the bottom of the barrel were beginning to rot. She said that she would clean the barrel tomorrow and assess their stores. She said that it was fortunate that she had frozen the fresh dill in fall, so that now she could just dip into the freezer for what was the closest thing to fresh dill. The parsley she’d used was dried, however, as all the fresh frozen parsley had been used up. She said that she needed new underwear, and she didn’t think that his mother would want to buy her dainty things. She said that she had enjoyed being with him the night before. “I was so happy,” she said. “And you were too. I could tell.” To all of this, he did not respond. He ate his soup, and he squeezed Roger’s Golden Syrup over his steaming biscuits, and he drank a tall glass of milk in one go and poured another. She did not touch her own food. She simply talked and watched him, and she knew that he was listening.
It became a habit of theirs that at meals he would eat and she would talk. He never told her to stop talking, but neither did he respond or open his mouth to speak. She had moved beyond talking about the practicalities of the house, the objects in the fridge, her daily life, to talking about emotions. She said that she felt invisible. “I know that I’m not supposed to feel anything, but I am very lonely. At least I think I am lonely. It is in my chest.” And she moved her hand towards her chest and then away again. She said that even now she was lonely, even though she was talking. She was young. Too young to be so sad and alone. And it was on that day, in the late afternoon when he had come in for his nap on the couch, that she introduced death. She told him about an eight-month-old child who had crawled out the door one summer evening and made his way out to the pasture and was lost to the family. Presumed dead. She said that the family hunted high and low. The mother spent her nights weeping. The father was heartbroken and avoided the mother of the child, whom he blamed for leaving the door open. But, in fact, it had been the father who had left the door ajar. This the mother knew, but she said nothing to contradict the father. The loss of the child moved through their lives. The father, whose name was Frank, in his grief suggested another child. The mother was horrified. So soon. So soon. But Frank insisted, and so they set about to create another child. The mother’s heart was abject and because her heart was abject her body rebelled. It spurned pregnancy.
But the child was not dead. It had been lucky enough to be picked up by a passing wolf and was carried back to the lair and raised by the wolf, a female, and her male partner. Five years passed. Litters came and went. The child walked about on all fours. It loped like a wolf. It spoke wolf language. It ate raw meat. The child, of school age now, was discovered by a farmer out hunting, who killed the mother wolf and scooped up the child. The child, who spoke only wolf language, and knew only the ways of a wolf, and was a meat eater through and through, was returned to the family, who had to lock the boy up at night because he was feral and dangerous. The boy couldn’t speak, he had no words, he just grunted. Even so, she said, the family was happy to have him back.
She stopped talking. Then she said that Johan must be tired. She said she was planning on making noodle casserole and corn on the cob and boiled beets for supper.
That night she heard him moving about in his room, and then to the bathroom, where he ran water for the longest time, and then back to his room. She heard him climb into bed. He sighed. He was already old, or acted old, and therefore seemed older than he was. She missed him. She picked up a book and she opened it. The lamplight was yellow and the words wavered and bent. The story was an old one, given to her by Aunt Dolores, who had little sense of taste, but threw novels at Lily like a lifeline. Here, and here, and here. And she snatched at them, and clung to them, and if the lives of the people she read about were harder and more dire and more desperate and sadder than her own, this did not make her happier, and it did not bring about any release, for she was buried deep beneath the soil of her upbringing, and it would take more than words to extract her.
She did not know that she was pregnant until she lost the baby. Six months earlier, when she and Johan had still been sharing a bed, she had missed a period and she had been sure that she was pregnant, and then her period resumed and she was relieved that she hadn’t said anything to Johan. This time she had gone two months without a period, but she hadn’t been with Johan, except for that one time, and so she assumed that pregnancy was impossible. Only in hindsight did she recall her mood swings—extreme happiness, and then extreme sadness. Or the thickness in her body—thinking she was losing her shape, she had tried to eat less, but often woke at night ravenous and climbed downstairs to pour milk over a large bowl of cereal and when she had finished, eat toast.
One evening, as she was peeling potatoes and dropping them whole into the pot of cold water on the counter, she felt a pain in her lower back and then it went away and came again, except this time it was very sharp and lasted a long time, and so she bent over, holding the paring knife in her hand. When the pain was gone she saw blood on the floor between her feet, and she lifted her dress right there in the kitchen and pulled down her underwear and she saw that she was a mess. She went to the bathroom and she locked the door and removed her dress and underwear and she sat on the toilet and she hemorrhaged. She was weak from loss of blood, and she had difficulty standing. She knew by now that she had probably been pregnant, and when she stood she looked down into the toilet bowl, fearful of what she would see, but all she saw was blood and clots of other matter. She managed to wrap a towel between her legs, and she washed herself, and then took the blood-soaked towel and placed it in a garbage bag, and she stuck a clean smaller towel between her legs and fetched some large underwear that would keep the towel in place, and she put on a larger dress, clean as well, and she stuffed the soiled dress and underwear into the garbage bag that held the bloody towel and she tucked the garbage bag under a shelf to be dealt with later. She sat in the kitchen for a long time, at the table, her head in her hands. She could still smell the blood and she wondered if Johan might smell it as well when he came in for supper. She rose and cut the potatoes and put them on to boil, and she checked the chicken roasting in the oven, and she opened a tin of corn, and cut some tomatoes and laid them on a plate. Throughout all of this she felt faint and had to sit down several times.
At supper, it was quiet as usual. She would normally have talked, have described her day for Johan, and talked about her thoughts and musings, but tonight she had nothing to say, for she didn’t have any words to say about what had happened to her, and any other topic would have been an abhorrence. She was afraid. Johan ate stoically and glanced up at her now and then, as if surprised by her silence, as if he indeed missed her voice, but he said nothing, for that was his duty, and when he was done, he pushed back from the table and went into the living room and lay down on the couch.
She cleaned up, shuffling from the table to the sink with the dirty dishes, the towel rubbing between her legs. She deboned the chicken and threw the carcass into a Dutch oven and added celery and onions and a bay leaf and salt and pepper, and then she filled the pot with water and set it to boil. This would be soup stock. She felt weak and had to sit briefly. When she rose again, she went to the bathroom and locked the door and lifted her dress and checked the towel between her legs. The blood had eased, but this towel was ruined as well, and she stuffed it into the garbage bag and found a newer and smaller and less cumbersome towel and she placed it between her legs and pulled up her underwear and dropped her dress and went out into the kitchen to finish the dishes.
Later that evening she built a bonfire in the drum in the yard out back and when it was burning hotly she fetched the garbage bag from the bathroom and she dragged it out to the fire and she threw the towels one by one onto the fire where they were slowly consumed. Her underwear and dress went last, and these caught quickly and flared and then disappeared. When she turned from the fire she looked back at the house a
nd saw that Johan had been watching her from the kitchen window. When she came into the house, she heard him upstairs, and she did not see him again until the morning, when he came down for breakfast.
