Sweet Hush

by Deborah Smith

“That you use it as seed money to start the Farmers Bank of Chocinaw County, again. Because money grows money, and I want to keep all the seeds right here where they have the best chance of helping people I care about.”

  After a moment spent just studying me, the man nodded. “I do believe I’d be a fool not to agree.”

  And we shook on it.

  DAVY AND I WERE pruning dead branches in the orchard that winter when he fell off an icy ladder and knocked himself out. When he came to I pressed my fingers to the bloody cut on the back of his head. “How much beer did you drink before you came here?” I demanded.

  He laughed. “Not enough to make me bounce, dammit.”

  I guided him to the house, letting my guard down, breaking another of the rules I’d sworn to Mama I’d keep: Never let Davy Thackery get you alone indoors. Smooch had taken Logan to her grandmother’s for the afternoon. The weather that day was cool and rainy and ripe, smelling of an early spring when animals would begin to breed and the bees to seek the eager, damp blooms of my trees. I was well aware that Mother Nature encouraged mating and survival above all else. “Open a window and let me smell some of that fresh rain to get my wits back,” Davy groaned dramatically as he stretched out atop the old quilts of my parents’ creaking double bed.

  I flung the window open and let cold air rush over me like protection. “Don’t bleed on my mama’s good pillow.” I tucked a towel under his head then sat on the edge of the bed and studied him with more sympathy than I’d admit. He was dirty, damp, and bedraggled, like me. “Got any beer?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Mind if I smoke me a joint?”

  “Yes.”

  He groaned. “Then I’ll just have to lie here in the most terrible pain and hope your sweetness eases the misery.”

  “I doubt it.” But I tenderly wiped his hands and face with a warm, damp washcloth. He grew quiet and watched me through slitted eyes. “You’re too good to me,” he whispered. “I mean it.”

  “Because I’ll never be able to pay back all you’ve done to help me.”

  “I don’t need any pay.” A lie if I ever heard one, but effective. He clasped my hands at the wrists, smoothed his fingers down my palms, and held my hands atop his chest. I shivered. Everything seemed gray and miserable except the heat of his hands. He gently tugged me toward him. “Poor sweet Hush. Tired. Cold. Worried. Com’ere. Just put your head on my shoulder and I’ll put my arms around you. That’s all. I swear it.”

  I knew better, but I was so alone, except for him, and he was so warm. I leaned over, still sitting on the edge of the bed, and rested my head in the cusp of his hard, lean shoulder. He had the strongest arms. When he held me up close to his chest and flipped one side of the bed quilt over the two of us I couldn’t help sighing at the cocoon of solid comfort the quilt made in league with his hug. When he stroked my hair and my back through my shirt, it felt too good to complain. When he slid his fingertips under the waistband of my dirty jeans and caressed the soft skin near my navel, I began to grow damp and warm and relaxed.

  “I love you,” I whispered.

  “I love you more,” he whispered back.

  And I was lost.

  A few hours later, with him asleep among splotches of semen and blood on the white cotton sheets my mother and father had shared, I dressed and staggered out of the bedroom in the cold twilight. I made my way downstairs on womanly legs, fixed a pot of coffee, and sat on the edge of the back porch clutching an old ceramic mug so hot it burned my fingertips. The gray winter mountains faded behind silver mists and deep, blue-purple shadows. The orchards made a melting watercolor of naked gray trees. I shook until my teeth chattered.

  I was a smart girl; I told myself I wouldn’t make any mistakes. In the fall, I’d start college. Davy, who had barely finished high school, would keep working for me. I’d keep sleeping with him. I loved him, and he loved me. I did like going to bed with him. He made me forget every fear, every worry, every chore.

  I goaded him into using condoms. I was also strict about attempting to calculate the fertile days of my cycles. I would only have sex with him at certain times of the month. He laughed and said I had crazy mountain ways, but in fact I’d driven the farm’s old pick-up truck down to a big bookstore in Atlanta and bought some kind of feminist-earth-mother book on natural birth control, which was all I could afford as a back-up for the condoms. I douched with herbal concoctions and parceled out my non-ovulating days to Davy as best I could figure them.

  But Davy was potent, and I was careless in love.

  That spring, when I realized I was pregnant, I sank to my knees under the branches of the Great Lady and shook my fists at her. “Why? Why give me more responsibility to handle? What did I do to deserve this punishment? I give you everything, but you give back nothing but another baby to raise! I’ve already got my brother to take care of! I don’t need or want another youngun’.”

  I cursed my own unborn child, sat thinking about ways to pay for an abortion, then dully admitted I didn’t have the courage to risk the hellfire preached by every mountain minister who’d ever pointed a finger at evil women. But I’d already thought the thought and wished it. I raised my face to the apple tree and the blue spring mountains. “So kill me and send me straight to hell!” Nothing happened. No lightning bolt struck me, no rush of wind indicated the hot breath of unhappy angels, nothing. I stretched out on the grassy spring earth and beat the dirt and sobbed.

  Davy found me there. White-faced but clueless, he crouched beside me. “What’s wrong, Hon, what’s wrong?” I sat up, wiping tears and dirt from my face, going as cold as the spring ground. “I’ve let you knock me up, that’s what.”

  I’ll never forget the look that came on his face—hopeful, scared, but then excited, as if I’d promised him a faster car or a six-pack. “We’re gonna have a kid!” He tried to pull me to him. “You’re gonna have my baby!”

  “I’ll lose the farm over this. Judge Redman will take it away from me. He’ll say I’m irresponsible. And he’ll be right.”

  “No. I’ll marry you! Don’t you understand? I love you! You love me! It’s okay!”

  That was true, but it was dull comfort that day. I finally let him pull me close and held onto him desperately. How could I love him but be so miserable? “You’re happy to have our baby. Admit it,” he urged. “You’re really happy.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  I hugged him but felt nothing growing inside my belly except that lie. Say goodbye to college. I put my face against his shoulder and moaned. I’d spend the rest of my teens sitting at the kitchen table like my own mama, young but worn out, with a baby nursing at my breast and no place to go but outdoors to pick apples.

  The old tree spoke to me.

  Even the finest fruit isn’t always easy to bear.

  I SCHEDULED MY marriage to Euell Davis Thackery at the county courthouse on a cold spring Monday without inviting anyone except Smooch, two old-lady McGillen cousins who thought I could do no wrong, and Davy’s kind, half-crazy Great Uncle Henry Thackery, a World War II veteran with scars, inside and out. Smooch was thrilled to serve as my maid of honor. “Oh, you and me will be sisters, now!” she cried. “I won’t feel so alone in the world!”

  Davy wore a new blue suit, smiled constantly, told everyone he was about to burst with excitement, but watched me with a worried look in his eyes. I think he always suspected I was sorry to be there. He just didn’t want to admit it, yet.

  I put on a white skirt and stern white blazer and insisted I was happy, too, at least in public. We went to Judge Redman’s chambers for the ceremony. He shooed Davy out and shut the door. “Have you lost your mind, Miss Hush? He’s ten cents’ worth of value in a two-dollar bag. He’s puttin’ on a mighty good of show of respectability for you, and I don’t doubt he’d walk over hot coals for you, but I wouldn’t pla
ce any bets on his long term prospects. I can only surmise that you don’t mind that he smokes dope and guzzles beer and sneaks over to the dirt track to fight with no-accounts and race old beat-up jalopies?” The judge paused. “And dare I mention,” he finished gently, “that he is a good-looking boy who never tries very hard to look the other way when girls look back?”

  I hid my trembling hands behind a homemade bouquet of bright yellow jonquils. Jonquils bloomed even with frost on their petals. So would I. “People like to gossip, and he is the best-looking boy in the county, and that naturally makes people envious—”

  “Hush, you only have one rotten apple in your personal barrel, and he’s it.”

  “He’s always there to help me and always has been. There’s nothing rotten about that.”

  “Will he support you while you go to college?”

  “I’ve decided to put college off a year or two. Concentrate on the farm.”

  He squinted at me. “Miss Hush, I have two granddaughters your age, thus I’m not a complete dunce when it comes to the evasive answers and dumb shenanigans of the current generation. So just let me put this bluntly: Are you carrying Davy Thackery’s apple pie in your oven?”

  I sagged. “Yes, I am, Your Honor.”

  “Oh, my lord.” He bowed his head as if in sorrowful prayer, then sighed and wiggled bushy white brows angrily. “I should’ve made staying away from Davy Thackery a condition of your keeping the farm.”

  “No, Your Honor. I chose him, and that’s that. He’ll do right by me, and I’ll do right by him.”

  “Hush, you can’t make an honest man out of Davy Thackery just by marrying him.”

  “I’m marrying him because I love him And I’m no fool. Yes, he’s the father of my baby. I realize that girls are having babies without getting married these days. Free love and all that. But I’m not playing by those rules. I’ll do what’s right for my good name. So. Me marrying Davy ought to take care of any questions about my sense of responsibility and my ability to manage the farm like a grown woman.” I said no more and waited stiffly, terrified he’d argue some more. Everything he’d already said about Davy swarmed in the back of my mind like angry bees I couldn’t tame.

  He sighed. “I’m not gonna take the farm away from you, Miss Hush. You’re gonna have enough troubles without me addin’ to them. Pride is your downfall, I fear.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  He shook his head. “Nothing to be thankful for.”

  Fifteen minutes later, thankful or not, I married Davy.

  I WAS FIVE MONTHS pregnant that August, starting to look as if I’d swallowed a bowling ball, and sucking on Sweet Hush apple slices soaked in saltwater to fight morning sickness that lasted about twenty-four hours a day. I sweated through that summer in cheap t-shirts and baggy shorts I bought at the Chocinaw County Flea Market And Movie Drive In. Most everything and everybody in Chocinaw County served at least two purposes, out of necessity and practical mountain ideals. The old drive-in theater showed movies every Friday night, mostly Disney films, since everything else broadcast curse words or sex scenes too far for public decency outdoors. But on the weekends, the owner rented ten-dollar flea-market booths—meaning you got a pair of folding tables in a space that fit inside a parking spot. I hung my SWEET HUSH FARMS sign on a speaker post, then sold apple jam and apple baked goods. I also bartered those apple products for baby clothes and a crib. The whole county knew I was pregnant by then.

  And then I found out about Davy’s girl.

  I cornered her behind the drive-in’s concrete block concession stand one Sunday evening when nearly everyone else had already packed up their flea-market wares and gone home. I tracked her and the scent of her fake designer perfume like a coon dog as she sashayed along in the hot dusk filtered by a yellow security light. Moths and small bats swirled above us, dipping so low I swore a bat or two aimed for her Farrah Fawcett haircut. Farrah was falling from favor in Hollywood by then, but her hairstyle would live on, in Chocinaw County, for years to come.

  “Turn around,” I called in a quiet voice. The girlfriend had an armload of stuffed paper bags. She’d been shopping for fake designer jeans—even tighter than the ones that made her butt move like two balloons about to pop. She swung about, surprised to find anyone there. “Oh, my gawd,” she said.

  “God isn’t here. Just me and the wrath of married women everywhere.” I raised a service revolver my father had carried in Korea, and I put the tip of the barrel right between her eyes. “Oh my gawd,” she said again, and began backing up, clutching her packages and making soft shrieks under her breath. I followed her, keeping the tip of the gun to her skull so hard I could see the indention on her skin.

  “Shut up,” I ordered, and to my impressed pride, she did. I kept the gun in place as she flattened herself along the concession stand’s back wall between a discarded Drink Coke-a-Cola sign and a fifty-gallon oil drum filled with half-burned garbage. “Please don’t kill me, please, don’t,” she mewled.

  “Stay away from my husband. If anybody asks, you never fooled around with him. He never so much as looked cross-eyed at you. Hear me?”

  “Please, don’t kill me—”

  “You touch him again, and people won’t even find your body. Not even pieces of it. I’ll gut you with a ten-inch blade I use to carve apple wood and feed your carcass to Tom Willis’s hogs over on Castleberry Road. Those hogs’ll squeal your name when they’re slaughtered.”

  Her knees went weak, and she sagged. “I swear, I won’t ever again, oh my gawd, don’t, don’t—”

  “Good. I’ve got your word. Now, beat it.” I lowered the gun, and she ran. As I watched her scramble into a little pick-up truck with pink vinyl seat liners I tucked the gun back inside an old burlap sack filled with trustworthy jars of apple preserves. My hand shook a little, and a wave of nausea rolled up my throat. I quickly filched a wet, salt-soaked apple slices from a jar I kept in the top of the bag. I sucked hard on it, and felt better.

  That night, when Davy came home from a trip to North Carolina, where he and some cronies raced motorcycles occasionally, he found me standing in the rutted driveway at the farm. He owned a jazzed-up, rust-red Impala sedan for dirt-track events. It was the fastest car in four counties. I had parked the Impala in the farm road, surrounded it with bales of hay, and doused the hay with gasoline. I waited there in the headlights of his truck, my face swollen from crying but stiff with pride. I held the gas can in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other.

  He got out of his truck. “What in the hell?”

  “I know about your girlfriend.”

  Davy sagged. In that first, quicksilver moment, I saw how much grief he’d caused himself; how much he knew it. He couldn’t do more than stand there with his hands out in supplication. “She doesn’t matter. I don’t give a damn about her.”

  “Then why did you break our vows?”

  “Because you don’t want my baby.”

  “Don’t you dare twist this—”

  “You think you can pretend? You think I don’t see how unhappy you’ve been since the day you told me you were pregnant? I thought you’d get over it, but you haven’t! You think I don’t know you only married me so people wouldn’t talk?” He was yelling by then, and crying. “Do you know how low that makes me feel?”

  “I love you! But I can’t help it if I don’t want a baby this soon! And I can’t help it if I don’t want to be married this young!”

  “You can’t really love me and feel that way!”

  “Yes, I can! I have to do what’s best for this land and these apples!”

  “That’s it. That’s the problem. You love these goddamned apples more than you love me!”

  “Yes, I do!”

  We both froze. I bit my tongue. Those words changed our marriage forever. Changed me. Changed him, ch
anged us. In that instant, I broke his heart as much as he’d broken mine.

  I dropped the gasoline can and the lighter, walked to the house, and locked the front door behind me. I cried at night for weeks, but never let Davy know. He slept in the barn until September, when I needed him to help with the harvest.

  “I’ll never touch another girl,” he promised. “I apologize.”

  “I accept.” We were cool and formal with each other. I didn’t believe him, and I was right not to, but I needed his help to pick the season’s apples.

  And we had a child still waiting to come.

  Chapter 3

  BECAUSE I LIED about my due date to hide the fact I was two months pregnant on my wedding day, I was alone on the rain-soaked November night when our son was born. Smooch knew the truth about my date and kept Logan for me that week, though she was scared to death. Davy knew it was my time, too, but couldn’t resist heading to the dirt track that day towing an ancient, banged-up, rebuilt Impala that he raced. “They’re running the Mudcat Five Relay,” he told me. “I stand a chance to win big—two, maybe three hundred bucks. We need that money. I figure I’ll bring home the jackpot and buy a go-cart. You watch—our kid’ll be racing go-carts before he’s able to walk.”

  “What if he’s a girl?”

  Davy snorted. “Girls can race, too. Hell, she’ll be the first girl on the NASCAR circuit. The first woman to win the Daytona 500, if I get my way about it.”

  You won’t, I said to myself, but dropped the subject. I’d never ask him to stay with me because I was afraid the baby was coming. I never admitted fear or need to Davy. I tried not to notice my giant stomach or think about the baby inside it. Boy or girl, I only wanted it out of my body so I could get back to business. “We have two acres of late-season apples left to pick. I’ve got a wholesaler who’ll take them all if we can get the crates filled by next week. Apples are money in the bank. We have bills to pay. Stay home. Pick apples.”

  “Apples can wait. Life’s too fast for apples.”