The Quickening

by Michelle Hoover

  “That’s all right, Mary,” Frank said. “It’s plenty clean now.”

  “But a man when he’s praying,” Mary went on, “he needs quiet. A woman needs it too. When they’re expecting a child, they need all the help they can. Isn’t that right, Jack?”

  “Mary,” Jack said, but Mary took hold of his arm and he left off. His fingers had tightened around his knife, but her hand seemed to settle him. A large man, Jack looked uneasy in our kitchen, his arms straining his sleeves. His face was rough and tan and darkened easily, his eyes sharp and strangely colored in the deep folds of a squint. He chewed at his meat. A fire in his silence, he stared out the window as if to count the worthy rows of our field.

  “A baptism,” Mary started again. “That’s what your child needs. Mother and child both.” She went on as if offering a sermon, talking with her hands over our cooling plates. I’d heard about these baptisms. The music and prayers, a day’s walk out to a large enough lake to have it done. They dressed to be drowned, these followers. A worn, white shirt, a dress that could be ruined, a robe. Cheap fabrics believed good enough to keep a person afloat. No one wore shoes except the minister. No one could spare the expense. The water was cold stepping in, a cause for sickness. The women’s skirts floated to the surface. The men left their hats ashore. There were prayers, a lowering of faces, and too much sun. As Mary talked, I wondered just what she thought such a soaking would do for us. “Before you’re too far along,” she said.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I let out.

  Frank turned to me then. For a man with such an easy tongue, he had a slow way of asking for things. Quiet in his meanings. I was used to this with my brothers, that silence in a man when his sense of right and wrong slips. He has no speech to tackle it. Frank’s face took on a look of desperateness. As if he knew what I was thinking, he took hold of my hand.

  “That’s right, Frank,” Mary said. “It’ll be your child too.” But she said it looking at me.

  When finally I agreed to it, I agreed because Frank had asked it of me. If we were having a child, it would be mine and Frank’s both. But I didn’t really think there was a place with so much water. And I didn’t think there would be so many interested in seeing it done.

  We walked out miles past our house, more than a dozen of us in a ragged line. It was dark starting and we carried lanterns. No one spoke, though the rocks under our feet made sound enough. By the time we reached the end of the road, the morning sun gave some light, all of us filthy with dust. Most of the others were women. And most of these had such a glazed look in their eyes, I feared I would soon look the same. The road narrowed into a stand of trees. As the trees cleared, the sun broke onto a wide stretch of water. I stopped and pulled at Frank’s hand. Children crowded the shore in dozens, their mothers gripping their shoulders. These were the curious. Not members of the church. They’d ridden from town in carriages and the men stayed back to tend to the horses. Mary stood alone out front, her hands clasped beneath her chin. Her dress was pale and long, like a robe itself, and a line of church members waited at her back. “All right,” Frank said and swallowed. “Just a few folks.” He smiled at me and tugged my hand. When at last I waded into the lake, Frank stepped in himself up to his knees. Soon there I was, waist deep in the water and shivering at the head of the line, for I was the first to be baptized.

  The minister wore a suit and button-front shirt all in white, as I’d never seen on a man before. Borden was his name. That summer, he and his father had only just raised their church when the older man suffered a stroke, or so I’d been told. His son was left for the ministering, new though he was in the area and alone. With his black hair and eyes, his blue-white skin, Borden was tall and easy to look at if you cared to for long. He hung his coat on the branch of a tree and stepped into the lake, a hitch in his stride as he went. “Are we ready?” he said. I looked for Frank by the shore. He waved. I nodded to Borden then and he touched my forehead, lowering me back. Borden’s hands were clean and white. Not a hardworking man. Religious. He would never understand what it meant to pray to a field. To feed and watch over the animals that ruled the fat of our stomachs. We looked in hope to the ground and the roots growing there more often than we looked for grace from the sky. He dipped us under and stumbled when we sank too fast. Red-faced as he tried to lift us up again, he was afraid. You could see it. The one coming out of the water, like a newborn, might forget how to breathe.

  I was a heavy woman then as I am still and heavier while I was carrying. Borden lost hold of me and I felt a rush of water. Beneath the surface, I imagined that boy from the laundry line again, swimming up to me from the bottom. His arms and chest were white and thin, his cheeks swollen from holding his breath. He swept a tangle of weeds from his eyes and took hold of my arms. With his face close to mine, I believed I’d known him my whole life. I’d already given birth to him. Already raised him in my house. When finally I felt the air again, I took it in. There came a flash of color, a confusion of hands. I stood in the sun and blinked. The boy was gone. “You are blessed,” Borden called. The church members echoed, “You are blessed.”

  I caught hold of myself, my dress clinging to me. The people on the shore watched and waited, their horses pawing the dirt. Mary’s blessing rose above the rest like a hiss. She gazed at Borden where he clung to my hand and seemed about to rush into the lake between us. I shivered where I stood, my dress soaked clear through. My belly was swollen and plain to see. I must have looked close to naked underneath. Frank rushed into the water and wrapped his jacket around my waist, but it was too late. Everyone had seen, and they would expect a child from me.

  Some mornings after, I awoke in a sweat and felt for Frank where he slept. His face burned against his pillow, his forehead hot, cheeks flushed. I would not wake him to his fever but sat back in our bed, hoping the fever would lift. Rain drove through the fields. The morning was dark and the darkness had let me sleep late. Next to me, Frank’s chest rose and fell, and I rested my hand on my stomach. If I waited long enough, I believed I might feel the child inside me stirring.

  My boy, you may not understand how awful this waiting was. In those years, you never could be sure of a child, no matter how soon in coming. And you never took for granted what a birth might cost the mother herself. The skin of my belly jumped. I pressed my hand against it again and whispered Frank’s name. Outside, the storm rattled the eaves, but Frank slept on. I felt his forehead. When at last he woke, the strain of his voice came from a dimmer place, and his eyes watered against the light of the lamps.

  Mary had become a regular visitor on Saturdays, but that morning she arrived late. “It’s bad today, Eddie,” she said. “Your yard’s breaking up.” I could barely hear her, so loud was the rain outside. Cold and dripping on our front porch, Mary and her good looks seemed to slide away, strange to me. I leaned against the wall.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Frank needs a doctor.”

  “But we can’t go anywhere in this weather,” she said. “It wasn’t bad when I set out, but now …” Mary left off, helping herself from her wet coat. Her legs and shoes were thick with earth, as if she’d crawled her way along the road. Outside, the rain had grown heavy, carrying the mud away with it. I knew at once no buggy could cross that ground. No horse could even draw it, not with the weight of a man. The baby crouched against my stomach, and I placed my hands beneath it, feeling it could fall.

  “Has he been fed?” Mary asked.

  “Some broth to work against his fever. I think it’s all he should have.”

  “A man must eat, Eddie.”

  “You’re not supposed to make it difficult for his system.”

  “Starving’s not hard? I’ll give him some meat.”

  Frank called my name then. I let her go and sat to take his hand. Frank was the one I worried about. His fingers were white in mine, his face thin. After a while he opened his light-colored eyes. The wind outside swept the house, and our ro
of shifted beneath it. When at last Mary reappeared from our kitchen, she held a cold leg of chicken on a fork and snapped her fingers at me.

  “I don’t want him to have any of that,” I said at once.

  “What now? After all my trouble?”

  “That’s trouble of your own choosing.”

  Frank stirred and I thought of my father when he grew ill, laid out in our home where we’d tried to tend to him. For weeks he shivered under every blanket we owned, coughed up the tonics we gave him and refused more. Nothing we did seemed enough.

  “Look at him,” Mary said. “My cousin was sick like this. You should have seen his wife’s face when the doctor claimed she’d tried to kill him. For days she hadn’t fed him anything more than broth.”

  I didn’t answer. I could imagine the look on that wife’s face as clearly as my own. I didn’t know about doctoring. And I didn’t know what would be worse for a man, a bite of chicken or two women in a quarrel over his bed. My father had refused doctors himself, leaving us at his bedside with our hands in our laps. Before I could even raise my head, Mary had dropped a piece of chicken into Frank’s open mouth. “There,” she said. “The meat will give you strength.”

  There wasn’t much use in doubting her now. Frank slept after he ate, and Mary and I sat in our corners, impatient in the silence between us as we watched over my husband. It was a while he slept. We spoke about the rain, about the animals and our chores, our voices low as if in some holy place. “Never seen a storm like this,” Mary said. “Why, I almost didn’t come. Where would you have been then?”

  “I suppose I’d be in the same place,” I answered. “Though Frank would be without his chicken. That would be the difference.”

  Mary made a kind of hiccup at that, but I knelt beside Frank and pretended not to hear. Even in his sleep, Frank seemed calm and distant.

  “Mary,” I said. “He won’t wake.”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “He’s not.”

  “But he’s breathing.” She went to slap his cheek.

  “You’ve done enough,” I said, catching her hand, and she winced. I wrapped my shawl over my head, found my boots and coat, and layered on what else I could before turning for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For the doctor.”

  “You can’t carry a baby through this.”

  I looked at her. Her hair had stuck to her forehead in drying and her dress was stained with mud and grass. “You could come with me,” I said.

  “But somebody’s got to stay here. Somebody should.”

  “And that would be you?”

  Mary backed away from me then, rubbing her arms. I shook my head at such a woman, keeping to her place in the warm, dry room she’d always hated. It had been building in us, this tugging at each other, sitting so still as we waited beneath the rain for Frank to wake. As I opened the door, the rain wet my hands and I stepped into the storm.

  It would be six miles to town. I pushed through the mud and tried to keep myself steady, listening to the wind as it whipped about and blew the shawl from around my head. With the shawl gone, I felt full out in the storm. The rain burned my cheeks. It stung through the gaps of my coat. With my hands raw and numb, I held on to the fence posts where they lined the road and I crouched beneath the weather, one arm over my face and the other beneath my stomach for warmth. It was luck that kept me to that road when I was pushed from it by the wind. When gusts turned me in circles and ran me into the fields. I was bleary with mud, thick with the stuff where I wiped my face, sweeping my hair back so I could see. When finally I found the doctor’s door, I could only lean against it and rattle the knob, hoping the doctor would hear.

  I’d spent the rest of the daylight and more in that struggle to town, but it took only an hour to reach home again. As I stepped in, the noises in my head confused many things: the length of our return, the doctor and I, my journey through the storm and back. When finally I’d reached him, the doctor was tired and angry. The tail of his coat whipped behind him as he stood in the rain, cranking his car until the engine turned. I’d never before ridden in a car myself. When the mud caught the wheels, we left it behind and walked the last mile. In that mile we saw the worst of the storm, the way it tricked us. It drove us to our knees in the mud before the wind and rain delivered us into the house.

  In the time since I’d left, the house had again grown quiet. Mary sat with her eyes on the door, her hands folded in a blanket as if she’d wrung the blanket in waiting. I dropped into our bed next to Frank and heard Mary speak at last to the doctor, explaining my husband’s fever and what we’d done. The doctor scolded me for the chicken. Mary hovered near, her hands cupped over her mouth and whispering to herself. Often in the years to come, I would see her when she thought I wasn’t looking, whispering just like that. A whole book of whispering whenever her luck ran dry, as if God Himself listened at her feet. I tried to keep my eyes open and heard my husband stir against his pillow, the sharp words of the doctor, and Mary’s nervous tongue. As I fell asleep, it was this that filled my head, empty of Mary’s speeches now, her watery gods, her assurances. She agreed with the doctor’s opinions against me as if she’d entirely forgotten her part. I was too beaten with rain to say anything in my defense.

  The rest was sleep for a while. The doctor moved about us, it seemed, for weeks. Frank and I traded our sicknesses, and I stayed in bed after Frank grew well. My dreams were rain and wind, spinning me where I slept. The baby was born still.

  II

  Mary

  (Fall 1909–Fall 1913)

  This could not be the place my new husband had brought me, it could not be where Jack meant us to live. This man who enclosed my hand in his and sent a shiver straight to my veins, he could never sink so low as to think this house could be our home.

  Still there he was, full of his green-eyed mischief. Something warm curled inside my chest. He bounded through the entrance, bent to his knee, and when he opened his arms I let myself cross that threshold and fall in—because that was the way it was back then, Jack with his wide, sturdy hands, his stubbornness, his strength, a burning in him that made me soft, magnificent, believing there was only talk and waiting in this world unless I was with him.

  So I worked at this house to make it my own—a gaping ship of a place, with two floors and more space than we could ever hope to fill. The rooms above me whined in the silence and heat. I spent mornings on my knees, scraping at the filth that blackened the floors, and learned in all my labor about the family that squandered their luck here at the turn of the century, having overbuilt, overplanted, and abandoned the house after seven years—I swore the same would never happen to us. After I scrubbed the windows and stripped the curtains, I left my rags and rubbish in a pile outside for Jack to burn. He carried in buckets of water before he set off for the barn, tossed the gray runoff when he returned home. Sweeping off his hat, he wondered at the rooms I had made, bright and smelling of soap, and at the state of my dress, my hunger for something clean. I kept at this house with a heavy hand the first years we stayed, shook the outdoors from the rugs and bolted the windows. When my sons were born, when they grew to stand and watch their father cutting like a knife through the fields, I kept them in too—because if anything, I wanted to hold them in that lifted-up place I believed was promised us, in that place where we were better than all the rest and more deserving, and with my sons it would not just be a far-off belief or a kind of pretending. It would be.

  But there is only so much a person can do beyond wishing. In my mother’s house, I was taught to walk in heels and carry cups of tea, though guests were rare back then. I sat alone in our parlor with my legs crossed, hands in my lap, and spoke only when spoken to. Beyond our windows, neighbors passed with their heads turned or crossed to the far side of the street. They no longer came to our door for my father’s woodwork, let alone for company. On a long, flat board, I learned to play my scales on keys my father had etched with h
is knife into the wood—because even if we did not have a piano, my mother was determined that her daughter with her long fingers would be able to play in any house in town that did.

  “The accident,” my parents called it, though my father said little if he could. It had happened just after I turned twelve, remaining with me like a dull haze through my teenage years. All I knew was how strange I felt one morning, sick to my stomach with an aching in my legs and just under my chin. This was not the way it had been, my parents seemed to be saying, the quietness of our house and our neighbors who kept their watch over us. After the accident, everything had changed and I was somehow the reason.

  “Practice every day,” my mother instructed. When I ran my fingers over the board my father had given me, she hummed the tune, stumbling whenever she believed I had struck the wrong key. What little my mother remembered from her childhood lessons, she remembered fiercely—to keep time, she beat a wooden ruler against my arm until the skin burned.

  “It will never be enough, will it?” she said, stopping the thump of that stick. I lifted my fingers from practicing while my mother gazed at the wall over my head. The ruler cut into her fist and a scar showed jagged along her knuckles—the scar invisible except when she grew nervous and her hands blushed. A boy with a temper had been jealous with her, she had told me, long before she met my father. I had to be careful of such boys, she said. Now with her standing so still, I thought I might reach out to touch her—there where that long, hot slice broke her skin—and its warmth would share itself with me and be mine for a while. When I was younger, before the accident, it had been different—my mother’s palm warm against the middle of my back whenever we were close enough to touch. Now she shook her head and I dropped my hands to the wooden keys. “No, it will,” she said. “It will be if we want it. We can have everything again as long as we are good and persevering. Mary, you just have to believe what I tell you. Never let anyone get in your way.”