Now as I sat in the chapel again, the fields outside were a dull white plain. The snow showed little save the shadows of birds—but in these walls I had to close my eyes to hear so much. No one listened as I played. Even Minister Borden kept to his rooms, taken I suppose with his books and papers. Still the keys of that piano hummed, one note following another—all that time playing that board my father had given me and I never imagined such a sound.
“Hello?” I called out. I stopped my playing and listened. Footsteps echoed in the back hall. As it grew late, the afternoon had turned into evening, the candles I had lit on the piano dimmed until I could no longer see the page.
“I’d hoped to hear you play,” Borden said, his voice faint. At the back of the chapel, he stood very still in the dark with only the white of his shirt showing, a draft from the doors behind him making a low whistling. “You didn’t stop because of me, did you?” he asked. I shook my head, though he could not see me well enough to know it. The bench felt suddenly warm beneath my dress, the blood pulsing in my fingertips, and the whistling too grew quiet. I did not dare move until his footsteps faded away. The light was gone then and I played what I could from memory, the hair on my arms raised by the cold—if not for the darkness, I could have seen my breath.
“The way to goodness,” Borden had said, “is one of sacrifice. He who sacrifices will have it a hundred times returned.” He stood at the pulpit looking down at the meager gathering, old and young but mostly old, twenty in all scattered in the pews. Still, he seemed pleased with the attention, though I am certain no one understood a word he said—no one did, but for me. The others sat with their hands in their laps, the old ones with their chins to their chests, asleep in the wooden seats until the music began. I never looked anywhere but up. Every week Borden hesitated less, seemed less uncertain, and soon the pews filled. That is what the expression on Borden’s face was, really—the way he nodded at his words and turned the page with the tips of his fingers—the radiance he wore was a mirror of my own, seeing him.
A week before Christmas, I crouched with Borden and the other wives in the church basement and for hours we fixed evergreens into yards of garlands and wreaths. Sacrifice, I thought, and the wreaths grew in a pile around my feet while theirs remained scattered with loose pinecones and needles, what with all their talk. “How are the boys?” they asked. They were plump about the ankles, their voices dense as cream.
“Your youngest, he’s four, isn’t he? That’s a long while between them. I would think you’d want more for the farm.”
I studied the one who had spoken. She lived in town, a wife of the man who owned the market, stiff and gawky as her name was—Mrs. Reed. She had pinned a flower of silk too close to her face, her hair a bush. I knew she had felt many a coin in her palm, the ring on her finger a prize. More children. But how could we? My husband came in late to our bed and lifted the blankets, his hand on my hip, but soon enough it slipped off as he fell asleep.
“My husband works very hard.”
The woman smiled. “But still …”
“Still?”
“He’s still your husband.”
“Mrs. Reed,” Borden said.
The woman let out a shout and stood, gripping her skirt. She had done nothing but hold the pine branches as she talked and the sap had gathered on her lap in a sticky pool.
“You’ll need a good soap for that,” I said.
Mrs. Reed looked at me. “Yes, I know dear. I know.”
Borden dropped his head, reading from his book, and the others grew quiet. Mrs. Reed scrubbed at her skirt with her fingers until they turned the color of the wool, a sickly yellow-green, and she threw her hands in the air. “Are you coming?” she said to the others, gathering her belongings. The women gazed at her for a moment—with a quick nod they abandoned their work, stuffed their purses with needles and scarves, and tossed their coats over their shoulders—then they were gone. Save for the two of us, the church was empty then, a cold wind batting the window panes. I had no desire to join that wind any time soon, no matter what needed me at home—with Borden’s quiet presence in the room, my fingers worked at fastening the pine needles with thread. He had seen, I knew, and he had come between me and those women.
“I thought you might play,” he said after a time. “Since you’re staying, I mean.”
“What would you like to hear?”
“Don’t ask,” he said. “Everyone with their questions. Just this morning, old Craeger wanted to know what he should do with his chickens. They’d gotten out of their pen into Peterson’s corn. I tried to send him to the deputy in town, but the law, he said, he didn’t trust it. ‘What greater law was there than God’s?’” Borden laughed, dropping his head.
“He’s right.”
“Who?”
“Craeger.”
Borden studied me and stood from his chair. “Mary,” he said. “You should have worn gloves.” I looked down at my hands—my fingers were red and wet with cuts. Borden crouched next to me with a wince and took a handkerchief from his pocket, holding my fingertips tight. When he closed his eyes, I looked down at the top of his head where the part in his hair showed a delicate line of skin, my hands caught between his. The handkerchief was spotted with blood when he took it back.
I had seldom in my life known such ecstasy and fear, and never both at once, but as I made my way home through the high snow and wind, I did not feel a touch of that cold—how could this be anything but the work of a higher presence? I walked with my coat open and swinging around my legs, my scarf in my hand. The moon was high by the time I left him, the sky black as midnight, and snow drifted through the fences while the grasses hummed. Across the frozen plain, the earth woke to my footsteps. When at last I reached the door to my house, I believed I was as bright and clear as the snow itself, touching ground.
Over the next few weeks I woke to a certain kind of dullness. In the morning light, our room was narrow and pale. Jack set out early for his shift at the mill, work that put food on our table in the winter months, and I lay in our bed listening to the clock on the wall and the sounds of daybreak. I felt an ache in every part of my person and was sick of my own skin, how faded and thin and all-encompassing it was, like a dress I could never take off. Outside the door, my sons sulked for their mother, whispering just loud enough for me to wake, and I smelled the sweat on my husband’s pillow. The morning after my visit to the church, Jack had come in for his breakfast and found me at the stove, looking out our kitchen window. The barn stood dark against the early light and a mist clung to the grass, easing toward the house. “Mary!” Jack yelled—beneath my hand the sausages on the stove hissed with a heavy smoke, the pan gone dry. Jack shoved the pan at me as I tried to push him away. For days, a burn shone red in the tender skin between my forefinger and thumb. Ever since, Jack had often lost his patience with me, suspending a fist just before my face with only weariness to hold him back. Lying in our bed, I shuddered to think just how long it would be before he struck me again, and a blast sounded like a train coming at us, so loud it shook the house.
I threw on my shawl and ran out to the road. A steam boiler had once burst in the mill the next county over and killed five of the men where they stood. Had Jack gone to work as he did every morning? Was he there still? Despite everything, it was Jack who kept our farm from starving—and without him, the house would rot on its perch, the land crawling out from under us, and my sons too young and nearly useless at saving the place from the fate of the family that had owned it before. “You’ll be lost in such country,” my mother had said on first seeing it. “It’ll eat you alive before you even know what living is.” Now the birds overhead were calling, and the cold of the night weeks before returned to me, my visit to the church and back again—I had never in my life known such pleasure in the aching of my limbs. It was rising in me again, the hard beating in my chest and the feeling of deliverance—so relentless and shocking in its presence that I found myself running to the mi
ll to escape it. I was no proper wife, I never had been, and now I hardly had the sense to stop moving, so sure was I in the churning of my stomach that something terrible had come to us and I was somehow to blame.
When at last I reached the mill, the saws had started up again and the walls shuddered. The men worked in overalls and goggles, indistinguishable in the half-light and coated in sawdust. They had heard it too, the crash breaking like thunder overhead. Shutting down the saws, they had stripped off their hats and stepped out to see—but the noise was gone, the fields unchanged. The foreman had insisted they start to work again, and the men shouldered the heavy logs. When they saw me standing there with my wet face and shaking, one of them signaled his hand in the air and the saws stopped at once. Out of the dimness, Jack pushed through the line of men and caught hold of my shoulders as if I might faint.
My husband may have seemed a brute, taller by a head and thicker than most, but in his size there was a hollow space just below his ribs that felt to the touch like tenderness. “Mary,” he had said, and this only months after my second was born. “The house is something, isn’t it?” He had said it with a look of wonder on his face, standing just across the yard in the night and staring up, his palms open. He wore the stench of a day’s work on him, his shirtsleeves soggy in the heat and a streak of dirt across his forehead. I knew then I had done what he could never leave behind—I had filled this house for him, that was what he meant, and in that darkness, the house seemed a bright and restful place, if only for a while.
Now at the mill I clung to my husband and glimpsed that tenderness in him again, knowing at once he would never disappear from me in any kind of accident. “Go home,” he whispered. “That noise isn’t about us.” Jack’s breath was hot and sure against my skin, but it was not relief I felt—not yet. I could not for the life of me forget what had sent me running, but not even my fear of losing him would make sense of the dread that held more tightly to me now. So I left him to his work. I turned straight away from the mill with only a nod. Walking aimlessly in the open air, I thought about judgment, and soon I found myself running again, heading down the path I had beaten all those years between the Currents’ house and our own.
Outside their barn, Enidina slouched against one of their horses, smoothing the animal’s back. When the horse shook and ducked at my footsteps, her heavy hand seemed to quiet it, both of them raising their heads.
“I suppose you heard it too,” she said.
“I thought we might take the wagon. Find out what it was all about.”
The horse swung its neck, sinking its muzzle in Enidina’s palm and snatching at a handful of grass. Enidina squinted at me and wiped her hand against her dress. “I suppose we should,” she said.
We took their wagon and Enidina steered the horses in the direction the noise had come from. For miles we rode without a word and the wagon lurched and rolled, the wheels slipping on the icy road, but every once in a while she would twist her head and study me. “You’re quiet,” she said.
“Can’t I have a little quiet for once?”
“Sure.”
“Does it always have to be me talking? Every single time?”
Enidina faced front again, shaking her head. “That horse,” she said at last and pointed her chin. “She’s been strange for weeks now. Restless. I think one of the males’ been at her. Act the same as people, they do.” Enidina left off, and only then did I notice how the horse before us swayed and strained as she pulled.
“If you know animals, you can always tell,” she went on. “At least I could. What do you think?”
“The horse?” I started. “She seems well enough.” Enidina squinted at me again and I tightened my coat.
“Well, I’ll be,” Enidina swore. From the fields ahead of us, a smell of burning drifted and smoke rose from the prairie, the air wavering over a wide strip of land. Enidina snapped the reins until the horses burst into a gallop and I covered my nose. The windows of the houses we passed lay shattered on the ground, their curtains blowing outside the sills. From an empty door, a smoke-colored mutt sprang as if rabid, barking at us from the ditches. The road had filled—wagons and men hurried along on foot, eager for a ride, all of them heading toward the smoke and heat with fear in their eyes.
Then it was before us. The prairie was afire—a good acre or more of it, without source it seemed, for the land itself was isolated and barren, without a single building or tree that could have burst and ignited the ground. The snow had melted a good distance, but the grass around the fire remained untouched, as if the flames had dropped from the sky. Enidina tied the horses and we ran out to see. Along the outskirts, a crowd stood, blackened with ash from head to toe. Others sat on the ground, having watched for hours while the seats of their trousers grew wet with snowmelt.
That was the way it was, the old watchers quiet with waves of newcomers coming in—and with them, rumors spread like a fever, so while the fire cooled, the crowd heated. It was a boy’s trick, some said. It was an accident, said others. “I saw it myself,” a man yelled. “A rock fell from the sky. It burst in the air.” Others cried in agreement, said they had seen it too—it broke the glass in their windows for miles around. The crowd jeered, chattering nonsense. In their midst, a woman still heavy with birth and milk stood dumb with her infant, ignoring its wails. Her face was colorless, her shoulder soaked with drivel. The child itself was red-skinned and crying, a furious body in its mother’s arms—its cries shivered through the air. At last a voice shouted, “It was a sign from God.”
I looked up into the sky. My tongue tasted sour and black, the smell of burning meadow. Next to me, Enidina stood with her legs wide, watching the others more than the charred prairie itself and me more than anyone else. When a sob rose from my throat, she took my arm in her terrible grip. “This here is nothing,” she whispered. “This is just natural. Best we don’t look for reasons at all.”
I wrenched my arm away. The baby’s wail grew. All around us were farmers and wives staring into the blackness, and I knew God had come. I saw His face looking down at me from the very clouds. There was no place He wasn’t—and worst of all there were places He was without question, and no heavy hand was going to keep the world from trembling. I left Enidina where she stood and I stumbled forward into the backs of strangers—they parted like grass to let me go on. Before me the land had been touched by greatness and I threw myself into it, surrendering myself to that fertile ground. The arms of forgiveness gathered me in, a warmth rising from the cold, and I let myself go numb.
It was then I slept—and in that sleep I imagined myself sitting in an empty pew at the back of the chapel. The air shone through the windows with a yellow haze that warmed my lap, so different from the light that left the fields in their pale coating of dust. The rest of the chapel had fallen into darkness, not a sound from the back hall, and I pressed my forehead into my hands. Out of the shadows a boy came and stood at my feet, blocking out the light. He was restless and smelled of smoke, all muscle and bone as some boys are just before they turn men, and in his fist he held a bloody handkerchief—as I watched, that handkerchief grew to the size of a sheet and I shielded my eyes.
When I was young, I had found such a light in an opening of the woods. The trees broke, leaving a wide stretch of grass where I could lie on my back and let the narrow shaft of sun hold me in its grip. I had escaped my mother’s house for a few moments of peace and found this place where I was hot-skinned and drowsy, the center of all I could see. Lying there, I believed something was beginning—it was something I believed I should feel ashamed for, but didn’t, and as I slept after that fire I felt that beginning again. The boy stood in the chapel at my feet, but now such a pleasure rose in the core of my stomach—quick as a liquid that would keep me swollen for months—and I knew I could hold on to that feeling as if holding on to a very bright light.
When I woke, I lay in the same narrow bed where the day had first found me. The windows were dark with evening a
nd a doctor held my wrist. Jack paced the far end of the room, and I felt a sudden affection for him, for the weight of his shoulders and his sullen footsteps, the fear I could see in his dirt-stained fingernails as he swept back his hair—how long had it been since I had done the same? My run from earlier in the afternoon seemed strange to me now—I had never disappointed him, never in our marriage had I imagined another life.
But there was Enidina. She stood in the corner with that same maddening look of patience she always wore, and the muscles in my legs ached, a knot in the back of my neck. I knew what had happened then, with a pinch in my chest I knew it—I had fainted on that ground and Enidina had carried me home. Only when Jack bent to touch my cheek did my calm return, his heat and size so easily obliterating her presence. “What’s wrong with her?” Jack asked the doctor, but the doctor only shook his head. The light shifted. Enidina’s face appeared above my husband’s shoulder and she opened her mouth. “She’s carrying,” she answered. “And who knows what else.”
V
Enidina
(Winter 1919–Spring 1920)
The Quickening Page 5
