The Quickening

by Michelle Hoover

  In the woods I smelled smoke and turned on my stomach—a boy stood in the shadows behind the trees, watching me. He was from our school but several years older, lanky and muscle-thin, the smoke smell coming from his fingers. When he saw me looking, he raised a hand to me and walked off. Over the next few weeks, I caught the same smell, different from a fire, but close enough that I thought someone might be burning leaves in a nearby yard, and when I looked, the boy was there again, watching, leaving just as quickly. “Are you supposed to be out here, all on your own?” he called out at last. “You’re in the sixth class, aren’t you? The smart girl. But you’re not so smart you don’t look like something. Mary, right?” It was hot and the light shifted, the woods abuzz. This boy smelled the way the older ones sometimes did to a girl, musk and salt and cigarettes—an awful smell I have thought ever since. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” he said. “The way you’re always out here, like you’re looking for something on that blanket of yours. Anyway, you’d better not. Knowing who my father is. Knowing your father works for him.” He stepped out from the trees and into my circle of sun, his boot kicking my blanket. When I reached out to straighten it, he caught hold of my arm and did not let go.

  “My God,” Jack had said the first night of our marriage. Lying together, he had lifted the quilt from my legs, and I snatched it back. Under the light of the lamp, the sheets looked spotless. Jack put his face in his hands and turned away.

  “It’s not the same with everyone,” I said, steadying myself before I reached for him. “It doesn’t mean—”

  “I know what it means.”

  “But it’s not—”

  “It’s plenty.”

  I sat up against my pillow and looked down at my lap, wet and sore as it was. My cheeks burned, and I lifted the sheet again, pinching the skin of my thighs until they turned red. I remembered the day I had met him and the violence in his voice, the way it thrummed inside me like a finger plucking a string. If I had a knife at hand, I might have cut myself just to give him that bloody stain he wanted, but it was too late. That boy in the forest with me, with his smoky weight and the crush of his legs—he had made it too late for a long time. I was the worst a woman could be and now my husband believed it too.

  Over the next few years, Jack worked with a kind of desperation I had rarely seen in him. In the afternoon, I kept an eye on him in the fields, Kyle heavy in my arms. Already Jack had cleared a broader patch of land to the east with the plow, but late one morning he decided to work back through with only his fingers and a rake, clawing up what the machine had missed. “Slow,” he spat, watching our boys where they crouched in the rows behind him. “You’re not to leave a single twig.” Beneath the sun, the fields were deeply furrowed and wavering—my sons worked listlessly, close to the ground and trailing after their father. When finally Jack seemed to forget them, they stole back to the house and closed themselves in their rooms. They would not appear again until dinnertime, not a word in the kitchen as we ate. Still Jack worked on, breaking the skin of his knuckles against pebbles and sticks, his back bent, pouring himself out until he had left the soil gutted after him. There was a fever in the way he took to the land, and I watched and waited, unsure how long he would take to work it out.

  When Jack came in at last to the kitchen, it was already dark and his hands were ragged. I took them in mine and hurried him to the wash bucket for soaking, fetching a roll of bandages I had waiting. In the corner, my youngest fretted in his basket.

  “That boy,” my husband whispered.

  “What boy?”

  “He’s strange to me.”

  I kept at the bandages, wrapping them around my husband’s fingers though my own felt faint. “What now? All that work has gone to your head. Kyle’s still new to you, that’s all. It doesn’t make a stranger out of him.”

  I shook my head and tied the bandages, turning his hands so I could see them—they lay large and wounded in mine, trembling. Looking down at me, Jack stayed quiet, though his pulse raced. The room was still, that motor in Jack raging to a pitch—he tore his hands from my grip and I fell, catching hold of the table. The bones in my wrist cracked. “Jack,” I called out, but he kept his back to me. Alone on the far side of the room, he stood red-skinned and bristling, the table sprawled on its side between us.

  “So Eddie lost it,” he spit out at last, hiding his face. “Frank says she’s had an awful time. Sounds to me like she’s doing things a person shouldn’t do. Crazy things, sounds like.” He stopped, righted the table, and swept his hands across the surface, wincing at the touch. “Best you go see her,” he said. “At a time like this, women need women. Isn’t that right?”

  I rubbed at the pain in my wrist, and he wiped his mouth and went out. I thought of our boys, how they bounded down the stairs for their supper, all of them limbs and restlessness—so like their father. Kyle cried from his basket and my breasts ached. Out the window, Jack walked across the yard, lit now only by the lantern he carried, and he disappeared from me into the barn.

  Up ahead, Enidina’s house was quiet. Three Jerseys sat together in the grass against the barn fence, their tails kicking, and a cat dropped off the porch and chased an insect over the walk. Inside, the house was dark and still and smelled of sickness, but soon a wet metallic ticking sounded from the kitchen.

  I found Enidina scrubbing the kitchen floor by hand. A pail of water sat at her hip, the water gray with mud and grass, but the floor was clean, the rag worn to threads. Enidina stayed on her knees, her face flushed. “Eddie,” I whispered—only when Kyle let out a cry from my arms did she drop her rag and look up, blinking against the light of the open door.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  She sat back on her shins, brushing her skirt. “All right,” she said, eying the stiffness of my wrist as I held Kyle. Without another word, she drew herself to her feet and reaching into her cabinets took down two teacups and set the kettle to the stove.

  “I have some crackers,” she said without looking at me. “Something he can suck on.” She dampened a towel with the kettle water when it warmed and laid the towel over my wrist, tying it close. I flinched but the towel numbed the pain and held my wrist tight. “I hope it’ll do,” she said.

  We sat at their table and Enidina closed her hands around her cup and seemed to breathe it in, the steam wetting her cheeks—her knuckles were red and swollen, her fingertips puckered. I rested Kyle on my knee and she gazed at him with her eyes closing.

  “Eddie …”

  “Did you hear about Marla Samuels? How she almost got herself killed?”

  “What now?”

  “Grinding feed for their poultry, she got her skirts mixed up with the belts. When she tried to get them loose, the machine threw her into the motor. She struck a big iron kettle when she fell. If her daughter hadn’t been there with her, who knows? She broke five of her ribs, and that husband of hers hasn’t left her alone since.”

  Kyle squirmed and I set him to my breast, imagining it—Marla was a mousy woman, the whole lot of the Samuels seemed shrunken and skittish and far too easy to please. Eddie cleared our dishes and stood for a time, watching us. “He’s a good boy.”

  “He is.”

  “Doesn’t take much after Jack, now, does he?”

  I looked at her and Enidina gave a quick nod and turned her back to me, washing the tea from our cups. “All this waiting,” she started. “It teaches you something.” Her voice was low, her hands working, and I knew she was talking about what Jack had sent me for, though Enidina would never admit she was telling it to me. “Patience,” she said, as if reminding herself. “When it comes right down to it, I suppose it doesn’t matter where a child comes from or why. I suppose it never does.”

  I shifted Kyle uneasily, and he began to doze as he fed. The air in the room was heavy and dull and soon the sound of water in the sink set me to dreaming—I shut my eyes. Enidina gripped my shoulder and I let her hand stay, though the weight of it
was painful in its grief. As Kyle slipped from me in my weariness, she took him up and settled him against my chest. When at last I woke, I was alone in the dark kitchen, Enidina hovering somewhere in the house behind me. Kyle rested in my lap and I heard Frank come in, his singing from the other room echoing like a hymn—I listened, not knowing what made this house so easy and full, no matter how poor it seemed, and why I always came to it, why it was so different from my own.

  When the days grew dark again, I made my way to the chapel, freeing the piano from under its heavy cloth—I had not played since Kyle was born, had not attended services since I was well and pregnant. Now I sat on the piano bench with an ear to the room behind me, Kyle asleep in the basket at my feet. Trees whined against the windowpanes, the wind heavy over the fields, but inside the air was hushed. I struck the keys—the room echoed, and I struck again, making little that could be called music. Kyle stirred without a cry, without even a whimper, as if he knew my reasons. Borden stayed in his rooms, head in his sermons I guessed, and at last my fingers tired. I rested my hands in my lap, my chin to my chest. I had not prayed for a long while, fearing God himself might have turned his back on me—now no matter how I called Him, that lifted-up feeling in my chest never came. What an empty place, this cold, pitiless room without even a voice to listen to, without a hand to take—when I ran my fingers over the keys again, it seemed I hit every note at once.

  Borden opened his door and I stopped my playing and listened. The day was bright, the sun through the windows lit the room with stains, reddening my music on the stand. At the back of the chapel, Borden stood with his legs wide, his shoulders hunched, as if braced against something. “Are you finished?” he said.

  I did not answer, my eyes turned to my lap.

  “I said are you finished?”

  I shook my head, my hair loose against my shoulders and neck, and my skin seemed to stand at attention. I pressed my hand into the seat next to me, expectant, but when I looked for him, I heard only the door to his room fall shut—the light through the windows shook, the red on that page falling to my stomach. On the floor at my feet, Kyle opened his eyes.

  In the months after I brought Kyle to the church, I could not sleep more than an hour without waking, could not be bothered to eat but a few bites from my plate. I stood on the rug in our front parlor with a broom in hand and forgot what I had wanted with it. My own husband was lost to me, gone it seemed for weeks to the fields and the weather. I tried to keep up with my chores, bleaching our linens and washing grease from our plates, the front of our shirts, but the work seemed different, cheerless—the mere ironing of a sheet undid itself as soon as it was finished and had to be done again.

  Inside our barn, I ground feed for our chickens, the belts stretching and pulling at the grain. Grinders were ill-tempered machines—it never took much for the motor to stick, throwing sparks. I shoveled in more grain, enough for the grinder to choke, and thought about Marla Samuels and her skirts—the way she had been thrown at such a speed and how hard she hit that kettle to break her ribs. What would it take? For months Borden had acted like a stranger to me, and my husband came in like a bear to my kitchen, that wildness in him hidden beneath a dark pelt. When Marla was finally well enough to walk, she held on to her husband’s arm as she strolled through town, that bandage of hers high across her middle. The townspeople worried over her, endlessly, and her husband refused to drop her hand.

  The smell of burning filled the barn, the grinder whining against the feed. The air was thick with dust, and the motor spat and pitched, my eyes watering from the smoke. Bending closer to the noise, I imagined myself caught, my skirts like feathers and the floor trembling with the force when I was thrown—what would it take? I gripped the fabric of my dress, thought about the break of bone and muscle, how quickly that pain might diminish if a wife was determined enough, if she could feel the heat of a man’s hand against her cheek—and in this town, she would be treated like a queen. The grinder was less than inch from my hip, the wind of its belts tickling the hairs on my arm.

  Beneath the roar of the motor, I heard a small voice. I blinked against the light from the open door—there was my youngest. He bit the tip of his finger, stumbling forward on his newfound feet. How he had grown, his eyes black and sharp, his hair dark and skimming his shoulders—the way he stood seemed more like a boy than any infant. How many months had it been?

  Kyle wobbled and fell to his knees and I swept him up, out of the barn, and coughed in the open air while the motor burned. Outside, Jack had heard the noise and come running, but now he stopped and watched me as I stepped out of the smoke. Seeing the way I clutched Kyle to my chest, Jack bit his cheek, and everything that had been cold and dark in my husband seemed to break. I had done it. I had skinned the beast and left him naked, for surely Jack knew what had happened with the Samuels and what I intended—the way a simple chore could prove itself worse. He touched Kyle’s head as it rested against my chest, his fingertips rough, catching strands of the boy’s hair where they stood from the back of his neck. The grinder squealed and Jack’s shoulders twitched, but my husband stayed holding on to Kyle just where he was.

  VII

  Enidina

  (Spring–Fall 1920)

  After I lost the second one, I was bedridden for a time. It wasn’t that I was too tired to work or too pained to lift my legs. Something in me wasn’t right. Some sadness I couldn’t undo. The women in town did their best to show me how wrong I was to pay so much attention to what I’d lost. I guess in a way I knew I should listen.

  They came every day for a while, bringing books and new linens, a change of clothes. As if I had none of these in my house. I thought of my brother’s wives and how little I knew of them. How little they cared to know of me. These women weren’t much different. They seemed bound by duty, sharp in their ways. I must have appeared peculiar to them. I didn’t gather in the shops to talk. Didn’t find the reason. When once I baked a pie for the church sale, they threw it out believing it burnt. I had a husband but no children, and that made me odder still. “Get up, this is no way,” they said. I couldn’t tell one voice from the next, only that what they said was true.

  It was Frank who had taken up my dress to wash it and Frank who had thrown out the plates and cleaned the floor. When I woke to find him missing from the room, I sat up in our bed. “We sent him off,” the women explained, lifting a gown from around my shoulders and putting on another one. Their faces changed from one day to the next. It took me days to understand they were different women altogether. Members of the church, wives of the men who owned businesses in town. The farm women nearest couldn’t have spared the time. Save for Mary. But I never saw her once.

  When Minister Borden came, the women left us alone in my room. He stood over the bed, his fingers pressed together like a tent. The quiet in him seemed a relief from the women and all their rush. When he drew up a chair, I realized how the years had tired him. The cuffs of his shirt were yellowed and worn, his chin dark with stubble, and he had a cut on his cheek. He smelled of soap and polished wood and looked as pale as a ghost. “Eddie,” he started. The last time I’d seen him, it was weeks before Kyle was born. I’d found Borden in the church kneeling in front of the pews. He pressed his forehead to his knees, his hands clenched over the crown of his head. His knees on the floor looked pained, bony as they were in loose flannel pants, and he made no sound, only a labored sort of breathing. The kind when grief takes hold of a person and shakes him through. He’s just a man, I thought. At a loss like the rest of us. I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him, private as his grief was. Now at my bedside, he sat with his eyes closed, and I remembered how I’d left him to himself. How sorry I felt for doing so. That day in the church, I doubt he even knew I was there.

  “Have you ever lost a child?” I asked.

  Borden blinked. “No,” he said at last. “But I do believe there’s meaning in what happens to us. There’s a reason.”

  “You think
?”

  “There are times …,” he said, but left off. “After we came here, I asked my father the same thing. We had almost finished the church by then, but my father was restless. Looking back I should have seen he wasn’t well. He was sitting in his chair where we stayed then in the back rooms and he folded his newspaper to see me. ‘God makes mistakes,’ he said. He didn’t bother to explain. He just sat there with the paper in his lap, not reading. I’ve always thought of that when something happens. ‘God makes mistakes.’ It’s little comfort, I know, but it’s a reason. My father died a few months later. I have no other family. Not compared with yours at least. I’m afraid I’m useless in that.”

  “No one?”

  He shook his head.

  “Must be hard off alone. Out there, I mean.”

  Borden took out his Bible, as if he was through with talking. The pages were tattered and he clung to them eagerly, reading to me in a quiet voice. It was a story I didn’t know, but there was a rhythm to it. His voice brought some comfort. I thought of him in that church without his father, nothing but air between him and that ceiling. How do you comfort a man who speaks to spirits? He seemed more of a child to me now than anyone and I tried to keep myself awake and listen.

  Finally Frank was with me again and the rest were gone. He squeezed a towel over the washstand and washed my arms and legs. Soaking the towel again, he let the water spill from his hands. He washed my cheeks then, my throat and chest, and I swallowed under his touch. When he was finished, he wrung that towel out well and laid it on the stand to dry.