The Quickening

by Michelle Hoover

  “Kyle,” she said at last. “He’s something, I guess.” And with your mother, I knew that something was a great deal more. It was bigger than she knew herself. She wouldn’t let out another word, but I could tell she was thinking it over. By early morning when at last she slept, I carried her back inside the house.

  Already a sense of cool was returning to me. On those mornings when I brought my girl to her bed, she was light and easy in my arms. My chest felt loose, my breathing full. I was less afraid it would run out. Just before I slept, I could hear the leaves shifting and the groans of the good earth I believed still waited beneath the topsoil. The stalks, I imagined, were tall, well grown. And with the shawl around me, I seldom coughed.

  But in truth, the fields were no different. The leaves hung with grasshoppers. Dirt drifted under our doors and through the cracks between the windows. In the distance, the horizon wavered like smoke, and the wind never stopped its grazing. This place had become strange to me, or I to it. I’d lived in such countryside all my life. I never thought I could survive in a place that wasn’t as flat and plain as a plate, where little was hidden. Now the absence that hung over the land seemed something I could touch. Frank and I took to sitting on the porch in the daytime, watching the sun take our crops as it would. Before us, the corn hummed with insects and brittle leaves. A terrible, hungry sound.

  It was Adaline who next took a fever, though the doctor claimed it wasn’t the same as mine. Donny walked the road to the Morrows alone. He was so set on that horse, he refused now even to have his father along. Still, without his sister, that boy seemed just about helpless. The rim of his hat broke, his lip showed a bloody crack. Adaline’s loyalty was that fierce. “He’s home,” I told her when she woke from her sleep, hearing his footsteps in our yard.

  “That animal isn’t right, mother,” she said, sitting up.

  “Have you told him?”

  “It’s Kyle. He’s the one who keeps Donny going.” She closed her eyes before she finished and sank back, already in a sweat.

  The horse was worse with Donny every time. It wouldn’t be tamed. Even Frank was convinced of it. Donny walked up the porch steps, threw himself into the shade.

  “You should think about quitting this,” my husband said, waking in his chair. “No harm giving up what never gives you a chance.”

  But Donny said nothing. Every day Frank tried to keep the boy home by not going with him, sure the boy wouldn’t go by himself. But Frank never could understand stubbornness, not even my own. Adaline fell asleep again and I tucked my shawl around her throat and chest. By the morning, she’d have thrown it off.

  At last I walked to the Morrows’ farm to see the animal myself, to see what it was capable of. I stood at the edge of their land and watched from a good distance. Kyle held the horse by a rope, and the animal circled the corral. It kicked when the rope stopped it short, running and jerking in circles until the length of the rope stopped it again. Only when Kyle gave it free rein did the horse show itself well. It was smooth and tight in its running, its hooves carving up the dirt. But even from where I stood, I could see how skinny the animal was. How this running didn’t have much to do with strength but with something more desperate. With its ribs showing, the horse twisted its pale neck, its eyes rimmed with white. Kyle whipped at it to keep it going.

  The boy himself looked like a stick figure beneath the sun. Tall but hardly grown. Five years older than Donny but seeming less. He was an unusual one too, not big like his father but slight in build and delicate. His face had been beautiful from the day he was born. Still, on that afternoon, his limbs carried a kind of meanness. He stood with a girl his age who was curly-haired and slim, pretty enough for distraction, and Kyle called out in awe of the animal, “Look at him.” But the girl couldn’t keep herself from looking. Kyle must have known it as she held on to his arm, breathing hard the way a sudden wind does a person. This wasn’t an ordinary animal. This horse was a powerful thing.

  Behind the Morrows’ winter fences, I stood my watch. The knot of the shawl rose and fell against my throat. The horse got little affection. Not from its owner or anyone else. Turning the rope, Kyle kept on and kept on while the animal ran. Soon he forgot the girl altogether, watching only the horse. Watching it and wiping the sweat from underneath his hat. I could see it in the way he stared at the animal, grinning. He liked to watch the horse go. He liked to drive it too far, just as his own father drove him, and every time the rope caught it short, I flinched. That horse was meant to go. It was meant to be gone.

  That was the way your mother went. She had her reasons, what with you so unexpected and this place like tinder to her. My boy, before you were born, I’d seen how she grew with you, though she tried to hide it as much as she could. I knew it in the way she touched her hand to her stomach, stopping when she walked into a room. She caught her breath, the blood high in her cheeks. Under her hand was the beating of a child she was too young to have. Restless, it felt, that child. Little more than a rippling in her belly, but willful enough to make itself known. I remember it well, you see. Sometimes even now I can feel that life in me just the same. When I was young, I believed it was a beginning. I believed nothing could take away a child that could drum so under my skin. And I felt powerful because of it. Little did I understand it wouldn’t last.

  For years I hadn’t seen any boy of your likeness in town. But the last time I went, months ago, before I was bound to this bed, I believed I’d found you in the market, and I hid behind the shelves. There you stood at the counter, that black hair of yours against your skinny frame. What I could see of your face seemed the same as Kyle’s, his dark eyelashes and the set of his mouth, as innocent as any child. The boy bought a pack of gum, a set of playing cards, and a pencil. With such a pencil, I thought, a child could write his grandmother. If he knew she existed at all. The boy popped his gum, and Mr. Reed dropped change into his hand. I watched how the man did it. One of his fingers brushing the boy’s own in that distracted way people have. He didn’t seem to notice. How close he came.

  But when that boy turned, I knew he wasn’t one of my own. His mouth was too full, his eyes strange. I crouched behind the shelves and felt tired of being wishful. Of looking for anyone who might be my own kin. When I came out from hiding, Mr. Reed seemed to know what I’d been wishing for. He looked me over as I dropped my bread on his counter and said the price as if asking too much. When at last he gave me change, he brushed my fingers with his. That man nodded to me as if that was the best he could do. Knowing you were mine. That I had every right to you. “Good day, Eddie,” he said, as if he could understand. Of all my trips to town looking for you, that was my last.

  There’s no stopping a child from doing what he wants. I know that as well as anyone. My boy, I hope you believe I tried. The next day or the next, I went again with Donny to the Morrows, no matter how he complained. When we turned the final bend, the corral looked quiet. But when the horse stepped through the gate, the dust rose. When Kyle saw us come, he climbed into the corral and took the rope, whipping at the horse to get it running. The boy wanted to impress me, I could tell. But I believe that horse knew what would drive that impression home.

  “Kyle,” I said, but before I could let out another word, Donny had climbed over the fence and hoisted himself on the animal’s back. Then the horse was off. I looked for Kyle to stop it, but Kyle only lifted his hat to me and waved. “Donny, you hear?” I called, pulling myself over the fence. When I stepped into the animal’s path and waved my arms, it passed me without a flinch. The animal’s flank heaved as it rushed, my son with only two thin reins to hold. Kyle whipped its legs and Donny’s mouth opened without a sound. The horse turned about the yard once, twice, Kyle pitching the rope high. The Morrows’ house cast a heavy shadow on the yard. It stood large and blank-faced. Not a soul at its lidded windows. Not even Mary looking out. Beyond it, the fields bent under the wind, the leaves on the stalks of corn showed their silver sides, and a haze shivere
d on the horizon. The corn under that sun, it didn’t look natural. And the way my boy clung to the animal seemed desperate and clouded in dust. When the horse circled again, it flung its head. The fence behind me shook and Donny slipped to the horse’s side, gripping the mane. Kyle lost hold of the rope and cried out, but still the animal ran. The horse drove Donny against the far fence. It grazed the planks as Donny hung on, the reins knotted now around his hands. It tried to force him off, hanging my son on the fence by his collar as if he were a doll. It raced along that fence over and again, as if the animal couldn’t do anything but run, and it trampled Donny when the fence fell.

  I should stop myself from telling you this. A child shouldn’t know so much. That was the start of your mother’s leaving. Eleven as she was herself at the time, as her own brother had been. Two months ago, eleven was your last birthday. Until then, I was hopeful. I made the same pancakes, but with honey and melon this time, and I lit a row of candles. I sat at the end of my table where I could see the clock. The ocean, your mother had written just a week before. Rhode Island, the stamp said. It’s not so very different, she wrote. The way the water looks flat and doesn’t change. You’d think there wasn’t a thing living in it, but it’s terrible how much. When I looked at a map in town, Rhode Island seemed lost up there in the corner. A state so small and crowded, there didn’t seem to be room for a person at all. I wondered why Adaline was going farther still. When she knew how important eleven was and how much I worried. Those candles on the pancakes burned. I lit another row and another. At last I didn’t have any more in the box. Sitting at that table, I got to thinking. It’s that thinking that put me in this bed. Your mother never did mention you in her letters. I figured she would when she got through being nervous. But eleven should have done it. At eleven, she should have come back. There must have been some reason she didn’t. Maybe you never made it to eleven at all.

  • • •

  It was late in the afternoon when I carried my boy home, though I stayed in our yard to watch over him. When I raised the shawl from my shoulders, the smell bent me double with coughing. I drew the shawl over Donny, head to foot. Behind me, Frank looked out in the coming darkness. He joined me on the grass, touched Donny’s leg and drew back. “Sit with me for a while,” I said, but I knew Frank wouldn’t sit for long. I couldn’t imagine how it must be for him, so torn was I with what I’d seen. The way Kyle had whipped the horse’s legs. The way the animal had circled, Donny holding on. Frank hugged the boy to his chest.

  I would stay crouched on my knees through the night and into the early morning. Every few hours, Frank paced the yard, looking smaller and grayer each time. He never said a word to hurry me. He never so much as scraped his foot on the ground. The fields in front of me blurred. The few clear breaths I took turned to smoke. I dozed where I sat, my head snapping back whenever it fell. Donny and the way he held on. The way he hung from that fence post. When I picked him up, he was hardly more than bones. And when I carried him off, his blood stained the corral. I must have been covered with the same myself.

  All this time they’d worried over me, that shawl an omen on my back. Now in my sleep, I saw the fire they’d dreaded. I imagined the fields slapped down by a mighty hand. I thought of the stove we hadn’t dared light in the summer and the matches I carried in my pocket. Such a blaze. I knew I’d seen something like it years ago. Something fantastic and final. A single strike. The match would catch and sputter, making a charred circle in the grass. Soon the shawl over Donny would melt, taking my boy away with it. But I would have to be the one to start it. To save my son from being forgotten. With Donny wrapped in fumes and the heat of the sun rising at my back, I believed I couldn’t do otherwise.

  XII

  Mary

  (Summer 1936)

  What no one knows is how my youngest troubled me, how one look from that boy could stop me where I stood, drop the rag from my hand, and make me take hold of him as if he were innocence itself—can you blame a mother for loving her son? He suffered from gentleness the same as others suffer from waywardness and sin, and I couldn’t help but raise him soft, even when he slapped me away, and remind him always of what I knew to be true—that of my sons, he was the one who could be more than the dirt in these fields, that his very blood promised it, even if he pretended at simpleminded ways. He needed only to learn persistence and faith, and these I taught him with a quick word at any misstep, so devoted an eye did I keep on his every doing. But Jack was different. He took a hand to the boy more than he ever had the other two. So Kyle grew quiet, skittish, despite all my efforts to teach him strength. And when I found the boy kneeling on the floor, forced to eat from a broken plate of food he had dropped—my husband standing over him, arms crossed—I swore I would do more than raise him for God. I would raise him a man.

  But on that day the horse went wild, Kyle was already half gone. When he came in, he was coated in dust, his hands bleeding and eyes like stones. Without a word, he fell into a chair in a dark corner of my kitchen, head to his knees.

  After a time, he said, “Mother, I did something.”

  “You did nothing,” I answered, drying my hands at the sink. “What did you do?”

  He shuddered in the chair, the towel twisting in my fingers. Outside, a constant churning of hoofs sounded in the yard and the rush of my husband’s footsteps as he yanked open the door.

  “Kyle!” Jack called out, as if slapping at the boy’s name, but he never did see him huddled in the corner as he was. Without an answer and without seeming to want one, Jack grabbed his shotgun from the wall and went out the way he came. I ran through the door to follow him—even before I knew the reason, he was out in the corral, the horse making desperate circles in the dirt. The fence was down, splintered, a deep, ruddy stain on the wood. The horse struck itself against the far wall, its bony hide red and lathered. With three shots from the gun, the animal fell to the ground.

  Inside, I took Kyle’s hands and felt the shiver that ran through him before he yanked his hands away. “Where’s Dad?” he said.

  I shook my head. “You didn’t do anything,” I whispered to him and whispered it again before Jack was in the room.

  “The Current boy,” Jack said coming in. I imagined Donny dwarfed in his overalls and hat, twisting his mouth as if riding the horse were a matter of will. I knew that face from his mother, knew it too well. Jack did not offer a word more, but I understood. That horse seemed terribly high next to the boy and still he had ridden it, his hands torn from trying to hold on—I sat on the floor and dropped my head. In the darkness between my knees, my eyes ached. My husband stood above me with his head back, the tanned skin of his neck clutching whenever he swallowed. The gun rested against the table, the smell of burning metal. A groan rose from Kyle’s throat and Jack stared.

  “It wasn’t his doing,” I said.

  “What?” Jack answered.

  “It wasn’t him.”

  “You should have seen it. Jesus, the way Eddie was carrying him.” Jack stopped and wiped his mouth. “There’ll be talk. If Kyle hadn’t let that boy ride it. Hadn’t pushed the animal the way he did.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing he ever does—”

  “Don’t you say it. You know very well why me and that boy have the trouble we do.”

  Kyle lifted his head and went still, watching us. “It wasn’t Kyle,” I answered. “Donny wanted to ride the horse, that’s all, and that’s what we’ll say if anyone asks.”

  Jack’s eyes grazed the gun, the table, and the sweating floorboards between us. “You’d do that, wouldn’t you?” he started. “You and that church you were always going off to, acting like the good girl.” He stopped as if he wanted to say more, but let out a laugh—a low, pained sound, dropping his hands open and slapping his legs. As he left the room, he squeezed Kyle hard on his shoulder before tearing himself away, stomping up the stairs and through the darkness above us. Kyle trembled, looking at the place his father had left. No
matter how many times I called his name, the boy never so much as turned his head. So I raised myself from that floor and wiped my cheeks. I rested that gun back on the wall where it belonged—and in the morning before Jack had stirred, before it was quite light, I woke my son from where he had slept the night in that chair and we were gone.

  We went straight to the Currents’, Kyle lagging so behind that I had to reach back and hurry him, but the boy ignored my hand. He moved as if asleep, quiet and stumbling over the grass. His clothes hung like a scarecrow’s from his hips, his arms thin as rails. He had grown far too quickly, without an ounce of fat or muscle—a boy who had seldom heard a kind word from a father in his life. Still Kyle forgave Jack everything, no matter what that man did, while with me he had turned as sullen as his brothers, as if I was the one who had turned Jack against him. Now my eyes watered and I tasted smoke—before us the sky had darkened and just beneath grew a wavering light. The air smelled burnt, a bright flickering where there should have been only corn and beans. Kyle stopped and stared over the plain.

  “There’s a fire,” he shouted. “That’s the Currents’ fields.”

  “Kyle?” I yelled out, but the boy had set off. I needed only to talk to Enidina before she saw him again, to convince her that the horse was an accident—but Kyle would make a mess of it, showing himself so recklessly before I even got the chance. Off he went, as if their house still held anything for him, and I could only follow.

  It had been seventeen years since I had seen the like, but this fire was different—this I believed was man-made. We hid ourselves from the front of the house, but I could make out Enidina as she crouched in the yard rocking on her knees and Frank standing just behind. The fire was spreading, the corn so dry the leaves shriveled under it, as quick to light as matchsticks. Already the neighboring farmers had driven in. They waited inside their wagons and cars with their doors open, gazing at the corn. It was then I saw the dark bundle on the ground, wrapped as it was in a shawl that burned and smoked after the grass around it had gone out—what had Eddie done? Burnt matches lay scattered around her knees, the earth black. Kyle saw it too and his face broke until he was heaving in the weeds. “Adaline,” he muttered and started off, but I caught his arm.