The Quickening

by Michelle Hoover

  Borden dropped his fingers to the keys, a dull twang. The skin on his wrist seemed paper thin, lined with veins, and the muscles twitched. “No one’s ever asked,” he said. The rush I felt under my ribs, it had not left me, not when his coat settled against my hip or now as I listened—he talked about wives who worried over restless husbands, widows who brought dishes hot from the stove. When finally he grew quiet, I started to play, but my fingertips ached when I touched the keys, the ivory beneath dark with bloody prints. Borden folded my hands into the corner of his jacket and held them against his hip as we sat, the piano humming still. For a long while we sat like that, resting against each other. I believed he would never let go.

  It must have been the same for my youngest boy—Adaline and the way she looked, those dresses too small for her and her back pliable as grass, twisting her foot out and still stinking of the farm. She was a fire, that girl, with Frank’s thinness and good looks and a vein of steel like her mother. She should have been born a boulder, just like that woman, but she was lovely—despite all her roughness—more than any other girl in town. Though my son could turn heads when he walked through the streets, though the ladies commented on his sweetness and charm, Adaline’s looks made her dangerous, especially for my son—there was a loneliness to her now that sent waves, living out on that farm with no one her age for company, no one who would even come near.

  Of course I have imagined how it went, ever since the day I found that blanket in the Currents’ northmost field—months after they had run off. It was a mangy pile of wool, so dirty I could not carry it home without coughing, and I shut it away in my closet, still ripe. I doubt they minded that stink themselves, young as they were and desperate enough to be out there to begin with. I had once known such desperateness, no matter how short-lived—but it was that girl who had made it stick, who had gotten away from this place. That kind of desperate, it can turn a woman reckless with any man who asks.

  I had seen Adaline myself from my kitchen window the day she watched Kyle in the fields. There she stood with her bare arms hooked over our gate, Kyle riding the tractor a good stone’s throw away, working closer to her row by row. He frowned, turned the engine off, and dropped to the ground, looking for some trouble between the wheels. He never did belong in this place, Adaline must have thought, that dust making him squint, the sun difficult. When Kyle saw her at last, he stopped where he stood. Adaline wore an old straw hat, one of Jack’s that Kyle himself had taken long before and soon after lost. The hat sat crookedly on her head, the brim fallen to her nose, and she pushed it back with a wink. Kyle never smiled. He never waved. He never said a word—he only watched her like a wild bird he might scare off. Finally he turned his back and climbed into his seat. When he looked for her again, Adaline was gone, that hat twirling on the gatepost for him. The next day or the next, they met at that corner of our road as if they had somehow agreed.

  It must have been late in the afternoon when they found it—that patch of dirt in the fields they soon thought of as their own, where out of a strange sort of indifference nothing grew and the corn stood like walls. The soil lay flat, the earth cool against their backs as they looked up at the sky overhead—like falling it must have felt, and she gripped his hand. “Kyle,” she must have said. She liked to say it now because it was different from the way his name had sounded to her before. It curled her tongue, like biting the meat from an orange—before he was just a boy and his name never sounded like anything at all.

  He leaned close enough to touch her bare shoulder with his, his skinny legs sticking out under the worn denim overalls, much longer than her own limbs. She must have thought him good-looking, my son, with those sharp cheekbones, as if he were starved. More than that, she must have liked that smell on him, the sticky saltiness like the belly of a dog, but harder somehow, finer, and sharp to the tongue. His hand fit into the small of her back, as if that was where it had come from.

  “We’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

  She leaned so close he could almost rest his chin in the curls on her head. It was a dare, he thought.

  “Where are we supposed to be?”

  Her hands were small, the bones of a bird—he could have smelled the cows on her and touched the white scattering of hair that clung to her skirt, making her familiar and warm and as easy as mornings in the barn. Such a girl—with her blue-black hair and her quickness, the way she never shied from anything. Who knew what kind of fire she had in her? What that look of hers promised?

  “I thought you might play,” Borden had said. Still gripping my hands, he rose from the bench and took me down the hall to his rooms. I had never seen such a sad place, a single cot with white linens, a scabby desk and chair that tried to match. The room smelled of paper and dust, pages of sermons pinned to the walls with X’s through the paragraphs—We are not the only ones who must know God, he had scrawled at the bottom of a page, beneath line after line of scratched-out sentences. “Sit,” he said, and I found myself in the nest of sheets on his bed. We are not the only ones, I thought, but those sheets were simple and soft, tossed aside as if he had only just slept in them and smelling of that sleep. Borden bent to his knees and took off my shoes, gripping my feet. He pressed his hand against my neck and slid his fingers down my collarbone. God would understand such things, I believed. Ecstasy and passion, they were God’s doing, and forgiveness was God’s. Everything was. Already I could see it on Borden’s face, a kind of light, a blessedness—and as he pressed into me in that nest of sheets, I knew that blessedness was ours.

  • • •

  It was only days after the Currents’ fire when I stood in that church again, but the chapel had suffered years of aging, something I could not recognize until it lay empty now and quiet. The wooden steps were unpainted and rotting. The walls had faded to a dirty white. Borden sat in the front pew, pale as the walls and thin, so much smaller than I remembered, and he raised his eyes at my presence. Some might think, I would say—I would make myself the center of the story. If I convinced him, no one could say a word against us. I sat in the pew beside him and gripped his hand—how good and warm that hand was, though stiffer than it once had been, and I thought of what that hand meant, what it had always promised.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Enidina. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  I sat back against the hard wood. “I’m here about Kyle.”

  Borden pulled his hand from mine, but I took it again and held it more fiercely in my lap.

  “I have no ownership of that boy,” he said. “Jack is his father. I’m nothing to him.”

  “Why did you go to her first?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I? Eddie lost a son.”

  “You have a son you can lose too.”

  “I go where I’m expected. Where I do the most good.”

  “You owe us.”

  “I can’t do anything about that.”

  “Just believe my side of the story. If anyone asks about Kyle’s horse, tell them it was Enidina all along.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I never expected anything from you, did I? All this time. I let you go, pretending whatever you wanted.”

  “What did I pretend?”

  “You pretended plenty.”

  He flinched, but still I held his hand. He is an old man, I thought, little more than fifty, but he creaks like this bench when he talks. I tried to think of him as he was when he was young—that look on his face and the way he trembled. I had to think of that to speak to him at all.

  “You can’t come in here like this,” he said.

  “They’ll start talking, don’t you see?” I went on. “If you don’t do something, I will.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Pretending you didn’t even know me. A man of God, as if you’d never touched a woman in your life. What do you think they’ll say when I tell them? You won’t have a churc
h at all.”

  Borden tore his hand from mine, and the light in the chapel went strange. He was nothing like he had been, now with his voice rising and the veins breaking across his cheeks. This man I believed I had known so well—with his clean, white skin, his faulty gait, and the shock of black hair under his collar—how had he kept out of the sun and dust and trouble of this place for so long? Jack wouldn’t have ignored me the way this man did. Jack never ignored anything.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think, but it was Jack I remembered and the look on his face in our kitchen years ago, the first time he brought me oranges from the store—an unusual gift at the time, what with their bright skin. The boys turned the oranges in their hands but would not eat them. Jack showed them how to peel the fruit with their fingers, pulling back the skin where the undersides showed a snowy white, and the sharp smell made the boys laugh. He dug his thumb into the meat and split the orange into pieces, giving one to each, and the boys ate them with juice on their chins. When Jack peeled the last one and held a piece to my mouth, I felt the coarse skin of his fingertips and tasted the salt and heat of his work with the fruit’s sweetness—so wild a taste I found myself asking for another piece from his hands.

  “Mary,” Borden broke in. I opened my eyes and he had moved away, standing now behind a high wooden bench and clutching one of his books. “You can’t expect so much,” he said. It is years ago now, but I can still feel Jack as he was that last night in our bed. What had woken me to his presence was not his new weight after all those years or any sound he had made coming in after dark. In my sleep, he had taken hold of my wrist, so tight that when he died and loosened his grip, the blood that rushed to my fingers felt painful and alive.

  “I won’t be forced into describing something the way it isn’t,” Borden was saying. “Not any more.” He would not look at me as he went on, about people and their expectations, about the decency of letting things go—but I no longer listened. I could think only of my husband, that juice on his hands. My visit to the church was long before Jack died, but even then I sensed that I was the one who had made Jack what he was, every last violent step. Borden stood before me, pretending to take offense, but the way he looked over the pews, I could tell he was thinking something different. If our letter to Enidina helped anyone, it was Borden, the congregation seized by his mission, the righting of a wrong. The next time I saw him at the pulpit, the man had grown gaunt with worry—but the congregation was with him again, the offering plates heavy, and his father’s church full. He would live on in that church for years until one day the congregation found the doors locked, the place empty—the man who had been their faithful minister disappeared without any sign of having ever been there at all.

  You may believe my going to the church was the worst, I would try to tell Kyle in a letter years later, one of the many he never got. So many pages have I written without a word back—there are stacks of them on the table, gray with dust, and stacks near my chair as high as my hip. RETURN TO SENDER, they say, with the stamp of that severed hand pointing off. That boy disappeared from this place soon after Jack died, as if the only good reason for his running had not already left the only way a man like Jack knew how. You don’t know what they could have done to us, I wrote. You don’t know how many teeth that gossip had in it …, but I never could explain what I did. “Someday you’ll know better,” my father had said, and that boy in the woods with me, catching me in his fists. I remember how dizzy I had been whenever I was touched, and how that dizziness first reared its head when I was leaving those woods for the last time. The boy’s hand across my mouth, the bitter scent—how the town turned against us instead of the one who had done worse. “My God,” Jack complained. “I know what it means.” There were all those things, the boy in the woods, the knife between my legs, and the way Jack had never forgiven me, the cold feeling in the church years later and the look on Borden’s face, as if I meant nothing to him. You can’t expect your old mother to wait for so long, I wrote to Kyle, hoping he might come home. It’s different without Jack. You could make a new kind of life in this place if only you’d try …

  I walked home alone from the church. In my tiredness I called out to Kyle to let me in. My youngest shuffled down the stairs in the darkness, but left me alone once inside. What I had done was for him, but I lost him all the same—though I would not know the truth of it for years. That night after my visit, I dreamed the church was as new as the day I had found it, with the young stranger speaking my name. That place was the farthest I ever went. I stayed late in the afternoons when I could, when the winters made walking home difficult—and then there was Kyle. That night, I imagined it whitewashed again and brilliant, smelling of grace, and when I walked into the chapel, there was Borden, without that darkness in his eyes or a hint of impatience, without looking away. When I lifted my hands, he was there to catch them, touching my fingers to his lips.

  “It’s the Currents’ fault,” I told him. “Their boy, Donny. They’re the ones.”

  XV

  Enidina

  (Summer 1937–Fall 1939)

  When the letter arrived, we were expecting it. Sitting in our box on the other side of the road, it’d been delivered on foot. We didn’t have to wonder which of our neighbors had walked out there on her thin heels and left it for us. As you have been dishonest, it started. In your ways of achieving financial success. The paper was tissue thin. The lettering strict. The congregation had signed their names at the bottom like a stamp.

  The summer after the fire, our field had grown. It had grown the next year and the year after that, better than any of our neighbors’. With the money that came in, we braced the barn. Bought back the acres we’d lost to the droughts. Frank put gaslights in the house and bought us a car. One of the finest cars in town he bought, but only because he believed it would last. Adaline swept her hands over the hood and helped her father wash it, but mostly she kept to herself. The stalks she hid in straightened over her head. The fields grew up finer than ever, your mother becoming beautiful in their midst. For a time I believed the way our life had been might come back to us, that we might make a fine living again. If only we could stay in one piece.

  But the fire had changed things. The town was different. The people had grown quiet, their manners easy, except when they thought we weren’t looking. The clerks wouldn’t name a price, writing it instead on a slip of paper and pushing the paper across. We sat as we always did at the back of the church, but no one but drifters sat with us now. That’s when I knew. The way the others kept their backs turned, all but ignoring us during greetings before service. There must have been meetings. Votes we weren’t invited to attend. Between us and the front of that church, a great crowd had joined together and left us out.

  “What have you done?” Mary read from the podium. She stood with the Bible at her breast, but the stories she told sounded different from any scripture I’d heard before. Borden sat on his bench behind her, head nearly in his lap. “Now you are under a curse,” Mary read. “Driven from the ground. When you work the land, it will no longer yield you crops. You will be a wanderer on earth for the rest of your life.”

  My boy, there are more ways than one to send a person wandering. It doesn’t take much to become a stranger in your own home. It wouldn’t have been difficult, though I suppose the congregation trusted Mary little more than us. Still, she had some pull with Borden himself. Over the years, we had lived as well as we might. But when Roosevelt brought in Wallace, we tried to save our hogs. We’d taken bankruptcy while the other farmers had nearly starved. Mary must have reminded them of all this, though our good crops those last few years had helped her along. There was a fear in them. If not of Borden himself then of God and the church Borden preached in. If a minister tells his congregation something as if it’s scripture, they’ll believe it. No matter what they know otherwise.

  As you’ve received more than you deserve, in our eyes and in God’s … I read that letter out loud to
Frank while Adaline stayed in the fields. A growing girl shouldn’t know so much. By number, they listed whatever they thought we had done against them or against God himself: One—the addition of a new wall for your barn. Two—the addition of gas lanterns in your home and such fixtures that go with gas lanterns. Three—the purchase of a new automobile. Four—a sow kept on your property. Five—top dollar for your crops these three years last. Six—the repurchase of your eighty acres, which profited you twice in your accepting the government’s bankruptcy in ’33. And Seven—increases in your giving to the church which has brought you much attention.

  With his hands between his knees, Frank sat in his chair and listened. He rolled a bit of straw against his thumb until it was little more than dust. I turned the paper over. From the other side, the handwriting showed clear through. Such benefits as you have received in your workings with the Devil through these bad times …

  Nothing comes from the Morrows that isn’t rotten. That’s why. Your grandmother has her reasons for telling what she does. That letter they sent, it wasn’t more than a single sheet of paper, but it had such weight. Your ways in this matter have been as such: One—breaking the law in keeping of aforementioned sow. Two—the use of home cures. Three—damage to your property by fire which has benefited you ever since. And Four—the death of your boy which is now believed an act of carelessness by your wife, as witnessed by one Mary Morrow, whose son is hereafter innocent of blame.

  Frank stood from his chair and I held my breath. He made his way through the door and out to the barn and pulled at the rusted gate, kicking it open with his boot. He gripped the gate and tried to tear it from its hinges, but it wouldn’t break. It only whined, splintering in his hands. Finally he stood back with his mouth set and his face raw and terrible beneath his hat, wiping his forehead hard against his sleeve. At last he disappeared into the barn. You are no longer welcome, that letter said. I spread my mother’s rugs over the floors of this house and couldn’t hear myself walking through the rooms. I couldn’t hear Frank or the visitors we never had. I couldn’t hear that son of ours who never grew. With all the noise coming from town, I covered it up just the same. That letter was only the beginning, the writing small and trailing to the end. May it be for God and all his helpers to forgive.