Cor raised his eyebrows. “Watch you don’t tear the skin on those birds, now,” he said. Thetis frowned, not because he was correcting her but because he was right. The birds were small things, and she should have known how to handle them. She plucked gentler but with her jaw clenched tight. The only sound for a time was the scrape of Cor’s knife on pine and the soft pull of feathers from flesh, and the silence could almost pretend to be companionable.
Three days later, Uncle came home from the city and left a white box on Thetis’s bed. The dress inside was as red as the belly of a pomegranate, and the neckline dipped low enough to show the hollow of her throat, and she didn’t want to love the dress but of course she did. A wild thing was Thetis, but even wild things can covet, and she wanted to own the dress as bad as anyone wants to own something beautiful.
Under the dress was a pair of dyed-to-match shoes—little heels and gleaming buckles. She hated them even more than she loved the dress, but she knew that there was no wearing one without the other. She clutched the soft cotton of the dress to her throat. She stared at the way the light sparked off the buckles of the shoes, like the sun catching the teeth of a bear trap. For the first time in her life, she was afraid.
* * *
The harvest festival that year may as well have been renamed the Thetis festival. Everyone was mindful of the prophecy and the fight that came after it. Everyone had seen the way Thetis walked slower now that she wore shoes, and everyone knew that Moss was closing in on her like thunder after lightning. The boys in town all slicked their hair back and washed their necks and starched their collars, but it was more out of respect for Cor and Uncle than out of a sense of competition. No one much wanted to compete with Moss, and no one much wanted to face down Thetis’s contempt.
She came to the festival in her red dress and her red shoes, her hair braided up tight by Doc Martha’s unforgiving fingers. Everyone who asked her to dance did it with the kind of polite you’d show a flat-eared cat, and she said “No thank you” until the only person left standing near to her was Moss.
The firelight caught on the chain of his pocket watch. Thetis worked hard not to stare.
“Let’s dance, Thetis,” he said, holding out a hand like the deed was already done. She made to stalk off toward the corn, but he snatched her arm sparrow-quick. Even though everyone nearby was making a show of not staring, there wasn’t a breath that didn’t catch when he laid his hand on that girl. Thetis whipped around, her finger under Moss’s nose like a nocked arrow, and twisted up her lip to give him her opinion of his hand on her elbow. But before she could spit hell at him, he spun her in a wide circle. The fiddle players caught on before Thetis did. She stumbled, trying to keep her feet under her, and the music turned it into dancing.
There was no escaping, so she danced with Moss. Her smile was a rattling tail. Cor and Uncle watched with folded arms as she let the man lead her in one dance and then another. Uncle’s face was still; Cor’s was more than a little sad. It was three dances before anyone else was brave enough to join in the dancing. Thetis snarled like a mountain cat, but Moss held her tight and swung her high and dipped her low, and by the end of the night, the thing had been decided. Moss had held onto the unholdable girl.
The last song ended. Moss dug into his pocket, and from its depths he excavated a dull gold ring. It shone like an apple in the firelight. Thetis couldn’t hide her fascination with the thing—it was the smallest beautiful thing she’d yet seen. She stared at it, slump-shouldered and hollow-cheeked and wanting.
He didn’t drop to a knee, just held the ring out and waited. Thetis gave her hand over like a woman dreaming, her arm lifting slow, her eyes unblinking as she watched the light play over the gold. It wasn’t until Moss slid the thing onto her finger that she startled, but by then it was too late. The ring fit perfect, and everyone clapped while Moss pressed his lips to her cheek, and Thetis was well and truly trapped.
* * *
They were married before Christmas. Thetis wore a white dress from the city. White satin shoes, too, the third pair of shoes she’d ever worn in her life, and she didn’t stumble in them even once. It was a good wedding with good food and good music, and the bride didn’t look at the groom at all, not even when she made the vow.
She had never been one to waste time once she’d decided on a project, and so by the time the first fiddleheads were poking through the snow, her belly was soft and her face was round and everyone was whispering that the two-yolk son was on the way. She answered their congratulations with the same grim satisfaction she’d shown after slaughtering her first rooster. “Only way to get a kettle boiling’s by lightning a fire under it,” she’d say, looking at the ring on her finger with increasing distaste.
Neighbors gave her a rattle and a pair of impossibly small shoes and a long white christening gown and knitting needles and an embroidery kit. She was tired enough for the last half of the pregnancy that she learned to sit by the hearth and make use of the latter two. She sent Uncle to the city for thimbles and colored thread and kitten-soft yarn. She bared her teeth at Moss when he tried to press his ear to her navel to hear the baby’s heartbeat, and she still threw her shoes into the garden. But she also sewed buttons onto miniature shirts, and the fury in her frown gentled when she smoothed her fingers over the stitches.
She seemed so close to settled that it was almost a surprise that next January when Moss ran into town, wild-haired, chasing after his missing wife. He ran from the post office to the grocery to the barbershop, but it wasn’t until he got to the dentist’s that he found someone who had seen Thetis that day. The postman who was getting his bad tooth looked at said that he’d seen her. He’d almost forgotten about it, with the news about the war and the draft being all anyone wanted to talk about, but he’d seen her all right. She was walking into the wheat that morning, he said, both hands braced on the small of her back, her belly set out in front of her like the prow of a ship. He told Moss that he saw her walk into the field and thought nothing of it, that wheat being on Cor Ellison’s land and all.
“Was she wearing her shoes?” Moss asked, his fists in the postman’s shirtfront, and when the man shook his head Moss turned and ran. Everyone who’d seen him run into town saw him run out, faster than a hare with a hawk over his shoulder. He didn’t stop running until he reached the wheat.
But of course he was too late—by the time he got to the wheat, Thetis was staggering out of it with blood soaking her legs and a baby at her breast. She swept past Moss in her bare feet and her ruined skirt, walked up the steps of Cor and Uncle’s house, and let herself in. Moss followed her bloody footprints inside and found her sitting on Cor’s whittling stool by the hearth, her leather shoes in front of her and the baby asleep with her nipple still in his mouth. The room smelled like iron and clean sweat. Moss stood with his hands braced on the doorframe, and Thetis finally looked at him. Her gaze was flat and final; she had gotten what she needed from the man she’d allowed to marry her. She didn’t so much as blink as she slid her bloody feet into the shoes she hated.
They named the baby Esau, and with that they renamed her Esau’s Momma. She stopped being Thetis, when anyone talked about her—she had never been Moss’s Wife, but she was sure as hell Esau’s Momma. He was a strong boy with a swagger of red curls that nothing could settle. He had fists like his father and a holler like his mother, and Moss shone bright with pride.
Esau’s Momma was something different from proud. Her mouth tightened whenever someone called her by her new name. She didn’t look at her son with warmth, but she wasn’t quite cool, either. She stroked the newborn-down above his ears and studied his fast-growing fingernails. She watched him sleep, her eyes bright as a cat’s. She loved him the way a bear loves its trap-caught paw.
He needed her, and whether she liked it or not, she needed him right back.
* * *
The harvest festival that year, just a few months after she came out of the wheat field with a damp-headed Es
au in her arms, marked two years since Moss made Thetis dance. She was wearing that same red dress, the one Moss had captured her in. The red shoes, too, the dancing ones, although Moss knew better than to ask her to dance. She kept Esau close in a sling made of white linen with orange blossoms embroidered along the edges in her wide, clumsy stitches. They stood by the bonfire drinking cider, a tidy family to look at them. Moss rested his hand on the small of her back. She shivered away like oil pearling on a hot pan.
Moss didn’t notice her shudder, of course, because he wasn’t looking at her. He was talking to somebody about the way the war would change the price of alfalfa and barley. Esau was craning his neck out of his sling, watching his daddy with the eyes of a child who’s just starting to recognize who his people are. He was watching the way Moss’s watch chain glinted in the flickering firelight, hypnotized in that way babies get.
Esau’s Momma was watching the fire.
Her shoulders were set, and anyone who’d been thinking or looking close enough could have seen what was coming, but nobody was watching Esau’s Momma because Moss had his hand on her back. His hand on her back might as well have been a latch on a storm door, as far as any of them were concerned. So they didn’t watch, and they didn’t see the way her fingers twitched at the edge of the baby’s sling.
The moment came when his hand left her back, and when it did, Esau’s Momma moved fast as a snakebite. She whipped the baby out of the sling, both his legs in one of her strong hands. She swung him toward the fire like she was aiming a horseshoe at a post, and she let go at the top of the arc and Esau flew—but Moss reached out and snatched the boy from the smoke before anyone could finish gasping.
“You’re the one’s always talking about the prophecy,” Esau’s Momma spat, firelight glinting off her teeth. “The prophecy says he needs to be strong. I’ll burn the weakness out of him; you see if I don’t.”
Moss held the squalling boy close, patting his back and frowning like this wasn’t the first time and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. “The prophecy says he can live long or he can live hard,” he said quietly. “You try this way to turn him into a man who’s strong, you and I both know which of those it’ll be.” His brows drew down into a pleading kind of frown. “He could live long. We could raise him up into a man who lives long.”
Esau’s Momma just stalked away into the night, the baby’s sling loose around her belly. She didn’t come back to the festival that night. Later that week the boy who milked cows for Barrow the dairy farmer was telling anyone who’d listen that he saw Esau’s Momma walk out of the cornfield at dawn, still wearing her dancing shoes. The next day, she was back in town with Esau in his orange blossom sling, buying butter for biscuits the same as ever, murmuring to the boy in a singsong voice about the shape of choosing. When she went to pay for the butter, the grocer asked if she’d donate a dollar to send cigarettes to the troops. Then he asked how the baby was coming up.
She nodded and laid a hand on Esau’s head. “He’s weak now,” she said, stroking his hair with her fingertips. “But he’s going to be strong.”
* * *
She finally got her way the day before the river finished freezing over. There was slush on the surface, but the water was still moving, cold as death and twice as fast. She left Cor and Uncle’s house, left them talking with Moss about the way the draft was picking up. She slipped away quiet, and she walked to the water with the boy asleep in her arms. Her steps were quick and sure even though she still hadn’t quite got the hang of those damned leather shoes. Moss and Cor and Uncle ran hard when they noticed she was gone, but they were far enough behind to have to shout after her, and she was faster than they could catch up to.
She didn’t look over her shoulder as the men ran at her. She just grabbed Esau by the ankle, and before he could so much as wake up crying, she’d flipped him upside down and dunked him. She could have let him go—he would have died all the same, him just being so many months old—but she held him tight, the skin of her hand turning white in the water. She stood with her feet rooted to the riverbank, and it wasn’t until Moss reached her that she finally pulled the baby out. He wasn’t quite blue, but he sure wasn’t pink, either, and he was still as a stone.
Cor and Uncle stumbled up behind Moss, panting hard, hands braced on their thighs, but Esau’s Momma didn’t spare them a glance. She shoved that baby into her dress next to her skin and whapped his back hard with a clenched fist, and he choked up water and caterwauled like he’d just learned what screaming was for, and for the first time in a little over two years, Esau’s Momma smiled.
“He’ll be good and strong,” she said. “That’s all the weakness washed away, near about. Good as I can get it, given what his daddy’s made of.” And with that, she walked right past those men who’d decided she would have that baby.
For weeks after, the boy had a purple ring around his ankle in the shape of her fingers. Folks liked to say that was the place the life stayed in Esau when his momma tried to kill him dead. Esau’s Momma took to ignoring her husband and watching her son, and some of her fury seemed to smooth down into patience. She had learned something new that day by the river, something small and human: she had learned to wait for what she wanted.
* * *
Esau was a scrapper on the schoolyard—half in the way kids are, half because every other child his age had heard about the prophecy, and about his momma drowning the weakness out of him. His eyes blacked and healed like the turning of the moon. It was all friendly enough, the way he and his friends tossed around playing soldiers, and if the occasional fight got hostile—well, Esau ended those fights. He hung onto the teeth that got knocked out against other kids’ knuckles, and his momma tossed them into the hearth, saying that if she didn’t, they’d wind up sown in the fallow field and an army would spring up tougher than any that had ever marched before. The boy was bold and brave and tougher than saddle leather, just like Doc Martha said he’d be. There was no weakness left anywhere in him.
Except that he was always bringing things home. Half-starved kittens abandoned in the alfalfa by their mothers, and ducks with their wings broken, and once a mountain cat with the broken bottom of a soda bottle stuck in her paw. It wasn’t quite a weakness, the way he brought things home. Just a fondness, and softer-hearted than his momma thought he’d turn out. She helped him mind the broken things he brought her, and she worked to make sure he grew up with the right kind of balance. Not too tender, but not so hard that he’d wind up the sort of broken man who stays home so he can feel bigger than the folks he bullies, either.
She let the kittens suckle on milk-soaked rags while she spun Esau stories of war and courage. She set the ducks’ wings and fed them corn, and she murmured to Esau about the way battle makes a man strong. She eased glass out of the growling mountain cat’s paw, occasionally running her fingers across the fur between the cat’s ears, and she taught the boy the meaning of glory.
She watched him as close as she had when he was new and small, and so she wasn’t surprised when sixteen-year-old Esau brought a bigger broken thing home. A boy from school by the name of Pistol, which wasn’t his Christian name but then Moss wasn’t Moss’s Christian name either and nobody gave him a second word about it. Esau and Pistol were stuck together close as two yolks in the same shell. Esau told his momma in a low voice that Pistol’s pa had come home from the war different, drunk and mean and broken, and could Pistol stay the night?
Esau’s Momma nodded in that quiet way she’d taken to, and she watched the way Esau rested a hand on Pistol’s shoulder, and she didn’t say a word when they walked out into the woods together that night. She just left the front door unlatched and turned down Esau’s bed, and the next morning she put an extra plate on the table.
It was only three days before Pistol’s pa showed up on Esau’s Momma’s doorstep, pounding on the pine with a clumsy fist. Esau’s Momma laid a hand on Moss’s shoulder, folded her napkin on the table, and answered the knock at the do
or. Pistol’s pa’s eyes were swimming, and he smelled like poison.
Esau’s Momma stood in the doorframe and listened to the liquor-brave man as he told her all of what he thought of her. And then she stepped out into the night, closing the door behind her, and Pistol’s pa didn’t say anything more.
The three men in the house finished their meal in the heavy kind of silence that wells up between people who are trying their best to listen for what might be happening just out of earshot. They cleared the supper things—Moss wiped down the scarred wood of the table, and Pistol took the scraps to the yard, and if he saw what was happening out there, he didn’t say. Esau scrubbed the plates and dried them and put them away. None of them dared breathe too loud. There wasn’t a sound to be heard outside of the men trying to be quiet.
Esau’s Momma didn’t come back into the house until Moss had settled by the hearth with his polishing rag and his watch chain. He stood as she walked in, but she offered no explanations as to where she had been or what she had been doing. She kissed Esau’s red hair, and she gave Pistol’s shoulder a squeeze. She sat on her stool near the fire, put a hand into her pocket, and tossed something into the hearth that clattered against the stone. She reached down to wipe something off the toe of her leather shoe. She smiled.
Then, Esau’s Momma picked up her sewing and began mending one of Moss’s old shirts. She announced that Pistol would be staying in Esau’s room from then on, and he’d better go on and get washed up for bed. Her tone did not invite argument, so they did as she said. The boys stayed up late that night in Esau’s bedroom. They whispered in the dark with their noses pressed together and their breath on each other’s lips, telling each other that those were surely pebbles she’d tossed into the fire. Surely pebbles, for the question of where she would have gotten a whole pocketful of teeth was a question the boys could not make themselves ask.
The Mythic Dream Page 13
