Luna (10 page)

Electricity, refrigeration, running water, vacuum cleaners, Rhea had recited.

Happiness. Happiness, Diane echoed softly, after a minute. Something in me insists that there is more, there has to be more.

Happiness, freedom, Rhea said the words back to Diane, or perhaps to herself.

In the same soft voice Rhea had just used, Diane asked, do you know what I want?

I see the energy churning in you, Rhea said. It comes out your eyes and the tips of your fingers.

She begins to knead the dough again, falling into the rhythm. She feels it growing lighter at last under the palms and heels of her hands. The muscles in her lower back and her shoulders begin to ache.

Diane had dropped her eyes abruptly and Rhea had known she was thinking, Rhea’s madness has crept up on her again, she’s not sane now. So Rhea hadn’t said, you make me think of a young goddess—your slenderness and grace, your beauty, your long, glossy hair—a huntress, a priestess, a … She kneads her bread.

All the young women, she muses as she kneads, are sweet and slender at thirteen, their young breasts round and light, their skins fine-grained and easily flushed, their eyes have that quick sparkle. At sixteen their bodies have grown heavier, lost their buoyancy, their breasts have weight, their thighs and hips have thickened, their eyes have deepened and already that glow is fading from their complexions. At eighteen …

Well, right or wrong, I have to go, Diane said.

It’s not wrong, Rhea had replied, hearing her own voice deepen and grow strong. You go.

Now her shoulders are aching. The dough has developed the smooth elasticity she has been waiting for, she can feel its lightness under her fingers and in the heels, the palms, the fingers of her hands. She puts her face close to it to smell it, she draws in a long breath of it, so cool, so sweet. Yet the wonder of it is how it rises and doubles itself and grows light as air itself. I wonder who invented bread? she thinks. God, maybe, but no, it had to be a woman. A goddess.

As she cleans the basin she remembers how she protested when Eli insisted she have water pumped into the house. I don’t need it, she said. I’ve pumped water at the well for over fifty years and I can do it till I die. I like the sound of it, she said. I like how cold it is straight from the well. Now, Mother, Eli said. It’s too hard for you now that you’re older.

Then they were digging trenches to lay the pipe, and fiddling on her step with a pump. It’s a jet pump, Eli said to her. What do I care? she replied. A well-witcher witched that well, she told them. It’s the same well, Mother, Eli said. It’s the same water. If you won’t move to town …

And they were in her kitchen, tearing things out, sawdust everywhere, noise from morning till night, men lying on their backs on her floor with their heads vanished inside the cupboards. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Martin had come home, too, with his wife and kids in a camper, parked outside on the prairie for two weeks while he built a bathroom onto the side of the house. It was pointless to protest, none of her sons paid any attention to her.

When the basin is clean she polishes it dry, then sets it back on the table beside the round of dough. She takes a wad of butter in the palm of her hand and slaps it back and forth till both hands are amply buttered, then butters the inside of the bowl with long streaks of yellow butter. She lifts the dough and sets it in the bottom of the basin, turning it a few times to round the edges. She butters the top delicately with a thin, shining coating of grease. Next she takes a clean cloth and drapes it over the bowl, moves the bowl to the centre of the table and stands back.

Her hands tingle from the flow of blood stimulated by the kneading. They feel large, swollen, and very warm. Sometimes she thinks she makes
bread just to feel that heat and power in her hands. But her shoulders and back ache, reminding her that she has been making bread for more than sixty years. It is a thing of pride, she thinks to herself, to have sixty years of bread-making behind you.

She washes her hands in the warm running water her sons have given her, thinking, men dig wells and run pumps, and women make bread. Then she goes outside to the old woodpile near the back of the yard.

The sun is so hot it strikes her like a blow. I never could stand the heat, she observes again, and shades her eyes with her hand while she scurries back into the kitchen, takes her big straw sunhat from the hook by the door, ties it under her chin, and goes back outside.

She finds some kindling, a few sticks of wood left from her last bread-making. The axe waits in the chopping block. Jasper always kept the wood chopped, she has to give him that. After supper every evening, the familiar thud and crack, rhythmic, the silence, the thud-crack, the silence between the blows. She especially liked the sound of the dried sticks cracking as he twisted them on the axe. She rarely watched him, but could see with her mind’s eye how his shirt wrinkled over his shoulders and stretched tight over his biceps, when he raised the axe, and how, when the axe began its long fall, the muscles in his back would swell and move. He was a strong man, Jasper was, she tells herself. But I’m stronger.

She lifts the axe and lets it fall. A flock of horned larks swoops past on the other side of the pole fence and then they are gone. I always liked horned larks, she says to herself, letting the axe fall again. They don’t bother nobody, and they’re pretty little birds.

She wonders if Diane is gone. She thinks Selena told her, but she can’t remember. Oh, she went all right, I knew she would the moment she was born. Maude holding her up for me to see. Another girl, Maude said. A girl, and Archie so wanted a boy. Let him have the next one then, I told her, but poor Maude only burst into tears. This one’s a seeker, I said, when I saw how she squirmed, her eyes already looking all around.

Suddenly Rhea’s energy deserts her and she sets the axe heavily into the chopping block, turns, goes around the house and back inside. She is grateful for the cool, dim interior of her house and she takes off her hat and
hangs it wearily back on its hook. She sits down again in her armchair at the end of the room and lets her head fall back against its padding. Jasper sat here. For years it was Jasper’s chair. Now it’s mine. She closes her eyes.

Darkness. Only pitch darkness behind her eyelids. She relaxes, sinks deeper into it. Slowly it begins to lighten, and she finds herself back in her own kitchen, many years before.

Blood. Blood everywhere. On the kitchen floor, the table leg. Sprayed out across the washstand, a trail from the door. All over his hands and face and his belly, too, soaking the clean shirt she had finished making only the day before. I’ll never get it all out, she thought, flustered.

Jasper was white. The hired man supporting him by holding one arm at the elbow. There was blood all over his clothes, too. Jasper took his hand away from his calf, raising his head to look beseechingly at her. Do something, his look said, and she pressed her hands against her thighs, bending to see better.

Blood surged suddenly through the tear in his pant leg. He pulled up the cloth so she could see the wound better. It spurted again, three feet it must have shot out, splattering against the washstand, this time brushing her own calf as it shot past. It started another surge, but Jasper clamped his hand over it, and the blood leaked around his fingers. The hired man pushed a chair behind Jasper and he dropped into it. He was growing paler. She straightened, frantically searching the room with her eyes. Do something—stop the blood! Outside, the cows in the corral were bellowing, searching for the calves that had been taken from them for branding and castrating. The noise was too loud, the blood too red, she couldn’t think. Then calm descended over her. Her eyes rested on the flour barrel, she strode toward it, bumping against the hired man, who stepped back out of the way. She wrenched the lid off the flour barrel, she could hear Jasper behind her taking short, quick breaths. She reached inside the barrel and scooped out a double handful of flour and carried it to him. He held his pant leg up, the wound clear, so small, a puncture he must have done with his castrating knife. She pressed the mass of flour against the wound, cupping her hands over it, pressing. Hold it, she told Jasper. He put his big hands where hers had been.

She rushed to the bedroom, found an old sheet she had been meaning to make into dish towels, ripped off a rectangle and hurried back to the flour barrel with it. She folded the rectangle double, then scooped flour onto it, folded it again and then again, so that the flour was sealed inside. She took the flour filled cloth to where Jasper still sat, pressing the loose flour against the cut, pushed his hands aside, scraped away most of the blood-soaked flour, then quickly pressed the cloth against the wound. She pulled it tight. Hold it, she said again, and Jasper held it while she ran back to the bedroom and tore off another long strip with which to bind the cloth against the leg.

The hired man went back outside. She began to clean the blood off the floor. Tea? she asked Jasper.

The dream deteriorated into a shifting sequence of pictures, most of which made no sense. Then she was alone and it was night, coyotes moaning in the winter blackness beyond the windows. She was bleeding, the warm blood running down between her legs, her gut cramping, the pain growing, then releasing. No telephone in those days. Jasper away selling cattle. She would have to go out and hitch the team and drive the thirty miles to the nearest hospital if she wanted help. The baby asleep in its basket beside her.

She folded a flannel sheet over and over again and wrapped it around herself, the heaviest thickness between her legs. She made herself a cup of tea and went back to bed.

All night she had bled, bled and bled, and hurt, till finally it was over. One long, wrenching cramp that had forced, at last, a groan from her, and the baby she had not been sure she was carrying was gone. She had fallen asleep then, or lost consciousness, and when she woke again, the bleeding had dwindled to a manageable flow. She had heated water in the kitchen, filled a basin, taken some rags and scrubbed the inside of her legs. Then she had burned the sheet and the rags in the burning barrel in the yard, before Jasper returned.

It seemed to her now, musing, in some realm between sleep and wakefulness, that a woman’s life was filled with blood. That its sticky texture, its odour, its blue-red colour filled her life, was always with her.
Menstruation, miscarriages, births—I even bled when Jasper went into me that first time, on our wedding night. There was no woman without that intimate knowledge of blood. Trickling down your legs, smearing itself on all the things you own, your hands, reminding you of yourself, the self you don’t talk about. The self that seems most real to you, no matter how you try to pretend it isn’t.

My bread. She opens her eyes. The light has grown yellower while she was resting. The day is waning. She rises and returns to the kitchen.

The dough has mounded up above the pan. She washes her hands, butters them, punches the dough down, divides it into six equal sections and shapes each into a loaf. She butters six breadpans and sets the loaves into them. That done, she begins to carry in the wood she has chopped. It is time to start the fire in the stove.

When she came around to the kitchen door again, her arms full of wood, Selena was standing there. Rhea was so startled she almost dropped the wood.

“Well!” she said, and went inside. She set the wood down in the old woodbox Jasper had built years ago, which sat beside the cookstove. When she turned around, Selena was standing behind her. “Well!” she said again, and wiped her hands on her apron.

“Oh, Auntie Rhea,” Selena said, her voice filled with dismay. “Why all this bread? You can’t possibly use it, and you don’t even have a deepfreeze.”

“It’s for you, of course,” Rhea replied, “that family of yours.” She turned back to the stove, lifted the lid, and began to crumple paper, stuff it into the burning chamber and set kindling on top of it.

“And in the cookstove! In this heat!” Rhea turned away from the stove without replying and went back outside to get another load. As she stooped at the woodpile, she heard Selena coming after her. Selena stooped too, and began to gather an armload. She wanted to tell her to stop, she didn’t want another woman interfering in her breadmaking, but she refrained, remembering that she had after all taught Selena to make bread, that Selena was her acolyte. Acolyte, she repeated to herself, and
said it out loud, “Acolyte,” wondering where such a satisfying word had come from.

“What?” Selena asked.

“Hmmph!” Rhea replied, embarrassed. They carried all the split wood into the house; it filled the woodbox and an armful sat on the floor beside it.

“You split all this yourself?” Selena shook her head. “I’m fifty years younger than you, and don’t know if I could do it.”

“Forty,” Rhea said. “Let’s have some tea.”

She set the kettle on the electric stove, turned the burner on, got down the teapot and cups and then stood waiting for the kettle to boil. Selena pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table.

“I see you picked yourself some wild sunflowers,” Selena remarked, looking through the doorway into the living room.

“Pesky things,” Rhea replied, having forgotten about them.

“Wherever did you find them? They sure don’t grow out there.” She nodded her head toward the bald prairie around the house, on the other side of Rhea’s garden. Rhea shrugged her shoulders.

“There’s a place,” she said, tossing her head vaguely to the north. “You take them. I don’t want them.”

“What’s that?” Selena asked, pointing to a bunched plant hanging upside down from a nail in the old wooden ceiling. The flowers were still yellow although they were fading.

“Cinquefoil,” Rhea said.

“Cinquefoil! Whatever for?”

“Hah!” Rhea replied. She lifted the kettle and poured the boiling water over the teabags in the teapot. While the tea steeped she checked the fire in the cookstove, opened the oven door and put her arm in, elbow first. She straightened, then bent to the woodbox.