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Dobbs lowers himself. He grinds his pelvis against mine. He starts to rock. I squeeze my legs tightly together. He knees them easily apart. He rubs himself against me. The thin polyester nightgown is no match.
“No! You’ve got no right!”
A cold hand shoves its way down, rips my underwear to one side.
Dobbs uses his head to push up against my chin, forcing me to look at that horizon. I feel his spit land on my chest, run down the side of my neck.
He is at the shore of the lake, and I am out deep where his hook’s got caught in my resistance. I pull away. The harder I pull, the harder he yanks. I’m all thrashing. He wades into the shallows, drawing up his rod. Reeling, reeling, reeling. Everything in him is one taut line. Something gives way. He is out of breath. It takes one more mighty pull to rip me free from the current. He sputters and pants. I am his flapping, gasping catch.
Measure it, weigh it, take a picture of it for your scrapbook. Just don’t throw me back so you can return tomorrow and cast your line again.
He won’t look at me when he stands up. Anyone would think he’s the wronged party the way he covers himself, hunches forward, hurries from the room.
I get up. I can feel color, awful color running down my legs, spreading in places I don’t want to look. The floor is covered with powder except for one speck of bright red. Some rainbow.
All my faiths have forsaken me, save one. Faith in my body. The fixed set of functions just goes on and on and on. Heart continues to beat; lungs expand; stomach growls; kidneys flush. And now, a new function. It took me a long time to cotton on. It wasn’t the lack of a period that gave it away, it was this appetite, and even then, it took me a good many meals, not to mention a few pounds.
There are several of us Blythes down here. There’s the girl from that day at the Horse Thieves Picnic, thinking she was in love. There’s the one who wears herself out throwing things and overturning furniture and pounding her head against the wall. There’s one who doesn’t come out till it’s dark. I have no clear picture of her except she snivels and whimpers a lot. And then there’s this one. Fatty. All she does is eat, but not with any real enjoyment. I mark the changes. Swelled-up belly, swelled-up ankles, veins pumped up with all that blood. She’s like a tick.
To keep from jumping off the top of the bookshelf belly first, this is how Fatty’s convinced the rest of us to think of it: our way out.
Dobbs is still attributing my weight gain to eating too much, and he bellyaches about the cost of keeping the shelves stocked. It’ll save him a lot of money, my going home. And I am going home. Because this is not
part of his plan. He’s showed me his plan. Procreate is in Section IX, right after Outliving Radiation Fallout. Heck, we haven’t even come to Apocalypse yet.
I wash the dishes and make last-minute preparations. Instead of the bulky sweater, I find a dress that won’t leave anything to the imagination.
“I said, I’m pregnant.”
For a moment, I think he’s going to do something creepy, like hug me, but he sits down heavily instead. “Are you sure?”
I smooth down the dress. He can see for himself that the weight gain is confined only to the waistline.
“How far along?”
“Four months, maybe five. It’s started moving.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me before now that you’re going to have a baby?”
I shrug.
“It’s a baby, for crying out loud!”
I nod even though I don’t think of it that way. Secret weapon is what it is.
His nose starts to run. He goes to the bathroom and shuts the door. I hear him blowing his nose. When he comes out, he picks up the duffel bag. “You tricked me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You planned this.”
If it would do any good to remind him of the facts, I would. After that first time, I thought he’d come back for more, but he hasn’t. Only once has he even spoken of it, to make me understand that he wasn’t “that kind of man.” The way he put it, anyone would think it was my fault, virtually throwing myself at him. Some apology.
“Babies come early sometimes, you know. It can go bad when they do. My aunt almost died that way.”
Dobbs begins pacing around the room. He keeps running his hand through his hair.
I know, I know, is how I nod.
“You think this was all for me? It was for you, too.” The pitch of his voice is right up there where dogs cover their ears.
When he turns to me, I rub my hand over my belly, which incenses him.
“It was all for nothing!”
Hear it? Past tense.
Was, was, was.
The word for things coming to end.
“You should have told me sooner!” When we could’ve done something about it, he means.
“It won’t work like this,” he mutters to himself. And then a few minutes later, “You’ve ruined everything!”
I turn slightly, giving him the side profile.
“Everything!” he screeches.
I have. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve brought him down. The tremors rock the silo. The bomb’s gone off. The pipes are falling; the beams are collapsing; the plaster crumbling. It’s all coming down.
I try several different outfits. I have to look my best. Imagine how Mama would feel with a beggar on her doorstep. Settling for the cornflower-blue empire-line, I rummage through the stacks for the sweater Grandma knitted so it can hide the part where the zipper won’t close. I stand in front of the plastic mirror. He’s let me grow my hair again. It doesn’t quite touch my shoulders, and it isn’t auburn anymore—more dirt-colored, except for the white streak sprung from my widow’s peak. I trim my bangs as best I can with the nail clippers. I polish my teeth,
then polish them some more. My face has lost its roundness, but at least I have green eyes again, not dark wells.
I set about packing. I’ve got to take the letters I wrote to Mama, though I doubt I’ll give them to her. My notebook. The blank pages where my poems are going to be. I take the portrait of Dobbs to show the police. On second thought, I put it back. He’s not going to let me leave with an Identi-Kit.
The voice says, “You think he’s worried about some stupid picture?”
“Oh hush up!”
Dobbs is going to run, that’s what he’s going to do. He’s always talking about some remote location in Mexico. He’ll tie me up someplace and leave himself enough time to get across the border.
“And all this stuff?”
He’ll come back for it when the fuss dies down. Or he won’t. Nothing to stop him building a shelter and piling up more junk somewhere else.
“Or from finding another girl.”
That’s all it takes for Fatty to throw up her breakfast.
Hearing the latch, I meet Dobbs at the door, paper sack in my hand. “Hi!”
“Well, aren’t you perky today?”
It’s true. I am all smiles.
I follow him to the table, where he puts down the duffel bag. He looks at me flitting about him on ballerina toes.
“I think you know today’s a special day.”
I nod in agreement, smooth my hair. I am ready.
He gives the room a once-over. The only difference between this scene and the one from a year and a half ago is me. Me multiplied four different ways should make me a quarter of what I was, but I know it’s worse than that. In percentages, I’d say I’m down to single digits.
“You’ve made the best of this situation, as I knew you would.”
If anything, I think I’ve been impertinent, packing away all the little gifts he brought me.
I am about to suggest we save the speeches for the car when I see him slip one hand behind his back. I am to be given something. I can’t think of what I need when I am about to be set free. Unless. The key.
“I admit I was beginning to give up hope.” He scratches the parting of his hair with a long fingernail and pulls it close to his face to examine it. “I didn’t think you were ever going to see things my way. Until your—announcement—I wasn’t entirely sure you felt the same way I do.”
Suddenly, I don’t want what is behind his back.
Dobbs drops to one knee. He holds out a small velvet box. The room starts to spin. He mouths something. I clamp my hands over my ears. I squeeze my eyes shut, but it’s too late—I’ve read his lips—Will you marry me?
The engineers who built this monstrous steel drum and suspended it in a concrete cylinder had it all wrong. It cannot withstand impact. The entire rattletrap shakes and sways, and it is hard to believe rivets aren’t exploding from the beams and flying about like bullets. Dobbs tries to help me to my feet, and all I can think is, Duck and cover!
“I don’t want you to think of this as a shotgun wedding,” he says, dragging me out from under the kitchen table. “I was planning to marry you in a couple months, on your eighteenth birthday, but this way we can think of it as an early Christmas present.”
Birthday? Christmas? He thinks I care about these things?
“Go on, open it.” He means the box, not the door.
His smile slips when I begin shaking my head. This is worse than being violated.
He takes my wrist, twists it face-up and puts the box in my palm. “Anyone would think it was going to bite.”
I cannot open the box. I cannot even look at it. A squall forming up across the way, one of those late snowfalls that freezes all the daffodils barely up from their bulbs—that’s what’s got my attention.
I snatch my hand from his, and cover my ears again. His promises will have to find someplace else to land.
He offers me the piece of paper when he’s done and tells me it’s my turn.
I grab my little sack of belongings. “You’re taking me out of here!”
He says not to worry, he will read my part for me. He does this while following me to the door.
“I can’t have a baby in here! I’ll die!” It’s the other Blythe who has the floor now. The one who screams and kicks and throws things.
“Well, that’s certainly not the reaction I was expecting,” he says, once he’s done with all the obey-this’s and obey-that’s.
She starts busting her foot on that door. I can hear toe bones cracking. He stops her from going at it with the other foot.
He unfurls her ring finger. He slides the ring on it. “There. I now pronounce us husband and wife. Mrs. Blythe Hordin, will you do me the honors?” Dobbs purses his lips, juts out that long chin, and leans toward me.
With every ounce of weight, with the power both of the forgotten and the unborn, I shove him away.
“Oh,” he says, falling backward.
When I drop my hand to my side, the ring slips off my finger and bounces across the floor. He crawls to retrieve it, while I slump down, feet too broken for standing.
“Any day now.”
I don’t answer.
He gets up and brings me a book. “This tells you what to do to get ready for the birth. There’s a big section on home delivery.”
It’s never going to come out. It’s too big. Even if it does I shudder to think what it would look like. Two heads? It can’t be anything except some twisted thing, something that belongs in one of his jars. I’ve asked him to put me out with the chloroform and just cut it out and sew me back up, but he says this is just the worry talking. It’s not worry; it’s terror.
I leaf through the pages and even the diagrams horrify me. A picture falls from the book. Dobbs hands it to me, making sure to brush his fingers against my arm. They leave a damp spot. I shiver in disgust.
“That’s her, isn’t it? Your friend.”
It’s a snapshot of Mercy with the aunt who raised her, and a little girl, maybe a year old, on Mercy’s hip. They are walking out of the post office. Mercy’s gained weight since I last saw her, gained a hunch around her shoulders, too.
“I got it for you.” He watches me run my fingers over her image, and says, “Black folks look peculiar white, don’t they?”
“She’s not peculiar!”
Eighth grade was well into its second quarter when Mr. Landon came to the door with a new student. Sally Ludnow didn’t even try to stifle her gasp, and Buddy Morris coughed in his fist, but everyone heard what he said. Freak. I thought Mercy was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Rare, like an ancient map, lightened from the sun. Before sitting down at the vacant desk in front of me, Mercy gave me a searching look. Or maybe it was a testy look. Whatever it was, for the first time in a great long while, someone looked me in the eye and acknowledged my existence. Right then and there, I knew I wanted to be her friend.
The resemblance between Mercy and her child is unmistakable. “Lucky her kid didn’t get it.”
“I don’t want you to talk about Mercy. Just leave her alone.”
“I’m just saying if someone like her can do it, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
I remember our last conversation. She wanted to know if God ever spoke to me. Mercy went with her family twice a week to the Church of Christ Our Precious Redeemer, where folks were prone to hearing the Lord speak. I came from a long line of old-school Protestants. God didn’t have heart-to-hearts with us.
I immediately suspected Mercy’s question had something to do with her cousin with the green eyes, the one who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. “Is this about Rowland?”
“Reverend Washington says God has a plan for each of our lives. He says we got to pray to make that plan a reality.”
“Tell me you did not let that boy get into your pants.”
She got real quiet, which obviously meant she had.
I start to cry. I miss her so much. And here she is, going on with her life, baby and all.
“You’ve got no right to take pictures of her. She doesn’t belong to you. Not everyone in this world belongs to you. I don’t belong to you.”
“You’re going to dump your baby on someone’s doorstep?”
“You just do what the book says when it comes time, and pay the rest no never mind.” He sucks in his lower lip. “You ready for Married Time?”
All the many months before, and he barely touched me. I never thought of it as restraint, like with priests. I mistook it for him not being like other men, not being quite right down there. But it’s wicked, what he now has. The pregnancy has brought it out in him. It’s obvious the minute he walks in the door. He has his way, and five minutes later, he wants it again. Sometimes, he has me do him with my hand when he sees I can’t take it anymore.
“I’m not your bride, Dobbs—I’m your prisoner.”
He pretends he hasn’t heard. “A wife has a duty to her husband.” To make his point, he unbuckles his belt.
In the same situation, Mercy would have found a way to kill this man by now. By now, Mercy would have burrowed a tunnel straight up to the sunlight with her fingernails, and if not that, she would have dug her way to the red core of the earth and joined its fiery river.
Mercy is no coward.
Dobbs pulls me to the cot and forces me to lie on my side. When he spreads himself over me, I pretend it is a shroud covering me. I pretend Mercy is wrapping me up in her white love and laying me down. Where God’s purpose for me ought to be is a blank space. To fill it, I tell myself I am Mercy’s friend. I am Mercy Coleman’s friend.
“I love you,” Dobbs cries, quaking.
“Mercy,” I whisper.
Thinking it’s leniency I want, Dobbs thrusts quickly. “Hold still, it’ll be over soon.”
I tell Dobbs the cramps are starting up when he reaches for me again. Reluctantly, he lets me go for a walk. “I’ll be reading till you get back.”
Even though it’s still painful to put too much weight on my buckled
foot for too long, it feels good to get away from him. He’s given me the run of the place now, except for the silo and the Inner Sanctum. His trust keeps coming, like an oil slick. I hobble downstairs to the tunnel connecting the control center to the silo. Dobbs has cleared out the loose electrical wiring and secured the larger tubes and conduits to the side so there is no risk of me tripping. He’s put down a rubber runner, hooked up electricity to the old light fixtures, and installed a handrail.
I manage half a dozen laps back and forth till pain flares up in my foot. I don’t want to go back to my cot, so I head for the stairwell, where I can sit and be quiet. Just as I am about to take a seat, I pee my pants. I watch a puddle form at my feet. Nothing much about my body surprises me these days, but wetting myself is surely a step too far. And then it dawns on me.
It’s too soon. I’m not ready. Not now.
I try heading upstairs but only get as far as the first cubicle of the lower level. In the cabinet is where he keeps the medical kit. Something for the pain. I tip out everything on the floor—bandages, antiseptic ointment, iodine, dental tools, and some magical pack that’s supposed to turn to ice when you bend it, as if a sports injury down here is likely. If that’s not ridiculous enough, there’s a neck brace, too. Finally, I find it—the prescription bottle with two codeine pills. For an emergency, Dobbs said. My belly about to rip asunder—I’d call that an emergency. I down them both with an almighty slug of cough syrup.
I’m not ready for this. I haven’t even had a chance to read the book. I don’t want to do this!
I double over. I feel as though I’ve been caught in a stampede. I’m being trampled to death.
“Dobbs!”
I get on my hands and knees and crawl to the pillar. I look up and scream for him again.
“What is it?” he yells back.
“It’s coming.”
I don’t want to think of Mama, because I hate what she’d have to say about this, but I can’t push her from my mind. When a contraction passes, I picture her bedroom. As with almost every memory, a window is front and center. In this case, it’s tall and veiled with blinds that twang when you peek through them. Buttercream light falls on Mama, who is lying in her high bed, just home from the hospital. Suzie, Gerhard, and I are huddled at the door, not too sure about this latecomer to the family. Everything about Mama is different—her hair tied in a ponytail with a bright yellow scarf instead of scraped into a bun, the airy way she waves us to her bedside, the sound of happy in her voice. Not that Mama was sad before. Folding laundry, fixing dinner, buttoning our coats—she’d do all of these things yet still leave the impression she was off someplace else. But here in bed, with a pea-pod baby tucked in her arm, it seems as though Mama’s body has finally caught up with her daydreams.
Another blow. I take my position on the middle of the sheet. How the woman was illustrated in the book is how I lie. With the onslaught of pain, I am on my hands and knees, then on my haunches. To heck with the picture! By the time the contraction ends, the sheet is mussed up into a ball, the tower of towels knocked over, and the bowl of water spilled. I can’t possibly go through another one of these.
“Why don’t you help me?” I shout at Dobbs for the tenth time. All he does is show me how to huff and puff. How’s that supposed to help?
“My mother used to say—”
“I don’t want to hear what your mother had to say! Take it out!”
“Here, hold my hand. When it starts to hurt again, you give it a good ol’ squeeze. Hard as you like.”
“It
is
hurting!”
I should have chosen a name for it, at the very least. It is about to be born, and I don’t want the silence to have the final say again. I’ve got to find something symbolic—a birthmark of a name. I can only think of one thing: Freedom.
Dobbs counts for me. It’s no use. The futility of everything—what’s the number for that? Because I’ve reached it. The band tightens around my womb harder still. I get up on my haunches. Time to push!
“Freedom,” I growl through clenched teeth.
It becomes a chant, “Freedom, freedom.” Something starts to give way, something else rips.
Dobbs moves between my legs.
“Freedom, goddammit!”
And then it comes. My fingers reach down and run across the landscape more beautiful than the fields of home.
Dobbs puts the baby on the towel next to me, bends back down between my legs.
I gather that little creature.
I put her on my chest. The instant Mama placed Theo in my arms he was no longer a stranger. All the many months I’d spent wondering what my baby brother would be like, and there he was, the element we didn’t realize that had kept us from being whole. At the same moment I felt both a longing and the fulfillment of that longing. Looking at this child is no different. All anyone has to do is peer into those dark, glistening eyes to feel a part of something big, of something with no edges. She lifts me clear off my feet and sets me up where the stars dazzle. Every faraway dream has taken root in this little one. And that’s when I realize I don’t want to be robbed again. I want to keep her, this perfect little baby.
She’s so quiet. Not at all like the squalling babies on TV.
I whisper to her, “Hello, little one. Hello, Freedom.” She is very pale and very still.
“She’s trying to go to sleep.”
I caress her tiny head. So soft, like chamois leather.
“She’s not sleeping, Blythe.”
All at once, she doesn’t feel right. It’s as though my rib cage is about to crack open. “Shouldn’t she be crying? Dobbs, you were supposed to make her cry!” And her eyes don’t look right now, either, and I spread my hands over her to keep her from growing cold.
In a panic, I hand her to Dobbs and tell him to swat her bottom like he was supposed to in the first place. But instead of doing that, he cradles her and covers her with a blanket, and I think, I could do that! He’s supposed to be making her breathe. He is the most impossible man!
“Give her to me!” I will do it myself. I sit up and a pain shoots up through my stomach.
Dobbs is saying something, but he’s speaking too softly; I can’t hear what he says. He’s pulled the blanket all the way over her head. He starts walking to the door.
“Where are you going with her? Come back here!” I am on my knees, gripping the chair leg to help right myself. Why can’t he just fix it?
“She’s gone, Blythe.”
“Bring her back here. I said, bring her back to me!
“Freedom,” I whisper when the door closes. Because she has found it. And I am robbed once again.
“What did you do with her?”
“I took care of everything. Don’t worry. Here.” He offers me a mug of lukewarm broth. “You have to get your strength up.”
I put the mug aside. “You buried her someplace nice?”
With his back to me, he says, “I’m sorry it happened the way it did.”
“No, you’re not.” She would have loved me. I saw it in her eyes. I’ve never felt so cut off by love, anyone’s love, than I do now.
“Look, the sooner you put this behind you, the better off we’ll be.”
“You’ll be, you mean.”
Dobbs, the Taker Away of Things. Waste products, sunlight, the shape of a child.
What he brings I don’t want. Today it is a cassette tape and a record player with batteries. I am violently ill when he pushes
PLAY
and a guitar starts strumming. I hurl it against the wall. Dobbs gathers up the parts
and tries to put it back together again. He holds up the castor oil. I can barely be bothered to shake my head at him.
“You’ve got to snap out of this. It’s been five weeks.”
“Why don’t you stop coming? That’ll make me feel better.”
He puts his hands on his hips, sighs. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”
“I could follow her to the grave. What’ll it take? A couple of weeks? A month?”
“You want another baby? Is that what you want?” He touches his belt.
Someone other than him is what I want. Anybody. Doesn’t have to be my mother. Bring me any mother, a wife, anyone. Bring me Bernice, with her talk of rainbows. We could pretend for each other, and it wouldn’t be so bad. We could make up new names for each other, new personalities. Ruth and Naomi. “Whither thou goest, I will go,” I could tell her. She could say to me, “Your people shall be my people.” She, too, will mourn for the loss of Freedom. She will cleave to my side and pledge her loyalty and cry the tears I cannot cry.
Dobbs finds the soiled sanitary pad. He acts like it’s my doing, summoning a menses at will. He can’t understand why, if I mope about a baby so much, I am not knocked up again. Especially given how he’s gone about his business with a nose-to-the-grindstone thoroughness.
“I don’t work right anymore. I keep telling you. Might as well find another girl to help you seed the New World.” I get up, go to my cot, and show him the bent coat hanger I keep hidden under it. “I fixed it so I can’t have another baby.”
That gets his attention.
I run my finger across the tip. “So, no need to keep trying.”
It’s a lie, but he swallows it hook, line, and sinker.
“What good is it if you’ve got a woman who can’t produce? Not going to be much of a New World, is it?”
He turns around. “I have to go away for a while.”
When he leaves, I pull out from under my pillow the slim volume. It is the Book of Common Prayer. I turn to the section of prayers in Latin. I begin with one of those. It is easiest to pray when I don’t know what the words mean.
I’ve come to believe that if I can control one thing, I can be free, even if that freedom is the size of a matchstick head. I didn’t have any control over my coming into the world, but I do have control of when I leave it. That is the one thing. It’s almost two years since he brought me here. Long enough.
I gather every flammable thing I can find—all those hideous clothes, my notebooks, the knitting patterns, the classics off the shelf, a year’s worth of paper goods, the bedding, the wig. It forms a great big pile right beneath the escape hatch that isn’t an escape hatch.
Before I light the match, I present myself to the plastic mirror. My hair’s long enough to braid now. It’s brittle, though, and breaks easily. The same color eyes, the same small mouth, but there is nothing left of that girl. It’s just a skinny cripple person looking back at me.
You don’t ever think, this is the last time I’m going to kiss my mother good-bye, make it a good one. You don’t think to turn back where she is standing at the Dutch door for one last look at her face. Just as you don’t think to look in the mirror one last time, and say, Good-bye, dimple; good-bye, cowlick; good-bye, funny birthmark. You get in the back of your father’s pickup and go for a ride and don’t pay much attention to anything—not the bullfrogs croaking, or the pealing church bells announcing the official start to the Horse Thieves Picnic. It’s a crying shame you don’t even look up at the evening sky and wonder why night never falls in Kansas, why it comes slowly, reluctantly, dragging its tail feathers. Giant cotton spools sit in the middle of shaved pastures.
Good-bye, land, I wish I’d said. Good-bye, sunflowers. Good-bye, green; good-bye, yellow; good-bye, blushing pink clouds.
This time, I say it. “Good-bye, dimple; good-bye, cowlick; good-bye, funny birthmark.”
I ask the cripple for her permission.
She is so glad someone finally does. Yes, she says.
