The Quickening (22 page)

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
.

When Frank took sick in the months that followed, nothing slow in him warned me. He worked as he always had. Told his stories, though there was strain in his voice when he did. “You remember that old dog of your father’s?” he would ask. “Remember how long it lived?” Those stories, in the end he rarely could finish them. But when I asked him how he felt, he gripped his stomach with a look of pain and only grinned. At night I would wake to find him standing at our window looking out, the sheets on his side and his pillow soaked right through.

•  •  •

I’d rarely let myself imagine how it might be to lose him, not since the day Frank came home with a bird in his hands. The bird was dead or close to it, the twins not yet six. And the way Frank carried the thing, he seemed to be telling me just what to expect. How a person can freeze like that and become something different. And that I would be stronger to get through it than he ever could. I could bear losing him the way he never could losing me. But he was wrong.

It was a jay, I think. A kind of blue-feathered bird, and our tractor had broken its wing. The animal couldn’t have had much sense in the first place to get so close. In our mudroom Frank fixed a cage for it out of twine and sticks and fitted a perch so the bird could sit and look out. He doctored it himself, you see. No proper vet in these parts would have bothered with such an animal. They had cows and horses enough. Frank did his best, leaving seed for it in the night and covering the cage with a blanket. The next morning when he woke, the bird sat on its perch, stalk-straight and gripping the wood.

It died like that, sitting up as birds do in their sleep, its eyes open and unblinking. Frank carried the cage out to the woodpile, but the bird he buried in a corner of our garden under a pile of stones. I’d never seen a man broken over so small a thing. I took his hand and held it, bone thin and rough as it was, and I wanted always to be able to do just that. That easy run of blood beneath his wrist, the way it hummed against my skin. I never wanted to lose it. I’d believed the twins should see the bird before we buried it, so
they might learn from the death. But Frank said no, that wasn’t the way death was. For that bird, he thought, the whole world seemed to have stopped along with it. Over time, of course, Frank would find out stopping like that was exactly what death was.

In those last few years, these were the ordinary things: A potato soup warm in a pot on the stove. One of us standing from the table to fill our bowls with more. Fresh apples, marmalade, and eggs we peeled with our fingers. The dishes we shared, collecting the broken, spotted shells. We were three of us in our corners, a heavy woman, a husband, and a girl in between. We knew the house by barefoot. Passed plates to one another. Shared a bowl of fruit. Our laundry hung together on the line. Along the same paths, we carried buckets of meal to the animals and worked our crops. But Frank and I never went to town. It was always Adaline who left, setting off after supper and coming back before it turned dark. This was ordinary. We never worried but waited for her as we rocked on our porch. It was a wonder she’d found others to be friendly with. That the young ones had found a way to forgive, unlike their parents. But there was a great deal we didn’t know about Adaline then. In the last three years, that neighbor of ours had grown into a man, and a handsome one at that. Back then, we didn’t understand how lonely our girl had become. How a slap could change into something different. We’d kept Kyle’s hat on the coatrack under our stairs for a good winter, but soon I noticed the hat was gone.

•  •  •

It was Frank who guessed it. When our girl rushed to the outhouse in the morning, her dresses tight. The rest of her glowed, her eyes feverish. She took to walking on the outside of her feet. In his last few months, Frank woke before the sun with a desperate energy and made pancakes in our skillet, something he hadn’t done since the twins were small. He shaped the cakes like animals and slipped them onto Adaline’s plate. “A dog?” she guessed. “A sow?” She sat at the table with her knees tucked to her chin, her hair in curls around her ears. The cakes lost their steam as she guessed at them, her fork hovering above the animal’s head, ready to strike. Frank wore a pleased, peaceful look, but he wouldn’t tell her which animal was which, not until she had eaten them. On those mornings, Adaline was just a girl again and she had never done anything wrong.

I suppose such a thing was too hard for me to understand, though a mother should see the signs before anyone. But the way her father doted on her. The way he seemed pleased with how our girl was growing, no matter what that growing meant. I should have known something wasn’t right with them both. Frank’s hair had gone white at the temples, and he’d taken on weight. The skin was dark at the corners of his eyes. He was happy to see something growing, I guess. Happy the child would live on after him, though he could only hope to see it himself. Despite everything, I wasn’t about to scold that girl any more than necessary. No matter what she’d done, she and Kyle had given Frank something in the end. My boy, as
you read this, you should know. You were a gift in your grandfather’s eyes.

There is butter for a burn. A poultice for the cough. Alum for itch. Baking soda for skin. Frank walked straight into the corn.

It happened late in the afternoon, before the sun had settled. Grasshoppers stuck to our screens and birds circled for water overhead. There had been a noise, I’d thought. I stepped out onto the porch to find it. Frank was in the yard as usual, splitting wood. The back of his neck had gone red and stiff. His hair was dark with sweat. He drew his arms over his head and down. The wood broke evenly, falling from the stump. At last he dropped his ax and set off for the field. The last I saw of him, before I would think to follow, was only a break in the corn that ran deep into the field and stopped.

The work on that good crop had been done. The stalks were high and drying. Soon he would have cut them down.

When I found him, he was standing between the rows of corn, his hands on his hips, eyes closed. His hands were cut and bleeding, full of leaves. His shirt hung from one shoulder over his bony frame. I called out to him, but he never turned from the pastureland and the spread of fields he was watching. Still, he knew I was there, or so I believe. He seemed to be listening when he fell.

That was the way he went, falling back like that. As if he knew I would catch him and had already decided on when and where. His shoulder dropped hard beneath my chin, his hair wet. The field was high and still around our heads,
quiet as dusk. He hadn’t said a word. It was only the way he’d walked off, straight into the corn like he was set on finding something. And maybe he did. If I hadn’t thought to follow, the dust would have been the first to greet him, the sky empty overhead. When I touched his cheeks I could feel the warmth leaving with how slack they were and numb. I laid him on the ground as if he might break.

Over the next few weeks, my dress front still smelled like Frank. I hardly thought to change it, what with the house seeming too big and the rugs letting little sound through. In the smokehouse I found the nails in a jar and kept them between my teeth. The boards I took from the barn, damp with the animals that had brushed them with their flanks. I nailed a slab of wood across this door behind my head, moved my bed against the wall, and turned the lock, closing up the back of the house. The windows in those rooms are closed, the doors nailed shut. I made sure of it. I took out what I didn’t want to leave behind. Carried it all to the attic. Bent over as I worked, I kept Frank’s smell with me long after we’d buried him. Those nails between my teeth tasted sour as they were old. Twenty-six years those nails had given us. Frank had hammered them to a point himself.

With Frank gone, I sold the farm. Auctioned the animals and tore down the smokehouse and pens. Our hundred and eighty acres, I sold them to Jack who’d always wanted them. The other farmers had made themselves strangers. They hated the land we kept as much as I hated what the
Morrows had done. But Jack paid good money. And he was the only one who would do so without a fuss.

“It’ll be a lot to handle,” I said.

We sat together at my kitchen table and he took the glass of water I gave him and held it. “I’ll do all right.”

“A lot for one man.”

“I’ve done more and I’ve done less. I can hire if I have to, but I’ll try not. I don’t like strangers.”

“But there are plenty anyway.”

He nodded.

“I’ve never seen so many,” I went on. “Makes a person think there are either too many people in this world or too few.”

Jack studied me and took a drink. He seemed to be thinking, looking around the room but not really looking. “I’ve always thought there were too many myself,” he said in a low voice. “Now, not so much. A whole week will go past, and not so many people now.”

It was four or more years since I’d seen him. The muscle in his jaw had taken on fat. He’d settled into his sturdy frame. The veins on his forearms had spidered and spread, the whites of his eyes gone yellow. He took a drink from his glass and breathed between swallows. He hadn’t yet said a word about Mary. But who else did they have on that farm but themselves?