Those Who Favor Fire (28 page)

At this point, Rachel made as if to rise up out of her seat. But then, inexplicably, she checked herself, tamped herself down, and put her hands into her lap.

“Raise your hands,” exhorted the preacher. “Mothers! Mothers! Raise your hands. Let your open palms wave like flags of gratitude, emblems of praise for your stalwart husbands, the fathers of your priceless children. Raise your hands if you know, in your deepest heart of hearts, that without them lies poverty and sorrow and fear.”

As if from a vast clutch of closely packed eggs, three hands hatched out of the nestled congregation and reached tentatively upward. No more than three. But to Joe’s astonishment, the preacher began softly to applaud.

“Before me rises a sea of waving hands, acknowledging, celebrating the bond between us, the certainty that it is the marriage, the collaboration of parenthood, and not the woman unto herself that we are honoring today. A sea of hands. A sea of hands. This sea of hands rejoicing. And another. And another. And another.”

Rachel had known liars before. She had been lied to, fooled, shamed—not often, but often enough. Never, though, had she spoken up, drained her fury. Contained, it had achieved a greater potency, a stronger proof, than it merited. It had tainted the vessel that held it, embittered her, occasionally made her bold.

And yet, in this place, Rachel was mute. She wanted so badly to face this man. But she simply could not. And she was not even sure why.

“Come on, Joe,” she said, stamping her feet solidly as she rose, so that the thump of them echoed through the church. “Church is over.”

Rachel let her heels knock on each step as she led Joe down from the balcony. At the door, she turned. She looked straight down the aisle toward the pulpit. The Reverend Gerald Cryers was counting on his fingers the merits of the assembled men, calling out their praises to the congregation who still sat, heads bowed, obedient as calves. He watched Rachel and smiled uncertainly. She leaned her back against the church door so that it began to open, creaking. One man at the end of a pew swung his head into the aisle, leaning around to see who was sneaking out early, like a horse looking out of a barn door, eye mostly white, mane twitching. He too watched Rachel for a moment and then swung back around, surveyed his neighbors. She saw him counting the hands raised for fathers on Mother’s Day. Seven.

In a moment, when the minister arrived at his reluctant “Amen,” every head came up. There was a great shuffling of feet. It was time to go home.

Rachel walked out of the church into the drenching sunlight and was immediately warmed. There were bees in the air and the smell of new grass.

“You know, my father was a splendid man,” Rachel said, as she and Joe turned onto Maple Street and toward the creek. “But this is Mother’s Day,” she said, throwing up her hands. “
Mother
’s Day. Not Father’s Day. Not Columbus Day or Veteran’s Day or some president’s birthday. Not Saint Patrick’s Day.
Mother
’s Day. A measly twenty-four hours in which the mothers around here get flowers and cards and chocolates and get to cook themselves their favorite meal or maybe even eat out. What in the world would move him to meddle with that?” She was walking fast, looking straight ahead.

“I mean, imagine all those women sitting there, happy that this is their special day. And then that bozo starts telling them that without men, they’re nothing. Dross. Sheep. Imagine.” There was awe in her voice. “And then they’ve got this absurd choice: raise their hands … and they might as well just bleat at this point … or sit still. Which is like saying, ‘No, I don’t honor my husband.’ When maybe they really do.”

She was silent the rest of the way back to her house, and Joe left her alone. He knew that she was lecturing the Reverend Gerald Cryers, walking off her fury like a cramp, and he did nothing to distract her, although he suddenly felt as if there were things he ought to tell her. About his own mother, and especially about himself.

When they got to Rachel’s house, Joe led her around back and straight to her hammock. “Have a rest,” he said, gently taking off her hat, slipping her shoes off her feet. “I’ll fix us some lunch.”

“Peanut butter and jelly,” she said with her eyes closed. “Milk if it’s really cold.”

They ate in the hammock, swinging slightly, and then went into the woods together.

When they reached a patch of moss under a giant pine, Joe put out a hand to stop her. He tilted his head back and saw the blue of the sky through the branches of the tree, heard the gentle conversation of mourning doves, felt the chill of shadows on his face, and could not stand it for a moment more.

He turned to Rachel and, although he knew that he should give her some warning, gentled one hand along the back of her neck, put the other on her hip, and kissed her with such longing, with his lips
moving so softly against hers that she stood very still and did not stop him. Their chests touched and parted, touched again. Rachel felt the space between them closing. As he was kissing her, she took a small step forward so that she suddenly felt him all along the front of her body, from her thighs to her throat, felt the pressure of his hands behind her, one still along her neck, the other flat against the top of her thigh, holding her gently, pressing her gently against him, as astonishing as brands.

She had had no inkling of this and wondered if he had known it would happen. She hoped that he had not. She hoped that he had walked into these woods unknowing. She held herself in check for a moment more as she pondered these things with a sliver of her mind. And then she opened her lips as slowly as a space between clouds, moved her hands around him as unerringly as vines, and closed the last of the distance between them.

Joe felt Rachel make her decision and was as moved by the knowledge as by anything he could remember. He lifted her up against him and carefully laid her down on the moss. It took him a long moment to open his clothes, lift her skirt like a veil, slip her blouse over her head. And then, as he laid himself down on her, she stretched her arms high above her head and parted her legs until the eventual, mild protest of her hips, as if she were making an angel.

Muscled in the way that men who pick corn and shovel snow and tote ice are muscled, Joe mourned the lack of a blanket between Rachel’s back and the million stems of moss. He wanted nothing to distract her now, not a single, small discomfort to refract her attention. So, even as he made himself as close to her as it was possible for him to be, he rolled with her deeper into the bed of moss so that she soon lay atop him, gasping, and immediately began to love him in the fashion of females.

It was, perhaps, nothing more than this simple reversal that accounted for the intensity of Rachel’s arousal. While the blue jays screamed and the trees shuddered in the wind, Rachel regretted the fact that there was no way to press herself any closer against Joe than she already was. But it was more than their coupling that aroused her. It was that this was Joe. This was her Joe. These were his hands holding her down hard against him, his belly straining against hers. When she sat up suddenly and put her freed hands down against the place where they were joined, felt it wet with her own thick juice,
smelled their raw smell, she could not prevent herself from panting lightly, like a cat. When Joe heard her, he grabbed her hips and she could see the muscles in his belly harden like the ribs of a seashell. She clenched him, and he dug his fingers more insistently into her, closed his eyes, and began to rise up from the moss, lifting her with him.

Joe had done something, moved against her in some way she could not isolate, and she quickly lowered herself back down along the length of him. She laid her hands on the smooth caps of his shoulders, tucked in her folded arms, and as she gently kissed him, made love to him in an entirely selfish, inexperienced way that seemed to be exactly what he needed. As her rhythm became more emphatic and her mouth grew suddenly slack, he took her head in his hands and lifted her face away from his so that when she opened her eyes she saw, in his, the unbordered scope of his desire.

        “None,” she said as they walked back through the woods toward her house.

“Jesus Christ, Rachel. What do you mean, ‘none’?”

“I mean none. That’s what I mean.”

“You’re not on the Pill?”

“No.” She snorted. “I’m not. I wasn’t expecting to have any sex this month, and even if I had, I wouldn’t be on the Pill. Why should I pop hormones every day of the year on the off chance that I’ll be ravaged under a pine tree on Mother’s Day?”

“I can’t believe this,” he said, stomping into her kitchen and letting the screen door smack shut behind him.

“I don’t understand.” She took two bottles of beer out of the fridge and handed one to Joe. “You mean you haven’t ever bothered to think things through?”

“
Things
. I hate it when you do that. What are
things
?”

“How can you go around making love to people and not be prepared for fatherhood? Seems to me you should have given some thought to procreation before you took off your pants.”

“Look who’s calling the kettle black.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, taking a long drink of beer.

“Of course you are.” He set his bottle down on the counter so hard that the beer foamed up and out of the neck. “Maybe I was wrong to assume you’d … taken care of things—”

“No maybe about it.”

“But what you did was worse. You
knew
what kind of chance we were taking, but you took it anyway.”

She nodded. “I’d be quite happy to have a baby anytime soon,” she said calmly. “Wed, unwed, whatever. I’ve got plenty of money, a house, friends, and I’ve wanted a baby ever since I was twelve. So if I get pregnant, that’s fine.”

“But you’re only twenty-one, Rachel. Barely that.”

“I’m an old lady, Joe. My body just hasn’t caught up with me yet. I’m temperamental. Set in my ways. Not very wise, but I will be.” She sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed the cold bottle of beer up along the inside of her arm. “I saw a woman named Mrs. James in the park last week,” she said, smiling. “She was walking very slowly, as if her hips were locked. But when she got to the swing set, she settled down onto one of the seats and began to work herself up into the sky. She grabbed hold of those two chains with her old-bird hands, leaned back so far I was afraid she’d fall, and stretched her legs out to get herself going. She was wearing horrible, thick stockings and big, heavy black shoes. She swung as high as anyone I’d ever seen, with her sweater flapping out around her and her hair coming loose. And then, after a bit, she slowed down, had to wait until she had stopped completely, and then she got off the swing and hobbled away down the path.” Rachel looked up at Joe and shook her head. “It was like looking into a mirror, Joe. It was just like looking into a mirror.”

“Then that’s even worse,” he said, taking her cold hands in his.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not safe for old women to have babies,” he said.

That night Rachel did some thinking. She sat on her moonlit porch and thought about lying with Joe on the moss in the woods, resting, letting their bodies cool. She thought about the differences between the first time she’d been with someone—with Harry—and this second time, with Joe. She remembered how terrified she’d been, for two long months after Harry (through the death of her parents and the long gray days that had followed) when she’d had no period to end things properly, completely. She remembered her explosive relief when she’d felt the first hot blood seeping, finally, and had moved a great step further from that dreadful time.

How different those ghastly final months of college had been from
her first extraordinary days away from Belle Haven. Despite her reluctance to leave home, she had almost immediately felt a great freedom, a great release, an enormous excitement. Every choice she made filled her with pride and satisfaction. Every new friend, every good day, every letter home that spoke of what she’d learned and what she’d gained compounded her certainty that this new chapter of her life was one she’d be sorry to end.

And now it all seemed so long ago and far away, almost as if it had never happened. As this Mother’s Day waned—as the feel of Joe holding her faded—Rachel wondered how her awful humiliation and disappointment at Harry’s hands might also have diminished if she’d only had the chance to ride them out, go on to better things, return to the sound habits and safe choices that had brought her such satisfaction.

But her parents dying—when and how they had died—had made it impossible for Rachel simply to pick up where she’d left off. She had changed. She could not ever retouch the way things had been. They were there in her mind, sharp, stuck images: Harry laughing with the next girl; the slick, hot feel of Skip tonguing her ear; Paul turning her out of his car; ashes rushing downstream.

And now, Joe. Now she had Joe. This afternoon she had done something she’d sworn never to do in haste again. But Joe was not Harry. Not at all like Harry. She’d known him for a whole year already, and she felt that she knew him through and through.

So why, even as they had nestled on their bed of moss, even as he had lazily combed her hair with his fingers, had she felt her lingering curiosity begin to harden into clots of doubt?

It’s no good, she thought, watching the moon. I can’t just hope for the best.

The next day, when Joe came to her, his eyes alight with memory, she sat with him in the hammock in her backyard, let him lace her fingers with his, and asked him for the hundredth time, “Why are you here?”

“ ’Cause I finished turning over Mrs. Grant’s garden early and Ian doesn’t need me to do his until two.” He rolled out of the hammock and pulled her shrieking into the grass.

“Stop it, you fiend.” She laughed.

“Not until you admit that you didn’t sleep at all last night.”

Which sobered her, for indeed she had slept very little. Yet he was
smiling when he said, “Every time I shut my eyes I was back in those woods with you.”