by Rhonda Riley
Adam’s voice swelled, ascending, hot, sharp, sorrowful.
“Adam!” I cried.
They turned as one. Alarmed, confused.
I remembered the shocked faces in the church, the frightened faces at the graveside. “Don’t . . .” I choked. “They’re too . . .”
Adam’s hand fell away from Gracie. He looked down.
A shudder of puzzled shame crossed Gracie’s features as her eyes met mine.
“Just sing, girls! Please, just sing,” I pleaded. “Open your mouths and sing. Like everybody else does.”
Gracie glanced at her father, then back to me. She blinked and cut her eyes quickly again toward Adam, who glowered darkly at me.
She stepped forward. I reached for her, but she did not come into my arms. She opened her mouth and sang, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray . . .” Jennie’s bedtime song. Her voice quavered, then held fast.
Adam strode past me.
I opened my arms and the girls came to me. Sarah cried. Lil bunched silently against me.
Rosie’s voice rose hysterically. “Momma?”
Gracie wiped a tear from my chin. I pulled them in and hugged them. “Just sing, girls. Only singing. Regular singing.” I picked up Sarah and took Rosie’s hand.
“Gracie, bring Lil.”
Unhinged and transparent, I struggled to keep my voice even as I led them up to the porch and handed Sarah to Gracie. “You all go inside. I’m going to talk to Daddy. We’ll be there in a minute. Everything’s okay, girls.”
I found Adam standing in the middle of the stable. The horses huffed, restless in their stalls. His face hardened. His hand shot up in protest, to stop me. “They are the only ones who might be able to . . .” He faltered. “They are the only other ones, Evelyn.”
A dark, violent sorrow for his solitude clenched my chest. I sucked in a deep breath and forced myself to continue. “I know, Adam. But not now. They’re children. How will they handle it? You didn’t see the faces of everyone in the church—they were scared of you.”
He squinted at me.
“People were vomiting. Babies screaming . . .” I stuttered. “It hurt.” I didn’t mention the odd shame I’d just seen in Gracie’s eyes.
His face crumpled. “No,” he whispered and shook his head slowly. “No! If I had only been there. I stopped to put the tools away. I was putting tools away while . . .”
I pressed my hand over his mouth.
He let me hold him. But he was alone within my arms, his skin hot, his sweat sour. “Hush, Adam. Hush. I saw her too, by the tractor, talking to Frank, and I went back to the laundry . . .”
His eyes sought mine and held them for a long moment.
“Hush,” he said. “She is gone.”
He slept that night for fourteen hours straight. I sat up with the girls, the four of them packed into the bed Jennie and Lily had shared. We talked about everything except Jennie and what had happened after the funeral. I longed to protect them from what I’d seen on everyone’s faces. And, yes, from their father’s searing voice, the same voice I cherished so intimately. How much of A. was in them? They were normal girls. How much could that change?
I was alone in my questions.
Finally, when I could hear their four steady breaths, I turned off the lamp and left.
I stood in the dark dining room for a long time, listening to the new silence of my home. I thought of the street where I grew up, of Clarion, of the people I’d known all my life. Their voices, names, and faces so familiar to me, suddenly seemed alien. The town now knew that my husband was a stranger.
I crawled into bed with Adam, spooning up behind him and wrapping my arms around him. Gutted and skinned, I lay there in the pool of Jennie’s absence and tried to hear what was coming.
All night, I dreamed of Jennie’s eyes, so like Lil’s and Momma’s, receding under ice-blue water. The mingled vibrato of all the girls engulfed me. I was helpless and drowning. Out of my element.
After that night, Gracie and Rosie came to Lil and Sarah’s room at bedtime. They sang the good-night songs that Adam no longer sang to them. When I heard them sing, I was haunted by the bargain I seemed to have made with them, by the voices they might have used.
Adam never spoke of it to me again.
To this day, I question my judgment. I regret my fear. I regret my silence.
The Sunday after the funeral, Adam appeared early in the morning at the bedroom door, smelling of horses and hay, his face sallow and motionless. I hooked my garter belt to my stockings, smoothed my slip down, and took a deep breath. He made no move to get ready for church, just shook his head. Then he turned and left.
The small wave of relief I felt shamed me. I put my hand back under my slip to unfasten the garters and begin undressing. He was right. How could we do this? We were staggering, fresh amputees.
Then I stopped myself. I could not acquiesce to the fear and anger I had seen at the funeral.
I heard the girls rustling down the hall. “Hurry, girls!” I called to them. “Or we’ll be late.”
Sarah, who, like her father, had never cared if any of her clothes matched, wept when she could not find two pink socks. She stood in the hall, screaming and waving a single sock. Before I could get there, Gracie and Rosie ran to her. The three of them rummaged in her bureau drawers and pulled out socks until they found two that matched.
Moments later, I discovered Lil standing next to the closet she and Jennie had shared. She tugged her blue Sunday dress down over her belly. It bunched oddly at the sleeves and in the back. The collar of one of Jennie’s favorite dresses, a purple-and-white cotton, peeked out at the neck. Lil spun quickly to face me. “I can do it. I’ll get it,” she said. She reached back, elbows high, and kept her eyes on me while she finished buttoning her dress. Once buttoned up, she quickly straightened the two collars, tucking the collar of Jennie’s dress neatly under her own. Then she turned around for me to brush her hair.
“You look pretty in that dress, Lil.”
She did not smile. In the mirror, she watched me pull her bright tumble of hair up into an orderly ponytail. We contemplated each other in the same mirror Addie and I had first looked at. There were no twins now.
An hour later, we pulled away from the backyard, the girls all combed, calm, and somber in their Sunday dresses. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a feather of dust rise from the dry yard. At the far end of the field, Adam, straight-backed and tall, drove the tractor. The disker cut the earth in a neat line that paralleled the distant trees.
We’d missed Sunday school and were among the last to enter for the sermon. Heads turned as we filed into our pew. I felt the congregation’s eyes boring into my back.
Joe turned in the pew ahead of us and smiled quickly, a flash of genuine warmth and concern in his eyes. Beside him, Mary gave the girls a quick wave. Then both of them swept their eyes past us, obviously relieved to see that Adam was not there. Mary gave a subtle nod of approval and whispered to Joe. I remembered the stricken faces and the smell of vomit the week before. Suddenly, I thought I could smell it again and instinctively looked down at the clean floor.
Sarah pressed up close to me and sucked her thumb through the sermon. Gracie sat ramrod-straight, her arm around Lil, who stared ahead. Rosie fidgeted, rearranging her skirt and scuffing her shoes against the floor. Several times, I had to reach across the other girls and quiet her. I have no idea what the minister said.
After the sermon, people stepped aside as we passed by on our way out. On the church lawn, the girls did not linger, playing with the other children, but stayed near me.
I hadn’t seen any of my family since the funeral. As we went down the church steps, Momma appeared suddenly at my side and touched my arm. “Y’all coming to dinner?”
I had nothing prepared for dinner. But my shoulders burned with exhaustion, my face was a mask. “No, Momma. I need to get the girls home to Adam.”
Somet
hing unfamiliar flickered across my mother’s face. She glanced down to make a quick, unnecessary adjustment to her purse.
“Bring them by soon, then,” she squeezed my arm.
I drove the girls home, three of them in the front with me, and Rosie sprawled across the backseat. They sat quietly. As we pulled up into the backyard, I realized that none of them had mentioned their father or asked why he hadn’t come to church with us. I shut the engine off.
“Momma.” Gracie leaned forward so I could see her across her sisters. “I don’t want to go to church anymore.” She spoke softly, her face solemn and open, waiting for my response.
The others listened.
Then, from the backseat. “I don’t want to either.”
The thick, sweet burden of their need lay on me like lead. I took a breath and sat up straight. I still felt the burning stares of the congregation. Unbidden, unearned, shame flushed through me, followed by a shudder of defiance. I cleared my throat. “I’ll think about it,” I said. In our vocabulary, that meant an eventual, qualified yes.
People whose children have died do not believe in God the same way everyone else does. The death of a child is an earthquake of the soul. The landscape changes forever. I cannot say I was a believer at that time, but I knew that the church was a link that bound us to others. Now, I felt that link breaking. Did I have to let it break in order to protect my children? To do so seemed a kind of defeat, an admission that my daughters did not—could not—belong there. If they did not belong there, where they were born, where did they belong?
I decided that Gracie and Rosie could stay home from church most Sundays with their father. Special days and holidays, they would still have to attend services. In exchange, they had to cook the Sunday dinner. It would have to be ready to go onto the table when Sarah, Lil, and I returned from church. This seemed to be a reasonable compromise.
Later that week, I stopped by Momma’s near suppertime. I expected to find her alone in the kitchen, making dinner for Daddy. But when the back door slapped shut behind me, the kitchen was empty. The distinct vinegary sweetness of Pearl’s takeout ribs lingered. The theme from Momma’s favorite TV show, Jeopardy, blared from the living room.
Momma stepped into the kitchen and dropped into one of the dining chairs as she motioned for me to help myself to the coffeepot and refill her cup. I dreaded telling her that we would not be coming to Sunday dinners after church.
When I told her, her brow wrinkled with concern. “Evelyn,” she began. I expected a protest of some sort and perceived its beginning in her clipped delivery of my name. But something changed her mind. Her face softened. Instead of objecting, she sighed. “You might be right. Gracie and Rosie are old enough that they should be learning to cook for the family. That’s a good idea.”
Her quick concession shocked me. I swallowed my rehearsed defenses and reasons. As I remembered the pained shock on her face at the funeral, I tried to keep my own expression neutral. Helpless humiliation filled my throat.
“Your brother and sisters will be fine with this,” she added firmly. “You all can take turns feeding your daddy and me each Sunday after church. We’ll rotate among you and y’all can come here for Christmas and Easter.” She grinned. “Maybe Thanksgiving if you play your cards right.”
I heard the relief in her tone and I wondered if Joe, Bertie, or Rita had already had this discussion with her, maybe all of them. “Everybody else’ll be okay with this?” I asked.
“Yes.” She crossed her arms over her chest. She wouldn’t be telling me who objected to having dinner with us. She’d always been the kind of mother who dampened rather than inflamed our tiffs and sibling rivalries. But when she leaned toward me across the table, her voice was low, confidential. “Evelyn. I’m tired. When all of you come with all of your kids, your husbands—that’s more than a couple dozen people crammed into this little house. How about your daddy and I showing up next Sunday at your house? Get those girls cooking.” She did look tired. Suddenly, I was embarrassed by my lack of concern for her and what all of this must have cost her. She had lost a grandchild.
Moments later, as I drove to Rhyne’s store, Momma’s agreement and my certainty that Joe, Bertie, or Rita didn’t want us there for dinner plagued me. Bertie’s disdain alone would have been easy to take; that was her standard response to most of life. But the thought of Joe or Rita wanting to avoid us jolted me. I stopped outside the store, determined for a moment to rush back to Momma’s and demand to know more. But something in me collapsed, a reluctant finality that made me queasy. Everything seemed to be changing.
Inside the grocery store, every face was familiar. I knew each aisle and where to find everything on my short list. A man knelt to squeeze a loaf of bread on one of the lower shelves. Even from behind, I recognized his narrow head and the set of his shoulders. When I was a girl, his family had lived two streets over from Momma. His daughter had a gimpy leg from a fall off the shipping deck of the mill. She was Rosie’s age. Did she know my girls? Had she been at the funeral?
The floor under me seemed to dissolve. I put a loaf of bread in my basket and headed toward the cashier.
As I drove back to Adam and the girls, the pink and yellow light of the sunset shed an unnatural, deeply shadowed light on the houses and fields.
I’d never been a woman to need or keep intimates. I’d always thought of myself as something of a loner, as likely to take solace from the glissando of a mockingbird as from the laughter of friends or family. With the secrecies of being A.’s lover then wife, I’d come to understand how much I relied on the small graces of those I knew but was not intimate with. I had my place among the people of Clarion. Their familiar faces and multiple acknowledgments fed my need to belong as much as the land did. Who would we—me, Adam, and our children—be here in Clarion now, if we went everywhere surrounded by silent questions? Who was he to these people now that they carried the memory of his darker voice in their bones?
I pulled up near the back door and unloaded the groceries. A horse whinnied inquisitively from the stable. I heard Adam’s faint, muttered response. The mingled sounds of the girls—a guitar, the radio, and Sarah’s call to her cat—filtered down the hall as I put away the groceries.
When I’d finished, I took a small empty jar out of the pantry and a hand trowel from the barn. I knelt on the spot where I had found A. and, breaking up the packed clay, scooped a handful of it into the jar. His origin. The only certainty I had. The thing that set me apart from him and bound me to him.
I put the jar on our bedroom bureau among our combs, nail files, and pocket change, next to my bobby-pin box. At night, it was one of the last things I saw before I turned out the light.
Supper the next Sunday was just Momma, Daddy, and the six of us at our house. The meal was cordial, almost formal. No one mentioned Jennie or the funeral. The girls did not ask where their cousins, aunts, and uncles were.
Grief is a powerful river in flood. It cannot be argued or reasoned or wrestled down to an insignificant trickle. You must let it take you where it is going. When it pulls you under, all you can do is keep your eyes open for rocks and fallen trees, try not to panic, and stay faceup so you will know where the sky is. You will need that information later. Eventually, its waters calm and you will be on a shore far from where you began, raw and sore, but clean and as close to whole as you will ever be again.
Adam in his grief neither struggled nor floated. He took on weight and sank like a stone. His surrender was nearly total and his eyes went dead, the brightness of his gaze extinguished. At times, though, he would suddenly flash open, struggling as if grief could be gulped down entire in a single swallow. A puzzled, naked terror would streak across his face then, far beyond any consolation I could offer; he would stop where he was and weep.
I felt myself far downstream, tumbling along trying to keep the girls in sight. I could not reach him. For the first time since I found A. lying on his side in the mud, I felt alone. I did not know what t
o do.
I wanted him to hold fast to what was left—our four daughters and me—and not let go. I wanted us to stay afloat together. I saw his vacancy as a kind of desertion, as a deep disregard, not just for us, not just for the love that remained, but for life itself. I was afraid for him. I didn’t know what he was capable of or how we would return to each other.
During the day, I was stunned into numbness. Lying in bed at night, I thought of how I could have prevented Jennie’s death, imagining what might have been if I had called her to me instead of returning to that last sheet, stretching it out on the line, smoothing those inconsequential wrinkles while she climbed up on the tractor to join her drunken cousin. Helplessly, I replayed that day. Did she smell the whiskey and his sweat in that last breath she took before she fell and the disk swept across her body? Or did she smell the spring air, the sweet, clean odors of fresh-turned earth?
I allowed myself to consider the infinity of details that might have left Jennie alive. A change of weather the day she died, rain keeping the girls inside. One of us taking longer in the bathroom that morning and delaying Jennie’s walk to the field. A broken washing machine and all the girls pitching in to help do laundry by hand. Sometimes my tracing of consequence and connection went back as far as the war. If Frank had not survived, Jennie would have. The possibilities were endless. I let myself comb through them in small increments. Such thoughts were madness and futility, but they vaulted me into anger and provided a respite from the daily numbness. Sometimes, those were the only thoughts that could engage me.
I did not share these musings with Adam. To speak would have unleashed an endless wail in me as well as him, I was sure. So I shut my mouth on what my heart needed to say. Adam and I learned a new vocabulary of silence.
The girls, in their raw youth, sustained me. They carried the absence of their sister, but they glowed, vibrating with life and health, even as they grieved. I had only to touch them or look at them to be given that. They did not cease being themselves.
Lil, of course, missed Jennie the most directly and actively. Her face often had the same emptied-out look that Adam had. Frequently, I found myself, out of habit, looking past her for Jennie. At times, I could hardly bear to look at her. She was a constant reminder then, as she would be for the rest of her life, of what Jennie would have been.