Follow Me to Ground

by Sue Rainsford

–Close your mouth, close your eyes.

  When I was a child, up in the trees.

  There got to be a time when all the birds knew to stay away from me.

  It’s a hard thing to get across; being that kind of alone.

  Lydia Bell

  No, none of the men went near her.

  All sorts of reasons. Rumours, for starters – it’d get bitten off, she’d eat you after. All that nonsense.

  But also, you know, she looked quite young.

  Not like a child, to my mind, but not fully grown.

  A young woman, I’d have said … or getting to be.

  Most of us found it sweet, comforting, but a few found it … unnerving.

  When I woke in the morning, I thought maybe I’d dreamt it all.

  Or maybe he’d come for me and I’d slept through.

  I went down into the kitchen and saw Father looking out at The Ground, stood safely on a stone.

  I opened the patio door and kept it open with my hip, pulled my cardigan around me.

  –How were the woods?

  He half-turned around.

  –Loud, he said. Loud and wet.

  He hadn’t dressed yet and was covered all over with mud.

  –Be doubly sure to stay off The Ground today.

  When I didn’t say anything he looked at me full.

  –That storm last night … it’s wakeful. Stay well clear.

  He walked past me and I followed him, watched him wash himself down with a towel and sit at the kitchen table, letting himself dry. I was worried he’d catch some scent off me, some mischief-musk, but he seemed to have taken me at my word. Sitting across from him the day seemed like any other, only I’d a taste in my mouth that I knew was heartache.

  –What time are we bringing up Miss Gedeo?

  –You know what time. Eight.

  His mug was on the table and I twirled my fingers ’round its rim.

  –You’ve a Cure tomorrow.

  I made a lilting, agreeable sound and watched the inside of the mug.

  –You remember Lorraine Languid.

  –Sure. Fred Languid’s widow, Mr Kault’s cousin. Lorraine of the lambs.

  He ignored the laugh in my voice.

  –The change is on her. She needs it eased.

  I thought of Lorraine taking me into the barn and the lambs moving toward her. The womby smell come rich off their wool. I said

  –It’s been on her a long time already. She must be almost done.

  –It doesn’t agree with her.

  –So … I’m to steady it?

  He shook his head, standing now,

  –Just hurry it along.

  Women Cures did ask for this on occasion. The quicker to get back to work. No time for a chorus of rising flushes and leaning against the cool part of the wall. But Lorraine Languid had never worked in the fields.

  –Why does she need it hurried, though?

  But he was at the stove now, tired of me, tired of chatter.

  Dim, blunt sound: the wooden spoon nudging the bottom of the pan.

  For weeks afterwards, an animal followed me.

  It was always next to me, just a little to one side.

  An animal with four legs and a cropped tail and a wound for a mouth. I told myself it was only a heartsick dream but every time I looked I saw it big and clear and alive.

  Eager to dip its muzzle in my open chest.

  It wanted to eat my heart and sometimes I wanted to let it; I missed him like he were a limb.

  I tried saying his name to myself, thinking I’d find some comfort or soothe in the soft coupling.

  Sam-son

  Sam-son

  Son-Sam

  The sound of it quickly lost on me, the hiss of the ‘s’ losing its lull and becoming as meaningless as any other name. And still, on and on the shuffling of the short-tailed creature beside me. His red mouth pointed at my heart.

  I’d sit down on the back step, looking at the lawn.

  Put a hand on my low-belly.

  That place he’d been.

  Bringing up Miss Gedeo was always slow-paced and tentative on account of her weight and size. Father once said she was built like a birdcage, and even her heart struck me as bird-like. A small bird. Watchful and hurried.

  I watched Father clear away the earth and remembered the sight of his hand inside her, his fist the size of his own large heart up behind her ribs. The soft cloth of the gown we’d buried her in fell into the dips of her collarbone and crumpled there. Father leaned close and blew the dirt from her eyes.

  –Miss Gedeo, you can wake up now.

  When she didn’t stir I whistled the sound of her name. The wind had a cold bite and I pulled my cardigan tighter around me. We watched her come up to her elbows and smile. She opened her mouth to speak, and then her arms went from under her and her throat rolled upward in a taut, unnatural arc. Her breath was caught there, in the tight of her throat. She couldn’t breathe, and her eyes were set to fail her. She reached out for Father who stood looking down at her, clucking his tongue.

  I got on my knees and put my mouth over hers and put a tunnel of breath between us. Her lips tasted of earth and I thought of Samson’s mouth, the loam thick on his lips.

  Under my hand: her heart going wild.

  When I took my mouth away her eyes were quick and watchful.

  Father put down his shovel and squatted to give her his hand.

  Her lips had tasted of The Ground.

  –You all right, Miss Gedeo?

  She nodded and looked to her soil-filled lap, wanting to clean it away though the whole of her was covered in dirt, and then she started on in her honeyed way, talking about how much better she felt, how well.

  Back inside she changed in the downstairs toilet and from the pantry I heard her sighing and contentedly folding up her gown. A fresh one fell around her legs, the rush of its hem sounding like her own name drawn long at its narrowest points.

  Liiliia.

  Listening to her I wondered if maybe she had a fondness for The Ground, for the fact of our hands having been inside of her.

  She opened the bathroom door and I went quickly into the kitchen.

  –Thank you again, Miss Ada, I feel I could almost run.

  –Not to worry Miss Gedeo, you’re hardly any work at all.

  –I always feel so clean and right, after you’ve been inside me.

  And then she laughed a little at herself, at the strangeness of her phrasing. Though her new dress was clean her face and throat and arms were still coloured grey from being underground.

  –I mean, I always know once you’ve looked inside that everything’s as it should be.

  I smiled at her and leaned back on the counter, wanting her to leave.

  –It was Father that tended to you, mostly.

  Her hands were at her chest and she squeezed them together now. In a flat voice she said

  –Oh, is that right.

  –That’s why your ribs are a touch cracked. Because there wasn’t enough room in you. For his hands.

  A watery sheen came over her eyes.

  –I … thought I remembered your mouth on me.

  –You’d lost a little breath, so I gave you some of mine.

  Squeezing and squeezing her small white hands.

  –I see.

  She started looking around the room, looking at the walls in the lightbulb-light.

  –It’s just, there was such a softness to it.

  –To which?

  –Your mouth.

  And then the sound of her mother in the drive outside. She stopped holding her hands and started holding her shoulders, rubbing her arms up and down.

  –Miss Gedeo, you ever feel unwell, you come here. Don’t come here besides.

  She turned away and picked up her bag and I knew she was crying.

  Father had come in. He looked at miss Gedeo, looked at me, and I shrugged: Cures. I made myself some tea while he took her outside, and avoided my face in the black of th
e kitchen window.

  Mrs Delilah Sharpe

  Of course I remember it.

  Cruel hot day.

  I called Will into the kitchen and he looked at my legs but I wouldn’t look down. I could feel it and that was enough for me. He took me out to the truck and we didn’t say a word because where else would he be taking me?

  Not that we’ve a name for him.

  When I was a child we called him Mr Fix.

  We got to the house and I still wouldn’t look, though by then I could smell it. The mean metal smell. I don’t remember getting into the house, just the rocking chair. That damn chair tilting to and fro with him knelt beside me and peering between my legs. I remember he told me not to move and I wanted to say I’m not moving, it’s this damn chair you’ve made me sit in but I thought if I spoke it’d put more strain on the baby.

  How long we were there I don’t know. Him ripping up sheet after sheet and trying to staunch the flow and singing – the whole time he kept on singing – and then he looked up and told me again not to move and then his daughter was in the room.

  Little Miss Ada.

  And she’d a bundle in her arms.

  A red-streaked barely moving bundle of cloth. And then she said what she said and I thought My baby, that’s my baby, and Will was crying and I thought I should hold his hand.

  When we came home the blood was still on the floor and even then, through the happiness, I thought What a sight this would be if our baby had died. But she didn’t die. No matter what’s wrong with her. My beautiful girl.

  I’ll not have an ill word said against Miss Ada.

  It was close to two when Lorraine arrived.

  From my window I watched the car approach while the rain spat and settled in a mist above the grass. Whoever drove her to the bottom of the drive looked away as she made for the house, drove away without helping her with her bag, which was clearly heavy.

  She didn’t seem to mind.

  She walked like a woman who’d grown up slim.

  The small heel of her shoes saw her wobble once or twice, one arm stretched away from her body and the other pulled taut by the weight of the bag. When she came closer I could smell it: cigarettes and cold cream, and of the foil that Cure candies come wrapped in.

  The thin fabric of her dress moved over her hips and thighs with the same frenzy of a lightbulb flickering before it finally expires, and the scoop of her armpits had the velvety look of charcoal after a fire.

  Hot, hot weather. It took its toll on older bodies.

  I went to the door and I opened it and right away she pointed at her bag and said her lower back was tender. I took the drooping handles in my hand, felt the moist fingerly grooves.

  Inside the hall she leaned back to look at me.

  –Why Ada, I do believe you’ve grown.

  The most I could have grown was a half-inch or so. I suppose she said it because it’s something Cure children and adolescents like hearing.

  I left her bag behind the sitting room door and told her she might sit for a moment. Her freckles gathered close about her lips, a sign she was about to smile.

  Upstairs Father was standing in his bedroom, his back to the door.

  –Just open her in the sitting room.

  –You’ll not be coming down?

  –You know your way.

  –And you don’t want to talk to her?

  –No.

  He’d left a towel hanging over the chair. I picked it up and held it in both hands.

  –This feels very strange to me. Curing her without your coming down. Without talking to her at all.

  –You’re getting older, now. You don’t need me watching over you all the time.

  I helped Lorraine lift her stocking feet onto the couch and asked her to leave her hands at her side. If she wondered after Father she didn’t say. Her dress was lined with buttons down its front, and once I’d laid my hand across her eyes and seen her sleeping I undid them one by one.

  I looked at her belly, at the belts of fat falling under their own slack weight and pooling ’round her waist.

  She smelled like a rag left near the sink. I peeled away her underthings and wedged the towel up between her legs and a little ways underneath her. My thumb, when I ran it along the soft inside of her arm, saw the blood come heavy and slow. This we did with women past a certain age, relieve some of the pressure that gets into their blood. But her blood was extra thick. So thick I half-expected the opened vein would shimmy up flecks of iron, as pebble-bedded streams will sometimes in a certain light reveal shards and lumps of gold.

  After a few moments I pushed the skin back together and wiped it clean with my dress. The skin of her stomach fell easily apart, its elastic long gone. The ovaries were all sinewy and very small, lined with the deep grooves of a peach stone, and her womb shone with an unseemly wet.

  It made me think of staling fruit that takes on the shape of the bowl it sits in.

  I held a hand over it, felt its heat. I wondered it didn’t turn the flesh of her stomach pink. I ran a finger down its middle and it opened slack and uneven as her sleeping mouth. Inside was the usual liquid, only cordial-thick.

  I sang the sound of water in a drain, of rain moving through the gutters. She quivered, which was the change in her blood, and then water was coming out onto the towel, quickly followed by a heavier substance that saw it darken.

  I closed up her womb and flattened down her stomach. It took me some moments to button her dress. I looked at her wedding band and tweaked it out of its groove. It had stained the root of her finger a mossy green.

  I took away the sopping towel and pushed it under the couch. It would stain the carpet. It had dripped on my dress. I hadn’t thought to bring in a bowl.

  With her underwear back around her hips and her dress straightened, I roused her.

  –Well. You should feel better – cooler – right away, and you’ll notice the other changes in a day or less. Once your body catches onto the change in your blood.

  I put my hands over the stains in my lap.

  –Oh, Ada.

  She was laughing as she sat up, keeping her knees together and pointing her bunched toes toward her shoes. Laughing like she hadn’t a care. The fine wrinkles around her eyes deepened in time to her irises flaring.

  Her eyes were a dark, deep green. The colour reminded me of the patch of ground ’round the side of the house. That sliver of earth the sun never hits, where the barest hint of moss festers in the wet shade.

  Agatha Bond

  I liked them fine. They could always do something for you. You always left feeling better.

  It was the burying I couldn’t get my head around.

  In the ground. Not dead, just asleep – and for days.

  I used to worry that something would go wrong and I’d wake up buried. Wake up dead.

  That was the only thing.

  Well. That and talking to them afterwards. About what they’d seen.

  How do you talk to someone who’s been inside you?

  Who’s seen more of you than you’ve seen of yourself?

  Father met Lorraine in the hall and I lifted the sagging towel into my lap and carried it up to the bathroom, making a sac out of the front of my dress. It landed without ceremony in the bath and pooled toward the drain. I pulled my soiled dress over my head and tossed it in, too, and quickly all the cloth stewed into one. I heard her on the porch, heard a car in the drive.

  Father came and stood in the doorway.

  –Well?

  –The usual. It was fine.

  –What did you tell her?

  –The usual. It was all the usual.

  –She’s coming back next week.

  I leaned forward to turn on the tap. It sputtered at first, the smell of the old drains filling up the small damp room.

  –Why?

  –She wants to keep going with it. To keep getting flushed out.

  –But it’s all gone.

  –She’s set on it. Says she
’ll pay the same each time.

  The water was coming strong now and I rolled my eyes.

  –Father.

  –She kept saying how she never felt better.

  –You wouldn’t let this pass it if it was you who had to sit with her.

  –There are worse ways to spend time.

  And so Lorraine kept coming back for what she called her ‘treatment’.

  It was dull work, in that it was no work at all. I put her to sleep and waited a little while, sometimes singing a tune that would see her wake up cool.

  As I’ve said, women Cures wanting their change sped up wasn’t uncommon – the same women who went back to work when their newborns were still gasping for air. But Lorraine had never worked in the fields. Mr Languid had had his own land. She’d no reason to put a rush on anything.

  Her work had been what the other women called clipped-wing work, which also meant there were habits she couldn’t shake. She was determined, for instance, to soothe us and feed us. To give us things we didn’t need.

  It was a quiet time of year, with autumn’s onset seeing less work in the fields and Cures more eager to spend time amongst themselves, so often once she woke up she could see no reason to leave.

  –No other visitors today, Ada?

  And then she’d lie back on the couch and shuffle through the box of postcards she carried around, telling me she brought them especially for me. With her knees gathered up to her chest I’d watch her finger their soft edges, and one day it struck me that Lorraine was the first Cure I’d ever known who’d once lived elsewhere. Her eyes had not always fallen first thing on our lemony horizon, and she’d not spent all her summers taking heed of the terracotta ground.

  The postcards were inscribed with quick notes in coloured ink, from Lorraine to Lorraine, mentioning to her future self the pastries of a particular street and the cobblestones of another, a corner where hems were lifted and soles peeled from their shoes. She was always turning to me and starting stories she couldn’t finish, flapping a hand whenever a name escaped her, the unlit cigarette between her fingers losing its tobacco in fluttering slivers of yellow and brown.

  Or else, she’d busy herself around the house. Her body wakeful and well, loud and unyielding. I can hear them still, the sounds she made: the harsh spittle sound rocking across her tongue and clinging to her teeth, the pimpled skin of her inner thighs shifting against one another other like the sheaths of a winter dress, her breasts damply filling the cups of her brassiere, like wet leaves tightly packed in a drain. The sigh of her body sinking into the cushions while her hair, falling away from her face, gave up its lacquered curls.