During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  “Where are they going?” Katie asked, her face tear-streaked.

  “Don’t be dumb,” Anne said. We all knew that Aunt Grace was going to Cleveland. She’d been there before, when she had her operation. We didn’t want to talk about it. We lay on the grass under the oak trees which were in a line at the edge of the highway. The grass was pale and feathery. Cars passed on the road, the ground vibrating, and it felt as though we were still connected with the car that had left us behind.

  We hung around the house. Aunt May called to see how we were doing and said she’d be over later with some ice cream. She said Valerie was under the weather. Valerie was her daughter, another cousin, a little older than we were.

  “Is she sick?” We wondered if Valerie had locked herself in the bathroom again.

  “No, it’s just her time of the month. Is Dad there?”

  We’d forgotten Grandad. We wanted to go with him to the mill. He would leave us. “We have to go,” we told Aunt May, and grabbed our shoes. In the hall we nearly collided with Grandad, who was padding in his stocking feet, his long underwear showing like a shirt under suspenders. He wore it all summer long.

  “Quit your rammin’.” He went into the kitchen and carried a few things to the table and sat down. We stopped, uneasy about being alone with him in the house. His lunch was cold cereal with half the sugar bowl emptied on top of it. “If you’re going to do it why don’t you stab yourself. It’s quicker,” Gram would snarl at him.

  “Where’s Rossie?” we asked. Grandad didn’t answer, the question gone as though it had fallen down a well. He finished his cornflakes, then filled the bowl with Ritz crackers and dumped his coffee over them. They bloated and dissolved. Gram said he’d been feeding pigs so long he ate like one; sometimes he cooked a rank mash for them on a hot plate in the cellar.

  Since no one was there to care, we made ourselves sugar sandwiches on white bread and went onto the back porch to eat. Grandad went to the sink and began to splash and snort, washing up. Gram would have had a hissy, him spitting there, using her sink for his slops the minute her back was turned. Other times she swore at him for not washing all over except a few times a year, when he changed his underwear. She made a great fuss over the event—once she held his long johns suspended from a stick to burn in the trash can. After Grandad washed, we heard him shuffle toward the living room and later he snored. Peaceable, we waited on the porch in the dappling noontime. In the Mason jars stacked up dusty and fly-specked on the side shelves, in the broken-webbed snowshoes hung there, the heap of rusty hinged traps waiting this long time to be oiled and set to catch something in the night, was the visible imprint of the past we were rooted in.

  The way Gram told it was that all she had ever had in life was kids and work and useless men and what she wanted, and had earned besides, was to be left alone. Part of that was nobody accusing her or expecting anything from her. She took care of herself, did her own personal laundry, cleaned her room, cooked her own supper, and what’s more, did the breakfast dishes for the whole family. Plenty. Beyond that she felt put upon, although she continually nagged her daughters and grandchildren to see to one chore or another, as if she couldn’t rest easy, didn’t really believe anyone else would take responsibility. At eleven she had been sent out to work on a nearby farm, to take on many of the household duties of a mother of nine children who was dying of tuberculosis. That was the end of her childhood. “My ma hated it,” she told us, “but they was feeding me instead of me taking from the family. All the same my ma hated it.”

  We were about eleven ourselves when we first paid attention, playing all day, quarreling over our share of the supper dishes. The stories she told seemed made up to impress us, to wheedle sympathy and make us feel guilty. But we knew for certain how she’d felt about one thing, staying with a dying woman, because Aunt Grace was already sick.

  Gram had been Lil Bradley then, and the two miles she walked or rode, clutching the mane of an unsaddled horse, was usually covered in the dark—going before sunrise, returning after nightfall. As soon as she got there she took up the baby, shook down the ashes in the cook stove and, the baby on her hip, prepared breakfast for the family—this only the beginning of a day that wouldn’t end until the dark miles home.

  In later years Gram liked to be driven the thirty miles south to Marland, where she was raised, and she would point out the fields she’d crossed then and we would wonder how she’d ever been a thin wiry girl in a cotton wash dress. She would point proudly to the house where she was born, by now refurbished with a grandness she had never known. Though her father had built it, he had been unable to give it the touches—small-paned windows, shutters and lattice detailing—which made it, when we saw it, so substantial and original-looking. Gram was possessive about it, even then, as though in some way it still belonged to her and affirmed what she had become. She would smile out of her late-model Pontiac, nod and point. Even if the present owners were in evidence, she would stare just as greedily, bold by right, so that Aunt Libby would have to get out of the car and explain our interest. Or rather hers and Gram’s, because we kids were only thinking of the ice cream Gram would buy us at the dairy. We had already seen her old house a hundred times. It was not until we were much older that we wished we’d paid attention, although Gram was always more interested in how people had improved things than in what the house had been like before— rather like appreciating her connection with a friend who had risen in the world. We had to dig her past out of ourselves as much as out of her.

  For the most part, Lil had grown up without her father. The 1890s were a time of speculation and fortune hunting and her father was one of the many men who couldn’t stay home. Lil’s uncle, her mother’s brother, had gone to California in the years of building the cross-country railroads and the family heard all sorts of reports about his associations with the wealthy and famous. They didn’t believe most of what they heard, but Lil’s father developed a frantic anxiety that he might miss the boat— remain at home in poverty and wistfulness.

  Time and time again he went out to the oilfields of the West. Back home, out of money and chagrined, he stayed and worked the land awhile, until it seized him, the urge to try again, and then he would be gone. They might not hear from him for a year or longer. At first a little money would come for Lil’s mother and her six children. Then nothing, until he was back with them once more. Until the time he was gone for so long they thought he might be dead and later heard word he was. He had been killed sinking a dry hole in east Texas.

  Then Lil’s mother became ill and it wasn’t long before she was dead too, another victim of tuberculosis. Lil gave up working for the neighbor and went to stay with her older sister, Hat, who lived in town. It was the first Lil had lived anyplace but on an isolated farm and it was a lot more lively than any life she’d known before, different young men seeing her home from church or visiting her in the evening. It was then that the piano arrived, first evidence that her rich uncle might not be entirely a family myth. Ordered from New York, the piano was a gift for their mother. But, too late for her, it was brought down from Cleveland on a wagon bed by Hat’s husband and put into her parlor, up against the plank walls, with a rag rug under the stool. Lil took in washing and ironing and with the little extra money she kept, above room and board, paid a woman to start her on the piano.

  Then Hat’s husband lost an arm in a farm accident and Lil was forced to take another job, to contribute what she could to Hat. By now seventeen, Lil went to live away from home again, six miles out of the town, where she cooked in a farm kitchen, peeling a peck of potatoes before noon, and boiling tubs of salt pork and greens, finally to bed down in a blanketed-off section of a barn loft, where she froze in winter and melted in summer. Once more she was excluded from the little bit of town social life, but she was too exhausted to care, certainly too tired to walk the six miles, and there was no one to take her.

  Unless she favored Jacob Krauss. She didn’t think much of it at f
irst, his still wanting to see her in the evenings, now riding out from the town, but she figured if it was worth it for him to travel that distance to sit and watch the fire, there wasn’t any harm in it. He never did have much talk in him, even as a young man. He was out of the plain people, maybe shunned for something, folks suspected, though no one ever knew his past for sure. But Lil was seventeen and the mystery of Jacob’s past was part of what intrigued her—she liked the different way he dressed, in shirts of home-dyed indigo and suspenders, and she liked his quaint old-fashioned manners, so at odds with his rough hard look. Tall and lean, he had straight dark hair falling to frame both sides of his face, and the little habit he had of tossing his hair back showed the strong bones clearly and his slanted, long-lashed eyes; and she began to want him in the way you want something you think will occupy you until Doomsday. The wanting felt like enough. There was no mother to warn her, and the other girls she knew were thrilled with Jacob too and envied her, though there was not a father or mother who would have sanctioned his attentions to their daughter. Lil did not desire the children that would come in a marriage; already she knew their demands well enough. But neither did she fancy the endless monotony of cooking for twenty farmhands every day while guarding herself against the teasing, fresh-mouthed married ones who, sensing her loneliness, determined to break her off and make use of her. Better that she should have her own man and the life he would bring her.

  She did not deny it—Jacob drew her. He would sit with no words for her, before the wood stove, watching her continually with his dark, dark eyes, and she began to feel his hunger, so that often she would get up to put more wood in the stove or busy herself at the sink, just to avoid his eyes and hide her trembling. Every night his eyes were watching, wanting her and letting her see it in him; but he wouldn’t touch her, not so much as to let a hand graze hers, though when she would pass close beside him she would hear his breathing, harsh and quick. It nearly drove her wild and her mind came to dwell on him nearly every second. Sometimes, when she lifted up the handle of the stove to stir the wood, the glutted, ashy coals crumbled at the slight touch and something inside her seemed to fragment in the same way.

  Lil would plot to forget him. During the day, going about her work, she would plan how she would be gone in the evening when he came. But she never was, and again she’d open the door to him, to his silent and steady need. It got so peculiar between them that neither of them said a word to the other through whole evenings. Lil would back against the wall when he entered and feel the exact dimensions of his body, the insistent presence of his nature. He would pass close to her, nearly touching her, his eyes locking on her, where they would stay fastened through whole evenings. Eons. She forgot time.

  It took Hebbard Watson coming to court to change things, or else, Lil thought, they might have jumped together off a cliff to end it, both of them stubborn beyond belief. But Hebbard tied his horse by the gate a time or two, and although Jacob didn’t even come to the door, his feelings were plain enough on his face as he stood outside and glared as if he wanted to strangle the horse. Then he tore away in the direction of town without a further glance, though Lil was certain he’d known she watched from behind the parlor curtain. After a third evening of that, Lil was in the kitchen in the morning, peeling through a pail of early yellow apples, thinking about Jacob and his silent withholding, when she heard a commotion on the road. She went to the door and then out in the yard, wearing her flowered apron, her braids frayed with curl. Coming along was a wagon team of six horses driven by Jacob, who was so intent on managing things he didn’t even glance up to see her, though they both knew she was there, the same as when they sat beside each other at the fire. The piano from her sister’s house was strapped onto the wagon bed, swaddled with quilting and roped down to keep it steady. She watched it pass, slow and resounding, the wagon out of sight but the raised dust keeping its memory a little longer, almost like a song resonating, and Lil knew they would be married. It was the only semblance of a proposal that passed between them.

  Married, they moved into rooms up over a store on the town’s one street and in the secret dark Jacob touched her and moved himself in her, and though she got accustomed to it, a part of her was more aggravated by his touch than satisfied, and then it came to seem more invasion than touch, his need something he took care of, quick and by dark, by daylight no trace left, as though it had never happened between them. Lil felt resentment rising in her; his tacit denial shamed her, convinced her that he felt he stole something from her, was taking without asking. Every night, nearly, he turned to her and held her against him while, rapid and brutish, he moved in her. She began to be sick to her stomach nearly all day long. Afraid that it was a baby coming, dreading it, she lay under his heaviness, which blocked out any trace of light, and thought: Soon I’ll be dead.

  Then Jacob became more active in his cattle business. He left her alone, stayed away for days at a time, and Lil began going out to the church for prayer services or hymn sings, a little society one way to distract her mind from continual hating and grieving. Jacob didn’t like going to church. He’d left his own religion but some of the teaching stayed with him, that fancy music mixed with religion was an abomination. Though he didn’t try to stop her, a few times she’d seen him standing outside the church window staring in. Sometimes she was harmonizing with the schoolteacher and she felt it served Jacob right to see her with another man, for she had come to hate him for his neglect.

  One night Lil watched him standing outside the church window for a long time. She trembled, knowing something was changing. When she got to their rooms, she felt certain of it, smelled the strong drink in the air though he stayed hidden and didn’t answer when she called, “Jacob.” She built up the fire because of her shivering, though that wouldn’t touch the part that came from fear. She felt him watching her again. Waiting. Wanting her and still hiding it like a thief. She would give him something to want, and she began to remove her clothes, with the fire hot and dancing over the walls, shattering the shadowy places, Lil excited, knowing she was beautiful and that he had never seen her and that it would be a power over him and would cause something between them to change. The thought of it made her fumble over the layered items of winter clothing and her nipples stood erect, chafed by the fabric. It came into her mind that she would take his head in her two hands and place it against her breasts, each one in turn, press his mouth to suck on her, his tongue to lick her nipples. Wanting that all through her, she turned, fully naked, toward the doorway, where she heard his step.

  By firelight all his need was finally visible in his face, what she’d longed to see. But there was such anger in it too that she tried to cover herself. When she saw the kindling hatchet raised in his hand, she thought that would be the end of it and part of her was glad, fire staining the blade red before blood. She couldn’t get her breath even to scream. He brought the hatchet down then, on the piano, and twice more he struck, to leave it then, anchored in the wood, the piano vibrating as though it shrieked out and held to its voice long afterwards, as though it were her voice. Still she seemed to hear it, after he’d gripped her to bring her hard against him and then carried her to the bed. She couldn’t take breath but repeated wordlessly: why didn’t you, why didn’t you?

  The piano quieted and while Jacob strained into her, Lil’s breath regained its regular and solitary pattern and, quieted, she heard in the distance the repeated howling of a dog left out in the cold. She began to count the times it sounded while Jacob finished and rolled off her. Then she went on counting. Sometime in the night she was sick, threw up everything she had eaten, and let herself think about the baby that was growing in her. Then she went on counting. It was a fearful and lonesome thing but finally she went to sleep and it was possible to imagine how its small eager mouth would fasten on her and pull at her breast. She never told Jacob a baby was coming. She let him see it for himself as if it had nothing to do with him.

  Lil and Jacob w
ent on living and sleeping together for more than twenty years and they never spoke of these things between them. For Lil there were the children they had, seven finally, although the two boys died in infancy, and they meant more to her than she had expected, kept her too busy for worry and lamenting. Looking around, who had it any better? It was the lot of women. Who among them wasn’t stuck with something she couldn’t abide? She, for one, determined to forget it. Sometimes she knew it hurt her children, to see her with bruises or a swollen face, or to find something in the house smashed while there was never any money to give them even the little they needed for school. But she wouldn’t ever give Jacob the satisfaction of showing that she cared, that he could hurt her.

  She left him only once. The children were young and he had started drinking hard and coming home staggering and falling dead asleep. This night, though, she had awakened in the night and found him gone from their bed and she’d followed him to the end of the hall where the little girls slept, hardly knowing where he was or what he was doing. Something in that scared her and she left the house as soon as she got him asleep in their bed again, and went to stay with her sister. But she couldn’t stay on there indefinitely, crowding in with the four children she had then, and when word reached her that Jacob had stopped drinking, she went back to him. He was soon drinking again but he didn’t wander through the house at night; in fact, he often stayed away at night, drunk, or on business. It was a relief to Lil, although the money, always short, became even more scarce. But Lil kept a large garden to feed them and she took in washing along with the Italian women in the neighborhood. Most of those women had it worse than she did.

  It satisfied Lil to do so well without Jacob and for him to see it plain when he came home. Their girls were nicer than there was reason to hope for. They helped her, were bright in school, and all of them were good-looking. And they were with her, set against Jacob, ashamed of his ways and determined to better themselves. The more crude and brutal he became, the more they locked against him. None of his abuse could touch them. Spitting in the wind. About the sum total of all his whammings—save a moment’s hullabaloo. She would show him. There was always the hope, too, that like her own father, he might one day go away and never return.