The Northern Reach

by W. S. Winslow

  “You okay, Edith? I thought I saw Royal Edgecomb come out of here. That guy’s a real rape artist. Just ask Sylvia Clough. I heard he tried to force himself on her, if you know what I mean.”

  Henry looked away, blushing to the tips of his ears. In a confidential tone he went on, “Pushed her down and ripped her dress ’fore she got away.” The story should have horrified her, Edith knew, but instead, the thought of being wanted by Royal, feeling his breath on her neck and his hands on her skin, made her back teeth tingle. And it made her want to beat Sylvia Clough bloody. When Henry extended a hand to help Edith down, she hesitated but took it.

  SIN, 1928

  Edith hated the Independence Day church service. She saw no connection between the American Revolution and Jesus but knew better than to risk being backhanded, or worse, for questioning it, so she buttoned up her church dress and scuffed into her good shoes. She was hiding the romance paperback she’d borrowed from her friend Silla under the coverlet when her father stepped through the doorway.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, a book,” she said.

  Jubel Tainter extended his hand for it, palm up, and looked at the cover. “Trash, filth, and sin. That what they taught you at school, girl?” He cocked his elbow and slapped her face with the book, again and again, before he opened it and began tearing out the pages, wadding them up, and dropping them on the floor.

  “Clean this up and get out to the car. And for Lord’s sake stop your crying.”

  Chewing her resentment like a cud, her eyes still swollen and burning, Edith settled next to Mumma in the front pew of the First Church of Christ’s Glory and thought about her wedding. She and Henry had planned it for next spring, but Edith was trying to figure out how to move it up.

  She hated being back under her father’s thumb, especially after the freedom she’d had living away from home for four blissful years of high school. Since graduation she’d played her cards right with Henry Baines, and soon enough they’d set up housekeeping in town, safely beyond her father’s grasp, finally leaving Wonsqueak behind, along with Pastor Bell and the endless grind of church and more church. At least she wasn’t expected to go to the pastor’s boring political meetings. Of course if they formed a Klan youth group, like Mother suggested, there’d be no avoiding it.

  Edith looked past the minister’s jowly face and raw-meat nose to a painting of Adam and Eve, their nudity hidden—and the decency of God’s chosen preserved—by some conveniently overgrown shrubs. A clumsy, primitive thing, it was the only decoration in the plain white room. To Edith, it looked like the serpent was about to take a bite out of Adam, while Eve, munching her apple, wore an expression of bemused detachment, blissfully unaware of the damnation, and the agony, that awaited her.

  Nodding occasionally to show she was listening, when she was really thinking about what she and Henry might get up to after they spread out their picnic blanket in the back of his truck that evening, Edith considered giving in to Henry’s begging.

  It was risky. Once he’d had his fun, Henry might call off the wedding and abandon her, and she’d end up ruined and alone like those factory girls in the books from the five-and-dime. He promised he never would, and she wanted to believe him; Henry was nothing if not good-hearted. If she ended up with a baby in her belly, it’d be an awful scandal, but at least she’d get married and away from this suffocating little blot on the coast of nowhere.

  “There’s more than one way to skin a cat, you know,” Henry had told her last time, after she’d refused to take off her underclothes. She was curious to find out what he meant, because she was sure he was a virgin, too. That Henry might actually know something about sex made him seem more interesting.

  More interesting than Caleb Bell, anyway. The preacher’s son, who as usual was staring at her from the choir loft, probably knew less than nothing about the ways of the flesh. Oh, Caleb was pleasant enough, but his lashless, red-rimmed eyes were always crusty and he smelled of milk; just the thought of having to share a bed with him made her cringe. Her father, she knew, still held out hope she’d marry into the Bell family. If there were a way to force her, and in the process make an in-law of his idol Pastor Bell, he’d find it. The more Edith thought about it, the more inclined she was to let Henry have his way.

  “James 1:14,” Pastor Bell announced, his sticky baritone oozing through the church. “‘But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.’ So says James, servant of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Now the preacher was rolling, and it was only a matter of time before he’d find his way to his favorite subjects: demon liquor and its ruination of even the most God-fearing men and women, the filthy ways of fornicators, and the unholy cataclysm that awaited once the papists succeeded in removing “our own King James Bible from the public schools paid for with your tax money.” She stifled a yawn.

  Services at the Congregational church in Wellbridge, which her parents used to attend and Henry’s still did, were shorter and cheerier than this. A couple of hymns, once through the Our Father, a brief talk about doing unto others or honoring somebody, and you were out the door before you’d finished digesting breakfast. There was never any mention of the lake of fire, or the mark of the beast, or avenging angels of death. No one talked about the pope, let alone called him the Whore of Babylon. The pews had cushions, and the minister’s wife handed out doughnuts after the service.

  Henry’s parents, Edith thought, were so much nicer than her own. They didn’t holler or threaten; the doors in their house all locked from the inside, not the outside; and Henry had never been gagged with a cloth or had his mouth washed out for blaspheming or just asking a simple question. Henry may not have been her dream man, but the Baineses were as close to a dream family as she could imagine.

  That evening, waiting for the fireworks to start, Edith sat on the blanket Henry had draped over the tailgate of his father’s truck. The high-summer breeze tickled her bare legs and lifted her skirt. The July afternoon was finally fading, and the sun had slipped behind the western trees, spilling shadows across the village green. Overhead the clouds were stained purple, tender bruises on the sky, and in the gloaming the fireflies rose from the grass, oblivious to the danger of sticky-faced boys with their punctured-top jars, bored of torturing frogs and pox-itchy with excitement for the first sulfurous blast of celebration.

  Across the green, a fat little towheaded boy with a garter snake chased a screaming girl. When he couldn’t catch her, he flung the creature at her, but his mother was on him in a minute, meting out justice that was as rough as it was swift. Edith turned away. She’d been on the receiving end of enough slaps, clouts, and kicks to know what punishment looked, and felt, like.

  Henry had gone to get a Moxie and should have been back by now. Edith scanned the doorways, but instead of finding Henry’s lanky form, her gaze passed over, then went straight back to, a larger, darker one. She didn’t need to see his face to know it was Royal Edgecomb leaning against the Grange Hall porch, arms crossed over his threadbare work shirt. As soon as he raised his eyes to hers, Edith looked down at her hands. By the time she looked back, he had moved over to the town hall; again she met his gaze and averted her own. They repeated this dance twice more, until Royal was standing right in front of her. Edith folded her legs underneath herself and tucked her skirt around them.

  Royal raised his eyebrows. “Edie Tainter, as I live and breathe.” He was mocking her primness, she knew, so she smiled as brightly as she could, just in case anyone was watching.

  “How are you, Royal?”

  He laughed and leaned so close their noses nearly touched. “Heard you’re getting married.”

  His breath smelled of whiskey, his skin of sweat and earth mixed with something feral that she could neither identify nor breathe deeply enough into her lungs. He settled his right palm on her g
ingham-wrapped knee and tickled her thigh twice with his finger. His hands were impossibly warm. Edith slid back, just beyond his reach.

  “Yup. Next spring. To Henry Baines. My fiancé. He’s just gone to fetch a Moxie. Speak of the devil, there he is, right over there by the Rotary Club booth.”

  Royal didn’t bother to look. Two breaths later, when the silence was as heavy as the July heat, he said, “Ain’t that swell. You still staying down to your grandmother’s?”

  “Just for the night. I’m back living in Wonsqueak, till the wedding.”

  Royal’s eyes never left her face.

  “You got a sweetheart, Royal?” Edith asked to fill the silence, and immediately wished she could suck the words back in and swallow them whole.

  “Ain’t the marrying kind.”

  After waiting just long enough to make her uncomfortable, he said, “I’ll leave you to your soda pop and your fella, then. Edie.” Her name came out in a sigh, evaporating into the air as Royal slipped away, across the lawn and into the deepest of the lengthening shadows.

  “Nice to see you again, Royal. Best to your family,” she called after him with exaggerated friendliness, loud enough to be sure Henry heard, but Royal kept moving, didn’t wave or even look back, just melted into the oak grove next to the cemetery.

  After dismissing Henry’s annoyance at her conversation with “an old family friend” and soothing him with a kiss and a cuddle, Edith set the sweating Moxie bottle on the spot where Royal’s hand had been to cool the throbbing beneath the fabric of her dress.

  Five hours later, her skin was still hot when she looked out her bedroom window and spied Royal standing under the elm tree out back of Grammie D’s house. After she’d cleaned the last trace of Henry’s fumbling from between her legs, Edith slipped downstairs and out the kitchen door to follow Royal into the woods.

  RECKONING, 1929

  Edith still held out hope the child would be stillborn. When the contractions started coming fast enough to call the doctor, Grammie D told Henry to run next door and use their telephone. He had been gone a long time, and Edith figured that rather than hurrying, he’d probably wandered over in his usual unheroic way, disappointing her, predictably and again. Lately everything about Henry Baines, even his tenderness—no, especially that—had begun to grate. She knew better but couldn’t help it.

  Now, flat on her back in the bed they’d shared for the past six months—six and a half if you counted by weeks, seven if you rounded up—Edith’s thoughts about her husband came to an abrupt end as the next contraction seized her abdomen, pushing ragged, animal sounds through her gritted teeth. Like all the others, this pain was worse than the one before. When it had mostly faded, she rolled on her side and curled into a ball, squeezing her belly between her thighs and chest.

  Grammie D said, “Hurts like hell, don’t it? Last time I gave birth—that’d be your angel mother—I bit down so hard I cracked a molar. Eleven and a half pounds Rita was, about tore me in half. ’Course by then I was so stretched out from the first six, I prob’ly could’ve birthed a normal-size baby with a cough. Didn’t know whether to put a diaper on her or a saddle.…”

  Edith tried to purge from her mind’s eye the image of a young Dorothy Powell spread-eagled on the bed tethered to a pony-size infant and with her parts in shreds, but what with it being so disturbing, the thought lingered.

  Grammie D mopped Edith’s forehead with a cool cloth. Now even between the pains it was nearly impossible to talk, and all Edith could manage were mewling sounds.

  “They say you forget the pain after the baby comes, but I never did,” the older woman continued. “I imagine it’s true for most, though, otherwise nobody’d have more than one. My babies got heavier every time, but don’t worry, dear, you’re not awful big.”

  To Edith’s relief, her grandmother’s chatter was cut short by the arrival of Dr. Penney. Henry tried to follow him into the bedroom, but before he could get through the doorway Grammie hustled him back, clucking about birthing rooms being no place for men. Edith heard her say something about women in labor not being in their right minds, but hers had never been clearer. She’d done everything she could think of—starving herself, bumping into things, squeezing into corsets, jumping up and down, even praying—to get rid of this baby, but it had held on and was coming anyway. Payment for “the wages of sin” Pastor Bell was always threatening had finally come due; she saw that now.

  The doctor pulled off the sheet and pushed Edith’s knees back and apart. Peering into the depths, he was promptly rewarded with a gush of amniotic fluid that sent him reeling into Grammie D, who had just closed the door behind her.

  The old lady cackled while the doctor wiped his face. Undaunted, he leaned back in and shoved most of his right hand into Edith, stripping away her final shred of modesty. A drop of her water clung to the doctor’s bushy right eyebrow, and when the straw-colored sun caught it just so, it glistened like a diamond, the only beautiful thing in her life. She turned her head to avoid seeing it drop to his lapel and instead looked out at the woods on the other side of the reach. There were a few tattered evergreens, long-needled pine and Christmas tree fir, but most of the trees were deciduous, fleshless skeletons of ash, beech, and oak, wind-raked and gray from the dry-bone crack of winter. In the purgatory of mud season, they remained naked and despairing, oblivious to the promised resurrection of the coming spring.

  “Water’s broken, no question about that. Nearly ten fingers dilated, too late for ether,” he said as if checking things off an imaginary list. Then to Edith, “Looks like it’ll be an April Fools’ Day baby. You’re going to have to push soon, dear… Edith? Do you understand?”

  This time the contraction was so intense she screamed. The agony seemed to go on forever, wrenching every muscle, twisting every bone, and as it did, a memory floated up from deep in her mind, growling the same love-pain words she’d heard the night the child was conceived, as she lay on the soggy pine-needle mat with the snaking tree roots digging into her back and her wrists pinned over her head. “I’ll do as I please with you, Edie Tainter.”

  “All right, Dorothy, I think we’re going to need your help,” the doctor said, then, muttering something about more light, he grabbed Edith by the ankles and gave her a quarter turn so that her legs dangled over the side of the bed. “Prop her up now.”

  The springs creaked as Grammie D climbed onto the bed, hooked Edith under the arms, and raised her up so that the small of her back rested against the old lady’s thighs. Edith’s throbbing head settled between her grandmother’s breasts. She smelled of camphor and onions.

  From far away the doctor’s voice asked where Edith’s mother was, and across the distance came the snorted response. “At church, of course. Couldn’t miss the Sunday service, now they’re on a first-name basis with the Lord.”

  If Dr. Penney replied at all, his words were sucked up in a hurricane of pain as Edith’s world collapsed into one room, her life to one breath. Now there was nothing but the need to push, to get it out, she bore down once, twice, three times. After that she couldn’t count anymore, couldn’t even think, but eventually, when she was sure she was dying, a head of dark hair emerged, followed by the white-hot sear of the child’s shoulders forcing their way through and tearing her open. And then it was over.

  Behind closed eyes, Edith waited for the first cry, frightened and half expecting to see the child blue-faced and limp, with the cord wrapped around its neck like what happened to Silla Trout’s baby brother, the one that was born dead. She covered her face with her hands. When no sound came, she peeked between her splayed fingers and saw the doctor holding the tiny boy upside down. Though silent, the baby was alive, his neck unscathed, his face beet red. The doctor gave the child a good whack, and as soon as he brought up the clot of blood that had been clogging his windpipe, her baby took a big breath and let loose an angry wail.

  In that moment, with that first cry, Edith was not sorry he was alive, or repentant of t
he sin of his creation, but happy, and she whispered something so quietly that only her grandmother, arms wrapped around Edith, ear to her cheek, could hear.

  “Royal.” There was no question in her mind. Finally, he was hers.

  LIFE

  The first time she sees Henry holding the baby, it isn’t love or lust Edith burns with, but shame, its flames licking her face, flushing her cheeks. There is no escaping the truth of this child, or the miracle of him: from her sin and Royal’s darkness has come light, immaculate and unfathomable. Nothing else matters.

  “He’s all you, Edith. Can’t see much of me, not yet, anyway,” Henry says, gazing at baby Mason, named for his beloved Grandpa Baines. The boy coos in his arms. Outside, a cloud drifts away and a ray of sunlight passes through the window, enfolding her husband and son in the sapling arms of spring.

  He lifts the swaddled baby to his face and breathes him in, kisses each downward-tilting eyelid. “Hey there, little man, aren’t you lucky you didn’t get Daddy’s ears.” When he looks at Edith, there are tears in his eyes. “Aren’t we blessed?”

  She cannot speak, so she nods, unwilling to give voice to the lie, acknowledging only the truth, small and sullied though it is. Blessed is exactly what the two of them are.

  HOME FRONT

  This time it wasn’t the usual open hand, but a closed fist, a right cross like a rock to the jaw that George never even saw coming. On the way down he scraped his cheek against the edge of the stove, then landed with his back against the icebox. He felt a warm trickle above his chin. It should have hurt, but it didn’t, not yet, anyway. When he tried to get up, his legs were rubbery knees and wet-noodle bones. He stayed put.

  Standing over his son, Frank Lawson shook his head, fists curled tight. He looked down at his hands and straightened his fingers, grabbed a dish towel, and dropped it in George’s lap. George swatted the towel away and found his feet on the second try.