The fact was, however, that Cora felt so much better she knew she had been short of air for some time. Too much of it, perhaps, hastened to bring on her labor pains. Orion walked the horse and buggy three miles to the farm of Otto Kahler, whose wife was a midwife, and by the time they had returned, Cora was stretched on the rack, as if meant to be broken. Although urged to cry out by Mrs. Kahler, Cora made no sound. Unable to bear the silence, Orion left the house and found Emerson in the storm cave, sorting the sprouting potatoes. The air in the cave was moist and almost warm, fragrant with the smell of the lantern. When he returned to the house the child was howling, but the woman on the bed appeared to be dead. It clarified Orion’s first impression that she was a woman of remarkable appearance. She was not dead, but in a place so like it no one but herself might have drawn the distinction. She had lost so much blood that Mrs. Kahler marveled how a body so thin had managed to contain it. From where had it all come? How could it be replaced? Just a few days before, Orion had remarked the fever-like pricks of color in her English complexion, but now her face in the lamplight was like wet plaster. He wondered if any person should come back from where she had been. He was sent out to fetch Emerson, so that the father might see the mother and child together, both of them alive. When shown the wrinkled, howling infant, he commented that she squawked pretty good for a girl.
The little tyke, as Emerson described her, was heavier than most boys Mrs. Kahler had delivered. Given the bottle, she stopped her squalling, like a good child. The strain of the birth had changed Cora’s color, and hollowed her cheeks as if teeth were missing. She looked more like Abe Lincoln to Orion than Emerson’s wife. What a strange sight it was to see her with the child. Her unbraided hair hung in lank, oily strands, her scalp showing bone white where the hair parted. However strange she looked, she proved to be of one mind about the infant’s name. It would be Beulah Madge, the Beulah after the mother of Emerson and Orion, the Madge after the mother of Cora’s father. It had been her name that Cora heard the most often as a symbol of womanly attainments. It was to her that Cora owed her high coloring, if not her temperament.
Emerson’s comment was that with a name like that a girl would not find it hard to frighten off the boys. A moon-faced child, with light-brown hair that grew forward and down from the crown’s bald spot, she had Emerson’s small pale eyes, his chubby paw-like hands. Her complexion was that of a smooth Plymouth Rock egg. But if there was so little to remind one of Cora, was that cause for complaint? In line with the facts as seen by Orion, or the few people he spoke to, the girls would do better to take after the father, and the sons, if any, after the mother. In such strange ways, surely, the Lord went about his mysterious work.
Along with the father’s moon face, and his comforting figure, Beulah Madge inherited his constitution. Nothing fazed Emerson. Only lack of nourishment disturbed the child. Most infants deprived of their mother’s milk were predictably wayward and choleric, subject to rashes and digestive disorders, with a corresponding sourness of breath, temperament, and outlook on life. Not Beulah Madge. The child cried so seldom Cora wondered if a faculty might be missing. In this she differed from Emerson, who took its equable nature for granted. It played with his paw-like calloused hand. When bounced on his knee it hiccuped and giggled. On Cora’s insistence, however, it was denied the pleasure of sucking or chewing on his overall buttons. In the taking of food, in the soiling of diapers, she was methodical and tireless. In a wedge-shaped box made from a feed trough, she would lie gurgling and content to stare at the shadows moving on the ceiling. Each time the ashes were shaken, the air in the kitchen danced with dust motes. Cora worried that such air might be too thick to breathe, but not for Beulah Madge. As the cold tapered off, and the windows were opened, letting in the bird songs and the cackle of the hens, Beulah Madge was referred to as Madge. Perhaps Beulah seemed a large label on such a small package. Madge was what her father called her, words of one syllable coming natural to him, this one escaping his mouth with no visible parting of his teeth or loss of tobacco juice. It was not Cora’s nature to handle or fondle a child if it would sit by itself. The bald spot on Madge’s crown troubled her, but she was reassured that it was temporary, as was her craving for feathers when Cora plucked a chicken, and turned to see the child with a mouthful, like one of the cats. The lightness and flatness of her own body pleased Cora, but she still found it a strain to lift the child to her hip or hold her for burping. Orion assumed this chore, patting her to the tune of nursery songs that irritated Emerson. If it was his intent to yahoo and yodel, would he get on with the building of his own house? The long wintering together, in the unfinished house, had aggravated the way the brothers rubbed one another, Orion leaving the house after breakfast to not return until Emerson had eaten. Cora kept his food in the range warmer, but he would bolt it in silence, then leave the house. Where did he go? On the moonlit nights he walked in the fields with his gun. The sound of it firing exasperated Emerson, certain he would kill himself or somebody more useful. Orion set his traps on the banks of the Elkhorn, where he trapped skunks, musk-rats, and rabbits. The skinned bodies of the creatures repelled Cora, and she could seldom bring herself to eat the flesh. Ducks she felt to be different; she heard them honking at night, and welcomed the long-necked, almost legless creatures with their still unruffled feathers concealing their dark, shot-pitted flesh. Orion liked the bird roasted, but Emerson complained that swallowed lead pellets remained in the stomach, or worse yet, got into the veins and made these bumps and lumps.
In March the ground was firm enough to move the kitchen range from the temporary house to the new one, the draft up the new chimney so strong it would suck the flame from a wad of corn husks. A porch had been planned for the front of the house, where they might sit on summer evenings, free of the heat off the kitchen, but for the time being the wood was used to construct a platform porch at the back, low to the ground but running the width of the house. It would be deep enough to take the washing machine, with its tubs and pails, and a line to hang laundry in rainy weather. The floor was tilted to drain wash spill and drippings, and the one low step to the yard was no higher than a child could take, when it had to, which might be soon. Inside the house only the living room was plastered, the others ribbed with laths like a corn-crib, looking more like a building that was coming down than one going up. The stairs to the bedrooms, however, were heated like a warming oven by the chimney, so that Cora leaned on it for warmth as she went up and down. Furniture was lacking, and colorful wallpaper, but lace curtains screened the light at two windows, with green blinds at the front on rollers. Who was to look in at them but her chickens? Emerson asked. Two large crates of pullets, all of them Plymouth Rocks with the exception of two confused Rhode Island Red roosters, sat for almost a week at the station in Battle Creek before Emerson got the word to come and get them. For two or three days they cackled all day and half the night. It had been Cora’s intention to fence them in (the chickens were her problem, not Emerson’s), but they scratched up food for themselves running loose, and she liked the way, hearing her in the morning, they would come clucking to gather at the porch screen.
Cora had never been much of a rocker, the creak and motion of the chair disturbing the quiet cherished by her father, but rocking proved to be a comfort those moments she had to herself. Her arms crossed on her front, since the chair was armless, she rocked with both feet on the floor, lifting her heels on the backswing. Orion had brought back from Columbus a small Axminster rug which she was at pains not to walk or rock on. The intricate pattern, in harmonious colors, provided the background for her thoughts. The glare and shimmer at the windows gave Cora headaches, but Emerson seemed to welcome the light in his face, a chair drawn up to the window while he sat shelling popcorn. Holding an ear of the corn in his injured hand, he would husk off the kernels with a cob. Whatever he did, shelling corn, husking peas, or sorting potatoes, some of it made its way to his mouth. In the evening, on the chair with springs, t
urned so the lamplight glowed behind him, he patiently read the operating instructions of his latest piece of machinery. After a period of concentration, he would say, “Who they expect to read print as fine as that?” and pass it on to Orion. It was left to Cora, after the brothers had haggled, to fill out the order blanks in the mail order catalogues and calculate the shipping charges. Neither brother had gone to school far enough for fractions, or what to do with the decimal point in multiplication. On the mailing envelope Cora’s Spencerian hand was fine as the signatures seen on labels. Emerson had not known his wife was so accomplished when he married her.
As smart as she was, Emerson felt it necessary to read aloud to her from Capper’s Weekly, his lips puckered to hold in his chew of tobacco. Politics interested Emerson, but he understood its complexities were beyond the grasp of women. On those points where he differed with Orion, or Senator Capper, Emerson would fold the paper and refuse to read further. He did not argue. In another man this might imply he was thinking, but in Emerson it meant the issue was settled. His gaze averted, he would use a kitchen match to clean the wax from his ears.
A bounty had been placed on wolves in the county, although neither Emerson nor Orion had seen one. Orion shot rabbits, but to tell the truth, it almost sickened Cora to clean and cook them. Stripped of its pelt, the taut body glistened. The small legs put her in mind of fingers. On her plate all she could think of was the pleading eyes. Somehow this did not trouble her about chickens, which she took the pains to behead herself, sometimes chasing the headless flapping bird around the chopping block. Orion plucked the bird for her, and the feathers were saved for a sleeping crib for Madge. They had pork from a neighbor, a pig raiser, who exchanged the cuts for eggs and butter, Cora’s way with the cream, after the separation, proving to be sweeter than customary. Orion would clean the rim of the crock with his finger, then lick it off.
Very briefly they had a problem with eggs, since Emerson firmly believed the yolk concealed a live but featherless chicken. His eggs had to be fried to the hardness of meat, and sliced with a knife, like cheese. Nothing would budge him. He would not touch an egg that he could penetrate with his fork’s edge. Both Emerson and Orion liked their potatoes in a white sauce, their peas in a white sauce, and their biscuits served with pan gravy, the biscuits used to wipe the plate clean, like the tongue of a dog.
Cats appeared before stray dogs, however, prowling around the sheds, skulking across the yard, or furtively competing with the chickens for the food she threw out with the dishwater, hissing like snakes. Cora did not welcome cats, having heard of the way they stole the breath of babies asleep in their cradles, but Emerson, of all people, encouraged them to gather around him in the barn at milking time. A few would stand erect, exposing their undersides to be squirted with milk from the cow’s teat, then draw back into the shadows to lick it off. He was not averse to dipping his hand into the frothing pail, then letting the cats lick it clean to the wrist. Along the trail from the barn to the house, both pails sweeping the weeds, the cats followed along so nimbly even Cora spied on them, their tails up stiff as a cane with a crook at the end. Time taken for such idle pleasure, although for just a moment, required that she apply herself harder to whatever she was doing, more pressure to the crank of the cream separator, the clothes wringer, or the handle of the broom. She was not one to criticize idleness in others and indulge in it herself.
Observation assured Cora that chickens were stupid, but how had she ever begun the day without them? They were her chickens: where they laid their eggs was her responsibility. Missing her from the house, or seeing her only dimly, a long striding phantom in the dusk of the evening, Orion understood she was looking for the eggs it seemed the purpose of the hens to hide. Brought into the house in the sling of her apron, they were stored in a syrup pail until Sunday, at which time, seated on the porch, she would remove the dung spots with a scrape of her thumbnail, then bury them in sawdust in the storm cave. Emerson would sell these eggs to a grocer in Battle Creek, and bring back to her, in silver, the proceeds. This was her money, which she stored in a bowl that might be used for sugar on special occasions. Joshingly Emerson asked her what she meant to do with it. Was that a mistake? When he came in from the fields a few weeks later, he found the porch screen latched and had to rap on it. His shoes were caked with field dirt. She asked him to take them off. Behind her he saw, gleaming as if wet, the linoleum that covered the floor of the kitchen, brightly colored as Christmas paper. Wasn’t it to walk on? he asked. While it was new, she replied, they would walk on it with their shoes off. This proved to both clean it and give it a polish. Her pleasure in this possession was tempered by her knowledge that it bordered on display. Dr. Geltmayer was the first to walk on it in his shoes. With a cleverness that shamed her, Cora explained that the plank floor was drafty in the winter and the crawling child sometimes picked up splinters. It reassured her to learn that he had such refinements in his own house.
Often the chores were so demanding Cora simply lacked the time to churn the cream which was yellow as butter. Orion poured it like syrup on his pancakes; if it soured, he ate it spread on his biscuits. He washed both corn bread and her shortcake down his throat with gulps of buttermilk. From all of this, to her surprise, he suffered no ill effects. He took a boy’s delight in the slip and suck of his boots in the deep manure of the cow manger, as thick and dark as chewed tobacco. In the open fields she often heard him singing at his work.
Nothing astonished her so much as watching Emerson with the child. He made faces with closed eyes, his thumbs in his ears, the fingers wagging as he brayed hee-haw like a donkey. He made a face with open eyes, the lips forming a round O, suddenly exploding in a loud Ah-chooo! that startled Beulah Madge silly. This gave her hiccups, which had to be treated by slapping her on the bottom until she burped, or letting her hang like a rabbit by the heels. He covered his face with his hands, peering at her through the slits between his fingers, her eyes so wide and staring Cora feared they might pop. Placed to straddle his knee, her tiny hands gripping his fingers, the child would bounce until she was dizzy. But if Cora said, “Here now, I’ll take her,” how she would howl. It was comical how much she looked like him. Placed on her back in the crib, she would squirm in such a manner the hair was slow to grow at the crown of her head. It troubled Cora to see them both from the rear, their heads bald as targets. It also seemed to Cora that the child was slow to talk, but how would she know? During the church service other infants she saw either slept or howled, their faces red as cherries. When she hesitantly hinted at her concern, Emerson harumphed, pleased as if he had been tickled, reminding her that the problem with a female child was to shut them up once they started talking. Actually, it pleased her, on a trip to Battle Creek, to see the vanity he showed selecting a new straw hat, allowing the salesman to move around behind him so that he could see the rear view in a mirror. His hair had been cut, the scalp white as a bandage above his dark, weathered neck.
The summer chores were demanding, each day long and exhausting, but never long enough for her to catch up. Too tired to sleep, she would sometimes rise from bed and go below to sit in her rocker. In the moonlight the white trim on the barn’s doors and windows stood free of the barn, and seemed to come toward her. It was eerie what she saw, or thought she saw, one night. Her husband, Emerson, moving like a sleepwalker, came down the stairs and passed unseeing before her, crossing the yard to the privy, where he sat with the door open, his legs white as paint. On his way back he paused to dip water from the pail and take several deep swallows, his Adam’s apple pumping. It troubled Cora that he would seldom bother to skim off the flies. He had belched, then said, “What a woman needs is one thing, but what a farm needs is another.” She had been too startled to reply. He spoke as if he saw her right there before him, at the door to the porch. She thought he meant to go on and she waited, hushed, while he tossed a dipper of water at the bugs cluttering the screen. Somewhere in the barn, or behind it, she heard the moan
ing caterwauling of the cats. Their piercing ear-splitting shrieks no longer dismayed her. How well she had come to understand it! Nothing known to her had proved to be both so bizarre and so repugnant as the act of procreation, but she understood that it was essential to its great burden of meaning. In the wild, cats shrieked. In the bedroom Cora had bitten through her hand to the bone. Dimly she gathered that Emerson, in speaking as he did, wanted her to know that she had failed him. What a farm needed was sons. She had borne a daughter, to be fed and clothed, then offered on the marriage market. Who would be there to run the farm as they grew old? Nothing in Emerson’s nature assured her that he would not repeat the first experience, but the passage of time, the consoling rut of habit, had dulled the terror and anxiety she had once felt. He did not move toward her. He did not caress or strike her. He lay awake with his thoughts or he slept, or he snored, as if they had reached an understanding. Was she right in thinking he had spoken as he did to relieve her of the burden of his expectations? They were heavy within her. They weighed her down more than the child. Had he spoken to her as he did so that she would feel free to go back to bed, or so that she would share a burden too great for him to bear alone? She didn’t know. It sometimes seemed to her she knew him less than if they had never met. Nevertheless, what had happened, or what had not happened, took on for her the importance of a religious ceremony: her feet seemed nailed to the floor, she could neither rock the chair nor rise from it. This awesome, aching silence would be broken by Emerson, scratching himself inside his underwear, then seeming to forget what time it was and taking the clock from the range to wind it, saying aloud, “Why, dang, I already done that,” and proceeding upstairs.
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