The Truest Pleasure

by Robert Morgan

  The work in the sun and the sunburn acted like a spur to our lovemaking. It was as if the heat of July and August stored up in our veins and skin as a fever to be quenched by love in the hours of darkness. Never had I seemed to need less sleep. After he got home each evening, milked and washed and had supper, Tom counted the money he had made. The coins shined like little flames and faces on the hearth. The bills crackled as he smoothed them in booklets. Afterwards he put the money in the cigar box.

  As he counted the money, we talked about what we needed to buy for winter, for the children and for the place. Jewel would start school that fall, and needed new clothes. “You have to dress your girls nicer than boys,” Tom said.

  As soon as the children was asleep Tom and me went to bed ourselves. Pa was reading in the kitchen, and we tried not to disturb him. When Locke come on furlough for a week he slept on the couch and we tried to be careful not to bother him as we giggled in the dark and tried to keep the bed from creaking.

  It was as if we was not ourselves some nights, but bigger and more powerful, more perfect, as we would want to be. The day had been a long delay and build-up of fever toward the summer night. And it felt like we couldn’t do anything wrong. Every place we touched was right, and every pause was right. Everything we did in the dark led to something new and better.

  As a girl I would not have thought a man of forty was capable of such exertions, or a woman of thirty-four for that matter. At moments of joy I felt this was what all the feeling of my life had been tending toward, including my shouting and dancing at meetings. It was all just a preparation for this.

  But I put such thoughts out of mind for they was blasphemous. I may have felt them, but I didn’t want to think them, least of all to say them. Long as I didn’t put my feelings in words they was innocent. Kept at the edge of thought they couldn’t hurt.

  And I told myself lovemaking was also worship and praise. I told myself it was through love we take part in God’s creation.

  I remember one night in August special. We had picked beans in the far end of the bottom and Tom sold them by the bushel to women in the village. I reckon he had made more than ten dollars. But on the way home the axle of the wagon broke. I don’t know why it broke. Maybe the extra hauling had wore it out. Tom had stuck in a sapling to hold up the wheel till he got home. The new axle would cost ten dollars, so the day had been wasted, he felt.

  Now I have noticed that loving is best when you’re feeling real good, or sometimes when you’re feeling a little bad. If you’re feeling a mite low you resist lovemaking at first, and then it comes like a blessing. And your body takes over and reminds you of things you had forgot. The body has its own wisdom and its own will, and sometimes it knows what you need most.

  That night I saw Tom needed to be cheered up. I took a full bath in the tub in the bedroom, and made myself rosy and soft. I put on powder and rubbed on cologne. By the time I had finished Tom had already gone to bed. I knowed he was tired, and when you want to forget some loss or bad news nothing is as comforting as sleep. In fact, I think he might already have been asleep when I put out the lamp and got in bed.

  But as I slipped under the covers I could feel him waking. First, it was the way he stirred and was quiet in his breathing. Then he pushed against me a little, just enough to show it was intended. It’s strange how much a little pressure tells you.

  Well I won’t go into detail. Folks got no right to hear what married couples do. But it was a time I never forgot. The katydids was out, loud in the woods beyond the orchard. And there was crickets in the yard, meadow moles with their mellow note. After the heat of the day the house was cracking and knocking.

  But I soon forgot the sounds in the dark. Time got big and magnified. The dark was lit with purple fires. I could feel colors through my fingertips and through every place I touched.

  And we had so much time. Every instant was stretched out, and stretched further. Our bodies was big as landscapes and mountains and we had all the time in the world to climb and cross them. There was no hurry, never had been. There was years for a kiss.

  It was also like a patient waiting. We was in no hurry because we knowed something would be give to us. I thought about the beans we had picked that day, and how beans get hard when they are ready to pick. You could pick beans just by the feel of them. With your fingers you could tell the pulses in a bean, and then count the beans into a basket.

  I thought of Solomon again. “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me,” I whispered. The words seemed perfect in the dark. “I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favor,” I said.

  We did some things new that night. Don’t matter exactly what, but they was new to us. It was like we found out more things about each other. I guess it was like climbing way up a beautiful mountain past ridges and hollers. Laboring up a slope you think you are almost at the top, but when you get there see it is a false peak, and the real summit is higher and further.

  The smells of the body are thrilling, the scent of armpits and sweat on skin. The skin has its own savors and salts. It is the salt of memory and wit and laughter. There is the salt that wakes you up, and salt like the taste of rocks deep in the ground.

  “Tom,” I said. I had never been one to talk much while making love. Before, it had felt better to be hushed. “Tom,” I said again, “this is the best thing, ain’t it?”

  He didn’t say anything. He was waiting for me to say more.

  “Tom,” I said, “we won’t never know anything this real.”

  It was like the dark was smoothing out in contours of pasture hills and deep valleys lined with fur and velvet.

  “I can see where the sky touches the ground,” I said, “and it’s smooth as milk.”

  There was rivers of sparks in the soil and they swirled through the dark and spread in wind to the end of the earth. It was a warm Nile flooding out of soil, lifting higher and higher.

  “This is the place,” I said, “ain’t it?”

  Tom still didn’t say anything. He was waiting for me to go on. He never liked to waste a single word. It was for me to say things to him.

  “This is the place it all starts,” I said. “This is the place of creation.”

  And then in the dark I could see Tom’s face. I don’t know how I did in the pitch dark. Maybe there was heat lightning, or maybe a meteor outside. But I saw Tom’s face, and his eyes was looking right into mine, like he saw what I was thinking and feeling. He could see and feel any part of me. Even if he laid still he could feel every inch of me that was moving.

  “Tom!” I said. And then I knowed my talking made another kind of sense. It wasn’t daylight talk with its words and sentences. It was a higher kind of talk. And it come to me I was speaking in tongues. It was the first time I had spoke in tongues outside a service. I didn’t know what I was saying, but I saw what was visited upon me was a gift. “Tom!” I said, and my mouth flew like a bird and my tongue soared. I gripped and sung out and didn’t hardly know what I was doing. I was on a long journey that went on and on over banks and gullies, valleys and mountains of flowers. The whole world was coming to us in the dark.

  And then I saw what we had been going toward. Everything swung around like compass needles pointing in the same direction. It was in the eye of a pigeon setting high on a tree at the mountaintop. The eye was still as a puddle with no wind. It was still at the center of the whirl and clutter of things.

  “This is what was meant,” I said.

  Tom still didn’t say anything.

  “This is really the place,” I said. “Ain’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. It was all he said, but it was enough.

  Sometimes in the evenings, after Tom counted his money, I read to him. As the nights got cooler we set by the fire and I read from the paper or a magazine. Sometimes I even read poems, or the Bible. Though he never would say much about what I read I thought he enjoyed it. Keeping up with the news is as much a
habit as anything else, and the more you know about what’s going on in the world the more you want to know. You start following out the threads of events and you want to know what happens next.

  The Russians was fighting the Japanese off in the Pacific, and the Japanese had attacked one of their seaports. I couldn’t say the name of the place, so I spelled it, V-l-a-d-i-v-o-s-t-o-k.

  “What kind of name is that?” Tom said.

  “Russian, I reckon.”

  “And what happened?” Tom put the coins in the cigar box and took off his shoes. On cool evenings he liked to warm his feet in front of the fire.

  “‘The Japanese warships bombarded the port city for most of a day,’” I read from the paper. “‘Before nightfall the Russians surrendered and the city was occupied by Japanese troops. All inhabitants, including American citizens, were taken prisoner.’”

  Tom listened to every word I read. Jewel come and set in his lap. “What is a citizen?” she said.

  When I read Longfellow to Tom I think he was a little embarrassed. I would read from “Hiawatha” for several minutes and he listened close. I think he liked the song of the words, the rhythm and repetition. I read on and it looked as though he was listening, but then his head would begin to nod. I stopped.

  “Don’t stop,” he said, and straightened up.

  “You want me to go on?” I said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I read a few lines more and his head started to nod again. His chin touched his chest and his eyes closed. I stopped reading.

  “No, go on,” he said, stirring hisself.

  “No use to read if you’re just going to sleep,” I said. “I can read something else.”

  “No, that’s fine,” he said.

  I started reading again, and the next thing I knowed his eyes was closed and his head tilted over. I closed the book. “Tomorrow I’ll read something else,” I said.

  “No need to,” he said, pulling hisself up.

  “I don’t think you’re interested in Indians,” I said.

  “Them ain’t Indians,” Tom said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Indians don’t talk like that,” he said.

  “How do you know how Indians talk?” I said.

  “They don’t talk like that,” Tom said. “I know that much.”

  That winter I was expecting again. It was the fourth time, but I reckon I was scared by what happened to the last baby. I couldn’t get it out my mind that I had done something wrong, though I didn’t know what it was. It come to me I had worked too hard in the heat, or eat the wrong things, or bent over the washpot the wrong way. They say drinking liquor before a baby is born will hurt the youngun, but I had just took a drink from time to time to calm myself. I done that more after Moody was born, but I never did it much. Pa kept a jug of whiskey in his cabinet, along with herbs and powders. Sometimes I bought a bottle myself and kept it in the linen closet. It was something I did to soothe myself when I got too worked up.

  As winter went on and spring was near I was irritated by little things. I couldn’t stand for the younguns to make noise or fight. If one started to cry it bothered me. If I looked at the mess in the house, or washing to be done, it made me mad. I lost my temper and snapped at Pa and Tom. I couldn’t take the sight of the younguns getting dirty in the yard. As Moody got bigger I saw how much more trouble boys was than girls. He was always climbing, or pushing something over. He would fight with Jewel, and lash out in fits of temper. From the time he was two he liked to play shooting a gun. I thought how different he was from Tom. “Bang, bang,” Moody would yell, as though he had shot me.

  When I couldn’t stand it anymore I went to the outhouse under the big hemlocks down the hill. A woman that’s expecting has to go more often anyhow, because she don’t have much room inside her. But I found it was such a relief to be out of the house and away from the bother I stayed for several minutes. Nobody could pester me in the toilet. I would set there longer and longer, and put off going back to the kitchen.

  Even the cold wood of the seat felt good on my bare skin. The wood had been polished by more than twenty years of wear, and it had the shine of a waxed floor. The cold wood made me shiver, but it felt soothing. Soon the wood I touched warmed up.

  There was something about the dim light that made me feel sincere, prayerful. It was shadowy as a chapel or closet. The hemlocks brushed the sides and the roof when there was wind. Needles seeped through the cracks and gathered on the floor.

  I thought how this was a place where earth was brought back to earth, an offering made for what we received from soil. It was a place of return and payment. I thought how important it was to have a place of quiet, of asylum. In our head we hide and look out from a secret place. But sometimes the eyes see too much and we hear too much. It was good to have a second shelter to go to.

  It felt like I could almost get outside of time setting there. I could let the stream of seconds go past, while I stayed in that still pocket. The space was a gray crystal I climbed into. I could hear the younguns shouting and the cows bawling, and crows in the hill pines. I could even hear the river mutter after a big rain. But mostly I heard what I was thinking.

  And I thought how that calm was the farthest thing from the rapture of a service, and yet it was almost the same too. To get off to the side of time and think and remember was a special privilege that had its own sacredness.

  Sometimes I felt like a little girl again, and it seemed I didn’t have any work that had to be done. I imagined I didn’t have a husband to worry about, and I had all the time I needed to read and go to meetings or do whatever I wanted. I could play in the woods if I felt like it, or go down to the river and wade in the shallows looking for crawfish or periwinkles.

  Setting in the gloom I felt closer to Mama that died when I was a girl. I could remember how she taught us Bible verses. She hated the Holiness meetings as much as Tom did. I thought how the generations was linked and kept doing the same things even when they didn’t know it. I saw how we was like our mamas and daddies in spite of ourselves, and how our younguns would be like us. And there wasn’t much we could do about it, even if we wanted to.

  Then I heard Moody bawling, screaming at the top of his lungs. It sounded like he was down the bank by the chickenhouse.

  “Mama, Mama,” Jewel yelled. She run to the house thinking I was in the kitchen. Through a crack I saw her go up the steps.

  By the time I got outside and up the bank Jewel had run back out on the porch. “Come quick,” she said. “Moody has fell over.”

  “Fell over what?”

  “He fell over the bank.”

  I run by the house and looked over the edge of the yard, and sure enough, Moody was in the weeds at the bottom. He was upside down, like he had tried to do a somerset and stopped halfway. Sticks and leaves stuck to his jacket. I don’t know if he had got the breath knocked out, or if he was too scared to get up. It was clear he had rolled down and stopped on his head.

  When I picked him up his eyes bulged out. It looked like he was too scared to cry. Dirt and trash stuck all over his face.

  “Are you hurt?” I said.

  He started jerking like he was beginning to cry again. I felt him to see if any bones was broke. Then he started bellowing again and I knowed he was all right.

  The baby born in June was a boy. Tom named him Muir Ray, after his boss at the Lewis place. He said since I had named Moody after my favorite preacher he would name this boy after somebody he liked. I didn’t make any protest for I figured it was fair. But I never much liked the name. It sounded dark and hard. I knowed it was Scotch, and it sounded stingy and unfriendly.

  After the wonderful nights of the summer and fall, and the hard work of the fields, you would have thought the new baby would have brought us closer together. You would have thought Tom’s pleasure in a second son would have spilled over into his feelings toward me. But nothing works out the way you expect.

  At first, after the
birth of Muir, Tom just got quiet. He come around me less, and he didn’t touch me as much when we was together. We had slept together until I was six or seven months along, and then Tom had fixed his pallet up in the loft again. He forced hisself to move, he said, for the sake of the baby. There is always the danger of injury, both to the mother and the baby, Dr. Johns had said. But we found again that when a man and woman ain’t sleeping together they don’t feel the same toward each other. No matter how careful they are not to quarrel it’s not the same. I reckon the sex thing is a lot of the glue that holds people together. That’s the way the Lord made them. But I wasn’t sure I believed the doctor. Sometimes I found myself looking at Tom, before he climbed into the loft. But he was a man awful strong and strict in his ways. Though I couldn’t hardly see it when I was mad at him, I knowed he was a man with his own honor.

  The Waters family had typhoid fever that summer of 1905 after Muir was born. I told Hilda to let the children that wasn’t sick stay with us. I knowed people with typhoid needed absolute quiet. They had to lay in a still dark room until the fever broke. It was hard to nurse them with other children running around.

  I said that to Hilda on a Saturday, not having mentioned it to Tom. She had helped birth all my babies, and it seemed like the least I could do. If folks don’t help each other, then nothing good will ever happen. If women didn’t help each other out I don’t know how the world would ever get its children raised.

  Since we didn’t have any extra beds it meant having two of the Waters children sleep with Jewel, and two on the floor on a pallet. But I saw quick that Tom was angry when I brought the Waters younguns back with me. I reckon I should have asked him first, but it was too late. I got angry too. When you think you might be a little wrong it always makes you madder.

  “I didn’t know we was taking in boarders,” Tom said.

  “I had to help Hilda,” I said.

  “And now our younguns will catch typhoid,” he said.