The Solace of Water

by Elizabeth Byler Younts

  He nodded like he knew he impressed me, but I didn’t care about that no more. He was going to college. “Wow.”

  His chest puffed and he put his hand out to me. “My name is Malachi Evans—what’s yours?”

  I raised my chin up real high when I took his hand. “Miss Delilah Mae Scott.”

  “Dee?” Malachi’s voice cut through my lighthouse memory, reminding me that there ain’t no lighthouses in this old Pennsylvania land. “It’s barely dawn.”

  I hadn’t slept much last night. I moved around like a snake in a sack. I didn’t want to be pent up in bed and left before the sun was up. It was like my body didn’t know what tired was, or maybe it didn’t know what awake was. I just went through all the motions I needed to do every day.

  He sat with me on an old pew on the front porch—he was too close. I wanted to be alone. He was disturbing me now like I disturbed him when we first met in that lighthouse. “Just needed to get up is all.”

  “There ain’t that sizzle to the sun waking up here, is there? Not like it was in Montgomery.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “George’s fussin’ woke me up.” He stretched his arms above his head for a moment before letting them flop back onto his lap.

  “George?” I started to get up from the pew and my coffee mug tumbled out of my hands. The handle broke off on the old porch slats.

  “Doggone it.” The words were whispered but like a loud one that scraped against your throat.

  Malachi bent down before I could and handed me the handle piece inside the mug. “He’s fine. I checked on him.” He patted my hand before resting his on top of it. I supposed he wanted me to hold his hand, but I didn’t want to. After a few moments he put his hand back into his lap.

  “What were you thinking about?” I was glad to hear he hadn’t turned on his preacher voice. That was when his questions were just to get someone to talk out their own problems and then he’d go and slap a verse on top of it like a bandage.

  Don’t get me wrong—I loved the Bible—but it couldn’t be used like that. But right now, in this quiet country morning, he was just Malachi, my husband. This was the only reason I started talking.

  “You remember that lighthouse back when we thought we was so big?” I said and I felt the smile somewhere inside my words.

  “’Course I do. That was the day we met.”

  “You mean that was the day you called me a child and you was acting too big for your britches.” I couldn’t keep a smirk from my face, but I wiped it off in a moment. Even my grief wouldn’t erase that memory. “You was so puffed up.”

  Malachi let out a loud laugh and poked my arm. “I wasn’t the only one puffed up, you haughty peacock—Miss Delilah Mae Scott.”

  He laughed again at my old self and then grazed my face with his knuckle. “You were so pretty that day, but you were so young.”

  “I watched for you every summer at church. All us girls had our sights set.” I let my memory go back and skipped over the stuff that hurt. I figured it was okay to do, just for a minute.

  “I had my sights too.” He nudged me with his shoulder.

  I had always wanted to marry a preacher. A smart man. One who wanted a whole bunch of kids. My parents loved him more than they loved me. I was extra hopeful when he told me that twins ran in his family. I’d prayed for twins since I was eleven, so I figured he had to be the one.

  Twins. I’d had my twins. But I didn’t no more.

  A mourning dove landed on the chipped-up porch rail. It cooed but didn’t seem to notice us. Then it turned all the way around and it was almost like it looked at me before it flew away. I was jealous of the way it could just fly off and not care about the worries that made a soul heavy and thick.

  “You know, baby, there are lighthouses everywhere. In the sunrises every morning. The church bells.” He paused and I fought rolling my eyes at the sermon I heard behind his words. “But, Dee, I don’t think you’re looking for a lighthouse right now. I think you’re looking for an anchor so you don’t go anywhere—so you don’t go too far away from him.”

  “Don’t you go and try to figure me out.” I stood and Malachi took my hand.

  “Baby, don’t go. Let’s talk. We never talk anymore. Ever since Car—”

  “Don’t say his name.” I pulled my hand from his.

  “Dee, come on now.”

  “Don’t wanna talk.” I said it like I meant it but I was lying again. I wanted to tell him just what I thought. “You always said you’d be my lighthouse. You said when I feel like I’m—”

  I stopped. My mouth just wouldn’t form more of my thinking into words.

  “Say it, Dee. When you feel like you’re drowning.”

  “Don’t you say that.” I stuck my finger in his face.

  “When you were drowning because your mama got sick—we got through it together. When you felt like you were drowning when the Robinson girl got attacked by those white boys and you were convinced Sparrow was next—I was right there with you. But now, with this—our baby boy—you’re pushing me away. You think I’m okay? Don’t you see I’m drowning alongside you? And Sparrow—”

  “Don’t you go saying all that. You stop it. Don’t you talk about him like this is just one more burden to deal with.”

  “You can’t even say his name. Say it. Carver. Carver. He was our perfect, precious boy but he’s gone.” Tears rolled down his face and it made my own eyes burn. “He ain’t coming back. He gone.”

  “You fixin’ to make me hurt worse?” I could tell he had crossed into his other self because he wasn’t using all his proper words no more.

  “Nothing going to bring him back or hurt him. Not your sadness. It wouldn’t even hurt him if you moved forward—if you’d let yourself. He won’t hurt if you forgive Birdie—and forgive yourself. But instead you blaming me for not being your lighthouse. Like I ain’t in those same waters with you trying to find my way.”

  We were quiet for a minute and then a car drove up. It wasn’t nobody I recognized.

  “Grannie Winnie’s grandson-in-law, Titus, is taking me into town to find a car. I’ll get to the grocery store too.” He looked at me like he wanted me to say something, but I just didn’t want to. I wanted to tell him to get potatoes, milk, butter, eggs, and bread mostly, and if there was any way to get his hands on some chicken, I’d be grateful.

  But I didn’t even want to tell him that. I just wanted him to suffer and not get what he needed from me. That was how I lived now. Not getting nothing I needed.

  When Malachi came back a few hours later, he was driving an old red beat-up truck. A truck. I pursed my lips in disgust. But he come bouncing out like he was excited to get that old clunker. He grabbed two paper bags out of the back. Mallie caught sight of him and opened the door for him.

  “Daddy, is that our truck? Did you get that today? Can you teach me to drive it?” Mallie never did know nothing better than trucks and nobody better than his daddy.

  Malachi laughed out loud.

  “You got that right, son.” He set the bags down on the kitchen counter. I wanted to riffle through them but didn’t want to act too excited. “I think on these old country roads I could teach you pretty well.”

  “No, you ain’t,” I piped up. “He just a child.”

  He didn’t know it, but I saw him elbow Mallie in the ribs and wink at him. I let it go.

  “Why don’t you go get the last bag out of the back,” Malachi said, then looked at me. “Sorry about this morning, Dee. I didn’t mean to come at you like that.”

  I believed him, but instead of saying anything, I looked at the bags and raised an eyebrow. “Can I get that food put away now?” But I forced out a small smile to make him see that I still loved him. And I did. But all them good feelings were just covered up under all the bad ones.

  He smiled back but then got this expression that I knew meant he was thinking on stuff. “The grocery store is okay. Pretty different from Montgomery.”

  “Di
fferent? How?”

  “We can talk about it later. But Mr. Coleman, the grocer, is nice.”

  “Mr. Coleman? I thought you said his name was Carl and that you played together when you was boys.”

  “Same fellow, but he’s Mr. Coleman to me now.”

  Of course he was.

  EMMA

  When I walked into my bedroom, John was sitting just outside the moonlight that cascaded onto the bed. The last I’d seen him he’d gone into the cellar, giving our company some false reason that I alone knew didn’t make sense. My husband was a liar—but so was I.

  I didn’t know how or when he’d slipped back upstairs and then into our bedroom. He lounged with his back against the oak headboard, one leg on the bed and one leg off. Boots still on and the quilt—our wedding quilt—had bits of dried mud scattered nearby. His hat was hanging over the footboard corner and his hair was dark and pasted on his forehead where the sweat had accumulated.

  He didn’t hide his bottle when I walked in, and the mix of alcohol and his natural scent wrapped around me. Though he’d made drinking this Communion wine his evening habit for over a decade, it was still rare that I saw him with a bottle. But I always saw the drink. In his eyes, in his breath, and in his touch.

  “Blahp doh, Emma.” He told me to stay with more sobriety than should be possible.

  “Ich muss—” I started to say I must before my throat closed up around my words and intentions. I tried again, stating his mother needed some help with something—anything—but didn’t finish my untruth. “Deh mem muss helve mit—”

  “Neh.” His no was simple but firm. I never believed that the Bible meant for a wife to submit to a man who pretended to be someone he wasn’t, who chose control over love. But yet I chose to submit. I stood there with the doorknob in my hand—it grew warm and sweaty—but I didn’t have the power to let go.

  After he took a long drink from the green wine bottle, he got up from the bed with his usual slow movements. The kerosene lamp’s small flame was so unfettered within its glass globe, and I fixed on it instead of considering what was going to happen. The bottle was over half empty.

  “Kumm.” Come. He used his head to wave me over to him.

  The tears in my eyes burned and then blurred the setting in front of me. I didn’t want to go over there. I knew what he was going to do and what he wanted from me, which I didn’t want to do this way. Without my even blinking, a hot tear betrayed my supposed bravery and trailed down to my chin. I felt it drip onto my dress.

  “Why like this?” I whispered.

  “Because I need you, Emma.” He set the bottle down. His hands went around me and he moaned as he leaned into my middle.

  “Please, John. I don’t want to—not this way.”

  “Come on.” He pulled me over. “You know this way helps us. You know what to do.”

  Hot tears coursed their heat down my face. But I would submit to him because I couldn’t say no to him. I’d never been able to. I would do anything, tell any lie, and hide his sin from everyone—all for him. But he didn’t know what I did for myself.

  That was my own secret and maybe it was my revenge on him.

  “Go on.” His voice wasn’t his typical monotone but had a lift to it and was warm around the edges.

  “I don’t want to, John.”

  When his hand moved from its relaxed place on the bed to his lap, I knew not to test his patience.

  “Please.” His husky voice was nearly a whisper.

  I reached out and wrapped my sweaty palm around the green glass bottle on the nightstand, and I emptied it. The warm liquid was strong as it traveled through my body, past my heart, and drenched my soul with such deceit I could not confess. But this was how we could be close.

  The next morning I woke to the sound of a car door slamming and the sounds of voices yelling good-bye. I lifted my heavy eyelids and saw that my window was open. The light that spilled through stung my eyes. Why did my head ache? Why did my body feel so heavy?

  A few long moments passed and I looked down at myself, not recognizing my condition. Naked. On top of the bed crossways. My hair loose. My covering smashed between the footboard and the mattress. Then I remembered.

  He had made me drink. It was how he needed me when we were together as husband and wife.

  My headache worsened as I stumbled out of bed. I couldn’t pick up my dress on the floor or the straight pins scattered here and there. I didn’t even try to piece together what happened after I’d drunk. I hated this frailty that I woke to but wore like a covering.

  I should have refused to drink with him. Our intimacy was so rare and I didn’t know when this had begun to be part of the ritual. Was it to lower the walls our guilt had built between us? But it wasn’t the right way and I hated it.

  I watched the drivers pull out with a car and a van loaded with our home-going visitors. Johnny walked toward Arnold’s, and though John should’ve told him no, he didn’t. John went to the barn where he would tend to the horse, a chore acceptable on the Sabbath.

  I looked at the drawer where I kept my papers and pencils and my herbs. I wouldn’t need to take the herbs today—tomorrow morning. Every Monday morning.

  I fixed myself the hottest bath I could stand, though my body ached as I sat with my knees folded against my chest in the small tub. I didn’t get out until the water had cooled.

  It was our in-between Sunday, so we didn’t have a church service. The house was empty again—and I was certain to be chastised in a forthcoming letter from my mother-in-law that I wasn’t present to send them off. The now-empty bedrooms seemed to sigh in thankfulness. Or was that me? Scripture kept me from starting the washing of all the sheets and towels on the Sabbath, but it wasn’t just that.

  When I walked into the midmorning air, it was thick with invitation. A long walk through the friendly woods was within what was allowed on the Sabbath. I hadn’t been in the woods since the day I’d found George and the very trees called to me. Sometimes it was in the way the wind wrapped around them and their leaves waved hello. This morning it was in the birdsong with its trill reminding me that there was something beautiful still to be cherished.

  I repeated the word trill. I would have to use it in one of my written lines soon. I touched my pen and paper that I’d tucked in the waist of my dress.

  I walked past the barn and saw John before he saw me. I had so many memories of Sunday walks from our early married days. A flutter of my eyelashes was all it took for him to drop everything and stroll with me. Every now and again these memories would cross my mind and I would try to feel them again to remind myself of what we once had.

  Back in those now lost times, we would hide out in the woods for hours. When our marriage was new, when everything was fresh and laced with love. We lived far enough from neighbors that we could slip away without judgment of the unpredictability of young romance.

  One day we found a piece of earth that fit our bodies just perfectly. We conceived a child on one of those jaunts. But my body gave the child back to the earth when just half grown. The baby was a girl and I never forgot her. It was as if she’d never existed because her birth was her death. The precious unknown one never had a name until the season moved from summer to the wild colors of autumn, and that became her name, Autumn. She would’ve been thirteen this year.

  Then I began to rename her as often as I liked. One spring day when I saw the first fawn of the year, I named her that—Fawn. And every time I saw the mixture of green and brown from a long view of the woods, I thought Hazel should be her name. It was always changing. But when I learned the Negro girl’s name—Sparrow—I knew that my daughter would have that name now and maybe forever. A bird so uncelebrated by man but not forgotten by God.

  “Emma.” John spoke my name loudly, pulling me from my spun memory web.

  “Ja?”

  “I was telling you that Simon Miller may stop in before lunch.” His face looked stern over the top of the almanac he was reading. He
looked down. “Just for company.”

  Simon Miller was a young man whose wife had passed recently. He came over for John’s company some days. He’d been married only a short time and they had had no children, and now he was alone again.

  “Should I stay?” I tried to speak normally, but my tongue felt fat and dry in my mouth. “Make sure you have coffee and pie?”

  “No,” he said too quickly, then paused so long that I started walking away. “There’s some lemonade and the cookies that Mem made. That’ll do.”

  With nothing more to say, I walked away with the thick, humid air slipping around my hands and pulling me to quicken my pace. It walked me toward the woods, past the pond, along the path that deepened my freedoms.

  I breathed in the rain-washed woods. The growth had shrouded portions of my path and brushed against my dress. The nameless mother and Sparrow had walked this path. It was no longer lonely.

  I hadn’t walked far but my eyes knew what I needed to find. The wild turnip, even after all the rain, looked to be faring poorly. The green and almost purple plant brought me freedom. The plants were so small, however, that the roots would not yield much when cooked and dried. In another week I would have to take what I could and hope. I allowed my eyes a quick glance at the eternal bed of my daughter. I would not stop today. The sorrow didn’t seem right for the Sabbath.

  When I continued walking, my foot rolled over something slick and I was on the ground.

  I groaned, then noticed that I’d tripped over one of John’s Communion bottles. It shouldn’t have been out here. They were stored in the darkest corner of our basement. The bottle was green glass, which was the oldest brew.

  I picked it up and looked around. I found a snaky, worn path heading off of the main trail. I followed it, holding the wine bottle. I entered a small clearing. It was man-made—or, as I suspected, boy made. Son made. Several sawed logs were rolled together like seats. Newly hewn branches were piled over the makeshift seats as if to hide them. I pulled them off—what more was Johnny hiding?

  There was an old hankie wet on the ground with the initials JM in the corner. In my handwriting. Old, empty, weather-beaten packs of cigarettes and butts littered the ground under the branches. My heart hammered and my hand trembled as I tucked the empty bottle under my arm. Johnny was taking his rumspringa more seriously than anything else in his life, but seeing the proof broke too many pieces of me. It was time for John to get involved before real damage was done.