The Quickening

by Michelle Hoover

  Next to our bed, a handful of daisies stood in a jar. The blanket under my chin smelled fresh, and my dress hung on the closet door. How Frank must have scrubbed it, for it was thin and almost no color now. But it was clean. It was respectable at least. Still, I would never wear it again. Not even for him.

  I’d been thirty the day I met him, late in a woman’s life for marrying. Even now I remember the afternoon in all its heat. I’d started out to my eldest brother’s to spend the night, more than five miles by foot, and stopped in town along the way to get a drink of water. In the country store was a young man, tall and very thin, the look in his eyes as soft as cotton. He was there to visit cousins, or so he said. The merchant introduced him as he would any stranger in town.

  He was just old-fashioned enough to shake hands. I nodded and drank my water. The men went about their business. But every time I looked up, I found this stranger’s gaze on me. I didn’t know if it was because of my roughness or the red of my hair, the heaviness I carried. I’d never drawn much attention from a man before. Nothing that was kind.

  Finally he asked, “How is walking?”

  I was timid and backward then. No better now I suppose. With the water on my tongue, I kept my mouth shut.

  “Speechless,” he laughed. “Well now, I never would have thought. Still, a person only has so many words in him. A person has to be careful. Otherwise, he might just run out by the time he’s old, and there’s no helping a man who can’t speak his mind. I know for myself this is the most I’ve said in a very long while and I’m just about spent.” He clutched his throat, pretended a look of pain. “I’ve seen it happen. My uncle, his jaw hanging but not a word, and nobody knew what to do with him. They said when he was young he was always just yammering on …” He scratched at his ear and grinned, blood rising to his cheeks. I just about spit that water out. He reached out his hand, wiped a drop from my chin. It was then I learned his name. Frank, he said.

  My boy, you may think it girlish, but that’s what I’d always believed my husband’s name would be. Frank. A name that promised someone good and decent. Someone who might not mind a woman who said her piece when she thought it useful and otherwise said little at all. A man honest more than proud. At the time, I thought this Frank might be him.

  You must understand what a shock it was for my family, their aging daughter, as strong as any of the boys and without a delicate bone to speak of. Frank brought me to my eldest brother’s in his wagon, and my brother wondered at him in silence as he took us into the house. We sat together in the kitchen, the table bare between us. All of us were worn with travel or work. The evening had grown to dusk. Upstairs, my brother’s wife paced the hall. After greetings on the porch, she had left us alone. The kitchen itself was quiet, save for a loose window that rattled in its sill. Finally, my brother spoke. “Frank,” he said, “you ever drive a four-horse team?”

  “Since I could tug a rope,” Frank said.

  My brother clapped his hand on the table and looked outside. “Well then, it’s too late in the day for travel. It’s not even day any more.” His wife’s footsteps had stopped and he leaned in to speak to us. “We’ve got a cot out back. Would you be needing a place to sleep?”

  “I would,” Frank answered.

  “Well, there you are then,” my brother said. “It’s yours.”

  I don’t remember much of that night once I closed my door to sleep. I’ve never been one for dreaming. Never seen the use of it. But I knew a man slept near me in my brother’s house and that seemed important. Early the next morning, I woke to help my brother with the milking, and there was Frank. He waited out back in the yard, fixing a hat on his head to join us.

  We walked out in the darkness and didn’t speak. Mornings like that have a quiet a person doesn’t want to break. There’s something precious in it, precious too in how close to sleep it seems. The light when it comes shows the richness of the soil under your feet. The cows are close with the scent of milk, their eyes dark and lush. We brought them in from the outdoor pens and lined them up, keeping our tongues except to whistle at the animals when needed. After steadying a cow in its catch, we straddled our stools and pulled the buckets between our legs. Frank worked as well as my brother did, though he didn’t know which of the cows had a temper or were slow to milk. He sat with his hat low on his head, his hands in an easy rhythm. He worked those cows as if he’d known them his whole life.

  I probably did the same. I’ve always had a way with animals, or so others have said. It’s sympathy, I guess. I take what I need. No more. No less. I treat them as creatures that know pain and stillness and the pleasure of a stomach when it’s full. Just the same as us. That morning at my brother’s place, I drew up my skirts to fit the bucket between my knees and pressed my forehead against the animal’s flank. I could feel her breathing, knew she was nervous by the way her ribs shuddered. Those cows smelled good and warm, the smell of hay and something sharp enough it makes your eyes water. Some might call it a stink, but that smell has always been home to me. It’s the same as the smell of my skirts after a good day’s work, the heat of my lap. As I milked, I talked to the animal hushed-like. Nonsense it was, but calming. My brother did the same. Then I heard it. Someone was humming. I’d worked in barns most of my life and never known such a sound.

  I turned my head and saw Frank. He pressed close to his cow, straining his neck so he could see me where he sat. He hummed as he worked, and the cow chewed at her hay without a twitch. That humming was low and clear. A song I didn’t know, but familiar all the same. Not calling attention to itself and quiet, barely more than whispering. That’s when, you see. You might not understand how your grandmother would go with a man who was little more than a stranger. You might think it was handy for us or that our families wished it. But really, it was the way that sound filled a dark place and stayed with me for weeks. Even now I can hear it. A kind of brightness. And Frank, he seemed to think a woman with such a soft touch on an animal was worth watching. A woman who’d never lost a bucket, who didn’t mind the itch of a cow’s hide against her cheek. He seemed to think that was something. And I suppose it was.

  It was later that morning after breakfast that Frank shook my brother’s hand and brought me home in his wagon. The air was cooler that day as we went. It promised rain. When we turned onto the road where I’d always lived, it looked like a foreign place. The gravel beneath us lay rutted with wet. The grasses were a strange silvery green. This was the beginning, I thought. This shrinking of all I’d known, it promised a new life. The trees stirred and I stretched my limbs. The ground beneath our wagon leveled off. We stopped just far enough from the house so Frank could tie the horses, and there was my mother. She must have heard the jolt of the wagon wheels, for she stood in the yard out front, squinting under her hand.

  “Mother,” I called. “This is Frank.”

  “Well, now. Look at that,” she said. She studied him as he fed the horses. “Just wait for your father,” she said and turned back to the house. When she came out again, she held two glasses of lemonade. She pressed one into Frank’s open hand and stayed to watch him drink it. After that, she brought him a second glass and hurried us to the porch where my father waited.

  “Let him be,” he started before my mother got another word out. “Eddie isn’t the kind to sit in the kitchen and be still,” he said to Frank. He had already grown ill, my father, though we didn’t know it. He’d aged a great deal in the last few months, heavier in his steps and late to rise, the hair at his temples white. My mother often found him asleep in his chair. She had to call his name more than once to wake him. My father had lived in this house since the day he was born, my mother joining him when she was seventeen. Now they had four grandchildren, two more on the way. With Frank next to me, I couldn’t think they’d ever been strangers to each other. “Eddie has a hand in everything on this farm,” my father went on. “She can heft the grain and birth a calf, lead a plow with the best of them.” Hat in his han
ds, Frank listened with the new glass of lemonade empty at his feet. “She’s a different kind of girl,” my father said. “She won’t be spending a lot of time in front of the mirror with curlers and what not.”

  Frank scratched his ear after my father finished and seemed to stew awhile. Through the screen, our grandfather clock chimed the hour. The sun fell behind the clouds. My mother and father looked at him, expectant. “That’s just fine,” Frank said at last. “That’s all the better.” He opened his hands and shrugged. It was then I saw that easy way in him that made marrying and all the rest as simple as closing your eyes when you grew tired or eating when you felt the hunger for it. “I must say I’m partial to her,” he added. My parents had to lean in to hear him.

  My boy, you may not believe it, but the second time I thought I found you in town, I remembered my Frank the way he’d been that morning in the barn. There you were, trailing after some woman, and she kept reaching back to take your hand. You would give it to her for a moment, but slowly let your hand slip. You would have been eight then. This boy must have been close to the age himself. Mountains! your mother wrote in another of her letters, from Colorado this time. So high a person gets headaches walking the streets. There are plains too, but they’re nothing like home. Too dry for growing much. November fifteenth. I have marked the day your mother was due on my calendar for years. When you turned seven, I went so far as to fix you pancakes for your birthday dinner, just as your mother liked. I used plenty of butter in the pan so the edges would crisp. I kept them in the oven, piled on a warm plate. Waiting for you, I must have fallen asleep in our sofa chair. When I woke, it was early morning and the sweet smell had turned sickly. I opened the oven and the edges of the cakes were dry as boards, the middles a soggy white. Still, I thought those middles must be worth saving and I ate them myself. Fifteen cakes as wide around as the reach of my pinky and thumb. I’ve never liked food to go to waste, but those cakes put me in a bad way for a week.

  But birthdays aren’t what I wanted to write about. At least not yet. When I saw that boy in town, I thought he could be you. You, if only he’d been longer in the legs and narrower in the mouth. Breaking from the woman’s hand, he scrambled after a dog in the street. He never knew it, but he ran right past me, pressed close as I was to the side of the old meeting hall. When the dog got away, the boy stopped close enough for me to hear him humming. It wasn’t even a tune. No melody I could follow at least. But there he was, breathing hard through his nose to get the notes, making them up as he went. For a moment, I was back in my brother’s barn. I was with Frank, with his slow gaze and his easiness, the way nothing seemed to rumple him or take that grin off his face. And I believed that I might be more than imagining. That the boy I saw before me might just be you. But when I looked again, he was gone.

  I spent many a rag cleaning the floor of that kitchen once I was out of bed. I could never quite trust it. For months, Frank worried about my taking on heavier work, and the days turned long and terrible. When once he found me nodding off with a pair of his good trousers over my knees, needle in hand, he took me by the arm. There was a revival, he said. Outside under a large open tent, no less. He knew I didn’t care for sermons. Too much chatter. But he believed there would be a great many people gathered there, enough maybe for me to forget myself for a while.

  In the morning we set off on foot. Frank talked as we went, taking my hand if I fell behind. He said when the ministers grew hoarse, the musicians would bring out their instruments. Then, Frank said, how the people would sing. It would be good to hear after what I’d just lost. At the time, I saw no more children to come. We traveled the gravel road for miles and crossed fields. In the sun, my hand sweated in his. Stepping out across the tracks, Frank came at last to a stop, though we hadn’t yet reached it. “Look Eddie,” he said, his arms drawn out. “Look over there.” And there it was.

  The tent was taller than this house and covered most of a field. Around it were smaller tents, the color of burlap. The canvas was brown with dirt and heavy with rain from the night before, the grass gone to muddy footprints. The tents stirred in the low wind, the ropes straining to hold them. People stood by the hundreds inside.

  We slipped through a gap at the back of the larger tent and others made room for us. They were strangers, most of them. Folks who’d traveled more miles than we had walked. Borden stood in front, hands above his head. When he saw us, he broke from his sermon as if surprised. Borden wasn’t the long-winded kind. He didn’t belong with the red-faced men and their starched collars who sat in a long row behind him, waiting their turn. When he started again, I can’t say I listened. I was too tired to stand for much. “He’ll be done soon,” Frank said. “Look at him. He’s already running out of steam.” I wanted them to sing.

  It was then I saw Mary. She stood at the front with her new boy in her arms. Her skirt hung loose from her waist and seemed to have lost a stitch, her hair pinned so the skin at her temples stretched. I hadn’t seen her for months, not since she’d come to our house with Kyle. After only an hour, she had fallen asleep in my kitchen and I couldn’t do anything but watch. That’s how tired she was of mothering. That’s how tired we all were, I suppose. I’d held her boy’s thumb as her head nodded and dropped. I didn’t think once of letting go. When finally she stirred, I left her to wake as she would. I didn’t want to hurry her. I still had the milky scent of that boy’s thumb in my hand, one I could keep with me for weeks. I thought then that Mary and I might become more than neighbors. That we might be friendly for once.

  Now Mary turned and saw us. She dropped her chin against her boy’s head and breathed in. Borden kept on. “What are you saved from?” he was saying. “Are you saved from pride? Are you saved from longing?” Around us, men and women clapped their thighs and called out to each other when they agreed. When they had committed some terrible sin or hadn’t done a thing and still they felt ashamed. I held my tongue. The woman beside me kept her hymnal closed around her middle finger. Others used ribbon or scrap to mark a favorite page, but soon all of them had opened their books. At last, the noise of their restlessness made Borden stumble, dropping his hands. You would know it then. The people were ready. They were ready even before the music began.

  That’s when I heard it, the like of which I hadn’t known since I’d stood by Mother’s piano when I was young and listened to her at the keys. Since I’d watched my brothers sing with their guitars. There were guitars here too and horns, even fiddles. The women tilted their heads to reach the higher notes. The men sang into their chests. No one stayed still but rocked on their feet, and the children played in the dirt beneath us. I could hear Frank then, the way he always sang, but more. The sound of him warm and deep. It was a song I knew. Something ordinary for churches and plainer places. Something good and plain and loud. I sang low as was my voice and it was easy, this singing. This wasn’t preachers telling us what to do. It was something inside us, rising. It opened inside my chest, a tremor to wake my sleepy head.

  My boy, I hope you are never in as dark a place as mine was then. But with that singing, I imagined enough wind to lift the tent. If we could have seen it again from the road or from farther down the field, what a wonder it would have been. The hundreds of us. The quiet of the field wrested from it. We had made it. As Frank had promised. We had come just for this. What a noise we put out.

  VIII

  Mary

  (Spring 1923–Fall 1925)

  “I’ve spoken of sin before,” Borden began. “But when you think of sin, I believe most of you see it as something you can touch. You can point to it, smell it, sense it. It is something you can find evidence for in the physical world. But I tell you, sin is much more difficult to grasp.” The congregation stirred, feeling Borden’s finger on them—I crossed my legs on the piano bench. I had expected the church to be half empty, but after the fire outside town, the chapel seemed to rise out of the fields like a beacon, and a line of carriages stood in the yard. There was something
in this man now that caught our attention—with the dark of his eyes and the pallor of his cheeks, his hands seemed to hold all of us in his grip.

  “As the Proverbs tell us,” he went on, “the very thought of folly is an offense. The very thought. Sin is something far more than we can touch. For God, to even think of a sinful act is the same as having done it.” A woman stood from her pew and sat weakly again—a few of the men dropped their mouths to their fists and grudged against something deep in their throats. My hands felt thin and limp where they rested in my lap. Borden went on, but I saw only his fingers as they struck the air, and the opening and closing of his lips. When finally he had finished, he closed his book, and those hands in my lap seemed as frail as paper. In their pew, Jack and my eldest sons sat tanned by their hours in the fields, as if they had carried the earth and stink of our farm in with them, while Kyle remained pale between them—but it was Jack who signaled to me with the drop of his chin. I took a breath.

  Clumsy at first I played what I could, though the surfaces of the keys were slick to the touch. The piano droned, the strings struck dully in their case—where were all those years when I had balanced that board on my knees? With the thud of my fingertips and my mother’s humming, how brilliant I had sounded then. Borden stood at his pulpit, gripping the wood. He had never been a man who showed himself well, staying closed off as he did behind his robes and the walls of his room. I felt for him, as I often had, for his strangeness in this place, his loneliness, and all that he kept hidden.

  A slow thing happened then—a man cleared his throat behind me and I knew the sound, that low guttural rumbling, as well as I knew the shape of the bones in my wrists. My husband was watching me, like a furnace I felt him, and as I stretched my arms they became fine and delicate again, almost weightless. I closed my eyes and my hands grew swift, all of my husband’s wildness rising out of me. How clear and light it seemed, the sound under my fingertips quivering into the room. It turned and echoed, keeping them all at attention. With Borden holding on to the pulpit and the heat of my husband at my back, I had never before felt so grand. I played on, moving from one hymn to the next, never breaking. Behind me, the congregation shifted in their pews—but I did not want to finish, not yet. I was not ready to give up this new place I had found, a place where I never had to choose and had done nothing wrong. At last, the groaning of the wooden seats grated against my every note, and with a final chord, I lifted my hands.