“You’ve seen enough of that girl,” I said.
The heat gusted now against our skin, the fire making us sweat though we stood some distance from it. Enidina clutched her arms to her chest, her eyes shut, indifferent to Frank’s hands on her shoulders and the men who had left their wagons now and called to each other for water and sand to put the fire out.
Then Jack was with them—already his face was wet and dark with smoke, signaling the others to work, though they were slow to follow. “What’s wrong with you all?” Jack yelled. “Smoke in your ears?” The men broke off from each other and bent to work, steering clear of the large heated man in the middle of them—they would listen to him, their faces said, but they would not like it, glancing off as they did from time to time at the bundle on the ground. Enidina must have heard Jack cursing at them, for she opened her eyes and stood, swaying heavily on her feet. She rushed toward him as if falling, taking him down and striking him weakly with her fists until he yelled and twisted beneath her. Frank gripped her waist and tried to pull her back. “Get her in,” the other men were yelling, running toward the scene, but she hauled herself up before they could reach her and they stood back.
It was then she saw Kyle where he hid with me next to the house. She watched him for a time, wavering—there was something in the way she looked, some hungry and half-crazed tremor in her eye. The fire burned behind her, her dress black with soot. She lurched toward us, but I stepped in front of Kyle and slapped her face.
“What’s wrong with you, Eddie? Have you gone mad?”
Enidina stopped, holding a fist to her ribs.
“It was an accident, Eddie. That’s all. Kyle had nothing to do with it.”
“It’s always you,” she said. “You and yours. You’re the ones.”
Enidina sank to her knees, and the men pushed me aside and carried her into the house. Jack lay on the ground, watching us, and Frank helped him up. “That wife of yours,” Jack spit, but Frank stared at him and Jack put up his hands. There were others around us now—the women fleshy and worn with their hair pulled back in handkerchiefs and their eyes red, children squirming in their arms. Their men were squat, ruddy creatures, walking back for buckets and frowning at the rest. Behind them, Borden stepped down from a carriage and a farmer carrying water struck him on the shoulder as he hurried to the fields. “That horse of theirs,” the women were saying. “Wild enough to throw a grown man, let alone a boy.” Borden stood back, his trousers soaked from the man’s buckets. With a sickened look, he turned his head to see the fields and slouched against the carriage wheel. I remembered Kyle behind me and reached back my hand—but when I turned, he was gone.
The door to the house gaped after the men had carried Enidina in. The smoke from the fire darkened the side of the house, but Kyle was nowhere to be found. In the yard, Borden crouched next to the bundle and pulled back the shawl. His hand came away black with char and he stumbled to his feet. Without a glimpse, he rushed past me and caught himself on the porch, wiping his hand against the rail and straightening his jacket before hurrying in. The crowd of neighbors soon lost their interest in me, though they would talk enough in the weeks that followed, saying out loud what they had always wanted to, what they had always thought. “That horse,” they would begin. “They should have known. Look at them, always carrying on behind people’s backs.” I would hear it in the market aisles when none of them thought I was listening and in slips of gossip at church, as if they never had anything better to do with their tongues—and in that talk the horse would become terrible, and my son along with it.
I walked home alone, though I could not help but think of the place where I had borne my son and how we had always been strangers here, what with all their gossip. It had gotten them nothing. Now after the accident, they would study whatever we said or did—if Kyle came back, if he ever showed his face again. But he would never abandon his mother. He would never be so unkind. Over the plain, the wind had grown. An animal bayed in a far-off field and another answered it, the sounds like the calling of a child.
The accident—how could I have forgotten? The fear of it had been sitting just under my skin since Kyle had come into my kitchen, since Jack shot the horse with his gun. I could name it now as I remembered my father’s face when he found me, raw-eyed and trembling as I rushed out of the woods. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” the boy had said. “Knowing who my father is. Knowing your father works for him.” But my mother never could keep her tongue. The boy’s family had been a good deal richer than our own, and she asked them a favor in exchange—a sum to comfort her daughter, a promise of marriage. But the boy’s mother had her own way of setting things right—it was entirely my fault, she made clear, inviting the boys out with me in the forest as I did, with a blanket no less. The townspeople turned their backs on us. We were a family of tramps and liars, they said, slandering their community with gossip. Soon they pretended we had never existed at all. That pain between my legs, for so many years it had never left me, and the way those people watched us in Enidina’s yard, shunning anything they did not understand. “You and yours,” Enidina had said.
Behind me the fire was lessening, the wind grew quiet as the heat died, but not a soul worried the horizon, not even an animal in its pasture. A dust rose up ahead and I imagined Enidina running toward that horse with Donny on its back, the way it bucked against that look on her face. I could pretend I had seen it myself, from my place at the window where I so often looked out. And if I repeated the story often enough, if I imagined every part, I might begin to remember it just that way—not an accident at all, but a part of Enidina’s carelessness, how she had rushed at that horse with her fists and spooked it, sending the poor animal off in a wild run around the yard and throwing the boy in fear for itself. There were far more terrible things than pretending, I knew that much—far more terrible than telling something different. Enidina had been the one to make the horse buck, not my son. And with such a story, I could stop Kyle from running, as his own brothers had run before him. I could find some way to quiet people’s tongues and keep him safe—but Kyle would have to help. I would need to convince him myself when I returned home.
The house was the same as I had left it, the gun on the wall, the towel by the sink, the chair pulled into the dark corner of my kitchen, but the chair was empty now, as was the house. The gaping ship glared back at me as I walked the rooms. Even Jack was gone—I would find him later in the early morning, lying straight on his back in the barn, breathing as he did when he was asleep, that great rumbling that ran through him. My husband slept like a man who no longer enjoyed sleeping, who found no release in it, and lately he had lived like a beast tossing in circles in its stall—he would not return to our bed until the night he died.
I found Kyle’s door shut the next evening and turned the knob. “Kyle,” I called. He sat on his bed, head in his hands, and I lifted his chin—his cheeks were bloodied and dark.
“What did they do?”
He dropped his head.
“Kyle, things like this can be terrible for a family. There are consequences. You don’t understand what people are capable of.”
“He died,” he said. Delicate as he was, he sat with his knees nearly to his ears in a mess of sheets.
“Donny,” I said.
“He’s dead.”
“You don’t have to keep repeating it.”
“But that’s all I am. To her, that’s it.”
I stood from the bed and straightened my skirts. I did not know this “her” he spoke of—I thought he might even have meant me. Outside his window, the Currents’ house was a white-headed pin, the fields surrounding it black and crushed like a piece of coal. “That poor boy isn’t all there is,” I said. “There are others to think about. Your father and your brothers, for one. Me.”
Kyle made a strange, sobbing sound and dropped back in his bed, covering his face. “What did he mean? That thing Dad said. ‘You know very well.’”
“He didn’t know what he was saying, Kyle. He was in one of his fits.”
“This was different.”
“It was worse, that’s all. Your father takes no pleasure in shooting a horse.”
Kyle went quiet.
“Listen, there’s no way to undo what happened, but you should consider your family now. There are things we need to make happen. People we have to convince. Our way of seeing it, that’s what matters …”
“All right, Mother,” he whispered between his teeth.
“But you have to agree …”
“I said all right.”
He lay on the bed and his chest rose and fell, his lip swollen as if he had been punched and his hands raw with scratches. I closed his door behind me but listened for him through the wall. I would have to speak to him again—I would have to be more forceful. Kyle had always been so restless, the thought of keeping still like death to him, as if he hoped the truth of this world would not reveal itself as long as he kept going. “Mother?” he called from the other side of the door, and I took my ear away. “What are you going to do?” But I was not ready for explanations—not then. I made my way down the stairs and could still hear him at my back, opening his door and asking questions. What did he mean? It was the way he had said it, as if I kept some secret about Jack from him—but I never did, not anything I cared then or later to tell him. And until this day, I have never said a word.
XIII
Enidina
(Summer 1936–Spring 1937)
They brought me to my mother’s after the fire. I’d asked Frank for this while I lay in my bed that afternoon, listening to the fire outside dampen and the calls of the men. Frank was sweating as he held my hand. He said our house would be safe, the fire had turned and was heading down the field. Outside, the men worked to remedy what I’d begun. The doctor claimed me cured of my fevers. He told Frank, “Take her to her mother’s. It’s all she wants.”
In a borrowed car, Frank drove me to her home and my Adaline came with me. I felt sick with moving so fast, used as I was to wagons even then. I tried to think of something slow and remembered leaning against my mother’s leg as a child. Back then, at the turn of the century, all the world seemed to be breaking apart. Many were looking for the Second Coming. Some even took their own lives. In the summer of 1899, our town seemed to close up altogether. Houses emptied or fell silent, the people inside losing themselves one way or another. Poisons, rope, blades, or drowning. But never the grandmothers, it seemed. Never the old. Then the last of it, the wife who’d lost three children to fevers from the winter before. Without a penny in her pocket or so much as a loaf of bread in a paper sack, she left town on foot. The ones who saw her go said she walked without hurry, as if she had a destination well in mind. She kept her eyes on the horizon. She never wavered. Never looked back. When they found her weeks later, she had gone more than a hundred miles and dropped to her knees when she grew tired. She had died like that.
My father was done with religion then and kept us from church, but my mother read her Bible when she wanted. Sitting on the floor at her feet, I could smell her lap, warm and damp under her dress. I’d rarely been so close. What I’d heard about the woman who walked away and all the rest troubled me, and I asked her would He come.
My mother answered by stopping her work and tapping her Bible on the table next to her chair. “Nothing like that’s to happen to us,” she said. “Not anytime before the year 1939.” She looked up through the ceiling and I couldn’t see her face. Her neck was marbled with veins. “And you have to believe that, Enidina. It’s written down and has been for some time.” My mother grew quiet then and went back to her stitching. She had saved her rags and the rags of her neighbors in a basket at her side. Now she smoothed them into strips and pieced them together. Those rugs she made, they were just like my grandmother’s. Like the ones my mother tried to teach me. Braiding them, it’s how women told each other things. She started with something old, something others thought rubbish, but what she stitched spilled out from her neat and warm and wanting of a house. When I saw each rug she made, with no holes or loose stitching, I believed she knew of such matters. She knew the ways of a thing breaking apart and she knew how to fix it and she was holding the Coming off from our house until the year 1939.
But in the days after the fire, I had my doubts. Nineteen thirty-nine was only three years off. My dress was dark with smoke and still reeked of it. In our yard I’d waited too close to see how my son went. Walking into my mother’s house, I carried his smoke in with me. My mother sat stitching in her chair, but Adaline pulled at her until the rags she worked slipped out of her hands.
“Where’s the other one?” my mother asked.
It was Frank who answered, standing at the door as he was. “There was a fire,” he said. Without a sound, he had come in and dropped our bags on the floor. I never thought a person could grieve in so much quiet. My boy, I feared I’d lost him with what I’d done. But when Frank touched my arm in my mother’s house, he let his hand rest there for a while and warm the both of us. Finally he said he had to go.
I stood in the light of the doorway as the car pulled onto the road. Looking back, Frank lifted his hand to me and let it fall. My mother caught hold of Adaline and tried to settle her, but she only loosened the rags from my daughter’s grip. The girl tore around the room, upsetting the piano bench, and my mother took the rags in her fists and kissed them, pressing them roughly against her cheeks. Up the stairs Adaline went, roaring above us and banging every door. Outside the sun was setting and the house felt close in the coming darkness. Night would be a relief to me. That morning I’d seen such a bright hot thing in the field. I didn’t know what I’d done or what would come of it. I only knew it came from me.
I sat on my mother’s floor again and leaned against her legs. She went back to her stitching, though her hands shook with grief. She was going blind, my mother. The neighbors no longer wanted the rugs they’d paid for, the colors now a bright and curious mix of her own choosing. They had to give them away. Still, they were fine pieces of work. Smooth and careful in their stitching. “Is it now?” I asked as her fingers turned. I was sleepy and in the dark room what I believed of any Second Coming seemed fit for the morning. I coughed with the smoke still clinging to me and reached around my shoulders, but the shawl was no longer there.
My mother kept at her rags, clearing her throat as if to convince herself. “Children die, Eddie. It’s not God who does it.” Her eyes grew wet and she blinked. Taking hold of my hands, she kissed them, and I wondered if she could taste the salt that stained my cheeks. Above us, Adaline ran in a fury down the hall. I remembered how I’d felt for the matches in my apron early that morning. It was fire I’d been dreaming of, keeping vigil as I did that night outside with my son. I dropped one match and the ground took the flame, the stalks going with it. In my fever, the fire spread faster than I could have imagined. When finally I turned back to the house, there was your mother at her window, gripping the sill. How I’d hoped to save her from that sight. How sure I was that no other burial would do for my son. But Donny had always been more his sister’s child than my own.
“You’ve got to watch out for her now,” my mother said. “She’ll slip away from you quick as rain. Keep her close.” She looked at her stitching again and measured the rug against her chest. “This is for you, Eddie,” she said, folding the rug across my knees. “For when you go home.”
• • •
Two days later the trucks still lined the road in front of our house, our neighbors crowding in. They were curious to see the fields and to see where the fire had stopped at the ditches along the road. It didn’t spread to anyone else’s land. None of them had suffered a loss to complain about. Leaning out their husbands’ windows, the women hooked their elbows over the doors, and the children peeked through the passengers’ sides, sometimes three heads together. The men waited by their tires or gathered in a circle, watching as we passed by. I su
ppose that was what they’d come for.
Most of our crop was gone. The stalks stood like spent torches or lay broken in the soil. The trucks crowded each other, but now none of the men would set foot in the fields, afraid whatever fever had caused the fire might spread to wives of their own. We pulled into our yard and I touched my feet to the ground. I could smell it again, the fire, the burnt-up corn, and the animals, safe in the barn. They were quiet now. Though their pails were full, Frank said they wouldn’t eat. In time, he figured, they would grow hungry enough. All at once the trucks started their engines. The roar echoed against our house, all of it noise.
When we stepped in, Mary was there again and I wasn’t surprised to see her. She stood over the stove wearing my apron, a towel in her hand and her hair tucked behind her ears. I watched her warily. When she opened the stove, it sent out such a heat that we all fell into place at the table and didn’t speak. For the first time in days, even Adaline was quiet. She rested her head against her father’s chest and he drew his arm around her, his mouth working at something he was holding back. Since the drive from my mother’s place, he hadn’t yet said a word.
Mary set out our plates and left a pile of forks and knives between us. She poked her fork into a potato on the stove and the fork went easily through. Her face was red with the heat and fallen. Her cheeks, her mouth. She seemed older now, and the corner of her eye twitched. My face still stung from Mary’s hand. I’d said something cruel and meant it. “You and yours,” I’d said. But except for that twitch Mary seemed too wearied now to do anything at all. She rolled the potatoes onto our plates and we stared at them between our empty hands. When finally she bowed her head to bless the meal, I couldn’t even close my eyes.
The Quickening Page 14