The Quickening

by Michelle Hoover

  When Frank took sick in the months that followed, nothing slow in him warned me. He worked as he always had. Told his stories, though there was strain in his voice when he did. “You remember that old dog of your father’s?” he would ask. “Remember how long it lived?” Those stories, in the end he rarely could finish them. But when I asked him how he felt, he gripped his stomach with a look of pain and only grinned. At night I would wake to find him standing at our window looking out, the sheets on his side and his pillow soaked right through.

  • • •

  I’d rarely let myself imagine how it might be to lose him, not since the day Frank came home with a bird in his hands. The bird was dead or close to it, the twins not yet six. And the way Frank carried the thing, he seemed to be telling me just what to expect. How a person can freeze like that and become something different. And that I would be stronger to get through it than he ever could. I could bear losing him the way he never could losing me. But he was wrong.

  It was a jay, I think. A kind of blue-feathered bird, and our tractor had broken its wing. The animal couldn’t have had much sense in the first place to get so close. In our mudroom Frank fixed a cage for it out of twine and sticks and fitted a perch so the bird could sit and look out. He doctored it himself, you see. No proper vet in these parts would have bothered with such an animal. They had cows and horses enough. Frank did his best, leaving seed for it in the night and covering the cage with a blanket. The next morning when he woke, the bird sat on its perch, stalk-straight and gripping the wood.

  It died like that, sitting up as birds do in their sleep, its eyes open and unblinking. Frank carried the cage out to the woodpile, but the bird he buried in a corner of our garden under a pile of stones. I’d never seen a man broken over so small a thing. I took his hand and held it, bone thin and rough as it was, and I wanted always to be able to do just that. That easy run of blood beneath his wrist, the way it hummed against my skin. I never wanted to lose it. I’d believed the twins should see the bird before we buried it, so they might learn from the death. But Frank said no, that wasn’t the way death was. For that bird, he thought, the whole world seemed to have stopped along with it. Over time, of course, Frank would find out stopping like that was exactly what death was.

  In those last few years, these were the ordinary things: A potato soup warm in a pot on the stove. One of us standing from the table to fill our bowls with more. Fresh apples, marmalade, and eggs we peeled with our fingers. The dishes we shared, collecting the broken, spotted shells. We were three of us in our corners, a heavy woman, a husband, and a girl in between. We knew the house by barefoot. Passed plates to one another. Shared a bowl of fruit. Our laundry hung together on the line. Along the same paths, we carried buckets of meal to the animals and worked our crops. But Frank and I never went to town. It was always Adaline who left, setting off after supper and coming back before it turned dark. This was ordinary. We never worried but waited for her as we rocked on our porch. It was a wonder she’d found others to be friendly with. That the young ones had found a way to forgive, unlike their parents. But there was a great deal we didn’t know about Adaline then. In the last three years, that neighbor of ours had grown into a man, and a handsome one at that. Back then, we didn’t understand how lonely our girl had become. How a slap could change into something different. We’d kept Kyle’s hat on the coatrack under our stairs for a good winter, but soon I noticed the hat was gone.

  • • •

  It was Frank who guessed it. When our girl rushed to the outhouse in the morning, her dresses tight. The rest of her glowed, her eyes feverish. She took to walking on the outside of her feet. In his last few months, Frank woke before the sun with a desperate energy and made pancakes in our skillet, something he hadn’t done since the twins were small. He shaped the cakes like animals and slipped them onto Adaline’s plate. “A dog?” she guessed. “A sow?” She sat at the table with her knees tucked to her chin, her hair in curls around her ears. The cakes lost their steam as she guessed at them, her fork hovering above the animal’s head, ready to strike. Frank wore a pleased, peaceful look, but he wouldn’t tell her which animal was which, not until she had eaten them. On those mornings, Adaline was just a girl again and she had never done anything wrong.

  I suppose such a thing was too hard for me to understand, though a mother should see the signs before anyone. But the way her father doted on her. The way he seemed pleased with how our girl was growing, no matter what that growing meant. I should have known something wasn’t right with them both. Frank’s hair had gone white at the temples, and he’d taken on weight. The skin was dark at the corners of his eyes. He was happy to see something growing, I guess. Happy the child would live on after him, though he could only hope to see it himself. Despite everything, I wasn’t about to scold that girl any more than necessary. No matter what she’d done, she and Kyle had given Frank something in the end. My boy, as you read this, you should know. You were a gift in your grandfather’s eyes.

  There is butter for a burn. A poultice for the cough. Alum for itch. Baking soda for skin. Frank walked straight into the corn.

  It happened late in the afternoon, before the sun had settled. Grasshoppers stuck to our screens and birds circled for water overhead. There had been a noise, I’d thought. I stepped out onto the porch to find it. Frank was in the yard as usual, splitting wood. The back of his neck had gone red and stiff. His hair was dark with sweat. He drew his arms over his head and down. The wood broke evenly, falling from the stump. At last he dropped his ax and set off for the field. The last I saw of him, before I would think to follow, was only a break in the corn that ran deep into the field and stopped.

  The work on that good crop had been done. The stalks were high and drying. Soon he would have cut them down.

  When I found him, he was standing between the rows of corn, his hands on his hips, eyes closed. His hands were cut and bleeding, full of leaves. His shirt hung from one shoulder over his bony frame. I called out to him, but he never turned from the pastureland and the spread of fields he was watching. Still, he knew I was there, or so I believe. He seemed to be listening when he fell.

  That was the way he went, falling back like that. As if he knew I would catch him and had already decided on when and where. His shoulder dropped hard beneath my chin, his hair wet. The field was high and still around our heads, quiet as dusk. He hadn’t said a word. It was only the way he’d walked off, straight into the corn like he was set on finding something. And maybe he did. If I hadn’t thought to follow, the dust would have been the first to greet him, the sky empty overhead. When I touched his cheeks I could feel the warmth leaving with how slack they were and numb. I laid him on the ground as if he might break.

  Over the next few weeks, my dress front still smelled like Frank. I hardly thought to change it, what with the house seeming too big and the rugs letting little sound through. In the smokehouse I found the nails in a jar and kept them between my teeth. The boards I took from the barn, damp with the animals that had brushed them with their flanks. I nailed a slab of wood across this door behind my head, moved my bed against the wall, and turned the lock, closing up the back of the house. The windows in those rooms are closed, the doors nailed shut. I made sure of it. I took out what I didn’t want to leave behind. Carried it all to the attic. Bent over as I worked, I kept Frank’s smell with me long after we’d buried him. Those nails between my teeth tasted sour as they were old. Twenty-six years those nails had given us. Frank had hammered them to a point himself.

  With Frank gone, I sold the farm. Auctioned the animals and tore down the smokehouse and pens. Our hundred and eighty acres, I sold them to Jack who’d always wanted them. The other farmers had made themselves strangers. They hated the land we kept as much as I hated what the Morrows had done. But Jack paid good money. And he was the only one who would do so without a fuss.

  “It’ll be a lot to handle,” I said.

  We sat together at my kitchen table an
d he took the glass of water I gave him and held it. “I’ll do all right.”

  “A lot for one man.”

  “I’ve done more and I’ve done less. I can hire if I have to, but I’ll try not. I don’t like strangers.”

  “But there are plenty anyway.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve never seen so many,” I went on. “Makes a person think there are either too many people in this world or too few.”

  Jack studied me and took a drink. He seemed to be thinking, looking around the room but not really looking. “I’ve always thought there were too many myself,” he said in a low voice. “Now, not so much. A whole week will go past, and not so many people now.”

  It was four or more years since I’d seen him. The muscle in his jaw had taken on fat. He’d settled into his sturdy frame. The veins on his forearms had spidered and spread, the whites of his eyes gone yellow. He took a drink from his glass and breathed between swallows. He hadn’t yet said a word about Mary. But who else did they have on that farm but themselves?

  “With Frank, we had our disagreements,” he started again. “But he was a good worker. He was true to himself. I admired that.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  Jack looked at his glass. “It wasn’t right what she did.” He brought out a check from his back pocket and flattened it with his fingers. “Frank deserved better. I just wanted to say that.”

  I got up from the table and opened our kitchen drawer for the deed. I stood at the drawer for a while, my back turned, until I could catch my breath.

  “It’s a fair price,” he said after a while.

  “I hope so,” I let out. When I gave it to him, he folded the deed in half and half again and tucked it into his pocket. He put on his hat then and left the check on the table, lifting his brim to me before he left. In less than a year’s time, that man too would be gone. He went quiet, or so I heard. Unlike the way he did his living. But sitting at that table, I knew what he would and wouldn’t do. He would leave the house alone.

  The nurse turns me on my side, but the sponge breaks in her hands. She has to start again with a towel she finds in my kitchen. For days now, she hasn’t left me in peace. She sleeps in the chair when she grows tired and rests her feet on my bed. I believe she fears I’ll soon be leaving this life.

  “There must be something in those letters,” she starts again, the towel circling in her hand. “An address on the envelope, a stamp.”

  “Haven’t you already asked?”

  “Not today,” she says.

  “No, not today,” I mumble. The water drips down my spine, but that old skin is so far away. The cold and wet seem years from me now. “Rhode Island,” I say.

  She stops her hand. “When?”

  “Just before his birthday.”

  “Kyle was born in summer.”

  “The boy’s birthday,” I say.

  She starts with the towel again, but her hand jerks. I don’t think she’s paying attention. I wonder again how I let this nurse in. With all her busyness, she has left me time at least to think.

  “Eddie,” she says at last. “You know full well there isn’t any boy. She lost that child when he was born. It was the last letter Kyle sent.”

  “Eddie,” I say, and grab hold of her arm. “That’s what Frank always called me. Only him.” This nurse, she doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself but bother me in my own house, speaking about boys she shouldn’t know and using their names. “Look at you,” I tell her, gripping her arm. Her face draws close to mine, wincing. But I don’t have the energy any more. “I know you,” I say as my eyes fall shut. “I know who you are.”

  For months after Frank’s passing, Adaline chose our bed for her own and rarely left it. In the daytime if I made too much noise as I worked, she watched me with a dull look. Her hips carried a new weight. Her belly thick, her ankles swollen. She let one arm drop from the warmth of the covers and worried at the floor with her fingers, tugging at the braided rugs. I wondered if Adaline could feel my mother with her eyes closed.

  My girl was leaving, I could tell. She had been leaving ever since Donny fell under that horse. In a single bed we lay at night next to one another, but Adaline slept with her back turned. I thought of the way Donny went and how she had watched that fire out her window. I wondered what she thought of me, her mother, after what I’d done. Laying a hand on her shoulder, I felt the down of her skin standing on end. I drew my fingers through her hair, that wild nest the same black as her father’s. She never stirred.

  I was the only one to call after Adaline when she left. She had come back to the house while I was out settling the last of the crops and I found her standing on our front porch. She had already packed. Frank’s car waited in the yard, the engine running. Adaline strained with the weight of the suitcases in her hands, her belly full. Eight months pregnant she was, and she kissed my cheek. I could say nothing, knowing how strong-headed my daughter had always been. Kyle himself sat in the driver’s seat. He offered me a smile and popped open his door, but with one look from Adaline he shut it again. That boy had been like one of my own. Now he was taking what I didn’t want to give. If he came to talk to me at all, they might never get going. All three of us knew that.

  “Well,” I said, wiping the dirt from my hands. “I don’t like it.”

  Adaline’s eyes filled and she set the suitcases down.

  “But I understand,” I went on. “I left my own mother, but she had warning. I gave her time to offer me something before I went at least.”

  “I’ll write. I promise.”

  “You do that,” I said. “Now wait a minute.”

  “Wait,” she called back, but already I was in the house. Before I could run out again, the passenger door slammed shut. The wheels turned in the dirt. I stood on the porch with a stack of money in my hand, not much more than a hundred dollars, but it was something. From the passenger’s side, Adaline waved the tips of her fingers, her forehead pressed against the glass. She rolled the window down and the car slowed. “Don’t,” Adaline said, wiping her face. The car started up again and turned the corner out of the yard. Adaline twisted around to watch me, and Kyle strained his head to look back, but she was telling him “Don’t” again. I could see her mouth saying it. She’d waited for me long enough on our porch to say something, but she couldn’t have gone with me standing there. Not as a mother-to-be, she couldn’t. The look on her face told me that much.

  You are no longer welcome, they wrote in that letter, and Adaline heard it well. Mary made certain of it. But I don’t believe she imagined her own boy might leave along with the girl. Mary, you don’t need to bother me with your questions. Kyle wasn’t yours alone. You should know that by now. No matter what that boy did, I never would have said a word against him. That story you told the church, whatever it was, it only did you worse. As far as I would guess, address or no, Adaline and Kyle are never coming back. If what you say about their boy is true, they have nothing to come back for.

  • • •

  It was late last night when I first dreamt it, that mother walking off from her home after losing one child after the other, just before the turn of the century. In the last few months I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about her. She wore the thinnest of shoes, her shoulders bare. She didn’t have an apple in her hand to keep her going, not even a jug of water. Three children she’d lost that winter, and it wasn’t difficult for me to imagine her leaving. She untied her apron, hung it in the pantry for the moths. When she walked down that road, she moved as easily as if off to visit a friend. Only the heat hurried her steps. She had a quiet look on her face, like she knew what she wanted, knew right well how she might find it. Wherever she was going, she was never coming back.

  I awoke in the darkness to an empty house. Now the blankets on my bed feel heavy as wood, and my legs seem little more than sticks. I am an old woman wiping my cheeks. This room, it’s a small haunted place. At times, I believe even the floors speak
to me with all their settling. If anything now, I know I’m done. I’ve worked these fields until I rubbed myself raw, sold them without so much thought. The weather here I know like the veins in my wrists. The cicadas that rise in the summer months, the snow that clings to the sills. There are no more surprises. Nothing more to hold on to.

  I’ve looked for you many a time, my boy. This notebook should bear that out. But if there’s any strength left to me, I plan to go on looking still, in this world or the next. I’ll carry little with me. Leave these words behind. It’s a better thing, I’ve decided, to have written this life and abandon it now, as much good as these pages have done in saving anything at all. I’ve got my mind set for the morning, as early as I can manage. The doors I’ll leave unlocked, the windows open. With the wind, these walls probably won’t last for long. But should I keep my wits about me, should these feet of mine bear me out, I will find my way to you no matter how far.

  “I have such dreams,” Adaline said once. This was days before she left, before you were born. “Awful things. I never would have thought.” She worried at her middle with her fingers. Her cheeks burned the way they had when she was a child.

  “Once I dreamed you wouldn’t have feet,” I said.

  “You did?”

  “No feet. And you never left this house. Back then, I thought it would be terrible for a child to never leave.”

  She drew a breath. “Look,” she said and took my hand, holding it to her stomach. There you were. Kicking as if all the world depended on the ruckus you could turn out. Adaline dropped her head and raised her blouse so the both of us could see the rippling under her skin. She pressed my hand to her stomach again, bare as it was and warm to the touch. Her hand on mine had such a grip, my knuckles burrowing into the soft underside of her own. We stayed together like that. A long while.