The Curing Season

by Leslie Wells

  —I’m glad I found out your secret, Nita says. —I’ll see you next time.

  —Next time, I say, and she calls Joshua and all three come thrashing out of the water, dripping wet, broad grins on their faces.

  —Your mama’s got to go, Nita says to Joshua. —And we’d best be headin home too, chirren. Tyree, you can hold that snake on the stick, but no scarin your sister, you hear?

  Tyree runs to get the snake, and Nita faces me.

  —You take care of yourself, and I’ll see you both soon, all right?

  Joshua tells her goodbye and I nod, humming to Joshua to come along. We move into the woods and uphill on the path. I take it slowly and Joshua stays with me, tired from all his playing. The sunlight through the trees dapples our skin and clothes. All the way home I alternate between joy at having a friend, someone I can safely talk to, and concern about having spoken to Nita. But through all my worry I keep reminding myself that there is no one who knows Aaron who knows her. There can be no way for him to find out that I have broken his prohibition on speaking, or that I am friendly with a colored woman.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I have noticed that there are different kinds of pain. Some are worse than others. There is the pain that doesn’t start until three days after the blow, then hurts like the devil for a solid week. There’s the nagging ache that you want to fool with, like a throbbing tooth that your tongue goes to, over and over. Then there are the soft areas with the sharp point of tension in the middle. This leaves the worst bruise, turning from deep purple to black to green to the color of tallow, but oddly enough does not hurt nearly as much as some of the other thumps and cuts.

  There is the kind of pain that echoes in your brain and causes a ringing that goes on for days. I do not know if this is from my ears being plugged up, or if it is the reverberation of the blows to my head. It is horrible to have the only thing you hear to be this ringing. It goes on and on in the silence, and seems louder in the dark. Oddly enough, when I am frightened, the ringing stops, or else perhaps I just do not notice it.

  The worst pain so far is the echoing ache in my heart, seeing my own son try to talk to me and not being able to respond. Unlike the other kinds, that pain does not ever lessen or go away. And the fact that now I have spoken to Nita makes it even more tempting to say something to my child.

  Tonight, Aaron comes in after I’ve fed Joshua supper. Joshua is playing with some dried gourds that I’d given him; I know from his delighted expression that the seeds make a noise like a rattle when he shakes them. Aaron stops for a minute, takes one of the gourds out of Joshua’s hand, and looks at it. He says something to Joshua, but I cannot tell what, since his back is turned to me. I watch him carefully. Although he has never tried to hurt Joshua, I don’t know where his temper will lead him. Joshua glances up expectantly, knowing not to protest about his taking the gourd.

  —You can have, he says, watching Aaron.

  —I used to play with gourds when I was little, Aaron says, turning so I can see his lips. —Be careful not to crack them.

  Joshua nods his head energetically, and it saddens me to see the wariness in his eyes. I hope that Aaron will continue the conversation, but he merely puts the gourd handle into his back pocket and goes upstairs. Joshua is so thirsty for a father, and at times I think it might help Aaron if he spent more time with Joshua. But I am so afraid of something happening when he is drunk that I quickly let that idea dissolve.

  After a while I take Joshua up to bed. I notice that he has bitten holes in his covering; little ratted edges gnawed loose at various places. I hope he is doing this in his sleep, not as he is lying there awake, listening. I change him into his nightshirt.

  —like the gourds, he tells me. —Me have a ball?

  I nod and smile, thinking surely I can get into town at some point and buy him a rubber ball.

  —a big blue one?

  I nod again, stretching my arms wide to indicate how big it will be. He smiles happily.

  —thank you, Mama! thank you!

  I gather him in my arms and hold him, humming, until he goes to sleep. His eyes droop, flutter, then close at last. He leans back against me, his sleep so deep and innocent, his mouth open, small even white teeth showing above his still-babyish-looking lower lip, delicate blue veins scattering across his eyelids. I hold him like that for a while, smelling his boy-smell from the top of his head, feeling him breathe. It is a moment of utter peace, and I feel happy.

  I ease Joshua off my lap and onto the bed without waking him. I hold my breath and go into our bedroom. The smell of wet ashes from the fireplace hits me; Aaron has poured something on them, whether water or liquor or his own urine, I cannot tell. The poker sprawls askew in the plashed soot. I should clean out the fireplace, but so far I have lacked the energy to do it all summer long.

  I look at Aaron, breathing deeply on the bed. Thank God he is asleep. He has thrown his overalls on the floor on top of his mud-caked boots. A few hairs sprout from his otherwise bare chest, and his underdrawers are stained yellow. No matter how hard I scrub them, I cannot get the stains out. Luckily he doesn’t seem to notice my failings with the laundry.

  I ease out of my shift and try to lie down on the pallet without making a stir. Just as I think I am safely in, Aaron sits up. He reaches over to the floor and rummages in his overalls, pulling the gourd out of his pocket by its long handle.

  He looks at it for a moment, musing, tapping it into his palm, running his hands up the side of the stem. Suddenly he pushes up and is over me, breathing into my face. A sharpness is pushing into my bottom. At first I think I have laid on a knife he has dropped in the bedcovers, but then I realize that one of his hands is below me, thrusting. He is pushing the stem of the gourd into my anus.

  I try to squirm away, but he catches my shoulder hard with his other hand. I look up into his face, pleading.

  —You hold still, you, he says, his teeth flashing in the moonlight.

  Something in me gives way and the handle is sliding up into my nether parts, tearing me as it goes. Aaron pushes it hard and then slides it out a little ways, then in again, hard. I cannot help gasping as it hurts me. He takes his hand from the gourd and pushes his erect member into me. He has entered my anus with the gourd and my vagina with himself. I gasp at the evilness of it, hurting. As Aaron pushes himself into me, he reaches around again and pokes me with the gourd. I shut my eyes in humiliation, hoping he will hurry up. It seems the invasion of my body will never end.

  Finally I feel him burst into me and he collapses, knocking the wind out of my lungs. He lies there, panting, as I try to get my breath back. After a few minutes he sloughs off of me and yanks the gourd out of my body. I squeeze my eyes shut but he grabs my jaw and forces me to look. The handle is rusty with my blood.

  —Wash this thing off. You disgust me, he says. He shakes his head and laughs. —The things you make me do, woman.

  He makes me take the gourd, then cuffs me in the head as I get out of bed to go downstairs to get cleaned up.

  • • •

  I tried to run away once, right after we moved here. Ever since my mistake with the government lady, Aaron’s temper had spun out of control. Whereas before, when he’d have days where he was at least civil or merely ignored me, when I could gauge his moods and avoid him when drunk; now he had become sadistic, relentlessly cruel, whether sober or intoxicated. Now he was either stopping up my ears with the painful hot candle wax or hitting me, hard. There were no more reprieves for me, and since we’d come to Tarville, he’d paid no more attention to Joshua than he would a gnat.

  Finally I decided I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d long lost the anger I’d harbored against Mother and Sibby after receiving their letters, and yearned for the day I could return home to them. I merely had to muster enough courage to go, as the thought of Aaron’s fury if he caught us was very frightening to me. On one hand, I found it hard to believe he’d object to our leaving, as he complained almost constantly ab
out me—my lack of domestic abilities, my bad cooking, my ugliness—and how much upkeep the two of us required. Given all this, you’d imagine that he’d be happy to see us go, but somehow I sensed it wouldn’t be as easy as all that.

  I gathered up Joshua and a bundle of his clothes and walked out one day when I knew Aaron was going to be working in a neighboring farmer’s field all day. I made it about four miles down the road by late afternoon, and then I had to rest. I had no idea where I was going, but I had to get away. He had hit me so hard the night before, I thought I was going to die. I really thought I wouldn’t live to see my son the next morning.

  When I did wake up, blood matted in my hair and my lip split and swollen, all I could think of was to escape. By the time I was four miles down the road, I was struggling, but still determined to go on. I knew he’d look for me at my mother’s farm, so I couldn’t go there immediately. I figured maybe some kindhearted farmer’s wife would take us in when it got to be nighttime, or I’d find a barn to shelter us, as I’d done so many times when I was first with Aaron.

  I sat resting by the side of the road, Joshua asleep on my lap. My legs ached from carrying him so far. I must have been in a daze, staring at my cracked shoes, when suddenly a shadow fell across my legs. I looked up and it was Aaron. I started and tried to edge away from his boots, eyeing his face to see what he would say.

  —Get up and come on back, he cried. —You think you’re going somewhere? You’re crazy as you look. You aren’t going anywhere I don’t want you to go. You’d better get back home if you know what’s good for you.

  I wanted to ask him why he wanted us back, when all he ever did was hit me and ignore our son. I wanted to ask him why he treated me this way, what I’d ever done to him. But I knew if I tried to speak, I’d infuriate him even more. I laid Joshua on the ground and struggled to my feet, tears coursing down my face. Aaron smiled at me evilly, grabbed Joshua, and set off on the road toward home. I could see Joshua screaming in his grasp, his mouth wide open in a wail, but I couldn’t keep up to save my soul.

  When I got home it was pitch-dark. I went upstairs, my legs burning with the fiery pain shooting through them. My heart pounding, I looked into Joshua’s room. Thank God he was there, asleep on his pallet. I examined him in the lamplight and saw that he was not torn or bruised. Wearily I went into our room. Aaron had left the house that night, but he took it out on me later. I never had the fortitude to try to leave again, for fear of what he’d do to Joshua if he caught us.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Aaron has been in the field behind the house all this morning, trying to break ground for a few rows of corn. I imagine he thinks that if he does this, he will be able to make his own squeezins and not always be in need of money for drink. It is a good idea for a man more organized than Aaron, but I know that even if the corn manages to send up green shoots from the scorched earth, he will not have the time or patience to see that they are watered and cared for so they grow to maturity. Aaron is impatient, dyspeptic, choleric. He hates anything that tries his patience, and everything does try it—me, Joshua, the dry barren earth, the farmer he works for occasionally, and Nettie, our broken old mule.

  The sun beats down on the parched field. The reddish mud has crusted over many times, and is very hard ground to break. Nettie is feeble and tired and does not want to be pulling the plough through this tough clay under the merciless sun this hot morning. She pitches her head from side to side, trying to rid herself of the blinders that Aaron thinks she needs. I believe they only make her worse about staying in the row, but he always puts them on her, hot as it is. Sweat makes dark runnels down her sides; I can see them all the way from the backyard where I am hanging up laundry that I’ve just pounded clean at the creek. If I wash Joshua’s shirts once more they will fall apart in my hands, they are so old and frayed. I sewed them out of Aaron’s old shirts, so they were already worn when he got them. Now they are almost transparent from wear.

  Joshua races around the yard happily. At least I can be thankful that living with Aaron hasn’t ruined his spirits yet. He leaps and bobs, brandishing a crooked tobacco stick, now riding it as if it’s a horse, now using it as a spear. His brown curls fly free in the air as he chases and whirls. He has just learned how to jump, and he does it over and over, gleefully. He looks up at the sky and shouts, proclaiming his own wild energy. I wish I could hear his cries.

  I look toward the field again to see Aaron pick up a big rock from the ground and start clubbing Nettie about the face with it. She is tossing her head and kicking, and I see she has stepped out of the traces at the end of the row. Aaron hits her repeatedly, and blood starts to flow from a cut above her huge brow. Now he drops the rock and strides off into the woods. I hope he is going away for several hours. Perhaps he will drink enough to pass out and be gone until the wee hours of the morning. He has been doing that lately, once a month or so, and it is a blessed relief when he does.

  I go over and take Joshua’s arm as he is whirling around with his stick, and motion for him to stay in the yard. I pick my way through the brambles and clumsily walk across the burnt earth to where Nettie is standing in a stupor, the cut on her head bleeding profusely. I pull off the halter with the blinders and her big brown eye rolls up at me, blood dripping into it. I take the corner of my apron and try to sponge it off, then unhook her harness from the plough traces and lead her back to the yard. Joshua runs up and says,

  —wrong with Nettie, Mama?

  but I just indicate for him to stay there. I go inside and get a bowl of water and a rag and come back out and clean Nettie’s wound. Then I change the dressing on her hind leg where Aaron kicked her last week. The cut on her leg is still oozing pus. I worry that the infection will worsen in the heat with the horseflies and bluebottles feasting on it, and that she will die. We will be in serious trouble if she doesn’t survive because Aaron has been using the fact that he has his own mule to get work. The farmers like it when you show up with your own work animal, he says. Besides all this, I like Nettie, and feel we are comrades in our suffering.

  I take off the rope that I have led her with and remove the harness from her back. She kneels slowly and rolls in the dirt of our yard as Joshua and I stand there and watch. Then she gets to her feet and shakes the dust off her body. Joshua and I are covered in a red film, but we don’t care. I motion to him that we will take her to the creek, and we head down the shaded path to the water.

  I remember Mother watching a farmhorse roll after having been hitched to a plough all day. They took off her harness and she rolled in the dirt and Mother laughed and said, —That must be how Bessie Myers feels when she takes her girdle off after church.

  It was one of the few jokes my mother ever made, and Sibby and I nearly died laughing from it.

  The creekwater is blessedly cool. Nettie wades in fetlock-deep and takes long, thirsty slurps with her rubbery lips. I drop her lead rope and let her graze on the grass on the far bank while Joshua rolls his pants legs up and wades in. He splashes a little water at me and I smile and splash him back. Joshua thrusts both hands in and up and I am soaking wet. The water dripping down my face and dressfront feels heavenly in the heat. I wade in farther and we splash each other until we both are drenched. Nettie stands gazing placidly at us as if she thinks we’ve both lost our minds. I point at her and Joshua giggles—I can see his shoulders shake as he laughs. He splashes Nettie too, and the poor old thing stands there and lets the water trickle down her sides.

  Finally the horseflies set upon us in earnest and we must go. When we get back to the house with Nettie, Joshua helps me look for a patch in the yard where there is a little grass, and we tie her up. The yard is nearly grazed out, the grass so short she can hardly get any up, but still she tries, for hours on end.

  We have a new hen, which I imagine Aaron stole from a neighboring farm, but I don’t ask. I catch Joshua’s shirtsleeve as he hurtles past and motion to him that it’s time to check for eggs. He leaps in excitement,
and I indicate for him to walk toward her quietly.

  The hen always sleeps on the drooping branch of a struggling oak that provides us with a pitiful bit of shade for the yard. I keep hoping she will drop an egg, although what she would use to sustain such a production I cannot imagine, other than the insects she manages to swoop down on. She certainly isn’t being fed cracked corn the way she must have been at her former residence, and Aaron doesn’t show any signs of buying any for her. Nettie’s ribs are more obvious every day, and I worry that unless we get some feed for her she will die of starvation, much less from the infection. But Aaron isn’t one to believe in coddling the animals.

  We sneak up on the hen as she is roosting, her scat spattered all over the tree branch and ground beneath. Her head remains tucked upon her breast and I see, wonder to behold, an egg peeking out beneath her dirty lower feathers. Carefully I place my hands on either side so it cannot roll off, and shake the limb. The hen flutters up and I capture the egg, still warm from its nesting place. I wave it at Joshua, who of course wants to carry it, and he follows me into the house. Aaron is nowhere to be seen, so perhaps I will have time to boil it for Joshua so he can have a rare treat.

  Just as I am placing the cut-up egg on the table to cool, I see a flash of color through the window, in the corner of the yard. I go to the doorway and it is Nita, holding a croker sack in each hand. I step outside and she drops the sacks and smiles at me.

  —Got some fine ’maters and squash, too much for us, she says, speaking nice and slow and looking straight at me. —Thought you might could use some.

  I nod and smile, nod and smile, indicating that Joshua is in the kitchen behind me and I cannot speak to her. I will thank her the next time I see her at the creek. No one in this community has brought us a meal or a sack of anything, so this is a rare kindness. But perhaps I can blame that on Aaron; he is capable of telling people we lack for nothing, out of pride. Or perhaps he has told them all I’m crazy and to stay away from me.