In the evening after all our daily chores were done and we had eaten a wonderful dinner, she would play the piano and I would sit nearby and read or sometimes just sit and listen with my eyes closed. On wonderful nights like that we were often not alone. Many members of our spiritual family were there sitting on the settees and chairs or just standing about and smiling. Children, my many cousins, were sitting on the floor, being quiet and behaving. All of them stole glances at me and smiled and waited anxiously for me to smile back.
Although I still didn't tell Mommy. I saw Noble more and more. too. He followed me about the farm, criticizing my work, telling me he could do it better. At first he made me nervous, and then, mainly because of Daddy. I humored him and didn't take his comments to heart. I could almost say he haunted me, however, because as he grew more comfortable being in my presence, his complaints became more personal and more frequent. He was like a bee buzzing at my ear. No amount of swatting at him would drive him away.
One night I woke and saw him squatting beside my bed. He looked up at me. and I saw he had been crying.
"Why are you crying?" I asked him. "I thought there is never any sadness where you are."
"Maybe just for me," he muttered,
"I'm trying my best. Noble. I'm doing
everything you would do as well as you would do it. I've even begun to rebuild your fort. haven't I?"
"I'm not crying because of all that," he said as if I were stupid.
"Then what? What's making you so sad?"
He looked like he wasn't going to tell or he was afraid to tell. His eyes shifted about the room to be sure we were alone. I saw no one else either.
"I don't like wearing your dress," he said, "and your amulet. I want my own. I like my worm."
I simply stared at him. I didn't know what to say or what to do. I could never mention such a thing to Mommy, of course.
"You're not wearing a dress now," I pointed out.
He smirked.
"You don't know anything. I have to be like this when you see me, but every other time I'm in that dress. and I don't like it. Our cousins are laughing at me behind my back" he told me.
"Daddy never says anything about that." "He's just trying to keep Mommy happy." "I can't do anything about it. Noble." I said.
"Yes, you can." he insisted, "You can be vou. As soon as you are, it will stop."
His request took my breath away.
"I can't do that," I said in a loud whisper.
Now the conversation was making me dizzy. Luminous white smoke circled around me. Was I really awake, or was all this part of a dream?
"Yes, you can." he insisted.
"I can't. Mommy would... would be very upset, and besides, she was told what had to be done and what I must do," I pointed out. "She can't go against it, and neither can I."
"You will," he said, his eves small and angry like they could be when we were younger and I had done something that irked him. "You will," he threatened.
He popped like a bubble.
Soon after that. I began to vomit in the morning. I was so nauseous. I had trouble getting dressed and going downstairs. I was sure it was somehow Noble's doing, his way to get even with me. and I was confident that he couldn't keep it up. Daddy would stop him. I was still afraid to tell Mommy anything about him. I was sure she would be so unhappy if she knew some of the things Noble had told me, especially what he wanted.
And then one day when the morning sickness diminished. I realized that my monthly bleeding had stopped. There were other times when it had stopped for a few months and then started again, but this was different. It was accompanied by a new sensitivity about my nipples and a change in color. Also. I found myself drifting off more, napping, being tired. I was going to the bathroom more often. too. I kept anticipating Mommy asking me about it, but she didn't appear to notice, and I thought it might all just pass soon.
One morning while I was examining myself, noting how much bigger my breasts had become and the small swelling in my stomach. I looked in the corner and saw Noble smiling.
"You wont be able to be me much longer," he said with an impish grin.
"Get out!" I screamed. "Get out!"
He laughed, but he disappeared. Mommy came up the stairway, calling to me.
"What is it. Noble?"
I began to wrap myself as quickly as I could.
"Is something wrong?" she asked from the doorway.
"No." I said. "I'm just being teased. Like I used to be," I added.
"Teased? Teased by Whom. Noble? Who would tease you?" she asked, standing in the doorway with a confused smile on her face.
I turned away from her quickly.
"I didn't mean teased. exactly. I meant annoyed. I'm annoyed with myself."
"Why?"
"I'm just not getting as much done as I want, and we're already well into fall."
"Oh. Well, you will. Be patient. I'm not unhappy with your work," she said.
She kissed me on the forehead and cheek and then left.
I stood there looking after her and wondering what would I do.
Days and then weeks went by with me keeping my secret locked in my heart. Sometimes, my heart felt more like a closed fist battling to keep itself closed. It burned in my chest. too. I would stop working and find myself out of breath. gasping for cool air. There were even times when I would have to keep swallowing to prevent words from charging up my throat, into my tongue, and out of my tight lips.
"How can I stop this?" I cried. I would just pause in whatever I was doing and, feeling certain Mommy couldn't hear me, scream my pleas and wait for some response, but a strange new thing happened.
Daddy wasn't appearing.
Neither were any other members of my spiritual family. Only Noble was visible and heard, and usually it was to gloat and to irritate me. He would always follow with his complaint.
"I don't like wearing your dress. and I want my amulet back."
Some nights. I practically leaped out of sleep and sat up, a cold sweat over my body, my heart pounding. He was weaving himself into all my dreams, crawling slowly like a worm through my brain. His face was everywhere. Once. I saw a bobcat saunter out of the woods and cross the meadow. When it paused and turned toward me, it had Noble's face and it was
There was no escape. Even the wind began to repeat his complaint.
"I don't like wearing your dress, and I want my amulet back."
The tree branches and their leaves were like multiple hands of symphony conductors moving to the rhythm of that sentence. I would have to stand there with my palms pressed tightly over my ears and wait for the breeze to calm and the chanting to end.
Once Mommy caught me doing this and asked me why I was doing it.
I told her I had a buzzing in my ear, and she gave me something to stop an infection from developing. Now, evenings when she played her piano. I pretended to be busy doing something else other than reading. The last half dozen or so times when I was relaxing with her. I didn't see anyone but Noble, and all he would do was squat below me and stare up at me with that mean-spirited smile on his lips. It was on the tip of my tongue to shout at him. but I caught myself in time and just rose and went to get myself some water.
He tracked after me everywhere, cloaking himself in shadows sometimes and then just sliding out along the wall before he disappeared.
Another month passed without anything changing. My appetite went from hardly anything to my sneaking meals between meals. The more weight I gained, however, the happier Mommy was. The woman in me was sinking under the added pounds. Even the postman who saw me occasionally shook his head with disgust.
One result of Noble's haunting of me was to make me want to succeed more at doing the things he thought were his things to do. I mastered the use of the chain saw. and I cut many logs. I split them and piled them to dry. I had calluses upon calluses. but I didn't moan and groan. Mommy had good herbal remedies to soothe the pain. and I began to soak in an herbal bath eve
ry night. It helped me sleep.
Fortunately, she never came in on me, and she didn't see how my waist and my breasts had
expanded. She didn't notice the stretch marks or how my ankles were swelling. It was getting more and more difficult to tighten the corset around myself, but it gave me the idea to use one of my grandmother's girdles to keep my swelling stomach from showing. As another precaution. I stopped going places with her. For months now, no one off our farm but the postman and an occasional delivery man saw me. I didn't return to the school either. That was all ended.
"You're at the age where you don't have to attend any school anyway," Mommy told me when I made a vague reference to our failure to appear for my periodic testing. "Who wants those busybodies interfering in our lives? Not me," she answered.
Not me either. I thought, especially not now.
I used to wonder how Mommy could be so contented, living alone as we were. Didn't she miss the company of men, of other women her age? Didn't she want to get out in the world and see what was new in fashion?
Now I thought I understood her better. I didn't wake up longing to leave the farm as much anymore. I wasn't interested in meeting young people my age. After all, look at what that had led to when I had. I didn't even think as hard about the public school.
But I knew my time was running out. Despite all I had done and continued to do. Mommy would soon realize what I realized but refused to
acknowledge. Only Noble gloated about it, and he would never stop saying, "I don't want to wear your dress. I want my amulet back."
"I cant do it," I shouted back at him. "Why don't you stop?"
He just stared.
Everywhere, he stared and he waited and the weeks went by and I grew bigger.
One night I woke up absolutely terrified. I had dreamed of Mommy looking at me in the morning and bursting into tears and rage and great sorrow, so great, it broke her heart and she died. I would be alone, and because of what I had let happen, no spiritual ancestor would comfort me or care to be in my presence ever again. Where do people go when they can't go to the warm, happy spiritual places? What dark hole awaited me?
"I don't want to wear that dress anymore," Noble chanted from the darkest corners in my room. "And I want my amulet back." He was on my right, then my left, then behind me, then in front of me. I slapped my hands over my tars, but he was whispering in between my fingers like someone whispering through the cracks in a door.
I threw off my blanket and, dressed only in my stretched pajama bottom and top. I fled the room.
Like a ribbon tied to the back of a car, he trailed along.
I charged out of the house, down the porch steps, and across the yard, not caring about how the small pebbles and Gravel tore at the soles of my feet. I went to the barn. I was crying now, the tears streaming down my cheeks.
The sky was thickly overcast. I felt the first drops of rain, but it didn't deter me. I found the spoon shovel, and I rushed across the yard and up to the small cemetery. I was even surprised myself at how well and how easily I moved through the inky darkness. When I reached the tombstones. I saw Noble standing there. waiting.
"If I take the dress off of you and give you back your amulet, will this stop? Will I stop growing in my stomach?" I asked him.
"Yes." he said.
I dug the shovel into the grassy earth where I knew he lay buried in my dress. The around was soft enough, but the work was hard. I dug and I dug with such intensity and determination. I was blind to anything else. I didn't see the light go on in the house. I didn't hear the front door open and close. I didn't see the beam of the flashlight streak over the round until it found inc. I didn't hear Mommy coming quickly. I dug, and then I felt her gab my arm.
It surprised me so. I spun around.
She stood there looking at me, her face aghast, her mouth twisted, her eves wide. She spoke in a hoarse whisper.
"What are you doing?"
"He doesn't want to wear the dress, and he wants his amulet back," I said, looking to where Noble had been standing, but he was gone, lost in the darkness.
She shook her head and then lifted the beam of the light so it washed over me. In a moment she saw it all, my bigger bosom, my swollen stomach. I held my breath. My heart seemed to stop. I went completely numb. She reached out and ripped the shovel from my hands.
"What have you done?" she screamed, and then she dropped the flashlight and lifted the shovel with both her hands, raising it to bring it down on me.
I fell to my knees and waited for the blow, but it didn't come.
I looked up and, in the glow of the flashlight at her feet. I saw her frozen, her head slightly tilted, her mouth in a grimace. She was listening, and then she started to nod.
When she looked back at me, her grimace was a smile. She put the shovel down gently, and she reached for me.
"Come," she said. "Come back inside the house. It's all right. It's all right."
I rose slowly and hesitantly took her hand. She saw how frightened I was, and she put her arm around me.
"Everything will be all right." she whispered.
The rain started to fall harder, but neither she nor I took note of it. Without another word, she led me back, her arm around me the whole way so she could hold me close. We entered the house, and she led me upstairs to my room. She sat me on the bed, and then she went to the bathroom and got a basin of warm water. She washed my feet, cleaning out any and all scratches and scrapes. Then she helped me off with my damp pajamas and wiped me down.
When that was done, she directed me to lie back. She put her hand on my stomach and stood there with her eyes closed.
"What a wondrous thing has happened" she said.
"What wondrous thing. Mommy?" I asked. How could she see it as anything else but a disaster?
She looked down at me in the strangest way. I felt she was looking through me, not at me. It was truly as if she didn't see me at all.
"Mommy?"
"You'll be fine," she said. "Everything will be fine. They have told me. It will be a miracle."
"What sort of miracle. Mommy?"
"No more questions. Rest and do as you're told," she replied.
After she left, I saw Noble gloating in the corner. Why was he gloating?
"What is it? What's the miracle?" I asked him. He just laughed.
My mind reeled with so much confusion. I felt nauseous. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. but I heard him come to the side of the bed and bring his lips to my ear.
"I told you," he said. "You can be you."
He was gone when I opened my eyes and turned. There was only darkness. I was never more willing to sink into to a pool of deep sleep.
The next morning so much began to change. Mommy forbade me from doing any of the hard labor. I couldn't use the chain saw anymore. and I couldn't split wood or pile it. Even my gardening work was reduced. No more dining and bending. No more weeding. She modified my diet and gave me herbal pills she said were important for me, but she had that look on her face again. Her eyes were glassy, far-off. giving me the feeling she wasn't speaking to me. She was speaking to the baby growing inside me.
There were nights when she woke and came to my bedside because she said she had heard the baby crying. I was so confused the first time she did it. I asked her. What baby?
She just shook her head and told me she would make something warm for me to drink, which was really the way to get the baby to drink. Some nights she would sit there and sing and hum an old folk sang designed to calm the baby. She said it would help the baby sleep.
All this made me feel no more important than a wheelbarrow. I soon understood that in Mommy's eyes. I would be bringing the baby to the table or putting it to bed. I would move it out of the hot sun when I moved or cover it to keep it warm and secure when I covered myself. There was no longer a me. I was slowly disappearing, and the baby was emerging.
And Noble gloated.
He was always there in some shadow. in so
me corner, or just walking slightly behind me, especially after Mommy had spoken to the baby inside me.
"When the baby is born." he said. "you're going to disappear completely.
"And I won't have to wear a dress, andIll get my amulet back."
Even though I had less and less to do. I didn't feel life was easier for me. Almost overnight, perhaps because I no longer could or had to hide was happening inside me. I grew bigger and bigger. I waddled when I walked, struggled to rise out of a chair, climbed the stairs slower, and groaned about the pain in my lower back. I saw how it all made Noble laugh, Sometimes, his laugh echoed and was joined in a chorus of chilling laughter out of the dark. I felt the chill everywhere. It was colder in the house.
This winter was even more severe than the previous. It was so cold, tears would freeze as soon as they escaped my eyelids. To me, it often looked like the world might crack like a piece of ice.
Mommy thought it was dangerous for me, or more to the point, for the baby, to spend too much time outdoors. We had weeks and weeks of belowfreezing temperatures and weeks and weeks of temperatures below zero at night. I rarely went out of the house and spent hours and hours alone in my room, reading, sleeping, or just staring out the window.
The cold took its toll on everything. Mommy had trouble with our car. One day after she had left to get some groceries, she didn't return until a little after eight o'clock in the evening because some hose or something had broken, and she had been stranded for hours waiting for help and a tow truck and then for the mechanic to repair the damage.
We had problems with our oil burner. The pipes nearly froze, and the snow was so heavy with one storm after another. Mommy had to give in and hire someone to plow our driveway, two, sometimes three times a week. I recalled how Daddy used to do that with his truck and how Noble and I would ride with him, or we would be permitted to drive the little tractor and plow with it, and then how he and I had done it together after Daddy's death.
Toward the end of these severe winter months, we had ice storms and branches cracked on trees continually. The moonlight would dance on the icy bark, creating a dazzling show in the evening, but Mommy called it the "smile of cold Death, gleefully enjoying its triumph over fragile and vulnerable living creatures surprised by Nature's treachery."
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