by Jeffrey Lent
Throughout that spring and summer she worked alongside or separate from Norman, caring daily for the long pens of laying hens they’d built into what had once been the basement dairy of the barn, the pens stretching outside in wired runs on the south-facing open slope, dividing the several hundred hens by breed: Rhode Island and New Hampshire Reds, Barred Rocks, Plymouth Rocks and Silver-laced Wyandottes. Daily gathering the eggs in baskets and carrying them to the house basement to candle them and pack them in straw in wooden crates which twice a week were driven to the depot in Randolph where they were shipped to Boston; daily also working in the brooder house newly built according to plans from the agricultural school at the university in Burlington, raking the litter and spreading pine tar on young fowl wounded by others, clipping beaks when she found the warrior bird, culling the sick. She talked to the hens as she went among them, a low fluttering tone of speech half-directed at them and half to herself. She knew them all and would wring a neck when egg production dropped off. Six times a year the brooder house was emptied: young hens joining the laying flock, the young cocks packed two dozen to a crate and shipped south for the live market.
Most of the chicken they ate themselves was stewed, old hens eating more than they laid. Tough meat cooked slow and wet and well seasoned until it fell from the bone, made sweet with patience. Eaten in spring with dandelion greens or fiddleheads or asparagus and sometimes the small dense morels Norman would carry back from the woods, cradling them in his cap held in his hands; in summer with garden vegetables and sometimes great fried slices of the puffballs that would spring up in the pastures like brilliant white boulders; in fall and winter with the great Hubbards or Irish potatoes stored down basement along with carrots and parsnips packed in crates of sand. Always something good to eat and work enough to keep them both long-muscled and hard, both young and fresh enough with strength so that even the long stretching summer days, light by four and still light at half past nine at night, were not long enough. And they could not make a baby. After the fourth miscarriage they stopped speaking of the problem or what might be the cause and went through that spring and summer with the first true remove about them, a slight skim of distance walked with both through everyday, neither willing or able or even conscious to admit to themselves or the other that this was happening to them. Still coming together in the night, both still endless with appetite and it was not then, at the end of the day as dark and sleep came over them, but during the day that both carried the small discontent of attendant fear.
He woke one August midnight to the bed alone, the room cool with pewtered moonlight. He lay waiting even as he knew she was not in the house. Finally he rose and went to the window to stand and was there more than an hour before he saw her coming down from the granite ledges of the high sheep pasture, wearing the old shirt of his that she slept summers in. Still stood as she came into the house and he saw the faint flare of light from a kitchen lamp spread from the window below onto the dark of the yard, stood listening long enough to know that she was cooking something, baking something, and would not be back to bed, not soon.
When he rose again at four-thirty and went downstairs the kitchen was seasoned with steaming loaves and a pair of blackberry pies and he thought She was up there picking berries in the dark. She was still wearing only her nightshirt and was turning eggs in the pan, coffee already hot on the stove. He went to her and held her from behind, his elbows against her sides and his hands over her breasts and so felt the familiar new weight to them even as she spoke, her voice steady as her body was tight. “Trying again, Norman.”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s good.”
She slid the egg pan to the cold end of the stove. She didn’t turn around to face him. She said, “You got to tell me it’s going to be all right.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure it is.”
She still wasn’t moving. Letting his hands hold her, letting his body come up against her backside, but not giving anything into this embrace. She said, “No. You got to promise me.”
He didn’t understand. “We just have to see I guess.”
She turned then, still inside his arms and took his shirtfront in her fists, the hands small hard-curled knobs, tugging him toward her and pushing him back, a wild rocking, her eyes sprung wide and flaring. “You got to promise me Norman. You got to promise me.”
He stood there while she pummeled him, making no effort to stop her as if he deserved this, as if it were all his doing, his fault, as if he deserved not this simple sharp beating but something far worse; pressed between grinding stones. He held her until her breath was gone to sobs and her hands lay flat and still on his chest, all the while keeping his hands at rest against her back and when she was done and cried against him he still said nothing. Just held her standing there in the kitchen ripe with yeast. Then soft to a near silent whisper he said, hating himself for not being sure of it, not able to believe himself but sure it must be said, “I promise”.
Bringing her home, what he had not foreseen was not so much the drift away of his own family but the estrangement, the voluntary withdrawal, the displacement he felt toward the neighbors and villagers themselves. Times he felt he’d lost something and times he felt if he’d returned alone it would be the same: as if not the dark-skinned woman but the war he found her in was where he’d lost any sense of common-hold with other men. As if the affairs of humans had been revealed to him as puny maunderings, rife with self-interest and greed, little more than spinning of blood and brood to enthrall all inward toward a latch onto the world that was not so much a turning away from the dark as blunt refusal to acknowledge how frail the light was. Norman did not hold himself separate through any belief he was beyond or above all this but a lack of interest so sincere as to frighten him a little when he paused too long upon it. All he wanted was his daily round of work, the blood pleasure of sweat and muscle fatigue and the satisfaction of mild accomplishment and to follow this then with the woman who seemed such a part of him as if she’d stepped whole out from some corner of his soul; as if he’d lacked a part of himself never known missing until confronted with it: this he wanted and—as the years brought the miscarriages—children with her, at first children for her and then clear as grief after the third miscarriage, children for himself as well. He was to wonder silent if that failure of wanting on his part had played some role in those lost children. And he was to learn as well that she was not only that missing part of himself but a self full-blown in contradiction and turmoil far too great to have ever only been held silent in himself. Her temper roiled from her as easily as her passion; often he thought of them as each the backside of the other. He did not know rage in himself except in that one unending sweep of war years and that was not a rage to inform his life once left behind; as if that raised spectre of the human was now too great for him to confront, let him go mend harness or cultivate potatoes. He did not know if this began with the war’s end or his finding Leah; there was no way of distinction. He wondered if he’d been this way perhaps even as a child but there was no one to ask and no way to formulate the question even if there had been. That child was a stranger to him, as much lost as his father. As much lost as the world of his neighbors and townsfolk.
That first year he’d learned much. He learned more than Leah. Because what he learned constricted the world he’d thought he’d known. Leah reported village children following her through the streets and one bold boy who stepped forward and without asking took her arm in his hands and rubbed at her skin as if to loosen the pigment. Also the gawking and murmurs as she passed. Even the women standing side by side with hands flapped loose against their mouths as if to conceal the words they meant for her to hear as she passed. Even the merchants who ignored her until other latecomers had come and gone. It was all more or less what she had expected. Not the place she had come from. And so was puzzled first and then reluctant and then adamant with refusal when Norman offered to do what shopping must be done. This not a possibil
ity she’d consider. So it was left to Norman to set limits of whom they would and would not trade with, she smart enough perhaps even before him to not demand reasons. It was the place he knew, not she. So they carried trade in sundries and dry goods to Allen Bros. because Ira Allen offered the same clipped milk-eyed service to anyone, Leah or Norman or a grimed child wanting a penny’s worth of horehound or lemon drops. To Gould the harness maker for that work as well as boots and shoes and to Mose Chase for smithing parts for the machinery and implements. It was Chase who built the stoves and shaded lights for the brooder houses. Contracted with Flannagan the Irish farrier from Bethel to come twice a year with his ox-drawn wagon to the farm, spring and fall to shoe the horses, adding heavy caulks in the fall against the ice. Because it was the Randolph farrier Harringdon who caught Norman by the sleeve to ask if it was true those dusk women’s slit went sideways, Norman saying as if passing on fresh news that No it was just like the mares the smith tupped, up and down like all the rest of creation. The woman Norman did not know who came upon him on the street and beat his face with her open hands, him standing silent before her rant over her lost husband and both boys, as if their deaths were for nothing than for him to bring home love. Worse than all this were the handful of veterans missing a limb or more who would not speak but ran eyes hot over him as if he were their loss, him walking with both arms and the woman up the hill. There was nothing to be said. Not to them, not to the rest. He did his business and went home.
There was little they needed of the village. One time weekly or twice as the season called for, one or the other would drive the load of eggs and perhaps crates of young roasters to the station and then pick up what passed for mail and penciled list in pocket make the short rounds. They had all they wanted otherwise and so cared less for the town than it for them. First Tuesday of March, Norman went to Town Meeting and sat throughout, feeling his presence huge with silent condemnation before his neighbors. Business was conducted. He would speak his aye or nay and had done enough. Every other November he’d go down to vote. Beyond this he felt no civic drive; let them make their choices, it all came to the same thing. He left these obligations eager for the farm and whatever chore was postponed. Eager for the sight of her. He was twenty-six and she twenty-two after her fourth miscarriage the summer she was pregnant again. He did not understand his age; it made no sense to him. He did not know himself in the mirror or reflected in the other young men of the village he saw time to time. The middle-aged tradesmen seemed worn out from nothing. It was the silent old men he felt kinship toward. The ones he guessed who understood that life was partial at best. Everything else was grandiose imagination. He wanted nothing more than his feet on the ground. It was a tremendous thing to ask for. When Leah made him promise their child would come, it was the first time since the grapeshot concussed beside him that he felt he could not carry on all alone. His fear was so great that he could not ponder it, could not let it tag his days. He sat down at the pigeon-holed desk that same night and wrote a letter.
His mother had moved herself and Connie to the village three weeks after Norman first brought Leah home almost six years before. Cora Pelham then telling her son the move was for the girl, that she’d been overheard telling girlfriends of the noise coming through the attic floorboards nightly; Norman with heat in his face accepting this, knowing it was the one way his mother could silence him to acquiescence even as she went on in a burst of apparent candor explaining that it was only natural for a young married man to satisfy himself upon his wife, he watching her through this for the certain deception in her face, unwilling to accept that she might have lain with his father as burden. Realizing she censored with her actions even as she draped words over them. He listened with an odd slow pity, not sure if it was for her or his dead father.
“What I think, you’re spoiling her.” Holding her ribboned hat in her lap, her loosed hair flaying her face, the curls grown out to a thick bundle.
“Could be.” The reins tight against the backs of the bays, the geldings he’d traded for just after the war, getting rid of the team that included the mare that killed their father. “Could be just what she needs. Some peace of mind. Might do the trick. And, long’s you’re willing, won’t hurt, is how I see it.”
“It’s why I came,” Connie said. “But I won’t wait on her.” And then added, “I wouldn’t wait on anybody.”
Norman watched a bobolink bending a roadside stalk. Careless, he said, “Wasn’t thinking of anybody waiting on anyone. Just a set of hands to lighten the load.”
“I’m a set of hands then.”
“I was thinking more the company of a woman.”
“Mother wouldn’t do for that.”
It was not a question but he answered anyway. “She’s well settled at Breedlove’s. I believe she’s happy off the farm and wouldn’t want to come back except I asked.”
“I was happy off the farm too.”
“My asking was no commandment.”
“If you don’t know it was, you know less than I thought, Norman. It is fine to be back though. I doubt my lungs’ll ever clear all that crud.”
“I couldn’t ever tell if you were happy or not, down to Manchester.”
“It wasn’t happy or no. Not much in the way of opportunity for a single woman in these hills.”
“Thought you might catch a husband down there.” As they came upon it the bobolink lifted and coasted over the road before the trotting team, planing down into the river elms on the other side. The horses’ backs sweat shining.
“Oh,” she said, “I guess I could, that was what I wanted.” Her tone defiant with failure. He glanced at her, his compact pretty sister, and wondered what that story might be and if he’d hear it. Not from her. Leah perhaps. She went on. “Mostly, it was the awful monotony of the work. Five days ten and a half hours a day and a half of Saturday cooped up inside with the dust and noise from the looms and spinning machines. It wasn’t the work itself, just there seemed nothing human about it. Funny to say that, working with thousands of other people around you and comparing it to chasing cows across a pasture and thinking the cows more human than the woman at the next stitcher over. I liked the work all right and I liked making the money but I was ready enough to come home time your letter came asking. I worked next to people came into that mill when they were twelve or thirteen and will be there till they die or close to it. I couldn’t imagine that for myself, never once. Truth is I thought it would lead to something else and I guess maybe it has. Although there’s no telling what I’ll do when you’re done with me.”
He thought of Leah creating a minor poultry industry with no model and said, “When we chuck you out the door like a broken chair. Can’t say for sure but it seems to me there’s maybe more opportunity in the old burg than you’re thinking. And you’ve got plenty of time to find out. Might even be some single young fellers around town; you never know.”
She snorted. “Any still around Randolph are ones still wet behind the ears or lacking the gumption to go west.”
“Like your brother,” he said.
She looked at him. They’d turned off onto the road leading up to the farm. That spring Norman had leveled it, drawing a loaded stone boat up and down to flatten and smooth the gravel down into the dirt, working with a pick and shovel at the worst washes and clearing the ditches by hand. The road now in the end of August hardpacked and almost black, cool in the shade. The team kept their gait easily up the grade. Connie said, “No. You don’t lack gumption. Imagination either. I just don’t know what your problem is, Norman.”
“Could be there’s not one.”
“You still holding on to that flock of sheep?” Imp’s grin.
He smiled back at her. “Devil me about my sheep. That poultry puts a nice dollar in the wallet but it wouldn’t feel like a farm without the sheep. The wool price makes it a loss to shear and ship but the market’s good down to Boston for the spring lamb.”
She turned her hat in her hands,
nervous now as they came over the rise into the bowl of the farm. “A man’s a strange creature, Norman. Each and every one is capable of great surprise, maybe even to themselves.”
“Likely so. I like to think I’ve used up my share of surprise.”
“You should hope so, Norman.”
Norman and Leah in the pantry off the kitchen, the shelves lined with hot-packed summer vegetables in glass jars with glass lids and rubber seals and metal bails, tins of flour and meal, crocks of pickle and sacks of dried beans; they stood talking in tones urgent, hushed, as if the speaking suffered threat of interruption. Leah held his hands and stood close to him, her breath sweetly cooling in the close warmth of the summer afternoon.
“I’m not going to lie in the bed for six months. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even if somebody was to tell me, the doctor, somebody. I couldn’t stand it. Who says that’s what I should do, anyway? Who says it’s even me? Could be something with you. You thought about that, Norman?”