by Jeffrey Lent
Leah put aside her held mending. It was too dark to see the needle passing. She stood and lighted the lamp on the side table and crossed over and lighted the one on the end table next to the sofa. Standing there, near Connie, she said, “You and me both know the bad of men. But there’s good too. There’s Norman.”
“Well, yes, there’s Norman. But I shouldn’t care to share even if you would.” And screwed her face up goggle-eyed at Leah. Idiot face. Both women laughed. Fell silent. The room fluid with lamplight. Tentative flickering warmth. Outside in blue dusk Norman crossed to the purple shadow of the barn. A hanging hook of moon over it in the eastern sky. Leah ran her hands over the hard nut of her belly. Connie wrapped her knitting and set it aside and stood. Leah said, “Time to get supper on.”
“I’ll help Norman with the feed-up.”
“I think,” Leah said, “he can manage all right.”
Connie paused, then said, “What I’d like, is some tea.”
“We got that pine-bark tea your mother sent up.” They moved, not quite side by side, down the short hall to the kitchen. Connie said, “No thank you ma’am. I’ll make that mint tea you like.”
“Sounds good to me. I’m about sick of that herb tonic Marthe Ballou brought over for me. Build my blood, she said. Well, my blood’s built enough this one day. Drinking it makes me jealous over that pine-bark.”
“Maybe that’s what I need. A little build-my-blood.”
Leah looked at her. “Sounds to me your blood’s doing just fine.”
Connie shot her brows. “Being home’s not so bad. Except for the shortage of men.”
“There’ll be a man. Soon as you stop looking, one’ll jump right around the corner and scare you to death.”
“Think?”
Leah filled the kettle under the spring-fed line. Connie had the flue and firebox open, pokering the stilled fire back to life. Leah set the kettle on the stove and said, “It happened to me. Happened to me, could happen to anyone.”
Connie added sticks from the woodbox. Shut the stove door and straightened up to face Leah. “Except for the worry,” she said, “I liked it.”
Deep winter January. It had been sometime before Christmas since daytime temperatures rose over zero. Days still of air with light glittering off the hard-crusted snowbanks. Nights thirty to forty below and lying in bed wakened by the gunshot crack of trees bursting with the freeze, Leah swelling and flushed with heat, as if her body were a furnace wrapped around her child. Over the covers her breath hung in the starlight like pale moonlight off the snow. Afternoons she’d venture to the barns, swaddled like a slow-footed bear to review the hens from the walkway between the pens, leaving the filling of feeders and waterers and stoves and lamps to Norman and Connie, feeling henlike as she made her way in the fecund warmth. There were few eggs to gather and the brooder house was closed down. She’d go from there into the horsebarn, colder there, the windows rimed inside with a thick burr of frost, and slowly run a brush over each of the geldings. As a child she feared horses but this team of light drafts were different from saddle or fancy driving horses, capable of sustaining a light even trot on the cart or democrat wagon but happier with the steady step of day work in the woods or fields. Heavy-footed and round, thick-necked with large proud heads, eyes the size of her bunched fist, eyes of a density and depth she’d known on no other creature. Tommy and Pete. She talked to them while she worked over them, inhaling the sweet rich horse dust rising from them as if inhaling something of their spirits or souls. She had no doubt they had souls. She told them everything about the child in her belly. She told them about summer. She knew they remembered summer. She’d carry each a handful of shellcorn, the great soft lips against her palm. She stroked their noses. Small beads of frost chained along their sparse coarse whiskers. She’d warm their noses with her hands and breath and then leave them. They were in her dreams. She felt them to be protectors of her child. She told no one this.
She passed the benchmark of where she’d miscarried the winter before, marking it with silence. The weather had softened enough for several new inches of snow over everything, wiping clean the bootmarks and ash trails laid down on the paths, the scuffs of cinders, chaff and bark rubbish blown down off the hill. The world a new morning. There were times she felt she was living in another country. Not the winter or the place. Times she felt she was another person observing her hands at work over some piece of task. Times she would hum a low soothe that vibrated throughout her and would take her away to nowhere at all; only when back did she know she’d been gone. This could happen alone or not. As if she went away not out but deeply in, far below sense of sound or sight and she would lose everything around her and have only the deep surge of her own bloodstream, the dynamo of pulse a hum in her ears. For minutes at a time. And then resurface abruptly with no sense of having been gone but for the unfamiliar around her. At the supper table, Norman was saying, “Be mid-March now is my guess. Happens like that, it’ll be heavy.”
“Means we’ll be up day and night for a couple of weeks,” Connie agreed. “But I like it. That excitement.”
Leah kept eating. Her baby was due mid-April. She didn’t need to but she counted backward and forward again. About to speak, to correct them, when Norman went on. “I’ve by Jesus never seen a winter without a thaw late January early February. Just cold like this. Bitter cold. But its going to make for a good sap flow. You’d think it less exciting you slung a yoke and trudged the wet snow with sap buckets either side of you, instead of tending the boiling. But you’re right; I look forward to it.”
Connie said, “I could I’d match you in the woods bucket for bucket, and you know it too.”
Norman shook his head. “Yuht, you would. It’ll be on snowshoes this year too. Good for me I guess. Get hardened up for the summer.”
“That’s right. You been lazing around up to the sawpit all winter.”
“Yuht.” Grinned at his sister. Then serious again. “I don’t want the thaw now anyhow. I hate that stop-and-start sugaring. But Christ it could soften a little. I’ve got lambs coming any night now. Hard on those little buggers, this cold.”
Leah stood and carried her plate to the sink, clattering it down, and turned back. Both sitting watching her. Norman said, “You all right?”
Leah said, “I’ve got vinegar pie. Still warm but set up. You all want some?”
Norman nodded, studying her. She’d tried to explain herself to him days before but only managed to confuse and frighten him with her telling him she didn’t feel herself and then found herself reassuring Norman instead of the other way around. Since then, times she felt his eyes on her as if to fathom where she might be. That was fine. Let him keep an eye on her. He said, “I like that vinegar pie.”
Marthe Ballou came down on snowshoes late one bright morning, wearing the heavy green woolen trousers of her husband and a red and black mackinaw. She filled the kitchen with the dense scent of wood-smoked unwashed old woman, sitting with Leah and Connie and drinking coffee, two cork-stoppered bottles removed from her coat pockets before she sat down, the bottles clear glass with the murk tonic within: suffused wild herbs and the tender stripped inner bark of some half-dozen trees. Putting them on the table she said, “You steady now. Thought two see you through. You need more send that man up. Liddle spoon mornings all you need now, lest you got a taste for more. Me, I take it from first snow till dandylions out. Up to you.” Then sat silent drinking her coffee and refusing cookies while the sisters-in-law made chat of the cold and the three thus far new lambs until they ran out of things to say and fell quiet alongside Marthe. Marthe ignored Connie but kept her eyes on Leah throughout. After there had been steady silence for some long moments Marthe looked to Connie and said, “Come to see this one. Leave us lone, hey?”
“Well I—” Connie stood. A short pause with her fingers fluttered before her. Then said, “Gabbing like old geese. There’s work waiting.” Shot her eyes at Leah: sympathy and outrage, the hurt of a child
cut free of a game. Then went into the entryway mudroom and deployed herself with deadly silence, getting into boots and winter wraps and went out, letting in a waft of chill air. Marthe seemed to wait for the chill to lose itself into the warmth of the house and then scraped back her chair, staying down in it but pushing out from the table. She said, “Stand, you.”
Leah raised herself using both hands on the arms of her chair. Upright she faced the old woman: gray greased hair worn loose onto her shoulders, her face lined and charred to a texture of dried root, her nose a small smudge of lumped flesh set beneath great black eyes. Her mouth drooped and chapped to a rough red flake. Leah saw that as a young woman she had not been pretty but beautiful. Did not wonder what had caused her to join life with the half-wild man in the half-wild outward reach of the small gore. Anymore than she would explain herself and Norman. Marthe studied her midsection and then raised a hand, extended it open to its full reach before closing it upon itself and drawing it back toward her. As if bringing something in. She said, “Step close.”
Leah stepped to stand over her, breathing the aroma no different from the tang of fresh-turned soil or the ammoniac of manure or the bronzed bolt of Norman’s armpits the end of a summer day, smells all rending of her childhood and carried forward as if the movement of life itself, and Marthe reached and unbuttoned her dress from below her weighted breasts to her pubic arch, the belly moving outward easily as the fabric slid back against the protrusion, the navel distended. Marthe placed her hands on the abdomen and ran them over it slowly, moving from the center out to the sides and then back in again, a gentle round motion that touched deeper than it felt. Leah stood looking down at the grimed hands seeming to feel and draw something from beneath her own skin. Kneading as if the oldest most fragile loaf in the world. Wordless, worldless. Just hands and the belly under them. Going back once to where there was a slight movement, her hand again not probing but reaching somehow deep under the skin. Just a whisper she said, “Right foot.” Then reached up and opened the top of the dress so the swollen breasts were freed and took each in a hand and held them, weighing them or just letting their weight fall into her hands. Then ran her hands down buttoning the dress and only then did she look up at Leah.
“This baby, she fine. She gon’ be just fine. You fine. Beautiful, you.”
“She?”
Again Marthe put her hands on the belly, covered now. As if explaining she ran her hands again. “She spread around you. Out wide like this. Boy-child be bunched up, high, cutting off you wind. Men start like that, makes it hard to blame them, them not knowing how to stop.”
“A girl.” A whisper. “A little girl.”
Marthe leaned back in her chair, her eyes now bold on Leah. “Most likely. She start coming you send that Norman up after me. Don’ let him get that Hurdle man in here. That man no good at all. Kill a woman bringing out a child. Don’ let that Norman give you no guff. You gon’ have this baby just fine.”
Norman on his knees with one forearm slid into the ewe; a set of gelatinous feet lie along his wrist. Connie kneels at the front, cradling the lowered head with both arms, light comfort coming from her lips, holding the sheep still and upright. The ewe wants to lie down. Her bleats have broken to rasps, her breathing harsh in the cold night. A lantern hangs from a rafter overhead and a hinged two-sided gate leans against the drystone wall. At the other end of the sheepshed is a boulder half the height of a man, broad at the base and flattened at the top: too great to remove when the foundation hole was dug. Leah leans against it, over wrapped in one of Norman’s greatcoats. The lambs born the week before are awake with the lantern light and play king-of-the-mountain on the boulder, butting heads and flying on and off the rock, missing Leah neatly and avoiding the end of the shed where Norman and Connie work. Norman seems absolutely still but Leah can see the muscles of his bared arm flex as he works his hand inside, moving in fractions of inches. He’s silent, letting Connie croon to the ewe. Then, there, the ewe groans and the lamb slides out, Norman’s hand coming with it, under it. His arm thick with blood and mucus lays the lamb on the bedding and clears its mouth and nose of membrane and raises its head and the mouth sucks open and draws air. Norman wipes the lamb dry with burlap sacking and while drying brings it to its feet. The ewe has twisted her head to watch. Connie still holds her. Norman gets the lamb upright against the ewe’s side where it butts against her until striking the soft udder it finds the teat. The bit of tail works. The ewe groans again and a second lamb slides out just as Norman was raising his arm to go back in. He clears this one also and when it’s up and feeding he cleans his arms with the sacking and stands. “Sometimes, with twins, the first one pops the cork.” Leah steps forward to take the lantern while Norman and Connie pen the ewe and lambs with the folding gate against the corner wall. They all three stand side by side a moment and watch the lambs nursing. Norman takes the lantern and checks the other ewes still to lamb. They then go out into the hanging night, the moon great in the sky like the burnished skull of a long gone beast. The snowfields and hills with etched trees and farmstead buildings all softened, fantastic, substantial. Leah pauses a moment behind the brother and sister, watching the world. She loves this as much as a June day. Sometimes wishes at full moon she might sleep through the day and spend nights walking. Walking out in a world the opposite of the one she lives in, a world in reverse. A place where her spirit might be freed, truly freed at last. Freed from the burden of herself. A world that doesn’t exist. She goes on. No lamps are lit in the house, just the faint glow of the lantern where they wait for her at the entryway.
By midmorning he’d be done with what the barns demanded and then he’d file his saws and grind the double-bitted axe and using the heavy harness with brichens he’d hitch the team to the sledge, load in the skidding chains and whippletree and a pair of nosebags with rations of oats and head up to the woodlot. At the sawpit he’d unhitch the team and leave Pete to stand while Tommy followed him, Norman carrying the saw over one shoulder and the axe on the other and together they’d make their way up the broken trail into the woodlot. He’d fell a tree, selecting not just for the thinning but also for a clean fall. Each site held several right choices with twice as many wrong ones. He wanted no hung trees. Down, he’d limb out the log with the axe and saw through either the tip or midsection depending on the size. Most mornings he’d cut two trees, some three. Then Tommy would skid the log out to the pit. Tommy was a skid-horse; stepping off with Norman’s word and going on his own, needing no driving. Would be waiting with the log always just a few feet shy of the end of the skidway when Norman would catch up to him. So Norman would have to say “Step up there” and Tommy would ease the log up. Then Norman would slip on the nose bags with feed for both horses, step into the pit and pull back the old buffalo robe that covered over the peaveys and canthooks and heavy iron bar and using these tools roll the first log out onto the timbers over the pit. And begin sawing twenty-inch chunks from one end then the other of the log, the timbers over the pit set to act not just as guides for size but to keep the log stable until it was down to the final cut. Then it was down into the pit, the fresh sawdust spread sweet on the crusted old broken snow and frozen clotted sawdust from the days before. The pit not a hole in the ground so much as a cave manmade, with the south side open to level ground. Here he split the chunks into stovewood.
As a child with his father, this work took forever. Mornings were endless cold feet and hands and ears. Now alone he could load the sledge in a morning, often unaware he’d taken no break until the sledge was filled. At noontime he’d hitch the team again and take the load down to add to the lengthening cords stacked tight as drystone in ranks behind the entry way woodshed. Water and stall the still-harnessed horses, feed them down with hay and go in to his meal. In the afternoon doing it all again. He could look down from the sawpit onto the backside of the house and see next winters warmth in the gray stacks. Coming in at dusk or later to the kitchen steamed with food, fatigue a pl
easure over him like summer sun, smelling himself as he washed for supper, the sweat and sweet sawdust on him as the skin of a day’s work.
The danger stilled his mind. Danger only started with the felling. Then ran on the bright edge of the axe as he walked the downed tree, limbing. Then the log itself, in motion or containing motion all the way to the pit and then by hand up the skidway. Motion to crush a foot, a leg, a whole man. Then the axe again, rising and falling, quartering the rounds; the axe oddtimes glancing, and always throwing the chunks up to fall about him. And danger in the repetition: letting himself drift to the chickadee working the sawdust chips in the spruce boughs, the snort or thick plash of urine from the geldings, the bay of a hound over the ridge. His right arm pushed outward a small ache during the splitting from the old sabre wound, the ache serving to tether his attention to the bright slice of the axe.