XI
Enidina
(Spring–Summer 1936)
The way I heard it told you have to burn it out of you. You have to be strict about it. Consistent. The doctor had given me only months as I had the consumption, and I took to keeping turpentine and grease on my chest. Around my neck I wore a shawl covered with the stuff. Later, when my breathing grew difficult, I spent my nights sleeping in the fields. The summer of ’36 was hot and dry, almost as bad as ’34. The stalks of corn broke at a touch, the leaves yellow and bitten through. The daytime passed without a wind, the corn falling, but I was bent on saving it, my hands brushed with dirt for luck. I could taste the turpentine every time I coughed.
It had been three years since I’d had much to do with our neighbors. Three since Jack had come with his knife. Though we were slow in using it, we kept the money we got for the hogs he’d killed. Frank never let out what that man did. He himself had been the one, Frank said, who’d finished them off. Not Jack. I kept my opinions to myself.
Of any of that family only Kyle walked the distance between our farms. Every other day he came, and my Donny trailed after him as if the way that Morrow boy spoke, the fear and hunger in him, were the very qualities he wanted for himself. They went hiding out in the fields on “missions.” Took to the lake for fishing, though neither seemed able to hold a line. As Kyle grew older, I’m sure he shared with Donny a word or two about drink and girls. I doubted Kyle knew much about them himself. Still, those bruises on Kyle, they must have given him a great deal of mystery, at least for my son. Time and again, I took Kyle by the arm and made him sit in my kitchen where I could doctor to him.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Kyle shrugged. “Not any more.” The boy looked starved and fragile as a hatchling. I made a poultice and held him still until it set. “Does your mother know?” I asked.
“It’s not Dad’s fault,” Kyle said.
“It isn’t?”
“He gets mad, is all.”
“But Kyle …”
The boy looked away. “Where’s Addie?” he asked. He winced when he tried to talk.
“Upstairs,” I said.
I took hold of his chin, moving his head back and forth to see the cut on his lip. He strained against my hand, trying to look up, and I looked up with him. Adaline jumped from her bed above us and slammed her door. I clicked my tongue, but Kyle wouldn’t take his eyes off that ceiling.
“She’s a spitfire, that girl.”
He nodded.
“Going to be a handful. For any man she marries, I mean.”
Kyle looked at me and reddened. “Gotta go, Mrs. Current,” he said. “Gotta find Donny.” He backed out of the kitchen, skinny and pale and limping. My fingers were sticky with paste.
It had been Donny’s idea to learn the horse. He’d heard from Kyle about the animal’s speed. Said the boy had showed him with his hand how high he’d sit on its back, how well he’d ride it. But I’d seen them walk home after only the first try, Adaline, Donny, and their father to keep them in line. With dust on his skin and clothes, head to toe, Donny looked anything but pleased about the way it went.
“You should have been there, Mother,” Adaline started.
“The horse reared,” Frank said.
“When he was riding it?”
“No, not riding it. Not yet.”
Donny hid his hands behind his back, but already I’d seen how raw they were.
“Donny had just taken hold of the rope when the horse reared, almost dragged him under. That’s what happened to his hands.” Frank slapped Donny’s shoulder, forcing a grin. “You know, Donny. That rope is there to keep the horse down. On the ground, I mean. It’s not for flying.” Frank tried to laugh, but Adaline stood from her chair, her eyes wet. “Now there,” Frank said to Adaline. “It’ll be all right. He just has to be careful.”
“Addie,” I said.
Frank reached for her, but the girl rushed up the stairs. “Adaline,” I called. Her bed creaked above our heads as if she’d thrown herself into it. Frank drew a nervous hand through his hair.
I nodded to Frank to ease him and brought out a can of lard to rub into Donny’s skin. I knew no amount of mothering could calm that girl. Not for a while at least. Even as they came in, the three had watched me, the shawl I wore carrying such a stench. They had a way of cupping their noses, breathing through their mouths. All of them were afraid, you could see it. Donny and Adaline stepped away whenever I came near. They bothered me if I stayed outside for long. The sun was too hot, they complained, or too bright. As if the light and heat could set the shawl afire.
I held my son’s hands in mine, small as they were and bleeding. The lard would cool his skin, but peroxide might keep him from infection. Donny was tough and broad even as a boy, a bear of a child with my own build and temperament. But baby fat still clung to his fingers. The doughy cheeks he’d been born with, they hadn’t yet left him. He showed the same bruises now as our neighbor down the road, but from an entirely different animal.
That horse. I could imagine it well enough. Imagine the way Donny could walk under the animal’s flank without even having to bend. “Enough now,” I said to him, though I couldn’t be sure the boy listened. “Your father says you have to be careful. It’s a horse, but it’s a wild one. Keep your sense.” I imagined the horse kicking him. One strike could send my son to the ground and then the speed of its legs as it ran. Donny pulled away from me. I’d been holding his hands too tightly, what with his sore skin. He stood from the table, twisting out of my arms, and I opened my fingers and let go.
“Don’t mind him,” Frank said, and clapped his hands on the table to be done with it. But I knew it wasn’t done. It might never be. With such an animal, I knew that at least.
We’d had a hard few years after the rains, as had everyone. In the summer of ’34 we planted crops as usual, but with the drought we didn’t raise a bite. The stock were starving for feed and water. It was almost too hot to breathe. From the nineties in the shade, the temperature climbed above a hundred and ten and stayed for fifteen days. Frank dragged a mattress out to the back porch and took to sleeping there at night with the twins. In the middle of August, a breeze came through my bedroom window about midnight and it sprinkled rain. I ran to tell them, but Frank didn’t trust the weather enough to move his mattress. Still, from that day on it felt close to livable again.
Nineteen thirty-five was a poor crop year just the same, but we did raise a little something. Still, our shade trees finished dying from the burn-up they got the year before. The bank raised the interest on our loan and we had to let eighty acres go, but agreeing to bankruptcy saved the rest. This was almost unheard of then, shameful as it seemed to most. We knew other farmers talked about it whenever they met in town. It was the same as accepting charity. Taking something that wasn’t yours to begin with and not paying what was owed, from the government no less. But we didn’t have five hundred men to keep the state from bothering us, as they did over in Cedar County when the governor tried to test milk. And our neighbors wouldn’t crowd out buyers from an auction at any foreclosure. After the trouble with the hogs, after keeping our sow, we’d lost quite a bit of trust with the town. Bankruptcy, it was different than the money we’d gotten from Wallace. It paid for failure, or so they saw it. Helping only the ones who asked. With the hogs, we at least had to do something hard, something like work. With bankruptcy, we didn’t raise a sweat. And we’d benefited well from it, keeping over half our land while the others turned up their noses at any kind of handout. Still they lost everything they had. For weeks, Frank and I struggled over the decision. The land was ours. It was who we were. Those acres, they were our very life together. Some twenty-odd years of marriage and work.
It was the next summer that my lungs started to fill. The doctor listened to the liquid in my chest and ordered me to bed. At night I made myself a pallet of wood and blankets and slept outside near the fields. This did me some good. There was a slight wind, the smell of the ground. I breathed it in, wrapped my shawl close. During those nights, Adaline brought a blanket for herself and laid it out at some distance to watch me sleep. I kept my eyes shut, though I was well awake. Only when she believed I wasn’t listening would she talk. “I’ve decided on it, Mother,” she said. “I’m going to marry Stan Wilson. He’s skinny, but Dad says boys change plenty by the time they grow, and his folks live in town. That’s what I like.” She was quiet for a while and I heard her rustle in her blanket. The moon was high and bright. She could have seen the shawl around my chest without even squinting. “You’ve got to be careful,” she said at last. That rustling sound, she was biting her fingers like she did when she worried. In the last year of my sickness, she was often biting them, so much I thought I’d have to bandage her hands. “That awful thing you wear.”
I raised my head, shrugged the shawl from my shoulders, and the rustling stopped. “What about Kyle?” I asked. Adaline didn’t speak after that, but still she stayed. After a time, I turned as if falling asleep again, and she let out a breath. It was a safe time for her to be with me. At night, the fires in her head seemed to lessen.
“Kyle,” she said at last. “He’s something, I guess.” And with your mother, I knew that something was a great deal more. It was bigger than she knew herself. She wouldn’t let out another word, but I could tell she was thinking it over. By early morning when at last she slept, I carried her back inside the house.
Already a sense of cool was returning to me. On those mornings when I brought my girl to her bed, she was light and easy in my arms. My chest felt loose, my breathing full. I was less afraid it would run out. Just before I slept, I could hear the leaves shifting and the groans of the good earth I believed still waited beneath the topsoil. The stalks, I imagined, were tall, well grown. And with the shawl around me, I seldom coughed.
But in truth, the fields were no different. The leaves hung with grasshoppers. Dirt drifted under our doors and through the cracks between the windows. In the distance, the horizon wavered like smoke, and the wind never stopped its grazing. This place had become strange to me, or I to it. I’d lived in such countryside all my life. I never thought I could survive in a place that wasn’t as flat and plain as a plate, where little was hidden. Now the absence that hung over the land seemed something I could touch. Frank and I took to sitting on the porch in the daytime, watching the sun take our crops as it would. Before us, the corn hummed with insects and brittle leaves. A terrible, hungry sound.
It was Adaline who next took a fever, though the doctor claimed it wasn’t the same as mine. Donny walked the road to the Morrows alone. He was so set on that horse, he refused now even to have his father along. Still, without his sister, that boy seemed just about helpless. The rim of his hat broke, his lip showed a bloody crack. Adaline’s loyalty was that fierce. “He’s home,” I told her when she woke from her sleep, hearing his footsteps in our yard.
“That animal isn’t right, mother,” she said, sitting up.
“Have you told him?”
“It’s Kyle. He’s the one who keeps Donny going.” She closed her eyes before she finished and sank back, already in a sweat.
The horse was worse with Donny every time. It wouldn’t be tamed. Even Frank was convinced of it. Donny walked up the porch steps, threw himself into the shade.
“You should think about quitting this,” my husband said, waking in his chair. “No harm giving up what never gives you a chance.”
But Donny said nothing. Every day Frank tried to keep the boy home by not going with him, sure the boy wouldn’t go by himself. But Frank never could understand stubbornness, not even my own. Adaline fell asleep again and I tucked my shawl around her throat and chest. By the morning, she’d have thrown it off.
At last I walked to the Morrows’ farm to see the animal myself, to see what it was capable of. I stood at the edge of their land and watched from a good distance. Kyle held the horse by a rope, and the animal circled the corral. It kicked when the rope stopped it short, running and jerking in circles until the length of the rope stopped it again. Only when Kyle gave it free rein did the horse show itself well. It was smooth and tight in its running, its hooves carving up the dirt. But even from where I stood, I could see how skinny the animal was. How this running didn’t have much to do with strength but with something more desperate. With its ribs showing, the horse twisted its pale neck, its eyes rimmed with white. Kyle whipped at it to keep it going.
The boy himself looked like a stick figure beneath the sun. Tall but hardly grown. Five years older than Donny but seeming less. He was an unusual one too, not big like his father but slight in build and delicate. His face had been beautiful from the day he was born. Still, on that afternoon, his limbs carried a kind of meanness. He stood with a girl his age who was curly-haired and slim, pretty enough for distraction, and Kyle called out in awe of the animal, “Look at him.” But the girl couldn’t keep herself from looking. Kyle must have known it as she held on to his arm, breathing hard the way a sudden wind does a person. This wasn’t an ordinary animal. This horse was a powerful thing.
Behind the Morrows’ winter fences, I stood my watch. The knot of the shawl rose and fell against my throat. The horse got little affection. Not from its owner or anyone else. Turning the rope, Kyle kept on and kept on while the animal ran. Soon he forgot the girl altogether, watching only the horse. Watching it and wiping the sweat from underneath his hat. I could see it in the way he stared at the animal, grinning. He liked to watch the horse go. He liked to drive it too far, just as his own father drove him, and every time the rope caught it short, I flinched. That horse was meant to go. It was meant to be gone.
That was the way your mother went. She had her reasons, what with you so unexpected and this place like tinder to her. My boy, before you were born, I’d seen how she grew with you, though she tried to hide it as much as she could. I knew it in the way she touched her hand to her stomach, stopping when she walked into a room. She caught her breath, the blood high in her cheeks. Under her hand was the beating of a child she was too young to have. Restless, it felt, that child. Little more than a rippling in her belly, but willful enough to make itself known. I remember it well, you see. Sometimes even now I can feel that life in me just the same. When I was young, I believed it was a beginning. I believed nothing could take away a child that could drum so under my skin. And I felt powerful because of it. Little did I understand it wouldn’t last.
For years I hadn’t seen any boy of your likeness in town. But the last time I went, months ago, before I was bound to this bed, I believed I’d found you in the market, and I hid behind the shelves. There you stood at the counter, that black hair of yours against your skinny frame. What I could see of your face seemed the same as Kyle’s, his dark eyelashes and the set of his mouth, as innocent as any child. The boy bought a pack of gum, a set of playing cards, and a pencil. With such a pencil, I thought, a child could write his grandmother. If he knew she existed at all. The boy popped his gum, and Mr. Reed dropped change into his hand. I watched how the man did it. One of his fingers brushing the boy’s own in that distracted way people have. He didn’t seem to notice. How close he came.
But when that boy turned, I knew he wasn’t one of my own. His mouth was too full, his eyes strange. I crouched behind the shelves and felt tired of being wishful. Of looking for anyone who might be my own kin. When I came out from hiding, Mr. Reed seemed to know what I’d been wishing for. He looked me over as I dropped my bread on his counter and said the price as if asking too much. When at last he gave me change, he brushed my fingers with his. That man nodded to me as if that was the best he could do. Knowing you were mine. That I had every right to you. “Good day, Eddie,” he said, as if he could understand. Of all my trips to town looking for you, that was my last.
There’s no stopping a child from doing what he wants. I know that as well as anyone. My boy, I hope you believe I tried. The next day or the next, I went again with Donny to the Morrows, no matter how he complained. When we turned the final bend, the corral looked quiet. But when the horse stepped through the gate, the dust rose. When Kyle saw us come, he climbed into the corral and took the rope, whipping at the horse to get it running. The boy wanted to impress me, I could tell. But I believe that horse knew what would drive that impression home.
“Kyle,” I said, but before I could let out another word, Donny had climbed over the fence and hoisted himself on the animal’s back. Then the horse was off. I looked for Kyle to stop it, but Kyle only lifted his hat to me and waved. “Donny, you hear?” I called, pulling myself over the fence. When I stepped into the animal’s path and waved my arms, it passed me without a flinch. The animal’s flank heaved as it rushed, my son with only two thin reins to hold. Kyle whipped its legs and Donny’s mouth opened without a sound. The horse turned about the yard once, twice, Kyle pitching the rope high. The Morrows’ house cast a heavy shadow on the yard. It stood large and blank-faced. Not a soul at its lidded windows. Not even Mary looking out. Beyond it, the fields bent under the wind, the leaves on the stalks of corn showed their silver sides, and a haze shivered on the horizon. The corn under that sun, it didn’t look natural. And the way my boy clung to the animal seemed desperate and clouded in dust. When the horse circled again, it flung its head. The fence behind me shook and Donny slipped to the horse’s side, gripping the mane. Kyle lost hold of the rope and cried out, but still the animal ran. The horse drove Donny against the far fence. It grazed the planks as Donny hung on, the reins knotted now around his hands. It tried to force him off, hanging my son on the fence by his collar as if he were a doll. It raced along that fence over and again, as if the animal couldn’t do anything but run, and it trampled Donny when the fence fell.
I should stop myself from telling you this. A child shouldn’t know so much. That was the start of your mother’s leaving. Eleven as she was herself at the time, as her own brother had been. Two months ago, eleven was your last birthday. Until then, I was hopeful. I made the same pancakes, but with honey and melon this time, and I lit a row of candles. I sat at the end of my table where I could see the clock. The ocean, your mother had written just a week before. Rhode Island, the stamp said. It’s not so very different, she wrote. The way the water looks flat and doesn’t change. You’d think there wasn’t a thing living in it, but it’s terrible how much. When I looked at a map in town, Rhode Island seemed lost up there in the corner. A state so small and crowded, there didn’t seem to be room for a person at all. I wondered why Adaline was going farther still. When she knew how important eleven was and how much I worried. Those candles on the pancakes burned. I lit another row and another. At last I didn’t have any more in the box. Sitting at that table, I got to thinking. It’s that thinking that put me in this bed. Your mother never did mention you in her letters. I figured she would when she got through being nervous. But eleven should have done it. At eleven, she should have come back. There must have been some reason she didn’t. Maybe you never made it to eleven at all.
It was late in the afternoon when I carried my boy home, though I stayed in our yard to watch over him. When I raised the shawl from my shoulders, the smell bent me double with coughing. I drew the shawl over Donny, head to foot. Behind me, Frank looked out in the coming darkness. He joined me on the grass, touched Donny’s leg and drew back. “Sit with me for a while,” I said, but I knew Frank wouldn’t sit for long. I couldn’t imagine how it must be for him, so torn was I with what I’d seen. The way Kyle had whipped the horse’s legs. The way the animal had circled, Donny holding on. Frank hugged the boy to his chest.
I would stay crouched on my knees through the night and into the early morning. Every few hours, Frank paced the yard, looking smaller and grayer each time. He never said a word to hurry me. He never so much as scraped his foot on the ground. The fields in front of me blurred. The few clear breaths I took turned to smoke. I dozed where I sat, my head snapping back whenever it fell. Donny and the way he held on. The way he hung from that fence post. When I picked him up, he was hardly more than bones. And when I carried him off, his blood stained the corral. I must have been covered with the same myself.
All this time they’d worried over me, that shawl an omen on my back. Now in my sleep, I saw the fire they’d dreaded. I imagined the fields slapped down by a mighty hand. I thought of the stove we hadn’t dared light in the summer and the matches I carried in my pocket. Such a blaze. I knew I’d seen something like it years ago. Something fantastic and final. A single strike. The match would catch and sputter, making a charred circle in the grass. Soon the shawl over Donny would melt, taking my boy away with it. But I would have to be the one to start it. To save my son from being forgotten. With Donny wrapped in fumes and the heat of the sun rising at my back, I believed I couldn’t do otherwise.