XIII
Enidina

(Summer 1936–Spring 1937)

They brought me to my mother’s after the fire. I’d asked Frank for this while I lay in my bed that afternoon, listening to the fire outside dampen and the calls of the men. Frank was sweating as he held my hand. He said our house would be safe, the fire had turned and was heading down the field. Outside, the men worked to remedy what I’d begun. The doctor claimed me cured of my fevers. He told Frank, “Take her to her mother’s. It’s all she wants.”

In a borrowed car, Frank drove me to her home and my Adaline came with me. I felt sick with moving so fast, used as I was to wagons even then. I tried to think of something slow and remembered leaning against my mother’s leg as a child. Back then, at the turn of the century, all the world seemed to be breaking apart. Many were looking for the Second Coming. Some even took their own lives. In the summer of 1899, our town seemed to close up altogether. Houses emptied or fell silent, the people inside losing themselves one way or another. Poisons, rope, blades, or drowning. But never the grandmothers, it seemed. Never the old. Then the last of it, the wife who’d lost three children to fevers from the winter before. Without a penny in her pocket or so much as a loaf of bread in a paper sack, she left town on foot. The ones who saw her go said she walked without hurry, as if she had a destination well in mind. She kept her eyes on the horizon. She never wavered. Never looked back. When they found her weeks later, she had gone more than a hundred miles and dropped to her knees when she grew tired. She had died like that.

My father was done with religion then and kept us from church, but my mother read her Bible when she wanted. Sitting on the floor at her feet, I could smell her lap, warm and damp under her dress. I’d rarely been so close. What I’d heard about the woman who walked away and all the rest troubled me, and I asked her would He come.

My mother answered by stopping her work and tapping her Bible on the table next to her chair. “Nothing like that’s to happen to us,” she said. “Not anytime before the year 1939.” She looked up through the ceiling and I couldn’t see her face. Her neck was marbled with veins. “And you have to believe that, Enidina. It’s written down and has been for some time.” My mother grew quiet then and went back to her stitching. She had saved her rags and the rags of her neighbors in a basket at her side. Now she smoothed them into strips and pieced them together. Those rugs she made, they were just like my grandmother’s. Like the ones my mother tried to teach me. Braiding them, it’s how women told each other things. She started with something old, something others thought rubbish, but what she stitched spilled out from her neat and warm and wanting of a house. When I saw each rug she made, with no holes or loose stitching, I believed she knew of such matters. She knew the ways of a thing breaking apart and she knew how to fix it and she was holding the Coming off from our house until the year 1939.

But in the days after the fire, I had my doubts. Nineteen thirty-nine was only three years off. My dress was dark with smoke and still reeked of it. In our yard I’d waited too close to see how my son went. Walking into my mother’s house, I carried his smoke in with me. My mother sat stitching in her chair, but Adaline pulled at her until the rags she worked slipped out of her hands.

“Where’s the other one?” my mother asked.

It was Frank who answered, standing at the door as he was. “There was a fire,” he said. Without a sound, he had come in and dropped our bags on the floor. I never thought a person could grieve in so much quiet. My boy, I feared I’d lost him with what I’d done. But when Frank touched my arm in my mother’s house, he let his hand rest there for a while and warm the both of us. Finally he said he had to go.

I stood in the light of the doorway as the car pulled onto the road. Looking back, Frank lifted his hand to me and let it fall. My mother caught hold of Adaline and tried to settle her, but she only loosened the rags from my daughter’s grip. The girl tore around the room, upsetting the piano bench, and my mother took the rags in her fists and kissed them, pressing them roughly against her cheeks. Up the stairs Adaline went, roaring above us and banging every door. Outside the sun was setting and the house felt close in the coming darkness. Night would be a relief to me. That morning I’d seen such a bright hot thing in the field. I didn’t know what I’d done or what would come of it. I only knew it came from me.

I sat on my mother’s floor again and leaned against her legs. She went back to her stitching, though her hands shook with grief. She was going blind, my mother. The neighbors no longer wanted the rugs they’d paid for, the colors now a bright and curious mix of her own choosing. They had to give them away. Still, they were fine pieces of work. Smooth and careful in their stitching. “Is it now?” I asked as her fingers turned. I was sleepy and in the dark room what I believed of any Second Coming seemed fit for the morning. I coughed with the smoke still clinging to me and reached around my shoulders, but the shawl was no longer there.

My mother kept at her rags, clearing her throat as if to convince herself. “Children die, Eddie. It’s not God who does it.” Her eyes grew wet and she blinked. Taking hold of my hands, she kissed them, and I wondered if she could taste the salt that stained my cheeks. Above us, Adaline ran in a fury down the hall. I remembered how I’d felt for the matches in my apron early that morning. It was fire I’d been dreaming of, keeping vigil as I did that night outside with my son. I dropped one match and the ground took the flame, the stalks going with it. In my fever, the fire spread faster than I could have imagined. When finally I turned back to the house, there was your mother at her window, gripping the sill. How I’d hoped to save her from that sight. How sure I was that no other burial would do for my son. But Donny had always been more his sister’s child than my own.

“You’ve got to watch out for her now,” my mother said. “She’ll slip away from you quick as rain. Keep her close.” She looked at her stitching again and measured the rug against her chest. “This is for you, Eddie,” she said, folding the rug across my knees. “For when you go home.”

•  •  •

Two days later the trucks still lined the road in front of our house, our neighbors crowding in. They were curious to see the fields and to see where the fire had stopped at the ditches along the road. It didn’t spread to anyone else’s land. None of them had suffered a loss to complain about. Leaning out their husbands’ windows, the women hooked their elbows over the doors, and the children peeked through the passengers’ sides, sometimes three heads together. The men waited by their tires or gathered in a circle, watching as we passed by. I suppose that was what they’d come for.

Most of our crop was gone. The stalks stood like spent torches or lay broken in the soil. The trucks crowded each other, but now none of the men would set foot in the fields, afraid whatever fever had caused the fire might spread to wives of their own. We pulled into our yard and I touched my feet to the ground. I could smell it again, the fire, the burnt-up corn, and the animals, safe in the barn. They were quiet now. Though their pails were full, Frank said they wouldn’t eat. In time, he figured, they would grow hungry enough. All at once the trucks started their engines. The roar echoed against our house, all of it noise.

When we stepped in, Mary was there again and I wasn’t surprised to see her. She stood over the stove wearing my apron, a towel in her hand and her hair tucked behind her ears. I watched her warily. When she opened the stove, it sent out such a heat that we all fell into place at the table and didn’t speak. For the first time in days, even Adaline was quiet. She rested her head against her father’s chest and he drew his arm around her, his mouth working at something he was holding back. Since the drive from my mother’s place, he hadn’t yet said a word.

Mary set out our plates and left a pile of forks and knives between us. She poked her fork into a potato on the stove and the fork went easily through. Her face was red with the heat and fallen. Her cheeks, her mouth. She seemed older now, and the corner of her eye twitched. My face still stung from Mary’s hand. I’d said something cruel and meant it. “You and yours,” I’d said. But except for that twitch Mary seemed too wearied now to do anything at all. She rolled the potatoes onto our plates and we stared at them between our empty hands. When finally she bowed her head to bless the meal, I couldn’t even close my eyes.

“Nice of you,” I said when she’d finished. She was a mother too, I reminded myself.

“Yes,” Mary answered.

“Nice this.” My potato steamed as I broke the skin, and Mary watched us as we ate, fork in hand. “Your middle son,” I tried again. “I heard he went west.”

“My son?”

“Yes.”

“Well, yes he did.” Mary lifted her chin. “And the other one. The oldest. You should see him. He’s in Chicago now. There are bread lines, you know. But Chicago …”

“So far off.”

“He says it’s the place to be.”

I lifted a piece of potato, blew on it, and took a bite. Before the fire, it’d been a long time since I’d spoken to Mary. Longer than I’d realized. But the Morrows were different from us. I still had the scars from Jack’s knife and the way he’d shown up in our fields after the fire, as if he owned the place.

“Kyle send that animal off yet?” Frank said. “Like I told him?” He kept his eyes on his plate, his mouth full.

“Jack took care of it days ago. He’s quick with his gun.”

Frank swallowed and sat back. “That wasn’t called for. That wasn’t called for at all.” Mary salted her potato as if she didn’t hear and Frank went back to his meal, working his jaw. We were quiet, scraping food from our plates. Mary set a pitcher of water on the table and we drank fast from our cups. It was too hot an afternoon for baking, but the potatoes settled us. It was the first time in days I’d had an appetite myself.

“I don’t know what he told you,” Mary started. “Borden, he went to you first.”

“That’s what ministers are for,” Frank told her.

“He didn’t say much,” I added. Or I didn’t remember what he said, I thought. The twins, that’s what I had my mind on then. Borden seemed too nervous a man to do much of anything useful.

“He almost died himself when he was that age. That’s what he said,” Frank explained. “He didn’t understand it. Why one and not the other. There had to be a way to make it right, he thought.”

Mary held on to her water glass though it was empty, that twitch again at the corner of her eye. I thought of the twins when they were younger and how we’d raked leaves in the fall. We swept them into piles that Adaline and Donny couldn’t help themselves from jumping in. When at last we had one great pile together, we set it on fire. Frank stood watch, digging into the fire with his rake. At the sink inside, I washed potatoes and could see him out there, spare and long-limbed, the air about him wavering. I gave four potatoes each to the children, grinning. “Throw them on top of the leaves,” I said.

Donny and Adaline ran with their arms full to the fire. But when they reached it, they held those potatoes tight. They must have thought it was burning up food to do such a thing. I stepped out into the yard and yelled, “Go on.” They threw the potatoes then with both hands, jumping with the effort, their arms high over their heads. The potatoes flew. I thought they’d miss the pile entirely, but they landed in the middle with a thump.

“You’re leaving,” Mary announced. “You have to.” She had both her elbows on the table, pointing her fork. “It will be easy for you. We can buy the fields.”

You can leave potatoes in a fire like that until the fire has died. Until there is a black circle in the grass and the potatoes sit inside like coals. Brush the ashes off and the potatoes will taste like the grass and soil they come from. Like the good smell of the fire you try to keep inside your clothes. But this you can eat. You can hold it in your mouth as if you are holding on to everything at once. When you swallow it, you belong to that place and that fire. My boy, you have it in you always.

“Eddie,” Mary snapped. “It would be good of you at least to apologize for what you’ve done. You don’t know what they’re saying.”

I rested my hands in my lap and thought about that, Mary speaking with her knife. I should have found a way to keep my son a little. But it was a relief, that fire. It took him straight away. There wouldn’t be any work to bury him. There wouldn’t be a mound in the yard marked by a stone. I felt an awful rush in my head. Mary was on her feet. That twitch. Whether we left or not, she’d already made her mind up about what she’d do next. I remembered that slap again. Cruel, what I’d said. But I doubted I was wrong.

“Why’d you come, Mary?”

“I wanted to tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because I know what they’ll do and I can’t stop it. People think you’ve gone near crazy and they want to make sure nothing like this happens again.”

Frank stood and the table jumped an inch across the floor. Pulling at Mary’s arm, he took her straight out of our house to where her car waited in the road. He sat her in it and shut the door behind her, catching the end of her skirt. When she opened the door again, her mouth was quivering, and she snatched at her hem. “Just you think about it,” she called out. “Before someone takes advantage.”

Adaline slumped against her father’s chair and murmured as she dreamed. The buttons of Frank’s shirt had left their mark on her cheek. I swept a strand of hair from her forehead, desperate as she looked. Borden had come to give us some peace, I knew. But he was not a peaceful man. He’d sat next to me in our front room and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Why one and not the other, that’s what he’d said. But it wasn’t the kind of question a person asked. Not anyone with common sense. There are no good reasons for life or death. And no decent God could even begin to make a choice. Outside, Mary sat watching the house. I knew she was up to something, and now I believed Borden might be a part. Frank waited at the door outside, pinching his hat between his fingers until he was sure she was well sent off. At last she drove away.

I lay my head on the table, but I couldn’t rest. I felt terrible for Frank and your mother both. Frank stood in the doorway with a heavy head and didn’t look back. When smoke rose from the stove, I opened the lid with my bare hand. Mary had left two potatoes inside and they looked burnt through, their skins as black and tight as stones. Taking them out, I burnt my fingers to blistering. But when I cut into that bitter crust, the potatoes underneath were good and soft and white.

She was our only one then, your mother, and she was always trying to fill the quiet. Snapping her fingers, banging cabinets, taking down the house all by herself. Or so I reminded her. But her eyes rarely settled on either of us any more. We left the door to our house open to let her out. Hours she spent in the fields and beyond the road, rolling marbles or dice, jumping hopscotch over squares she drew with a stick in the dust. She had long talks with imaginary friends, scolding them with a shake of her finger. In the corn she hid herself and found herself and sought herself out, staying there all day with her games. No one let the other children come near.

But at night there was only the one attic room she’d slept in with her brother and the memory of him going to the outhouse at least twice a night, keeping her awake. After the fire, that attic must have felt full of his being gone.

It wasn’t for weeks until Kyle came himself. He waited in our yard, staring at the house for any sign of the girl. He must have believed taking a step closer would do us another wrong. But from where I watched, I thought of inviting him in. I thought of taking hold of him and wringing out everything that had happened.

“Addie,” he said when he saw her.

She’d walked in from the field, but when she noticed him there, she stopped. I remembered how I’d found him in our house after Borden had left, with everyone else still in the yard. He lay on his back with a bloodied nose, my daughter with her knees against his stomach, holding him down. Her cheeks were streaked, a sound like a cat in her throat. As I pulled her back, Adaline kicked and spit, but as soon as I put her to bed, she quieted. When I came out again, Kyle still lay on our floor in the hall, his eyes shut. I lifted him up, but I didn’t have the heart to tend to him. Not the way I once did.

Now in our yard, Adaline’s knuckles were red and broken from her beating on him. “Don’t,” he said as if fearing the same.

“What do you want?”

“To see you.”

“Who says I want to be seen?”

“Well, I guess not.” Kyle hid his hands in his pockets and seemed about to spit. The rose in Adaline’s cheeks came from her time in the fields, though it was stronger now. Her black hair fell loose in the daylight, her ankles bare. Her coral dress with its thin straps showed the lines of sun on her skin. I felt nervous for her, the woman she was becoming in the clothes of a girl. But before I could send Kyle home, Adaline kicked the dirt and left him in a cloud of dust.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey what?” Adaline kicked the dirt again.

“Hey,” he shouted and seized her arm. She twisted his hand behind his back, and he bent to the ground, laughing. Adaline’s face was furious, glowing. They scuffled in the dirt until they were covered. Finally Kyle twisted himself right and pressed her arm against his chest. “Listen,” he said.

But Adaline kicked the dirt again, harder this time.

Kyle let go of her arm and fixed his hat on his head, trying to smile. “Ever wonder what it might be like to leave this place?”

Adaline stared at him.

“I’m thinking about it,” he said. “About leaving.”

“So?”

“That’s all you’ve got to say?”

She lunged at him and slapped his face. He stumbled. The two squared off against each other again, my girl only half his size though fierce in the fury of all her eleven years. She snatched the hat off his head and ran inside the house, leaving Kyle looking close to naked in our yard. I asked her what went wrong.

“Nothing,” she said, though her eyes brimmed. She dropped the hat at my feet. “I hate this place. I hate everything about it. It’s all just going away.”

She ran up the stairs and slammed her door. Out the window, Kyle stood with his arms limp, hair stuck to his scalp. It was then I saw Mary, waiting as she did down the road a good distance. As if she had any right to watch us. Kyle turned toward home though he didn’t raise his head to his mother as he passed her. She seized his sleeve, but he wrenched away, leaving her to stare after him. When she turned at last to our house, her look was desperate. I feared what she might do after Kyle had come to our place and still wanted to be a part of it. After everything else, he’d done that. And I didn’t have to imagine how she felt.

My boy, I suppose any mention of your parents might be hard to take. But before I lose my strength, I want to get this down whether it’s useful or not. There were both things between your parents after the fire, their easy way as children and Donny’s accident. It was Kyle’s horse, Kyle’s goading that had gotten my son on the animal. And it was Kyle who’d whipped at the horse to get it going. But Adaline was lonely after the loss of her brother, and your father didn’t leave this place. Not until Jack himself was gone. No matter what I imagined might happen between that boy and Adaline, I kept my peace. I didn’t want to lose another child.

I study the nurse where she sits now in my chair, her lips moving. I can’t understand a thing she says. But that twitch of hers, it tells enough. “Who sent you?” I ask.

“County services,” she says. I know her and it’s been for more than the last few months, what with her white hair pulled back, the way her foot sticks out when she crosses her legs.

“Whose?”

“The county.”

I stay quiet. I can only think about asking her again.

“Look,” she starts. “There must be an address on one of those letters.”

“Why?”

“It would be good for you,” she says. “To have your family here. People who know you. Who can take care of you. Don’t you want your daughter back? Your son-in-law?”

“That letter they sent,” I say. It’s all her talk about family, the way she keeps after me, and I can imagine the pages of that letter again. It came more than eleven years ago. Of that I’m certain. I burnt it as soon as I could.

The nurse grips her hands in her lap and her heel jerks. “You don’t want to tell me, do you? Because that way, I could write too.”

“That letter was the last thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Frank never got over it. And the ones who sent it, they pretended they were good people, the praying kind.”

“You’re sleeping too much. Confusing things.”

“She was trying to keep Kyle from leaving.”

“You’re not listening.”

“But that boy was always going to go. No matter what she did, it was a waste.” My eyes blur, a rush of heat in my cheeks. Then I can’t remember why I’ve said it or what it was, wasted or not. All of it must have been before Adaline left.

“That’s a long time ago,” the nurse says, but her heel has stopped now. Both her feet are on the floor. I close my eyes and hear the scrape of her chair, a blanket pulled to my chin. Letters, I think. Before the nurse leaves, she takes the box again from under the bed and searches through. But she won’t find anything close to an address. I never did.