Michelle Hoover - The Quickening

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My boy, you might think an old woman hasnt much to say about the living, but your grandmother knows when a person does right by her and when they dont. In this bed, I have little else to do but scratch my life down with this pencil. And I have little left to me but the thought of you my grandchild who Ive known only in the warmth of your mothers belly under my hand. Even if you never come home, you should understand the way our life once was, your grandfather, your mother, and I, and all the little things that make its loss so very terrible in my mind. The Morrow family, they were a worry to ours from day one. And once you know what they took from us, you might just understand the kind of people you come from.

It wasnt until late in the summer of 1913 that your grandfather and I began to work this farm from the acres of weeds and grasses it was to a fine place. A place where we could earn a living. Thats what a beginning is. My father and his father and his father before that had lived within the same ten square miles of land. Even after I married, I didnt move farther from home than a days wagon ride. Id seen no other landscape as a child. Had never dreamt of it. A farm is where I was born. Where I would always live. Id known it from the day my mother walked me through the fields and rubbed her fingers in the dirt, putting her thumb to my mouth so I could taste the dust and seed we lived on. She said this was home. When I asked her if there was anything else, she shook her head. Nowhere you need pay any mind to, she said. Not for the likes of us.

It was only a month after Id lost my father that Frank and I first came to this place. We married on a Sunday, as Frank thought right, the chapel holding only our families and a few friends. There we stood, both in our thirties, Frank the older by eight years and graying at the temples. He wore a borrowed suit that showed his ankles and wrists, I in a dove-colored dress, my red hair combed smooth to lessen my height. Afterward we ate cake and berries and they tasted too sweet. We opened our gifts. My mother swept a spot of frosting from my chin and drew out my arms to look at the fit of my dress. Id always been a big woman, suited more for the farm than for marrying, an old bride as I was back then. My cousins had to squint to find the ring on my hand.

Only late did we return to what Frank had made our home. This same house, with borrowed furniture in the rooms. The house smelled of earth and smoke. Frank had polished the wood and swept the floors, leaving the broom to rest on the front porch. Hed spent most of his years working to buy the house and land, much of it still in sorry condition. Though he didnt speak of it, his family were croppers. Hed seldom had a thing of his own. Now the both of us had a fair bit, and after the loss of my father, I was as determined as Frank to keep it. When I hurried in, Frank took that broom under his arm and strummed me a song, a sorry frown on his face when he pretended the broom had snapped a string. I grinned, dropping a penny at his feet. This was my husband, a string of a man himself with a good bit of humor in him. He was fair-skinned with black hair and long limbs, his eyes fainter than any blue Id ever seen. If anything, I knew him to be kind and hardworking, and that was enough. Behind a curtain of chintz was the bed hed made. The sheets were white and damp with the weather, and in the night they proved little warmth. Outside, the animals in the barn were still. I could smell them through the window. But inside, this was what marriage was.

Id left those ten square miles and moved to the next county over, a place that looked and smelled the same as my fathers land. The difference was my part in this place. I was a wife, and not until that night did I know what the word meant.

It was still dark the next morning when I carried water back from the well, wearing the whitest skirts I owned. I filled a large basin in the smokehouse, dunked the bed sheets in. The water in the basin reddened. The stain on the sheets loosened and spread. It was the same that had stained me in the early morning and sent Frank hurrying away to milk. My mother had told me if a husband was easy, if he was a good man, the first night wouldnt be trouble. Maybe it will be better, shed said. But she hadnt said a word about this. In the smokehouse, my hands puckered from the long time I scrubbed. The sheets turned a muddy pink, my chest and arms wet. The light of my kerosene lamp fell against the skin of hogs hung to smoke, a gift to us, their torsos stripped and twisting slow on the hooks caught in their spines.

Outside I kicked the basin over, let the bloody water sink into the dirt. There were fewer trees around the house then. They did not make much noise in the wind. Gnats and midges circled my feet, a knocking in my chest. A good man, I thought. But Frank was nearly a stranger to me, as I was to him. Beyond that stain, a mist crept over the fields. The land seemed barren in the early morning, not another living creature. In only two months was the harvest and we would be planting late. We wouldnt have much to keep us through winter. The night before had given me a full-up feeling, a kind of lightness and pain. But with the smell of meat from the smokehouse and the dark-wetted dirt, that feeling turned into misgiving. When finally Id gathered myself, I pinned those sheets to the line where they whipped together and I left them for the sun.