II
Mary

(Fall 1909–Fall 1913)

This could not be the place my new husband had brought me, it could not be where Jack meant us to live. This man who enclosed my hand in his and sent a shiver straight to my veins, he could never sink so low as to think this house could be our home.

Still there he was, full of his green-eyed mischief. Something warm curled inside my chest. He bounded through the entrance, bent to his knee, and when he opened his arms I let myself cross that threshold and fall in—because that was the way it was back then, Jack with his wide, sturdy hands, his stubbornness, his strength, a burning in him that made me soft, magnificent, believing there was only talk and waiting in this world unless I was with him.

So I worked at this house to make it my own—a gaping ship of a place, with two floors and more space than we could ever hope to fill. The rooms above me whined in the silence and heat. I spent mornings on my knees, scraping at the filth that blackened the floors, and learned in all my labor about the family that squandered their luck here at the turn of the century, having overbuilt, overplanted, and abandoned the house after seven years—I swore the same would never happen to us. After I scrubbed the windows and stripped the curtains, I left my rags and rubbish in a pile outside for Jack to burn. He carried in buckets of water before he set off for the barn, tossed the gray runoff when he returned home. Sweeping off his hat, he wondered at the rooms I had made, bright and smelling of soap, and at the state of my dress, my hunger for something clean. I kept at this house with a heavy hand the first years we stayed, shook the outdoors from the rugs and bolted the windows. When my sons were born, when they grew to stand and watch their father cutting like a knife through the fields, I kept them in too—because if anything, I wanted to hold them in that lifted-up place I believed was promised us, in that place where we were better than all the rest and more deserving, and with my sons it would not just be a far-off belief or a kind of pretending. It would be.

But there is only so much a person can do beyond wishing. In my mother’s house, I was taught to walk in heels and carry cups of tea, though guests were rare back then. I sat alone in our parlor with my legs crossed, hands in my lap, and spoke only when spoken to. Beyond our windows, neighbors passed with their heads turned or crossed to the far side of the street. They no longer came to our door for my father’s woodwork, let alone for company. On a long, flat board, I learned to play my scales on keys my father had etched with his knife into the wood—because even if we did not have a piano, my mother was determined that her daughter with her long fingers would be able to play in any house in town that did.

“The accident,” my parents called it, though my father said little if he could. It had happened just after I turned twelve, remaining with me like a dull haze through my teenage years. All I knew was how strange I felt one morning, sick to my stomach with an aching in my legs and just under my chin. This was not the way it had been, my parents seemed to be saying, the quietness of our house and our neighbors who kept their watch over us. After the accident, everything had changed and I was somehow the reason.

“Practice every day,” my mother instructed. When I ran my fingers over the board my father had given me, she hummed the tune, stumbling whenever she believed I had struck the wrong key. What little my mother remembered from her childhood lessons, she remembered fiercely—to keep time, she beat a wooden ruler against my arm until the skin burned.

“It will never be enough, will it?” she said, stopping the thump of that stick. I lifted my fingers from practicing while my mother gazed at the wall over my head. The ruler cut into her fist and a scar showed jagged along her knuckles—the scar invisible except when she grew nervous and her hands blushed. A boy with a temper had been jealous with her, she had told me, long before she met my father. I had to be careful of such boys, she said. Now with her standing so still, I thought I might reach out to touch her—there where that long, hot slice broke her skin—and its warmth would share itself with me and be mine for a while. When I was younger, before the accident, it had been different—my mother’s palm warm against the middle of my back whenever we were close enough to touch. Now she shook her head and I dropped my hands to the wooden keys. “No, it will,” she said. “It will be if we want it. We can have everything again as long as we are good and persevering. Mary, you just have to believe what I tell you. Never let anyone get in your way.”

We were no longer considered a fine family, but in her every hour, my mother relied a great deal on seeming.

“Someday you’ll know better,” my father told me. He was a quiet man, already stooped, spending his waking hours in the shed where he worked. I thought then my father’s words were offering me a better kind of living, but later I knew he had meant how gray those days would seem, the polite and constant practicing, when what I wanted was something glowing and passionate and strange.

When first I met Jack, it was his voice that shook me, echoing out of a storefront where he argued with the owner inside—I stopped at once, wondering what kind of man could have a voice like that, as large as daylight. He cursed and a case in the store broke, knuckles into glass. He rushed out the door with the owner yelling and I saw him then, turning one way and the next, not knowing what to do with himself. “I’ll pay for it all right,” he yelled back. He leaned against the porch rail an arm’s reach from me and stared at the ground. I scratched my foot against the dirt until he looked up, his green eyes rising over my face without expression. When his mouth opened without a word, I felt swallowed up whole.

Later I would learn that Jack was the youngest in a family of men, that his mother had died a year after he was born. They were only a father and five brothers, the father lost to work and drink and the sons all born into a four-room farmhouse far in the East where they sweated for women in their bunks. His brothers had raised him with their fists and jokes, my husband nodding without a word whenever I asked to know more. But I could imagine the way that house had been, the heat of all those boys as they worked the farm and cooked their meals, a charred crust of fat and bloody meat in the saucepan. It was a place of temper and few words, the taste of smoke and salt—boys playing mother to each other, their feet muddy in the kitchen. Because that was the kind of place where Jack must have been born, the hard muscle of a man that he was and still so much a boy.

Jack stood against the rail, his overalls wind-whipped and dull, breaking at the seams. The straps hung loose at his thighs and his thighs were thick and muscled under the denim. The skin of his knuckles had broken into bloody streaks and he bound his hand in his shirt.

“You’ll never get your price like that,” I said.

For a moment he only stared. I took a step back, the store’s brick front hard against my spine.

“I know it,” he swore, sweeping off his cap and twisting it between his fingers. “I was never much the bartering kind.” He shrugged with a smile and dropped his head. It was then that what had seemed devilish in Jack fell away, as if he were a child—his face streaked by the sun, his eyes green and squinting, and the crown of his hair standing on end. What a wonder, I thought, the way such a man could hold both at once, all that rage and innocence, and I had been the one to bring that innocence out.

I was twenty-two years old the day we met, Jack over thirty—we would marry later that year at my mother’s house with only my parents to witness the event. He was born a wanderer, my Jack—he had no family or friends of his own nearby to invite. Ever since he was young, he had worked to get as far as possible from that four-room farmhouse, and by the time I met him, he had traveled a great deal, from the dark, narrow countryside of the East, little more than a nickel in his pocket. But that husband of mine had cunning. He could smell the stench of a family’s foolishness from a distance, so our farm he got for a dime, troubled as the place had been and abandoned for over a year. I was the one who had stopped him in his traveling, or so he said, the one who had made him want to think about building a home. Carrying me off as he did more than a week’s ride from my parents, Jack found a ground he could root his fevers in, and I knew with those green eyes of his that I had traveled and stopped as well—all before I got the chance to do otherwise.

For the first four years, our house never did lose that ache to fall back into the wreck it had been. I kept at my work to clean it, and my husband returned only at dusk, bringing in the weather on his boots and the barn stink—a wildness, despite all that could be steady in him and warm. Upstairs my sons grew and fidgeted in their beds, drooling on the sheets with wide, hungry mouths—always wanting. Yet if I should want to hold them, they wearied and twisted their limbs like animals out of my grip.

I had a gold-threaded shawl of silk my mother had given me for our wedding, and late in the afternoons I took to sitting when I could in an empty room on the second floor and wrapped the shawl around me. The windows looked out over the fields, the trees bent and withered against the dust. There was the grayness again—earth, brush, and wind—not even birds rested for long on that ground. If I said Jack’s name aloud in that room, it would sound as hard as metal, and if I opened the windows, the sound would travel over the fields without so much as a tree or hill large enough to break it, without anyone to hear save for the animals wrenching the grass with their teeth. When it circled back again, I imagined it running against this house with its hard brick front. I imagined it finding me again in this room, echoing where I sat for hours with that shawl knotted around my neck.

It was only when I turned to face the windows to the west that I saw a difference—a small house that stood on the horizon like a stone. I watched it for a whole year until one day smoke came rushing from the chimney.

“You’re hiding,” my husband whispered. He stood in the doorway, gripping the frame. I turned back to my window and the smoke. There it is at last, I wanted to say, a sign of the living. My husband rested his hands on my shoulders and I realized how much I was in need of company, something feminine and soft.

“See that?” I tapped my finger on the windowpane. Inside the house, I imagined a woman sat at her own window after the afternoon chores, looking out and seeing us, a large place less than a mile out. She was a young wife herself, and she tucked her hands into her lap to keep warm in the winters or turned a fan in front of her face against the heat. Her children were already in their beds, that slow time of day when a woman has a chance to think—and what she thought was this: there must be more in this place if a person goes far enough. Jack crouched to look out, his hands weighing into my shoulders, all that was hungry in me still rising to his presence. Upstairs, my sons woke from their nap and bounded down the steps, their voices pitched, calling for supper. I saw myself knocking on the woman’s door, the hearth inside and a meal with tomatoes and fresh cream, a clean tablecloth. In the mornings, we would press bread together and work our gardens, and in the afternoons I would help the woman bleach her linens and can fruit and meats. Girls she would have, two of them, and they would make my own boys quiet and thoughtful, good to their mother. Jack cleared his throat and kissed me quickly on the cheek—but when I looked in the glass, his face was silent and dark. Ever since our first night in the house, Jack had studied me the way a mother studies a child with its hands behind its back. Sometimes even children are innocent, I wanted to say, but Jack never would let me forget—the sheets appeared clean and white that first morning when we woke, though we had become a husband and wife in every sense.

“The old Bowers place,” he said at last. “They should have a hard time of it.” He clapped me on the shoulder and walked out. I could still smell the work on him, felt it sink into my skin with all its sweat and noise and dirt. My fingers moved lightly over the pane, my hands feeling for the notes. Girls, I thought, and the woman sang while I played her piano, her hair tied back with pins. My husband had left me alone in my room, but I could sense him still watching for me from the hall. My sons were in the kitchen, their hands I imagined too close to the stove, red and blistering, waiting for me to snatch them back. The house itself ached for my attention—even in my sleep I heard it suffer in the wind. When I looked out the window again, I caught my breath—the afternoon had darkened, my reflection suddenly bone-thin, and I feared everything in me that had been bright and young could die in this place before I ever turned thirty.

It took weeks until I finally set out on foot, walking toward the house I had seen because the horizon held little else. I carried nothing with me, wore only a housedress and easy shoes, wrapping my mother’s shawl around my shoulders in case of wind. How far I would go I left to hunger, weariness, or chance—but surely there was a place where the sun did not shine so brightly, where I could stand against the trunk of a tree and listen to the creak of its limbs, not have to worry about the weather or the state of the soil beneath my feet. The back of my neck grew wet from walking, the fields liquid under the sun. Insects clung to the stalks with a humming that covered my skin with dust. I still had that neighbor woman at her window well in mind, and if she could lead a horse, I thought, we might go as a pair to the market in town. We might meet other women there, a whole group of them—and together we could make this place bigger than it was. Nearer to the house, I saw a woman working in the fields. She was large and sturdy, not much older than myself, with fire-colored hair and a dress that stretched like a rag over her hips. Wiping her hands from the dirt, she left prints on her lap, so often she seemed covered with her work—a stone of a woman, her hands sun-spotted and rough, her fingers short, nothing delicate, much like the house.

“Hard work,” I called out.

“Always is.” She raised her head, studying the shawl around my shoulders before she pulled back her chin.

“We’re neighbors,” I said. “First time in three years I’ve seen someone in this house. Our place is just over there.”

“I’ve seen it,” she said. “A big place.” She lowered her head again.

I rubbed my neck. Inside that dim little cabin, I imagined her holding out a cup of water that sweated against its glass, cold as I believed I had not tasted for months, and offering the last piece of fruit from her pantry. I waited for her to invite me in, searching down the road for any kind of distraction—for miles there was little more than corn and beans.

Finally the woman straightened. “Enidina,” she said. “We’ve been here only a few weeks. Haven’t had the time to meet neighbors.”

She was clearer to me when she stood, heavier and taller than I might have guessed, her speech coarse, impatient, but there was a carefulness in the way she moved. Dirt stained her stomach more than the rest of her dress, as if she could not help but touch the place again and again—there it was, I thought, a second life, something I often sensed in women before they even knew it themselves. I wanted only to cross that distance, to touch a bit of that softness and have it for my own. I reached out my hand, but it dropped dumbly between us. “Why, you’re carrying,” I gasped.

Enidina grimaced. She brushed her hand over her stomach again, as if to sweep away the dirt and everything with it. For decency’s sake and luck’s, I should never have let the words out. Later, I would think of what I said when Frank grew sick, when Enidina abandoned herself with such recklessness to the storm. What kind of woman was she after all—bent to the ground, her fingers thick as rope? I would never be as marked by this place or as raw, and even then I believed such a woman could never carry a child for long.

“My first,” Enidina offered, though she seemed pained to say it. “I wouldn’t be out walking for too long in this weather. It’ll cook you through. That house of yours, it looks big enough to keep a woman busy I’d think. I’d think with a house like that, a person wouldn’t have much time for visiting at all.”

I opened my mouth, but already she had bent to her work, tearing weeds from the soil. What new low had this woman driven me to? I turned at once, heading in the opposite direction from home. When I looked back, she stood as if abandoned in her field, her hand on her forehead to hold off the sun as she watched me go, and I was not surprised when she called out. “I suppose I’ll be seeing you,” she said.

The road ahead was empty and behind me were only men and work closed off in a too large house I could never keep clean. My mother would arrive to care for the boys, chores would be taken care of for at least a day or so, and I could be gone, if only I could keep walking. The farmland was plain and forbidding—up ahead, not a living soul waited for me. What I wanted felt like a hunger, rising from my ribs, my throat, starved for something immense, golden. Jack was greater than many a man, but he could give me only sons and mud and butchered meat—I wanted something clean.

Enidina’s house had disappeared behind me, but a small white chapel rose ahead out of the fields. I had lived in this place for years, but the chapel seemed new, standing as it did over the flat, graying bottomland and pointing upward, endlessly—as if it had nothing to do with this place and never would.

I moved in a daze by the time I opened the doors to that church. The very creaks in the floor welcomed me, the light through the windows stained and surreal, with a life and color all its own. Aisles of red carpet led like arrows to the pulpit, the wood painted white, and a heavy cross hung from above, glinting. I closed a communion glass in my hand and felt its cool weight, no chips, no stains—it shone with the candles that adorned the altar, all of them flickering under some unknown breath. The chapel resounded with footsteps. A tall, very pale young man in a dull gray suit walked down the center aisle, a limp in his stride, but the name I thought I heard from his mouth was my own. “Mary,” he said.

I dropped the glass, but it did not break. It did not utter a sound when it fell. A cry escaped my throat, my name echoing against the walls in the voice of this stranger, and I felt myself lift. Here was a room of surrender and warmth. In this chapel I could do nothing wrong—and this man with his gentle limp, he was a part of it. A presence opened inside my chest, as if I were attended by thousands, and I knew at once I could carry this lifted-up feeling even if I returned home. I could keep this strength, drift above the rest. I could do my work without dirtying a finger, shake my husband’s wildness out of him, and if I cared, if I was good enough—and I was determined to be—I could make that Enidina into the woman I had once imagined she was.

The man stood, waiting, and I wondered where I might have met him before or whether the sound of my name had come from some other place or time. “Miss?” he said. With his hands clasped against his stomach, he seemed the very picture of patience. Long and thin his hands were, like a woman’s, but tufts of hair darkened his knuckles. He took my arm and sat me in a pew, his suit worn at the knees and his belt missing a loop, though his shirt was clean and white and tucked at his waist. “This is my father’s church,” he said at last, but I did not see a father about. It did not seem the place for fathers or old men, as his father would have to be—it did not seem the place for relations at all.

“My father built this church,” he said.

“You don’t have anyone else? A wife? A child?”

He looked at me puzzled. “No,” he said. He sat very still then with his hand on my arm and did not speak. I could not remember when he had placed his hand there, but it was firm and hummed with a kind of electricity. I had never known a man to be so quiet, so closed in on himself, and I listened to him breathe. “Are you all right?” he said at last.

“It’s your church,” I announced. I had meant it as a question, but I wanted to believe it myself so let the end of my sentence drop. The man shifted his weight to see me—there in the slow turn of his mouth, in the rush of blood to his cheeks, he showed such a wonder at my presence that I felt reborn. He seemed a man who needed taking care of, and in the months and years that followed I would learn this was what drove his church members to him, slowly at first and then by the dozens. When after minutes he removed his grip from my sleeve, it left a damp stain. Later, when I would see him lift Enidina and the others from the lake, when he would bless them with a touch of his palm, I would recognize a different kind of strength.

This is what I’m trying to say, that goodness has its fire too. There are those who work for a living, who milk and slaughter and plow, and those who ready themselves for a different life—I was to be the second kind.