In the mornings I prepare the noon meal and carry it through the narrow pantry to the round oak table in the dining room for Al and Papa and me, making a separate plate for Al to carry upstairs for Mother. Baked or boiled potatoes, green beans, roast chicken or turkey or ham, a stew of beef and carrots and onions and potatoes. Every few days I make bread with the sourdough starter. Watch the bread rise, punch it down, watch it rise again. In the summer and fall I can the berries Al rakes from their bushes and the strawberries he grows in the garden for jams and jellies, cakes and pies.
We mark the days by the chores that need to be done, the way farm families have always done. Al feeds the hens and horses and pigs, splits wood in the fall, slaughters a pig when the weather turns cold, cuts ice in the winter. I collect eggs from the laying hens and Al drives me into town to sell them. He times the planting so that by the Fourth of July we’ll have new peas and by September there’s a whole field of corn. Gulls lunge for a feast, ravaging the crop, so Al kills a few and hangs them from poles as warning. During haying season in midsummer, I see him from the dining room window in his visored cap, scything the hay by hand with six hired men walking abreast, forking the newly mown hay onto the hayrack. They haul the hay to the barn, where a block-and-tackle hoist lifts it into the mow. Swallows, disrupted from their nests, swoop in and out.
In late July and August, blueberry season, Al uses a heavy steel hand rake to harvest the small dark berries from their low bushes. It’s grueling work, stooping over those low bushes in the hot sun, dumping the berries into a wooden box to be winnowed and weighed, and all summer the back of his neck is burnt and peeling, his knuckles scraped and scarred, his lower back constantly sore.
Aside from the Grange Hall socials, the sewing circle I go to now and then, and the occasional visit with Sadie, I don’t see many people. Most of my old friends and acquaintances are busy with their new husbands and new lives. At any rate, I have little in common with most of the girls I went to school with who are married and having children. I can tell, when we’re together, that they are self-conscious talking about their husbands and pregnancies. But this difference only highlights what has always been true. I’ve never shared either their fluid ease of movement or their quick laughter. My wit—such that it is—has always been more sardonic, stranger, harder to recognize.
Now and then I leaf through the small blue volume of Emily Dickinson poems that my teacher, Mrs. Crowley, pressed into my hand. I remember her words to me when I left school: Your mind will be your comfort.
It is, sometimes. And sometimes it isn’t.
With no one to talk to about the poems, I have to try to parse the meanings myself. It’s frustrating not to be able to discuss them with anybody, but also strangely freeing. The lines can mean anything I want.
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightaway dangerous—
And handled with a chain—
I imagine Emily sitting at her small desk, her back to the world. She must’ve seemed very odd to those in her orbit. A little unhinged. Even dangerous, perhaps, asserting, as she does, that it’s the people who lead conventional lives who are the mad ones.
I wonder about that chain that held her. I wonder if it’s the same as mine.
MY CATS, AS cats will do, have kittens. Al takes boxes of them into town and gives away as many as he can, but before long I’m feeding a dozen. They swarm underfoot, mewling and jumping and sometimes hissing at one another. Al grouses about it, pushes them off the table with an open palm, kicks at them when they wind around his legs, mutters about solving the problem with a rock-heavy sack in the pond. “It’s too many, Christie, we’ve got to get rid of them.”
“Oh? And then what, I’ll go around talking to an empty house?”
He chews his lip and goes back out to the barn.
LATE ONE EVENING, I’m lying on my pallet in the dark in the dining room when I hear a commotion upstairs, directly above me. Mother’s bedroom. I sit up quickly, fumble for a candle and match, and make my way to the foyer. “Mother?” I call. “Are you all right?”
No answer.
Al is out with Sam, playing cards. Papa is sound asleep in his room. (There’s not much point in waking him; he’s frailer than I am.) I haven’t been upstairs in months, but I know I have to get there now. I haul myself up the stairs as quickly as I can on my elbows, sweat dampening my neck from the effort. When I reach the top, I pull myself to my feet and grope my way down the hall to Mother’s door, push it open. In the moonlight I see that she is on the floor on her knees, fumbling at the quilt in a kind of panic, trying to claw her way up back onto the bed, her nightgown bunched around her thighs.
She turns and gives me a bewildered look.
“I’m here, Mother.” Stumbling forward in the dark, I collapse on the floor beside her. I try to help her up with my hands, my elbows, even my shoulder, but her weight is like a sack of flour, and I can’t get any traction.
She begins sobbing. “I just want to go to bed.”
“I know,” I say miserably. I feel helpless and angry: at myself for being so feeble, at Al for going out. After a few minutes, her sobbing turns to whimpering, and she rests her head on my lap. I pull her nightgown down over her legs and stroke her hair.
Some time later—fifteen minutes? Half an hour?—the front door opens downstairs. “Al!” I shout.
“Christie? Where are you?”
“Up here.”
Footsteps pound up the stairs, the door slams open. I see the confusion in Al’s eyes as he takes in the sight of Mother collapsed on the floor, me cradling her head in my lap. “What is going on?”
“She fell off the bed, and I couldn’t lift her.”
“Lord a mercy.” Al comes over and gently hoists Mother up onto the mattress, then pulls the quilt over her and kisses her on the forehead.
After he’s helped me down the stairs and onto my pallet in the dining room, I say, “That was terrible. You can’t leave me alone with her like that.”
“Papa’s here.”
“You know he’s no help.”
Al is silent for a moment. Then he says, “I need a life of my own, Christie. It’s not too much to ask.”
“She could’ve died.”
“Well, she didn’t.”
“It was hard for me.”
“I know.” He sighs. “I know.”
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, about a week after Thanksgiving, I wake early, as usual, to stoke the fire in the kitchen and begin the process of making bread. The floorboards above my head creak with the ordinary sounds of Al getting up and dressed and going to Papa’s room to check on him, the muffled sounds of Papa’s deep bass and Al’s higher tenor. I scoop flour into the earthenware bowl and add a sprinkle of salt, my hands going through the motions while my head is free to plan the day: pickled beets and sliced ham, warmed in the oven, for the noontime meal; gingerbread cookies if I have time, a pile of mending . . . I add a scoop of yeasty starter, a dollop of molasses, warm water from the saucepan on the range, and start kneading, folding in the flour.