Katy Smith - Free Men

WE MARRIED IN December. It was 1786, the tenth year of the independence, and I was twenty-three.

As the town was dying, we built a home. That is, we took a home. I made a new door and she washed the walls white. She planted a dog rose by the window. I cut a path to my old fields. I could have planted acres, been a man who owned men, but the town was not hungry enough. I bought a horse and a whip and took my crops to Charleston. In the spring evenings, she read to me aloud. The gospels and the psalms. “All your children shall be taught by the Lord,” she read, “and great shall be the peace of your children.” Great shall be the peace of our children, I said. “The glory of children is their fathers,” she read. Yes. I would be the glory of my children. Just as my father. No, not my father. I saw him burying wood rats in the dry dirt. I looked to my whip in the corner of the room. My children would be the glory. I was nothing.

At night, if the candles were out and we were not sleepy, she would talk. “My parents?” she’d say. “They weren’t wealthy, of course, but laughed more than anyone I knew. My mother had a little flute that she would take to the poorhouse to play, and my father could jig, so everyone that saw them caught a glow. Faith, to me, was this. Charity was making men smile.”

You make me smile.

“You have a smile like my father’s. There was plenty to eat, though it was plain, and I had a dozen friends at school who would come once a week to make paper figures and melt chocolate if we could get it. There was a washline between our house and the neighbor’s, and the girls and I would send messages out by clothespin and wait for replies that never came. There was always an animal at our house being mended by my mother, and we’d play at doctor, feeding a sparrow or knitting a harness for a lame dog. It was a loud house, busy with love.”

You miss it.

“I do miss it, but if my parents could be revived and I were sent back to them, I would miss being with you. There are two sides to life, the noisy and the soft, and you’re my soft. But our children will change all that. You’ll have to build a barn for yourself to hide from all our bustle. This is what love does, it keeps getting bigger. You know that, of course. Think of those years when you had none of it. It didn’t go away, did it?”

She said this with a smile. I thought briefly that she knew nothing of sorrow, and briefly I didn’t trust her.

Finally by summer she began to grow. I had wondered but not asked and now she was growing. I held her belly and waited for the child. Was hungry to begin on another. Love could not come fast enough. Now that all days were days of sun. When she was sick, I worried. She’d heave her stomach once, then say she was well. And she was. I prayed at her. I told the heavens to cast an eye on her rounding body. What a marvel they had made. An infant, the fruit of me. He was swathed in his mother. He was shy. He was a seed invisible. Whatever strange herbs she ate, midwife-given, I ate too. We bathed in the river together. When I felt her belly, she felt mine.

“What will we call it?”

“Jesus,” I said.

She scrunched her face.

“Hero,” I said. “Best Child.”

“Protagonist,” she said. She brushed her fingers fast across my forehead, rubbing out the serious.

“Protagonist,” I said. I didn’t know the word.

“What was your mother’s name?”

“It will be a boy,” I said, though I could not know this, and though I was afraid of men. I felt a boy would be the fate of me. That I deserved one for what I had done, all the evil I caused needing repayment. But this would be a different boy. Blessed and calm. I would be a different father. We had Anne.

At the end of summer, she bent over in the garden. Her hand to one side. Her face a slant. I was building a shelf beside the hearth, could see her through the window. I came outside and asked if she were ill. She shook her head. A little blood, she said. She asked to be let alone. I gave her the house and sat in the bed she’d been furrowing for the squash and listened to her crying through the wall. I stuck my thumbs in the soil and twisted. Waiting. A worm came rudely up. If any animal had no family, worms would be it. I never saw two together. I stroked its side and it lashed around. I wished for a toad to feed it to. It found the dirt again and dove. A little dirt fish. I didn’t want to lose anything.

Dark now. She opened the door and said come in. I waved my hand and kept my eyes down. Looked at every brown grass flake, each gnawed stone. She said come in. But she had said a little blood, so I stayed still, my bottom in the dirt. I shooed her. She closed the door. I didn’t want to know. I was sitting and then I curled over, my knees to my chest. I fell asleep in the furrows. No dreams, just outside sleeping. Me in a long, long emptiness.

She brought me milk in the morning and put my hand on her stomach.

“We’ll try again,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Darling,” she said, which was my favorite word of hers. It made me feel young and not like a boy but something dear.

Where did he go, our child? I’d done no bad things since I came there. I asked her if I could see him.

“Nothing left to see.”

I was angry because she wasn’t crying anymore.

She said, “Here. Listen. This is what women do. This is what happens. We will have another. Shh.” Her arms were all the way around me now.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t want her to understand. What women do . She knew things she would never tell me. She would never tell me where our baby was. She pulled me up and brushed the dirt from my clothes and kissed my cheek and picked at the dirt beneath my fingernails and kissed my wrist and we kissed and we went inside and lay next to each other, but only softly touching.

ONLY A YEAR, and she was rounding again. This time would be different. I walked behind her. I stooped to pick the weeds so she wouldn’t. I held her elbow on the path to church. I nailed the shelf a foot lower so she needn’t reach. She got so sweated in the heat that I carried a bucket and cloth with me, to damp her face whenever she sighed. She said she didn’t like the fussing, but the baby liked it, for he grew and grew. When her stomach became a pouch, I’d lie in bed beside it, my head by her hips, and the skin would thin away in the dark so I could see the limbs of him. Small foot, small fist. He didn’t smile at me, because he didn’t know me.

Her aunt was sicker. Anne visited her once a day, but this was a danger. Surely the sickness had fingers and could move from one to another. So many had died. And if the sickness found its way inside my wife, dripped into her belly? I told her she was not to go again. She said this was needless fear, and I said this was a husband telling his wife. Once a midwife came to feel the kicking, but two weeks later she too had caught the sickness and two weeks after that had died. It did not matter that our town had lost its midwife, because I no longer trusted a stranger to touch my wife.

In the fall, a letter said her aunt was at the end. Anne begged to see her. Another letter came when she was dead. They would bury her along the old brick church with its corners in crumbles, another stone among the rows. That day I had to ride to Charleston with the crop and told my wife to be still. Don’t go to the church, I said. Your aunt is dead, nothing to see. I told her plague can rise through soil. Standing on top of the newly dead, she’d feel the sickness climb her skirts. She gave me a smile that wasn’t strong.

I was gone a night and day and when I opened the door to our house again, my whip in one hand and white asters in the other, I half expected to find her gone, a vapor, just a vision I’d once had. But she was sitting where she should be, in the chair with her cloth and needle by a cold hearth, for I told her not to light it alone. Under the window on the table were goldenrods.