Katy Smith - Free Men

“You went out,” I said.

She rose to meet me. It was hard to hold her, the belly between us. I set my poor flowers down beside hers.

“A short walk,” she said, fidgeting her fingers along my arm.

“And if you had stumbled?” I tried not to look at her beauty. I loved our family more even than her face.

“Someone would have caught me.” Me not looking at her, she looked away. “I went to see her buried. The churchyard is so near.”

I said what she said again in my head. Her hand on my wrist burned. She had been with the dead. The plague was on her. The baby. I couldn’t see him now, through the layers of skin and skirt. I couldn’t see him to hold him. Just wanted to hold. And she. I’d said she couldn’t go. If we lost another. She was rubbing my arm, trying to stop my red face before it cried. All the lives I’d seen bleed out. Chances gone wrong. No love, and then this, my new love. If someone should take it from me. If anyone. I shook off her hand, and in the shaking raised the whip and hard lashed her once across the knees. Lower than my father did.

She sucked her breath into a pang. She didn’t step back. I didn’t move. I dropped the whip. We didn’t move.

WHEN I CAME home, I brought her flowers. Anything colored. Blazing star, horse mint, green eyes, dog tongue. Leaves that were gold. I don’t know why I always reached for flowers. I had stayed in the woods to hide my shame. I’m sorry , I said. I’m sorry I’m sorry . She knew. She said she knew. I sat her on the bed and pulled down her stockings and put my face to her knees and kissed the welts. She said I was a good man. It crushed my bones to hear her. She trusted that I wouldn’t harm her, not knowing. She was a woman, married, her skin as thin as silk. I hated this for her. I loved her.

I buried the whip in the yard.

“How will you get the horse to trot?” she asked.

I whispered in her ear and kissed her and showed her how.

I held her more than I ever had, I stepped back, I let her bend into the garden, I looped her hair in the morning, we went for walks and when she sat on the old wharf on the river I didn’t clutch her hand. Every night I stumbled into new depths of needing. I kissed her face until its paleness pinked. We slept coiled like snakes. Three bodies in a nest. I didn’t speak of hurting her, and she said nothing. Oh, what it is to be a woman. To pretend to forget.

We had a snow that winter. What children were left gathered it and ate it with sugar. The fish were drowsy in the Ashley so we caught extra. I found a rabbit-fur muff in the city for her. I told her all the stories I could think of to show her how ready I was for love, the noisy kind. She knew, she knew. When she had pains, I sang to her until she laughed to quiet me. We warmed our toes at the fire, we tried to lace them in each other’s like fingers. The fields were sleeping. Our son was growing.

He would farm. He would ride jumping horses. He would box with other boys. He would learn letters and maps. He would eat oats before they had cooled. He would kneel to pray. He would cling to his mother’s knees, would always know what a rare and wondrous thing it was to have a mother. I carried ten-pound sacks of rice in my arms, to practice holding him.

Anne walked behind me, said, “Girls weigh just the same.”

SHE BEGAN TO scream in March. Before a moonless dawn he came. Blood, and a baby. Blue-faced. A tangle at his neck. I pulled it clear. He wasn’t breathing. Anne whacked his back. I blew into his mouth. “Warm him,” she said, and I took him to the fire. The sheets around my wife were filling up with color, her face growing white. He coughed once. We stared at each other, wild, mouths open in hope. She pushed the wet hair from her cheeks. On her elbows now, knees up, a crab. “Rub him,” she said, and I stroked his back in circles by the fire. He gasped a bubble. His little knotted face. His blue would not warm. He would not move his hands. A chill on his skin.

“Wake up,” I said, “wake up.” My son that made me a father. “Wake up.”

“Darling,” she said. I turned. In her hand a twist of sheet. The red was all around her. Her face the missing moon. My wife was bleeding out.

In the terror on her face I saw the woman Sterrett healed. I was the man that should be kissing her shoulders and her neck, except there was no Sterrett and the midwife was dead and I was the only one who knew that by putting my hands inside her and sewing something shut I could save her. But what would I feel for, in that womb? What if I pulled out not the pain but her life and then it was me that killed her? And where, during all this, would I lay my son?

I was on my haunches by the fire, my wife beyond my reach, the baby in my hands. Sometimes breathing, sometimes not. How long now was it since his last? If I put him down, he would die, would forget he had a father. I could not move. My son was in my hands. My wife across the room. Calling me. I could save her if I knew how, if I could put down my son, but I did not know how, and I could not put him down. I was in the lake again, my arms around the post. The house on fire. The girl caught in the flames I dropped. I lost her, and my father. I could not touch my wife too. Please let God damn me for all I haven’t done. She wept like all women. She could have been any woman. The red around my wife. Her face asking. My heart crawled. I could not move. My wife was dying, but my son was in my hands.

ACREEK DOESN’T MAKE a sound but I think of her. Straw hair, blue eyes wide. I fled my house eight days ago on a horse that died. I have been missing from her for eight days. When these two men talk, I hear the hole that is her voice. Eight days since I’ve heard her words, like bells. The closest sound is the creek water running. Sweet creek, that never knew a wife.

We are here to thieve the strangers. I know what little sense this makes. They rode on horses, asked where water was, stared some, turned back the way they came. And the black man and the Indian were crouched within a minute, their fingers in a twitch. Were they criminals? Or just sinners?

One said, “It’d be nice to have what they have.”

And the other said, “I know that man.”

“They’re rich, is all, and surely more of the same at home.”

“It was her father.”

“We’ve just been talking about how to get on with these empty pockets.”

“She who never knew her father, and there he was. Sitting there.”

“We can guess what use they’ll make of it; I’ll tell you what. Spend some on liquor and some on whores and some to buy a safe to put the rest in.”

“Damn him who made her, and damn her.”

“Are you listening? Now’s the time, we’ve got a chance. Been given it.”

“Men abandon, and women ruin.”

“Stop muttering. Plenty of fine folk in the world, I’m just guessing these aren’t them. You had your money stolen, right? Who’s to say this isn’t it?”

“The world is not so circular.”

“Damn wrong it’s not circular! Wake up!”

And all I was saying was no, no , but silently. I knew the circle of the world, and it had sharp edges.

They made speeches with closed ears. One kept pulling at his pants, fingering at the scruff on his cheek, the other picked at a spot on the earth till it was clean of leaves. They did not know they did this. Our wants were greater than their wants, is what was figured, and our hearts better. Between fiddling and neatening, they judged themselves. But how did they judge the others? Those men who passed never told us who they loved. This is a lie, I said, or did not say. I did not want the money. Nothing left in the world must be given to me.