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- Herausgeber: Honno Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A story of survival and humanity set in early 1900s New England. Miller explores themes of race, disability, eugenics and rural life on the fringes of society. 'A woman's body is a machine specially designed for producing consequences.' Winter closes in on a valley in northern New England where a violent history is about to repeat itself. The Allen family farm is nearly empty. Only Eddie, the youngest son, remains, living with his family's ghosts near the woods he loves. In those woods he meets Jeanne Delaney, a girl he's known all his life, now turning into a woman. This is not the first time that Eddie's people have come into contact with Jeanne's, though. Their families are already tied together by a violent past. For readers of Where the Crawdads Sing, Cold Grace is a dark historical novel defined by its frozen landscape. Both revenge tragedy and coming of age story, it tells of an isolated community haunted by the ghost of its own violence.
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Seitenzahl: 366
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Author’s note
This is a story about colonialism, about the lengths to which white communities will go in protecting the idea of their purity. The book contains scenes of sexual and other physical violence, as well as violence against disabled people. In editing, we’ve worked to avoid the kinds of dehumanising language which were used at the time in which the story is set. Nevertheless, some characters express beliefs and ideas which are violent and distressing. Please look after yourself while reading.ii
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COLD GRACE
Meredith Miller
HONNO MODERN FICTION
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Or is it that it shadows forth the heartless immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation … is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows…
Herman Melville, ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’viii
Contents
A Way Back
For a long time she whimpers in the dark, trying to find something to lean up against. It feels slick and smells rancid. Wet ash. The way you smell after a bonfire gets doused by sudden rain, the smell that won’t come out of your clothes and makes you feel like a hobo begging in the dooryard.
Her legs hurt, and the blood is pounding between them. And it’s dirty right up inside her, too. Her body is full of ash.
She’ll maybe have to beg like a hobo in front of her own house now, if she can face it. Standing outside with the chickens, asking for grace. Them inside will cross themselves and shut the door, leave her looking up, holding her mouth open to the rain until she drowns.
Later, she thinks she must have fallen. She opens her eyes and it’s just as black as with them closed. The taste of ash has made it into her nose and throat, and this is all there is ever going to be. There will never be light or sight again. This is hell, maybe. Not fiery, but the cold aftermath of fire.
Then, somewhere in the hours, streaks of light appear, coming through the edges of whatever it is they’ve stuffed in the smoke hole. They stab down at her like the light that comes through the clouds in pictures of God, then they go again. Maybe that will be how time passes now, a slow tolling bell made of sunlight, separating the pieces of darkness.
She isn’t dead, then. There is something outside of where she is, space and sunlight and time. But of course, there will be something else. If they weren’t coming back she would be dead now, or bleeding along the side of the road somewhere.
She chokes, her throat closing in. She coughs until bile comes up and then she is cold.2
The sound of metal ringing wakes her up. Someone is making something, doing or undoing something with tools. Something made of metal, done in the cold dark. God knows what it is, what’s next. There is a thump and then a long stillness.
The smokehouse door swings open. It is night but the moon makes it seem as bright as day. A horse nickers somewhere. The little brother, Eddie Allen, stands in the doorway with a finger to his lips. There is a bigger boy with him, one of the boat people from the lake. Eddie is so scared he’s shaking, and for a minute that makes her feel older. Steadier. She stumbles as he pulls her toward the paddock fence, and the world crashes down onto her.
‘I can’t go home,’ she says, and doubles over with the weight of it.
Little Eddie goes blank and stiff, looking at her like she’s ruined everything. She can see he hasn’t thought himself past that smokehouse door, and she can see what that cost him, too. She looks at the other one, T-Roy.
‘Where can I go?’
Why is she asking them? They’re both younger than her. Eddie ten, and T-Roy maybe fourteen. She almost feels she shouldn’t leave little the little brother there, in that house full of blood and cold eyes. He’s only a child. Then, so is she, according to her dad and her brothers.
She turns toward Eddie, reaching down to hold both sides of his face so he’ll have to look into her eyes, and mouths a silent thank you. T-Roy gives him a shove and he turns back towards the house. Then T-Roy one puts his wool shirt around her and rolls himself over the fence, holding out a hand to her. Swinging her leg over the lower rail, she tears herself open again. Blood falls on the wood, black and thick in the moonlight.
The cuffs of his shirt don’t even reach her wrists, but it’s warm and dry and scratchy. It smells like earth and things rotting in the water, instead of like ash.
Under the trees the ground slopes down. After half a minute, the Allen place disappears into the dark behind them. He has hold of 3her hand, pulling her through the fallen leaves, but the weight of the dark is stronger than him. It isn’t long before she falls.
She curls around herself and crumples the wool shirt in her fists, pressing it into her belly. Sick tremors come through her body, like it’s trying to shake the flesh right off the bone. She could vomit herself up until she’s inside out, a pile of meat lying in the leaves, waiting for scavengers.
He keeps right on pulling at her, saying nothing. In the end, she has to gather the body back around herself and stand up. When the grey light turns into pink and gold, she can see the soot and blood on her skin. Looking like this puts a girl outside of everything good. There is no way back from here. Her mind circles around, trying to picture herself anywhere warm, indoors. But there is no warm indoors, no family anymore. The saving you get from young boys in the night is only ever temporary.
The crows are talking over their heads, telling each other about where they are. When she turns towards the place where she thinks the road will be, they are higher up and not at all as far from the Allens’ as she thought. There is Jerusha Prichard’s spring house. She could clean up in there, but the sight of the lock on the spring house door makes her stomach clench. She leans her hand against a tree, bleeding again.
‘Well, you two’re up early.’
Jerusha is standing at the side of her cabin in the pink light of the new day. This morning that is the sharp edge of some new life. Her grey hair is braided down her back and she’s wearing a nightdress and work boots. Jerusha looks down at the blood and holds out a hand.
She lets the boy’s soft, slick hand go and looks at Jerusha’s calloused one. The hours pass in her mind’s eye, the black smokehouse, the stabbing light, the whites of Eddie Allen’s eyes. She feels like a doe being coaxed out of cover. Like there is probably a bullet waiting to cross the space between herself and Jerusha’s comfort.
Jeanne
Of course, I remember.
Listen, sit yourself down and leave your recording machine alone. I’ll make coffee. Well, yes, I can see you’re from the city. Nobody local woulda worn those shoes up here. You’re new, but government people come along every once in a while. They go again.
You’ll have to take my country coffee as you find it, government man. I said, sit down. The chair’s clean.
Yes, I’ve seen a recording machine. Whatever it is you think you’re collecting, you can save your questions. They won’t do you any good in my house. You want me to talk, you’ll have to just take what I give you and be satisfied. I’ll tell you the things I’d as soon give away anyhow. Certain things still come back to me every day, even though they’re small inside the whole size of it.
Maybe you have a time in your life that carries on through everything that comes after? Things move forward, but it’s like you haven’t. You’re always inside that time, underneath it all. Well, I’ll tell you mine. It was the end of the year I turned from fifteen to sixteen. The end of wandering through the woods and chasing things, or hiding behind things and waiting. You could think of it maybe as the year I became visible, stopped hiding inside my mother’s name. That fall, I finally arrived. Ripped a hole in the side of the world and walked right in.
Cream? You don’t get it like this where you’re from, city boy.
Them days, people used to shake their heads and roll their eyes when they said my name. They’d look at me and huff a big breath out and say, ‘Jeanne Delaney’. It was a name with a meaning all its own, at least while I carried it.
My mother laid the name on my head before anybody could stop her, with its too many letters and all. Still covered in blood, the both 5of us, that’s the way Jerusha told it later. Both names my mother’s and nothing in the middle. ‘Jeanne Delaney,’ she said, and then died.
Guess there could only be one with that name breathing at a time. If that’s the case, I suppose I appreciate her passing it on. But what if she was only saying her own name? Expiring it on her way out, like? In that case, I never even had a name, did I? Well, everyone calls me Jeanne anyway. How they say it depends on who they are. The people from the Children’s Aid always made it rhyme with bean.
’Twasn’t until I was nearly grown Grampy and T-Roy told me Delaney used to be deLaneuville. I said, ‘Why disguise one kind of Catholic under another?’ Grampy just said, ‘My father lived through the Aroostook war, girl. Don’t even ask what happened to us after. Just take the Delaney and be grateful.’ Don’t look at me; I don’t know what he was talking about. It was better not to be French if you could help it; I did know that. They called us vagrants, and pirates because we lived on a boat. They were wrong, and then right in a way, too.
Well, all right then, I’m grateful for the name she gave me and the life too. All of it. Look around you, city boy. See how much I have to be thankful for?
The fall I turned sixteen was 1913, I guess. That was the year we all went together into winter, me and Eddie and Jerusha and Eddie’s big brothers. All of us together into the whiteness and the cold, and also into the can’t-see-your-own-hand-in-front-of-your-face, can’t-even-find-your-own-soul darkness.
The first of it was the day I met Eddie in the woods. Well, see, I’d known Eddie Allen all my life, but when we ran into each other that day it was a shock, like tripping and falling into a cold lake. It woke me up and changed me without any warning or sense.
Summer was ending but our boat was still docked at the bottom end of the lake. We were still living our warm weather life, swimming and ferning and soaking willows. Haying was past; we’d made some money helping Bud Crook with his.6
It was the end of a lot of things besides summer too, the day I chased after that car and then cut up into the woods towards the beginning of the next thing. ’Course I didn’t know any of that at the time, me all tripping over my feet and not looking down at what was in front of me.
I’d gone out that morning to get some blackberries for my Grampy. Already, Grampy couldn’t get around much.
T-Roy, that’s my big brother, had made a little gangway we could throw out to the dock for him, instead of just a plank, but mostly Grampy stayed on the boat. By the end of that winter, he wasn’t moving from in front of the stove except once a day for the necessary. So I wanted to make him some blackberry jelly because he said it reminded him of his own me’mère. See, I was a good girl. Believe me or don’t, I don’t care.
There weren’t any women living on the boat but me. T-Roy had always wanted Etta Grace, but she’d been ruined and gone since before the time I’m talking about. He didn’t get another woman until later, and that wasn’t exactly by choice. For almost all the time I was growing, summers on our boat was just me and T-Roy and Grampy.
In the winters, once we dry-docked the boat and the water froze, the men headed up to the north end of the lake and I went to Jerusha. From her house I went to school as much as I had to, to keep the Children’s Aid away. Jerusha taught me quilting and canning and things. She braided my hair and washed the blood out of my clothes without saying anything. Like I said, I pushed my own mother out on my way into the world. She took up the slack, I guess. After Jerusha lost Etta Grace she was all alone in the cabin, unless it was me there. So I spent the winters with her even after I was old enough for work.
I went to school on and off until I was nearly fifteen. If you stayed still too long and didn’t get yourself to a school, the people from the County or the State started eyeing you up, wanting to ‘help’ you. You didn’t want to give them any excuses. The most important 7thing, according to T-Roy and Grampy, was that you never asked for money. I never have, still, and that’s kept my name mostly out of their filing cabinets all my life. Mostly.
Up at the north end of the lake there was a one room schoolhouse with a potbelly stove, the kind of thing they put in aspic and show to the tourists from Boston these days. The teacher there was Miss McLaughlin. I remember I thought it was funny calling her Miss, because she was older than Grampy. She gave me a book about Joan of Arc, written by Mark Twain, and some other ones where the people they called Iroquois were all bloodthirsty or else very noble and entirely without feeling of any kind. All the white women were terribly virtuous and fell down praying all the time when they should have been wetting themselves with terror on account of the bloodthirsty ones. LeatherstockingTales, that was called.
Down in the town there was a bigger school with five classes. I went there some, too. I liked Miss McLaughlin, though. It was her who inaugurated the tradition of huffing my name out while shaking her head. As in, ‘Jeanne Delaney,’ huff, ‘you’re bright as a button, but you’re hanging by a thread,’ sigh and shake of the head. She rapped knuckles with that ruler, but we didn’t mind. It felt kind of loving. Sometimes, there’d be a kid who wasn’t so well taken care of. She’d send us all outside to play and make them take a bath in a tin tub by the stove. They’d come out all pink with miraculous fresh clothes on, looking like new-born eight-year-olds.
Anyway, it was from Miss McLaughlin’s books that I learned about courage and swashbuckling sort of stuff. Blame them, if you like. Once when I cut myself with the gutting knife, T-Roy said that’s what school did to you, made you practically cut your fingers off ’cause you were dreaming about knights in armour while you were supposed to be paying attention to gutting the fish. Grampy said school could save you and that’s what the country was here for, and we should take advantage of it. Old people always said that. They didn’t have the Children’s Aid when they were young to disabuse them of that particular kind of starry-eyed notion. Me, I 8wanted the shining armour, not the scholarship to Bryn Mawr. I’m still glad about the books, though.
So I went to school some and never asked for handouts. You say the government is paying you and a bunch of others just to gather up our voices? Well, they wouldn’t pay a mother and baby not to starve. Not without making files on them, maybe tearing them apart and locking them up somewhere. Maybe worse.
Delinquent, degenerate and dependent: they could only ever pin two out of three of those on me, and those were the two that depended on which way you looked at it. I ducked them and dodged them like I was the Pathfinder and we moved ourselves up and down the lake, back and forth across the borders, county, state and nation. The last of my going to school was about a year before that day I saw Eddie Allen sleeping in the woods. That fall I’m telling you about I was done with classrooms, but not with Joan of Arc.
That particular morning when I saw the car, I don’t think I even noticed the fall coming, let alone the rest of it. I paid my own kind of attention to things, on my own time.
I couldn’t help running after a car, could I? A passing car was an event, them days. I saw it coming up the valley, with the sound that was like purring from far away and like you couldn’t hear yourself think when it was up close. It was painted the colour of dried blood, a kind of red brown, and the sound of it echoed off the sides of the valley, changing pitch as it came. The roof was made of canvas and the man driving actually had on a cap. The lady in the back seat was reading, like she couldn’t even feel the wind from the open windows, like she wasn’t excited by any of it a’tall. One of those charity ladies from the hospital, I guess, used to riding around in automobiles.
I knew I’d never catch the car. I chased after it just to make a breeze of my own, get in the road for a minute and feel the power of my own legs. Call it vanity if you like. I don’t care what you call things, I’m just telling them to you. I gave chase.9
We both slowed down going up the hill past Jerusha’s cabin, the car and me. Then the car dipped and disappeared and by the time I crested the hill it was twice as far away and that was when I saw two crows (joy) swooping into the trees above the creek. I had to follow them into the woods, because you do, don’t you? The lady in the car kept going down the hospital road and I cut through into the trees behind Jerusha’s place, all hollow and echoing the absence of Etta Grace. But I didn’t stop to feel that either. I was keeping an eye on those crows. I just knew, that time, they were flying towards joy.
And they were. Joy among a lot of other things, as it turned out.
So, I followed those two birds up into the woods, then later forgot all about it; only just thought of them, now I’m telling you. When you get older, memories put themselves back together. You had that yet, government man? Might not happen for you if you keep carrying around that recording machine, using that for a memory instead of your own head.
I knew where the best blackberries were and it wasn’t even a mile, but I was taking a long way around on account of the birds. I went into the yellow birches and stood still for so long I saw a quail with her nearly grown children still tagging behind her, and later a fisher cat, travelling on some kind of fisher cat mission.
You see? I could be still and notice things when I wanted to. It was a game I liked to play, practising stillness, seeing what would come out if I was quiet enough. That practice made a difference later. If I wasn’t so good at quiet, they might have seen me there, watching while they did what they did to Eddie. Or worse, Eddie might have known I was watching. But I’m getting ahead again. Like I said, it runs through everything.
After the crows and the quail and the fisher cat, I came out under the pines and Eddie Allen was sleeping there in the woods like it was his own house. Even though I knew Eddie from when we were children, somehow I’d never seen anything like him before that day. He had on a plaid wool shirt like a logger would wear, working in January with the steam coming from his mouth. I pictured him like 10that, swinging a hatchet and sweating. I just stood there in between the patches of sun, picturing him in every season. Swimming in the red pool in the summer, too. I guess I was staring, but he looked like a song or a prayer to me. He just struck me different all at once. I don’t know. Anyway, I wished he’d just keep on sleeping.
Now there’s two pictures lying over each other in my mind. It’s only now I can see that the shape of him was the same at the beginning and the end, sitting with his legs stretched out, leaned up against something. Except that first day his hands were free and in front of him.
Later, Eddie told me he came out that morning because he smelled it, the good rot in the woods that means summer is over. He said he could smell me coming too, before he even opened his eyes. You felt like an animal around him, like something hunted, but it wasn’t a bad thing. It was like he could reach into the silence around you, feel what you were about to do without you having to say anything. He thought of everyone like they were an animal he was tracking, but you need to understand that was a kind of love. He loved the deer, even while he skinned them.
When he did open his eyes, I stepped aside and looked down. I think that was the first time in my life I thought about what I was doing with my arms and legs. Jerusha would have been happy; she was always telling me to watch my limbs and quit knocking into things. Right then, though, they seemed too many, in the way.
Eddie just looked me up and down, stopping at my boots.
‘Ain’t you got a button hook, girl?’ he said.
A Carpet of Needles
The autumn of 1913 is warm, dry and long. It makes Eddie feel sleepy and light, like his lungs can’t get enough of the cooling air. He can’t keep from drowsing under the trees.
Coming in from milking in the blue dawn, he catches the taste in his breath. He cocks his head and takes a deeper breath. The dog looks up and whines.
‘You smell that too, Don?’ Eddie says. ‘Gimme a minute, then.’
He gets a canteen and a hard apple from the kitchen and lets Don out the gate. The dog runs down the road toward Jerusha’s, looking back once to check he’s right, then disappears around a bend.
In the woods, mulch is making itself under Eddie’s feet, and the shelf fungus is brighter even than the leaves will be in a few weeks’ time. Don runs before him up the slope behind Jerusha’s cabin and off onto the deer path.
Hoof beats pound from the edge of his hearing to the centre and Eddie Allen’s heart speeds up to match them. The doe flies out of the scrub not five feet in front of his face. Her belly slides past at eye level, then she drops and pounds away again on the other side of the road. There is something about the way a doe is made that always startles Eddie. He might have taken her skin off and separated all her parts dozens of times, but she still seems longer and rangier, more sinewy, than the picture in his head.
Anyway, she’s got nothing to fear from him. Don yaps and chases her a little way. He knows they’re not hunting. Not legal for another few weeks, but that’s not what stops Eddie. Hunting just isn’t why he’s here. He’s come for that smell of disappearing leaves that blew past the kitchen door this morning.
The woods up here have all been cleared once, likely in his grandfather’s time. Since then, the pines have had sixty seasons or 12more to make a carpet of old needles springier than his Sears mattress that’s been in the house since who knows when. He’s not so simple he’d sleep out here at night without a reason, but you can’t help yourself resting on that ground on a fall afternoon if the sun’s out. Eddie can’t, anyway.
Maybe he’s just as alone in the woods or the house, now they’re all gone away, but the house stifles. It’s full of scratchy whispers and things half made in the shadows. Memories, you could say, but that word isn’t really enough for it.
Even though there are four different beds, he still sleeps in the same little room off the downstairs parlour he’s been in from a boy. He hardly goes upstairs at all. The thought of sleeping up there unsettles him if he’s honest. It’s like if he closes his eyes and lets go, the rest of them who used to live up there might slide into his dreams and take over. His own bed is haunted too, of course. Sometimes he thinks he’s woken up and can’t see or move, his mouth full of ash, or a knife sliding into him, or his brother Hank pushing a pillow onto his face while Micky holds his legs down. Then he’ll wake all the way up and there will be just the dark window and the lumps in the bed.
He’ll get up and go outside then, tie his boots on the back porch and walk through the yard. He’s knocked all the latches off the outbuildings, but nights like that he checks them all anyway, looking for what was trapped there years ago. Once he’s opened every door and shut it again, he heads out the gate. Sometimes, he crosses the road and walks through the near field up into the woods, where he can stop and breathe his silver breath into the trees, listen for the night animals slipping by. After a while, his thoughts slow down to match the air around him. It’s better than a drink or a smoke to calm you, breathing in and out with the whole breathing forest.
At the farm, inside the fences, the things that have been done can still be felt. The yard and the near fields have been cleared maybe two hundred years, and full of Allens for at least half that. They say 13the first settlers ploughed right in between the stumps of the old trees they felled.
But Eddie stays for the forest, not the farm. The house makes a stopping place in between walks, a place to store things up and clean his gun and make biscuits. Anyway, someone has to do the work, with Micky not able and Ma taken him to live in town. And, too, it doesn’t matter where Eddie goes. The ghosts are inside him, making themselves at home in his head. Moving away wouldn’t change that. In the daytime under the trees, his dreams are different, though still not what you’d call restful.
He eats his apple with his back against a pine. Don takes off, but he won’t go far. He’ll circle around, checking for threats or excitement, then come on back. It isn’t cold yet, the rotting smell is just a foreshadowing, a telegraph of the coming change. Eddie slides down into the patchy sun and shuts his eyes. He startles and then settles again when the dreams fall down between the trees.
He can feel Grampy Pliny’s bowie knife in his hand, but how he got it from Hank he doesn’t know. There is a wet peeling rip as he separates skin from muscle, slipping the bowie knife along in between. It’s a satisfying sound and it excites him in his dream.
He’s taking the doe apart, but she’s still moving, flying past him while her skin falls away under his knife. He is like a god, or some kind of hero, making and unmaking things. The deer goes past again, and her skin is whole. She flies in front of the sun, interrupting his tall, godly shadow. It goes all the way dark then, night pricked with stars. She is a constellation. He throws his knife at her, but it falls short of the sky, misses its mark. Then his brothers are behind him, snickering.
Don barks once, somewhere nearby. Eddie panics and shrinks, then feels his shirt scratching him. There is someone right there between himself and the light, a dark outline close enough to touch if he stretched a leg out. He keeps his eyes half closed, trying to hang on to the dream. He can feel Don, moving the air in front of his face with his wagging tail.14
Eddie knows the shadow belongs to Jeanne Delaney, even without all the way opening his eyes. Who else will it be, wandering around behind Jerusha’s cabin, now that Etta Grace is gone? It’s somebody Don knows, and nobody else would stand staring at a sleeping person like that.
When he does open his eyes she steps sideways, smiling and letting the light through. Well, it is her, but then it isn’t either. She’s grown tits and a light fur on her legs that shows in the slanting light, and then there’s a smell coming off her like the woods. How long has it been since he’s seen her? Long enough for spring to turn to summer in her body while summer moved across the rest of the world. Jeanne Delaney seems to have turned into a woman, and for a minute he wonders if he’s still in his dream, where things are changing into each other.
She used to be part of a mismatched pair with Jerusha’s Etta Grace, the two of them running around in the woods behind the old logging camp where Jerusha lives, their bird voices startling the deer away and stirring up dust between the pines. He came on them once, splashing in the oxbow with their shifts pulled up and their stick legs all red from the cold water, the light stabbing up from the creek in all directions, blurring them and making coloured spots in Eddie’s vision so they seemed like angels.
It was Etta Grace’s body Eddie saw that day, with the sun coming through, making that thin cotton into a halo around the shadow of her. The shape of her was singing into his eyes. When he saw it he felt sick, like he wanted to throw a cover over her and then run. He wanted to find a secret place and hide her under the leaves where his brothers couldn’t find her. That day, he shook the feeling off without even asking himself what it was.
Jeanne is standing there now, wearing her new body and waiting for him to say something. He’s caught up, though, trying to remember when he last saw her, when she changed.
She must have been one of that whole gaggle of kids, standing around the day they took Etta Grace away to the hospital, Crooks 15and Delaneys and stray kids come down the lake with their families to plant potatoes. Surely Jeanne was a child then? How long ago was that? Two years, maybe three? He can almost see Jeanne there, staring down at her feet while the doctor helped Etta Grace into the back seat of his automobile and Jerusha screamed the only scream of her life.
Everything that Moves under the Trees
A flash of white in the trees brings Jerusha to the back door. Everyone is traipsing through her yard this morning. First Eddie with the dog, now Jeanne.
The girl looks like a ghost, wearing nothing but a white thing that’s more of a shift than a dress, her boots all undone except for the top button. She’s chasing something that flies, running with her face thrown up to the trees. You’d think she might suddenly lift up too, and take off like a water bird, rising. But no, not her. Flighty isn’t exactly the way you’d describe that girl.
Maybe it’s the feeling of fall coming that makes Jerusha think time is working its way around in a circle. It isn’t that Jerusha mistook Jeanne for the ghost of Etta Grace, not that at all. You wouldn’t, not even with the way she runs with her head thrown back. But the minute she sees Jeanne flapping through the trees she knows things are coming back on themselves. Somehow, she just understands right away that Jeanne will run into Eddie Allen back there. She feels like she’s watching a story being told the second time. Not even the names are different.
Eddie went up a couple hours ago. He didn’t stop to talk, but that’s nothing. He’s the type that talks to trees more than people. He’ll stop when he likes, and he’ll be glad when she comes into his yard, too. In his flat kind of way he will, anyhow. He needs the company, whether he admits it or not.
He shouldn’t be alone up at that farm. It isn’t natural, and that family of his won’t help. Got something broken in the blood, that bunch. Turned in on themselves. Well, it happens up here. The grandparents are supposed to guard against it, make plans and see the marriages aren’t too close. Raise the children up right. That wasn’t going to happen for Eddie and his brothers though, was it? 17Grandfather poison, too. Jerusha has always known exactly who and what they were, since the night she brought Eddie out of his mother.
It was this time of year when Eddie was born, must be a birthday around now. Twenty-two?
The night his mother gave birth to him, the summer heat had just started dropping off quicker after dark. Back then, Jerusha lived up in the garçonièrebehind Seb Crook’s house, doing for old Seb where she could keep an eye on Etta Grace at the same time. She couldn’t let Etta Grace go to the school. They’d have taken her away. Taken her sooner, that is. So she kept quiet back there on Crook’s farm and never took the child into town. Old Seb was sweet to Etta Grace, showed her how to peel an apple in one long piece and sprout beans in the windowsill. Made her laugh at the stupidity of chickens.
By then, people around the valley knew Jerusha as the one to call when their babies came. The trick to midwifing is to make folks feel like you’re there to make calm out of chaos, like they can finally let go of themselves, now you’ve come.
Hank Allen, the big brother, came to get her in the pony cart the night Eddie was born. She went out the door to feel the air and then went back to wrap a second blanket around Etta Grace before she laid her in the back of the cart and got in on the seat beside Hank. It was dusk but you could still feel the heat of the sun coming up off the road. A porcupine snuffled in the grass along the edge, and she had a sudden urge to shout and scare it away from that boy and his cart. Right then she didn’t know why, but she knew later.
She’d been expecting them to come for months, ever since Mrs Allen started showing. That woman didn’t bring out many live babies. There were big spaces of time between the Allen boys and in the intervals Julia Allen’s body coughed up half-formed, bloody things. Time Eddie come, she was more than forty. You’d have thought Eddie would be the broken one, the way change-of-life babies sometimes are. The way Etta Grace was, perfect to look at, but what people call not all there. In the end, though, Eddie seems 18like the only one whole. In and out of the world all backwards and twisted, those Allens. It’s easy to think of Eddie as a kind of saviour, a sort of redeeming angel, the way that family throws him into relief. You have to guard against that kind of thinking, though. You don’t want to put a halo around anyone, in case the light blinds you.
Well, if Eddie is a saviour, she was there for the miracle of his birth. Which was an ordinary thing in itself, considering.
It was nearly full dark by the time Hank got her over to the farm, sky the colour of the Virgin’s veil. She climbed down out of the cart and had to remind Hank that it was polite to lift Etta Grace down and put her in her mother’s arms, not make a woman who’s come to help your ma lift all the weight herself. No doubt it was the first time Hank Allen touched the girl, and it was Jerusha who suggested it. Most of the sins we commit happen all unknowing.
Things were going slow with Mrs Allen. There’d been no need to rush. She was silent about it, just went stiff with every pain and lay against the headboard like a statue until it passed. Not a good way to be at all, better she should be screaming than that, but you can’t soften a woman’s soul all at once at the same time her body is doing them kind of things to her. It either happens or it doesn’t, and usually not till the baby is out. Anyway, there was plenty of time to lay Etta Grace on the couch, get a pot of water on the woodstove and change the bedding under Julia. She’d piled up all the old quilts and they smelled clean. Bit proud, in fact, Julia Allen.
A couple hours after dark, once the room was in order and Mrs Allen as calm as a stiffened-up woman was ever going to be, Jerusha tucked the blanket in around Etta Grace and stepped out into the yard. She made a circle around by the barn, just to stretch her legs. A fox screamed somewhere so far away in the woods you could barely hear it. She could hear the creek, though, playing over the rocks at the bottom of the hill. It was that kind of night, with heavy, open air that carries sound in ways you don’t expect. There was a light in the dairy barn and the door was slid open. She looked in, thinking to say something comforting to whoever was in there.19
It was Hank, sitting on the floor in the aisle. He had something in an old chicken carrier, curled in the corner as far away from him as it could get. The creature was doing its best to be smaller than it was, and she couldn’t make it out at first. After a minute she realised it was a fisher cat.
It took time for her brain to put together what her eyes were telling it. It didn’t make any kind of sense. What she was seeing frightened her before she all the way understood it, but she didn’t stop looking.
Hank Allen had strapped a hunting knife to the stock of a hoe or some such, lashed the blade to it, so it was a knife with a handle three feet long. He had this long knife stuck through the side of the cage and he was poking holes in that fisher cat while he looked right into its eyes.
Jerusha felt like she was seeing something enormous in the landscape, an ocean or a ten-year storm or one of the giant falls in the Seaway, something so big it would crush you or wash you away before you’d hope to comprehend it.
Had to have been a while he’d been going at that fisher cat, because the thing wasn’t spitting or snapping or trying to look fierce. The situation was past any of that. Hank Allen was master already. The creature didn’t look away from him, didn’t seem to know how. It was already as far away as it could get and all it could do was curl around itself and keep its eyes on the danger.
Hank’s arm jerked forward again and Jerusha gasped. Surely, she made a sound he could hear out of the dark, even if he couldn’t see her? She took a step back and cast her eyes around, looking for the best way out. That was when she saw the other boy, on the edge of the lamplight. Micky Allen was sitting up on the door of a stall, holding a post to steady himself. His eyes were shining and he was breathing through his open mouth. He was so intent on what his big brother was doing, he never looked her way, even when her feet scuffed against the dirt in the yard. That night, Micky Allen was maybe eight years old.20
Jerusha never made a move to help the creature. When she pictured herself stepping into that circle of light to get between them, she could feel the knife going into her own thigh, then her belly, just as though it was actually happening.
Those boys were somewhere west of reason, as her William used to say. People like that make no sense; the next thing they do could be anything. It never occurred to her that what she’d seen was something small, done by boys who will grow out of such things. That scene didn’t strike her like one thing by itself. It gave her a feeling like thunder building up in July. In the thrust of Hank Allen’s knife hand, she could see a future stretching out over the valley like war and famine and burning rain. She backed away and stood shaking by the kitchen door for a minute before she went inside again.
What if she had stepped in and scolded them instead? Would everything have come out the same anyway, or could she have bent them in another direction?
