The horns and bells continued. The people celebrating below were people I knew. I knew their sons far away at war or fresh in their graves. They’d eaten the beans and corn my family grew and brought them back to us in heaped bowls when someone got sick, or died. The boy who would dig my grave was probably out there among those cheering.
We were under the same sky, breathing the same air. All of us. And not just us. The Germans and the Japanese, too.
In the months after the victory of war, a stunned quiet followed, then the town leapt into optimistic giddiness. Everyone everywhere seemed relieved, fatigued, excited. The world seemed wide-open. At church, at the feed store, in the shops downtown, and on the streets of the mill-village, expectation and relief blossomed into robust intent. Any moment things could burst out of themselves. I felt it in the long bones and muscles of my arms and legs.
Even in the quiet of Sunday morning, returned to us now that the war was over and the mill no longer ran seven days a week, I woke aware of the people down the hill, my family still warm in their beds, sleeping the sound sleep of victors.
Downtown one Saturday, I saw a woman open a newspaper. The headline declared the liberation of the death camps. The photograph showed gaunt, skeletal Jews. She studied the front page and crossed herself.
A violent scorn rose up in me. “Fool,” I thought. “You have the same God as the Germans.” I imagined a Nazi crossing himself before he turned on the gas.
I stood outside Bun’s Café, about to cross the street. Then, like a slap, the thought came: I, too, had the same God as the Nazis. I stepped away and turned my back to the busy street. I saw my face mirrored in the window of the café. The reflection of a passing car slid over the backs of the men eating inside at the counter. They were—we all were—Christians. Good Christian people.
A door shut in my mind. My heart tilted.
I kept that moment, running my hands over the worry stone of it. Church was not the same after that. I sat at the same pew every Sunday. My family expected me to be there and I did not want to disappoint my mother, but my throat could not be open as it had once been to those old familiar hymns.
A few weeks later, one rare day when I had finished my morning chores early, I took my lunch and walked down to Clear Lake. A snake the color of the water undulated near the shore, barely disturbing the reflection of clouds on the water’s surface. Trying to move with the same deftness, I followed on the lake’s bank as the snake paralleled the shore. After a few minutes, the snake turned toward the deeper waters of the lake. I watched its silent swiftness until it was lost in the glare of the sun. I longed to move through the world like that, deliberate and certain, the waters folding around me, wakeless.
I felt I could wander, seduced, into the woods and forget myself, leave my hair uncombed and let my name fall away. I wanted to lie down where I was with only the sky above me. I recognized this desire as the feral love of an animal for its place of being. It seemed most akin to the awe and holiness I knew I should feel in church. I also sensed in that impulse a kind of danger, a dissolution that could lead me from my own kind.
I was grateful, then, for the farm and the animals that demanded my attention. They tethered me, protecting me from the impulses that the land engendered.
Everything on the farm seemed purposeful: the bird calls; the thickness of the morning dew; light moving across the kitchen floor; the barn’s musk of hay, fresh manure, and dust. Even the sow’s prissy, mud-caked haunches were imbued with grace.
I settled in, grew lean and muscular. I ripened, ready for whatever came next, certain it would be good and new. I’d slept through the war, but now I was waking up. At night, I tossed and turned in my bed. In the house of my refuge, I set aside the God I was raised on and woke each morning, tenderized by light, bird song, and hard labor.
The farm was once again the solace it had been. It knew me and I knew it. On the hottest night in the summer, when I could not sleep for the heat and my sister Rita snorting through her dreams beside me, I made myself a solitary pallet outside under the stars. But the bugs kept me awake. Finally, with only the full moon for light, I got up and, in boots and nightgown, walked the creek and cut through the fields. A breeze stirred the corn, whispering, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Everywhere my foot pressed the land I heard, “Home. Home. Home.” I was in love.
But love of land is not enough for a young body. I had put on weight and curves. I was stronger than I had ever been. At the feed store, at church, anywhere I went, I could feel as much as see how men were looking at me. Their gazes, like hands, cupped my hip or shoulder.
Some of the men were the same boys who had called me “carrot top” when I was a young girl, sneering as if red hair was an aberration worthy of hell. Many of them, fresh from combat, were broken-faced. Around them, I felt the burden of my innocence. I told myself that their attention was just the war’s end, just men lusting, as I did, for the land and smelling it on me. If one of them showed up at the farm, I did not stop my work to chat and flirt. I put him to work.
S
omething had been in the corn, so I rode the plow horse, Becky, out to check the fence between the Starneses’ pasture and our cornfield. I reined to a halt deep in the shade of a broad, low oak near the border of the Starneses’ land. One of their stallions was after a mare. I had seen horses mate before, but this time I went closer, right up to the fence, and watched. The receptive mare danced before the stallion and then stood still, her tail swished to the side. Becky snuffled and took a little two-step under me. Despite the cool of the shade, heat rose up from my belly.
I did not hear or see Cole Starnes ride up. But suddenly he was there in the shade, taking off his hat and wiping his face. I startled. Becky shinnied sideways again.
“We weren’t planning on breeding her this season,” he said, as if we had been discussing the situation for a while. “She came on earlier than we thought. Caught us off guard.” He was a good-looking boy, tall and thin, with a broad, friendly face and cowlick above his forehead.
I could feel the red in my ears. I kept my eyes on the horses.
Cole kept talking. “We were working on the tractor. Didn’t know she was coming on. I don’t like that tractor much.” He glanced back toward his house as if he expected to see the tractor coming his way. His horse stomped and pulled.
I turned without a word and left just as the stallion dismounted.
After that, Cole gave me a little nod and a comment every time we ran into each other, which began to happen more often. Every Sunday after church he was there, not saying much, talking about fences, tractors, and the foal that was coming. He never mentioned seeing me in the pasture that day. The swirl of his dark brown hair above his forehead made him appear continually windblown and slightly surprised, qualities that I began to find endearing. He’d never teased me about my hair or my freckles. I found myself thinking of him.
Then one night, he showed up at my back door with a bouquet of cornflowers and lilies, and a little Mason jar of moonshine. The day’s chores were done; there was no work for him to do, so I fed him supper. We drank the moonshine for dessert. I cut mine with cider, but he drank his down manly, grimacing. Outside of family, it was the first time I’d had company for supper on the farm. I felt like a grown woman, entertaining in her own home.
I was fine until he slid his hand over mine as I passed the jar of shine back to him. Once he touched me, it was all over. I lost my virginity that night and so did Cole, the two of us fumbling at each other until we got the job done. I don’t think either of us was very impressed. I had brought myself more satisfactory pleasure alone at night—a pleasure I’d never associated with boys. But the intensity and how badly I had wanted it stunned me. We were suddenly shy and sober afterward, the booze sponged up by our amazement at what we had done.
The next day, I waited for God to strike me down. I thought I would feel bad, but I didn’t. I felt relieved that the first time was over. I was curious to try it again, to get a better look at Cole. The barnyard can take some of the mystery out of the mechanics of the act, but a man is not a hog, a bull, or a stallion, though some do aspire to be one of the three.
A week later, Cole was back at my door. He had flowers again, but no shine, and asked in a shy, sweet whisper if we could try “it” again. There had been no punishment from God, so, being curious about both God and Cole, I said yes.
After that, he would wait until dark fell and cut across the pasture instead of coming up the road. For the first time in my life, I made a conscious decision to sin and continue sinning. I braced myself for God’s retribution. I was careful though, making Cole withdraw. I didn’t want a baby to be the payment for my sin. Cole would have married me. He was that kind of boy, but I didn’t want that either. We were just very young and doing what nature told us to do.
Still, I was doing something I had been warned against all my life. A terrible sin. I continued listening, expecting some punishment from God. But there was none. In that silence, I kept remembering something I’d once heard that contradicted all else I’d heard about sex and sin.
When I was about twelve years old, Grandpa Mac, Momma’s grandfather, came to Sunday dinners at our house. Rail-thin and nearly blind, he sat on the front porch one evening with Momma. He rocked in the cane chair and she shelled peas beside him. I stood just inside the screen door behind them, bored until I realized they were discussing the mother of a boy I knew and a man she snuck around to see. I got very still, wishing Grandpa would stop creaking in the rocker so I wouldn’t miss a word. As if he had heard my wish, he paused. I thought he stopped to listen better to Momma, but he looked off toward the mill and said, “I don’t understand how something that beautiful between a man and a woman could ever be so wrong as people make it out to be.”
To my amazement, Momma nodded, smiled, and kept shelling as if he was discussing the beauty of sunshine, not sin. Grandpa spit off the side of the porch and went back to rocking.
Being quiet around adults, I was often rewarded with gossip or bawdy jokes. But suddenly, I realized that there were other worlds and ways of thinking, secret agreements and understandings among adults.
After I had been with Cole, I thought about what Grandpa had said. “Something that beautiful between a man and a woman” didn’t seem to describe what I did with Cole. But what we did didn’t seem to be an awful sin like stealing or hurting someone, either.
Momma and Daddy didn’t mind Cole courting me. He was a good, respectful boy. They were fine with him walking me to church and Momma welcomed his help on the weekends when my family came up to the farm, but they would not have tolerated his night visits. So Cole and I had to be discreet.
Still, Momma seemed to know somehow. Frank Roe, a cousin on my father’s side, had been discharged and would be coming back from Japan, she told me. He’d need a place to stay. With him at the farm, I would not be alone and I would have live-in help with the harvest every day.
“It’s not good, you staying up there by yourself. What if something happened to you? We might not know about it for days,” she said.
My being on the farm alone had never bothered her before.
Frank was not one of my favorite cousins, and I did not want my solitude broken, but how could I protest? The farm was not mine, I was just the caretaker until it was decided who would inherit it. But I told myself, if I had less work to do, I might be able to meet Cole more often.
As soon as Frank jumped off the back of Daddy’s truck and I saw his swagger, the way he wore his uniform and threw his duffel bag down, I knew that seeing Cole would be more, not less, difficult. Frank always had an edgy side to him, like a strange dog, alert and ready to lick you or rip into you. You could never tell which, and you didn’t want him to do either. His eyes seemed smaller now, more doglike, his body harder and more compact. The war had concentrated what he had been as a boy. He was not a man you would want to give the advantage of your secrets.
He moved into Ricky’s old room at the far end of the hall from me, and the house immediately took on the smell of his cigarette smoke and shoe polish.
“Looks like my little cousin is all growed up and got herself a farm,” he announced after he had given himself a tour. Then he looked me up and down in a way I did not like, sucked on his cigarette, and flicked the butt down onto the barn floor. I stared at the smoldering stub and he stomped it, twisting his heel into it. “I got it, I got it. I’m not going to let your precious barn burn,” he said.
As we walked out of the barn, Cole came up from across the field. Frank saw Cole’s face change as he realized I was not alone.
“I guess you are all grown up,” Frank leered.
Frank was a hard worker, but he was also a man. He expected me to fix all of his meals. The first night, I did make him a nice ham supper as a welcome. But on the second day, when he came to me at noon, I returned his dog-stare and told him, “You are not my husband and you are not my daddy. For the work you do around here, I’ll get our supper in the evening and if I make biscuits in the morning, I’ll leave you some. Otherwise, you take care of yourself.”
He ate heartily each evening, but never cooked. His eyes followed me. But he seldom spoke. Only at night did I hear much from him. I shut my bedroom door, but I could still hear him turn and shout in his sleep. His bed lurched and squeaked when the ghost of the war visited his dreams.
At the end of the first week, he went into town, bought a battery radio, and put it in his bedroom. Then there was smoke and music every night. Sometimes I could smell the booze on his breath by mid-afternoon.
He had been at the house a few weeks when I walked by the half-open door of his room one night. He sat on his bed, his back to me, staring at some pictures spread out before him. A man and a woman whispered to each other from the radio. I opened my mouth to speak, then realized that he had his hand down his pants. He may have just been scratching himself. As I stepped back, he turned, grabbed the pictures with both hands, and laid them over his lap. He shot me a look of pure disdain and said “war pictures” over the cigarette smoke that curled up his jaw.