Written by Nancy Dillingham – (Mature theme)
~~ Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts.
By Louise Bogan ~~
— I —
Her skin, like paper that has been folded many times and carried in someone’s pocket like an ancient memory to be taken out and looked at again and again—dry, brittle, creased with fine wrinkles—is thin to the point of transparency, and, as she talks, a blue vein on her high forehead pulsates. When one of her hands (soft and tiny, with fingers like thin, pink sacs) suddenly flutters through the air to make a point and accidentally brushes against one of the reporter’s, it is hot to the touch—her heart beating, it seems, in her hand.
Although the voice, rising as her fingers flutter, is surprisingly strong for someone her age, the earnest young man thinks how fragile she looks with her wisps of gray hair above the high forehead. He is reminded of the time many years ago when he stood on tiptoe cautiously peering at some small birds in their nest, their defenselessness overwhelming him—their eyes big and sightless, their mouths open, their bodies featherless except for some soft, gray fuzz here and there pink and pulsating.
— II —
Her bare toes dig into the soft, sand-like dirt, little puffs of it rising and falling delicately before her as she walks up the lane. The big house stands at the end of the lane, a formidable awaiting.
She goes up the steps to the front door, lifts her arms, raises the heavy door knocker, and brings it down hard. The noise is so loud that she jumps back. The door is jerked open, and shiny boots (not creased and mud-caked like those of her father) rise toward a tall figure in a frock coat, his heavy, black brows flecked with gray. She looks up into the face. “My daddy sent me,” she says in a clear, resolute voice. She is eleven years old.
— III —
She stands plaiting her younger sister’s hair, feeling the smooth silkiness of the long, shiny, cream-colored strands slipping through her fingers as she laces them in and out.
Her father stands in front of the fireplace, his elbows resting on the mantel, his head bowed. Although she can’t see his face, she knows that if she could, it would hold a look she has seen many times before—one of desperation. His voice is low and too calm as he speaks. “I can’t pay the big house,” he says. Her mother, scraping potatoes in the kitchen, suddenly stops, and the girl imagines in the quiet that the swishing of the hair through her fingers makes the only discernible noise—except, perhaps, for her father’s heart.
Later as they sit down to fried potatoes and corn bread, her father speaks again in that voice, measured and controlled. “This land is all we’ve got. If we lose it, we’ll be out in the big road. I was counting on the corn for payment this year. But this drought… ”
He shakes his head, and his voice trails off. Then her father suddenly looks at her. “The Man has offered to take you in place of the payment. He has promised to take care of you and be good to you until you are sixteen.” He takes a deep breath. “Then he wants to marry you.” She feels faint and sick as she hears her father continue. “This family, of course, will make the decision together. Your mother and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you, but I think it would kill us all to lose this land after we’ve given the best years of our lives to it.” His voice gives out suddenly, but he continues to look at her, the oldest child in the family.
She looks deep into her brother’s and sister’s eyes and speaks for the first time. “My brother, my sister, and I vote that I go to the big house, don’t we?” Her brother and sister nod their heads slowly and obediently, not comprehending. Her mother sucks in her breath, and her father puts his head in his hands. She rises from the table and stands between her mother and father, an arm resting on each of their shoulders.
— IV —
The man with the heavy, black brows with the flecks of gray in them, takes her into the house and cares for her. The first day he leads her around the staircase into the dining room. He puts one arm carefully on her shoulder and speaks to the housekeeper who is serving his lunch. “Get her some food and then see to it that she has clothes and shoes.” The woman nods and takes her into the kitchen where she eats her meals for the next four years.
When she is fifteen, she is served her meals in the dining room with him. They eat at opposite ends of the table. At first, he eats as if only he were there. Then he begins to look at her and, finally, to talk to her, formally at first, offering only pleasantries. She observes that he looks at her directly only when he is silent, never when he talks. Instead, he looks at the clock mounted on the wall just above her head as if he were waiting for time to pass.
On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, she hears his footsteps stop at her door instead of going on down the hall to his room. She listens as he opens the door slowly and closes it gently behind him. She is not surprised, for she has been awaiting this moment for five years now. Wordlessly and deliberately, it seems, he sits down on the edge of the bed, takes off his boots, and drops them to the floor with a soft thud.
Some time later, just as deliberately, he puts his boots back on in the darkness and leaves. He has not spoken a word. She listens until she hears his door close and sees in her mind the practiced motions as he sits on his own bed and drops his boots to the floor. She hears the mattress sink with a little sigh as he slings his weight onto it. Only then does she put down the covers and open the curtains for the moon to come in. She lies until dawn on top of the covers, letting only the moon’s rays touch her, their cool comfort cradling her. Over the years, the moon has become her best friend, bringing to her, in her fantasies, as it does tonight, members of her family with whom she talks until dawn.
The next day, on her sixteenth birthday, he marries her as he had promised her father.
— V —
Until the day he dies, he never sleeps all night in her bed. But one night (as he lies on the opposite side of the bed before he rises to put on his boots to leave), out of desperation—after years of silence and because she is drowning—she reaches out and hears her voice calling his name. It becomes an incantation as she whispers it over and over again. Only then does she know that she can survive.
Later, after he has gone to his room, she opens up the curtains and only the moon’s clear light shines in. The shadowy forms of her family have now dissolved forever; she hears in her mind only the sound of her own voice calling his name over and over again.
— VI —
Still, there are many kinds of silence. During the following years, she has seven children, all of them stillborn except the last. Each time, she is deathly sick. Each time she feels the life flow prematurely from her body, helpless to do anything to hold it back.
The last one, the one that lives for a short time, has no eyelashes or fingernails. She feeds it with a medicine dropper and warms it with a big rock, heated and wrapped in a blanket. She holds it in her arms and watches it die, covering its face with a cloth dipped in camphor, rocking it until the doctor comes. For years afterward, she can’t bear the smell of camphor.
— VII —
The fateful day burns in her mind like a struck match. She is doing the wash in a big, black pot hung over a smoldering fire. She has just picked up the wooden stick leaning to one side of the pot to poke and stir the boiling clothes, the steam wetting her face, when she sees him coming up the lane. Immediately she knows something is wrong because he never comes out of the fields until lunchtime; he comes in through the kitchen, washes up at the sink, wets and combs his hair in the little glass hanging by the window, goes into the dining room, takes out his pocket watch, winds it, and checks its time against the big clock on the wall over the table then sits down to eat. But today he is here in the morning, and something is wrong.
She drops the stick, wiping her face with her apron, walking towards him, quickening her pace until she is running. He too, is walking faster now, though his gait is uncharacteristically unsteady. Coming closer now, she sees that his face is red and that he is gasping for breath. He reaches out one arm jerkily towards her and tries to speak. In the instant before his body hits hers, she notices that his face is contorted and that one side is curiously slack. He falls heavily on her. The impact jolts, threatening to knock her down, the body still lean and muscular.
Out of breath, and struggling, she drags him the rest of the way up the lane and into the house. From that day on, he never again speaks a word or takes a step.
— VIII —
She stands under one large tree, dwarfed by its height, her hair pulled up high on her head, her hands clasping the back of a shiny, arched, wooden chair on wheels. He sits in the chair, immobile. The photographer, catching the best light of the day, covers his head with the black cloth, peers at them through his box, and, squeezing the ball in his hand, snaps the photograph with a small explosion. She is thirty-six years old; he is sixty.
— IX —
She speaks his name softly, from habit now, as she wheels him out onto the side porch. The morning air is fresh. She positions him beside the railing where she has set his breakfast bowl. She holds his face with one hand and feeds him with the other. His face is as closed now as it was fifty years ago when she first came up the lane, and she has perhaps just as many questions now as she had then. But it is a familiar lane and face now, and she knows the planes of each. Her silence is a steady companion now. With a practiced hand, whispering his name over and over again, she cajoles him into eating. The wind carries his name down the lane, blowing it away with the little puffs of dirt.
Some time later, before the clock’s practiced hands point straight up, the wind takes his breath away, carries it too, down the lane, and scatters it over the land.
— X —
The voice is whispery now, like a quiet wind through the room.The house smells of ripe apples and old newspaper. It is late and the shadows of the trees play with the curtains. She fingers the photograph. The sleek, empty glasses stand on the tray in little puddles, having long since shed their frosty wetness. The visit has come to an end. She rises and walks the young reporter out. Through the screen door she calls a farewell, her voice once again clear and strong. As he turns, he sees her silhouette against the light from the big windows at the other end of the house, the hall long and narrow before her.
__________________________________________________________
Writer and educator Nancy Dillingham is a sixth-generation Dillingham from Big Ivy in WNC. Her poems, short stories, and commentary have appeared in various literary journals and newspapers such as Asheville Poetry Review (10th Anniversary Issue), Great Smokies Review (on line–Spring 2011), Parting Gifts (Winter 2010-11), The Arts Journal, Bay Leaves, A Carolina Literary Companion, Half Tones to Jubilee, The Lyricist, Victoria Press, Raleigh News & Observer Sunday Reader, Asheville Citizen-Times, Mountain Xpress, WNC Woman, Weaverville Tribune, and Big Ivy News. She is the author of 8 books of short stories and poems: New Ground (1998); The Ambiguity of Morning (2001); First Light: Poems (2003); Thanks for the Dark but That’s Not Home: Poems and Stories (2006); Colloquy in Black and White: Poems (2009); Home (2010 March Street Press), nominated for 2011 Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance; and Americana Rural (2012 Wind Publications). She collaborated on Reflections in a River: Photographs by Joan Medicott and Haiku by Nancy Dillingham (2011 Grateful Steps). She is co-editor, along with Celia Miles of three anthologies: Christmas Presence from 45 WNC Women Writers, Clothes Lines from 75 WNC Women Writers, and Women’s Spaces Women’s Places from 50 WNC Women Writers She also co-edited, with Irene Dillingham Richards and Ken Richards, The Family Named Dillingham: 375 Years in America–1630-2005. Most recently her poetry appeared in Blue Ridge Parkway Celebration, Silver Anniversary Issue and Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel: Contemporary Appalachian Writing.
