Beautiful day, beautiful day. I wince each time Mary pours a bucket of ice water over my head, but it doesn’t hurt. It feels like waking up. Mary scrubs my skin with a misshapen bar of homemade soap, up my arms and down my legs, carefully around my mangled ankle, and then back up again, over my belly and breasts and then across my back. She reaches every nook and cranny of mybody, even the most private parts. Before long, the spongy suds have turned the color of clay. All the while, Mary talks. There’s so much work to be done today, so we must be efficient, we can use this water for laundry when we’re done, and then after that we can use the water again to mop the floors, and then we need to collect the eggs from the ladies, we should’ve already done that, so technically we’re behind for the day …
The rhythm of her voice is so comforting, I wish I could disappear inside it. Instead, I start to cry. Mary doesn’t stop washing me, but she does become gentler with her scrubbing, sayingthere, thereevery few moments. “This’ll make you feel better, Mama,” she says at one point. Is it the first time she’s used that word? I can’t recall. Regardless, it makes me cry harder.
“Don’t be sad, Mama,” Maeve says, when she sees me in the tin.
Oh, darling,I want to say,I’m not crying because I’m sad. I’m crying because of how good it feels to be clean again.
Instead, I smile and say, “Hello, ladies!”
After I’m clean, Mary takes care of laundry while Maeve and I go get the eggs. Together we make breakfast, Maeve monitoring the eggs over the fire while I try my hand at another bread boule to be eaten at lunch.This one will be better,I tell myself, and as I watch my hands move of their own accord, I actually almost believe it.
When the boule is cooking above the fire and Mary has finished mopping the floor, we go to the barn. Usually Old Caleb milks the cow early each morning, and she isn’t our problem. But today, Mary says, he told her about an infection on the udders, so we have to check on her.
As Mary leads us into the barn toward the far stall, I pause by a farming scythe hanging on the wall. Next to the scythe, an iron ax, the kind used for splitting wood, and next to that, a sharp metal rake, which looks a little bit like a pitchfork.
A current of queasiness runs through me, and I swallow it.Props,I think to myself, willing the good cheer back through my limbs.That’s all they are. Tools for imagination.
The cow is standing totally still in the back stall when we arrive. Mary shows me how to spread the ointment all over the udders, taking extra care in the places where the skin has grown red and irritated. “Big girl,” I say quietly while I work, Mary watching behind me. “Beautiful girl.” When I’m finished, I pet the cow’s nose, even though I know how stupid cows are. They’re not like dogs, or horses. I used to hate spending any time around Sassafras, the way that four-legged lard monster would roll her tongue across my hair whenever I got too close to her head.She’s like a golden retriever,Caleb would insist, to which I would say:If the retriever had brain damage, sure.
“Good girl,” I say to the cow. She stares at me with those black marble eyes, so spiritless she might as well be filled with stuffing.
After that chore is finished, Maeve asks if we can go look for wildflowers to make a crown. Mary hesitates—so much todo—then says, “Just a few minutes.”
We walk up the hill by the barn. At the top, Maeve crouch-walks around, looking for colorful buds, and finds none. Then she casts her gaze upward to the sky, which has started to speckle with clouds. “I see a bunny,” she says, pointing at one incoherent white wisp. “What do you see, Mary?”
“Hmmm,” Mary says patiently. “I see … a horse.”
“What do you see, Mama?”
I see, I see.What do I see? The loneliest landscape on the planet. Fences in disrepair. The roof of the barn bowing dangerously. The horse that is not my horse standing quietly in a paddock corner, not even his tail swishing, like a battery-operated game that is currently turned off. It looks and feels like the end of the world. Like Judgment Day came and went and took everyone but us. It looks like Hell, I think happily, and then pause.
Hell.
Happy.
Shouldn’t Hell terrify me? Yes, I think it should. But I can’t seem to summon fear—or anger, now that I think about it, or even sadness. Those emotions are far away right now, behind a padlocked door down the longest of long hallways.
All I feel is—fine. I feel fine.
I cock my head at the thought. Why do I feel fine?
The tonic.
The tonic Mary gave me. That must be what’s making me feel this way.
Terrible,I think experimentally.How terrible of her to drug me.
But it doesn’t feel terrible. It feels incredible. Clear and cool and calm, the world around me sweetly blurry, like I’m floating face down in a river, eyes open underwater, staring at the muck and the grime, saying hello and then goodbye as I float mercifully past.
Thank God someone finally drugged me.
“Bunny,” I manage finally.
“I alreadysaidthat,” Maeve says. “Somethingelse,Mama! Something else!”
I play along, gaze traveling upward. What do I see?
I see a cloud that looks like my piece of shit pioneer husband when he’s standing over me, watching me scream.Yeehaw!I see a cloud that looks like the kind of bread I’m capable of baking these days.Lumpy lumpy lumpy.I see a cloud that looks very much like—what did Caleb become obsessed with, once we moved to the farm?
