“I think I’m going to be sick—”
Of course,I had said calmly.I was going to suggest the same thing myself.Though my hand shook uncontrollably when I signed my name on the final paper.
“There, there, darling. There, there.”
I reached the bathroom door, opened and shut it quickly behind me. Abigail’s children were screeching and laughing, splashing each other in the tub, while Clementine sat naked next to Caleb on the side of the tub, watching her cousins with a quiet smile, her wet hair already washed and conditioned and combed back. The baby was in a bouncer by the toilet, running his fingers along the inside of the porcelain rim. The bathroom floor was slick with water. My husband—to whom every red cent of our fortune and every square inch of this ranch exclusively belonged—turned to me and whooped.
“Well, well, well,” he said grandly, in his good ol’ boy Western accent. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes, little lady.” The children shrieked in delight.
An impossible thing to imagine, what might happen if my husband ever paused and thought about the governing law of his own starry universe: his wife might as well have been a farm dog, for all the rights she had. Even the sweetest, stupidest man can grow cruel and cunning when he learns a thing like that.
29
“Cold front’s comingthrough this afternoon.”
I look up in surprise. Old Caleb is standing a few feet away from the laundry tub.
“It’s a big one,” he says. “Might even get some snow.”
Behind him, on the porch twenty feet away, Mary is beating the table rug over the railing. She pauses when she sees him standing before me. I’m sure she’s thinking the same thing I am:He never talks to me if he can help it.
“We’ll need to take the animals inside the barn,” Old Caleb goes on. “And we should stack some extra wood. We might be snowed in for a day or longer.”
I don’t know what to say. He hasn’t asked me a question, so I return my focus to the laundry. Plunge my hands into the frigid water and watch them work. They’re so numb I can’t feel them at all, can only watch them move through the water with a sort of amazed wonder. So much work to get these clothes clean, and for what? The boys will stomp around in muddy puddles the next day.
“Nattie,” Old Caleb says.
Underwater, my fingers twitch and dance. I swallow the rising bile in my throat. It was a good day, and now it’s starting to feel like a bad day. I pull my hands out of the tub, wipe them dry on my apron, and look up at him. In my periphery, I notice the porch is empty. Mary has gone back inside.
“I don’t like hitting you,” Old Caleb says. “You know that.”
I imagine a camera zooming in on my face. I tilt my chin slightly so the sunlight catches my pout.
“I didn’t want to do that,” he says. “You made me do that. You were … hysterical. And the trap—”
As if on cue, my poor bandaged foot begins to throb.
This man.My husband.I wonder which of the tools in the barn I’d use if I needed to kill him. The wood-chopping ax would work nicely, I think. No—the scythe.More personal,I think, and smile.
“Anyways,” Old Caleb says. “I’ve been keeping my distance. Sleeping in the boys’ room with them. I’ve wanted you to rest. But you seem much better now.”
Poor idiot,I think.You misunderstand my smile.
“So,” he says, and casts his glance over my head, toward the mountains. “I’m going to share a bed with you tonight.”
The smile slips off my face.
“I won’t have any complaints about it, either,” he goes on. “You’re my wife, and I’m your husband, and we’re meant to share a bed.”
I just stare at him. Pray against all rationality that I might hear, in the faraway distance, a director shoutingCut.There’s nothing but the wind whistling through the valley, a sky the color of frostbitten skin.
Shame. I’d let my guard down. So many weeks of my own bed, I’d actually started to think it could stay that way. But of course that’s not how this works.
Everyone has a role on this farm. Old Caleb tends to the fields, and Noah tends to the horse, and Abel tends to his father, and Mary tends to the kitchen and to Maeve, and Maeve tends to the chickens—and me?
A few days ago, I might have said my role is to take care of the laundry. That is, of course, not correct. The laundry is an addendum, a footnote, a midafternoon side quest for a woman with too much time on her hands. This, right here, is my true role. To spread my legs when my husband demands. To have as many children as I can until my legs give out beneath me, and to feel nothing butgratitude on the hour of my death. To smile while the spirit hemorrhages out of me.
Ha. It really is funny to think of how I all but begged Caleb, in our early years of marriage, to become the kind of man who is standing before me now. The opposite of a kindergarten teacher. A farmer. A cowboy. A patriarch. A man without a single soft edge. I craved it, I prayed for it, and what did the Lord do? He listened. He gave me what I wanted. He gave me a man.
