For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.
Old Caleb is looking at me expectantly. I feel like I’m sitting beneath a spotlight, like the whole world is waiting for me to speak.Can someone tell me my line?
Yes, master. As you wish, master. Should I lift my skirts and bend over right here by the laundry, master? Would you like to come on my face or my tits, master?
But that last joke doesn’t work, does it? This man doesn’t want to come anywhere but deep, deep inside me, so that I may have—Lord save me from this wakingnightmare—a baby. Here. In this world.
I wipe my wet hands against the fabric of my lap, then look up at him. “Who are you, really?”
Old Caleb shakes his head, looks up at the sky, looks back at me. “I don’t think I’m interested in playing this game today.”
A voice in my head, echoing softly:America hates angry women. The Lord hates angry women. You hate angry women. Do not be an angry woman.
Except I am angry. I am very, very angry. So angry that I can’t keep myself from saying, “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to behave like a mother and wife,” Old Caleb snaps, and suddenly I realize he’s angry, too. As angry as I am. It’s a terrifying, thrilling realization. You could strike a match through the air between us and watch it catch flame.
“Well,” I say. “Maybe I’m not interested in that anymore.”
Old Caleb raises a hand swiftly into the sky. I close my eyes. I’m so prepared for the thunderclap of pain that it takes me a moment torealize the moment has passed. I open my eyes, watch his hand push back his hair in agitation. He didn’t hurt me again, he can always hurt me again, he will eventually hurt me again. A sob escapes me. I’m so tired of this place. “Why am I here?”
“You’reherebecausethis is where you want to be,” he roars.
“Well, now I want to leave,” I cry out. “Now I want to go home.”
“Go home, then, Natalie. Go walk on home, wherever you think that is. See what good that brings you.” He leans over and spits, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Stares past me at the mountains with a tight, working jaw.
“If I try to leave again, will you stop me?”
He’s still looking past me when he says, “It won’t be me that stops you, no.”
A chill runs through me. I am looking at my husband, this stranger, but I am thinking of the woods, and then the world beyond those woods. I can’t imagine what they hold.
That’s not true, actually.
The truth, the real truth, is that sometimes, out here on this ranch, I have this terrible feeling, like a loose electrical wire in my chest, that if I think hard enough for long enough, I will know exactly what is waiting for me on the other side of those woods, and the horror of this knowledge will eat me alive.
Lord, God, save me, wake me from thisdream—
The wind picks up and a chill whips past the house. Old Caleb grabs his hat to keep it from flying away. I tuck my cheek against my shoulder to protect it from the stinging cold. He’s right. A storm is coming.
The clouds move quickly down the valley. One minute, it’s just me and Old Caleb outside, a blue sky overhead, and the next minute the world has gone gray and the wind is blowing my hair out of its braid and the children are pouring out of the house like little weathervanes.
“The snow will be here in a minute,” Old Caleb says to me, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “Get the clothes inside.”
I look at the tub in indignation. “But they’re sopping wet!”
But he’s already walking toward the pasture. I watch in amazement as the cow and the horse trot over to meet him by the pasture entrance, eager to be guided to the safety of the barn. Does every animal on this property have a better sense of the world’s shifting currents than me?
Then Maeve is by my side, tugging my arm. “Clothes, Mama.”
I plunge my hands back into the freezing water, hauling the soaking pile of fabric out and wringing it as best as I can. Maeve holds her arms out, and I drop some of the clothing into her arms. A few pieces fall to the ground, immediately dirtying themselves, and I let out a cry of frustration. I pick them up and stuff them back into the pile. Together, we run two loads of laundry into the house, setting up the clothing by the fire to dry. Around us, the other children are moving just as quickly, stacking wood and closing the barn up and shutting the kitchen windows and securing them with flimsy wooden latches.
I’ve experienced storms on this land before. I know how powerful they are. In recent years, we even lost power a few times, but the generator always kicked in. Now I stare at the fire and remember that this is the only source of warmth we have. “Get more wood,” I shout at the children. My first true command in who knows how long, and an utterly useless one at that. They’re already doing it.
Not an hour later, hail pounds the roof like machine-gun fire. It’s late afternoon, but the sky is so dark it looks like the dead of night. Mary is cutting up chunks of bread and slathering them with butter. That will be our dinner tonight. I am sitting by the fire, Maeve resting in my lap. Across me, the boys sit, their legs splayed out in front of them to warm their feet. Abel mimics holding a rifle, pointing the imaginary trigger toward the roof. “Pow, pow, pow,” he whispers. “Take that, you savages.” Noah watches with rapture. Through his gaze, Abel’s rifle seems so terribly real.
As the storm pounds away at our little cabin, I close my eyes and imagine it. Cowboys and Indians. A great bloody battle for theserolling hills. Old Caleb scalped by some hardened warrior chief. The boys slain. The girls and I carried off to some faraway teepee with smoke spilling out the top.
