The Wife Tree by Dorothy Speak

ploughing party halted directly north of the house, took shelter from the sun beneath a maple tree in spring leaf, ate a lunch of cold chicken, loaves of fresh bread, potato salad, gallon jars of preserved beans, baking-powder biscuits spread with peach jam, Thermoses of steaming tea. When they returned home at five o’clock, they immediately noticed the stillness in the house. The fire had gone down, which was a blessing, as the day had warmed to July temperatures and all the windows stood closed, making the house hot and airless as a tomb.
    “She’s quiet at last,” said my mother with relief, pulling off herboots at the kitchen door. Then she noticed that no preparations had been made for dinner. On the kitchen table lay three unplucked chickens, bunches of spring carrots awaiting scrubbing, potatoes with the skins unpeeled. A row of loaf tins, bread dough spilling over their sides, stood unbaked on the counter. Entering the front room, she found my grandmother’s brittle body crumpled on the floor, her head dashed, heavy as a stone, against the hearth, on her brow a welt the size of a plum.
    My dead grandmother may have tried to sing me a lullaby, and the more she sang, her voice an antique whistle in her throat, the more lustily I’d cried. Unable to calm me, unnerved by this child shouting brazenly at life, she’d suffered a stroke. Together we’d pitched forward like a pair of divers, my grandmother’s cheek pressed at last against the rough flagstone, the radiant apple tree outside the window reflected in her eyeglasses, twin images shining in the small round lenses as though cast there from within her head, a photographic projection. The spill forced her porcelain teeth out, shot them across the hearth. In the corner of her mouth, a ruby scab had formed. Tumbling like a soft bundle of rags across the rug, I’d survived the fall unharmed. The bottle containing the milk my mother had expressed before going out had rolled across the room and lay now against the wood bin.
    The year was 1912. I was the eighth child. Two of my brothers were already adolescents. Now they crowded in behind my mother, awkward as cattle, cumbersome in the narrow room, inarticulate, smelling powerfully of the sweat of their labour, big boys already growing fleshy, acquiring farmers’ guts, their necks reddened by the day’s strong sun. The three girls pressed in behind them, the hems of their dresses heavy with dust, hair plastered to their hot faces, long sleeves and wide straw hats worn to protecttheir milky skins from the sun’s rays because of my mother’s vow, “No girl of mine is ever going to turn dark as a nigger.”
    My father sighed with exhaustion. Things had gone wrong out in the fields. A plough handle had snapped, an old horse had collapsed, another had lost its shoe, the spring soil was unyielding as stone. There’d been shouting and they’d all come inside hot and defeated and murderous and now there was this dead body to contend with.
    In the room hung the ripe smell of the old woman. Not the smell of death but simply of this woman’s elderly flesh, a mouldering odour they’d been inhaling for years without noticing it, a strange fruity rot rising out of the yellow folds of her ancient skin. Had the stench of the butchery invaded her pores, hung there long after she closed its door behind her?
    “She was the only gentle thing left in my life,” my mother, looking down at her, said. “She was my last connection with the city.”
    My mother’s breasts, at five in the afternoon, were hardened and painful with their bounty of milk. She was a tall, robust German. She’d learned to get up out of bed directly after childbirth to bake half a dozen loaves of bread and as many pies for the threshers’ noonday meal. She could peel potatoes, wash dishes, put up canning, juggling jars of boiling vinegar, and hold a baby safely in the crook of her arm all the while. Now, in the window behind her, the apple tree that