had so filled her with hope shimmered. Within twenty-four hours, the petals would drop.
The sun began to set. The house grew dim. When my mother didn’t move to pick me up, my father, a soft-spoken man with thin blond hair and ears large as monarch butterflies, stepped forward in his earthy overalls and reached for me. Unaccustomed to handling babies, he held me at arm’s length, like a leaky bucket. Turning, he thrust me at my oldest sister, Alfreda, a brainy gat-toothed girlstudying that spring for her Normal School exams. My mother went to the pantry, opened her bodice, pumped breast milk into a bottle. Alfreda, school books spread open before her on the kitchen table, pushed the rubber nipple into my mouth, never lifting her eyes from the text, her breath singing through the spaces in her great square teeth.
I’m told that, for a month, my mother didn’t go near me. She couldn’t bring herself to pick me up. A mother’s touch is as familiar to an infant as the landscape of the womb. I ached for the physical power, for the knowledge of myself contained in my mother’s strong hands, which had defined me from the moment I’d emerged from her belly. Since birth, I’d been sleeping in my parents’ bed. I’d grown accustomed, in the darkness, to their deep unconscious breathing, to the sound of their coupling, to the rocking of the mattress as my father rode my mother. He may have been shy and docile, but, a man of his generation, he knew his rights in bed. Only through breast-feeding had my mother avoided a pregnancy a year. Now, exiled to a cradle in a corner of the kitchen, I had an oblique view in daytime of my mother moving from stove to sink, erect, a woman whose face had lost its softness, her jawline now lean as a trowel, her eyes hollow with grief. They say that, all that month, while the petals in the orchard snowed from the trees, I didn’t once cry. I learned to be silent, not to draw criticism, to be obedient, to submit.
“If I never hear another sound from that child, it’ll be too soon,” my mother said.
Born in 1878, she was an only and rebellious butcher’s child. My father, a farmer’s son, had met her at a church dance and married her because she had skin like snow and large dark eyes and because she looked strong as an ox. The day of the stroke shewas only thirty-four, but I was the finish of children for her. She knew it, standing beside my father in the cemetery, gazing down at my grandmother’s pine coffin. And he, sensing a resolution forming like a meaty tumour within her, may have suspected that she’d never allow him to touch her again.
But was I really, as my mother often described me, the youngest murderer in the world? How can anyone be sure that it was in fact my howling that killed my grandmother? Is it not possible that on that May afternoon, sealed within the airless farmhouse, a fine widow’s sweat breaking out of her old pores, she’d begun to think about Honey Halpern? Had she pictured the young mistress sitting, not twenty miles from this very farm, on a cottage porch surrounded by its lush growth of ferns, cooled by an offshore breeze, a view before her of wheeling gulls, glittering waters, late reflective sunsets — the precise vista my grandmother had envisaged for herself? And is it not possible that, the more she thought about Honey Halpern, the more embittered she became and the harder she rocked until finally an artery in her brain ruptured like a faulty garden hose and she pitched to her death?
Today, listening to the song of the newborns in the maternity ward, I thought about how, as an infant, I’d had lungs powerful enough to knock an old woman to the floor. Now I’ve grown so timid that this afternoon when a nurse asked me, “Are you Mr. Hazzard’s wife?” I answered timidly, “Yes, I am,” and my voice came out in barely a whisper.
Dear girls,
…Do you remember the Christmas Day when your father was going on and on at the dinner table about
The sun began to set. The house grew dim. When my mother didn’t move to pick me up, my father, a soft-spoken man with thin blond hair and ears large as monarch butterflies, stepped forward in his earthy overalls and reached for me. Unaccustomed to handling babies, he held me at arm’s length, like a leaky bucket. Turning, he thrust me at my oldest sister, Alfreda, a brainy gat-toothed girlstudying that spring for her Normal School exams. My mother went to the pantry, opened her bodice, pumped breast milk into a bottle. Alfreda, school books spread open before her on the kitchen table, pushed the rubber nipple into my mouth, never lifting her eyes from the text, her breath singing through the spaces in her great square teeth.
I’m told that, for a month, my mother didn’t go near me. She couldn’t bring herself to pick me up. A mother’s touch is as familiar to an infant as the landscape of the womb. I ached for the physical power, for the knowledge of myself contained in my mother’s strong hands, which had defined me from the moment I’d emerged from her belly. Since birth, I’d been sleeping in my parents’ bed. I’d grown accustomed, in the darkness, to their deep unconscious breathing, to the sound of their coupling, to the rocking of the mattress as my father rode my mother. He may have been shy and docile, but, a man of his generation, he knew his rights in bed. Only through breast-feeding had my mother avoided a pregnancy a year. Now, exiled to a cradle in a corner of the kitchen, I had an oblique view in daytime of my mother moving from stove to sink, erect, a woman whose face had lost its softness, her jawline now lean as a trowel, her eyes hollow with grief. They say that, all that month, while the petals in the orchard snowed from the trees, I didn’t once cry. I learned to be silent, not to draw criticism, to be obedient, to submit.
“If I never hear another sound from that child, it’ll be too soon,” my mother said.
Born in 1878, she was an only and rebellious butcher’s child. My father, a farmer’s son, had met her at a church dance and married her because she had skin like snow and large dark eyes and because she looked strong as an ox. The day of the stroke shewas only thirty-four, but I was the finish of children for her. She knew it, standing beside my father in the cemetery, gazing down at my grandmother’s pine coffin. And he, sensing a resolution forming like a meaty tumour within her, may have suspected that she’d never allow him to touch her again.
But was I really, as my mother often described me, the youngest murderer in the world? How can anyone be sure that it was in fact my howling that killed my grandmother? Is it not possible that on that May afternoon, sealed within the airless farmhouse, a fine widow’s sweat breaking out of her old pores, she’d begun to think about Honey Halpern? Had she pictured the young mistress sitting, not twenty miles from this very farm, on a cottage porch surrounded by its lush growth of ferns, cooled by an offshore breeze, a view before her of wheeling gulls, glittering waters, late reflective sunsets — the precise vista my grandmother had envisaged for herself? And is it not possible that, the more she thought about Honey Halpern, the more embittered she became and the harder she rocked until finally an artery in her brain ruptured like a faulty garden hose and she pitched to her death?
Today, listening to the song of the newborns in the maternity ward, I thought about how, as an infant, I’d had lungs powerful enough to knock an old woman to the floor. Now I’ve grown so timid that this afternoon when a nurse asked me, “Are you Mr. Hazzard’s wife?” I answered timidly, “Yes, I am,” and my voice came out in barely a whisper.
Dear girls,
…Do you remember the Christmas Day when your father was going on and on at the dinner table about
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