Good Water

Just two days after my father was laid away, I came down with the measles and pneumonia at the same time. I'd had pneumonia in the winter of 1910 also. Frank sat by my bedside three nights and three days and brought me safely through, better than any doctor could have done. I had measles through all of May and part of June, and from that time on my lungs got better, but now when I am more than ninety years old, they are full of tissue scars and I am sick so I may never get my story told.

Frank and I were married on a Sunday. I stood over the seated guests, my red hair combed smooth to lessen my height, and felt myself grow light-headed in my dove-colored, too light dress. Frank and I ate cake and berries and they tasted too sweet. We opened our gifts. My mother swept a spot of frosting from my chin and drew out my arms to look at the fit of my dress. Others studied my shoulders or my feet, tipping as I was in my low heels. Already I was a big woman, suited more for the farm than for marrying, and the others had to squint to see the dainty ring fitted on my hand.

Our neighbors Mary and her husband Jack Morrow made the best of the dance. Mary was dressed in silks and looking slim, and with his hand at her back, Jack carried her around. The two were fast and light and almost lifted off their feet, and when the song finished, our friends clapped and rushed forward to shake their hands. My mother pushed aside to make announcements then, clearing the floor with her outstretched arms. It was our dance next to come. Frank and I stepped out and held each other with space enough between, and I watched my feet as we turned lest I should trample him.

Only late did we return to what Frank had prepared to be our home. This same house, only rented then, with a stranger's furniture in the rooms. The house smelled of smoke and wood, and Frank had swept the floors, his broom resting against the front porch. The bed he'd made lay behind a curtain of chintz. The sheets were white and damp with the weather, and in the night, the sheets proved little to cover us. Outside, the animals in the barn were still. I could smell them through the window, and inside, this was what marriage was. In the morning, we waked early and Frank left our house to walk the miles to his father's place to milk.

It was still dark that morning when I carried water from the well back to the house. I wore the whitest skirts I owned. The water lapped inside my buckets and spattered the ground. There were fewer trees grown up around the house then. They did not make much noise of the wind. Gnats and midges jumped about my feet and they rose with the coming of the sun.

Frank had stacked wood on the back steps and I filled the stove to heat the water. When it boiled, I carried the water to the smoke house, filled a large basin with it, and dunked our bed sheets quickly in.

The water in the basin reddened. The stain on the sheets loosened and spread with the same that had stained me in the early morning and sent Frank hurrying away to milk. The light of my kerosene lamp fell against the skin of the hogs hung to smoke in the smokehouse, their torsos stripped and twisting slow on the hooks caught in their spines. Above my head, they turned in the light with a gnawing sound.

My hands grew wet and ragged with the soap. My nails split after the long time I scrubbed. I lifted the sheets over the line outside to let them dry and the sheets whipped together. I turned to the house and the sun felt hot, rising at my back.

Inside I fixed a pot of...