The Farmer's Wife

Emily stepped from the hot kitchen onto the front porch to catch a cool breeze sweeping through the hemlock planted close to the house. Sweat matted the hair at her temples and she placed her hands at the small of her back the way she'd seen her mother do long ago. She unfastened the top button of her blouse to let the wind play against her skin.

She watched him out in the field. Charles was standing up behind the tractor's steering wheel looking back at the plow cutting the dry, rocky soil. He was a good farmer, perhaps the best in Chester County. Everything he planted seemed to grow. Dry or wet seasons, droughts or floods, their fields of corn dazzled in the sun and were always towering with thick ears of silk-clad produce. They got wheat, two harvests of hay annually, and truck loads of soybean on years he decided to plant it. She was sure he could do anything with the plow, but with her body was another matter.

Some nights he came into her bed and lay beside her. He smelled of earth and seed, the scent of farming rooted deep within his flesh. Callused hands scraped over her body, parted her thighs. Afterwards he spent an hour in the washroom.

The dim light filled the opening under the washroom door. She watched his shadow move within. Finally he turned off the light, came out and climbed into his own bed by the window. He would never talk to her in the night, after they'd made love. He'd always hasten out of her bed to soak his crotch with a damp cloth to stop the blood leaking from the old wound, and he wouldn't even look at her, as though ashamed for what he'd done. But sometimes she heard him crying and saw his chest tremble beneath the blankets and moonlight. She wanted to tell him it was okay, but she was afraid to break the silence.

The day after making love, Charles always worked extra hard in the fields to punish himself, and today was no different. They already had a bumper crop of corn on the way and one harvest of hay in the barn, and there he was getting ready to plant a field for the second time that summer.

The sun was high. Looking at him seemed as if she were looking through moving air. Heat shimmered out of the ground like invisible smoke. She waved until he saw her and stopped the plow for lunch.

"Something smells delicious, Em" he said, peeking in through the doorway. He kicked mud off his boots before entering the kitchen. He hung his dirty tan hat on the hook by the door and washed his hands in the sink.

"Look what you did to my sink!" she said when she saw the dirt from his hands layering the bottom of the stainless steel basin. She ran water to rinse it clean. Then she cut two strips of meatloaf and two slices of bread, put them on a plate with a tomato, and handed it to him. In turn he passed the plate under his nose.

"This smells good too," he said.

"There's pie for dessert, if you didn't already guess. I'm getting sick of these apples. I'm cooped up baking pies all day. I don't care if that tree has apples for another decade."

He made a sandwich of the meatloaf. She watched his careful exactness as he quartered the tomato with a knife. This was typical of the day after, she thought. He rarely looked at her, directly into her eyes, as he occupied himself with meaningless tasks like cutting up a tomato. She'd tired of trying to cheer him up when he got into this mood. She'd learned that he would have to come back to her a little at a time, bit by bit, on his...