The Seary Line (2 page)

Though her body had aged, her voice was just the same. He heard it only for an instant when she said his Christian name. As quickly as she spoke, he locked those two syllables
away. Knew he would replay them time after time when he was still, when he was silent. He thought she wavered when their old eyes met, and he considered that she was building up to their meeting as well. How long had it been? An easy number to recollect. Fifty-three years.

Once she was well inside his home, Uncle's knees buckled, and he collapsed against the sun-warmed door. He was light-headed, overwhelmed by the weight of emotion within him. Joy and sorrow. Looping, weaving. Mending. Tearing apart. Many, many strands of both. And these strands had nothing to do with the fact that right now, in the home where he had lived his entire life, a child was being born.

“How bad is it?” Percy Abbott asked as he sat knee to knee with his wife Delia at their kitchen table.

“Not too bad,” she replied. “I don't think.”

Percy took her hand in his and sighed. Another mishap, just enough to make him teeter. He wiped his sweating face on the shoulder of his plaid shirt, then noticed the skinned rabbit lying on a wooden cutting board beside him. Its furry paws were removed and pushed off to the side. One desiccated black eye stared up at Percy.
She didn't listen to me either
, it seemed to say.
Didn't heed a peep
. With his elbow, Percy nudged the board, re-orienting the dead rabbit's gaze.

Now holding her hand up to the light, he saw the tip of her index finger, firm and ready to burst, offering up a blistering heat. A spider web of redness threatened to take over her palm.

“Can you move it?”

“Not since this morning.”

“Jesus, Del. Why did you hide this?”

“Don't yop my head off,” she snapped.

A rush of air from his nostrils.

“I didn't hide it exactly,” she continued, eyes focused on the calico fabric of her dress. “You just didn't notice.”

There you go
, he thought,
turning it around
.

“Did not,” she said flatly.

He chose not to respond.

Percy knew something was wrong when she met him at the door. He arrived for his afternoon lunch, but there was no steaming tea, no plate of squares or bread on the table. Not even a dry cracker to calm his cranky belly. Instead, she was standing in the doorway, holding her hand against her chest, chirping through a nervous smile. “You're going to be mad.”

“Not again, Del. Poking around in my shed.”

“I wasn't, then. I was. . .I was cleaning.”

“Poking around.”

“Okay. Poking around.”

“Again.”

Only last winter, he had found her trapped there, unable to move. He'd been cutting wood most of the day, but when fat snowflakes began to sift down through a darkened sky and the air grew dense, he decided to haul his sleigh out before the path was erased. When he arrived home, the house was strangely quiet, the fire low. He called to his wife, but she didn't answer. All of the rooms were empty. Lonely. For a fleeting moment, as he sat down in the kitchen, he had the notion that his wife may have left him, and he glanced about for a scribbled note.

Then, from the window over the kitchen sink, he saw his shed, the colour of blooming poppies, permeating the
storm. Brazenly, it called to him, Come take a look.

Sure enough, she was there, hunched over his lathe, head and neck twisted like a chicken's just before the snap.

“Percy? Hand me the sickle, will you?” she said in a relaxed voice, as though the scene were somehow banal. Her arm stretched out behind her, pale fingers wiggling. “Can you pass that to me? I can't quite get it.”

He reached around her, felt her hair, a gnarled mess coiling a length of wood, firmly secured in the lathe. Then, stepping back, he roared, “Sickle! A sickle! I got half a mind to hand you the scythe.”

Her hand crawled up over her shoulder, and she tugged at her shawl, covered up her head. The whole works began to shake, and he could hear her muffled crying. He paced back and forth in the tiny shed, hoping his anger would scatter with each livid scuff of his boots.

That morning, he had fixed a piece of knotty pine in the lathe, taken it down using the barrel of an old gun as a roughing gouge. When he left it, the newly formed spindle was still jagged, hitching onto his sweater when he brushed his arm against it.

He could just imagine what had happened. Tentative at first, she would have pressed the treadle slowly with her buttoned boot, and pressing it again, she might have leaned her face closer to feel the sweetly scented wind rising up from the dry wood. Then her hair would have fallen over her shoulder, and in a shocking instant, her head would crack downwards with a sudden awful force. Astounded foot like ice on the treadle.

He stared at his wife's backside and thought about her hair out loose like that in the middle of the day. Unpinned and unbraided, a nighttime style. Bedtime. The more he thought about her handfuls of hair, the harder he scuffed his
feet along the worn wooden floor. Some part of him felt slightly sick, as though an unspoken confidence had been broken.

Then to find her in this most vulnerable position.

Certainly most men would think her stupid, might even strike her as though she were an errant animal. He shuddered at the thought of a bruise on her fair skin, and for the moment, his anger was outweighed by relief – that he was her husband, that he was the man coming upon her like this.

“What a mess,” she mumbled, and her feet danced slightly. “I don't know what else to do. I've tried everything, but I's stuck. I've near scalped myself, I yanked so hard. Cut my hair, Percy, for God's sake. Cut it.”

“That I won't.”

She moaned. “Please, Percy. I's frozed, right down to the bone, been out here now God only knows how long. And. . .and. God, I don't care what you thinks of me no more, if you don't cut me free this instant, I's going to. . .I's going to lose my water all over myself.”

Percy paused.

“For God's sake, have pity on me,” she squealed.

He bent over her, released the tailstock, and pulled up on the piece of wood. Once freed, she bolted from the small room, darted up the slippery path through the woods towards the outhouse. Percy watched her, and even though his heart was still beating against his chest, he couldn't help but smirk. Bounding over the icy hill, the unfinished spindle offered its own form of punishment – a whack to the backside every time her springing feet touched the frozen ground.

Inside their home, he stoked the fire and waited for her to return. She never spoke when she entered the room, but sat in the chair beside him. Not a flinch as he began to
untwist the wood, loosen her hair, snipping scattered stands. The tangle looked worse than it was, and in only minutes, wood and woman were separated.

She rubbed her neck, then stood, smoothed her apron. “How about I put that soup on the stove. Warm our bones?”

My bones is plenty warm
.

Her cheeks glowed with his unspoken scolding, and she turned away from him, walked to the back stoop.

Percy was bewildered, wondered why she was so unsettled. After all these years of marriage, her landscape was familiar, but the earth beneath was always a surprise. Didn't women have their place? A place that had nothing to do with their husband's livelihood? A safe place: kitchen, church, vegetable garden, bedroom?

Then again, how was he to know? Percy had grown up with a silent father and four brooding brothers, and he understood nothing of the desires of a woman. Who was he to tell her what to do? Did he really have that right? He was uncertain, and hadn't said a word whenever she hovered in the doorway, lingered beside him as he worked. But soon, she began slipping in while he was away – his mallet might be in a different location, the dusty planer cleaned, a piece of furniture shifted. He was a precise man, and he noticed these things.

Delia returned with the frozen soup. Percy watched her hold the frosty pot to her abdomen with one hand, rub the other hand over it, a glitter of frost falling onto her skirt. And he was bewildered no more. Children. A child, even. Missing from her life. That would have changed everything. He had failed her.

“As the man–” he began, then coughed, reached for a handkerchief in his back pocket. His voice was like a wilted plant, and inside his head, he could hear his brothers mock
his softness.
Oh, have mercy, little Percy
. He cleared his throat, then continued more forcefully than intended, “As your husband, I forbid you to ever go in there again. It's no place, no place for a decent woman.”

He remembered her wincing when he'd said the word “decent.” But the sting didn't last long. She had responded soberly, “If I hadn't gotten stuck, you'd never have known.”

Percy shook his head, released the memory, tried to focus on Delia's finger. He laid her hand back in her lap, patted it, and stood. In the porch, he poured water in the basin, lathered his hands with a swipe of dark lye soap. A fly landed on his forearm, and he turned to see a tear near a nail in the screening on the door. An open invitation. He made a mental note to repair it next chance.

Delia extended her finger, but looked away when he approached holding a thin blade. With a quick flick, he sliced open the tip of her index finger, then squeezed and pressed until the pus-coated shard of pine oozed out. He could see the blush of her pain climbing up over her collarbones, then painting her thin neck, taking hold of her pretty face.

“Almost done,” he whispered.

At the counter, he mixed a poultice of old bread, a few drops of water, and patted it onto the wound. Then he wrapped her finger with clean rags, bound the hand tightly, layer upon layer, tucked the tail of the fabric close to her palm.

“You was doing such a grand job, I's surprised you stopped at my wrist.”

“Your wrist is fine, though I was wishing I had enough to wrap your mouth.”

She smiled at him, then looked down at her hand.

“If it's not on the mend by tomorrow,” he announced
after several moments of silence, “I'm going after Dr. Barnes. Get him to take a look at it.”

“Oh no, Percy. I swear I's his best patient. Come fall, we'll have nar vegetable left, and his cellar'll be overflowing.”

Percy's coarse eyebrows knitted together.

“I'll be fine, Percy. Honest.”

You'll have to be
.

“Now who's being dramatic?”

“I never said a word.”

“Didn't have to.”

He gazed about the room, focused on the rabbit, imagined the legs and body reunited, innards once again tucked neatly inside, thimble-sized organ pumping, head slipping through the neck of its furry sweater. Springing away.
Too late now
, he thought.
Once you're overtaken, once someone has got hold of all of you, there's no way to ask for nothing back
.

Uncle waited on the stoop while Miss Cooke was deep inside his home. Along with his wife, she was now witnessing a woman, splayed, stray child emerging from the bloodied flesh between her legs. Images of the crinkled female arrangement crept upwards, tap-tapped on his consciousness, but he pressed them down the back of his neck. He would be first to admit he struggled with that sort of thing. Whenever he heard a shrill cluck from a hen, he couldn't help but visualize a glistening egg emerging from a hidden mouth stretched beyond. And once, when he had to reach into a mare, grip the greasy legs of a breech foal, he came close to fainting when the wet animal was finally standing beside him on rubbery legs.

As he grew older, even relations with his wife became increasingly difficult. The morning afterwards, he always found his skin sensitive to any lick of wind, the brightness of the sun a terrible distraction. As he worked the field, a spicy scent would leach through the fabric of his clothes, be carried off on the breeze, and he was bothered by the notion that it might meet someone else's nose. This discomfort intensified to the point where he abandoned that nighttime struggle altogether, and was more settled because of it.