“Aah,” she said, a little disappointed.
“Best let Agnes and Pris do the telling, Mary. They know more of it than I.”
She was disappointed for sure. She longed to hear of the birth. She wondered about all Aaron couldn’t tell her, about all the mystery involved in a birth that no one but a mother could know. She huddled there while he puzzled in silence over thoughts of his own.
As if he’d come to a decision, Aaron straightened, then leaned his elbows back onto the step behind him with a weighted sigh.
“Ah, I think I’ve been a damn fool,” he mumbled, more to himself than to Mary.
“You trying to convince me or you?”
“Not me, for sure. I don’t need any convincing.”
She said nothing, waiting for him to go on when he chose. It was cold. She curled her bare toes away from the concrete.
He half turned on the step below her, so she could see his face profiled with the moonlight behind it, and he saw her bare feet on the same cold concrete step. He moved and took them onto his warm thigh and covered them with the hem of his Sunday suit jacket, which he still wore. Over the hem he placed his hand, and between Aaron and Mary there was a natural warmth that had nothing to do with his taking her feet upon his thigh to warm them. He did it without conscious thought, for they’d always had that careless way between them. They’d always counted themselves lucky at the friendship they enjoyed, knowing Jonathan was not the reason. They’d have been friends even if Jonathan were neither Mary’s husband nor Aaron’s brother.
“I hurt Pris tonight, on purpose, something I never thought to do. We argued and I ruined her day for her—after the birthing and all. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Is all the blame yours? It takes two to anger, doesn’t it?”
“It takes two to do a lot of things.” Then he grew quiet, the silence more telling than the words.
“So it’s finally come to that?”
“Yes, finally. She’ll have it no other way. And damn my hide! I’m just not ready. But she can’t see it my way, and I can’t see it hers.”
“You’ve given her reason to look at you with marriage on her mind, Aaron, you can’t deny that. You’ve seen no one but her for a good year now. Could be she’s a right to expect more than walks in the moonlight.”
“Maybe I’ve a right to expect more, too.”
Once he’d said it he felt coarse and guilty, and he supposed he must seem so to Mary.
“That’s what you fought over, then?”
“Aha,” he confessed, “I told you I’d been a damn fool.”
“Well, I reckon many other men have been equally as foolish as you, then.”
“It ought to be Jonathan I talk to about this,” Aaron said.
“Jonathan isn’t a man for talking, though, is he?”
It was true. Aaron had always been able to talk with Mary far easier than with Jonathan.
“A man’s needs can sometimes be bigger than his common sense, you know? And women have a hard time understanding that. But a woman’s needs are so different.”
“A woman’s needs aren’t different at all, and don’t you think they are. We all want pretty much the same—marriage and love and children.”
“In that order?”
“Most of the time.”
“It doesn’t always happen so for a man.”
“That’s nature, Aaron.”
“Yeah, well, nature’s been giving me a hell of a time lately, then.”
“Maybe it hasn’t been easy on Pris, either.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“I can’t take sides, Aaron. You know I can’t. I care enough about both you and Pris to want to see you happy. Both of you.”
She paused.
“But you see, Aaron, there’s something you should understand, and it’s what happens to a woman when another woman has a baby. It’s like nature plays a trick on her, makes her think of it as her own. Hearing the news the first time, she’ll hold fast to her own belly, just as if it were growing there. And no matter who the father is, for a time he seems special—as if she herself had been touched by him. Why is it she asks so many questions of an expecting woman? Well, it’s because the more she hears, the more she shares—the discomforts and the joys. She hears about the quickening, and for a time it’s hers, too. She hears of a heartbeat, and it might as well be beating inside herself. And the birth—she takes a share in that, too. And to see a newborn child is to want one of her own, whether she already has two—or twelve. It doesn’t matter. Because that’s the trick nature plays on her. It makes all women think of babies in terms of themselves.”
Under his hand Aaron could feel her toes, curled tightly now, as some might clench a fist in intensity.
“You plead Priscilla’s case too convincingly for it to be only her case,” Aaron said, smoothing his hand over her feet, looking down at them. He looked up at her, huddled shivering above him. “I’m sorry, Mary, for being selfish and going on about myself.”
She drew her robe tighter about her.
“No, Aaron, that’s not true. If you’re selfish, then so am I, but I don’t see us that way. I see us as two people who have to talk about what needs saying.”
“Don’t excuse me so lightly. I should have had more sense than to go on—”
“More sense than to what?” She cut him off. “To air a few feelings that needed airing? That’s all we’re doing, you and I.”
And it was all they were doing. But it occurred to Aaron how unseemly it would be if anyone knew how freely they’d talked. Here in Moran Township the straitlaced matrons would not understand that a talk so personal could take place innocently. He was amused at the thought of some pucker-faced old harridan pursing her mouth in sour shock. Gossip was the thing they thrived on, and Aaron disliked it.
“Oh, but if the town gossips could hear what we’ve been talking about, they’d choke in their sleep.”
It hadn’t occurred to her before, but the thought of it brought a bubble of mirth to her lips. “Oh, Aaron, I expect they would,” she laughed.
And the night, sealing them against self-consciousness, carried their laughter on its uncensoring ear.
2
Out in the fields was the place where Jonathan did his best thinking. There he found expressions and feelings that seemed to avoid him everywhere else. Between him and the land, it seemed, he could work out most anything. All of his twenty-eight years he’d lived on this land, and it had never failed him. At times he felt he might have sprouted right out of it, breast-fed by its nectars, nurtured by its grains, and made secure by its perennial richness. When in doubt, the land was there. It gave back all he put into it. So he gave it his best. He worked it in love, and it returned his faith.
Walking on his soil that spring afternoon, he thought how easy it was to drop a seed into it, how effortlessly the land returned it. Far easier to ask a return of that kind than to ask what he was setting out to ask of Aaron and Mary.
“Consider, Aaron, if you were to father Mary and me a child.”
He said it aloud, and it was good on his ears. Yes, that’d do just fine as a beginning. What would come to follow he couldn’t guess, but Jonathan was fey to do the asking, no matter what. He would keep his arguments all stored and ready to voice—somehow—and would divine just how to voice them when the time came.
But the time never came that day, while Jonathan’s words were fresh on his mind. He returned from his walk in the late afternoon, and Aaron wasn’t home yet. At chore time, he still hadn’t returned. Then when the milking was done and Jonathan returned to the house, Mary said she’d seen Aaron heading for town and figured he’d gone after Doc Haymes for Agnes.
So Jonathan went to sleep that night with the question unasked, but through the following day it remained in his mind just as he’d rehearsed it, and by the end of the day, when they were all three in the kitchen around the big old claw-foot table, he was tense from the weight of it.
r /> One thing worked in his favor. Agnes Volence had had her baby last night, and Mary had that queer urge to talk about it, like she always did after news of a birthing.
“We’ll have to all go down there to visit, as soon as it’s respectable. Maybe the end of the week or so.” She was mending something she held on her lap, and she didn’t look up.
Aaron was drawing a handful of cookies from an old molasses pail in the middle of the table. He glanced at Mary, reading her intention immediately.
“You wouldn’t be planning to do a bit of matchmaking while you pay your little social call, would you?” he asked.
“Why, Aaron, no such thing. It’s just common politeness to visit the new parents. You know that.”
“It’s not common politeness to go calling within a week of the birth. Agnes will more’n likely still be in bed.”
“And what better time to take a cake down there than when they’re likely to appreciate it?”
She looked across at Aaron and put the thread in her teeth to bite it off. When she bit something off she was prepared to chew it, and he figured the sooner he made his peace with Pris the sooner Mary’d let up on him. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “We’ll see. What do you think, Jonathan?”
And then Jonathan did the strangest thing. He jumped. Or flinched, rather.
“Jonathan?”
Mary couldn’t see Jonathan’s hands, for the oilcloth cover hanging over the edge of the table hid them from sight. But she could tell he was wiping his palms on his thighs.
“Is something wrong, Jonathan?”
“Wrong?” But Jonathan had a frog in his throat, and he had to clear it before he could continue. “Just that everybody is having babies but us.”
He didn’t look at Mary, so he missed seeing her eyes drop quickly back to the work on her lap.
“Excuse me…” Aaron rose from his chair as if to leave.
“No. I want you to listen,” Jonathan said, staying his brother with a hand on his arm. “I got something to say, and it’s for both of you.”
Aaron glanced at Mary, but she kept her eyes on her needlework. He sat back down slowly.
“We’ve been married seven years now. That’s a long time. And there are no babies.”
“I think this is between you two, and I’ve got no place in it.” Aaron started to rise again, but a word from Jonathan stopped him.
“Stay.”
And though Aaron stayed, he did so reluctantly while Jonathan went on.
“We all here know what happened when we were boys—how we both got the mumps, Aaron, you and me. They left me”—here Jonathan swallowed—“I mean, we all know I can’t father babies.”
“We don’t know that for sure, Jonathan,” Mary said. “I haven’t given up hope.”
“Well, I gave up hope, Mary, and you’re just fooling yourself anymore,” Jonathan said.
“There’s no call to hurt her,” Aaron said quietly, remembering what they’d talked about the night before.
“Well, this place needs children, and they won’t spring from me.”
Jonathan’s palms were cold and damp on his thighs. His tongue, like a thick, swollen cork, threatened to stop up his mouth.
“But you, Aaron, they could spring from you.” It came out half question, half something else. But it was out. Before he dissolved in his own sweat, Jonathan hurried on. “You’re the natural one, Aaron. You’re my brother. You see how there ought to be a child, don’t you? It’s not a thing I ask lightly.” He looked at Mary, and her hands were still, her face expressionless.
Aaron’s impatience erupted.
“I’m getting pretty damn sick of everybody in five counties pushing me to get married. First it’s the townspeople, then it’s Pris, then Mary, and now you, Jonathan. It isn’t bad enough that the others push only for a wedding. Here you are, pushing for an heir! If people would leave us alone, maybe I’d be more in favor of the idea, but I’m not even ready to marry Pris yet, let alone have babies!”
“I’m not talkin’ about you and Pris.”
“Well, what the hell are you talkin’ about?”
Jonathan’s Adam’s apple rose and slid back into place. This whole thing had gone wrong from the start. Mary had a puzzled look on her face. He wanted to ask this for her sake, too. He wanted to give her this, but how could he get her to understand? The sweat rolled down his temple. Dampness made dark stains on his blue cambric shirt.
“I said, what are you talkin’ about?” Aaron repeated.
It was now or never.
“I’m talkin’ about you and Mary.”
The silence in the room was broken only by the tick of the pendulum clock on the kitchen wall.
“Me and Mary?” Aaron asked it in a quizzical way, as if he weren’t sure he’d heard the question right. He didn’t look at her, but he sensed her awful stillness, and it cracked the outer layer of his disbelief.
“Before either of you say anything, I got to explain—”
“Christ almighty! Explain! If I understand what you’re asking, you got more than explaining to do. You got some apologizing!” Aaron was on his feet now and leaning toward Jonathan across the table. “There’s nothing between Mary and me. Nothing! Do you hear me, brother?”
“I know…” was all Jonathan could get out before Aaron raged on.
“Mary’s your wife, man! Your wife! You’d best look at her and see what you’ve done in the last minute here.” Aaron pointed a shaking finger at Mary. She sat staring at Jonathan with enormous eyes, her mouth working.
And Jonathan knew he need not plumb too deeply to see how he’d hurt her.
“Why, Jonathan?” she asked at last, and her voice was a quiet croak.
“I want us to have a son, and I give up hoping I could father one. It came to me that you and me had those mumps together, Aaron, but you being those four years younger than me, well, they didn’t go down on you like they did on me, and I figured—”
But Aaron cut him off again. “Oh, no, you don’t! You don’t lay the guilt on me, Jonathan. Yes, we suffered side by side and you came out of it worse off than me, but that doesn’t mean I owe you this that you’re asking.”
“I didn’t mean you owe me. You know I’m not handy with words. But I thought about this plenty over the whole winter, and it appeared to me you and Priscilla were getting mighty close, so before you up and married I thought—”
Once again he was cut off, this time by Mary.
“Oh, Jonathan, you thought of it all winter? You planned on asking us all that time?” There was such hurt and bewilderment in her eyes that both men looked away rather than see it.
“Aaron’s your brother. I’m your wife. The asking aside, did you think of the sinfulness of it? Did you think of that?”
“I did. And I’ve done some praying over it, and I’ll gladly take the sin onto myself if there is sin. But there’s nothing between you and Aaron. You said so, Aaron, and I could see that. Maybe the sin lays in the coveting, like the commandment says.”
“You can’t just bend and twist the words to suit your needs! You took those words and you chiseled off all the corners till they fit some hole in your scheming head where you wanted them to fit, and that makes it right?”
“I said I’d accept the blame, Aaron.”
“Accept, hell! You’ll accept nothing because there’ll be nothing to accept! No blame! No sin! No baby! It makes me laugh to think you even believed we could get by with it. Just how do you think the fine women of Moran Township would take to one of their own showing up at church with a bastard son in her arms? Have you thought of what they’d do to Mary?”
“They’d never know it wasn’t mine, Aaron. Look at us. You know how much we look alike? The child would have the looks we both got from Ma and Pa. Nobody could look at it and say it’s yours, ’cause if he looked like you, he’d look like me, too. And I’d call it mine. It wouldn’t be no bastard.”
Aaron still stood leaning on the table, glaring acr
oss at his brother.
“I think the only bastard here is you!” he shouted.
Mary leaned toward him and touched his arm, firmly but quietly demanding, “Sit down, Aaron. There’s been enough hurt done here already. We’ll not add more by saying things we’ll all regret later.”
Aaron sat down, but the black look of rage stayed on his face.
“Jonathan,” Mary said, “I never complained about there being no babies, and if I acted like I held you responsible, I’m sorry. But what you’re asking is wrong. It’s wrong for Aaron and me, and it’s wrong for you. How could you ask such a thing?”
Jonathan swallowed a great lump of love for her that welled up in his throat. He needed to make her see that he’d asked it out of love, but his wooden tongue was not easily commanded.
“Mary,” he began, but the words were so hard to place between them, “Mary…I…it was a thing I wanted to give you, like I couldn’t give you a baby.”
“To give me, Jonathan?”
“Every woman should have the chance…I couldn’t see no other way to give it to you.”
Tears welled up in Mary’s eyes, and a confusion of feelings tightened her chest.
“There’s nobody else I’d ask except Aaron,” Jonathan went on, “I thought maybe he’d see it my way, like maybe some deed of goodness he could do you…and me, too.”
“But Jonathan, there’s got to be love before…” Here Mary looked at Aaron, and for the first time she became embarrassed. His anger was partly under control, and with its going she had no defense against self-consciousness.
“It’s not as if there’s no love at all,” Jonathan said. “And I can see the need in you, Mary. I can see you need what nature intended. Would it be unkind if Aaron could give you that?”
She could see that Aaron’s jaw was tightly clamped shut, the muscles quivering as he kept his silence. Suddenly the things they’d said last night, those confidences exchanged so innocently, became laden with meanings neither Aaron nor Mary had intended, and her eyes flashed quickly away from his when she sensed that he was thinking the same thing.