“Wish they wouldn’t go,” I said, and that was the closestI’d gotten to wanting or not wanting anything since the ring went on my finger.“Too quiet up here.”
“They don’t miss you,” he said. “Waste of time, missingthem.”
I nodded.
“You’d feel better with a baby,” he said.
We’d been trying for months already by then. I chewedraspberry leaves and slept underneath a quilt I’d sewn out of old clothesbecause that’s what Grammy used to say a woman should do, but nothing workedfor me.
“I know,” I said.
He laced his fingers across my stomach so his arms containedme. I used to think in the middle of nowhere you couldn’t help but spreadyourself out, but now I knew that really walls didn’t have to be wood or stone,they could be arms, they could be anything that held the world out and yourbody in.
◊
They stared when we went to town, and I felt sick thinkingwhat we looked like to them. Wasted witchery in my blood and muddy water inhis. We both needed to account for something. He didn’t see their eyes ordidn’t care. At the post office, he shuffled a stack of letters into my lap,then lifted a dappled coon hound into the truck bed and told me its name was Baby.
I couldn’t figure out if the dog was a cruelty or akindness, so I said thank you and kept my stinging eyes on the back of hisenvelopes. I didn’t recognize the names or cities on the return addresses. Noone here was accustomed to getting much mail from outside town.
He’d gotten the feed store to order a dress for me from acatalog, gliding silk colored like blood. I was a fountain inside it. I slippedit down over my underwear in the supply room and stepped out to show him. Hesmiled without showing his teeth, said, “You have to wear it for me,” and Iheard myself say, “Of course.” When I pulled the dress back over my head, Ifound a broken old Confederate coin sewn into the neckline, stitched so tight Icouldn’t yank it loose.
“You have to wear it for me,” he said again, as we drovehome through the nodding foothills darkness. “Make it your every day.”
“I can’t wash it,” I said.
“I don’t mind,” he said.
When we came home, the white house felt so small inside thehills that I hated to close myself up inside. We’d been gone so many hours; Ihad the notion some other woman took up living there while I was away. I wastrespassing on her property, resting my hand on her husband’s knee. She waswhat I was inside the walls, and if I opened the door she would be therewaiting to become me. She pulled aside the curtain in the front window and Isaw her: big scared eyes, thin hair yanked back from her forehead, everydaycalico drab and heavy.
I knew already that he couldn’t see the woman. Mr. Rishnerhad only one wife.
“I don’t wanna go in.”
He nodded his head. I had a feeling like he didn’t either.He put the key in the lock and turned it fast, getting the worst over with.Then he nudged the door open with the side of his boot. The house shuddered andcreaked as the wind passed through. “Sometimes the crows break in,” he said.“We’ll send Baby.”
“No,” I said. “Let him stay.” I had pictures in my head thatI didn’t like of what might happen to the hound if he went inside alone.
He shrugged. “Dog’s gotta earn his feed sometime.”
“He doesn’t,” I said.
The three of us sat on the stoop for a while, Baby’s headresting on his foot.
“I want to see your dress,” he said.
“You wanna see it now?” With the door open, I didn’t say,when she could see? I couldn’t see her face in the window anymore.Inside the house was dead dark. We were wasting warmth, holding the door openin the middle of December, but neither of us was going to say so to the other.She was still there; how could we shut the door until she went?
I dropped my coat first, then my shoes, then the rest into apile in the snow. He held the dress up against me like he was measuring thesize, then I bent my neck and he slipped it over my head. When the coin brushedmy back, I shivered.
“Let’s go inside,” he said, so we did.
◊
For a couple years after Grammy died, I saw more of them: thewives who shouldn’t have stayed, but did. One was Miss Angie, who received mein Grammy’s will at least partwise because she was the only other granny witchin town. Unlike Grammy, she had a husband who she had to hide everything from,making like all her patients were friends come to quilt or bake. She said hewouldn’t approve of what she did, but she wouldn’t say why. For the years Ilived under her roof, she did nothing but ask me to show her our family Bible.
“I think there’s something your grammy wanted me to see,”Miss Angie would say, and I’d say maybe so, but I never let her see the Bible,because that book wasn’t supposed to leave our household even if that householdwas only made up of me.
Still she held me back from school, sat me down at her tablewhile she mended sickness like I was a special charm that helped the healing. Iwatched what she did, when the TV wasn’t on something good. Folks came forsnakebites and nightmares and something called female troubles but most oftenthey came to get a love potion. Miss Angie sold glass vials with ash andox-blood inside and no one ever came back complaining, but when we were aloneshe told me that no bottle of dirt ever made anyone fall in love.
“Do you know how to really do it?” I said once, doubtlessthinking on my prospects at some junior high school dance.
“I wouldn’t do it if I could,” she said, looking insulted.“I wouldn’t wish that curse on anybody, and I hope you wouldn’t neither.”
I was fourteen and had no notion of why anybody wouldn’twant to fall in love, except I knew Mrs. Miellon
