Sarah

He hasn’t mentioned a child in years. Not since we got the farm and the linen tablecloths and the cattle with their promise of riches. Not since that first September, when the wheat bloomed in abundance. Not since that night against the oil lamp’s unsteady flame when we came to the synchronous and silent understanding that I would not bring a baby into this world.

So when Abe–sitting on the chesterfield with his Almanac as I contemplate my next needlework project–asks me, “Would it be possible now to have a child?” I don’t know what to do other than continue organizing my sewing basket.

“Why are you asking this?” I keep my fingers steady as perspiration rubs into the fibers of the wicker. Outside, winter worsens, first having taken the chokecherry bushes and now burying the field, coating the poplars. On the wood stove, the kettle whines.

Abe and I have grown distant over the years, not so much to stay away from one another but to keep to ourselves. He has the farm and I have the house. We’ve lived like this, soberly and sufficiently; me, asking for nothing more, and him, giving it.

Is it possible?

It’s cruel. How could my womb, barren and rotting, carry anything, let alone a child with Abe’s eyes and aloofness.

Abe kneels before me and grips my hands and his touch stings.

“Because,” he says with a hesitance that is all but accusatory. “God told me to have a child.” He draws back to the kitchen table.

“God,” I repeat.

“The Almanac’s been saying drought. I’d rather have Him on my side.”

When I look at Abe, his shifting eyes under bushy brows, his sun-aged skin dry in the winter, there is an arranged familiarity. And I think I would give him my limbs, if not out of love then out of wifely duty. I would give him my eyes, if not out of trust then out of debt. I would give him my pulsing heart cupped and held out in my two palms if not out of devotion, then out of allegiance. I would give him a child.

“No, Abe,” I say, and look down at the threads and needles. “It’s not possible.”

Abe is not a religious man; he believes God to be faithful only to the land. When we first married, I planned a visit to church on Sunday, but he looked at me with a quiet glance that forbade me, and my relationship with religion has not picked up since. It’s to do with his father, I think, for he mentions him and God interchangeably when he is cursing under his breath, frustrated at the weather or the crop.

He looks at many things with indifference: the morning sun bulging from orange clouds or snow falling like petals on the field. Beef soup or chokecherry pie receive the same disdain.

But not when she is around.

When she is outside on the black stallion rallying the cattle, circling the field like an uncoiling snake, his glance is curious, closes in on her. Hagar and her wild-locked hair, midnight against morning sky and eyes so fierce they are almost hostile.

I’ve always thought of Abe as a man without desires, a being of farm and family. They have always been in him, though. Not so much suppressed as private–silent glances in town to the women who order dresses from catalogs. I called these observations illusive and let them leave me, and I appreciated his fond deceptions. But looking at him when he looks at her, the observations become memories, tangible and heavy in me like a stone.

Hagar came to us from the Johnson’s, after rebellion was etched into her reputation for she was passionate to a fault they said and they wanted her gone. But she came to them with whereabouts undisclosed, only wanting to find work where she could and enjoyment where she shouldn’t. I haven’t seen this side of her, not yet, and she asks for so little that we’ve let her stay in the bunkhouse during the winter.

I see her often kneeling along the edges of the white crusted field, digging for weeds or collecting rocks after the chickens have been fed. She likes to gather things, though she is unaware we no longer live that way of life.

The winter wheat shows green today as Abe works in the fireplace with the freshly sawed wood. When he gives rise to auburn flames, he moves to the window and stares out.

“Hagar must be lonely, out there,” I say, and he startles at my voice. “She’s a pretty girl,” I add. My eyes are on him, waiting for–even needing–a reaction, so much as a twitch of the ear or clench of the jaw.

“You think so?” he says evenly, and nods as if in self-reflection.

This is his response to my inability to harbor a child. To look to something younger, even if it borders on wild. To counteract this, like a joke, I say. “She could spend some time in the house. She’d learn a thing or two.”

Abe turns from the window and faces me, the winter like a halo at his back. “Where would she stay?” he asks. “We got but one bedroom-”

“On the chesterfield,” I interrupt, before his mind leads elsewhere. But, as hatred unspools inside me, the nape of my neck becomes stiff with the understanding of a choice that is not mine to make but could save a family I have yet to bear.

He nods, his chest puffing. “Do you mind talking to her?”

As a skeptic of his faithfulness I had failed to make this connection. I’ve been staring into his eyes for so long that the winter whiteness behind him overtakes his silhouette, and I’m left looking at a shadow but remembering a man.

It’s been a week since she moved in, and in the time spent with her I’ve become enamored. Womanhood has been kind to Hagar and motherhood will be loyal, when the time comes.

I don’t know if I want to cup her face and smell her cheeks or slap her to the ground. It’s little things, like the way she eats at the kitchen table, slumped and accepting of the food we so generously give her. Abe watches her often and I’ve become resentful of the look of possibility in his eyes. He has yet to thank me for my selflessness.

It’s her youth, or her femininity. I’m as good a woman as she is. I may have aged from Abe’s desires but I was fully his when he first took me and surely he cannot say the same about her. Passionate to a fault, they said.

She makes percussive use of the serving bowls and clanks together the spoons. She stomps and scuffs her feet at the floor–dancing, she says–and sways her rough linen skirt across her legs. I observe her in these foreign ways except for the times when I am stripped of this peace, made three dimensional with her returned stare as if she knows I have a voice and is challenging me to use it. But I only return to my needle, punch it into the quilt.

I wrapped my arms around Abe’s neck today not to feel comfort or love but to satisfy a hunger . . . for her. On his skin–what does she smell like? He kissed me, and traced his calloused palm along my arm. More out of pity than passion. I took it anyway, for I am constantly wondering if it is better to be pitied or to be alone. His kiss–an honest gesture. And yet we were both thinking of her.

The house seems suddenly so small. I cower in my seat and grip at threads in my lap, bounce my knee. The dimming sky is not stunning but rather ending.

Hagar stands in the center of the house, no longer dancing to her reckless noises but moving her ankle in a circle, feeling at her forearm. She reminds me of a needle I dropped; it slid into the grain of the wood floor, unnoticeable except for its luminosity, and so beautiful that I left it be.

Abe watches her before his eyes settle on me, and he smiles a moment, sympathetically.

If it was love that mattered most I could leave him, but it’s a marriage that runs me. What’s the point, anyways–I’d be able to get over him, yes, but never her.

So, I’ll be a woman in a house on a farm and strain for silence. I’ll look the other way as he extends his hand and pulls her to the bedroom.

And tomorrow, I’ll still have a husband, though he is not mine tonight.

Hagar

Sarah is building a family. Through me. But she acts as if I were a draft let in.

I feel sometimes like the buffalo in my momma’s stories. The last great buffalo hunt, when the men bit bullets between their teeth, ready to reload their guns after the signal was shot. The earth trembled under the hoofbeats of a hundred horses, the chants of a hundred men. Then the women would bring the red river carts with their squealing tune to cut and carve, and a feast would follow. And everyone had a place, and a purpose.

This was before the buffalo grew fewer and the groups of hunters smaller and the plains of grass turned to farmland. Momma and papa had their own dreams of holding onto the land, but land is hard to break and instead of homesteading they made home on road allowances. I grew up within the wood of the log cabins and under tar paper roofs. And we were happy, for a time, with our kinship and with our love.

I am a mother, when I squint hard enough at my belly. Abraham isa father. And Sarah is merely a woman who meets my glance and resents it because I evoke in her a memory of something that will never exist.

I told her the beauty of her stitching reminded me of my momma’s beadwork, and how I would pat my finger across the multi-colored petals, but Sarah only turned her head. Nothing I do is enough. I set the table with the fine china and I pick strawberries to place beside her. I fill the kettle, scrub the pots.

She wasn’t like this when I first came to them. Sarah had her arms open despite the Johnson’s verdict of me, although it wasn’t my fault their son had a curiosity. And, me, a want for love.

I was happy here. I found comfort in the paint-chipped fence, in my freedom to love the earth. And when Sarah came to me in the bunkhouse, bundled in her wool and holding two mugs of burnt coffee, I thought first friend and second foe. She brought with her a smell so unlike the smoke of the wooden walls, and sat upon the single chair with a hesitance so soft I almost smiled. She sipped as if to take the edge off.

“Abe received a demand from God, one that I cannot answer,” she said. “But I can give the privilege to you.”

She stood and squeezed my hand as if in promise.

“Abe needs a baby,” she continued. “And I cannot give him one.”

Her reddened cheeks made me understand. I nodded as the request thickened around me in the room, like tobacco smoke emerging from a fire and hitting me as if I were against the wind. I knew if I were to say yes, I would be going at it alone.

“You can move to the house. I’d want that,” Sarah continued. And then she was pleading. “I’ve always wanted a baby.”

I left the bunkhouse that night and walked across the glittered ground under the guidance of the moonlight.

Sarah is getting worse. Darker as the sun rises and colder as spring thaws. Abraham is so often in the field that I try to get out too, leaving Sarah to her house.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon picking crocuses by the back fence and came away with a bouquet, and Sarah told me I was bringing bugs into the house. Today, I’ve decided, I will go out and gather roots of dandelion and wild parsnips to make stew.

The crisp outdoors feels the same on my face in every life I’ve lived. As I walk, I bend and graze my fingers along the blades of grass. I’ve heard music again–in the wind. When I hum it to myself I am humming to the baby.

I want the best for my baby. I know momma and papa wanted that for me, which is why they sent me to the Church-run school when we lost access to the public one. My memories of before are faint and few in between but I can remember how I danced with papa, the burning in my lungs as I tried to keep his pace jigging, and I can hear momma’s singing voice verging into laughter, accompanying the strums of the fiddle. Where momma and papa are now, I don’t know. When families moved to make room for pastures, I lost them. But I have Abraham and I have God, and that is what makes this fair.

When I get back to the house, Sarah is sitting in her cross-stitching chair, pricking and pricking the quilt, and she looks up and I feel her eyes scrape me from the top down and then she pricks again. I find a shameful thrill in the battle of glances we often enter, in walking past her with my fat belly gait.

“You’re dirty,” she says. “There’s dirt all on your sleeve.”

I look at my sleeve and shrug and I spread the roots onto the table.

I begin to scrape off the dried skin of the potatoes and can feel Sarah’s hatred, how tight she pulls her thread. But I’ve faced the Church-school, where I’d have raw knees and burnt fingertips from scrubbing the floors, and where I’d go to sleep in a wet bed to the sound of calls for help. I ate cold porridge, or frozen meat, and it would come up 30 minutes later. The way they said half-breed felt like a weapon, and their open hand was their shield. The first time I was caught fleeing my bruises were purple, and the second, green and swelling. But I made it out of that school that was all but godly, and I now have my own understanding of God, one so intimate for I am having His baby.

I have my own understanding of Sarah, too.

I know when the rich and warm scent of my stew has hit her nose despite her set face. I know, if I were to rub at my belly, she would lurch forward and bring me to the ground by my hair, grabbing at my stomach like some ravenous thing.

“Abe says when God spoke to him, it was comforting,” Sarah says, confiding. But I see her posture stiffen and feel for the first time a pity for her, an understanding that she is unhappy and unloved by her husband. She is lost, too.

“That’s good, then,” I say, stirring the pot that gurgles the hot stew, the lard swirling into the vegetables and roots.

“But I find no comfort. He’s my husband. It should be my baby.”

It is your baby, I almost say.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Sarah yells suddenly.

And just like that I think it’s not hers, at least not anymore. Sarah’s made her choices just as I have made mine.

“You keep looking at me like that,” she yells.

She stands from her chair and struts to the kitchen, her hands outstretched. I think she is going to hurt me and so I ball my fists but she grabs the kitchen rag and then the pot of stew slopping and bangs out the door and throws it.

“I don’t want your foods. I don’t want your half-breed baby. I want . . . I want . . .” She leans against the doorframe, covered in broth, deciding between the field or the house.

But I run past her, take the choice from her, through the dirt and unblooming wheat until my lungs burn and my hair comes loose and heavy with sweat. I clutch my belly. I twirl until I feel the urge to vomit. I fall to the ground as the wind sets against me, and worry if the baby is ok and wonder if I have anywhere to go. It’s a cold feeling, wanting to go home but not knowing where it is. Always stripped and stripped of it. The pain was having to go away, but the hollowness was returning home only to find ashes of a log cabin burnt down for land.

Come back, I think I hear. The wind combs the grass. Calling me to it.

Come back.

But when I look up I see Sarah.

“Forgive me,” she says. And in her outstretched fingers I intertwine mine and she pulls me up, and we walk back to the house, through the grass, both of us under the same God.

Abraham

When Sarah yells, “The baby is coming,” I question for the first time why God asked this of me. I seldom talk to God, think of Him less. But when He came to me in that dream, there was that strange familiarity about His ways. I know God, as if I’d heard Him snoring, felt His ideas fall short on me.

Hagar is standing in the room’s center, her knees buckling as she cries out, teeth bared. She clutches her stomach and falls against the kitchen table, tipping a chair.

“Help her,” I tell Sarah, although Hagar has already flung her arms around Sarah’s neck, and Sarah is cooing in her ear, and for a second they look like one figure.

“To the bed,” Sarah says.

“I’m scared,” Hagar cries, and I see the perspiration at her lips shooting as they stumble past me and I don’t know how to intervene.

Why did God ask this of me?

My father made idols of us all, vowing love to his wife and praise to his children. His God was harvest, his disciples the heifers. He saw routine in even the humble deeds of gathering oats for the feed.

Hagar’s screams are just as loud in the other room, slanted and sharp, hitting the bedroom wall and then the kitchen cabinets, rattling the china.

Father could tell a calf was coming before the cow knew, and he’d drag me to the barn and I’d stand in one corner, afraid. He’d put his hand on the cow’s belly praying, or praising. Blood everywhere. 

When I go to the door, I see Hagar’s stark silhouette, glowing skin like bronze, tears like gold, staining the bed as Sarah leans at her legs. And I’m back in the corner.

I remember that quilt Sarah has been working on.

“I’ll count to three, and you push,” Sarah says.

I can’t stand the screaming. I think instead of my father and the old days when he said you’d ride for miles with no sign of fence or farm, but wheat is most worthy and cows who turn out to pastures with borders won’t turn to anger. Life was like a spitting fire that crackles at your fingertips. And what you put into it makes it grow, like the cows that are born first and fattened next.

The quilt in Sarah’s chair is a soft thing with thindrawn lines of thread that make out the shape of wheat. I stand with it, a useless thing in my hands.

When I hear the baby, tingles cripple my neck. I approach the door and see the body in Sarah’s arms. A tiny, squirming thing, canonized in pelvic fluid. I wrap the quilt around him and hold him and finally understand.

How closely I can now make out his mind. How clearly I understand his ways for this life is nothing without the ability to bow down before something ordinary and know its riches.

“Is this the child God wanted?” Sarah asks. She sits behind Hagar, stroking her hair, and Hagar, panting and distressed, moves her head into Sarah’s lap.

“No,” I say. “It was my father who wanted him.”

I take the child outside and leave the women behind as they cower into one.

It’s harvest. Cows, born first and fattened next, will be milked. Wheat will be brought in and will grow all the years to follow for this baby was not born in warning of a drought but a warding off of one.

The sky is one of which I’m not worthy but I kneel and lift the boy towards it. 

Jessalyn LeBlanc is a Canadian writer. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

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