The
Fox Went Out
By
Rachel Heffington
Part
One:
John
O’Grady is a man of his word. If, in a fit of the tempers, John
says he’s going to kill you, why he just does. I never knowed an
honorable man half as holding to his word as John O’Grady.
It
was a poor day for justice when that man rode into our clearing and
declared his mind..
“Anise
Clare...” He pronounced it “Annis,” tasting my name like it was
something he’d gone and invented. “I’m fixin’ to marry you.”
I
snapped a wet garment against the side of the wash-tub and looked him
right in the eye. Took all my willpower, I was that frightened of the
man, but I knew better than to show my scared.
“Well,
I’m
not
fixin’ to marry you,
John O’Grady.”
The
soft place between my shoulder blades turned tighter than January as
he swung off his horse. He had powerful-shaped legs—giant’s
legs—and they took him over to me in four paces. His arm went
around my waist. I planted myself in the muddy ground.He uprooted me
into his embrace.
Panic
sudsed to my head, feebling my knees.
“Hey,
Pa?” I called.
John’s
face, which leaned in close to mine like he was trying for a kiss,
went still. No answer from the cabin. If Pa had chosen to go out
hunting or fallen drunk, I knew John Grady’d have his way.
“Pa,
git out here, please.” The very end of my voice choked on itself.
John’s
arm tightened. His face advanced.
“O’Grady?”
I
got dropped and scrambled to the other side of my washtub, out of
reach.
“Mister
Clare.”
Seemed
funny to hear John O’Grady calling my Pa “Mister Clare.” Why,
Pa weren’t ten years older than him, and only half his size.
“What’re
you doin’ here?” Pa asked, leery-voiced.
“Just
sweet-talking Anise.”
Pa
squinted at O’Grady. I knew he couldn’t see good with the morning
sun singing glory in his eyes. “Whatcha want with her?”
John’s
laughter shot out. “Lots a’things, Mister Clare.”
The
tips of my ears tingled shame-bright.
“More
to the point, I’m wanting to marry her.”
Pa’s
tired eyes scooted from John to me, to the soggy laundry in the
trough. “Best stop foolin’ around, Anise.”
Did
this mean Pa’d send John O’Grady off for good? But Pa jerked his
chin, inviting him into the cabin. Can’t say I was surprised. Pa
never was one for protecting. I knew, even without sneaking to the
window-ledge, what would happen: Pa’d pour whiskey into two big
mugs and slide one rumble-slosh across the table. As the drink
dwindled, so would his caution, and John O’Grady’d get what he
wanted.
So
I didn’t spy. I didn’t run off into the cool, friendly forest.
I
washed Pa’s shirts one by one: red checks gone pink, green stripes
gone moss, blue and brown gone gray. I wrung them with a wish to
wring O’Grady’s neck and pegged them to the dancing clothesline
by the hen-coop. Really, just like any other morning. Except for that
shag-bark laugh...and the chair crashed over...and the front door
slammed against the side of the cabin. I turned around only because
he forced me, and took the kiss full on my mouth without looking at
him once.
He
tipped my chin with his finger. An empty-feeling finger, it was so
calloused. “Lookit me, Anise-girl.”
I
went cross-eyed trying not to.
“Lookit
me!”
His
snarl scared me but I still refused to look at him. That decision was
simple-foolish, but it was the only way I knew how to rebel. I would
not give it up. I’d just been sold over a glass of whiskey. My
first kiss had been snatched by a brawler. But I still belonged to me
and
I didn’t have to look at him.
“You’re
gonna die like a devil,” I snarled.
“Don’t
mind. Angels don’t have no fun anyhow.” Laughing again, even
though I could hear the anger rush up like floodwaters, John O’Grady
stalked across the clearing and swung onto his horse.
“Have
a good day, sweet-pea.”
I
hope your horse trips and breaks your neck.
“I’ll
be back soon, sugar.”
Hope
he falls in the river and drowns you.
“And
I’m gonna marry you, Anise Clare.”
He
left it at that, and Pa left it at that, and in two weeks, I married
him.
You’d
think I would have done something desperate after the wedding—killed
myself, run away—but
life
and I kept hold of one another pretty good. Of course I hated to be
married to John O’Grady. Trouble was, people supposed his wife was
just like him.
I
could take my new, solitary world of John’s clearing and John’s
laundry and John’s cabin and John’s dog. Everything was John’s—he
even
thought I
was
his, which fact I was reminded of many nights. I could take all these
things because they had nothing to do with who I was. But when we
rode into Fletcher-town in the silver-wood wagon and the women made
way and the men made jokes, that’s when life and I got to
scrapping.
No
one liked John O’Grady.
No
one liked me.
And
sometimes I near split with an ache to tell ‘em that me and my
husband were not one flesh. We were summer and snow, wet and drought.
But since when do devils marry angels?
They
all believed what they wanted to, and I grew to know that the reason
they steered clear of thinking anything else is so’s they never
have to consider the badness behind other solutions. It’s easy to
forget a bad man with a bad wife. But a sweet young girl handed like
a heifer to a blackest-hearted man...that’s a lot to swallow in
good company.
Eventually,
I found myself burdened with living secret. If John didn’t know, It
would be safe and quiet in the dark place inside me. I did not have
to
tell him, though It was partially his. Another small rebellion.
Another piece of me that did not belong to him. So I kept my secret
for several weeks till the violent vomiting-spells told on me.
“You’re
gonna give me a son, ain’t you?”
John’s
bare excitement petrified me. I had never known him to be so worked
up about anything. He moved too quickly for my dizziness and threw
himself on his knees beside the bed. He swept his hand into my hair,
pushed the strands out of my eyes.
“Don’t
you drop this baby,” he warned. “You rest. You grow it strong.”
I
pushed his hand away and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see the
energy in his face. I had none of my own. I’d emptied it six or
seven times into the wooden bucket beside my bed.
“Water,
please,” I whispered as another wave of sickness crawled its clammy
paws over my gut.
For
once, my husband served me. He whistled out to the well, returning
with a jug of the clear, cold water. Even tipped some of it into a
blue china mug and placed it in my hands.
“Best
news I’ve heard in an age, Anise-girl. Water that son.” The
over-brightness of his eyes, declared him already familiar with the
inside of his gin bottle, though it was only midday.
“Thank
you.” I sipped from the mug and tipped back. “Just let me sleep.”
John
took a kiss and his hat and slammed the cabin door. I listened to his
dog bawl the length of the clearing, probably hunting up a rabbit to
chase, and thought long and hard. My sickness had stole the secret. I
needed a new defiance. And then it came to me.
Lurching
out of the bed, I pressed my fingertips to my wrist. Be
still, stomach.
On my knees, I rested my forehead against the humid mattress and
breathed. The stench of vomit swirled around me and my stomach
flopped.
Dear
God,
I prayed. Give
me a girl. He wants a boy, but this is my child. Give me a girl, if
You love me at all. That
didn’t seem quite fair, suggesting the Lord God didn’t love me,
but I thought He’d see the heart of it. See that I couldn’t give
John O’Grady a son. A
girl, Lord,
I repeated, just in case He hadn’t been listening. A
girl.
Eight
months later, I birthed my baby. John was drunk and the midwife
refused to come. I birthed that baby alone and talked myself through
the miserable pains same way I had once talked Pa’s cow through a
hard calving. That is, when I could
talk.
Most of the time I yelled and
tried
not
to pray to die. I didn’t want to die. Not truly. If life and I
split apart now, my baby’d have none but John O’Grady for a
parent. I’d deserve damnation for leaving an innocent child to fend
for herself. Besides, I believed it’d be a girl and that she would
be mine and I’d have won that battle against John, at least.
In
the sticky night, in my sticky bed, I pushed a bawling, sticky child
into this hard, hard world and lifted her onto my breast. She was a
beautiful girl, small and perfect and squalling.
John
took one look between her legs, cursed, and left the house.
The
door stood open and the night air flooded in. Was it bad for my baby?
But no, it couldn’t be. It was the night, friendly and smiling with
stars. It would not, could not hurt my baby. Good things came out of
the night. Things like sleep, and unconsciousness, and a rest from
the world staring at my troubles.
I
thanked God for a girl, for a few hours to belong to myself and my
baby. Somewhere, deep down in the quiet part of me that I’d about
forgot since my mother died, the part of me that danced barefoot in a
thunderstorm and skipped rocks at the riverbend—in
that
part
of me way, way deep down, the rebel-ness strengthened.
And
somewhere outside a fox barked.
Foxpiece
I:
The
Fox watched her for three years, craned his neck, caught the moon,
and laughed.
Tonight,
standing in a loamy hole on the hill, he sniffed the air and scented
her. She smelled of stubbornness and wood-fires, wildwood honey and
sadness. Her small one smelled of protection. Sometimes he sensed
blood, too, and on those nights the Fox crept close to the cabin,
confident of remaining unseen. He sang to them in his crying-voice
through the cabin walls and wished She could hear. He never feared
the man, because the man had brought the blood and would be gone all
night in his rage. What he feared was the woman—the
Gray
Goose, as he liked to call her—discovering his presence and forcing
him away.
There
was no blood-smell tonight and no reason to skulk closer to the
cabin. The Fox settled down on his haunches...felt the wind in his
autumn hair...watched another year.
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