CHAPTER 17

i i i

“Writing a diary then?” Dillan asked, startling me as he threw open the tent flap.

“No, a letter to my sister.”

I was sitting on one of two rickety chairs at an old wooden table arranged against one wall of the tent. Dillan had seemed mildly offended when I’d laughed and called it the dining area. I’d strung a rope to curtain off one end of the tent for a little privacy. Dillan had agreed with Silas’s generosity in endowing me with the feather tick. I imagine he didn’t actually much like the idea, but would have been too embarrassed to insist a pregnant woman sleep on the ground. I hated to be indebted, but my aching back held sway over pride. The tick now rested on a plank set on four stumps. They were a little uneven in height so I rolled a bit toward the door, but I wasn’t about to complain.

“We’ll need to conserve kerosene.”

“Oh yes, I suppose.” I reached to lower the flame and cringed, my quick reaction an implicit agreement that my writing a letter was frivolous and wasteful. Maybe it was. I hadn’t heard a thing from home, and now I wondered if their letters could ever reach me in this isolated place. “Did you find water?”

“No.” He pulled his suspenders down from his shoulders and turned his back. “I’ll be off to bed then.”

“Oh, well.” With the mess of our things around us, the absence of privacy was more striking than I’d anticipated. “I’d better get out of your way.”

“Suit yourself.”

I couldn’t stay at the table and watch him prepare for bed. It was humiliating. But apparently he had no such sentiment. He started to take off his shirt. I left the lantern on his side of the tent and furtively watched his shadow through the fabric of the curtain. He was tall, his muscles long and lean. Dillan had a physical strength about him that Evan had not. Father would have said Dillan had the physique of a featherweight boxer. I was suddenly aware of staring at the shadowed movements of a perfect stranger preparing for bed. I blushed and turned away.

“You ready then?” he asked.

“Yes, you can turn out the lamp.”

Undressing in the dark, conscious of the moon’s glow through the canvas, the silhouette it might provide, I quickly pulled on my nightgown. The print was washed out, the bottom edge and cuffs tattered, the whole thing baggy and unflattering. But what did that matter now, in this place? Gingerly resting my head on the pillow I’d stolen from the boarding house, I relaxed a little and pulled the blanket up to my chin. The evenings were still cold and my nipples, darkening and expanding with pregnancy, hardened as my frigid fingertips brushed against them. My hands ran over my growing belly, at rest beside me like a great ball of flesh, an entity unto itself. I lay on my side with one leg crossed over the other in search of relief for my back, more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

“For what then?” His voice startled me. He could have been right beside me. I laughed out loud. He was right beside me, the facade of a wall there only to assuage my sense of decency.

“This tick.” I turned toward his voice in the dark. “I don’t think I’d sleep at all without it. Besides making me have to use the outhouse all the time, pregnancy is just damn uncomfortable.”

There was a pause. “Taffy never complained.” His voice was low as though the mere utterance of her name was cause for solemnity.

“Well every pregnancy is different.” It came out peevish.

“No, I think she just didn’t want me to know it hurt. And I was too stupid to get it.” The bitterness in his voice was painful. “She always wanted everything to be perfect for us, even when it was terrible.”

“That’s not such a bad quality sometimes.” It might have saved us from Mother’s constant complaints over the slightest inconvenience.

The darkness swallowed us again. Maybe talking about his dead wife was too hard, the emotions too raw. The silence was vaguely disappointing; speaking into the dark was comforting, the words captured and safe. Casey was snoring lightly in his crate bed. We’d managed to create at least a temporary home for him. I touched my belly again and the skin rippled as the baby moved. Only a layer of fat and skin, the baby curled up just beyond. That close, but the darkness sustaining the child was a world removed from my own. The possibility of my loving this creature seemed remote at best.

“And what of the father, then?”

I jumped again at his voice so close. Normally his boldness, the ease with which he delved into private matters, would have been appalling. At home such questions would have been met with the sniff of an upturned nose, scorned as uncultured and uncouth. But his question seemed ordinary, even obvious given the situation, and he had asked without motive.

“Studying in Scotland. His father sent him away.”

“Oh?”

“We weren’t married. Though you must know that... Other-
wise I’d be with him and not...”

“Here. A dollybird.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And your parents, they sent you away?”

“My mother.” I scowled into the night. “She couldn’t stand what the neighbours might think. Not my father though. He’d have kept me home.”

“Even so, parents get disappointed.”

“They only judge.”

“You can’t live in a family your whole life and not know what your parents will do when you get yourself in trouble.” His voice floated around the tent. “Say you were caught stealing? You knew they’d tan your hide, send you to take the stolen goods back and then off to confession.”

“Oh yes, confession.” I snorted. “A very convenient thing, that.”

He didn’t say anything and I was afraid I’d offended him again. “But a baby too soon?” he said finally. “Now that’s their greatest fear. ’Cause you can’t send it back.”

I thought of Father wanting me to take over the practice, knowing a baby would make it impossible.

“And you can confess, but maybe your parents know your confession’s just a lie. Maybe they actually understand why you did it, a love so strong.” His voice was frightening in its intensity. “And it scares them that you know that feeling, and you’re too young to know it, and now it will tempt you like the devil tempting Jesus in the desert. They know you’ll be fighting it your whole life, one way or another.”

“Good Lord, relations between a man and a woman are a natural thing.” I didn’t like where he was going.

“Natural yes, but a sin too. That’s what makes it so hard to resist.”

“This is crazy Catholic nonsense.” I sat up and shook my head. I thought I’d left my mother at home. What was I supposed to think of him now?

“Did you not feel anything then? No great excitement and then the greatest remorse?” His voice dropped to a gruff whisper. “Were you not in love with it and scared to death at the same time?”

With Evan, with the idea of love? I couldn’t answer for the tears squeezing their way out. I lay back down, pushing my face into the pillow, hoping he would sleep. I couldn’t let him hear me, vowed never to speak of this again. Soon his breathing was even and deep. I was awake long into the night, listening to the sounds of the prairie around us, rustling grass, the creaking branches of our lone tree, and Casey and Dillan snoring in syncopated rhythm.