Burn it all.
Elizabeth tugs another stiff-dried sheet down off the line and raises her arms, cracking the sheet down once, twice, trying to get the dust and pine pollen off of it. She holds it to her nose, breathing in against its scratchy, crinkled surface. It smells like vinegar and carbolic and the smoke from the fires in Idaho that are blowing east, which have been making the air hazy and hard to breathe for the better part of a month now. The laundry never smells clean any more: it either has the oniony, sour, organic reek of sweaty bodies and baby crap, before she washes it – a process that takes hours and hours of steamy, wet, scraped-knuckled and bent-backed labor – or there’s this smoky, medicine smell when it’s supposedly clean. This sheet in her hands is clean, but it stinks, stinks, and she’s still going to have to heat up the iron and press it and all the rest of the linens, make the scratchy surfaces smoother, easier on the skin so it doesn’t rub and chafe. Yet more hours spent hunched over, overheated and sweaty.
Just burn it.
The black bird, the fire-crazed one that seems to follow her lately, squawks from where it’s perched in a pine, watching her work. It squawks as if agreeing with her.
It’s always so hot now. Elizabeth can’t remember the last time she felt cool, rested, dry. Every day passes in sweating labor at one thing or another: laundry, cleaning the house, changing diapers, cooking. Every night she’s up, again and again, to feed the baby, change his diapers – again – always just barely dropping back to sleep when the cries erupt once more. It’s overwhelming. Sometimes, when Sol is off tending the tavern, she’ll push a pillow into her mouth and scream, over and over, just scream, muffling it as best she can – but always the baby will pick up on her distress and join in so that she has to leave off and soothe him. No one ever soothes her, never. Sol does his best to help, in his bumbling, man’s way, but it’s a waste of time. A waste. Even when he pitches in, helps with the cleaning or cooking or any of the thousand little things that need to be done every day, it’s more tiring than helpful. When he washes dishes, they’re never quite clean and she needs to redo them; when he cooks, the potatoes get burnt and the meat dries out to the point that it’s just better if she does it herself. Easier. He’ll shrug and smile apologetically, but it still means that she has to do everything. She’s raising two children, really: Owen and Sol. Sol’s heart is in the right place but that doesn’t make it any better. It should, but it doesn’t.
Elizabeth rubs the back of her wrist across her forehead, smearing the sweat and dirt and the fine dust of ash that’s always floating in the air lately. Her laundry basket is empty; looking down the line she sees sheet after sheet and a thousand miles of diapers, dresses, Sol’s shirts and pants, all the million woven things that are part of their lives. Hours of folding, pressing, ahead of her again, the same chore that she does over and over and will keep having to do, day after day, in this merciless heat and smoky air. She can feel another scream building up inside her but clamps it back behind her teeth.
Burn it all, she thinks again, sniffing the air. Take all this damn laundry, all the sheets and diapers and shirts, pile it in a heap on the ground, and set it afire. Maybe take Owen and Sol and hike up into the Bitterroots, high up to some mountain spot, somewhere cool beside a lake, where it won’t matter if there’s smoke in the air because of the trees and the cold mountain water and the shade and all that they don’t have here, down in the valley where the sun beats down mercilessly and the air settles thick and smoky with either no breeze at all or a sharp-edged wind that just kicks up more dust. If she looks west, she can see the mountains looming there, piney and sharp and cool, mocking her. She’ll burn this laundry in a pile and then burn their little house along with it; they’ll all turn their backs on this sweaty, dead-aired, smoky existence of chores and heat and wet rashes on the skin and go up into the mountains where it’s cool and she can think straight, where she can relax for once. Where laundry doesn’t make her want to scream and the wailing of little Owen doesn’t send her into a desperate, hopeless crying jag. She and Owen and Sol will just burn it all and leave together, or maybe she’ll just go by herself.
It’s just the heat, she tells herself, again. Just the heat and the sweat and this air that’s hard to breathe. At times like these, when the weight of her life seems to be pressing her down into the earth, cracking her apart, when everything about her feels broken and sick and crazy, she needs to remember, remember, that it’s just the heat and the lack of sleep and the inconveniences that come with having a small child and a bumbling husband who doesn’t make much money but who has a good heart and is trying to be a good provider, doing what he can to make their life better – she knows that – and these crazy, frantic thoughts she gets shouldn’t be coming and they shouldn’t mean anything when they do.
If only she had some help, though. There was that woman that Sol hired for a bit, but it hadn’t worked out. She was an old harpy, that woman, always at Elizabeth for one thing or another, always judging her and tutting her thin lips. Oh not like that, dear or surely you’re not going to leave it that way. All the time. Sol says he’ll try to find someone else to pitch in, but she knows that word of how it had gone with the first one has gotten into town – crazy Elizabeth Parker – and they’ll be lucky to find anyone else. She’s stopped going to town, as much as possible; she knows the way they look at her. Sol brings home the groceries and the things they need from the store. She’s not feeling well, he’ll say, picking up the bag of sundries, be right as rain in no time, though. He’s given up trying to convince her to come to town, even to go to service on Sunday. Be right as rain in no time.
It hasn’t escaped her that he’s spending more and more time at the tavern. Working, he says, trying to get us ahead, but he still comes home later and later, stinking of booze more often than not, a greasy look on his face and a rumpled, sweaty bag of groceries under his arm. It’s fine, though, she prefers it that way; there’s a time in the early evening, after Owen has been put down and the air is finally starting to cool off some, when she can sit on the couch and relax, feel almost normal for a while. She’ll lay back, hands laced over her belly, listening to the silence of the house, the chitter of the finches and nuthatches outside. Just sit there, not thinking. More often than not, though, when Sol comes banging in the door, Owen will wake and begin screaming and the spell is broken, the peace and normalcy cracking around her like rotten ice.
From the house, she can hear Owen wailing now, thin desperate shrieks climbing out of the open window. He’s a fussy, colicky baby, red-faced and angry more often than not. Even when he nurses, his face knuckles into an expression of indignant fury. It’s irrational, she knows it, but she has the feeling that he hates her. Maybe because she’s brought him into this hot, smoky, exhausting world from wherever comfortable place babies’ souls live in Heaven. Sometimes he doesn’t even look real, look human, as if that hatred that burns inside him molds his form into something unnatural. He’ll be there in her arms, just a baby clawing at her breast, and then he’ll become something dark and sharp, hard like a cicada, pinching and biting at her skin. More than once she’s had to peel him off her, ignoring his furious screams, and leave the room, go outside, get away from him, heart pounding, sick in the belly.
She knows she’s going crazy.
Elizabeth knows it, that she’s not going to be right as rain, maybe not ever. She shouldn’t have these thoughts, should just be able to be a normal wife and mother and woman and yet she can’t, not always, no matter how she tries. After the incident with the woman Sol hired, he wanted her to go see his brother up at Warm Springs, maybe see about some help, but she refused. Now she wishes that maybe she’d gone. She hasn’t told anyone about the things that she’s seen that weren’t there. Like dreaming while awake, remembering what never happened. She knows they weren’t real, those things, she knows it, but there’s a doubling that happens sometimes, when she can’t tell where she is. When she is, maybe. What’s real and what isn’t. Just for a moment or two, but the spells, that’s what they are, just spells, are coming more frequently. I’ll be fine when it cools off, she thinks, it’s just this heat all the time and with the baby so small still and all of that. When it cools off I’ll be able to think more clearly and Owen will sleep more and the colic will stop.
She rubs her face into the scratchy sheet that’s still in her hands, not caring that she’s soiling it with the sweat and ash caked to her forehead. It doesn’t matter: it’s not clean anyway, nothing’s ever clean any more. She’s not clean, outside or in; there’s something foul crouched inside her, leaking out the hotter and sicker she feels. She was so healthy once and now she isn’t. Maybe that’s why Owen hates her, because he can sense it in some baby way. Maybe she’s poisoning him, he’s sucking the foulness with her breast milk and it’s infecting him too.
Owen continues to wail from the house. Elizabeth throws the sweaty sheet into her basket, tries to catch her breath. Her heart is thumping in her chest and for a moment she feels like she might faint; for a wild second she wants to just run, hike her skirts up around her hips and just run, run, run, not stopping until her heart bursts or she’s so far away she can’t find her way back. Instead, she packs it all down inside, once again, biting the scream back behind her teeth. She’ll be right as rain in no time. Right as rain.
The bird squawks again and, when she turns, Sol is standing there, watching her.