The end of everything started on Tuesday.
That morning, Fern went to the Barn, got weighed, peed in a cup, and was led into Dr. Vincent’s office. Sunlight cut through the blinds and brought out his bones. He was a skeleton wrapped in a white coat. He bared his teeth and Fern realized he was smiling.
“As of this moment, you are officially on two-week warning,” he said, the loose skin on his neck wobbling. “In exactly ten days, on August fourteenth, you are going to deliver the baby. From this moment forth, I hereby pronounce you excused from all housework, and you should only perform minimal exercise. Take the stairs as little as possible, avoid sudden movements, and no baths. Showers only. I’d warn you not to drive an automobile, but I hardly think that’s a consideration.”
He laughed to himself at his little joke.
Fern wasn’t laughing. Everything was moving too fast. In ten days Charlie Brown would arrive and she’d scream so loud the corners of her mouth would tear and she’d bleed like Myrtle. Then Holly would have her baby. Then Reverend Jerry would come and take them away.
The clock in Miss Wellwood’s office ticked on, slicing away the hours until she gave birth. Until Reverend Jerry arrived. Until it was all over.
Holly had to run away with the witches now.
Tuesday night, Hagar lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Miriam lay beside her, but she could tell from her breathing she wasn’t asleep. Hagar listened to the crickets and the frogs outside. She heard a screech owl hoot twice, deep in the woods. She listened to the fan turning back and forth on the other side of the room. Way off, a dog barked. Finally, she sat up.
“I can’t lie here and do nothing,” she told Miriam. “Do you want to come?”
In the little bit of light coming through the window she saw her sister shake her head.
“I don’t blame you,” Hagar said. “But last night I dreamed Mother was knocking on the window again, trying to tell me something I couldn’t hear because of a train going by. I can’t pretend to sleep.”
Miriam understood.
“Take your rest,” Hagar said, getting out of bed. “No point in both of us ruining ourselves for work tomorrow.”
Worry pushed on Hagar, but she wouldn’t let it get the better of her. She got dressed, got her purse, walked up the road, and knocked on Mr. Jean’s door and asked to use his car. Of course he said yes without asking any questions. He knew the only two facts that mattered: if Hagar or Miriam needed to borrow Martha in the dead of night it was because they had to take care of important business, and that business wasn’t any of his.
Mother had gotten run over by a farm truck in downtown St. Augustine twenty-one years ago, which gave Hagar and Miriam a lifelong aversion to automobiles, but even so, Hagar usually liked the way the big old Plymouth drove, gobbling up the road and asking for more. Tonight, enjoying the drive was the last thing on her mind.
She’d been at the Home for nineteen years and in all that time Miss Wellwood had missed exactly one day of work, when she’d had to get a piece of cancer cut out of her womb. She’d been gone now for a week and acting squirrelly and short-tempered before that. Hagar believed it was a sure sign of trouble coming when people stopped acting like themselves.
Now these dreams about Mother at the window, knocking on the glass, her lips moving, but she couldn’t hear what she was saying over the whistle of a passing train. Aunt Sally’s said a train whistle meant a dangerous undertaking that would only be successful through nerve and boldness. Lucky numbers four, six, eight, and sixteen. Mother had been forty-six when she died on the sixteenth of August, the eighth month. The numbers were adding up. Something bad was afoot.
The headlights of the Plymouth picked out the front of Miss Wellwood’s little brick ranch house sooner than Hagar expected. She’d been woolgathering and lost track of time. She’d better get her head on straight. She needed her wits about her now.
She parked on the street and walked around back to Miss Wellwood’s kitchen door. A dark night like this and a neighbor was liable to mistake her for an intruder sneaking through the bushes and shoot her, but it wouldn’t do to knock on her employer’s front door at eleven thirty at night.
Hagar saw a light on deep in the living room, and that made things easier. She knocked on the back door, real gentle, trying to attract Miss Wellwood’s attention without rousing her neighbors. She could have telephoned from Mr. Jean’s house, she supposed, and cursed herself for not having her mind enough on the matters at hand.
A shadow moved across the living room carpet and Hagar stopped knocking, but nothing happened so she started again. Someone switched the living room light off. She couldn’t see a thing inside the house. A moment later a voice from the other side of the door said, “Did something happen at the Home?”
“The Home’s still standing,” Hagar said. “But I came to see you.”
“It’s very late,” Miss Wellwood said from the dark.
“I’m concerned about your health,” Hagar said.
There was a pause, and then Miss Wellwood said, “I’m slightly under the weather. I’ll return shortly.”
Hagar saw her mother’s lips moving soundlessly beneath the scream of the passing train.
“I’m afraid that won’t do, Miss Wellwood,” she said. “I’m not leaving until you let me get a look at you.”
“Nonsense!” Miss Wellwood snapped. “Go home. I won’t have you ordering me about and waking my neighbors.”
“I’ll go home just as soon as you open this door,” Hagar said.
“Hagar—” Miss Wellwood began.
“I’ll start knocking, too,” Hagar said. “Might even go around front and ring the bell. You know me, Miss Wellwood. I’m not leaving until I’ve gotten my way.”
The silence stretched on and Hagar got ready to start knocking again. Then she heard the lock snap open and the sound of Miss Wellwood’s slippered feet scuffing away from the door. Hagar turned the knob and stepped into the cool kitchen. She crept forward in the dark, not wanting to walk into the counter like a fool. She felt the walls for a light switch but her hands ran over smooth surfaces.
“Miss Wellwood,” she called. “You need to turn on a light before I break my neck.”
The lamp clicked on in the living room, throwing the kitchen into dim outlines, enough for Hagar to make it to the door and step through. Miss Wellwood sat at her secretary on the other side of the living room, hidden in the shadows. She wore slippers and a housecoat with a high collar. Hagar thought her face looked strange.
“There,” Miss Wellwood said. “You’ve seen me. Now go home. I’d like to return to bed.”
“You look like you haven’t slept since I drove you home,” Hagar said.
Miss Wellwood’s face looked too fleshy on her. It was a familiar look.
“We’ve known each other for almost twenty years,” Miss Wellwood said. “And I appreciate your service, but do not let that encourage a sense of overfamiliarity. I can find another—”
Her lips spasmed and she pressed them together for a moment, bringing out the lines around her mouth, looking down at something on the carpet in front of her.
“I—” she tried again, and again something stole her breath away.
Hagar reached for the switch to the overhead light.
“Don’t!” Miss Wellwood almost shouted.
But Hagar was used to ignoring people, and she flipped the switch. She recognized the shape of Miss Wellwood’s face. She saw it all the time.
“Stand up,” she commanded.
She’d never have spoken to Miss Wellwood like this if the woman wasn’t in pain. If she wasn’t pressing both hands to her belly. If she wasn’t in a condition Hagar saw a dozen times a day. Even then, all the words flew right out of her mouth when Miss Wellwood rose shakily to her feet and stood there swaying, her housecoat draping a familiar shape.
Hagar dragged her feet across the carpet to Miss Wellwood. She forced herself to stand before her and rest one hand against Miss Wellwood’s swollen stomach. She felt something move beneath her palm and jerked her hand away.
“I’m getting Sister,” she said. “You hold on.”
She drove that Plymouth like the wind back to her house and yanked the string on the light in their room, shouting at Miriam to get up and put on her clothes.
“Get your bag,” she said. “Miss Wellwood is having a child.”
They didn’t speak on the drive back, but Hagar had done the math in her head. Miss Wellwood was born in 1912 and that made her fifty-eight years old. Too old to be having a baby. She had no man around, not even a sometimes friend, and she’d gotten too big, too fast. Whatever was in her womb was no natural child. Whatever was inside her was the work of the devil.
They reached the house and this time, Hagar pulled into the carport. She didn’t want anyone to see Miriam going into Miss Wellwood’s house this late at night carrying her baby-bringing bag. Miss Wellwood waited for them on her sofa, and she’d turned the overhead lights off again, leaving only the table lamp lit. She didn’t want to catch sight of herself in the mirror. She’d stopped washing four days ago, and when she went to the toilet she did so in the dark. She couldn’t bear to see her reflection. It was obscene.
Hagar turned on the overhead light and Miss Wellwood shrank into herself.
“We’re going to help you into your bedroom,” she said, and she and Miriam each took an arm and lifted her to her feet.
“Do, Jesus,” Miriam whispered when she saw Miss Wellwood’s stomach.
They got Miss Wellwood to her bedroom door, but she gripped the doorframe with both hands and wouldn’t let them push her inside.
“Is…” And she didn’t know what to call this abomination in her stomach. “…it coming?” she finally asked.
A sheen of sweat slicked her face and her skin had turned the color of maggots.
“It is,” Hagar said. “Sister’s going to brew a tea to make it come quick.”
Miss Wellwood gave a sharp nod.
“Not in there,” she said, pointing into the bedroom with her chin. “Guest room.”
She jerked her head down the hall. Hagar understood. Even in her condition, Miss Wellwood needed to be in charge. Besides, she’d never want to sleep again in the bed where she was delivered of this thing.
Supporting Miss Wellwood between them, she and Miriam walked her down the hall and laid her on the brown bedspread in the guest room. It was barely furnished and what furniture there was looked simple. The only decoration was a sculpture of two hands clasped in prayer on the dresser by the door. Miss Wellwood kept her eyes on it while Hagar piled cushions up behind her and Miriam went into the kitchen to brew her tea. Hagar studied the older woman. Given the size of her stomach, she didn’t see this going easy tonight.
When Miriam came back, she handed Miss Wellwood her tea. She took it, then stopped, scared to lift the cup to her lips.
“We’re right here,” Hagar said. “Drink your tea.”
Miss Wellwood looked at the teacup. This had been her mother’s everyday china. She had always loved its red and blue pansies. She focused on them as she drank.
She got half of it down before her pains changed. The abomination in her stomach had twisted and writhed like a nest of snakes all day, but now the pain changed to something sharper, like it was sinking in its teeth.
“Oh, Lord! Christ my savior, protect me in my hour of need,” Miss Wellwood gasped.
She had known this moment was coming. She had known since that first time she saw her gently swelling stomach in the mirror last Wednesday morning and it had clicked into place what was happening to her body.
By the time Hagar had brought her home that afternoon it was almost too late. Her stomach had swollen to the point where it was becoming visible beneath her blouse. If it continued she’d look like one of her charges. She couldn’t go back to the Home like that. She couldn’t parade her condition in front of her father. She couldn’t let the girls see her in something resembling their pitiful circumstances.
So she’d stayed home. She’d managed to call Mrs. Deckle and tell her she had mononucleosis and must remain in strict isolation, and she thanked heaven that Mrs. Deckle didn’t have the imagination to entertain the thought that she might be telling a lie, then she hung up the telephone and her mind stopped working properly.
She’d sat in the dark, mostly, peering between drawn curtains, terrified a neighbor would visit or Reverend Fellowes might drop by. Every ring of the telephone frightened her; every time she heard a car slow down she was paralyzed with fear that it might turn in to her drive.
Her stomach had gotten tighter and larger and she knew there was only one way this would end, but she refused to accept it. She absolutely refused. She sat in the dark and read her New Testament, the way she’d sat that other time, so many years ago, sitting alone in that dark room reading her Bible, only this time, instead of finding comfort in the word of the Lord, the scriptures felt like hollow things made of sawdust and paste. Compared to whatever was in her stomach they felt false. But still she sat and read because she had nothing else to do as day after day the skin on her stomach stretched, and tightened, and itched, and the thing inside her grew.
She knew Hagar was talking now because she could hear someone making sounds, but she was not on her bed in her guest room listening to Hagar, she was in another room where everything was made of pain. Her bulging stomach was a sloshing cauldron full of black foam and it clenched tighter and she felt her muscles pinching down on her soft intestines.
Then it stopped, releasing her so fast it took her breath away.
“Can you…get it out?” she asked Hagar.
They had a blanket up over her knees so she couldn’t see what they were doing down there, but Miriam was bent lower than her sister. The bright overhead light was on and the curtains were pulled tightly shut. Thank you, Jesus.
Thank you for not letting anyone see my sin.
Miss Wellwood kept her eyes on the Hands of Faith standing on her dresser.
“Save your strength,” Hagar said. “This is going to be a fight.”
Miss Wellwood lost control of her muscles again. Whatever was in her stomach squirmed, it slithered, it thrashed, and Miss Wellwood’s mouth sagged open.
“Heavenly Father,” she moaned. “Do not…abandon me…in my hour…”
The thing in Miss Wellwood’s stomach picked her up and dragged her into the pain room. Her entire body was made of pain. Two massive hands reached into her stomach, and pulled out her intestines, and twisted them. They stretched her stomach and squeezed her liver, pinched her colon, and wrapped the loops of her large intestine around their knuckles and pulled them tight.
Miss Wellwood was at the mercy of these hands.
Sometimes she was dimly aware that Hagar and Miriam were tugging on her, pushing her legs apart or holding down her wrists, then the hands came and seized her stomach again, or lower, down around her private parts, scoring her soft meat with their ragged fingernails. Sometimes she was aware of Hagar putting a washcloth in her mouth as she bit down, then a black wave roared in and delivered her into the giant hands again and they twisted her body, they shaped it, and squeezed it, and she was sucked backward into the red darkness behind her eyes and the hands pressed down on her until she realized that the voice begging to die was her own.
She felt the hands take their massive thumbs and place them on either side of her skull and squeeze, and she cried and bargained and begged them to stop, but the pain was a storm that blew her backward into the room made of pain.
Miss Wellwood tried to tell herself it wasn’t real, it was only some kind of illness, or a tropical disease; she tried to tell herself that the Lord God would not have sent her any tribulation she could not endure, then the muscles around her pelvis flexed and rippled and tore, and Miss Wellwood’s insides shifted. They moved. They slithered out of her body. And she screamed.
She felt something deep inside her bowels knot and snap and she didn’t know if she was bleeding or not, but she hoped she was because the human body only contained five liters of blood and once those were gone she would finally be with Jesus.
Her jaw ached from screaming for so long. Miss Wellwood couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t screaming, when she wasn’t in the room made of pain, when everything didn’t hurt.
She couldn’t take much more of this, but it was out of her hands. What happened to her body was no longer her decision. She had no power over it, no control. She couldn’t stop this because she was only a vessel for the pain.
Something wet burst inside her and her lower parts caught on fire. She thought the pain had been bad before, but now she gasped a strangled scream and sat up in shock. All dignity fled. She was naked before this red sun.
Between her legs she heard Hagar say, “Get the bucket.”
Everything inside her body came unglued and her guts slid in all directions. Burning kerosene filled her stomach, and her muscles tightened and tightened until they began to shred, and then they relaxed, and everything pushed down at once.
Roots attached to her stomach lining ripped themselves free, and when Miss Wellwood looked down, Hagar was pulling something out of her in squirming handfuls. Wet, solid sounds slopped into the bucket. A stink filled the room, and thick, pustulant afterbirth pattered onto the carpet like hail. Black screaming static filled the inside of Miss Wellwood’s head and all the bad moments came out of her, all the ones she kept in a box buried deep.
She is standing in the corner of the yellow room where the girl, Clara, lived when she stayed in the house and she likes Clara because Clara always gives her stick candy and now Clara is staring at little Florence Wellwood standing in her bedroom door and Daddy is between Clara’s legs and blood drips from the saturated counterpane onto the floor and Daddy is working very hard lifting a tiny pair of limbs from between Clara’s legs, holding their ankles in his hand, but little Florence Wellwood knows that Clara is dead because she’s looking right into her eyes and they are dead eyes.
She is twenty-eight and pregnant with Charles’s baby and her father is sitting on the other side of the desk in his office which is her office now and she has come to tell him that Charles is not a “traveling handyman” but he repairs the organs in churches and they will be married and her father is telling her that he will not honor their marriage, that she should have been born a son or not been born at all. He is telling her that he is glad her mother is dead because she would not survive this humiliation.
She is writing a letter to Charles to tell him she can no longer see him. She is writing a letter because she is not brave enough to tell him in person. She is taking the train to Columbia alone and no one knows where she will be for five months until the baby comes and then she will never think about it again.
She sits in that dark room, rocking in her chair, reading her Bible month after month with the curtains drawn and now she is still rocking but she is nursing her baby. She has to nurse him for three weeks before they will take him away. She is nursing him and her nipples ache and she is crying quietly, forcing herself to look at his face and hands, and he is the grandson her father would have wanted, but they will never mention him, he will not exist, and her tears are dropping onto his face, mixing with her milk, and she makes herself look at him because this is her punishment for spreading her legs to a traveling handyman, and slowly, day by day, she kills that good feeling she gets when she sees his tiny, perfect toenails on the ends of his tiny, perfect toes, every day she crushes that feeling between her hands like a snake’s skull. This is her punishment. This is her curse.
She is coming home from her father’s funeral and she cannot sleep and she is at his desk which is now her desk and she is looking at his ledgers and trying to make them make sense but the columns sway and waver and don’t add up. She is stupid, she is ignorant, if she were the son he’d wanted she could force them to make sense, but the Home doesn’t make enough money and she has a black headache trying to figure out a way to make it work, and she can’t because she is a woman and she is weak, and she vows, she promises, she swears she will not let this house die. She will prove that she can do this, like the son she should have been.
These memories made her feel small and cheap but she would stay in them forever if someone would make the pain stop. Please. Make it stop.
Miss Wellwood looked away from the praying Hands of Faith and down at her body, punishing herself, making herself look, and Miriam was standing between her legs, handing Hagar the heavy bucket, and as Hagar went to the door she saw into the bucket for one clear moment.
It was splattered up its sides with black water, and the bottom contained a shiny, writhing nest of bone-white eels. They twisted and churned in the brown foam, squirming around each other, and their muscular coils lashed out like clubs, drumming the sides of the plastic bucket, and then Hagar was gone, and she took them into the kitchen and she crushed their skulls with a hammer, one by one, and flushed their bodies down the toilet.
But all Miss Wellwood could hear was the hollow, frantic drumming of their bodies whipping against the sides of the plastic bucket—the only sound she’d ever hear of the last children she’d ever have. It filled her head, blotting out the world, and Miriam held her while she sobbed and screamed.