Leaving Lucy Pear(59)
Once, before his trip, Roland asked why she wasn’t yet carrying another child. Emma shrugged him off with possible explanations—Joshua was barely three, she was getting older—and hid the diaphragm more securely. But the question, she knew, would not be raised again. During the day, Roland was quiet for long stretches, reading westerns Juliet brought him from the Rockport Library. Then he flashed into rages over a child tracking mud through the house or an empty bottle, rages made scarier somehow by the fact that he had to rage from his chair, which required that they come to him, as witnesses. They could not run away—his missing leg, his piteousness, was their trap. He pulled the children onto his lap and though Emma saw, in his face, a melting sorrow, a desire to be good, he handled them roughly, tickling and tossing them with gritted teeth. All except Lucy, whom he simply held, maybe because he feared losing her. The children would start school soon enough. They would not need Emma’s protection. But what would Emma do?
Emma’s fingers dipped inside Josiah’s collar, scratched.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “I dreamed of a girl like you.”
“An Irishwoman with nine children?”
“Yes. Exactly.” He turned to find her smiling just wide enough that he could see through to her gums. Then he climbed into the back.
That was how they started up again, sometimes in the afternoon, in the woods, sometimes at night, back at the Stanton estate, in the bathhouse. Roland never woke fully. He couldn’t wake, for he continued to take the pills the doctor gave him for night. He said he was still in pain and Emma couldn’t see how to disprove it—twice she had taken the vial to Perkins’s to be refilled.
When they were done, Josiah lay picking tiny hairs off her stomach, fantasizing about making babies with her. There was hair in his mouth, and all over the car.
“You look ten years younger,” Emma said. “She might kill you.”
Josiah nodded. He touched his head. He understood that he looked as vulnerable as a sheep after shearing. His heart bled and thumped.
“Did she lose the baby?” Emma asked.
Josiah nodded. His head rubbed against Emma’s chin, which felt good, and she couldn’t see his tears from here, so he kept nodding. They held each other for a while.
“They need help at Sven’s,” he said finally. “Pouring coffee. Think you could do that?”
Emma sat up. She looked at him with pity. “You have a funny way of saying thank you. But sure. I can do anything.”
Twenty-four
Lucy loved the quarry. She loved the thunderous blasts from deep in the pit, the derricks bent like fishing rods, the collective exhale—then applause!—as a mighty block arrived safely on shore. She loved the clinking of the old shims and pen hammers and points and pneumatic drill bits in her carry bag, and she loved making money. She loved the place even more for the fact that she and her brothers were the only children there that summer. At some of the smaller pits, a kid could still drill holes for half a penny, or scoop the drill dust out with a spoon before the men went in with their shims and wedges, or clear brush, but the Finns were done even with that. Their children would write and read. And the big companies were growing wary: they saw the labor laws moving in Washington, beat back yet breathing. So the Murphy kids, because Josiah Story was still in love with their mother, felt special. At times they felt like elves, dashing through the dirt and noise, from the quarries to the sheds, between the blacksmiths and the carvers, as the men coughed up dust and complained, though never about their coughs. The quarry was not the parochial place the local history books would later paint it to be. (Even the derricks were not local but made of Douglas fir shipped in from Washington and Oregon.) The men complained about the Association of Granite Manufacturers, those shit-for-souls men who were on the lobby pot again trying to lower the minimum daily wage, and about concrete and steel, which were taking over the world and would soon kill stone, and, as the summer wore on, about Sacco and Vanzetti, who (as Josiah Story knew) stood in their minds for themselves, not because the quarrymen were anarchists (though some of them were) or Italian (though some of them were that, too), but because they knew if they were accused of a crime, they would be treated like dogs, too.
All this talk was part of the excitement for Lucy. At first she paid it only as much attention as she paid to the suspenders digging into her shoulders, or her ever-present fear that her hairpins would come undone, or the hard, heavy way she tried to walk. Which is to say she attended it as a way of neglecting the growing desperation she felt when she was not at the quarry. Roland was drinking again, his old self and his new one joining forces. He pulled the children in but roughly now, tickling them too hard, squeezing them to the bone. As Lucy sat on his lap he poked and pinched her, pinches that left welts: in the crease where her leg met her body, in the tender flesh near her armpit, on the undersides of her thighs, where there was more to pinch than there had been a year ago. No one noticed—if anything, he appeared to be more gentle with her than the others, not wrestling but just holding her, his fingers doing their quiet work—and she did not cry out. If she cried out, she feared he would do something worse. If she cried out, no one in the house would know what to do, not even Emma. Or maybe especially not Emma, who left the house early now for Sven’s and came back late, who for the first time in Lucy’s memory hummed to herself as she cooked and cleaned and bathed the little ones. She hummed to cheer them, Lucy supposed, but her hum was not cheerful and it had the opposite effect, on Lucy at least: the need for cheer proved how cheerless things had gotten. The more loudly Emma hummed the further Lucy felt from her, and from the other children, who often hummed along. They barely seemed to notice. It was that natural for them, a funnel pouring straight from their mother’s throat to their own. Lucy wondered, sometimes, if Roland pinched them in almost-private places, too, if maybe they, like Lucy, endured him silently, if all of them together were like the idiot men in the story about the emperor’s new clothes. She almost wished it sometimes, shamefully: that she was not the only one. But she did not believe it, because Joshua and Maggie would not have been able to hold back their tears and because the others, all of them, even as they wrestled their way out from him, even as Lucy perceived beats of fear in their eyes, laughed as they fled.