Notes on an Execution(5)

Lavender had swiped her mother’s antique locket from the dresser on her way out. The locket was a circle of rusty metal with an empty nameplate inside. It had adorned the center of her mother’s broken jewelry box for as long as she could remember—the only proof that Lavender’s mother was capable of treasuring something.

It was true that living on the farm had not been quite what Lavender had imagined. She’d moved in six months after meeting Johnny; before that, Johnny had lived alone with his grandfather. Johnny’s mother had passed away and his father had left, and he never spoke of either of them. Old Ansel had been a war veteran with a grizzled voice who made Johnny perform chores for every meal as a child. Old Ansel coughed, and he coughed, until he died, a few weeks after Lavender arrived. They buried him in the yard beneath the spruce; Lavender didn’t like to walk over the spot, still humped with dirt. She’d learned to milk the goat, to wring the chickens’ necks before she plucked and disemboweled them. She tended to the garden, which was ten times the size of the small patch she’d kept behind her mother’s trailer—it was always threatening to outgrow her. She had given up regular showers, too difficult with the outdoor spigot, and her hair had become permanently tangled.

Johnny did the hunting. He purified their water. Fixed up the house. Some nights, he’d call Lavender in from a long day in the yard—she would find him standing by the door with his pants unzipped, engorged and waiting with a sneer on his face. Those nights, he threw her against the wall. With her cheek slammed hard on the splintering oak, Johnny’s hunger growling into her neck, she would revel in the essence of it. His thrusting need. Those calloused hands, exalting her. My girl, my girl. Lavender did not know if she thrilled with Johnny’s hardness or the fact that she could gentle it.

*

They did not have diapers, so Lavender wrapped a clean rag around Ansel’s waist and knotted it at the legs. She swaddled him tight in one of the barn blankets, then stood to limp after Johnny.

She hiked barefoot back up to the house. Dizzy. She’d been in so much pain, she did not remember the trip to the barn, only that Johnny had carried her, and now she didn’t have shoes—the late-winter air was biting cold, and Lavender held Ansel to her chest as he spluttered. She guessed it was near midnight.

The farmhouse sat at the top of a hill. Even in the dark it looked lopsided, leaning precariously to the left. The house was a constant work in progress. Johnny’s grandfather had left them with the burst pipes, the leaking roof, the missing windowpanes. Usually, Lavender didn’t mind. It was worth it for the moments she stood alone on the deck, overlooking the wide expanse of field. The rolling grass shone silver in the mornings, orange in the evenings, and across the pasture, she could see the gnashing peaks of the Adirondack Mountains. The farmhouse sat just outside Essex, New York, an hour’s drive from Canada. On a clear day she liked to squint into the bright, imagining an invisible line where the distance turned into another country entirely. The thought was exotic, enchanting. Lavender had never left New York State.

“Will you make a fire?” she asked, when they were inside. The house was frigid, the previous night’s cold ash sitting gusty in the wood stove.

“It’s late,” Johnny said. “Aren’t you tired?”

It wasn’t worth the argument. Lavender struggled up the stairs, where she sponged the blood from her legs with a washcloth and changed her clothes. None of her old clothes fit anymore: the bell-bottom corduroys she’d thrifted with Julie sat in a box with her best collared blouses, too tight for her bulging stomach. By the time she climbed into bed, wearing one of Johnny’s old T-shirts, he was already asleep, and Ansel was fussing in a bundle on her pillow. Lavender’s neck crackled with dried sweat, and she dozed upright with the baby in her arms, anxious, half dreaming.

By morning, Ansel’s rag had soaked through and Lavender could feel the slick of diarrhea running down her deflating belly. When Johnny woke to the smell, he jolted—Ansel started to cry, a shrieking upset.

Johnny stood, fumbling for an old T-shirt, which he threw onto the bed just out of Lavender’s reach.

“If you can hold him for a second—” Lavender said.

The look Johnny gave her then. The frustration did not belong on his face—it was the kind of ugly that must have originated inside Lavender herself. I’m sorry, Lavender wanted to say, though she did not know what for. As she listened to Johnny’s footsteps creak down the stairs, Lavender pressed her lips to the screaming baby’s forehead. This was how it always went, wasn’t it? All those women who’d come before her, in caves and tents and covered wagons. It was a wonder how she’d never given much thought to the ancient, timeless fact. Motherhood was, by nature, a thing you did alone.

*

Here were the things Johnny had loved once: The mole on the back of Lavender’s neck, which he used to kiss before they fell asleep. The bones in her fingers, so small he swore he could feel each one. How Lavender’s teeth overlapped in the front—snaggle, he called her, teasing.

Now, Johnny did not see her teeth. Instead, the scratches on her face from Ansel’s tiny nails.

“For God’s sake,” he said, as Ansel screamed. “Can’t you make him stop?”

Johnny sat at the pockmarked table, using Ansel’s pudgy fingers to trace cartoon animals into the leftover fat on his dinner plate. Dog, Johnny explained, his voice croaking tender. Chicken. Ansel’s face was blobby, uncomprehending—when the baby inevitably started whining, Johnny passed him back to Lavender and stood for his evening cigar. Alone again, as Ansel’s fingers streaked grease across her shirt, Lavender tried to hold the scene at the front of her consciousness. How Johnny had gazed at his son for those brief, perfect minutes, like he wanted to impart himself on the child. Like DNA was not enough. With the baby in his lap, cooing and affectionate, Johnny looked like the man Lavender had met in the tavern so long ago. She could still hear Julie’s voice, misty and beer-soured.