Beneath the Apple Leaves(109)

“Well, I’ve done enough schooling for us both, I think. I could train you. You’d still have enough time at the farm. We’d start out slow. Be better for us both.”

“So, Houghton, what do you think?” Pieter rocked on his heels, grinned. “Ain’t polite to leave the man waiting. You in?”

From the corner of his eye, Andrew saw Lily laughing with Gwyneth, her hand on her belly while the other balanced a forkful of cake. Close behind, Eveline listened with mirth as Gerda’s animated figure told a story with its whole enormous form. Claire discussed baking tips with Bernice Stevens. Will and Edgar chased Fritz in the tall weeds. And in that moment, the land stilled. The movements of the season slowed and pulsed.

A slow smile crept across Andrew’s face. “I’m in.”





CHAPTER 56

Marilyn Claire Houghton was born with an early spring. Gerda Mueller delivered the baby with authority and grace, guiding Lily through the pain as she had when her own daughters delivered. And Andrew was there, despite the protests of everyone that his presence was not appropriate. But he would not leave and held Lily’s hand through the endless hours of contractions and birth. And when he held his daughter, his daughter, in the crook of his arm and she looked at him with that endless stare it struck him that her first impression of him would never be of lack. His daughter would never think it strange that his arm was not there. He was simply her father, whole and complete. She would not know that she was held in only one arm. She would simply know that she was held.

And he worshipped this little being—the sunburnt-colored skin and the hazel eyes of his wife, the V between the brows as she scrunched up her face with the new sensitivities outside the womb. Andrew’s eyes drifted from his baby to the small room. They rested on Eveline hugging Mrs. Mueller and the two women doting on Lily and he looked at his wife, at her tired glow, a woman who had traveled a long journey to find her home in his embrace.

His daughter squirmed in his arm. She opened and closed her gummy mouth and struggled to open her eyelids. A tear dripped from his eye and landed on his daughter’s cheek, startling her. He blinked away the rest.

Look at my child, he said silently to his father in Heaven. Look at your granddaughter. And he called out to his mother overseas, realized that she hadn’t slighted him with her letter but protected him with her distance. Look at my child, he told her. And they did. And his daughter smiled in that gurgling, gassy way and he laughed. He laughed and he cried and he held his daughter while his parents held her, too.

She’s perfect, they said. Perfect. And they held him, too. Kissed his temple.

The baby scrunched her forehead and let out a tiny, shrill cry. Eveline gently took the child from her nephew. “She needs to nurse.”

Eveline handed the baby to Lily. The tiny infant rubbed her nose down her mother’s breast hungrily and latched on quickly. Lily’s eyes rounded in awe. She met Andrew’s eyes gratefully and mouthed, She’s drinking!

Lily fed this child from her body. She had conceived this child and birthed this child from her body. And she was no longer a being of the dark. She cried hard at this and the baby had difficulty holding on with her mother’s sobbing. Andrew stepped forward, but Eveline held him back. “Let her cry.”

She was not impure. Lily looked at her baby. Something that was black and tainted could not create light. Only light came from light. And her soul and her heart cracked open and she cried with forgiveness for herself. She cried for what she had never seen within herself. She cried for all that she was and for all that had been locked away.

It was a personal, sacred moment and Gerda went to tidy the kitchen. Eveline left the room, just long enough to see Andrew wrapping his wife into his arm and kissing his child between them.

Eveline Kiser wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and went out of the house. The air was cold and bit at her skin, but she relished it, the first sensations that touched alive and real against her skin in a very long time. The sky was blue and open, the sun too bright to look at, yet she tried, let the sharpness burn her pupils for a moment before closing her eyes. She wanted to look at the sun. Wanted to look at all the brightness again, the light. She felt she had been locked in a closet for eternity and now she was out and she wanted to feel the cold air and look straight into the core of the sun and walk barefoot across the cool earth.

Eveline was drawn to the place of the old apple tree, scanned the empty space still seeing the girth of the trunk, the thick lines of the rugged bark and the branches that sprawled outward from the center. She sat down on the round stump, clutched the firmness and steadiness of it under her like sitting in the earth’s palm. The breeze stirred the tiny hairs around her face. Gray hairs, she thought to herself. Not all, but some. She had aged; this she knew. She had been to Hell and back and climbed by her fingernails to this place.

The sun warmed the side of her face despite the chilly spring air. She glanced at the old farmhouse, the perimeter of her dead garden and the fields that lay flat and barren as far as the eye could see. But these sights did not bring despair but all that was opposite and she smiled, felt the oddness of her lips shaped in such a way, wondered the last time she had smiled and meant it.

Soon the garden would sprout again. The fields would show the green shoots and rows upon rows of new life blooming and her sons would run to the creek to fish and ride the horses and go to town fairs.