Once

by Laura Davis Hays

Blackstone Island, Denmark 1928

I am mother of seven children, all but one left me, and wife to one old husband, still here. I have been married forever and always. There was never any before or after to ease the burden of this life I lead.

Once I waited with my father under God’s nose, and that was the beginning of it, the first moment I truly remember, when my life as I know it began. The minister fidgeted with his robes, his sour breath heaving in and out above us. The church was frigid, the old stones uneven and rocking under our knees. Beside me, my father seethed his impatience. I did not know if he would strike me again, but I wished it, for that would make the moment come alive with something other than my hot fear. We knelt there, waiting for Svend, his absence growing like a sinkhole in my heart. Above us, the minister clucked and sang under his breath, practicing some judgment he’d soon bellow out. I did not know if Svend would appear to marry me, as he’d promised, as he’d proposed. What I did know, as the moment grew into a lifetime, was that God was getting ready to deliver his curse upon me.

I am a slow thinker. I knew the curse was to be given, and that I deserved it, but I did not know how to escape it until this very moment. I knew only that God meant me to suffer. I have grown old and stupid from the suffering.

My husband’s absence that morning foretold more than his scant presence ever has. He is a man of few words who would do anything to escape his duties, a lazy man, a terrible man.

No, he is not a murderer, he is not a wife beater. He is a man who runs.

 

My second daughter, was born strong like me, a worker, an eater, and though she once followed a worthless man, she returned when he abused her to the brink of death. Alma lives with me now—she seems as old as I am—as does my crippled old husband who does not rise from his bed except to kiss a cow in his dreams.

The first child, named Louise after a famous Queen, was born frail and in the end, half-blind, kept to herself, reading her books, fairy stories and the heady thoughts of great men, and she is gone now. Gone to sit on the steps of some golden library. She described it to me once, saying it was the most marvelous place you could ever dream of, made of marble and gold and studded with jewels. Inside, away from the relentless sun, the volumes glowed and multiplied, with an eternity to read them.

I cannot read. I cannot write. What need have I for such foolishness?

My heaven will be one of endless banquets with servants wiping my chin, and always a pleasant companion to help me wile away the hours.

And then there is Peter. Who knows if he yet lives? A mother’s devotion, gone unnoticed, for he gobbled his dinner in a hurry to be off.  Only sixteen years old when he ran away to join the Bolsheviks. His careless goodbye assaults my good memory. Not even a word or a wave, just a nod as I cleared his plate.

Astrid, yes, the favored middle one, all imagination and selfishness, for Svend doted on her until she too deserted us for that wretch of a handsome man, and off they went, their trail no more than a cloud in the sky.

The fifth, Ingrid, named after my mother, was hard in coming. I near split with the bearing of her, and then her little stunted twin, Katya, named for my dead sister, popped out in a pool of seawater. These two crossed the water to become nurses in the great war, and once I got a letter from the both of them, which was read to me.

The last, Thor, was evil through and through, and he is dead to me.

 

This I remember.

I was baking one day, and my mother came in to help me. She was just starting on daft, and there was nothing much she could do and not ruin. She put her fingers into the dough, and they were dirty, so I had to give her the glob to eat in her corner. She was still strong enough to rise from her bed and smack her lips around the precious food she stole from the mouths of others.

Svend was in his barn milking, for I needed butter for my recipe, a recipe which many have praised and wanted for themselves, though I will not give it. Little Thor trailed after his father, who he loved like a dog loves his master. He did not love me in the same way, even as a child. He loved my food, that I know, but he did not love me. Thor listened to his father’s poison, and it took root and grew in him, so an ugly hatred reflected in his eyes whenever he looked upon me. He might hide behind a smile, but I could always see who ruled his heart.

That particular day it was warm for the summer was at its peak. The nights had come back and soon they would steal the heat and bring the winter cold. I was wearing a cotton dress, my old favorite from the years when I was pregnant, and I had let it out, filling the sides in with some curtains Svend found on a junk heap in Copenhagen. I loved that dress, because it told me just who I was and what I had been and what I had done.

Their voices stopped as they came into my kitchen.

“What was that?” I asked. “What were you saying about me?”

“Mama?” asked Thor. “Can I have a breakfast cake?”

“Did you already eat one?” I knew he had.

“No,” he said.

“Can you count?” I asked, pointing to the plate.

“One, two, three,” he said, lifting his little fingers.

“Four, Five, Six,” I answered. And then I was lost, for I cannot count either, not as much as a plate of cakes. But he had had one, that I knew from the sugar shine in his eyes, and the crumb on his collar.

“Give the boy a cake, Ka-aren,” said Svend.

I turned to see my husband, not old yet, but not young, either. A man with gray in his hair and a beard turned scraggly from lack of grooming. He had the smell of the barn about him, and perhaps that is what made him soft that day. He was like an animal, and he had said my name.

“Yes,” I said, meaning, yes, I am Ka-aren.

The boy snatched the cake and ran outside. Svend and I looked at each other, appraising, judging, shifting in our discomfort. The heat was high in the kitchen from the summer and the stove. I felt my fatness, and my dumbness. He was no better than I am, that I knew, had always known. But standing in the kitchen staring after our youngest child, my husband’s confusion only confounded me. He was weak and he was waiting for me to speak.

“Yes,” I repeated. “My name is Ka-aren.”

He has not repeated it, that slip of the tongue, oh, he would not give me that much. But I see it in his eyes as he lies dying this day, running to his final reward. He remembers who I am, and that is enough for me. I have found my own escape at last, one that will be the salvation of me, my solace against misery, and a shield against the curse I have carried most of my own life. It is my way to go on without him. It is a way to go back to before the beginning.

I have remembered my own name. Ka-aren. I was once called Ka-aren.

 

“Ka-aren, my mother called. Ka-aren, come inside.” She was standing at the door, her apron tucked up into the waistband because she was too short, or it was too long, and she was about her chores which required bending and climbing, and she did not want to trip. She had on a winter dress and boots, though it was a warm afternoon and she had been baking, so her face was flushed and her hair coming down at her ears. I was amazed as I looked back from my play in the mud, for she was like a picture. So pretty, so round and pink. Her dress was gray, and her apron white and stained with jam, and she was smiling. “Ka-aren,” she repeated, “come inside.”

So, I did. There in the kitchen was a plate of scones and the crabapple jam from the cellar, that we saved for Christmas. She had opened a jar this very afternoon, and there was butter too.

No one else was about.

Papa and Jach had gone out on the boat though the sea was rough and the ice still floating and separating and freezing back together in the evening, so as to make the return treacherous. Mama had fretted at their leaving, but now she’d seemed to forget all about them, for she was eating the scones one after the other, smeared with jam and butter, and she was encouraging me to do the same. “Will there be enough for Jach and Papa?” I asked. “Oh no,” she said smiling. “We are going to eat them all.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It is my name day.”

Mama was pretty and happy that afternoon, she had curly hair the color of bread and skin like milk, and her mouth was red from the jam. Those eyes, so blue, so merry, I could not resist her. So, we laughed and stuffed the food into our mouths. And laughed some more. The scones were sweet, and the hot butter rich and comforting, melting and running down our chins.

I ate the last of the sour jam with a spoon. After that I had a tummy ache, so I went to bed. I was asleep when they came back hungry and loud, and I got up to watch them eat. Mama fried some bacon, and they ate it with bread soaking up the grease and drank milk. There were no fish that night. “Why are you not eating, Ingrid?” my father asked. “I am not hungry,” she said, and I answered the same. She poured us each a little milk.

But Papa recognized the jam jar, which Mama had foolishly filled for herself, a pretty glass with the bubbly pattern on it—how she liked pretty things! “Where did that come from?” Papa asked. “Oh, I’ve had it in the cupboard since Christmas,” she replied. “I just thought I’d use it tonight to celebrate. Your safe return,” she added and curtseyed from her place near the washtub. “Then what is that?” he demanded. He snatched the glass away and reached his thick finger in to a lingering glob of jam in the bottom, still soft to the touch. He smelled, then tasted, yet there was no delight in his face. He found the crumbs next. They were on the floor, for she was a poor housekeeper, and perhaps she’d gone to sleep after our feast, like I had. He turned on me. “Ka-aren?”

What was I to say against the booming, the slapping, the threats, and the sniggering of my brother, but lie as long as I could, then resort to the truth? That we had eaten a whole plateful, a whole jar of jam, and saved none for the two of them. “Butter, was there butter too?” he asked.

“No,” I shook my head, no butter.

“Is this girl a liar, Ingrid? Ingrid!”

The two of them, freshly incensed from their battle with the sea that we learned about in the days to follow, their loss of not only their catch, but the net and lines as well, advanced upon us. My mother did not retreat, but I did. I hid behind her skirts and tugged at the white apron until it unraveled limply in my hands and fell to the floor.

After that night, Mama could not work as well as before until her arm healed, though it never did entirely. There was always a bump at the elbow that never straightened all the way. And she was changed too. She did not talk anymore of babies, even to replace the two she’d lost—the one dead, never right after almost a year at her breast, the second, my sister who’d married and gone away when she was pregnant and half-grown—and she was grim, not smiley. But she was still greedy, maybe more so than before. She became secretive in her eating. She did not share with me, so I began to resent her girth, her gnarled arm, her piggish appearance to which my father constantly referred. I did not carry such a physical wound. No. But I was shamed none-the-less. After that day, my father did not speak my name, only talked of getting rid of me, of the mouth to feed that he would one day be rid of, and even though I was only ten, I knew exactly what that meant.

I did not believe it would be any good to be married, even at that age.

 

You see how this all came to pass? I was running from that family, Svend running from his, so we came crashing together like two waves in the sea. For all those children I bore, I did not become a mother, rather a cook and a slave.

Not long after I was married, Father and Jach left together, and good riddance to them. So high and mighty that little Jach, though he was no better than me. That I knew even then. He is gone from my memory as though he never existed. My mother came to live with us, then, and so spoiled any chance I had with Svend. She settled into our little house with all her bulk, and from that day forward began to shrink.

I had little to give her, as I believed she did not deserve much from me. After all, she had married my father and birthed that mean brother and that scrawny sister of mine, and she had not much else to her credit. She was a force in our household. She sided with him when it suited her, and with me when it suited her, and she liked to remind us both of our duty and our debt. She did not care much for the children as they came one by one and two by two, though she was of some help. She had a way of taking a crying baby and squeezing and rocking it to sleep. She was aggressive in her rocking, so the chair sometimes tipped over sending her and baby sprawling. And she liked to tell them stories that weren’t true.

I remember once she had Peter in that chair. The twins were just born, and the little one so weak that I feared for her life at every turn. I was in the bed nursing them, one on each breast, and Peter was crying because he did not like to see me do it. He said I was like a dog. She had called him to her, and he’d climbed up into her lap, though he was already too big. The chair was still in the bedroom then, as were the babies, so I could watch her, and she could watch me with my dripping nipples.

Sometimes she called Peter Jach, and he would correct her, for he was a clever babe, clever with talking and with understanding his place.

“No Grand Mamma.” he would say. “I am Peter.”

She would come a bit out of her fog, the chair would stop for a moment, and she would smile at him with those pale eyes and wipe her mouth.

“I will tell you a story of Jach,” she would say.

“Once, when he was as little as you are, and your Mama was a very big girl, she gave him a snail to eat. The garden was full of them that year. Do you know what a snail is?”

Peter solemnly nodded, for he did not like to be caught out as stupid.

“Well,” she said, “a snail is a disgusting mouthful, and if you don’t cook it (who would) it can squirm around in your mouth and slither down your throat of its own will.”

“Ugh,” said Peter, just what she wanted him to say. But his eyes were shining with delight.

“Do you want to know what Jach did?”

Peter nodded.

“He pretended to eat it right up, and maybe he did too. And he convinced Ka-aren that it was the best thing in the world, so she went out into the mud and ate one herself. Of course she got sick and made a mess in her bed, so I had to punish her for it.”

This story was not true, except the last part. I did once mess the bed, and it was him, not her, who gave me the whipping.

But she wished it had been her, because she got meaner every day that was left to her, and she was less and less help. I had nothing to give her. I had only little Ingrid, her namesake, and she took that baby up like it was a cake to eat.

Long gone and good riddance, and the old man, my husband gone soon, too. The price of my freedom, his death. Was it worth it, all of it?

This, I will never know, I am sure.

What I do know, is that this day, perhaps his last in the world, I will go to him and once more gaze upon his face to see what he is.

I see the hallway, cold and white and wooden. I see the bed, white also, and the blowing curtains. I see the strange lights in the sky, for it is the endless day. I see his blue hand on the cover, his fingers scrunched in a gentle claw. I see his spotted brown arm, his bony shoulder, his withered neck. There is his mouth, parted to let out a single breath. There is his nose, flaring and beautiful. His eyes are closed, but I know them. Blue as the sky in his white face. He will not look upon me, this I know, so I am free to look upon him and imagine. I imagine his children waiting to be born, crowding together on the other side, each taking a feature from me or from him—those eyes, the nose, the skinny shoulders. A tendency to roundness. A disdain or a love for food. An upturned nose that some have described as piggy.

I look closer to see him squirming below the skin, dreaming with his whole face. I know that he is awake now, feigning sleep. But the fear is real. What would he have to fear from me? I think he would fear that I know him, that I know his cowardly soul. All the blows I delivered were not of consequence compared to that. Would he fear that I look upon him? Would he fear to look upon me and see what I have become?

Once, he did look. I was my prettiest then, and so young. I was meat in a market of flies. My father had said as much at the Friday meeting. “She is ready,” he declared in public. “She has bled this whole year.” He did not say that he beat me the first time when I stained my mattress so badly that he had to buy new straw to stuff it with. Well, my father was mean, and Jach was bad, so what did I expect of a boy soon to be a man?

Svend and I met at his special place, the place where he often took refuge. The place was a little cave in the black cliff at the end of our island and hard to get to except by a rope that he carried. Carved by ancient sea storms the cave is usually dry, except at the highest tide. I found him there and he let me, maybe even planned it. This is the sudden insight I have now as I watch him working it out. Svend was singing in the cave that I knew was his, that everyone knew was his. He was singing something out of tune, and I laughed at him and sang it right, and after his first shock he tugged on the anchored rope to test it, and invited me down. He let me share his perch and look out to sea with him. You can see the mainland from there on a not too foggy day. The sea was wavy and cold that day, but beautiful too. The mainland seemed so far away with its wreath of tall trees that came right to the water’s edge. We dreamed together that day and on many days, subsequent, and now we dream together this day.

My eyes are closed against the sun that streams through and blows the curtains this mid-summer day. The breeze brings the breaths to him one by one. He is dying one breath at a time. So I do him the courtesy and do not look again at him until he is done. Have I learned anything in my long life, my motherhood, my wifely compromises? Just this. To let him have his escape this one last time.

* * * * *

Laura Davis Hays lives in Santa Fe, NM with her husband and two cats where she works as an accounting consultant, writes fiction, and composes and performs music. Her first novel, Incarnation (2016), a past-life thriller, is set in Santa Fe, Belize, and antediluvian Atlantis. Laura is currently completing a collection of stories and novellas, and a related novel set on a fictional Danish island in the early part of the 20^th century. Laura recently published stories in Fiction on the Web UK, Persimmon Tree, and The Centifictionist.