I was still thinking about it when I met Ulla and Susie at the barn a week later. Mary Alice was four months pregnant with her first baby so she wasn’t meeting us anymore; Ulla was two months married, and Susie was engaged to be married in November during the harvest feasts. At first we joked and gossiped about our former classmates and their courting the way we always did, but soon I was too curious to keep quiet.
When it was my turn with the bottle I took a deep drink.
“Have you ever had a climax?” I asked my friends.
Susie knitted her brows for a moment, considering.
“I think so,” she said, “a small one.”
Ulla laughed. She had a gap between her front teeth that always made her look mischievous, like nothing would shock her.
“With Ned it’s like this,” she said, miming a hammer pounding in a nail. “Mostly I just feel sore. But my mama says not to worry, you don’t need a climax to get pregnant.”
She took a swig from the bottle.
“Why,” she asked, “have you?”
“I think so,” I said. I should have stopped there, but my confidence buoyed me on. My period was a day late and I knew that what Sam and I had done must have worked at last.
“And do you know,” I said, “I think a man can make you climax with his fingers.”
Ulla looked incredulous.
“With his fingers,” she said.
“That’s right,” I insisted. “He touches you between your legs, above the opening. And then it’s just like Mrs. Knutson says—a little hard to describe, but very powerful. Almost like fainting.”
“Your husband did this?” Ulla asked. “Just by touching you?”
“That’s right,” I said, in what I hoped was a convincing tone.
Ulla shook her head.
“That’s not possible,” she said. “Everyone knows a woman can only climax from deep inside. Mrs. Knutson says so.”
“Well,” I said, affecting a tone of pride, “maybe my husband knows better than Mrs. Knutson.”
She looked skeptical.
“Where did he learn it, then?” she asked.
It began to dawn on me that I had made a mistake.
“What do you mean?” I asked, stalling for time.
“I mean I highly doubt Mr. Vogel taught the boys about this form of climaxing, if none of us have ever heard of it before. And he certainly didn’t learn it from Fruitful Marriage. So how did he know how to do it?”
“From another book,” I said, “that only the boys have.”
“Really?” Ulla asked. “What book?”
“It’s called Fruitful Marriage for Men,” I said, cursing myself even as I said it. “It’s quite rare. One of my husband’s visiting cousins had a copy.”
Ulla took another drink, all the while looking me in the eye.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll have to track it down. Ned could use a copy.”
I’ll never know who put two and two together, whether it was Ulla or Susie or both who understood that the experience I was describing was much more likely with an outsider than with one of our town boys, young and inexperienced and raised on all the same folk wisdom as we had been. All I know is that when I came back to my husband’s family’s house after my rounds with Mama one evening, my husband was gone and his mother and father were sitting at the kitchen table.
“You know,” said my mother-in-law, “I stuck up for you.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Mama’s old suitcase, the one I’d used to bring my clothes and medical books to my husband’s house, was standing next to the stove.
“Malcolm thought you’d be a bad match. He said your mama was unstable. He said if it wasn’t for the charity of your neighbors, your little sister would have died.”
My father-in-law looked vaguely pained. He had never spoken more than three words to me. It was hard for me to imagine him saying all this to his wife.
“That’s not true,” I said. “I took care of Bee myself while Mama was sick. She was never in any danger.”
“That’s what I said,” my mother-in-law went on. “And I told him your mama still delivers every baby within ten miles of here. That has to count for something, I said.”
She waited like she expected me to thank her. I didn’t say anything.
“Are you listening?” she asked. “I’m trying to tell you why it hurt me so much to find out you betrayed us. To find out you chose to be with another man when my son loves you so much, he was willing to wait another year if that was how long it took.”
I imagined the conversations they must have had about my failure to conceive, the same ones in which she told him to save himself for my fertile days. I doubted either he or she would have waited a year.
“I didn’t want to sleep with him,” I said. “I just wanted to give you a grandchild.”
My mother-in-law rolled her eyes.
“Well, did it work? Are you pregnant now?”
I shook my head. I’d started to bleed that morning, while I was mixing mallow and beeswax for a baby’s rash.
“Of course not,” she said.
Was she disappointed? What would have happened if I’d said yes? Would we have raised the child, my husband and I, together? Would I have done it again? Sometimes I still wish for that life, and everything it would mean.
My mother-in-law nodded at her husband and he picked up my suitcase and handed it to me.
“Leave your wedding ring on the table,” she said.
That night I had dinner with my mama and sisters like nothing was wrong. Janie and Jessamine were excited to see me and told me everything that was happening in seventh form: how Arthur Howe said his daddy had gone to the high country to join the Hole in the Wall Gang, but everybody knew he had just taken up with a woman two towns away, how Agnes Fetterly had started her monthlies already but nobody wanted to court her because she was an only child, how Lila Phelps had tried to fake hers with chicken blood so her mama would let Nils Johansson come to court her, but her mama caught her pouring the blood onto her bedsheets and made her do all the laundry in the house for a month. It hurt, almost, to remember what I’d been like at their age, not so long ago, a woman-child—my body beginning to change, my mind, like theirs, still full of tricks and gossip. The darkness of the grown-up world just starting to seep in.
All the time our sisters were talking, Bee was stealing looks at me. I could tell she already knew something was wrong. Bee was eight years old that spring. Mama said we were like two sides of the same coin. When I was her age I’d been chatty, always asking questions. Bee was quiet—she picked up what she needed to know by watching and listening.
Jessamine and I were washing the dinner dishes when Sheriff Branch came to call. He was friends with Mama and often came just to chat, bringing barley candy or Babies’ Tears for my sisters. He’d tell us stories, too, tall tales about Jesse James or the Kid, the leader of the mysterious Hole in the Wall Gang. The Kid was nearly seven feet tall, the sheriff said, and as strong as three ordinary men put together. His eye was so keen he could shoot a man dead from a mile away, and his heart was so cold he’d steal the wedding ring from a widow or the silver spoon from a baby’s mouth. Unlike the common cattle rustlers who plied their trade in sweat-stained hats and filthy dungarees, the Kid was known for his vanity—he wore a wide-brimmed pinch-front hat in the Colorado style, and his face was always covered with a fine silk scarf.