Free The Quickening by Michelle Hoover

of the buckets in the trough and leave the other in a closed-off stall for the weaker ones. When I was tired, I tended to do such a thing. They had a way of marking time, those feedings. I’d broken a path from the house to the barn with all my walks between.
    So many days I worked in the house and felt the animals in the rooms behind me. In the kitchen, I heard them cry, imagined them breaking through the roof overhead. If I’d pressed my hands into the corners of our house, the sound of all their wanting came in. Their smell. The chaff on their skin. They wanted to eat from us, the animals. They wanted always to eat and they were eating us. My hands ached from carrying buckets. My days were taken up with the work.
    “We can’t be drowned,” my mother had said to Frank. “None of us.” This I’d heard after the loss of our first child. I could hardly believe it even then. “We crossed the ocean for this land,” she said. “We were born, every one of us, with the caul over our heads.”
    My boy, this place isn’t what it used to be. It was always difficult, but still it bore some life. No old women in their beds. I was always the hearty kind. I thought I could live alone for years more than that woman down the road. It’s the thought of seeing your face that keeps me writing. Still, it pains my hand to give out so much.
    Without knocking, the nurse invites herself in with her black leather bag and her hair pulled back with pins. She isthin and pale and walks as if she knows this house, her voice much too quick. There’s something in her seriousness, in the way she seems ready to jump out of her skin.
    “Who sent you?” I ask.
    “County services,” she says, but she’s slow in saying it. I know her voice, but I can’t place it.
    “Whose?”
    “The county.”
    “Services for what?”
    She wears a smile like your mother’s, cocked at the corner of her mouth. I’ve asked her this same question every day now and I’ll keep on asking it until she gives an answer that makes sense. “Why don’t you let me worry about what services, Mrs. Current?” she says. “Why don’t you just let me get started.”
    I study her, but let her be. I don’t have energy for visitors. As much time as these pages are taking, today and the day after that are the least of my worries. The nurse carries in buckets of water from the kitchen and strips the sheets. I know the song she hums. A lullaby. The same Mary and I once sang to our own. When she rolls me on my side, my breasts and belly drop like sacks of grain and I’m not so sick I can’t smell the difference. I was never proud of my own skin, but it didn’t used to look so mean. My ribs show and the flesh hangs from my hips. The water is warm. That sponge in her hand pulls at me until I wince. Not since I suffered baths as a child in my mother’s kitchen have I let another person do what I’ve done my whole life. “You know,” the nurse says. “You could get outof this bed if you wanted. You’ve got nothing wrong with you except being good and tired.” Her voice moves the way of her hand, warm like that and circling. But the air after she’s finished bites.
    I pull the blankets to my chin, but she tells me to wait. I remember my hand wet on the small of your mother’s back, trying to keep her still in our washbasin. Such a wail she put out, that curly hair of hers a nest. Got work canning in a factory , your mother would later write, from Des Moines that time. Men’s work, but so many have gone to war, I don’t mind it a bit. Out of the sun all day and such a din . Your mother and her letters. She wrote only a handful for me to keep under my mattress all these years. Never so much as I wrote my own. When she was young, your mother once came in with a ruddy dust on her hands and feet, holding up those hands as if she carried something delicate, so red I thought they were bleeding. I asked her where she’d gone. “The railway,” she said, looking at her