Free Wash by Margaret Wrinkle

breathing shallow just like I’d showed her. When I took my hand away, she floated on her own.
    As I stood beside her, watching that soft pink water lapping close around her swelling belly, all I could think was time is strange and there’s no escaping it ever. I felt that door I work so hard to keep bolted shut swing wide open and I was furious all over again at Sissy for refusing to let me teach our boy to swim.
    After I lost my wife, it took me five years to go to the quarters when it should have taken me forever. Sissy somehow managed to make it seem like she was choosing me when nothing was further from the truth. But her husband was already dead and she needed gold pieces as much as anyone. Soon enough there was a son. And from his very beginning, my third boy looked and acted so much like me that my chest caved in to lay eyes on him.
    But I tried to leave him to Sissy. Thought it would be easier on everybody. The only thing I insisted on was that he learn to swim. That big lake wrapped so close around my place seemed to be asking for trouble. But Sissy said she didn’t want that water touching even his feet and she pitched such a fit when I sent for him that I let it go.
    So when this third boy of mine, the only one who actually resembled me, when he ventured too far afield on the day he turned fifteen, and when those hooligans from the next county over called him a runaway and chased him with dogs into deep water on the far side of my lake, when he went in over his head rather than let them catch him, it did not take him long to drown. The biggest dog kept after him so he was still kicking and thrashing as the water came warm and maybe even welcome into his lungs.
    Those damn crackers dropped him at the back of my barn like they were throwing something away. I stood over his body laid out in my last stall for the longest time. Everything about him was me. Back when I was young and strong and thought I knew. All of it covered in a golden cast.
    There was not much else of Sissy to be found in his face, no matter how hard she’d worked to keep him from me. And it was his resemblance to me that did him in. It was his looking like me, talking like me and acting like me that had set my neighbors so firmly against him.
    When I knelt next to his body, I had to grab fistfuls of yellow straw to keep myself from running my fingers along all the echoes. Brows and jawline, shoulders and elbows, even forearms and hands. Somehow I knew Sissy would not want me touching our boy. Not even now.
    I tried to wrap his body so she would never know about that last dog but I was too late. She’d caught word and pounded on the stall door, saying let me see, he is mine, let me see, over and over until she was screaming and the horses were with her in her panic. I lifted the latch before too much of a crowd could gather.
    I could not bear to watch her running her fingers over our boy’s face then trying to mend the gashes in his forearm so I turned and left. Made sure she had what she needed for the funeral and worked to put it out of my mind. I buried my third son deep and then hunted a rock heavy enough to hold him down.
    One morning, I had myself convinced Mena had run because I could not find her anywhere. Rode up and down the beach until I saw her folded dress nestled under some sea oats. After I reined in my gelding to look, I found her face breaking the wide smooth sweep of the water’s surface. She floated right outside the waves, rising and falling on the incoming swells, drifting along the shoreline with the current. I had to watch for a while to make sure it was her and not a piece of driftwood. Every now and then, she’d break her float, twisting to burrow down into the water like it was a blanket.
    My horse shifted his weight and snorted. Chewed the bit and tossed his head, trying to jerk his mouth free, so I loosed the reins and let him walk on out. I’d have stayed awhile longer but the morning was too soft to fight him.