“I would like everyone to think of one thing to share with the family about Aunt Loretta tonight,” Ruth says. “One thing that you feel she has brought to our family. One thing about her that you love.”
Samuel mumbles into his plate, “She’s nice,” and Ruth nods vigorously. “She is very nice, Samuel,” she says. Elizabeth says, “She loves the Lord?” and Ruth agrees again, though she looks at Loretta as she nods. Benjamin says, loudly, “She weads to me!” and everyone laughs. Loretta, too. When it falls silent, Dean clears his throat and says, “I believe Loretta has brought a sweetness of spirit into our home,” and Ruth nods in agreement with this as well, mouth pursed.
Loretta has never adjusted to the silence of these children, their obedience, though she has seen the cause of it when they disobey Ruth. She whips them mercilessly with her large wooden spoon or pinches them in strategic ways. If Loretta had considered Ruth a hard woman, humorless, before the wedding, she has come to realize how little she really knew. Ruth is harder than humorless — believing life is meant to be a trial, and her task is to drive these children into heaven, to teach them to ignore pleasure in pursuit of salvation.
She has told Loretta as much. You must shut down that part of yourself that would coddle a child in weakness. When you encourage worldly softness, you are putting their souls in peril. It is the hardest part of a godly love, to be stern with your children. Ruth often refers to Loretta’s future children. Your children. They exist already, these children, and their souls await their chance to come to earth. It is her job to bring them here. Ruth believes this and Dean believes this and Loretta’s parents believe this and virtually everyone Loretta knows believes this. Loretta believes this. She tells herself she does not, but when she imagines her childless future — her glamorous days and nights of freedom — she imagines particular souls who will suffer for this, who will remain stranded, and she feels bad for them, a little, but also hoisted and enlarged — seeing herself the way Dean must see himself, as someone toward whom other wills must bend.
Out comes the sad, flat cake, with the birthday message in raisins and a single candle burning. The children sing “Happy Birthday.” She had wondered whether they would, or whether Ruth would consider it a worldly extravagance. Janeen, the six-year-old, sings loudest, and she smiles widely at Loretta when the song is over, a big gap in her nubby-toothed smile. Loretta blushes, wanting to check the feeling rising up inside her, because it is love.
If anything, hearing Ruth’s ideas about disciplining children has made Loretta want to coddle them more. She looks upon the children with intense tenderness; she feels their slights and injuries more powerfully than they do. She can’t bring herself to trim little Ben’s fingernails, because she once accidentally cut him to the quick and he cried and whimpered, warm and tight in her arms, for half an hour. She relishes doing the girls’ hair, and seeing them smile when she tells them they look pretty. She teases Samuel, who blushes hotly, and at night, when she tries to imagine her future, when she thinks about what Bradshaw must be doing with all that money of Dean’s that he is handling, when she remembers how much she hated Dean and realizes how that hate has slid into something like accommodation, how she has found a place inside herself for all of this, she becomes fearful at the idea of never seeing these children again, fearful that they may love her, too, and that it will hurt them when she leaves.
They eat the cake. It tastes terrible, odd and eggy.
“Sarah!” Ruth barks, for the youngest girl has laughed with a full mouth of cake, sending a small, wet hunk onto the front of her dress. The girl quickly and quietly tries to wipe it off before Ruth rises and comes and takes the napkin roughly from her hand, dips it in her water glass, and begins to dab at the stain.
Dean wipes his mouth, pets his beard, and leans back with a satisfied aspect. “Thank you, Mother,” he says to Ruth, and scoots back his chair and rises. Suddenly it is there again in Loretta’s mind: tonight. What must happen. She has prepared herself. Talked to herself. How bad can it be? How long can it take? She imagines it might take an hour, and that an hour is not so much. How many other hours has she endured? Yet she is weak with dread.
Ruth, Loretta, and the girls clean up. Dean and the boys work in the garage on tomorrow’s deliveries. Soon it’s bedtime, and she begins shepherding — it’s bath night for Janeen and Sarah, and the older girls need help putting up their hair. Ruth moves constantly through the enormous house, from the kitchen where she rinses a glass to the living room where she straightens the children’s scripture books on a shelf to the garage door where she asks Dean a question, up the long staircase and down the carpeted hall past the bedrooms to the bathroom at the end, where she scolds Sarah for taking too long in the bath.
Loretta goes to the boys’ bedroom. Her favorite part of the day. Benjamin waits for her, his hair buzzed close to the scalp, his big, light-filled eyes, and his entire face — that ripe, chubby face — alert with anticipation. She sits on the lower bunk with her feet up and leans against the headrest and he settles into her lap in the plain white pajamas Ruth has sewn for him. He loves The Poky Little Puppy. It’s one of the few books Ruth tolerates, because the puppy is punished. Benjamin snuggles into the crook of Loretta’s arm, and she reads. About halfway into the story he lays his head against her chest. His chubby hand curls into a loose fist, resting on her belly. She can smell his hair and his skin, a familiar scent — grass, sweat, play, boy, and something more, something family. She finishes the book. The wayward puppy gets what he has coming — no dessert. She thinks Ben has fallen asleep, but he lifts his head and says, “Again,” and she starts over. The puppy digs and disobeys. Ben adjusts, shifts against her. Loretta presses her cheek against his head. What a warm, fragile being. Bone and flesh. Belly and brain. With only these people, this family, to care for him.
• • •
She lies under the covers in her garments, afghan to her chin, and watches Dean unloop a suspender from one shoulder, then the other, and step carefully out of his black wool pants, not letting them drop to the floor. He removes his shirt and drapes it over the foot of the bed. His blush runs from the side of his face, brightening the shiny half-moon scar on his earlobe, and streaks down his neck and onto his chest, burrowing into the V-neck of his gauzy garments, the blessed garments that protect him from evil. His breathing is shallow and rapid. He is already erect, a dark bulb pressing outward against the thin cloth of the garment. He drops his hands in front of it as he walks to the side of the bed, and says, “I apologize if this seems vulgar,” and slides under the covers, sits up on his elbow, and puts on his serious face, his church-speaking face. “And I am sorry, little sister, for the way I behaved with you on our first night. I feel as though a demon has overtaken me when it comes to you, beautiful Loretta, and it is in this battle, this torture of the flesh, that I have found some spiritual solace these past months, that I have found myself tested, and imagined that I had battled this flesh in earnest, and, like all such battle, had gained something in my soul from it. Except for that first night.”
“It’s all right,” Loretta whispers. She had hoped he might be wordless and fast. That she might dream her way through it. But seeing him at the foot of her bed, his erection tenting, had surprised her: she was intrigued. Not aroused, not that — but curious about that pronging, and about the way it might be like or unlike Bradshaw’s pronging, which she has felt only through his jeans, though he has pressed her for more. When she imagines her future and wonders how she will get there, she realizes that it may involve Bradshaw and his penis, and she wonders if there will be others, and how she will feel about those others, if they might be pathways to other things or simply ends in themselves, and so she is curious now in the way she might be curious about the first time she saw anything. And part of her has always felt that all of this — romance, passion, love, sex, men, and women — was overwrought, overdone, oversold, whether in the worldly world or in the church world, both places treating it like some magic thing when it was just a body thing, an animal thing. She wants Dean to get started now and stop talking about God and temptation and the flesh, but he is doing it again, talking about the flesh, and Loretta wonders how he could think it makes any difference if they do it today or if they did it last week or if they do it tomorrow. How could it matter?