SHE WOULD HOLD a mirror beneath herself and stare for a long time, studying herself there. She had seen her mother naked, and her sister Grace, too, but not really up close. It was not the kind of thing she could ask to examine, to use the doctor’s word.
But she longed to do just that. If she could only look closely at Grace, and then again at herself, it would satisfy such a curiosity. So she got up her courage one day and asked Grace, bluntly, if she could see her down there.
“I mean take a real good look,” she said. “An examination.”
Grace looked offended, even baffled.
“Find you some girl your own age, if you want to play doctor,” she said before heading off toward the barn and her smokes.
Sometimes she was frightened, in a heightened way, briefly, as if some panic were about to take hold of her, and she would run, just run, until she outran it, or wore it out, and she would find herself way out in the middle of a pasture, with a curious, half-startled cow looking at her, stopped in its cud-chewing, like she was some kind of creature it had never seen before. Then she would notice the other cows, all turned to look at her, their chewing interrupted, some with long pieces of grass hanging from their mouths, their big brown eyes on her as if in wonder about how she’d suddenly appeared in their midst, a tiny creature from some other world. They’d wait to see what she would do. She would think in that moment she could do anything. She would move slowly to pluck a long piece of Johnson grass and chew on the sour end of it, let it hang from her mouth. The cows would take notice. She would stand very still. When she moved again they would startle, as if she had suddenly become human again.
Then, calmed, she would walk in the woods by herself.
She loved most being in the woods, with the diffused light and the quiet there. Such a stillness, with just the pecking of ground birds and forest animals, the flutter of wings, the occasional skittering of squirrels playing up and down a tree. The silent, imperceptible unfurling of spring buds into blossom. She felt comfortable there. As if nothing could be unnatural in that place, within but apart from the world.
There were innumerable little faint trails her father said were game trails. Animal trails. Their faint presence like the lingering ghosts of the animals’ passing. There was a particular little clearing she believed she had discovered, only her, filled with yellow sunlight on clear days, its long grass harboring primroses and wild sunflowers. A meadow she considered to be her very own, her place. The eyes of all the wild, invisible animals watching her. Time was suspended, or did not exist. She could linger there as long as she liked and when she returned from it no time had passed at all since she had stepped into the clearing and then awakened from it. That’s what it was like.
The meadow did not exist if she wasn’t in it.
THE SPRING AND summer storms were terrifying and thrilling, with sudden gusting winds, thick waves of rain, bone-jarring thunder, lightning that made everything for an instant like the inside of a vast glass bowl of bright blue light, or crackled across the sky as if to crack it open to the heavens, or boomed so near so sudden, leaving smoking trees in the woods or the edge of a field. There was a wooded area her father left open to the cattle so they could hide in there during storms. The rain flooded the flat yard, creating rivers where before there seemed no natural depression in the ground. Wind howled around the house in long, bending moans, moving against it like a flooding river, so that she feared it would rip the whole thing from its columns of foundation stones. And always, after, the yard and the fields beyond were littered with stripped branches and leaves, arboreal detritus and debris, and often, in the yard, some animal drowned from the sheer volume of water in such a brief time, a stray housecat caught out in it, or a bird, or a possum.
She would sit alone on a branch in a hickory nut tree near the pig pen, watching the hogs, sows, and piglets. Beyond that the cattle grazed in the pasture beside the pond, in their massive, slow, ponderous bodies. With their stupid, wary expressions. They startled easily.
She’d seen the hogs mount the sows in their pen. The hogs seemed almost to try to tender up the sows before they got to it, bumping the sows’ behinds with their noses, rubbing up beside them, bumping their heads gently, almost like a kind of kiss. The boars’ big pink things with the curled tip would come poking out. She went a little pop-eyed first time she saw that. They did not look like stinkhorns. And when they would mount the sows, the hogs didn’t seem to move much, every now and then pushing against her bottom, shuffling their comically tiny hind feet toward her in a little two-legged dance. And the sows stood as still as they could, just kind of staring ahead, their ears canted forward, and then after the hog got down they would kind of stand next to each other until another sow or boar came up, curious, and broke the spell.
When she asked about it, her mother seemed surprised and shocked, but the others only laughed at her questions.
She had seen dogs going at it, too, of course. A female would stray from a neighboring farm and have a small pack of males trailing along, nosing her. The female always seemed a little sullen, as if to say, I suppose I’m ready for this, although I’m not sure about it. She would be evasive without actually running away. The male had always to follow the female around, patiently impatient, attentive, until the female would stand still long enough for him to mount her. Then it was quick, with great purpose, the male’s eyes wandering off either in pleasure or distraction, she could not tell. The female’s eyes kind of sideways like she was thinking and not able to quite figure it out.
She had never seen their hound or Top doing it. What she didn’t realize was the hound was too old, stupid, and lazy, and Top, having been a stray, had been fixed by whoever he had first belonged to, before he was run off or ran away on his on.
Birds fluttered themselves together while on a branch in a tree and then fluttered apart and looked a little bewildered. The birds did not truly understand their compulsions at all. She thought maybe they would actually forget they had done it pretty much just right after doing it. Birds are the most distracted creatures in the world, she thought. She could figure that much. Bird brains. The rooster, too, hopped onto the backs of the hens, who seemed to bow down for him and lift their tails, and he clawed and grappled and flapped his wings and pushed himself at them, and you couldn’t really see much because of all their feathers, just the thrashing around. If they let that hen keep her eggs they would have chicks.
She was never able to come upon cats going at it. They were as secretive and mysterious about this as they were about anything else, if not more so. Although a female in heat seemed truly tortured by the condition. She did not want what needed to happen to actually happen but if it didn’t happen soon she was going to lose her mind. But somewhere, sometime, it always happened, for the female would disappear and no longer be seen creeping through the yard yowling in a low growly way, shoulders hunched. You might hear them down in the woods, screaming like tiny panthers. And then later there would be kittens.
She spied on Grace and her mother, when she could, after their baths, while they were dressing. If they saw her they stiffened and turned away or shut the door. Then she would take the shaving mirror from the wall over the pump sink out back and, down in the woods, set it on the ground, pull up her skirt, and examine herself. She hadn’t been able to tell enough about Grace or her mother to see much difference, but she could tell she was different, all the same. Well, she’d long known she was different, but she wanted to know more.