The Fulfillment

  Lavyrle Spencer

  THE

  FULFILLMENT

  With love

  to my grandma, Bessie Adamek,

  whose recollections made it possible.

  My perpetual thanks to Judie Coscio, Darlene Schaeffer, and Denise Brusseau who were my impetus, my conscience, and my critics whenever I needed them…and to Kathleen Woodiwiss, for writing The Flame and the Flower in the first place…

  among other things.

  Contents

  My perpetual thanks

  1 The truth had long been settling on Jonathan Gray, sneaking…

  2 Out in the fields was the place where Jonathan did…

  3 Aaron awoke to the sound of the lifter and lids…

  4 The fields of Moran lay at their blackest best, for…

  5 The following Saturday, they went to town with the double…

  6 Aaron tried to concentrate on Pris as he drove the…

  7 Sunday turned cloudy and cool, and the heat from the…

  8 The railroad station was depressing under the Sunday sun. The…

  9 The sun was down now and it was purple outside…

  10 It wasn’t that it was any brighter in the room…

  11 The drone of low thunder brought Aaron awake in the…

  12 Jonathan had had a miserable ride from town. He’d thought…

  13 The end of June was nearing. This was the last…

  14 The waving pastures of wild hay had begun trading their…

  15 August bore down without consideration for a pregnant woman. It…

  16 Aaron could see his breath this morning, and the chill…

  17 It seemed like the answer to all their problems when…

  18 There were many small preparations to fill Mary’s last weeks…

  19 Aaron made his decision the day he first saw Sarah…

  20 Moran Township folk always turned out for weddings, births, and…

  21 The days returned to unvarying sameness. For Aaron they were…

  22 Late summer eased its bountiful self upon the land, bringing…

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The truth had long been settling on Jonathan Gray, sneaking into his resisting corners, but it had finally resounded in the deepest part of him. He’d prayed it wasn’t so, hoped that if he willed it untrue it would be. But it was true. He knew it. At last it had to be faced…and dealt with. After denying it all these years, it had come to Jonathan Gray that he was infertile.

  Jonathan and Aaron had suffered together in that winter when it had happened, as they’d suffered most of their childhood illnesses together. As only brothers they’d shared everything from the tin cup on top of the water pump to the bed they’d slept in all their growing years, so it was only natural that what one got, the other one got, from the croup of babyhood to the head colds of childhood and, finally, the mumps of adolescence. It was the mumps that had done it.

  Who’s to say why they’d stayed up on Aaron and moved down on Jonathan. Their ma had tried everything from packs of icy, burning-cold snow to poultices of boiled beans, but Jonathan’s swelling genitals had stubbornly refused to subside.

  It was one of the few times he ever remembered Doc Haymes coming out to their house, and maybe that had something to do with his mistrust of the man now.

  “There’s nothing I can do that you haven’t already done, Mrs. Gray,” the doc had said, and those words rang now in Jonathan’s memory. He blamed the doc because Haymes had found no way to take away the pain.

  When it was over and done with, they’d all said not to worry because it wasn’t a sure thing he’d been damaged. Probably he’d end up with more babies than he needed, they’d ventured.

  But he’d been married seven years and there were no babies yet. He and Mary had been trying all that time, and now it seemed almost certain there wouldn’t ever be any babies.

  And that old fool Haymes hadn’t helped matters recently, either. For the life of him, Jonathan couldn’t figure out why Mary listened to Haymes’s farfetched notions. Now he had her counting the days on the calendar with some nonsense about some days it can happen and some days it can’t. That riled Jonathan. Somebody ought to shake some sense into that old fool’s head, but Jonathan was a peaceful man and it wouldn’t be him that did it. Besides, the old fool seemed to keep Mary hopeful. So Jonathan stifled his tongue and went along with it when she announced it was the right day to try again. But he cursed Haymes half of the time for giving her false hopes.

  But the pretending got harder and harder and the bed seemed smaller and smaller as their lovemaking brought no babies. The strain was rife between Jonathan and Mary, and nothing would ease it except the baby they both wanted and couldn’t have.

  It wasn’t clear in Jonathan’s head just when the notion had come to him, but it was somewhere back during the past winter. He’d had time to mull it over in his mind, holding it, weighing it, measuring it, rolling it back and forth as he might work a lump of spring soil, wondering just when it’d be ready for its mating with the seeds.

  When it first came to him he was sitting where he was now, right here in the family pew after Sunday services, soaking up the good closeness of himself and the Lord after all the others had left the two of them alone for a while. It was a time he enjoyed best. Let the others yammer away, exchanging gossip in the churchyard like they always did on a Sunday. He’d rather spend his last few minutes here.

  He’d been reading his Bible, easing his eyes over some words there, when he came to a verse that held his mind from wandering on: “Take unto thee Aaron thy brother and his sons with him.” At first it was Aaron’s name that held him, made him go over it one more time. It was hard to say who had taken whom unto whom, for Aaron and Jonathan still shared their childhood home, and had since their parents had died. But as for who was doing the “taking unto”—now that was hard to say. For they shared the home place equally, although, strange as it was, the land had been left to Jonathan while the house and outbuildings had been willed to Aaron.

  Their pa knew what he was doing when he left things that way. It was a sure bet that Jonathan would never leave the land. He loved it too much. Aaron, on the other hand, was held more loosely to the land. Hadn’t he already left it once and taken a fling in the city? But he’d come back after a year of that wildness. He’d come back to the home place, and you might say Jonathan had taken Aaron unto his land while Aaron had taken Jonathan unto his house. Seven years ago when Mary married Jonathan, she was taken into the lives of both brothers, as wife to the one, as true friend to the other. And that suited them all just fine.

  Jonathan was pondering all this after he’d read that Bible verse the first time, and he wasn’t quite ready, in his peaceful, unsuspecting state of mind, for the downright disturbingly sinful idea that entered his soul after he reread the verse a third time. “Take unto thee Aaron thy brother and his sons with him.”

  It was the part about Aaron’s sons that started the notion rolling around in Jonathan’s brain. For Aaron had no sons. Aaron wasn’t married—yet!

  But before he was married…suppose Aaron sired a son for Jonathan!

  From the moment the thought entered Jonathan’s head it wouldn’t leave. It just lodged there like a fishbone sticks in your throat and no amount of hard swallowing or eating dry bread is going to make it move. You keep thinking you can forget it’s there, but you can’t.

  And that surely was the way of it with the notion he’d taken about how he and Mary could get a son.

  The sinfulness of it filled Jonathan with shame. But that didn’t make the idea disappear. Instead, It made him conjure up reasons why it might be
less than sinful after all—and now he’d gotten himself to the point where the idea seemed almost sound.

  Oh, he’d done plenty of praying over it, and time and again he’d asked the Lord’s forgiveness for it. But then, hadn’t he been reading the Bible when he’d first gotten the idea, and right here in the Lord’s house, under His very eyes?

  Through the end of the winter and early spring Jonathan had watched Mary and Aaron together. They had an easy way with one another, almost easier than between Mary and himself. But they were strictly friends, observing the proprieties between brother-in-law and sister-in-law no differently from the way Jonathan thought they should.

  “Thou shalt not covet…” gave Jonathan hours of troubled thoughts. It ran itself through his mind a thousand times, but after the thousandth time he still told himself that there was no coveting between his wife and his brother. Might they not therefore be sinless if they did this thing at his bidding? If there were sin involved, Jonathan would willingly accept it.

  He’d thought about it long enough now, and it had even come to him that the perfect time was in the offing. Soon he’d be off to Minneapolis to buy the Black Angus bull. And so, on a sparkling May morning in 1910, Jonathan Gray decided the time had come to put it to them.

  Once the decision was made, Jonathan apologized to the Lord one last time, left the quiet church, and stepped into the brilliant late-morning sun.

  Mary was standing amid a gaggle of Garner children, their mother—her Aunt Mabel—at its core, Uncle Garner at its fringes. Mabel Garner’s voice, as always, could be heard above most in the churchyard. As Jonathan approached, she was saying, “It don’t hardly seem like my Catherine here could be old enough to be a bride yet, but I reckon she grew up since you left us, huh, Mary?”

  “Catherine, I’m so happy for you,” Mary said, kissing her young cousin on the cheek.

  “Well, here you are, Jonathan!” Mabel Garner’s voice boomed again. “You’re either powerful good or powerful wicked, needin’ that much time in church!” Her boisterous laugh followed. She was almost as big as Jonathan, wattle-chinned, red-faced, bespectacled, good-natured, and well-loved. Jonathan was used to her outspokenness by now, and it didn’t bother him anymore. With her whole brood around her, she resembled a mother turkey, her head higher than theirs, gobbling away while herding the young ones.

  “Come over here, boy!” Every man was a boy to Aunt Mabel.

  When Jonathan neared the group, Mary said, “Aunt Mabel’s just told me that Catherine and Mike are to be married in June.” Jonathan had inherited this bunch of cousins when he married Mary, so it was more or less family news that the oldest of them was to marry.

  Preoccupied as he was with other thoughts, Jonathan found himself hard-pressed to join in the felicitations. But the women were giddy at the news and couldn’t be hurried away from each other, so Jonathan waited on the fringe of the group. Uncle Garner and he talked man-talk.

  Jonathan’s attention was now and then diverted to Aaron, who was across the dusty stretch of yard where the rigs were tied, leaning against a wheel next to Priscilla. From the way she cocked her head and blinked up at him from under her bonnet, it was apparent that Jonathan didn’t have a day to waste. Pris meant to have a wedding ring on Aaron’s finger, and then it would be too late. Sunday was the perfect day for doing the asking, the one day a week that they slowed their pace and let the farm do the same. The chores, milking and feeding the stock, were about all they did. It was the Lord’s Day, and they used it as such. Plenty of time to approach Mary and Aaron and put it to them, time for whatever would follow after he’d asked it.

  “Jonathan, you’d better listen up a bit better, ’cause by the looks of it you’ll be going through the same thing soon with that brother of yours over there,” called Aunt Mabel. “If ever I saw a lovesick calf, it’s Priscilla Volence. You know weddings always come in threes, and Catherine’s will be only the first one of the summer!”

  “Well, it’s what we’re hoping for, isn’t it, Jonathan?” Mary asked, glancing at Aaron and Pris while taking Jonathan’s arm.

  “That’s Aaron’s lookout and none of ours,” Jonathan said, “but yes, we’re hopin’.”

  They all moved toward the rigs, and Mabel Garner’s voice preceded them. “You gonna shine that wheel all day, boy, or you gonna drive that pretty li’l gal home?”

  The head capped with a wealth of russet curls came up, and a hand waved at Mabel Garner. Aaron was a slightly younger version of Jonathan, slim-bodied, straight-nosed, wide-mouthed, although his lips were more crisply etched. Aaron had an eternally amused look about him. Crinkling his brown eyes in a smile, he called back, “I see a morning in church didn’t put much benevolence in you, Aunt Mabel. Your tongue is just as disrespectful as always.”

  “Never mind my tongue, boy, just watch your own!” she hollered. Then, more quietly, she added, “That boy’s got the same spunk his pa had.” She watched Aaron and Priscilla mount their buggy and leave the churchyard, followed by Jonathan and Mary.

  Moran Township was still reaching for its prime. The grass along the roadside was a pale shadow, like the beard of a youth not yet shaved for the first time. The willows along Turtle Creek wore fat, adolescent buds, promising soon to burst into the fullness of maturity.

  So it seemed with Mary. She was something to behold, Jonathan thought, looking like a schoolgirl, eagerly leaning forward, hands on knees, nostrils to the wind, sniffing it, tasting it. Sitting as she was, she might be mistaken for a child. Her form was so slight that it seemed the knot of honey-brown hair at the nape of her neck must weigh her down. The only hints of maturity about her were small breasts, evident only when she drew in her breath beneath her woolen coat, sucking in the spring as if some of its fecundity might remain with her if only she could capture it long enough. She was a woman waiting for the same awakening that Moran Township awaited, awaiting the fullness of her season.

  Jonathan knew this. From the corner of his eye he studied her, her eyes the blue of a summer cornflower, always wide, excited. Her little face, so childishly round of cheek, told of her Slavic ancestry. When she smiled, her eyes became larger, rather than narrower. It was this that gave her the look of expectation and gaiety. Too, Jonathan had never seen her pout or sulk or feel sorry for herself, and perhaps it was this everlasting zest that made him hopeful now.

  “There’s just nothing in this world as good as April!” Mary claimed now, nose still windward. “Except maybe May!” Then in her typical, ebullient fashion, she raised her arms skyward and recited:

  “April away!

  Bring on the May!

  But never too soon

  For then it is June.”

  Then her hands slapped back down upon her knees, shoulders hunched as before.

  How in tarnation was a man supposed to reply to a thing like that? Most of the time, like now, Jonathan didn’t answer, for there was no answer in him, not in words anyway.

  “Just imagine waking up one year and finding that April and May had skipped by without stopping…I don’t think I could stand it!” she bubbled.

  Jonathan thought she talked like a child sometimes, and he wondered if it was because she had no child to do its own talking.

  She was going on, “…but I guess April and May can’t pass fast enough for Catherine and Mike. Just imagine, Jonathan, a June wedding, and Catherine’s at that! Oh, it’ll be lovely; Aunt Mabel will see to that. And we’ll dance…” Here she raised her arms again, a bit of her skirt caught up in her fingertips, swaying to the imaginary music. Jonathan enjoyed her merriment but found himself unable to respond to it, which was often the case with Jonathan.

  So, with the Minnesota breeze ushering them home, they rode, the quiet man and the childlike woman, following the rig that skimmed the gravel ahead.

  When Aaron Gray left Moran Township a couple of years before, Priscilla Volence had been just another of the gawky kids up the road. By the time he returned, the gawkiness had become fe
male allure. Everyone in Moran Township knew she’d set her sights on him the first time she’d seen him back at the Bohemian Hall. When his head snapped around for a second look, he found her meeting his stare boldly before the expression on her face softened. The gossips of Moran had hashed over every move the couple had made since then. And now they were sure Aaron and Pris weren’t long for the altar.

  If Priscilla had her way, they’d be dead right. She’d been ready for marriage since that first time she saw him after his return from the city, and he knew it perfectly well. But Aaron was put off by the idea. She’d worked her simple wiles on him in the plainest country ways possible: being available whenever he called, making no firm demands, letting him see how well prepared she was to handle a family and a home. Their farms were so close together that he’d had countless occasions to see her handle her younger brother and sisters, helping her mother with the never-ending house chores, her father with the field chores. Oh, she was prepared for marriage, all right. All she needed was the asking. But there was no pushing Aaron Gray. He seemed satisfied to woo her until they both started losing their hair, and nothing could get a proposal out of him.

  And what did Aaron think? Riding through that April morning, taking Priscilla home in her father’s rig, he recognized how deeply he’d settled himself into her family. He was so comfortable with them all that it seemed as if he were already a part of them. Maybe that was why his hackles rose when he thought of marriage. It seemed he and Pris had never had the chance to think about marrying before everybody in the township had the knot tied for them.