First Pages Friday: THE QUICKENING

[image error]

First Pages Fridays offers a taste of an author's work—from books long on the shelves to works-in-progress, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages.

In the upper Midwest of the early 1900s, two women struggle to make a living on neighboring farms. For one, their hardscrabble life comes easily, while the other longs for the excitement of the city. Though they depend on one another for survival and companionship, their friendship proves as rugged as the land they farm. While the Great Depression looms, the delicate balance of their relationship tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and exposing the dark secrets they hide. (from Michelle Hoover's website.)

"In Hoover's debut, the quiet struggle between two Midwestern farm women has the stark simplicity of a Biblical parable….The book's lament for a lost way of life—one in which people 'looked in hope to the ground and the roots growing there more often than we looked for grace from the sky'—has a mournful beauty." — The New Yorker

The Quickening by Michelle Hoover

I.  Enidina (Summer 1913–Spring 1914)

My boy, you might think an old woman hasn't much to say about the living, but your grandmother knows when a person does right by her and knows when they don't.  In this bed, I have little else to do but scratch down my life with this pencil.  And I have little left to me but the thought of you my grandchild who I've known only in the warmth of your mother's belly under my hand.  Even if you never come home, you should understand the way our life was, your grandfather, your mother, and I, and all the little things that make its loss so very terrible in my mind.  The Morrow family, they were a worry to ours from day one.  And once you know what they took from us, you might just understand the kind of people you come from.

It wasn't until late in the summer 1913 that your grandfather and I began to work this farm from the acres of weeds and grasses it was to a fine place.  A place where we could earn a living.  That's what a beginning is.  My father and his father and his father before that had lived within the same ten square miles of land.  Even with my marriage, I didn't move farther from home than a day's wagon ride.  I'd seen no other landscape as a child.  Had never dreamt of it.  A farm is where I was born.  Where I would always live.  I'd known it from the day my mother walked me through the fields and rubbed her fingers in the dirt, putting her thumb to my mouth so I could taste the dust and seed we lived on.  She said this was home.  When I asked her if there was anything else, she shook her head.  "Nowhere you need pay any mind to," she said.  "Not for the likes of us."

It was only a month after I'd lost my father that Frank and I first came to this place.  We married on a Sunday, as Frank thought right, the chapel holding only our families and a few friends.  There we stood, both in our thirties, Frank the older by eight years and graying at the temples.  He wore a borrowed suit that showed his ankles and wrists, I in a dove-colored dress, my red hair combed smooth to lessen my height.  Afterward we ate cake and berries and they tasted too sweet.  We opened our gifts.  My mother swept a spot of frosting from my chin and drew out my arms to look at the fit of my dress.  I'd always been a big woman, suited more for the farm than for marrying, an old bride as I was back then.  My cousins had to squint to find the ring on my hand. 

Only late did we return to what Frank had made our home.  This same house, with borrowed furniture in the rooms.  The house smelled of earth and smoke.  Frank had polished the wood and swept the floors, leaving the broom to rest on the front porch.  He'd spent most of his years working to buy the house and land, much of it still in sorry condition.  Though he didn't speak of it, his family were croppers.  He'd seldom had a thing of his own.  Now the both of us had a fair bit, and after the loss of my father, I was as determined as Frank to keep it.  When I hurried in, Frank took that broom under his arm and strummed me a song, a sorry frown on his face when he pretended the broom had snapped a string.  I grinned, dropping a penny at his feet.  This was my husband, a string of a man himself with a good bit of humor in him.  He was fair-skinned with black hair and long limbs, his eyes fainter than any blue I'd ever seen.  If anything, I knew him to be kind and hardworking, and that was enough.  Behind a curtain of chintz was the bed he'd made.  The sheets were white and damp with the weather, and in the night they would prove little warmth.   Outside, the animals in the barn were still.  I could smell them through the window.  But inside, this was what marriage was.

I'd left those ten square miles and moved to the next county over, a place that looked and smelled the same as my father's land.  The difference was my part in this place.  I was a wife, and not until that night did I know what the word meant.

[image error]Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Boston University and Grub Street. She has published fiction in Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best New American Voices, among others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Her first book, The Quickening, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize.