Darkness Has Made Himself Known

Rettie Sparks peers through the cracked window above the sink to watch the morning light. “Bless everybody, and give me strength to make your day a good one,” she says, smoothing the top of her white hair, thinning tresses coiled into a knob that rests at the nape of her neck. Outside, the rooster crows like his throat has rusted stiff, just like her own, and wood smoke and burning leaf litter hangs in the chilly air. Deep within the Appalachian Mountains, Rettie Sparks, a daughter, mother, and grandmother aged nearly eighty years, will finally rise up and open her throat to tell Duane, her husband of over sixty, what she has been thinking for at least the last thirty.

The old woman flips a thick, black switch mounted on the wall by her youngest son, an electrician who now lives in Richlands, some thirteen miles from their mountain home. The electric line buzzes, and she lifts her eyes to the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. She shakes her head, delighting in the new even as she clutches to the past. Five years ago now, men were sent to the moon, but she still wouldn’t have imagined power making it all the way to the house, high on Jasper Ridge.

Rettie snatches a black pail from the floor filled with coal nuts she uses to start the stove to warm the kitchen before Duane wakes. She crosses the room, her back a little straighter now that she’s worked out the kinks, and she opens the drawer on the front of the stove to shake the grate free of ash. She stacks a few pieces of hardwood kindling atop the grate and plucks a stick-match from a wooden shelf above the stove. Flipping the end with the nail of her nubby thumb, she wishes for a gas stove, and gas heat too, like most of the other farms on the ridge installed long ago. “Cost prohibitive,” the fancy words Duane uses to put her off. Yet, she welcomes the familiar tasks since things have tilted between the two of them.

A rough hand settles on the back of her neck. “Morning, old woman,” Duane says. He slides the pail from Rettie’s hand and heaps coal nuts over the burning kindling, patiently watching until the edges begin to glow.

“Thought I told you not to call me that,” Rettie says.

“Now, Rettie, don’t start.” Duane places another load, closes the thick, cast-iron door, and slides his thumb along a lever to adjust the draw from below.

Rettie straightens her house dress, green and white gingham already a decade old, before scooting toward the far wall where she slips a white apron from a metal hook. She tersely ties the middle around her ample waist before bending to pull up her knee-highs.

Two weeks prior, Rettie had stood with the church folks who didn’t think the pill any more acceptable than abortion, but a rage tipped when Duane allowed filth to fly out of his mouth. “Whores,” Duane had hollered. “Jezebels!” When Rettie’s eyes found one of their own, her grandbaby, Iris, standing with the other side, anger rose inside her. Towards Duane—not Iris.

Mounted above a white and brown speckled Formica table, a framed print of Jesus surrounded by children oversees Rettie’s domain. She inspects each serene child’s face before her mind turns. She wonders if being pregnant with eleven children is akin to torture, one after another of her flowers tumbling forth in rapid succession, each tiny life sucking her dry of her own. She wouldn’t wish any of them away. Yet, darkness has made himself known.

“We got to get a move-on if we’re going to make morning service,” Duane says.

“I won’t be going,” Rettie says, as easy as she would say they needed to collect the eggs from the coop.

Duane tugs at the waist of his blue church pants. “What are you saying?”

Four decades prior to the Life March, Rettie, already plumping with their twelfth child— their last child—had been told by her doctor that the baby was not viable. She had been sent home to wait until the baby passed, and she had eaten as many lemons as she could get her hands on to induce the miscarriage. She chased the lemons with raw cinnamon, her body weakening, slowly succumbing to the terror of it all, yet the baby had retained a heartbeat. The abdominal pain became unbearable before Leela broke free. They buried her in a small wooden box under a lilac bush Rettie had chosen to mark her place.

Rettie crosses the room to pluck her Bible from the sideboard that houses the crystal plates she saves for holidays. Dog-eared devotion presses each thin page, and she fingers the volume before pushing it into Duane’s palm.

“Everything a woman endures shouldn’t be dictated by men.”

“Rettie, you’ve lost your mind if ….”

“It ain’t nobody’s business. It weren’t nobody’s right to decide for me about Leela, either.”

You’d have females free to lay with a man?”

“Men are free. It’s always a woman that deals with what happens.”

Duane’s shoulders slump.

“You show me where the good book says that females can’t protect themselves from the making of life until they’re ready. And living long enough to care for the healthy ones she’s already birthed is no sin.”

Duane’s mouth opens, but he issues no sound. He bows his head, his hands trembling. Swollen moments stretch while the heavy book rests in his palm until, without warning, his thick arm hooks around Rettie’s neck, and they are both in tears.

“Things can be done natural, Rettie.”

“Stop it. The stewed apricots didn’t work. The jack-in-the-pulpit-root and rue herb left me pregnant AND sick. Tell me the difference between doing those things and the safer ways we got now? I nearly died with Leela. No more. Not with our girls. I won’t be a liar anymore.”

***

Lora Hilty holds an MFA through the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University in Kentucky. Hilty’s work appears in various print and online journals. Accolades include: Finalist, ‘The Green Dot,’ Narrative; Judge’s Choice, “Biscuit World and Butterflies,” Still: The Journal; Honorable Mention, ‘One Night with Val,’ Glimmer Train. An excerpt from Hilty’s story collection placed in Blotter Magazine, as well.