Sleep will be a long time coming to one of us again tonight. I thought I’d doze right off, hugging my little victory to the flannel daisies covering my chest. I believe I did the right thing, taking matters into my own hands. The check in my wallet is proof. But my sleepy smile went hard, and a cold fear started chewing at my heart when Will came in. He hasn’t spoken to me since dinnertime, when I told him what I did. Seems I need to lay the thoughts to rest first, convince myself, and then, sweet sleep.

Before Will collapsed on the bed I’d started drifting, almost dozing to the soft scratching of ice chunks sliding off the roof, scraping the lip of the rain gutter and crunching into snow several times thawed, then crusted over. Nearby, I hear the thin, soft clicks of a quartz clock I bought last summer when thunderstorms knocked out the power so often we never knew what time it was. Usually sounds help put me to sleep when my thoughts are racing, one sound over and over, fading nicely away as I let go. The clock almost had me to sleep tonight. Then Will came in.

The clunk of his boots coming off—and how many times have I asked him to leave his boots in the mudroom? How many slippers have I bought for a man who tracks clots of mud into the bedroom? The sliding of his flannel shirt to the floor: can’t remember which one he wore today, but surely a shirt whose popped buttons aren’t missed, replacements aren’t noticed. The scratching of his socks coming off dry legs. I can almost hear the flakes of skin dusting the carpet, Will pulling the socks by the toes that will wear out first and require darning. The problems he won’t take care of, the seventy-two dollars left in our bank account, every night a new reason for not sleeping.

Like the culvert Will never cleaned out at the foot of our road. Thought the town would put us on notice for flooding the intersection and worried myself sleepless until I was ready to take a hoe to the damn thing and clean it out myself. But if I’d fixed it, Mr. Gibbons never would’ve got his car stuck. He wouldn’t have sat down for apricot pie and coffee after Will towed him out of the mud. Then Will never would’ve got to talking about the old Ford.

“Could be quite a classic if somebody took the trouble to fix it up,” Will said. “One of these days. Make a nice project.” As if Will had either the time or the money to tinker with a useless relic that’s been sitting out in the side yard for years with the right tires completely gone, lopped to one side on rusty rims and weeds climbing up past the running boards.

I saw a good thing coming when Mr. Gibbons tipped his chair back, slid his hands into his pockets, and asked Will how much he’d consider selling the old piece of junk for. Will sat up too straight, the way he does when his feelings get hurt.

“Isn’t for sale,” he said.

My eyes burned into him as I stood at the sink and stared at his spine as stiff and dumb as the floorboards. The ads I sneaked in the Nickel Classified couldn’t come up with a better customer than Mr. Gibbons. With all the work I’d done to sell that heap, Will could sit at the table and tell a man with his hands in his pockets that he wasn’t ready to sell. Fix the car up or sell it, Will couldn’t make his move.

Not deciding is what Will does best, which says a lot about how we came to work this farm in the first place. Because it was here. Because his family owned it already and the oldest son moved down to Boston to start a discount jewelry business that could buy a hundred farms like this one. Because Will didn’t have to do anything except continue what he was already doing.

Now that farming has become big business with subsidies and other things we don’t qualify for, we’re one of the last family farms in Northern New England. One of us would be damned before selling out to some businessmen from who-knows-where. I used to have big ideas. Somehow we’d get enough money to pull the farm into shape again. Rebecca and her husband would have babies and raise them here. We’d teach her children how to run a farm right.

Now that she’s gone and there’s no-one to leave the place to, I don’t nag Will so much about the sagging fences, the rusted swather, the broken bolt on the baler. We only have to pull in enough money for the two of us to get by. I haven’t started to sell the family silver yet. Since there’s no one to leave that to either, selling it’ll cause no heartache. Still, it’s hard watching the land go bad, seeing the hayfield yield dwindle each year, the livestock down to two cows, three sheep, six chickens. Time was when this farm won a handful of blue ribbons at every county fair, but that was in the days before Will ran the place.

Back when we were sweethearts, Will’s mother told me she should have sent him to finishing school—never finished anything he started. Nothing’s changed. Last spring he started to repair a small piece of the back pasture fence. Halfway through the job old Hansen stopped by to ask Will for a hand moving his double bed downstairs. His wife’d had a stroke, and he wanted to make it easier for her when she got home from the hospital.

If Will had come right home to finish the fence repair we’d still have three cows instead of two. But the old man was feeling sad, so Will helped him straighten up the house and told him stories while our best milker wandered down into the clover to graze. Three days later the cow was dead from bloat.

The bed heaves as Will grunts and rolls. I grab the covers quick before he leaves me exposed to the raw night air. Sometimes we can go the whole night long, tossing and rolling, without touching each other.

Rebecca used to ask why I didn’t appreciate her daddy’s poetic side. She didn’t understand that I was the one who looked out for her welfare. If it was up to her father, we’d have starved to death watching clouds move across the sky, changing into animal shapes. She was her daddy’s girl, and I was mindful not to turn her against him. No surprise when she fell in love with a man just like her daddy and worshiped him with the same blind devotion. Not that I had anything personal against Owen, his delicate hands or his silly notions. But I could sense the danger coming and couldn’t do anything to protect her.

The important things didn’t concern me either when I fell in love. I started loving Will, my knees going weak, when I was too young to name such things, when he still treated me like the tomboy from two farms over. One cool afternoon I stood out by the front porch, not knowing this would be my home someday, trying to distract Will and hoping he’d ask to spend time with me. He hardly looked up from his work he was so intent.

He wasn’t repairing the screen door that he put up months before but it never shut right, and he’d soon need to put up the storm door in its place. The job that occupied him so much he couldn’t give me the time of day was planting crocus bulbs. I didn’t tell him he was planting too late. I didn’t say he should be tending to the important chores first. I just stood there drawing circles in the dirt with the toe of my sneaker and watching him cradle those bulbs in his lean brown hands, stroking the dust away and laying them gently into the earth, kneading the rich dirt around them. I’m not ashamed to admit I wanted those hands on me with the same soft confidence that could break a crocus bulb’s heart.

How could those two people be the same people who ate an entire supper tonight without exchanging a single word? A good supper too. Everything was fresh, and nothing Will shouldn’t know about went into the pot. Even if I occasionally put something suspicious on his plate, it was never anything that could do harm; just a piece of chicken that fell on the floor and, if he saw it, wouldn’t eat no matter how well I rinsed it off. Or a little gristle he wouldn’t want in his soup if he knew it was there. He doesn’t know how often he eats cheese whose moldy edges were cut away.

I never dreamed of being disloyal in the kitchen when we were first married—so careful of everything that went on his plate. The overdone bacon would go to me, or the tough piece of meat, or the older potato. I’d butter his toast while mine got so cold the butter wouldn’t melt on it. I did a world of sacrificing for a man who didn’t notice the difference when I did, or when I stopped.

With Rebecca, the giving never turned into sacrifice. The joy in her face made me want to give her more than we had, more than we would ever have. I nagged at Will about money even though I knew better. Her joy didn’t depend on shiny presents. The best I had to give, my protection, failed Rebecca when she grew up.

She and Owen wanted to share the birth of their baby, just the two of them. That’s what Owen said later, as if words could help. I understood how they felt, but I shouldn’t have been so understanding. Before Rebecca was born, Will and I behaved like honeymooners. Didn’t want other people around. Being together in our home was all we craved. We’d sit on the couch and Will would read to me, his hand on my belly so he wouldn’t miss it if the baby moved. He said he wished the baby and I could curl up inside him, the same way the baby was inside me, so we could be together all day when he was working in the barn or the field.

I couldn’t blame Rebecca. I didn’t come to know the truth about a poetic man’s kind of foolishness until after my only baby was born. It was winter. Rebecca was about two months old and feeding furiously at my breast. We were snuggled on the wedding quilt Will’s mother made. Silky, our Irish setter, lolled near the fireplace, her tail fluttering and thumping whenever Rebecca cooed or gurgled.

Will came in from the night chores—the look on his face when he saw us. I asked, “What’s wrong, honey?”

He walked over to us so slowly, his face still looking like he was sick or thunderstruck, and fell down on his knees like you would at Sunday worship. He kissed Rebecca’s cheek and stroked her peach-fuzz head. Then he kissed me full on the mouth, sliding onto the couch beside us, being so careful of the baby.

I didn’t know what to do when he started easing up my skirt with the baby right there. Even though she was too little to know, it seemed wrong. Will was so carried away, looking me deep in the eyes, his own eyes tear-filled, I didn’t have the heart to stop him. But I felt torn apart, with Rebecca suckling at my breast and Will pushing at my clothes with hands cold and dirty from outdoors, pressing himself into the part of me that was sore and dry. Everyone needing something from me. Even the dog whining at the kitchen door, no one but me to notice.

That night was the start of my growing up. With every stroke my heart grew tougher and unyielding, like scar tissue. My grandmother, Rebecca was named after her, used to say that in every marriage there is a moment, remembered or not, when a woman says to herself, “Ah, yes, now I see how life with him is going to be.” And from that moment I knew my job was to protect Rebecca and myself from Will’s foolishness, his romantic notions, his unfinished business. Rebecca didn’t have the chance to learn that about her husband. Maybe I didn’t protect her enough, or maybe I protected her too well.

The doctor said it was nobody’s fault, really. A terrible case of misinformation, misguided faith that home births were for everyone. They had no business trying to have that baby girl at home, by themselves. They needed more than hands to get the baby out. Owen studied the midwives’ manual but didn’t understand that “bloody show” didn’t mean a dark and dangerous stream. When the bleeding finally slowed, the pains lessened, and Rebecca quieted, he thought these were good signs. He couldn’t know that meant there were only minutes left to get his wife and unborn baby to a hospital.

Afterward, Owen took to drinking and wandering. He visited old college friends all up and down the east coast, staying until they kicked him out and then moving on. Kept away from here though. I’d have taken out my rage on him, but what good would that have done when he was determined to live a ruined life to show his remorse?

When all is said and done, I blame Will for being the kind of father a girl would want to grow up and marry. Even now, I can hear Rebecca’s voice buzzing in my ear. “Go easy on him, Ma. He means well.” She was always excusing her father.

If Rebecca were here, I know what she’d say about the car. She’d say I shouldn’t have done it, that I was wrong to call Mr. Gibbons while Will was off in town and sell the car behind his back. Will loved that car. I’d say we had no money to fix equipment for spring planting. Will once said he kissed me for the first time in the Ford. I told him some neighborhood kid would get hurt playing around the rusty heap. He said he brought me home from the hospital with Rebecca in that car and couldn’t sell it like it was nothing but scrap.

Grandma Becca had another saying. “The worst regret is forgiveness come too late.” She stifled plenty a family row with that one. Those words have haunted me since Mr. Gibbons put the check in my hand. Have I done something Will won’t find it in his heart to forgive? When I told him the car was sold his shoulders sagged and he said, “Might as well sell it. Our Rebecca’s gone and you’re not the girl I kissed in that car.”

I remember the kiss. The car sat perched on a knoll above the old lower pasture. He turned and took both hands off the steering wheel to lift my face, drawing it to his mouth, like spring water to a man dying of thirst.

It’s not too late. I haven’t cashed the check. I can call Mr. Gibbons first thing in the morning and then the towing company. By God, I’ve finally gone as foolish as my husband. Tried to make a few dollars, and Gibbons might insist I pay the late towing cancellation fee.

I can picture Will’s hands on that steering wheel before he turned toward me. I can see his left hand, whitened, gripping and turning the wheel as his right one pressed me back against the seat, palm to swollen belly, when he braked too hard driving faster than I ever saw him drive before or since, getting me to the hospital to have Rebecca. His fingers twined around mine as we drove home from Rebecca’s funeral, like brown gnarled roots clenching the earth. I wouldn’t squeeze back, just left my hand there like a dead thing.

It’s not too late for me to reach over, slide my hand into his sleeping one, pressing lightly

Maybe we’ll wake up this way. Touching. The bedclothes gentle, the quilt brushing under our chins. Then he’ll know that memories can still soften what time has hardened. When he sees the Ford still in the yard, the torn-up check sitting next to his orange juice, he’ll turn to me smiling. Take my face in his hands. Draw my face to his, smiling.

Measure of Devotion

by Nell Joslin

  "An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel." — Kirkus Reviews It is the Civil War, Susannah Shelburne, age 36, is living in South Carolina. Although she and her husband oppose the Southern cause, their only child Francis is a Confederate soldier. When Francis is wounded in Tennessee, Susannah leaves home to find him. Under her care his condition improves, but he soon becomes a prisoner of war, and Susannah strikes a wrenching personal bargain in exchange for his parole. Soon, though, news from South Carolina makes it clear that returning home is impossible, and Francis’s worsening mental state necessitates a high-stakes escape plan.

There is a wildness hidden beneath Susannah’s demure façade, leading her into unconventional, courageous decisions that put her at odds with her husband, her son and her community. Adversity also brings her more fully into the realities of the people of color in her life. Measure of Devotion’s themes—political differences among families and communities, the urgent need for transracial understanding, a woman’s existential search for control of her own life—are the persistent issues of our national consciousness. “Measure of Devotion is a debut novel that is bound to enter the canon of classic Civil War literature. That it's told from a woman’s viewpoint makes it unique.” — Hungry for Good Books Available from Regal House Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookseller. For more, go to measureofdevotion.com

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