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By Root 617 0

his shirt and breeches. That is when I saw the knife. It was small and silver with a pearl handle, a gentleman’s knife, but I could see the blade hanging open by his side. He took a step toward me and I remember thinking that I had nowhere to run, for it was the mare behind me and him in front. I hesitated and he took another step and the mare startled. She jumped and kicked at me and I was knocked forward by her feet. She’d kicked the air out from my chest and I fell upon the ground not two steps from where he stood. He waited until I sat up, then he grabbed my arm and dragged me to the stall opposite. I struggled at first and he held the knife up to my face and said that he would cut me. I could smell the stench of liquor on him, so I kept my place. But he would not be satisfied, could not do at first . . . what needed to be done. This made him even more angry, and he hit me with his fist several times about the face and body. And then he held the knife and forced me to . . . revive him . . . until he was able to finish.” My mother pauses then, her chest heaving from the effort of the memory, her eyes filled with pain. I place a hand upon her arm and she flinches without even realizing. A length, she continues.

“The mare was our witness. I stared over his shoulder into her eyes and wished that I had chosen her instead. Afterward I began to cry, and once again he grew angry. He ordered me to stop but I could not and then he drew the knife again and said that he would cut me if I could not be silent. Just then there was a noise in the yard and when I screamed he took the knife and slashed me here. The door to the stable opened for a moment. I looked but could see no one, for I was on the floor. But he could see. He screamed at them to leave us, and then I heard the footsteps of a child run away across the yard.

“He left me then, cursing the child. There was much blood upon the floor from the wound and the smell of it all around. The mare stood watching me, and suddenly she was calm. It was then I saw the blood upon her chest, for he had cut us both. I waited there with her until darkness fell. By then the blood had stopped and I was able to walk home, where I found my father unconscious on the floor from too much drink. I dressed the wound as best I could, and waited for my mother to return.”

“She came at dawn the following morning, tired and upset because the baby was born still after more than two days of labor. My father woke and was still mean with drink. There was so much desolation in the house. All that we had worked and saved for had been lost. Or so it seemed that morning.” She shakes her head and stops talking.

“Did you tell her?” I ask quietly.

She lifts her head to look at me. “I found that I could not,” she says. “I caught a fever and spent some days in bed. By the time I had recovered, the wound was nearly healed, though the scar remained. My mother did not see it until many months later, long after I fell pregnant. By then she did not want to ask. By the time you were born, my father had run off and drunk himself to death. My mother died of smallpox the following spring. It was a miracle that you and I were spared.”

I stare ahead: cannot picture the young woman in the tale, cannot fathom that it is my mother, nor that I myself have played a central role. But most of all, it is the idea of my father that I cannot stomach. And the terrible violence from whence I came. Something rises up in me: the need to purge myself of the story seeded deep within. But my mother begins anew, and I raise my head to listen.

“When you first went to work at the Great House, I felt some fear. As if the house itself was partly responsible for what had happened. But I told myself that he was dead, and that your mistress seemed a decent and charitable woman. I had seen her many times about the village, and though we’d never met, I had a sense that she too had suffered at his hands. And the child, the boy: his tragedy was clear enough for all to see. Somehow I thought that we were joined to them by suffering, and though I could