Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from a short story titled "Lydia MaQueen" by Wilma Dykeman, from her book The Tall Woman (© 1980 by Wilma Dykeman)

The wind was a wild dark thing plucking at the trees outside, pushing at the door and chinks of the house, then dying down still as death before another rise and rush and plunge. Listening to it, Lydia McQueen waited and shrank deeper under the quilts, until the corn shucks in the mattress rustled and settled into new shapes.

She thought about the wind—like the great fine horse Papa had owned once, strong and willful with no bit or stirrup that could tame it. Quiet for a spell, it would break with a sudden burst of energy. Yet her father, a gentle man, had controlled the wildness in the horse as surely and invisibly as the sun controlled the plants in her mother's garden.

The wind came again and she feIt the pleasure of her own body-warmth. Like a seed, she felt, one of those sun-warmed seeds in the spring ground, growing, ready to give forth new life. She was aware of the dry smell of the corn shucks. Her mind went back to the day she had sorted them, pulling the leaves off the hard stalk ends, working toward a soft stuffing for the mattress.

"It's a fair morning," she had said to her mother as they worked out in the yard beside the corncrib, where the shucks had been stored through the winter.

"Ah, fair enough today, but dogwood winter yet to come," her mother had answered.

And after the cold spell, when dogwoods bloomed, there would be whippoorwill winter and blackberry winter. The reminder cut through her joy. She set her mouth and determined to be stingy with her words the rest of the morning—until she spied the first flock of robins down in the new-cleared field. Then she cried out in pleasure again for her mother to come and see the plump, neat birds, for Lydia Moore was eighteen, and chancy too, like March.

But, "You're a girl turned woman now," her mother said. "No need for such wispy ways. Anyway, I'm of a mind they won't last long around Mark McQueen."

Lydia thrust a cornhusk into the sack so sharply that one dry blade cut her middle finger. She knew her mother had wanted her to marry Ham Nelson. "Ah, Hamilton's a well-turned boy, and the Nelsons are good livers," she had said when he brought Lydia home once from a sociable at the Burkes'. And Lydia had replied, remembering all that Ham had told her as they rode home that night, "Could he buy himself for what he's worth, and sell himself for what he thinks he's worth, he'd be princely rich overnight."

But Sarah Moore had not smiled. Neither had she smiled when her daughter came to ask her if Mark McQueen could speak to Jesse Moore about their wedding. "With all the boys in the valley, Lydia, you must choose him?"

"Mama, I didn't choose."

But she had felt helpless to explain how it was since that first day she'd seen Mark at the mill, big and dark with the strength of a mountain in him. She was full of a strange confidence and beauty, and wept to herself behind the barn because she had so little confidence and was so lacking in prettiness. It was a time of days like spring, changeable and quick with life. She had no words to fit such feelings." I didn't choose, Mama. It's like I was chosen."

Her mother looked at her then, steadily.

"Living won't be easy with Mark McQueen. He's a proud man, with a restlessness on him that will be hard to still. Such a man's life can hurt his wife, be he ever so in love with her or not."

For a moment she was quiet, looking no longer at her daughter but at the distant woods. Lydia heard the first spring insects humming out in the fields, heard their tiny rustling in the dry cornhusks around her where the warm sun was stirring them to life. But all she saw in her mind's eye was Mark McQueen's face and his stout sun-browned arms.

"It may not seem so to you now, being a girl only and a girl in love," her mother went on, but there's something beyond even love, for a woman as well as a man. A body's personhood."

Her mother's gaze came back from the woods to the yard and the house and the garden patch beyond, and Lydia did not know how to answer all this strange talk. The insects ticked and droned even louder around them.

"Your papa has gentle ways not common to many men. A man who is driven is not easy to live with."

The silence between them was longer than the words before Lydia said softly, "I never asked for easy, Mama."

"I know, l know." Her mother turned suddenly back to the crib and an armful of shucks. Her voice was muffled. "I'm beseeching the Lord to hold you in the hollow of his hand."