The Promise
From the kitchen table, it was all sunlight and haze. Through the sliding glass door, the morning mist burned off the green waves of corn. A low red veal barn, far beyond, marked the place where the land rose up, then turned to trees. The girl named Birdie diligently spooned raisin bran into her mouth, cold milk dribbling down her chin, and, against her will, thought of her visit to the veal barn the day before, the tug of the calf’s tongue on the mauve nipple of the bottle, the white formula sloshing inside.
After breakfast, she had a stomach ache and sat by the living-room window, watching cars pass at irregular intervals, listening for the growl of motors as they approached, roared, faded away. She went to the cupboard next to the brick fireplace and tapped each wrinkled storybook spine. She rubbed the beige carpet threads with her fingers as she looked at the pictures of a bird, a dog, a loud machine. Are you my mother? the story kept asking.
The day before, she had fed a calf with her much older cousin, Angie, a beautiful girl who smiled when she said sad things and was engaged to be married when the leaves turned red. That was how she’d put it to Birdie, as she showed her how to hold the bottle against the calf’s tugs. Angie lived on the family farm, just down the hill from their aunts’ and grandmother’s place, where Birdie was staying. The veal barn had a smell Birdie had never smelled anywhere else—antiseptic, then sweet like a flower and rotten like manure. It reminded her of being in a clean hospital where everyone was dying or already dead, though she’d never been in such a place.
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Birdie had found the calves darling, so darling her chest hurt. She liked to rub the rough swirls of hair between their eyes. They tried to lick her wrist when she did this. Their noses and the inside of their ears and their long tongue muscles were delightfully pink, the color of a crayon. Each baby wore a collar with a chain and had a messy bed of straw. Once Birdie and her cousin were back outside, the air hung green and full. She had to walk all the way around the cornfield and along Market Avenue, up the hill, to get back to her aunts’ place. She would have preferred to go home to her mother and father, but they weren’t there.
At the fireplace’s dark mouth sat a small black iron, heavy as a bowling ball, impossibly heavy. She touched the chain-metal curtain gathered at the fireplace’s edges, and her fingers came away soot black. She rubbed them on her skirt, ruining its pretty. She picked up an empty ostrich egg, put one eye to the small hole on one end, then quickly set the shell back down, repulsed.
After the living room, Birdie wandered to the dining room, where she was cast into an underwater light, the sun sifting through the plants arranged by the long window. A white lace cloth covered the dining table, and a stiff piece of plastic covered the lace. She climbed onto a chair and reached for the bowl at the center of the table. She took the cluster of purple grapes from it, touched each sticky plastic fruit, then took the too yellow banana in her hands and bit it gently, enough to leave a few small marks. She knocked it lightly against the table to hear the hollow inside.
In the kitchen, her aunt Rebecca kneaded dough on the floured counter. Birdie sat at the little table by the sliding glass door and watched her work the dough forward and back, her shirtsleeves rolled above her elbows, an apron covering her denim skirt. Rebecca wore her simple weekday covering over her hair, which had been pulled back in a ponytail, then braided and pinned up on the back of her head. On Sundays, she wore the lacy covering the girl preferred but put her hair in a simple bun, because that was more godly. Rebecca asked a question in Pennsylvania Dutch, then laughed and tried again: “Birdie, do you want some bread?” Well, of course she wanted some bread. Her aunt gave her a warm piece with margarine melting at the center. “For goodness’ sake, Birdie, wash your hands. And it’s better not to mess with the fireplace.” Rebecca unfolded a little metal stool for her and placed it in front of the kitchen sink.
As Birdie ate her bread at the table, she watched her grandmother carry a blue bucket from the shed to the garden, where she and Birdie’s other aunt, Miriam, worked in worshipful ways, bowing down to weed in their flapping skirts. Miriam wore a navy-blue task jacket to ward off the loose chill of the morning. Grandma’s white cardigan bloomed like a daisy against the green. Birdie tried to understand her grandma’s beige shoes, stiff with a thick sole. Her grandmother left them on a little rug outside the door when she came in from her work. Birdie was still sitting at the table, with just a few crumbs on her plate. The sun was high in the sky now, and, despite Miriam’s smile as she slid the glass door open, the girl’s chest was full of crying. Her parents had gone to Indiana to visit old friends, other Mennonites they’d volunteered with in Africa. Her older brother and sister were staying with classmates, but she was still so small. It had been easier to leave her with her aunts and grandma at the house on Market Avenue than to take her on the long drive. Tomorrow, a Tuesday, was the first day of second grade.
The kitchen smelled of coffee and yeast. Grandma sat opposite the girl, with her back to the sliding glass door. She smiled and brushed Birdie’s hand with her fingertips as the aunts talked and laughed. Grandma spoke—something the girl couldn’t understand. The phone on the wall rang, and Rebecca snatched the receiver, then pulled the curly cord down the steps to the basement and shut the door. A battery-powered radio on the counter played tinny gospel songs. The girl grew heavy, heavier. Her head tipped toward the table. Her lips turned. Then Rebecca was there, with bits of tissue stuck up her nose. Birdie laughed but didn’t feel happy. The day went on and on. Before long, a little carved cuckoo emerged from the open door of its house on the wall and sang five times.
In the hallway off the kitchen, Miriam pulled a box of games from a high closet shelf. Birdie sat on the cool linoleum, half in the closet and half in the hall. Red, red, blue, yellow, green. Red, red, blue, yellow, blue. A buzzer bleated. She played again. The women’s talk in the kitchen rose and fell like a song. A purple melancholy settled into the shadows on the hallway floor. The backs of her legs stuck to the linoleum, and, when she pulled away, her skin sliced with pain. Before long, the night would be there.
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Listen to Rachel Yoder read “The Promise.”
After dinner, Rebecca split open a melon from the garden. She scooped the furry seeds from inside the orange flesh. The chunks of fruit were warm and sweet, like cough syrup. The girl sucked on the fruit, and, when she finally bit down, juice leaked onto her chin. She wiped it with her hands, and then her fingers stuck together. When she pulled her fingers apart, she saw dirt gathered in the hollows between them.
While the girl had a bath, Miriam readied for bed. At the bathroom mirror, she pulled three teeth attached to glinting metal parts from her mouth and scrubbed them with her toothbrush. She turned to the girl.
“Well, what do you think?” she said, smiling a little. Her front teeth were gone. She covered her mouth with one hand, now laughing from the horror of it. She placed one of her partials in the girl’s soft, small palm. “Careful with it, little bird,” she said. The girl touched the yellowed thing attached to wires. It was a part of Miriam that was already dead. Birdie placed the tooth on the edge of the tub and moved white bubbles around in the water, then pushed her face into the bubbles and further down.
Before Birdie went upstairs to bed, she stood in the doorway of her grandmother’s small bedroom. Her grandmother sat on the single bed as Rebecca undid the back of her dress.
“Come see the scar where they cut her breast away,” Rebecca said. The girl shrank. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” Rebecca insisted, tugging at her mother’s dress. Birdie shook her head.
“Don’t make her if she doesn’t want to,” Grandma said quietly. Rebecca’s hands stilled, and the girl stared at her grandmother, wide-eyed. Her long white hair, normally collected in a bun, trailed down past her shoulders in smooth, pale waves. It was the most beautiful thing the girl had ever seen.
It was another era, or even the end of it. Birdie didn’t want to get older. She liked being small, except when she was scared. She stayed in Miriam’s bedroom because this was the aunt she belonged to. Before, when her father was small, he had belonged to Miriam, too. There were a dozen kids altogether, and Miriam was the third-oldest girl. The eldest girl, Ruth, had raised the middles. The second-oldest girl, Rebecca, did the cooking. And Miriam raised the little ones, Birdie’s father included. This had happened in the farmhouse down the hill, where Angie now lived, along with Uncle Abe and Aunt Martha and a trio of her brothers. Angie’s bedroom was where Birdie’s dad had slept as a boy, and, whenever Birdie went in it, she felt a white spirit pass through her. In which room had her uncle June died when he was seventeen, a brain bleed after he’d collided with someone in the outfield during a baseball game? In what room had her grandfather seen the angel warning him of June’s death? She never asked. Her father called Miriam a princess, but Birdie knew she was more than that: a queen. There was nothing better than Miriam, except Birdie’s own mother.
Miriam watched soap operas on the little black-and-white television on her hope chest, even though they were forbidden by the girl’s parents at home. Birdie puzzled over the woman on the little screen shouting “I hate you!” at a man, and then embracing him, kissing him desperately.
“Well, little bird, there’s love and there’s hate, and you think they’re opposites, but they’re almost exactly the same thing,” Miriam explained. Even though the girl was only eight, she could understand.
Miriam had pictures on her mirror, one of a man whom Birdie had met a few times, a Hungarian named Zoltan, who had a nice accent and a kind face. He always wore a dark suit.
“He wanted to marry me,” Miriam smiled. “He brought me a very nice set of knives.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Oh, it wasn’t right. And I suppose I wanted to do what I wanted to do.” She paused, then blurted, “He was shorter than I was!”
“Why does that matter?”
Miriam hesitated, the question twisting her mouth and eyes. She looked at Birdie, then laughed.
“Maybe I’m petty,” she said. “Plus, I already had a set of good knives.”
Miriam was forty, or maybe fifty-five. Birdie wasn’t sure. She was older than Birdie’s father, at least. She worked at the meat locker, where Birdie’s father had once taken her. Miriam had given her a heavy coat and wrenched open the silver door. Inside, bloody pieces of animals hung in the cold. A single bulb illuminated the room, and Birdie wanted to leave as soon as she was inside. She could smell the blood. She watched her white breath blossom and fade in front of her face, while Miriam walked among the bodies, touching each one to make it sway as she explained the cuts.
In bed, Birdie wore a floral nightgown that wrapped her in heat. Her new backpack and folded first-day clothes sat on Miriam’s upholstered reading chair. She had wanted to wear a smooth white button-down with her little skirt, but, when she’d tried it on, Rebecca had said it made her look like a boy. She was ashamed for having liked it. Instead, they picked a nice blouse with an itchy lace collar she despised.
Tucked under the quilt, Birdie watched Miriam as she searched her head with her fingers in front of the mirror, pulling pins from her dark hair one by one.
“Would you like to hear a story?” Miriam wondered. “I have a good one from my friend Susie Coblentz.” It was something that had happened to Susie’s friend, she said.
Across from the bed, the ceiling sloped precipitously, with a dormer cut into it. On either side of the window, a small door opened to a space just the right size for a little girl, where her aunt stored wrapping paper and yard-sale finds. Miriam didn’t like for Birdie to play in there, but it was the only place the girl wanted to play. It seemed like a punishment not to let her shut herself in with a flashlight when it was just the right size for her make-believe. At night, though, the doors took on a tinge of terror. They were also the right size for dwarves and goblins, sundry other monsters. You couldn’t be certain, in the night, what sort of world they might open onto, were you to turn the knob. People shouldn’t have small doors in their houses, Birdie thought. It wasn’t right.
“So, the friend of my friend Susie,” Miriam continued. This woman was lying in her bed one night when she heard a tap-tap-tapping coming from the living room. She got up to see what was making it, and there, at a little desk her husband used for his bookkeeping, sat the Devil, working away on a typewriter.
Birdie, paralyzed beneath the hot sheets, imagined the living room below them with a little wooden desk and an old-fashioned black typewriter on it. An oil lamp, like the one that Rebecca kept in her room as decoration, illuminated the Devil, who wore dark slacks and a dark vest, an impeccable white shirt. A golden chain glinted against the vest, disappearing into his pocket. His skin was browned and his neck and chin wispy with hair. He wore round, gold-rimmed spectacles. His nose and mouth protruded wolfishly. A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray near his hand.
“Well, of course Susie’s friend was absolutely petrified, but soon enough she found her voice,” Miriam said. The story went that Susie’s friend asked, “What are you doing here?” And the Devil replied, in a strange accent she couldn’t place, “I’m here to write your life story.” Smoke wafted from his ears! The woman couldn’t breathe. It was as if she were suffocating, just being near him. “I’m here to write your life story,” the Devil repeated. “Whatever way you’d like it. Just tell me: Do you accept my offer? If you do, I’ll make it so.” He waited with his long, sharp fingernails poised above the keys. “I suppose you want my soul in return,” the woman said. “Of course,” the Devil said, smiling.
His handsome grin bewitched her, and she imagined all the ways her life might go. Maybe she could be a famous jazz singer. Perhaps she could travel around the world on an ocean liner. Or what about living in New York City and running a soup-and-bread restaurant visited by people from all over?
Birdie felt the woman’s dreams swell in her own chest. She herself wanted to be an astronaut, or a ballerina. She wanted to live in a city and visit the art museum every day. She wanted to order takeout Chinese food in white cardboard boxes, even though she’d never had Chinese food. Her mother said she was worldly, and her father said she could not, under any circumstances, be an astronaut. Also, they would not drive her across town for something like ballet lessons, but still all she could think about was a pink tutu. Her parents weren’t quite sure where she had come from, they’d say, chuckling, but Birdie didn’t understand why what she wanted was funny.
“The woman thought long and hard, longer than a good Christian woman should,” Miriam said. “And in the end she said, ‘I don’t. No, I don’t accept your offer. No, I don’t want you to write anything. I want my soul to go to the Lord. I love my good, simple life as a mother and wife, with my family, and nothing could ever replace that.’ As you might imagine, the Devil was furious. He slammed his fists onto the keys and let out a horrible screech. He moaned and grunted as she walked back to her room, got into bed, and easily fell into a restful sleep.”
Even though the story was over, the Devil of Birdie’s imagination had moved upstairs and was now conducting his business just across the hall, in Rebecca’s bedroom. He was in there still, sitting at his desk, as Rebecca slept, in the light of the oil lamp. Birdie feared she would hear the clicking of the keys if she listened hard enough.
Miriam snapped on the bedside lamp and touched the girl on the shoulder.
“Did that frighten you?” she asked with concern. Birdie nodded, though the answer was more complicated than a simple yes. Miriam’s face fell. “I should have thought it through more. I’m sorry.” Miriam pulled one tooth, then another from her mouth, and clinked them into a porcelain dish on her nightstand.
Miriam rubbed some pink lotion on the girl’s little hands and arms, to make her feel better. Then the girl watched her aunt read, willing her eyes to stay open as long as she could manage. The glinting metal of the Devil’s watch chain flashed in her mind, his hair and his teeth. She thought of a long, jagged scar cut across her grandmother’s chest.
“Why can’t the woman have the life she wants,” Birdie asked, “without the help of the Devil?”
Miriam paused her reading and stared into a dark corner of the room. Birdie had been tired, nearly asleep, but her aunt’s silence kept her awake. She waited, but her aunt said nothing.
Birdie rolled over to stick her feet out from beneath the quilt. Three long shelves of books covered the wall next to the girl’s side of the bed. She ran her eyes over each spine, sounding out the words to keep herself awake. She stopped at a book with the word ROOTS on its thick spine. What could it be about? She closed her eyes and imagined roots tunnelling into the soil, anchoring the house to the top of the hill as if it were itself a living thing, then all the plants in the garden and fields, all the distant trees, attaching the landscape above to the earth below. White roots cracking through her grandmother’s strange shoes and burrowing down into the dark, soft soil, and then Rebecca’s taproot breaking through the kitchen floor, travelling across the expanse of the cool basement, plunging into the concrete floor, and below, below. She imagined Miriam planted outside in the garden with the zucchinis and eggplants, strong like a tree. She thought of the roots that kept a person in one place, a place where people looked like they were related and smelled the way her parents smelled. Where they brought in wooden baskets of gnarled tomatoes and laughed about the humidity, instead of complaining, and pruned the rosebushes so that they bloomed exuberantly. Where people were happy, and happy, and happy. But, in her imagination, Birdie herself didn’t grow roots. She grew wings and flew above them all. And it was as she flew that, against her will, she fell asleep.
In the years to come, Birdie asked her mother and father, her brother and sister, even some cousins, whether Miriam had ever told them the story about the Devil and the typewriter, if it was the sort of story that was passed around, part of the culture, so to speak, or a Mennonite version of an urban myth, but she never found anyone else who had heard it or could help her remember precisely how it went. It obsessed her because the story seemed like some sort of prophecy, or key.
Birdie woke before dawn. Pain throbbed deep in her head. Sweat dampened her nightgown. She moaned, and Miriam woke, touching the girl’s face.
“You’re aflame,” she murmured. The girl couldn’t hear out of one ear. Miriam rose and returned with a cold washcloth, which she placed on Birdie’s forehead. The girl closed her eyes, and, when she opened them again, the room flared white with day. Miriam put warm oil in her deaf ear. She brought Birdie a tall glass of water with ice. The little girl cried because she was missing the first day of school and was worried, worried about what her mother would think, worried that she had done something wrong by getting sick, that she should have behaved better and not been interested in the Devil, that she was now being punished, and rightly so.
“Poor thing is delirious,” Rebecca said, bent over the bed and holding the girl’s hot hand. Birdie cried and slept and cried, then woke to an oily splotch on the pillowcase. She took off her nightgown and slept in just her underwear.
Later, much later, as she thought back to the story about the Devil, it seemed as if the story itself had been the earliest symptom of her fever. She incorporated the story into her sickness, into her absence from school on the first day of second grade, her parents in a faraway state. She had not merely been scared of the Devil. She had wanted to sit on his lap and kiss his hairy cheek. She had wanted to clickety-clack on his black keys. For this, she had been struck with fever, made deaf in one ear—a warning. Her fever dreams were of floating untethered in an infinite black space, of being trapped in a blinding spotlight on an empty stage, not knowing how or where to move.
In what felt like the late afternoon, Birdie rose and stuck her head out the bedroom door, listened to be sure her aunts weren’t nearby, then opened one of the small doors beneath the slanted ceiling, and went inside where it was cool. Just inside the door, Miriam kept a flashlight. Its ray illuminated a case of wrapping-paper rolls, a wooden stool, a broken box full of old picture frames. Behind the wrapping paper, under a piece of gauzy fabric with frayed edges—she was sure that was where the Devil’s black typewriter would be. It was as real to her as her own heart. She pulled away the piece of cloth to reveal a wooden knife block, black handles neatly tucked into every slot. She touched the biggest hilt just to be sure it was real. Her fever glowed orange all around her, outlining her hand. She slid the big knife from the block and held it in front of her face, tilted the blade back and forth. She saw a man in a black suit. He spoke lovingly, with a strange accent, to Miriam, before lowering himself to one knee and handing her six knives plunged into a wooden cube. Birdie blinked slowly to clear her eyes, then carefully pressed the cold metal of the knife against her cheek.
Crouched in the darkness like that, the knife a comfort, quite suddenly—or maybe after a long, long while—she was the goblin beyond the little door whom she had once feared. She made raspy little grunts and snorts and flicked her tongue against her lips. She rubbed her palms back and forth against her scalp until her hair was in knots, then dragged her nails down her cheeks. She picked her nose and wiped it into the carpet, then peed through her underpants, the urine flaming hot as it ran down her thighs and splattered on her feet.
She emerged from the little door into moonlight. How could that be, she wondered. Out the dormer window, the garden overflowed its small plot, an unfettered grotesquerie of florid kales and chards, the tomato plants baroque with late-summer wandering, tendrils crawling up and out of their cages, the squash plants making beds with their elaborate arms. Lie down in that garden and it will take you over, the little girl thought. It will wrap you up and you’ll never leave. As she tilted it back and forth, the knife blade flashed blue, then white.
The story Miriam would tell the girl’s parents upon their return was that she had found the girl standing in the dark hallway late at night, underwear sopping, a length of gauzy fabric draped over her head. They would all laugh, Birdie included. What Miriam would not tell Birdie’s parents was that, when she found her, Birdie held in her hand a butcher knife. This was when Birdie learned from her aunt that sometimes lying was a necessary sin, though she wasn’t certain this was the lesson her aunt had meant to teach.
In the hallway that night, Miriam had moved close to touch Birdie’s flushed cheek, damp and hot with the sickness. She pulled the veil from Birdie’s head. The girl’s eyes were black, pinpricked with silver light.
“Little bird,” she murmured. “You’ve given me a fright. Come, let’s clean you up. What are you doing out here? And with that knife, no less.”
On her own June wedding day, decades later—the ceremony under a young maple tree, the reception in a red barn, hot as a fever—Birdie would remember what she had said that night. She would remember how she said to her aunt in the hallway, “I am the bride,” as she held out the knife, “and this is my promise.” A man slips a golden ring on her finger. The cornfield rises up around them like a fortifying wall, a defense protecting what from what? She remembered for all those years the promise she made with the knife in her hand, and then, after she said I do, she forgot. ♦