When Darkness Loves Us

Colorful boxes from the townsfolk were piled high under their little tree, gifts of gratitude from the people Fern had helped. Harry had to chunk out a little freezer room in the ice alongside the cellar door for all the turkeys and roasts they’d been given in appreciation; they’d all have to be eaten before the thaw.

Fern oohed and aahed over the hand-embroidered tablecloths and matching napkins, the quilt, the kitchen towels and potholders. Harry opened sets of coffee cups and a hand-painted teapot, feeling mildly uncomfortable. He should be providing all these things, not the neighbors. Then he opened his present from Fern, a brown-plaid wool shirt, heavy and sturdy and warm. Fern had made it at Addie’s. He hadn’t a present wrapped for her, but he took her hands in his, looked into her eyes, and promised a new room to be built onto the house in the spring. A room she could use for her sewing, or whatever, until it became a nursery. Fern wept a little, so Harry got up and put on the teapot. He didn’t like tears.

Now those hands that had fondled delicate lace only this morning were moving quickly over the small form on the sofa. Intense concentration deepened frown lines on her forehead. What was she feeling?

Tom and Mae Wilson had driven up shortly after noon, their little girl wrapped with blankets. Mae had been crying; her puffed face showed it. Tom’s face looked old and tight, as he carried their only child, born late in their lives, into the house.

With just a glance at them, Fern wordlessly swept the presents and wrappings onto the floor and helped Tom lay the girl on the sofa. She unwrapped the homespun blanket as Harry pulled up chairs for the parents to sit on, then poured them each a cup of tea, putting a little shot of brandy in Tom’s. Tom sipped, then winked at Harry with a weak but grateful smile.

Fern worked quickly and quietly as they watched. She looked older all of a sudden. These few months since Dave’s accident had put wisdom in Fern’s face. She’d gained a little weight, plumping up her breasts and thighs; she no longer looked like a skinny little kid—she looked like a young woman, blooming, with even a touch of rose in her cheeks. Harry thought she was gorgeous.

When Harry saw her working like this, he was proud. He felt like a rooster, wanting to strut in front of his friends and neighbors, the people who’d watched him as a child and put up with his boyhood pranks. Now he’d grown, and brought a healer home to Morgan, Illinois, and he wanted the whole community to respect them.

He looked at her, hardly more than a girl herself, leaning over the child, and blood pulsed in his loins. He wanted to pick her up and carry her to their bedroom and make love to her all afternoon, slowly, tenderly. But he shoved this thought from his mind, because he knew that after the Wilsons left, their little girl healed, or nearly well, that Fern would intimidate him, being a far greater, more gifted person than he, and he would be embarrassed and shamed. Not only that, but their lovemaking was never slow and tender. It was fast and rough, his need suddenly all consuming, and then it was over and he was embarrassed and ashamed again.

He hated this.

Fern was talking quietly to the child. Her big eyes showed white in the red of her flushed face; perspiration stuck her bangs to her forehead like tissue paper. She nodded in response to Fern’s murmured questions.

Fern stood up and turned to Tom. “Please carry her to the bedroom. I need her on the bed where I can get around her.” Tom picked up his daughter and carried her in, laid her down on the brown and gold quilt, then went back to the kitchen. Fern closed the bedroom door.

She sat on the edge of the bed, left hand palm up in her lap. She passed her right hand a couple of inches over the child, from her toes to the top of her head. She could feel the sickness. The throat and the stomach. She laid her hand on the throat, the skin hot to her touch, and closed her eyes. She saw the familiar glittering blue sweep through her upturned palm, streak across her chest and out her right hand into the throat, it was cool and comforting, like menthol ice cream, melting on contact and sinking into the reddened, swollen tissues.

When the flow of blue stopped, she moved her hand to the other infected area, the child’s right side. She felt a corresponding ache in her own side. Ignoring it, she concentrated. She made her conscious mind like a black drumhead, stretched tight. Every thought, every noise made little thumping dents in the fabric, so she shut them out. Pure and black. Peaceful and undisturbed.

Soon she began to get a picture. She felt she was crawling inside the girl’s skin, around the different organs. In front of her were a cluster of polyps, like grapes, black and unnatural amid the pink, red, and white glowing of healthy flesh.