Anyone who stared at Thetis that morning got watched right back by her and that owl just the same, and which pair of eyes was wilder no one could say.
* * *
The day came, as days come, when Thetis needed help Cor and Uncle couldn’t give. It was a long time coming by most standards, twelve years to the day since she’d walked out of the wheat. She knew well enough what was happening to her. She put her knuckles to Doc Martha’s front door, and handed over a bucket of good ripe figs in exchange for a conversation about the blood and the pain and what to do about it.
Thetis didn’t so much as flinch when Doc Martha fetched a basket of fresh eggs. She just lay down on the floor with her loose hair fanned out behind her shoulders, pulled her dress up over her ribs, and waited. Her bare toes curled on the floorboards as Doc Martha cracked the egg over her flat belly.
The yolk was double.
“You’re going to birth a boy someday,” Doc Martha said in a voice that didn’t have congratulations anywhere in it. “Tougher’n saddle leather, a fighter and a bruiser.” She pointed to a speck of blood on one of the yolks. “And a lover. That boy of yours’ll live long or he’ll live hard. You’ll be birthin’ a squaller, no two ways about it.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Thetis said, the whites of the egg running off her sides and dripping onto the floor. “No sons nor husband neither, thank you very kindly.” She said “thank you” like it was a new kind of fruit she was tasting, one she wasn’t sure was quite ripe.
“If you had a choice in the matter, I’d’ve said as much.” Doc Martha handed Thetis a rag to clean the egg off her belly and watched the way the yolks held strong for a long time before bursting under the linen. “He’ll be greater than his daddy, even. Stronger too, he’ll need to be stronger. And you’ll belong to that son until one of you is through,” she said.
“Won’t be a daddy to be greater than,” Thetis told her, and her eyes blazed as cold as the river. She walked out the door as if the conversation was through, and she spent half the afternoon in the woods, slapping branches out of her face and growling at rabbits. Her fury grew as the light on the horizon died, and by the time she got home, she was a thing made of pine sap and wrath—but by then, Cor and Uncle Ellison had gotten word from Doc Martha. They lived on the outskirts of town, but it was a small-enough town that even outskirts still heard rumors before the telling was finished. They were ready for her.
They fought like thunder, them saying she had best decide what kind of man she’d marry, her shouting back that she’d sooner walk into the corn without a ball of string to find her way back than do something as stupid and small and human as get married to a man. Every ear in town was turned to the sound of that fight—even the crickets held their legs apart to listen. It was a still-enough night that it was hard not to hear the way Thetis started losing ground.
They told her she was too old to keep running barefoot through the woods and swimming in the river the day the ice cracked. They told her she’d eaten enough of their food and spent enough nights under their roof that she was a woman now, bound by that prophecy just as much as she was bound by the humanity she’d grown into. Even as she slammed her way through that little house screaming that she wasn’t a woman and never would be, they told her it was time to grow up. Her voice began to soften with defeat as it became clear to her that they were right—for all her slamming, she couldn’t outright leave.
They said it was time to start braiding her hair and wearing shoes and thinking about who she’d aim to marry. Good Christians, were Cor and Uncle, but even so they couldn’t ignore Doc Martha’s prophecy, and they weren’t about to let Thetis ignore it either. They loved her, in their way, and so they told her to find some fellow who could manage her, someone good enough that her son being greater than him would be a boon instead of a burden. The only way out, they said, was through.
It was past midnight before the fight quieted, Thetis having shouted something about wearing the damn shoes just to shut those fool men up. The whole town heard it coming as clear as a hailstorm pounding across a fallow field, and they hunkered in to wait for the rooftops to start shaking.
Whether anyone liked it or not, Thetis was about to start courting.
* * *
By the time the sun came up, Moss Hetley was waiting on Cor Ellison’s porch with a fistful of thistles.
Moss was everything that a town like that one wanted a man to be. He had bull-broad shoulders, and his hands were mostly knuckle. He wasn’t mean enough to beat his dogs, but he wasn’t kind enough to bring them inside when it snowed, either. He was more civilized than Cor and Uncle; he wrote poetry, most of it about chopping wood, and at the start of every summer he bought new shoes for the children at church. He liked being the only one who could do an impossible thing, and he liked to feel like a hero to the town, and he was as stubborn as a headache—so of course he had his hard-set black eyes fixed on Thetis to wife.
When she went out to pump water in the morning, she didn’t notice him at first. Her hair was in a clumsy, half-knotted braid. She was trying to figure out how to walk in shoes, now that Cor and Uncle had made wearing them a condition of staying in their home. The way she tugged at the braid and stumbled in the shoes spoke to a choice she’d been outraged to have to make at all—she wanted to stay, so she was bending to the new rules, but she didn’t have it in her to pretend to be happy about it.
She stumbled over the doorframe and nearly toppled right into Moss. When she looked up at the great wall of a man standing on her porch with his thistles in his hand, her eyes caught on the shining chain of his pocket watch. She froze, hypnotized by the links of delicate silver. He reached out and touched her chin as sweetly as if she were made of crystal, and when his finger met her skin, fury swept over her like wind through tall grass. She walked past him with her nose pointing east and her hips pointing north, and when she came back lugging the bucket of water, he was right where she’d left him.
“What are you after?” she snapped, though she surely knew.
“I’d like to speak to Cor Ellison,” he rumbled. “Or Uncle, if Cor’s not in.”
Thetis slammed the door behind her and didn’t bother telling Cor or Uncle that Moss was waiting on them. When she came back out an hour later with a hatchet over her shoulder to check the traps, the thistles were lined up in a row on the porch rail. She knocked them off with the hatchet handle, then reached down and tore her new shoes off with a snarl. She threw them after the thistles and jumped down the porch steps, and she didn’t come back until the frogs by the river were singing down the dusk.
When she got home, the thistles were in a jar on the windowsill, and her shoes were waiting by the door. She picked them up with ginger fingers like they were foul things instead of fresh leather, and she walked inside on silent feet. Cor was whittling by the fire with long, thoughtful strokes of his good knife. Thetis dropped the shoes with a clatter, slapped the three fat quail she’d trapped onto the kitchen table. She glared at Cor, but he didn’t say a word until after she’d scalded the first of the birds.
“Uncle wanted to know if you need anything from the city,” he said to the hunk of wood in his hand. “He’s going into town to see about a suit and thought you might like a new dress for the harvest festival. Some dancing shoes.”