All the Truth That's In Me by Julie Gardner Berry

Author:Julie Gardner Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

I.

I let the door slam behind me as I go inside. Mother and Darrel thrash around in their sheets and sit up.

“Mmm,” I tell them, so they know it’s me.

Darrel lies down again. For a long time Mother doesn’t move—I can tell from the silence—but at last she lies down.

I get out of my coat and boots and crawl back under my blankets.

Darrel begins to snore.

My body is heavy and sore with grief. Sleep would be welcome, but I can’t rest. The silence and blackness smother me, make me want to bolt back out the door and run for the colonel’s house across the river tonight. But that’s ridiculous.

I will go, though, and when I do, I will learn to stop remembering you.

I have a widow’s claim on whatever your father left behind. His hut was the place where young Judith died, and I was born. Ought I not to return to my home?

Young Judith was infatuated with you. I ought to know better.

The night drags on.

“Think he’ll marry you?”

Mother. My muscles clench.

“This man of yours. Or boy. The one you keep going to.”

I am paralyzed. She thinks I’m bedding a lover in a village hay barn. My own mother.

Her voice is calm and low. From behind her bed curtains, it has a distant, ghostly sound.

“Or is he someone already married?” She could be a friend whispering to me in church.

Can I pretend I’m asleep? No, she knows I’m awake.

“If you’re going to make a strumpet of yourself, find another place to live.”

I can’t even let myself breathe freely, lest my throat reveal some emotion she can seize upon.

“So for your sake,” she says, “I hope he can and does marry you.”

II.

I learned, during the years with him, how to cry without making a sound. Mostly I learned how to not cry.

But my mother has found a fragment of my feelings that I didn’t know was there, and pierced it between her thumb and fingernail.

For her to see me every day, and believe this of me, hurts in my deepest inner parts, wounds wordless memories that I still hold of my life and my mother, before he took and cut me.

III.

I can’t live here anymore.

Then I remember, I wasn’t planning to. I’m going to move to the colonel’s cabin. I’ll go tomorrow. Mother is not the reason for my leaving. You are. I leave you both behind.

There is a curious comfort in letting go. After the agony, letting go brings numbness, and after the numbness, clarity. As if I can see the world for the first time, and my place in it, independent of you, a whole vista of what may be. Even if it is not grand or inspiring, it is real and solid, unlike the fantasy I’ve built around you.

I will do this. I will triumph over you.

IV.

“Wake up, slugabed,” Mother barks in my ear. “Winter’s come and morning’s wasting.”

I sit up in bed, disoriented. When did I fall asleep? Did I really go to your house last

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