Saltwater Cowboys by Dayle Furlong

Author:Dayle Furlong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2015-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

In the morning she woke up and ran down the hallway to check on the children. Their beds were empty.

“They stayed the night at Wanda’s, remember?” Jack said.

“I didn’t,” she said and wilted into his arms.

He held her for a moment then led her back to bed. They stayed in bed for most of the day, quietly holding one another. Angela rubbed her hand across her chest. Her breasts were taut and heavy. She’d nursed every one of her girls, despite pressure to feed them formula as the other mothers in Brighton had done. Angela had loved the little tugs on her breast, how the mouth had moved so rapidly, the muscles a vibrato of movement on automatic while they slept and ate. After three children she’d been ready for another, didn’t mind the heaviness in her breasts, was looking forward to the weight of the little lump in her arms, cradled against the breast, toughening up the nipple while nursing. She loved their little mouths, crying for milk, desperate for a feed. They had the red-fleshed gaping mouths of baby birds.

She loved being a mother. She had never done anything else; she’d gone straight from her mother’s house to the small peacock-blue clapboard Jack had bought. She’d never had a job; her two older sisters had gone to work early to help out their mother when their father died, but not her, she’d been coddled.

It infuriated her how much she’d loved this baby — why couldn’t she be blasé about it? Why couldn’t she see it as just a clump of flesh like the more liberal women of the world? The forward thinkers, the women who wanted to see more women in mining, the women who admired Thatcher’s position yet despised Thatcher’s policies? Just a simple woman she was, liked a clean house, a fresh baked chocolate cake in a plastic Tupperware container, and her children squabbling or not, loose at her feet.

Jack was sound asleep next to her. She lifted his heavy arm off her torso and went to the kitchen for a cup of tea. She turned on the stove, left the kettle to boil, and turned on the television. All over the screen, babies — baby commercials on every channel. The image of a newborn being powdered broke her heart. The scrunched-up scarlet face, flailing limbs and hiccup-like cry, she wanted to reach in the screen and tear the child away, keep it all to herself.

When Sheila would see a cute infant in Brighton, she would tell Angela to distract the mother over and over again like an official announcing an alert so Sheila could tear the child away and they could keep it for themselves. It would make Angela laugh.

Now this cavern in her womb, this emptiness and her stretched-out, fattened abdomen noxious with hormones, as empty as a blasted hole in the rock. All the food in the world wouldn’t numb it, all the drink won’t either. She could drink all the red wine she wanted, until the gums in the gaps in her teeth were as dark as black cherries.

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