Chapter 5
Ruth Swickard woke to the smell of coffee, her bedroom windows rattling with the roar of the November wind. The radiator ticked and hissed, but she knew the promise of heat would not compare to the warmth beneath her blankets. The feather pillow wrapped around her head, and she burrowed deeper.
The bed creaked as she felt the weight of her husband crawling toward her.
“You look very cozy,” Bill said.
She smiled without opening her eyes. “You made coffee. Does that mean you’re taking over breakfast duties today?”
This was the best part of the late fall and winter.
They still had plenty of work to do around the farm, but after long months of tending and harvesting, the brutal cold had swept in and the ground turned so hard that nothing could be done about it.
No more getting up before dawn, at least for a while.
Sometimes that meant breakfast in bed, and sometimes it meant other things.
“I could be persuaded,” Bill said.
Dragging the blankets down, he slid in beside her. Only his feet were cold.
Bill wouldn’t be trying to get frisky if he hadn’t already seen Benjy off to school, which meant it was just them in the house. Careful to stay burrowed, she touched his chest and trailed her fingers southward.
“Thank you for the coffee,” she said.
“Taste it before you thank me.”
“I just need something warm in the morning.”
Bill laughed softly. He kissed her as her fingers found what they’d been seeking. Suddenly, it felt too warm beneath the blankets, and it was Ruth who tossed them aside. Good morning, indeed, she thought.
As she straddled him, the house jumped, just once, a jolt so powerful that the windows shattered and the opposite wall cracked open. Bill shouted to Jesus and scrambled off the bed, but froze when he saw the shards of broken glass on the floor. The cold wind blasted in.
“My God,” Ruth said. “An earthquake.”
She drew her legs beneath her and cloaked herself in the blankets.
Bill started explaining that it couldn’t be an earthquake, that a single shake didn’t qualify.
It felt more like a bomb, he said, but there’d been no sound to accompany the jolt, no explosion.
Ruth hadn’t needed him to tell her any of that, but she knew he was just talking to talk—that they were both scared, and nothing scared a man like Bill Swickard more than being scared.
Wrapped in blankets, Ruth crawled off the other side of the mattress, opened the wardrobe, and retrieved Bill’s house shoes.
“Put these on,” she said, tossing them onto the bed.
He looked at her as if she’d gone insane—throwing his shoes on the bed, when she’d have scolded him if he’d done the same.
But dirty sheets were the least of her concern.
She let the blankets slide down to pool around her ankles, cold air stinging her bare skin while she struggled into a thick sweater and a pair of Bill’s long woolens. She slid into house shoes.
Glass crunched, and Ruth turned to see Bill by the window. It was her turn to think he had lost his mind. He’d put on his shoes but was otherwise stark naked, skin so cold it looked pink in the gray morning light.
She started around the bed. “I gave you those shoes so you wouldn’t cut your feet, but I thought you’d have sense enough to at least put on a shirt and some drawers. You’ll catch your death.”
Bill shook his head. “Would you look at that,” he said softly, almost a whisper.
Ruth crunched over the broken glass, arms crossed, the sweater not enough to warm her.
She bent to peek out the other window, to Bill’s left, and straightaway, she could see what had given him such pause.
The ancient oak tree in the cornfield had split in two.
Half of the oak lay across the ragged stumps of old cornstalks, while the other half remained upright.
“Lightning, you think?” he said.
The sky hung low and gray, but there hadn’t been a drop of rain, nor had they heard thunder, unless they counted the one seismic moment when the ground had bucked beneath the house.
“Doesn’t seem likely,” Ruth replied.
Neither of them offered any further suggestion. Instead, they stared at the split in the ground. Ruth noticed that the earth beneath the oak tree had risen into a kind of hump. Two of its thick roots had burst up through the ground like dinosaur bones revealed by a desert wind.
“I’ll get the broom,” she said again, hurrying out into the corridor. As she descended the stairs, Ruth tried to make sense of the way the house and land had cracked, and the way the earth had bucked beneath the oak tree, almost like something down there wanted out.
Two thick roots had been broken when it thrashed in its sleep, in that moment when—far away—Maggie Wise had taken her final breath.
Other roots still held it in place, one around its throat, one that twined tightly around its pelvis and left leg, and another that had grown in such a way that the root melded with its right forearm—wood and bone fused.
And yet …
Weak as it may have been, trapped, still buried beneath what remained of that splintered, ancient tree … the thing beneath the oak had awoken. After long centuries, it tasted the marrow of the world and wanted more.