The Devil's Dream by Lee Smith

and the ice on the river changed instantly from gray to silver, to diamonds spread out sparkling before their eyes. Ezekiel squeezed her hand. “Hit looks like Heaven, don’t it?” he said, and then the preacher took her and then she was under, frozen solid and dead, and then she was up sputtering and resurrected, and as soon as it was done, the choking dream stopped forever.
    Now Nonnie could go on about her life, her good life as it came to pass, for she grew accustomed to Ezekiel’s limitations and learned to compensate for them, handling all the money, for instance, doing the things Ezekiel was not cut out to do, while he did the things he could. Under his hands, the farm prospered. Hired girls came in to help Nonnie with the work as time went on and more children were born, Pack Bailey in 1886; little Elizabeth, called Lizzie, in 1890; Sally Fern in 1898.
    These were the blurred and busy years, the good years, when Nonnie got so caught up in the great tumble and roar of her life that she never even thought of the rose silk dress folded away in the loft, nor of Jake Toney, nor of how she used to dance up on the counter of the store in Cana when she was a little girl and sing, “The cuckoo she’s a pretty bird, she sings as she flies” —
    Oh, Nonnie still sang, while she carded the wool or rocked the baby or shelled the beans, but now she mostly sang the hymns that Ezekiel loved, or the old bloody ballads like “Barbry Allen” and “Brown Girl” and “The Gypsy Laddie.” It gave Nonnie the strangest feeling to sing that one, all about a woman who left her house and baby to run away with a gypsy. For how could a woman do such as that? Men might wander, but women were meant to stay home, and during those years when the house on Grassy Branch was brimming over with babies, Nonnie could not imagine anywhere else she might even want to be, whirled round as she was in the great spinning wheel of the seasons, as implacable as the stars. Plant now pull the fodder now hoe the corn now dig the newground the baby is crying she wants to be fed the cow is lost Mamma my throat hurts Mamma whar is the hairbrush Mamma he hurt me it is time to buy the seed corn Mamma he it is time to Mamma it is time mamma mamma mamma .
    Ezekiel loved the children and played with them by the hour, rolling down the hill behind the house with them, making cat’s cradles with string and chains with daisies, singing to them swinging them chucking them under their chins tickling them, “Tickle, tickle, on your knee, if you laugh you don’t love me,” which made Lizzie, fat little yellow-haired Lizzie, dissolve in laughter every time.
    Once when Ezekiel and the boys were wrestling on the floor at her feet while she mended their clothes, Ezekiel grabbed Nonnie’s leg, as shapely as ever, and said, “Tickle, tickle, on your knee, if you laugh you don’t love me,” and all the children giggled expectantly, but Nonnie looked at him and did not laugh, as anger, like a bolt of lightning and just as unexpected, cut through her body like a knife.
    â€œEzekiel Bailey,” she said, “you ought to get up from there”; for she wanted a man suddenly, and not another child on the floor. And furthermore, as Nonnie looked down at them all in a roiling heap, it hit her that she did not want to be everybody’s mamma, which she was. All of a sudden Nonnie was in a temper, the way she used to get. She was still pretty, she was still young, she was furious. But when Zeke tickled her knee again she managed to laugh, even though it was not real laughter, not like back when she was a silly girl and everything was funny.
    Was this the moment that marked the change, that signaled what the rest of her life with Ezekiel would be like? Or was there ever such a moment, or only a slow slipping away, a long estrangement so gradual that in the later years of the marriage Nonnie could not