As Meat Loves Salt. Maria McCann
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let me—’
Amorous propensities heated by struggle, whispered the Voice. Other men took their pleasure, even with sluts like Patience, whilst I, a loving fool, had waited weeks, months for a wife who at the first trial offered to leave me. I grabbed her by the waist and pulled her down. The wedding gown was heavy and in the dark I knelt on it. My fingernails tore in trying to hitch it up. A squib exploded in my head: she had hit me in the eye. I brought my fist down on her face as if chopping wood. She commenced screeching, and I gave her another, and another, until she learnt better. At last all I could hear was stifled gasps.
‘Now keep still,’ I said.
Her thighs under the robe were damp and cool as mushrooms. My hand gouged between them, found the soft place where I would slake myself. I undid my breeches.
‘Jacob, please.’ Her voice quavered; she coughed and snorted and I guessed her nose was bleeding. ‘Zeb hears you.’
Again I saw her hand move under his shirt. ‘Let him.’
‘Please, Jacob, Jacob.’ Caro’s tears and spittle all but choked my name. ‘How will you feel tomorrow?’
‘Married.’
She whimpered, mingling prayers and sobs as I pushed into her. She had still her maidenhead; I drove in hard until the flesh gave way and I was packed tight.
‘You’re killing me!’ Caro shrieked. ‘Killing!’
I pushed harder, for mastery.
‘Zeb!’ she screamed.
‘Keep him away if you love him,’ I snarled. ‘I’m able for him, too.’ Let him hear that. Let him hear all – let—
The spasm was upon me and it was intense unto agony. I heard myself growl. Teeth clenched, I crushed my hips against her, the pleasure surging in me so that for a moment I was nothing but that, I was dying, and even as I let go the gasping of the flesh slowed, slackened and I knew where I was and who lay with me. Heart pounding, I collapsed onto her breast. Caro at once shifted under me so that my body slipped out of hers. She then tried to pull the gown over her thighs, but my weight prevented it.
There was silence apart from our breathing.
From the side of the stream came Zeb’s voice, timid: ‘Caro?’
‘Don’t make me come over,’ I threatened.
‘Caro!’ There was a pause, then he commenced weeping. I made to rise and stop his noise.
Caro at once called, ‘Take courage,’ and the crying grew quieter.
‘What should he want with courage?’ I demanded. ‘Have I hurt him?’
She gave no answer. I knew then that Zeb, listening to our struggle, had feared Caro was killed outright.
In time, pain in my knees obliged me to raise myself. My wife turned on her side and curled up like a child, her back to me. I lay stretched out, staring into the invisible trees. My coat was lost in the dark, and now that the animal heat was gone off the cold of the wood struck to my very bones.
It was already coming to me what I had done, the ruin I had made. Rage and lust had sharpened in me to a madness. I had even wanted Zeb to hear this butchery of a wedding night, and now my cheeks burnt with shame. Whatever it was that Zeb did with his women, it was not this.
‘Caro?’ When I touched her neck she shuddered. ‘Wife, are you cold?’
‘If you will do it again, just do it,’ came her voice, crackling with hatred.
‘You must be cold. Let me put my arms around.’
Caro gave a terrible laugh. ‘Here, take this.’ She prodded at my hand with something hard. I felt for it with my fingers and found myself holding the wedding ring.
‘How can I take what’s yours?’ I fumbled for her own hand and pressed the ring back into it.
‘Very well,’ she said and I felt her body jerk. Something landed in the leaves.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘The ring gone. Thrown away. Now leave me.’
I listened while she strained with sobs that went on and on like some beast mourning for its young. Tears slid out of my eyes, and my throat was contracted to an ache. It was not what I had meant. Not the boy, not fleeing the house, not this – connection – with Caro. Not what I had meant.
When I laid my hand on her shoulder she only wept the more loudly. There was nothing to do but lie and wait for sleep. Zeb did not call again. I rolled away from her in my turn and lay facing in the opposite direction, listening to the wind-battered trees, thinking of the bridal bower I might have had, and had rent in pieces at that moment when I spitted Christopher Walshe. Caro should by rights be cradled in my arms and I in hers, each drunk on the other, or sleeping innocent as surfeited babes. Instead we lay back to back, the whole of the earth between us.
At last I slipped into a dream of shifting trees and paths. Something moved, and I woke in a terror, heart clanging; but all was still. I slept again, and Father came to me, saying that my life was in God’s hand, and I saw the hand with a little flame of fire in it, and was afraid. When next I woke, it was dawn, mist sieving through the trees and a pearly grey just sweetening the sky. There was a great coldness all round my belly, and feeling down there I found myself still unbuttoned. I sat up. The grass next to me was pressed flat, but Caro, Zeb and the horses were gone.
Some days later I emerged from the wood on the northern side, having torn every garment and twisted my shoes almost off my feet, but that weighed little against the inner torment that rent me. I would almost have been glad to be taken by Biggin and be done with it, yet the miserable cowardice of the flesh made me still listen for the sound of men and shrink down in the bushes if I heard any. On coming out of the trees and seeing the highway fair and open before me, I felt a deliverance of body if not of soul. The morning was soft and my road lay between fair green hills, so evenly balanced that I seemed walking in a picture.
Behold, said the Voice, earthly beauty. It is nothing but seeming, for to the uninstructed eye the world appears fruitful and sweet, yet in it is nothing but a pile of skulls, showing where others were lost as they went before.
‘I am lost,’ I answered, ‘and can never be found again.’
Not one of us merits salvation. We are too feeble and corrupt to attain to it or form the most childish conception thereof. Yet God shows His mercy in saving some, and His justice in condemning others. Father told this to Izzy and me, and spoke to us of the Elect: he tried to explain these things to Zeb also, more than once, but the boy was too young and foolish, and began to cry. The Elect are chosen from before the beginning of time, and are known by their inner light and godly conversation. Within me all was darkness, and neither my conversation nor my conduct godly. I must look, then, to have Hell as my portion. God cuts out our path, makes a groove in the clay with His finger, and we poor blind ants slide down into it.
I was not long out from the trees when I fell prey to savage thirst. Like a fool, I had not thought to drink deep from the stream before quitting it, I was come across no other water in the wood, and now I sweated much in the sun. Men are wont to think of our England as a soft green land, nourished at the breast of many rivers; yet I can prove by bitter experience that it is possible to walk for miles along the King’s highway and find no more than a puddle. On coming to the first village I dared not stop, lest word of our flight had reached there, and methought the wedding garments were like to become the mark by which all might know me and put me to death. There was a well, however, by the