The Fulfillment Read Online Free PDF Page A

another woman has a baby. It’s like nature plays a trick on her, makes her think of it as her own. Hearing the news the first time, she’ll hold fast to her own belly, just as if it were growing there. And no matter who the father is, for a time he seems special—as if she herself had been touched by him. Why is it she asks so many questions of an expecting woman? Well, it’s because the more she hears, the more she shares—the discomforts and the joys. She hears about the quickening, and for a time it’s hers , too. She hears of a heartbeat, and it might as well be beating inside herself. And the birth—she takes a share in that, too. And to see a newborn child is to want one of her own, whether she already has two—or twelve. It doesn’t matter. Because that’s the trick nature plays on her. It makes all women think of babies in terms of themselves.”
    Under his hand Aaron could feel her toes, curled tightly now, as some might clench a fist in intensity.
    â€œYou plead Priscilla’s case too convincingly for it to be only her case,” Aaron said, smoothing his hand over her feet, looking down at them. He looked up at her, huddled shivering above him. “I’m sorry, Mary, for being selfish and going on about myself.”
    She drew her robe tighter about her.
    â€œNo, Aaron, that’s not true. If you’re selfish, then so am I, but I don’t see us that way. I see us as two people who have to talk about what needs saying.”
    â€œDon’t excuse me so lightly. I should have had more sense than to go on—”
    â€œMore sense than to what?” She cut him off. “To air a few feelings that needed airing? That’s all we’re doing, you and I.”
    And it was all they were doing. But it occurred to Aaron how unseemly it would be if anyone knew how freely they’d talked. Here in Moran Township the straitlaced matrons would not understand that a talk so personal could take place innocently. He was amused at the thought of some pucker-faced old harridan pursing hermouth in sour shock. Gossip was the thing they thrived on, and Aaron disliked it.
    â€œOh, but if the town gossips could hear what we’ve been talking about, they’d choke in their sleep.”
    It hadn’t occurred to her before, but the thought of it brought a bubble of mirth to her lips. “Oh, Aaron, I expect they would,” she laughed.
    And the night, sealing them against self-consciousness, carried their laughter on its uncensoring ear.

2
    Out in the fields was the place where Jonathan did his best thinking. There he found expressions and feelings that seemed to avoid him everywhere else. Between him and the land, it seemed, he could work out most anything. All of his twenty-eight years he’d lived on this land, and it had never failed him. At times he felt he might have sprouted right out of it, breast-fed by its nectars, nurtured by its grains, and made secure by its perennial richness. When in doubt, the land was there. It gave back all he put into it. So he gave it his best. He worked it in love, and it returned his faith.
    Walking on his soil that spring afternoon, he thought how easy it was to drop a seed into it, how effortlessly the land returned it. Far easier to ask a return of that kind than to ask what he was setting out to ask of Aaron and Mary.
    â€œConsider, Aaron, if you were to father Mary and me a child.”
    He said it aloud, and it was good on his ears. Yes, that’d do just fine as a beginning. What would come to follow he couldn’t guess, but Jonathan was fey to do the asking, no matter what.He would keep his arguments all stored and ready to voice—somehow—and would divine just how to voice them when the time came.
    But the time never came that day, while Jonathan’s words were fresh on his mind. He returned from his walk in the late afternoon, and Aaron wasn’t home yet. At chore time, he