The Childless Woman

"All of it," Cora repeated, and nodded slowly, as if he'd passed a test she'd given a lot of people who failed it. "All right. But I'll tell it in order, the way you build a thing — foundation first. And the foundation isn't the old man who started it. The foundation is me. Because before you understand the curse, you have to understand the one thing everybody gets wrong about it, which is that you think you can be clever and step around it." She poured herself more tea, her hand shaking, the spout chattering on the rim. "I thought that. I was the cleverest Calder of my generation, and I thought that, and I'll tell you what it bought me."

Owen waited. The book lay open between them on the table.

"I was a firstborn too," Cora said. "Did you know that? I don't suppose you did. I was the first child of my mother and father, born nineteen and thirty-seven, and I had a younger brother, Henry — your grandfather — born four years after me. Now you'll have noticed, reading those pages, that I'm sitting here at eighty-eight, and the curse only takes firstborns, and I'm a firstborn, and I'm not dead." She showed her teeth in something that was not a smile. "You want to know why."

"Because you never had a child," Owen said. "Ma told me that much."

"Because I never had a child," Cora agreed. "And I want you to understand that wasn't sorrow, Owen, and it wasn't that no man would have me, though that's the story the family told, poor Cora, an old maid. I figured it out young. Younger than you. I was a sharp girl and I read these pages when I was nineteen, the same as you're reading them now, and I saw the firstborn line and I saw the dates and I worked out the rule before anyone would confirm it for me. The curse comes for a firstborn on the night that firstborn's own first child is born. A life buys a life. So I thought — well. That's simple, then. I will be the cleverest Calder who ever lived. I will simply never give it a child to trade me for. I'll never have a first baby, so there'll never be a night for it to come. I'll cheat it. I'll live."

"And you did," Owen said. "You did live."

"I did live." Cora looked out the window, down the long bare slope of the land that her family had held for two centuries. "I sent away a man I loved. Did you know that? You didn't. Nobody did. There was a man, a good man, from over in Peacham, and he wanted to marry me, and I wanted it too, I wanted it so badly I used to lie awake with the want of it. And I told him no. Twice. The second time he asked me why, and I couldn't tell him because I am cursed and I won't make a child that the curse can use to kill me, because he'd have thought I was mad, so I told him I didn't love him, which was the cruelest lie I ever told and the only weapon I had. And he married a girl from Peacham instead and had four children and grew old, and I would see them in town sometimes, the whole laughing lot of them, and I would go home to this house and bank the fire and tell myself I was the clever one. I was the one who'd live."

She was quiet a moment. When she went on, her voice had gone thin and hard, the way a thing goes when it's been worn smooth by being held too long.

"I was nineteen when I worked it out and I am eighty-eight now," she said. "That is sixty-nine years I have lived in this house alone, on purpose, to keep that curse from having a child of mine to take me with. And I want you to hear what it got me. I want you to hear it, Owen, because you are going to be tempted, before this is over, to be clever the way I was clever, and I need you to know what clever costs and what it buys." She turned from the window and fixed him with her black eyes. "It bought me my life. That's all. One life. Mine. A long, cold, empty, childless life in this house. And it did not save one single other soul. Not one."

"What do you mean," Owen said. "If you cheated it—"

"I didn't cheat it. That's what I'm telling you. You can't cheat it. You can only make it look somewhere else." Cora put her finger back on the family book, slid it down to a name. "Henry. My little brother. Your grandfather. When I refused to give the curse a firstborn, do you know what it did? It didn't give up and go home. A debt doesn't forgive itself because one person hides the money. It went looking for the next firstborn of the blood. And the next firstborn of the blood, after me, was my brother Henry." Her finger pressed down on the page until the old knuckle went white. "So Henry married, and Henry had a son — your father, James — and the night your father was born, my brother Henry, who was twenty-nine years old and had never done a thing to anyone, dropped dead of his heart in the front room of this very house. While I was upstairs being clever and alive."

The fire ticked. Owen looked at the name under her finger, Henry Calder, and the two dates that were the same.

"I didn't save Henry by not having children," Cora said, very low. "I just moved the bill onto him. And then your father James grew up and had you, and the night you were born it took James on the Hollow road, because by then James was the firstborn of the blood. And so on. The curse is patient and the curse is exact and the curse does not care which firstborn pays, only that one does, every generation, forever. I thought I was a door it couldn't get through. I was only a door it walked around. And the people on the other side of me paid for my cleverness with their lives, and I got to be the old woman who lived, and watched, and read the dates into this book in my own hand because there was no one else left to do it." She closed the cover of the family Bible, gently, the way you'd close the eyes of the dead. "That is the foundation, Owen. Hear it before you hear anything else. There is no being clever. There is no stepping around. Anything you do to save yourself only hands the knife to a child who hasn't been born yet. The only firstborn you can ever spare is one you take the debt off of — and there has only ever been one way to do that, and it is the opposite of clever, and it is the opposite of saving yourself, and in two hundred years not one of us has been brave enough to do it. Including me. Especially me."

Owen sat with his hands around the cold tea. He thought of Maddie at home, of the circle drawn around a day in October, of the child that the curse was, even now, counting toward.

"You said there's a way out," he said. "You keep saying it. A way that's not clever. A way nobody's been brave enough for." He made himself say it. "What is it, Cora."

"I'll tell you," Cora said. "I will tell you all of it, and the words of it, and what it asks. But you can't understand what it asks until you understand why we owe it in the first place — what one of us did, two hundred years ago, that was so terrible the only fair price for it was this." She got slowly to her feet again, and went to the cabinet, and took down a second thing — not the Bible this time, but a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth, tied with string gone grey with age, a thing that looked like it had not been untied in a very long time. She set it on the table in front of him with great care, as if it might still be warm.

"This is the oldest thing in the family," she said. "Older than the book. It's the reason for all of it. And I think I am the last person living who has ever read what's inside, and I have not untied it in thirty years, because every time I do I can't sleep for a week." She sat back down, and folded her shaking hands, and looked at the bundle, and then at her great-nephew. "Do you know what year your family got this land, Owen? This good land we've all lived fat on for two hundred years? Do you know what year, and what it cost, and who paid?"

"No," Owen said.

"Eighteen sixteen," Cora said. "The year there was no summer. And the one who paid for it wasn't a Calder at all." She pulled the end of the string, and the old knot gave, and the oilcloth began to fall open. "Let me tell you about the year without a summer, and a woman named Esther Vane, and the boy your great-great-great-grandfather killed to make us what we are."