Chad clasped his hands together and tented his fingers under his chin, nodded. “It was profound, I’ll give you that. Maybe there will come a day when you can do the same.”
“It’s easier for men,” I said. “It’s not fair, but it’s true. Wives and mothers can’t just up and go to England to research and write and interview. You can go for two months and study, leave your four children with your wife, but there’s some invisible and unstated law that I can’t do the same.”
Chad’s gentle smile told me he understood. “Maybe one day, Joy. Maybe one day.”
“Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow. Do we believe him?”
“What ever do you mean?” Chad rubbed the bridge of his nose as if his glasses were too heavy.
“What if,” I said and leaned closer, my voice lowering. “What if I trust that command? What on earth would become of me if I should ever grow brave?”
Chad nodded his head. “Indeed, Joy. What would become of any of us if we were to become so brave as to believe his words?”
We were quiet for a few moments until Eva’s voice called for him, and he rose to leave. I sat alone as the storm raged.
After a while, with the house quiet, I slipped into the bedroom where Bill snored, in search of a sheaf of paper. I took it back to the kitchen, where I sat and vibrated with the thunder and began another sonnet. Although I no longer wrote poetry for publication, I could create for my spirit. Feelings that could not be acknowledged in the light of day or with the sound of voice—the ache of stifling desires, the pain of rejecting needs because they were unacceptable, the frustration of responsibility that hemmed me in as a woman—found their way out through the gateway of poetry.
I wrote in a tight script, and the first line of a sonnet appeared.
Shut your teeth upon your need.
CHAPTER 6
Coinsilver, moonsilver, buy me a tear;
I lost of all of mine in a bygone year
“FOR DAVY WHO WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT ASTRONOMY,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Winter 1952
“The moon goddess is Selene,” I told Davy one dark winter night with a full moon hovering above. Six months had passed since Vermont, and the peace of that trip had fallen away like a waterfall, down a river far gone. My elder son and I lay still on a blanket bundled in coats and staring at the dome of sky above us, naming constellations. He wore glasses by then—my genetic gift of poor eyesight—and his eyes seemed to grow beneath the round lenses.
“I wrote a poem about her once,” I told him. “About the moon. I imagined her dripping liquid silver.”
“You write poems about everything,” Davy said and shifted closer to me on the blanket. “Maybe you’ll write one about me.”
“I will do exactly that,” I told him.
Davy was enchanted with astronomy. We scoured the library for books on the celestial objects. I felt closer to him in this desire than any he’d had in his short life. I could feel bits of myself pulsing in his small, frenetic body. As a child I’d also been enchanted by the sky and the stars. The firmament demanded nothing of me, yet offered everything. As with Davy, in the rare moments when he was not thrashing his way through the world.
Meanwhile, Douglas was immersed in the earthly world, whether in a fort he’d made or in the mud he’d plunged into at Crum Elbow Creek, which sliced through our property over moss-covered rocks and silver pebbles. Topsy, our rescued mutt, followed Douglas everywhere as he roamed our acreage, and it was there, in the natural world, that I found my connection with my younger son. He dug his hands into the dirt of my garden and roamed the orchard I’d planted. He seemed to be as I had been as a child—a loner, yet quite happy with his lot.
At night I knelt at the edges of my sons’ beds to say prayers, tuck them under the blankets, and kiss their smooth cheeks. My precious boys, now seven and nine years of age.
Time fell away from me in the mundane dailiness of survival as I wrote and took care of them. “I love you,” I always said as I shut off the light. “Sleep tight.”
We spent the days together reading or playing outside. Color TV had come to our part of the world, but we didn’t have the money for such luxuries even if we’d wanted them. As I read fairy tales and mysteries to my children, the dream of visiting England, of meeting my friend Jack, grew.
We were two years into our pen-friendship, and I looked forward to his letters as I did to the arrival of spring. I was hungry for them. Sometimes desperate.
Jack: