Mary was standing in her nightgown when the undertaker's carriage took her stepfather's body away. She was standing with her face half hidden behind the frame of her room's single window; the candle snuffed and the northern-country moon settled somewhere behind the branches of the chestnut trees. The wind, as it was, came and went and she waited for it, and when it did come she would hide her face away from the pale moonlight that came through the tree's moving branches on the chance that the men working below might see her standing there watching them.
But she listened more than she watched. She listened to what she could over the rustling of the leaves, and the far-forest sounds of deer grunting and chittering heavily in the november rut. She listened to the sound of the breathing of the men as they moved the body-the muffled weezing that they made through the beaks of their strange, bird-like masks. She even thought she could hear her older brother along with them with his own wrapping of kitchen cloth covering his mouth and nose, for whatever good it would do against the dead man's plague.
Mostly though, she listen for a heartbeat. It was a mad thought, she knew. Be she listened anyway. For anything-a heartbeat, a cough, a gasp from one of the bird-masked men, saying, "He's alive! He's alive!" and knowing what that would mean for her.
She had once heard a man at market say that there was a certain incompleteness that came to those who died of the plague. A certain incompleteness of spirit, he had called it, and she had wondered what that had meant. At first she had thought about it with a certain morbid curiosity. Then, when her step father had fallen ill she had thought about it with a terrible foreboding, as if there could be some way for him to die and not to die. Moreso, by her own prior superstitions she had believed that if an evil man did die and did not in his last moments suffer by the evilness of another, that it had not been a right death, and that the spirit of the man would have to know of the incompleteness of its own journey and so be fated to seek out the evilness in others.
Against a sudden chill of the wind she found herself absentmindedly reaching for the button that on her nightgown should have been there to hold the cloth together at the nape of her neck, and then she reached down even further to a second button which should have been there to hold the fabric together at the first noticeable cleft of her breasts until she remembered that, that button wasn't there either.
It had been her mother's nightgown, and it had been handed down to her after her mother had died. She would have continued to wear her childhood things, and for a great period of time she even thought that she might always wear them as by the time she was seventeen she had still been deprived of any perceivable growth spurt. She had been by far the shortest of her group of friends and had even grown somewhat contented with her small stature.
But for her, eighteen was a different age. She had always made a point of exercising; volunteering to walk into town whenever it was needed; forcing herself to chop and haul wood whenever her brother's were otherwise occupied. Mostly though, she would ride her father's horses. Of the three, two were more than well aged and she exercised them sparingly so as not to stress the creatures, but as for the third and far youngest, she would truly ride.
If she knew she had all day, then she would ride all day. And if she felt the horse's strength begin to wane, then she would dismount and lead the horse by the rope as she ran alongside of it. And if the day was hot and she was to take the route of the river crossing, she would dismount again and run the animal back and forth through the water until both of them were wet and exhausted, and yet, exhilarated by the coolness of the river. It was around this time she began to notice the changes happening in her body-how when she would lift herself up from the river and onto to the back of the horse, how her skirt would ride higher, and in its wetness would cling higher and higher above her knees with each successive trip to the river until she was forced to stand in the stirrups and ride with her bare thighs glistening in the afternoon sun.
In a matter of mere weeks she did not dare to ride at all, and if she did dare she knew better than to go anywhere near the river-that she had no more clothes that could properly contain her in that position with any sort of modesty. Still, she longed to ride, and truthfully she had grown accustomed to and even fond of seeing her bare legs and the moisture of the sweat and the river water and the lean muscles of her thighs pumping alongside the muscles and the breathing of the horse.
By the time she was nineteen there were no clothes that she owned which had not at one time belonged to her mother, and even those she wore with a certain mismatchment that made more than a few items entirely impossible to wear.
Her breasts had never stopped growing. Or at the very least hadn't slowed in their process of growing nearly as immediately as she would have liked. A friend had even suggested that she bind them with chord and wrapping that they might be kept from becoming any more voluptuous, and she had diligently committed to the practice for nearly three months, changing the wrappings each morning and each night, before the process became too painful, and quite obviously, entirely ineffective.
She turned her eyes downward as she looked over her mother's nightgown. She eyed the places where the two highest buttons should have been but were not, and she eyed the third button that settled perfectly between the rise of her breasts, and she eyed the thick twine she had used to ensure that the button would not break free.
Looking even further down, she found herself considering how even her legs no longer fit the gown properly. There had always been a small slit that rose up the side of the calf, but not long after her growth spurt had started to verge on the point of being unmanageable and she had been forced to start wearing her mother's clothing, she had torn the slit. At first she thought she might repair it, and she did. Then she tore it again. And fixed it again. And tore it again. And fixed it again. And tore it again. After awhile she started to allow for some of the tear and even hemmed it properly so as to accommodate her growing figure.
Her eyes turned to the corner of her darkened room and she could faintly see the edges of her sewing table, and she considered then that she might finally replace the buttons on the gown now that her stepfather had died, but some part of her still felt wary at the idea despite her understanding the absurdity of it.
Then she started to consider other things that she might now do that she had not been allowed before, and within moments found herself nearly overwhelmed with possibilities. Yet, with each possibility came a certain dread she could not shake and still felt helplessly governed by, as if by his death, her stepfather's wishes had become a new doctrine made wholly sacred despite the otherwise nature of the man. But there was one thought that stayed in her mind, at first, somewhat distant from her most present considerations. In time though, for reasons she did not fully understand, and with a destination that she had no way of knowing, she found herself moving away from the window and toward the door.
