Eve of Dawn

Eva was exhausted. She could feel the fibers of her muscles stretched thin from carrying the fruit baskets, wheat baskets, barley baskets, and water jugs back and forth from the fields or the well to her house. Day in and day out it was the same routine: get up to the cock’s song right before the first rays of the sun pierced the clouds, milk the cows, collect the eggs from the hens’ nests, get dry firewood for the stone oven, light it, grind the cereals while the oven reached an ideal temperature, prepare breakfast for her children and husband. Eat. Clean out all the dishes, sweep out all the sand blown in from the desert, and spend the rest of the morning going back and forth to the fields, well, and house, until it was time for lunch, then prepare lunch for her kids and husband. Eat. Head back to the fields if the season was one for planting seeds or growing crops or harvesting, or weave clothes to exchange with her neighbors for other products, or to cover her children’s and husband’s indignities through the harsh winter.

She was a good wife, she knew. She did everything her father had told her she would have to do, the day before he disappeared. In the beginning, she had felt very proud of her level of compliance, of her ability to procure for all of her children and husband’s needs and demands, of her obedience and devotion to them. This was all that her father had expected. But after so many years of the same old routine, it was starting to take its toll.

She had never been much for thinking until then, not because she wasn’t smart or lacked her own ideas, but because thinking was the man’s station, and none of her business; her father had taught her so. But still, even though she was so busy that there never seemed to be any time left for anything but her chores, the kids were growing up quickly and had started needing her less. Every day they stayed outside for longer periods of time, until later hours of the night, playing whatever it was that children with no responsibilities played at. This had started freeing up a bit of her time, and without wanting or knowing it, she had started to fill said free time with, well, thinking. Never before had it occurred to her that maybe, just maybe, even though her father had not instructed it so, her husband could help out with some of the chores their living required. All he did, all day long, was wander around the desert looking for who knows what in pieces of split wood, under rocks, and in other people’s houses. The idea, and it was a very new idea indeed, that this was somehow not fair, had grown roots in her head and kept nagging at her like a cursed locust, robbing her of her patience, disrupting her sleep.

Adding to her daily troubles, that particular day, one of the ox used to pull the tilling cart had died in the field. She saw it waddling towards the trough in mid-morning, leaning to one side and the other like a cradle, ever closer to the ground, until it fell on its right side. She kept about her own work for a while, thinking that maybe it was simply taking in some of the morning sun, as animals love doing, but the fact that it did not move for about ten minutes alarmed her. She walked over to it to see what was wrong and found it wasn’t breathing. She tried splashing water on its face, pulling its ears, yelling out its name Abe! Abe! Abe! at the top of her lungs, but nothing worked. She had to pull the huge, dead beast about a hundred yards to the nearest creek so that the waste from its carcass and the insects it would attract would keep away from the crops. Again she thought this might have been something her husband could have helped out with, but again the image of her father scolding her, foaming-at-the-mouth angry, was something she’d rather not have to face.

Evelyn was exhausted. She could feel her lumbar muscles cramping up, pulsing with bursts of pain that threatened with throwing her to the floor, paralyzed, cursing the sciatica and hernias that bulged up along her spine. The endless repetition of mechanical motions required of her at the assembly line had limited and shortened her body’s range of movement; the hammering of steel sheets meant to become rails for the train tracks, the shoveling of coal into the furnaces to keep the smelting going, and the carrying to and fro of extremely heavy loads were breaking her spirit. Peering into tiny nuts and bolts, looking for dangerous imperfections, did no wonders for her eyes, either. Her hands were calloused and always full of sores, some were already scarred over but others were open to the toxic, soot-filled factory air, making them the perfect breeding ground for infection.

Day in and day out it was the same routine: Get up to the air horn’s shocking bellow right before the first rays of the sun tried to pierce the clouds of smog produced by the never-resting factories of the modern city, get her husband and children out of bed, and drag them and push them to the loo so they would do their business, leave briskly, and not make her late for work, go down to the kitchen to prepare whatever she could for breakfast, maybe some potatoes splashed with mashed tomatoes, maybe an egg with beans, maybe a couple of slices of moldy bread, light the gas stove, cook, call her lazy family down to the dining table. Eat. Wash all the dishes, sweep her husband and children out the door so they might be early to the unemployment lines and maybe, finally, get a job, and spend the rest of the day going back and forth between the hammering, the shoveling, and the inspecting.

She would get back home when the mostly invisible sun had gone down, and prepare dinner with whatever she had managed to scrounge up on her way there. Eat. Spend the first part of the night listening to her husband’s excuses for remaining unemployed, or even worse, take his abuse whenever he came home drunk; and the second part of the night, to top it all off, listening to her teenage boys, who took well after their father, bickering, quarreling, and all-out fighting in their room, robbing her of her patience, and massacring the few hours that were destined for sleep. She could swear that one of those days one of her children would go too far and really end up hurting the other one.

Being born poor in the slums of industrialized London had destined her to be, well, exactly where she was. Through belt and iron bar, her father had taught her diligence, hard work, and obedience as the pillars to survival; he had also promised to marry her off to a good man in the hopes that this would improve all of her family’s station. For a moment, when the man called Adam, now her husband, introduced himself as a nobleman, she had allowed herself to hope that what her father had said might come true. But too late did she come to realize that he was a noble alright, but a destitute one, a conman, a swindler without a penny to his name, and that marrying him had practically been a contract into slavery. Not that she would have had a say in the matter anyway; whatever her autocrat of a father decided was always final, set in stone, so there would have been no chance for her to wiggle out of the marriage.

She had gotten to thinking during her sleepless nights. This had started to happen automatically, without her wanting it, but for some reason, she just couldn’t stop. Thinking, she had been taught by her father, only brought about trouble. Idle heads could easily be overtaken by demons, and devilish thoughts only led to sin, and of course hell. She tried to fight these uncontrollable impulses in her head, but try as she might, these thoughts insisted on reminding her of her choices, the things she had opted for at the beginning of her very first life, and she was starting to wonder if defiance had not been the best idea.

Adding to her daily troubles, that particular day, one of the other women that worked at the same factory accused her of stealing a bottle of apple cider from the boss’s cupboard. Lilian, she was called, claimed she had seen her early in the morning, sneaking out of the office, holding her raggedy coat to cover a bulge over her belly. –Prab’ly bringin’ it t’her drunkard hubby, she is, so me’be he won smack the light oot her t’night. -

Outraged by the false accusation, Evelyn walked over to the viper that wanted to frame her and smacked her across the face with a right cross. She then filled a bucket from the bolt cleansing well and splashed boiling water on the accuser’s face as she yelled –T’was prob’ly you, y’bitch Lilian you! She managed to then grab her by the hair, shook her like a cloth doll, and threw her to the floor. Jacob and Abraham, two of the bulkiest, largest men in the place, had to pull Evelyn off of Lilian and dragged her out into the street, where she was immediately fired by her boss who did not give a rat’s ass about her new pregnancy.

For a moment she stared into the blackened sky, and words meant to curse her father and all his progeny started to form in her head; but before they became a sentence, way before they reached her lips, the image of her pissed father whipping the flesh on her back open, breaking a bone with the iron bar, eyes-bulging-out of his face angry, reminded her of things she’d rather not face again, so she swallowed them back down.

Ava was exhausted. She could feel her legs trembling under the added weight of the banner she had been carrying around for hours. The day had been very long, and going back and forth from the meeting hall of the Women’s Social and Political Union to the doors of Parliament and the Coalition Government was taking its toll. But she knew there would be time to rest later. The sun was high in the sky, the Armistice with Germany had ended the First World War, there was a general air of hope filling the people’s hearts. Yet she and her friends, fellow militant suffragettes, knew that the war for equality was still raging and that they could not let the momentum, the pressure they had going, well, rest. –Deeds, not words!- the women shouted their Organization’s motto. Although her throat was sore and she could lose her voice at any time, she would have it burst if necessary; this was the time for change, and it could wait no longer.

She had been raised by a very strict father whose disciplinary methods had included everything from a scolding to a beating, but never love; a man that had expected from her nothing but obedience, lady-like manners, and faithful, unflinching devotion to whomever he chose to be her husband. But in her early twenties, she had fallen in love with another woman, Emmeline, and although she went through with a marriage to get her father off her back, it had been nothing but theater, fake, a Shakespearean play, a placating act that set her on the road to her emancipation and total freedom.

She had given her husband Aiden two boys, and after they were well into their teens, she left the three of them to their own devices. Sure, it saddened her terribly to hear that her eldest had killed her youngest for who knows what insipid reason; they had always been desperate to please their grandfather, and maybe his arbitrary choosing of one over the other as his favorite had triggered the family feud. It was just like her father, causing envy and problems among equals. Her husband, she found out, had not even intervened, always lost in thought and musings of a Paradise he had once dreamt of, and hoped he would someday find. –Bah! Poets- she thought, -head in the clouds, totally disconnected from what is really going on-

Like most other women of her time, she had suffered more than her fair share, and not only in this, but in past lives as well, she remembered. History had been harsh and unfair to her and those like her, always placing them in second place for no good reason, especially her father with all of his preferences and all of the advantages he granted men; smelly, war-driven, hard-drinking sloths, totally useless in many cases: men like her ex. Yet this was the chance for change and she would not let it slip by. So, although the banner was heavy, her throat burned, and the sun was turning her skin into a dry prune, she held on. The present was ripe for their revolution; she and all others like her could almost taste freedom, like sweet, fruity nectar on their lips. Winning the right to vote was only the first step; a bit of extra suffering was well worth it.

-You sssssee my dear- said her dandy friend, the man with a lanky body, snake-like features, and top of the line frack and tie that only she seemed to be able to see –I never fooled you. If you had gone for the fruit hanging from the pear tree in the garden that day, maybe you would have ssssssaved yourssssself ssssssome pain, your passsssst might have been a completely different one; but then, where would you be?