The man with the lantern kicked open the door, so Mother never paused, but walked right across the threshold followed by the man with her rocker and carpet. The door closed. Dad stood alone in the yard.
“Mother!” I ran across the yard. “Stop her, Dad!” I ran past him and banged my fists on the door. “We can’t leave her here alone.” He grabbed my wrists, but I twisted away and kicked him. “Get her out, Dad. Get her out. She’s ours, Dad. Get her out!”
He grabbed me up and ran and didn’t stop until we were outside the gate. “I hate you. I hate you.” I screamed and kicked. But his iron arms stopped my breath. He held me against him and laid his hand on my head to press my cheek against his wet neck. “Swallow it, Danny,” he whispered. “Swallow it down.”
* * *
That night Dad and I started back to our claim in Oklahoma Territory. I lay in the wagon box a lot the first few days of the trip. I felt he hadn’t loved her and therefore it was not a sin what he’d done. I had loved her, but not enough. She wouldn’t have got that crying sickness if I’d loved her more.
Now and then, I raised my spirits by playing the paper piano in the back of the wagon. Mother’s voice was growing fainter, so I had to sing the notes myself, but that did no good, for I always sang the right note no matter where my dumb fingers struck. It was a kind of cheating.
One afternoon as I rolled up the paper, I stared at my father’s back, the knobs of his spine arcing forward, elbows resting on his knees. He was so bent the underside of his hat brim was all I could see of his head. I climbed forward to sit beside him.
“Are you lonely, Dad?” The cheek jerked with the bad tooth, but he kept looking ahead to the southwest. Finally, he nodded—one dip of his scraggly face.
“Then I’ll stay up here,” I said. I knew I would need to do all the talking, but that was fine with me because whenever I stopped talking, I could feel the weasel sneaking up on me. The names Andersonville and Lincoln Asylum kept coming into my mind, and I knew I’d feel better if I was sitting next to a soldier
THE END
THE LUCKIEST LITTLE THING IN THE WORLD
1887
Some wives run away. Victoria’s own mother escaped as a ghost.
A photograph was taken of my parents on their wedding day in Asheville, North Carolina, November 1870. I came upon this cardboard-framed portrait wrapped in a remnant of gray silk in their bedroom highboy. Ten or eleven-years-old at the time, I worked with trembling fingers to unwrap something Mama clearly wanted wrapped up. But I knew it immediately for what it was, and I couldn’t breathe. The groom in a beautiful frock coat looked perfectly frozen, standing straight, chest out, his mustaches curled up, his tall hat reverently balanced on his palm. The girl in a silk bonnet seated to his left appeared, by the fierce look in her eyes, to be trying to stay still. But what had been easy for the groom had been beyond her. And the mouth was blurred as though she had started to say something.
“Oh, Victoria, darlin’, kindly put that back as you found it,” Mama said. I hadn’t heard her come up behind me, and I jumped. “That ruined thing,” she said. “See how my mouth is all catty-wampus. A regular mess. Put it away. Please.”
I looked down at the photograph. It didn’t look ruined to me. She had many times told me how Father, a lawyer, a man of property, had fallen in love and rescued her from want and desolation. He married her when she was just sixteen. I thought of Mama in the flames of the war and in the mean times that followed, and my heart raced. She must have believed herself to be the luckiest little thing in the world to ascend from the ashes of a small farm near the Smoky Mountains into the shelter of society in Asheville, North Carolina. Society in all the cities of the South was in grave distress in those days because of the loss of homes and property and businesses, but there were men like my father, Gilbert Alphonse Jenkins, who made a quick recovery. The idea of the orphan girl on her wedding day was terrifying and romantic. And here in my hands was a proof of the stories Mama had told me of their love.
Ever after that first discovery, I would often unwrap the dry silk to gaze at the picture which seemed more and more important to me as the regular patterns of my life dissolved. Last spring Mama removed herself from that bedroom to a smaller room down the hall.
At dinner my little brother, Wendell, only five, had asked, “Mama, why did you sleep in the little room?”
Father scowled and Wendell lifted his hand to shade his eyes as though Father’s face were a fierce sun. Father reached out to pull his hand down. This caused Mama to sing out brightly, “Wendell, darlin’, I have removed myself to the sewing room until I’m cured of this pesky cough. Victoria, dear, tell your Father about your paintings.”
“That St. Pierre woman wasn’t here again today, was she?” Father asked.
“They are going to hang them up on Contest Night all over the school house. Just think, our daughter so accomplished at fifteen.”
“She’s nothing but a gossip,” Father pushed on. “Bessie said she was here today.”
“Well,” Mama said, extravagant and playful, “if Bessie said she was here, she must have been here. Isn’t that right, Victoria? I myself did not see her, but Mrs. St. Pierre would never speak ill of
you
, Gilbert,” Mama said, her eyes twinkling. “She is one of your admirers.”
Mrs. St. Pierre, a woman of strong opinions and coarse manners, forced a visit upon us often. In her garish mismatch of second-hand laces and furs, she reeked of perfume and unaired trunks. I had ceased taking her upstairs to visit Mama where she invariably clucked about, shifting the covers and recommending brutal remedies such as the blistering. I took upon myself the burden of entertaining this unrefined woman.
* * *
Bessie was our Irish hired girl who, though she rarely went anywhere except out to do the shopping, seemed to know a great deal about what went on Asheville as well as the whole of the Buncombe County. Bessie, her red face always moist, her carrot hair always frizzing down into in her eyes, was the one to tell me of anything exciting—calves born with two heads, girls sent away by their families, or murders— “She shot ‘im dead with his own rifle, cartridges in plain sight on the Chinese carpet.” Bessie was also the one who told me Father had made his quick recovery by putting all his own money and much he had from northern investors into buying up land from distressed plantation owners.
I was just the opposite from Bessie. I never knew what was going on.
That spring the doctor, who had at first been quite strict about the dangers of the cough medicine he prescribed for Mama—“One teaspoon only, morning and night”—put the bottle of medicine in my hand and told me I could give her as much as was needed for the catarrh. He seemed to be saying his patient could now swig down all she wanted.
And something else that had never happened before: I heard Bessie argue with my father. “I’m only asking for what’s my own back wages.”
“If you can’t be patient, I can have a darkie in here in a minute—plenty of them down at the Bureau with their skinny hands out. Not another word! You’ll be paid in due time.”
Around that same time I noticed another strange alteration in our household. I felt my father’s eyes pass off the three of us—Mama, Wendell, and me. I knew he was eating most of his meals at the homes of friends in order to spare Bessie. Nevertheless, his absence gave me a guilty relief. I was now able to look after Mama in my own way, and Wendell was allowed to keep to himself, dreaming and singing his silly songs without criticism. Father was busy with business and with Asheville’s society. He bought new clothes and hired a team of men to paint our house a beautiful ivory. All summer life had seemed more spacious as Father came and went, spending most evenings helping the Widow Barringer with her late husband’s estate.
Mama and Wendell and I ate at the little mahogany card table in her bedroom, at least we two children did. Mama’s cough caused her to keep to her bed most days. She would sometimes doze off, her head dropped back on her little baby pillow, the fork still in her hand.
“I am sleeping my life away,” she wailed yesterday afternoon. “I am not taking anymore of that cough medicine.” And then she began to cough. And I seized the bottle and the spoon and began to pour her a dose.
“No, no, Victoria. We are going to do something pleasurable. You rush home every day from school, never get to play.”
“Oh, no, Mama, I’m quite fine.” I rushed to pick up the covers which were sliding off the bed as she put her feet onto the embroidered foot stool. It was strange that the thinner and weaker Mama was, the more excitable and beautiful she became. She stepped off the footstool and with her long black hair still undone walked to the window. Wendell, who was turned sideways in his chair, leaned his head against the spokes in the back, stuck his thumb in his mouth and gazed at Mama. I stared also as she looked out at the ginkgo tree in back of our house, the afternoon sun shining through the folds of her lawn nightgown in such a glowing way as to make of her little body nothing but a wispy shadow. She was smaller than me now, and I could no longer wear her hand-me-downs.
“Just look at it, Vic,” she said. “Look at the sun on those yellow leaves. If only I could paint! You could do it with your watercolors. The world is so unspeakably beautiful! We are going outside today. Winter is coming, and we must seize this sunny day.”
“Please, Mama, come away from that drafty window before you begin to cough.”
“I don’t wanna go.” Wendell said.
“It’s chilly outside,” I said, “the middle of November. I would never forgive myself—”
“I will be fine. I am getting better. I surely am.” She turned slowly like a doll on a music box, her arms outstretched.
“Your arms look like twigs, Mama,” Wendell said.
“So they do,” Mama replied looking at her arms as though unfamiliar with them.
Wendell slid out of his chair and started for the stairs. By this time of the afternoon, his little room was warmed by the sun, and he would sit in the patch of sunshine on the floor and move his little horses around.
I dressed her warmly—flannel petticoats, muslin camisole, serge jacket and skirt, a heavy shawl, bonnet and gloves, wool stockings and her low-heeled boots. Over my arm I carried the tartan and the feather bed and Mama hugged her little pillow. She’d had this little pillow all her life. Her own mama had stuffed it with cotton and made a little pillow slip embroidered all over with blue forget-me-nots and violets made out of French knots and put it in her cradle. It’s all faded pinky gray now but Mama says the little pillow just fits at the back of her neck when she’s trying to get to sleep. I notice she also hugs it to her when she’s trying not to cough.
Exhausted from the effort of dressing, she rested her arm on my shoulder, and I walked her out the front door and around the yard to avoid the steep back steps. I spread the tartan on the ground beneath the ginkgo tree, and Mama lay down on her back gazing up through the yellow leaves. We loved this—looking up the tree. Even in winter Mama loved the patterns the black branches made against the sky. “See darling how straight out the twigs grow.” And I did see them jutting out like thorns or nails. In spring we’d watch for the buds to come on, and on a summer evening lie here to catch the breezes which swept down off the high meadow behind the house. Sometimes, after the sun was long gone but before the stars came out, I would feel quite sure Mama saw something I did not in the tree or the sky, for her eyes would look quite lively as though following a speeding image beyond the branches.
This afternoon I put the pillow under Mama’s head and spread the feather bed over her. She lay still, and I knew she was trying not to cough after the exertion of the walk. I crawled in under the feather bed and laid my arm over her waist, careful to avoid the sore spots. As though to welcome us the tree suddenly danced with a great shower of falling yellow leaves. “Oh my!” Mama exclaimed. “How lavish the Lord is! Like golden coins slipped from the Maker’s hand.”
Lavish, yes, and yet today, I felt the waste of it. So many times I had studied a single ginkgo leaf, holding it in my palm or up to the sun to see beneath the surface the hidden red flecks rushing up from the stem. These leaves seemed made of the thinnest leather like fine kid gloves. Little fans with cunning deckled edges. And with each gust of wind, a thousand more were spilt upon the ground to rot.
“Victoria,” she began in her hoarse, whispery voice. “I heard the elegant Mrs. St. Pierre downstairs this afternoon.”
“Oh, Lordy.” I was glad to hear her playful tone.
“Don’t you find her,” Mama whispered, “a little, shall I say, girthful for a young woman?”
I giggled.
“A little painted perhaps for a Methodist? a touch forward for—”
“A touch forward! Mama, she is a charging bison. Whatever happened to Mr. Pierre? Did she run him out of that big house?”
“Ah, Vic, when Mrs. St. Pierre turned twenty, she began a new life. She sold her farm to a carpet bagger, moved into town, and changed her name. She just refused to be an old maid.”
I was astounded. How is it I didn’t know this. I would wager Bessie knew this. “Was there a Mr. St. Pierre?”
“Well, there was a peddler.”
“Mama!”
“No, no. She didn’t marry the peddler,” Mama whispered. “This entirely innocent peddler had come to her farm before she moved, and he sold her some shell buttons. She asked him where these beautiful buttons had come from, and he said, ‘Ah lady, these buttons come from St. Pierre.’ And I suppose she thought it had an elegant sound, and she bought that house on Montgomery Street in the name of Josephine St. Pierre.”
“What was her name before?”
“Nettie Crow.”
I burst out laughing. “Oh Mama, that’s terrible. Nettie Crow!” I hooted.
Mama coughed hard and deep, then rolled away onto her stomach to spit a small pool of blood onto the yellow leaves. She quickly turned the leaves over, so I wouldn’t see it. She lay on her back, her pink cheeks blowing up with trapped coughs. I tried to find some serious thoughts to sober both of us. I looked up into the towering tree. A few leaves were still green, here in November, tender little leaves hugging close to the limbs. Ginkgoes are the strangest trees.