Stranger On Lesbos (12 page)

"I should have married one of the neighbor boys at home," Ma once said. "A farmer can always raise something to eat."

Pa gave her a sour look. "For Christ's sake shut up and quit bawling. You ain't never starved yet."

"Darrell did."

Frankie, hanging around the kitchen door, began to whimper. She had heard all she wanted to hear about Darrell, who just sort of dwindled away because Ma didn't have any milk for him and there was no money to buy groceries. The other kids were too little to understand what Ma's bulging apron meant. Frankie was a little vague on the details herself, but she knew there was going to be another baby soon
and there was no money this time, either, and the house was nightmare cold.

"I'll go out after dark and rob a vein," Pa said, surly.

"With company guards all over the place?" The MacAllister boy, shot down by the company police, lay in his mother's frigid front room with the cheekbones cutting through the wasting flesh, and the stink of his gangrened wound filling the house. The company doctor didn't bother with strikers, especially if they were known to carry union cards.

"Dirty sonsabitches," Pa said. "Shoot down their own mothers, company police would. A decent man wouldn't give them the time of day. A decent man would kill the bastards."

Frances said nothing. She had seen Bob MacAllister's own cousin Loren at the pit mouth, a boy who had gone fishing with the neighborhood kids a couple of summers before, beefy now with good food and armed with a police revolver. Had wondered if he was the one who fired the shot that pitched Bob on his face in the dirt.

Ma shook the last of the flour into a pan and turned the sack inside out. "Seems like I could stand it if I could get warmed up," she said. "Just for a minute, even."

Pa stood up. He was stooped from years of hard work and his dark thick hair was going gray, but he was still a big man, with iron muscles in his arms and shoulders. "I'll warm you up. Lorena, fetch me the ax."

So the doors came down, not neatly but with ragged blows of the old ax, and were hacked into kindling. Pa stuffed the cookstove and shook the coal-oil can hopefully, although they hadn't lit the lamp for more than a week. Then he ripped pages out of Frankie's geography book, and her heart tore across like paper.

But she stood up close to the stove with the others when the orange flames began to lick up and the first warmth stole out into the cold room. She held Delano up to see the red light flicker around the stovelids, and he forgot his sore chapped bottom and the hunger sores at the corners of his mouth and held his hands out to the light. Wonderful warmth
even Ma smiled, feeling her stiffness melt away and her long-carried dread lighten.

Frances, lying on Bake's sofa, sighed. And then tensed again, remembering that night when she lay awake and heard from behind the gaping doorway of her parents' bedroom the rise and fall of creaking springs, the muffled masculine whisper and the other, higher-pitched protest that she had been hearing from behind the closed door all her life. Only now there was no door to close. Lying on the front-room cot that had been all hers since Wanda married, she could see as well as hear. Moonlight came in the uncurtained window and lay across the patchwork quilt. Pretty soon the quilt slipped off, and the moonlight showed her the confused shape of two people merged into one. She was afraid and ashamed to look and unable to stop looking.

This was marriage, then. She had guessed at it last summer, when she came upon her sister Wanda and Chris Hollister in the woods, before they were married. But they were dressed, or partly so, and when they saw her standing there, Wanda smoothed down her skirt and Chris ran to hide behind a tree. So she hadn't been sure, had tried to fill in the gaps and empty places from her imagination.

"Oh God, Joe, you're killing me. It's too near my time."

A bass growl. The springs creaked faster and faster.

Frances squeezed her eyes shut. Hurry up, she begged silently. Hurry up and get it over with.

The sight of Wanda, the next day, sickened her even more. Married at fifteen and already pregnant with her first baby, Wanda had taken on the look of the older women, at once resentful and smug. Chris' widowed mother, lucky to be on home relief, had sent over a little brown-paper sack of wheat flour and one of dried prunes, and Wanda dropped them on the table and sat down heavily.

"God, my back aches."

Frankie stood beside the oilcloth-covered table, turning the little sack of prunes over and over in her hand. "Sis, do you like it
being married?"

"It's all right, I guess. Sure isn't much like you think it'll be." Wanda looked at her curiously. "What are you so interested for, all of a sudden?"

"I was thinking about Ma. Seems like she's never had anything but kids and hard work."

Wanda said, "Men's all alike, near about."

Frankie bent her head to read the fine printing on the prune bag. "I don't ever aim to get married."

"I used to say that too." Wanda laughed harshly. "Wait till the love bug bites you."

The gray of Frankie's eyes deepened, under the fine brows that were her only beauty. "I'm going to be a schoolteacher like Ma was, only I'm going to stay one."

"An old-maid schoolteacher?"

"Sooner be an old maid than have a baby every year."

Wanda sighed, cradling her bulge against the edge of the table. "Stay away from the men, then. Frankie, it's like an icebox in here."

Frances, remembering the skinny scab-kneed little girl she had been, shivered. She opened her eyes and looked at the embers in Bake's fireplace, glowing softly through a fine coating of ashes. "It's nice and warm in here," she said softly.

"It better be. I've got the gas bills to prove it." Bake appeared in the doorway, a smudge of flour on her cheek. "You're supposed to be asleep."

Frances blinked. "I hate to waste the time. We hardly ever get a whole day."

Bake grinned. "So rest. You'll be glad later."

Frances sighed. It was no use. She could never make anybody understand how wonderful it was to be warm clear through. Nobody else could possibly know.

She got lip, a little groggily, and followed Bake into the kitchen. She stood leaning against the doorframe, watching Bake as she opened the oven door and slid a pan in. This was a different Bake, her very own, no kin to the girl striding along against the wind or the girl reaching out in bed. Her heart warmed
all the way through.

"What's the matter, baby?"

"You know something?"

"Sure." Bake wiped her hands on the dishtowel. "Me too."

CHAPTER 10

“This is going to be a real vacation," Bake said. Her face glowed as it always did when she was describing some project of her own devising. "It's our anniversary. We've been together two years."

"Good God," Jane said, "that sets some kind of a record. Of course Kay and I have been together almost four, but that's different."

"Yes," Bake said with something steely and ominous in her voice, "I know about you and Kay."

"You know damn well
"

Lissa cut in, "Are you going to have a party? I love parties."

"Nope. We're going on a trip, a week or maybe two weeks if Frankie can get her vacation now. I've been thinking about Quebec. French Canada."

"Cold there this time of year," Jane said, breaking her Ry-Krisp and looking at it distastefully.

Frances said, "But Bake!"

Polly said maliciously, "Frances doesn't sound so enthusiastic. Maybe she isn't as crazy about sub-zero weather as you are."

"It isn't that," Frances said, troubled. "I'd love to go. Only I didn't plan on being gone so long during the school year."

"I suppose your child goes to camp in the summer," Polly said dryly. "How old is he now, old enough to wash his own neck and ears?"

"Seventeen. I know it sounds foolish, he's really old enough to take care of himself. But I don't like to leave him."

"The old maternal instinct. I use mine all up on Lissa, the big baby."

Lissa widened her eyes. "But Polly honey, I need to be taken care of."

"Sometimes I think both of those girls are feeble-minded," Bake said sharply when Polly had paid the waiter and left, with Lissa trailing along. "I can't understand Polly. She used to be such an intelligent girl. It isn't in that stupid little bitch of a Lissa to be faithful to anybody." She took the slip the waiter handed her and sat moodily studying it. "Goddam it, we can't even have a quiet meal together any more. Everybody has to come busting in."

Frances managed not to point out that the other three had been seated on the other side of the room until Bake called them over. There was no point in arguing with her when she was in this mood, especially after a couple of drinks. Bake's plans began to take on substance only after she had shared them with somebody else
she had to talk herself into things.