The Bride's House (15 page)

“I hear you.”

Charlie nodded then and put down his hands. He turned to the men who’d gathered outside the store to see what was going on and looked at each one. They’d heard. They knew he wouldn’t stand for anyone speaking against Nealie. They knew what he’d do. Charlie waited a moment, perhaps to see if anyone would challenge him. And then one of the men said, “Hello, Charlie,” and the others relaxed and shuffled back into the store. The story got about pretty quick, and before long, everybody in Georgetown knew better than to gossip about Nealie Dumas.

Charlie went on home then, waiting on the porch for a few minutes to calm down, reaching into his pocket for his pipe, but he had forgotten to buy the tobacco. Nealie heard him and opened the door and said grandly, “Welcome to the Bride’s House, Mr. Dumas.” He never said a word to her about what had taken place at the store. And while Nealie found out later on that Charlie had tromped a man the day of her tea, she never knew the cause of it.

*   *   *

That was Nealie’s only party in the Bride’s House, because she was sensible of her condition and had read in a magazine that women in the latter stages of pregnancy were not to be seen in society. She was content those last months to remain inside the house, building a nest, as Mrs. Travers put it. Each day, she cleaned the Bride’s House, waxing the floors, oiling the woodwork, sweeping the carpets. She gloried in the house and kept it as clean as a hymn. The Bride’s House was magical, and Nealie could not believe that such a magnificent place was hers. She never tired of wandering through its rooms, examining the house with awe. A dozen times a day, she drew aside the lace curtains to peer at Sunrise Peak or stood in the front hall admiring the staircase that curved up to the bedrooms.

She rarely left the house except to go to the Kaiser Mercantile to buy groceries, and she loved walking home, stopping on the walk beside where she would plant the lilac hedge—Charlie had ordered the bushes—staring at the house and knowing it was hers. Sometimes, as spring came on, she walked a little, stopping to visit Mrs. Travers, and once she stopped for the mail. Charlie always went for it in the afternoons, complaining sometimes that he couldn’t walk a block without someone stopping him to swap gossip about the mines, to ask his advice. She thought he’d be pleased she’d saved him a trip to the post office. When she handed him his letters, however, Charlie frowned at her and asked in a harsh voice, “What are you doing with the mail? You got no business picking up my mail.”

He never raised his voice to her, and Nealie was taken aback. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Pleased? The mail’s mine. Don’t you ever do it again.”

Nealie stared at Charlie a moment, confused, and then she understood. Charlie was afraid that Will would write to her. He picked up the mail just in case there was a letter from Will. And maybe there had been. Maybe Will had written to her, and Charlie had torn up the letter. What if Will had sent her a letter saying he was coming for her?

Nealie stared at her husband for a long time, wanting to ask if Will had written. And Charlie stared back at her, perhaps waiting for her to ask. Nealie knew she couldn’t, however. She’d promised never to mention his name. So she bowed her head and left the room and never again went for the mail.

As she neared her time, Nealie took to sitting in a little rocker in the upstairs hallway, stitching baby things and staring through the lace curtain at the falling snow, although it was spring. She had never been a needlewoman, but she liked rocking back and forth, thinking, feeling the baby move inside her, dreaming that someday, Will would come back. She would answer the door, dressed in gray silk, and she would say, “How nice to see you, Mr. Spaulding,” and hold out her hand. Will would find her elegant and refined, and see how she had come up in the world. He would be impressed with the house, the gardens, and he would ask to see the baby, and it would break his heart. Will would cry because of the way he had treated her. She would forgive him, and he would beg her to go away with him. The dream always turned fuzzy then, and Nealie was never sure how it ended. But the dream never went away. She was thinking about Will when the first labor pain hit her.

*   *   *

Nealie smelled lilacs. But it was too early for lilacs, and besides, the bushes hadn’t even been planted. They were her favorite flowers. That was why Charlie had ordered two dozen bushes to be set around the Bride’s House. She opened her eyes to the light flooding into the bedroom and looked around. The curtain was open and the window, and through it was the view she’d come to love of Sunrise Peak, its summit dusted with snow. Nealie turned her head a little and saw the lilacs then, a bouquet as big as a sagebush, sitting on the table beyond the baby’s cradle. She inhaled the fragrance as she glanced at the sleeping infant, satisfied.

The labor had been a hard one, and long. Charlie had fetched Mrs. Travers when it started, and the woman stayed with Nealie through the night, and the next day. “The boarders will understand, and if they don’t, they can eat their shoes,” she said. During the second night, Mrs. Travers called in another woman to help, because the delivery was worse than anything she had seen before. They made the girl drink water in which eggshells had been boiled and placed scissors and shoes upside down under the bed to ease the birthing, and the second woman remarked that she didn’t understand why Nealie was having so much trouble, because the girl had slender ankles, a sure sign of an easy delivery. But it hadn’t been easy, and the two women were afraid Nealie would be torn apart before the baby was born.

The baby came at last, but neither woman had been able to stop the bleeding, so Charlie had gone for the doctor. Nealie remembered the doctor, but when was that—yesterday or the day before? She had been so tired that she’d slept, and now time was unclear in her mind.

Charlie had stayed with her during her labor, she remembered, holding her hand, telling her it would be over soon. “Now most men, they won’t go in a birthing room. They’ll pace the floor or go to the saloon and get drunk, but Charlie Dumas, why, we couldn’t get rid of him with a stick,” Mrs. Travers told Nealie.

And then the baby pushed its way out of her, and she screamed with the pain. She thought of Will and cursed him silently, because she couldn’t say his name out loud. Finally, it was over. Mrs. Travers told her the infant was just a little chunk of a baby, too small to give Nealie all that trouble, but Charlie said she was just right, the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. He held her up, still wet, her hair slicked down on her head, so that Nealie could see her.

“Red hair. Fancy hair. She’s the spit of you,” he said, to Nealie’s relief, because she had feared the baby would resemble Will. “We’ll call her Little Nealie.”

“No,” Nealie replied. “I don’t want to call her that. Her name is Pearl.” She didn’t know why she blurted out the name like that. She had been so sure she’d have a boy, one she’d name George for the town, that she hadn’t considered a girl’s name. She remembered that Will told her once that he fancied the name Pearl, and after all, it was his baby. Charlie didn’t need to know about the name, of course.

Now as Nealie looked at the infant, sleeping with her little fist against her mouth, she decided Pearl was just right, because the infant was as smooth and pink as a pearl.

She wanted to hold the baby and tried to sit up, but she was weak, and so she lay there and watched the sun creep into the room, feeling its warmth on her face, which was flushed and fevered. Her hair, which had darkened during her pregnancy, was curly from the damp of perspiration. She felt lethargic, but happy. Charlie came into the room then with Mrs. Travers, telling Nealie he’d engaged the older woman to care for her and the child until Nealie was stronger. And Mrs. Travers had found a wet nurse.

“I told the boarders they could eat at the hotel if they wanted to,” Mrs. Travers said, then added, “Not a one of them complained when I said I was taking care of you and your baby.”

Nealie hadn’t expected happiness with Charlie, and it had come as a surprise. He was a good man. She’d thought that after a time, after they were settled in, he might change, that he’d resent her, might even beat her as her father had her mother, but he’d never once touched her except in tenderness. He brought her presents—perfume, a nightgown with lace on it, a pair of kid slippers. When Nealie’s legs cramped in the night, due to some quirk in her pregnancy, Charlie had rubbed them. And as the baby inside her grew so big that she had trouble sleeping, Charlie would go to the kitchen and bring her back a cup of hot chocolate. Then he’d sit beside her in his nightshirt and read to her from a mining book until she was so bored that she fell asleep.

*   *   *

“You’ve been asleep for two days,” Charlie told her.

“Two days? I’m as lazy as a chicken.” She pushed the covers aside and moved her legs, and when she looked down, she saw that both her nightgown and the bed were soaked in blood.

Mrs. Travers saw it, too. “Get the doctor. She’s still sick from the bornin’,” she ordered Charlie, who rushed out. After she staunched the bleeding, the older woman went to the cradle and picked up Pearl, handing her to Nealie. But Nealie was not strong enough to hold the baby, so Mrs. Travers laid the tiny creature beside her mother, and Nealie slipped her finger into Pearl’s fist.

“She has a favorance to you, not Charlie,” Mrs. Travers said. “Why, you’d think you produced her all by yourself.” Nealie barely nodded, and the older woman continued talking. “Did you see the lilacs? Charlie sent all the way to Denver for them. They’re blooming down below now, even though they haven’t yet budded out up here. They came in on the train. I guess there’s not a thing your husband wouldn’t do for you. Marrying him was a stroke of luck.” Lidie Travers’s voice was almost hysterical, the way she carried on, talking to keep both their minds off the hemorrhaging.

“I guess I ought to thank you for that. I never told you I was grateful, you telling him about me,” Nealie whispered.

“You’re acting druggy,” Mrs. Travers told her. “Now don’t say another word. Charlie will skin me if I let you get bad-sick.”

“Am I bad off?”

Mrs. Travers looked down at the baby, whose mouth was twisting about, and in a minute Pearl opened her eyes.

“Am I?” Nealie persisted.

“I don’t know about such things, but it looks to me like you’re a long way from heaven’s gate. Now you rest or you’ll be dwindling away.”

Nealie heard Charlie downstairs, and in a minute he was in the room, followed by the doctor, who went to Nealie and examined her. The bleeding had started again, and he asked Nealie how long it had gone on. The girl didn’t know, so the doctor questioned Mrs. Travers. He poked and prodded and examined Nealie, then turned his back to her and spoke quietly to Charlie.

“Am I going to die?” Nealie asked.

The two men looked at each other. Then Charlie nodded once at the doctor, saying his wife had the right to know. He broke into great, racking sobs then, so the doctor went to the bed and took Nealie’s hand and told her she’d be in heaven before the day ended.

Nealie thought about that a long time, and then she told Charlie she wanted to see the preacher. “You fetch him,” she said in a weak voice.

“I’ll get him,” the doctor offered, but Nealie said she wanted Charlie to go. So because dying people often didn’t make sense, the doctor nodded at Charlie, who left the room, the doctor behind him. Nealie listened as they went down the stairs and out the front door. Then she turned to Mrs. Travers and said, “I want a paper and an envelope. I got to write something before Charlie comes back.”

“If it’s a will and testament, I’ll witness it,” Mrs. Travers said, but Nealie shook her head. Mrs. Travers brought the writing materials and helped Nealie dip the pen into the bottle of ink. Then Nealie began a letter. It wasn’t long, just a few sentences, because she was too weak to write any more. When she was finished, she put the paper into the envelope and wrote “Will” on it, handing it to Mrs. Travers. “You make sure he gets it. But don’t tell Charlie.” Then she lay back on the pillow, exhausted.

Nealie was lying there, weak, her mind a little cloudy, when she heard the front door and whispered, “Will?”

“Hush. It’s Charlie. It’s your husband,” Mrs. Travers said.

Charlie rushed up the stairs and sat down on the bed beside Nealie, taking her hand, not talking, until the preacher arrived a few minutes later. Then Charlie stood and went to the window and stared down into the yard. The big man was not graceful, and his shoulders shook a little as he reached out to the wall to support himself.

The minister studied Nealie, a look of sadness on his face, because he was young and not yet used to ministering to the needs of those dying before their time. He opened his Bible and read a verse that began, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.” And then he took Nealie’s hands and said a prayer.

“I’m going to die,” Nealie murmured.

The preacher looked at Charlie, who turned, his hand still held awkwardly against the wall, and nodded once. “It’s God’s will,” the minister told her, and Nealie felt a great sadness, because she did not want to think God had decided she should go. But then her mind moved on, and in a minute, she was thinking about the lilacs, not the lilacs in the room but the ones that would bloom beside the house.

“I will stay if you like,” the minister said.

Charlie told him no. “I’d like to be alone with her,” he said, and the preacher nodded and left. Mrs. Travers went, too. Charlie talked to Nealie in a low voice, but the words didn’t make sense, and after a time, she stopped listening.