The Promise (11 page)

I backed away from the window, sure that the mark of adultery was visible on my features. Galveston was a thousand miles from Dayton, I told myself. And here, down the island, Dayton could be on the other side of the moon. Oscar might suspect I was in some kind of trouble but he couldn’t know the details. If he did, he would not have married me.

Someone still might tell him the truth. His mother might write to him. Or his younger sister or brothers. Oscar’s sister had been three years behind me in school. I couldn’t remember her name and I didn’t know what had become of her. But if she still lived in Dayton, if Oscar had written to his family about our engagement, if his sister had heard the rumors, she would warn him. A letter from her might arrive any day.

I went cold inside.

I must admit to it; I must confess to Oscar. Better to hear it from me than from his sister. I imagined telling him – ‘I found myself entangled with the wrong man, a married man.’ I pictured the shock on his face; I imagined him backing away from me.

The Ogden men had climbed down from their wagons and were walking this way, pulling up their braces. Oscar was with them. Andre ran to them and one of the men caught him and swung him in a circle. Andre laughed. Back on the ground, the little boy skipped, flinging his arms as the men walked with long strides. Oscar intended to introduce them to me, I realized.

No. I couldn’t bear for Oscar to see me, my disgrace exposed. ‘You do things right,’ he’d said about me. If he discovered the truth, what then?

The house began to shake. The men had come up the front steps. I went to the bedroom door to close it. ‘Don’t you all be tracking dirt on my floors,’ I heard Nan say.

‘Shoot,’ one of the Ogdens said. ‘You’re near as bad as Ma.’

‘Hush up,’ Nan said, and it was as if she were speaking to me. Say nothing, keep still. Oscar’s family might not know. His mother might not be living. His sister might have married and left Dayton years ago. His brothers could be the kind of men who did not write letters. Oscar might have lost touch with all of them.

On the crucifix nailed to the wall, painted blood dripped from the crown of thorns. Should Oscar learn the truth, he would turn me out of his home.

‘She’s having herself a rest,’ I heard Nan say.

‘She poorly?’ This was one of the Ogden men.

‘I asked her. Told me she wasn’t.’

‘Worn thin from the trip,’ Oscar said. ‘That’s what it is.’

Gratitude rushed through me. He’d made my excuses.

I closed the door and sat down at the dressing table. My face, pale and gaunt, stared back at me from the mirror. The voices of Oscar and the Ogdens in the parlor were distant and faint.

My hands trembling, I took off the black crystal earrings. Trinkets, I thought. For Edward’s mistress. I had worn them every day, even for my wedding. Now I couldn’t bear the sight of them. I went to the open trunk and pushed the earrings into a side pocket beneath my handkerchiefs and sachets. Tomorrow I’d bury them. Or throw them into the gulf.

Through the closed bedroom door, Oscar’s voice was a soft mumble. He’d wanted the men to meet me, his wife. As if I were a spoiled child, I had placed him in a position where he had to make excuses to his employees for my absence.

I deserved everything that had happened to me. I couldn’t repair the damage I’d done to Edward’s family. I couldn’t make amends to Oscar for my letters that were one deception after the next. But I would not shame him before his employees.

I put my hand on the doorknob and opened the door.

‘I’m ready to get on home,’ I heard Nan say.

‘You don’t look ready,’ one of the Ogdens said.

‘That’s ’cause I’m waiting for you to get the ice. Guess you all are just going to let it melt out there in the sun.’

I raised my chin and began the walk down the short dim hall to the parlor to meet the Ogdens.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mrs Williams

I saw how the new Mrs Williams looked at the house when Oscar brought her here. Her face was pinched like she was on the windward side of meat left out to rot in the sun. Oscar’s own face was streaked with worry as he helped her down from the wagon, then helped her up the veranda steps, doing his best to please her. For pity’s sake, I thought as he stumbled through the ‘howdy do’s, me and her taking our measure of each other. Oscar should stand proud of his house. It was painted and the veranda went all the way around it. There was running water in the kitchen and washroom, and the floors weren’t pine but oak, sanded smooth as could be. It wasn’t patched together like my family’s house was, Daddy adding on a room now and again, the floors not altogether even. Oscar had the finest fireplace on our end of the island, other than the Fultons’, but they were city people. The Fultons’ house by the bay was all about show, them able to have a big house in the city and one here, too. But Oscar’s fireplace was red brick, and if Mrs Williams noticed, she kept that to herself.

Then there was Oscar himself. A finer man couldn’t be found nowhere, and everybody on the island knew it. Everybody but him, that was.

My own brothers, Frank T. and Wiley, were nearly struck dumb when they met the new Mrs Williams. Oscar brought them up to the house as soon as they got back from their milk deliveries. At first I didn’t think she’d leave the bedroom, but there she was, her chin high. ‘Ain’t you all never seen a pretty woman before?’ I nearly said. I was that ashamed. Them two shuffled their feet on the parlor floor like they were ignorant schoolboys, not grown men. Frank T. put his hat to his heart like he wasn’t promised to Maggie Mandora. Wiley did the same, but he kept his mouth shut so as to hide where a cow had kicked out a few of his front teeth. They called her ‘ma’am’, and when she smiled that narrow smile of hers, both of them turned beet red. Frank T. took to patting down his brown hair like it could be tamed, and Wiley’s hand went to the back of his pants to make sure his shirt hadn’t come untucked.

It was plain to see that Mrs Williams cast a spell over men. Maybe it was that neck of hers, nearly as white as all the lace on her collar and shirtwaist. Or maybe it was her figure, buxom full but narrow at the waist. Her eyes were blue and her eyelids drooped just a tad, lending her a sleepy look. Her complexion wouldn’t win no prizes, though – it had a washed-out color – but all in all, she added up in a way that turned men silly.

‘Supper’s laid out on the stove,’ I told her when the men finally clomped off to the barn, Frank T. having told her she was mighty welcome to Texas. It was nearly time for me to go home, and if she knew about tomorrow’s dance set up just so folks could meet her, she hadn’t let on.

‘Pardon?’ she said. She was looking at the piano in the parlor, her long fingers tapping the sides of her yellow skirt. Earlier, she’d told me she was going to rest and I took that to mean she’d change from her Sunday best into something more everyday. But there she was, close to four o’clock in the afternoon and still dressed up. She’d taken off her black glass earrings, though, and I was glad for it. Nobody wore earrings that dangled, not during the day they didn’t.

‘I’ll be going on home directly,’ I said. ‘All you’ve got to do is heat up supper. It’s mostly what’s left over from dinner, fish and rice, it being Friday.’ Puzzlement showed on her face. I said, ‘Catholics don’t eat meat on Fridays.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said like she knew that.

‘Mr Williams likes his supper at five. Shortly, stoke up the stove, get it good and hot.’ Now another question showed on her face. I said, ‘Maybe you’re not overly familiar with a wood stove. What do you all have up there in Ohio? Gas?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t say,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived in a hotel for the past few years.’

Oh good Lord, what on earth had Oscar gone and done? I knew of only one kind of woman that lived in hotels. Tears burned the backs of my eyes and a sick feeling settled in the bottom of my belly. I turned away from Mrs Williams, just as I had resolved to turn away from Oscar and bury my feelings for him. I had to; I was a curse to the men that took up with me. When I was sixteen, Oakley Hill drowned five days before our wedding, his fishing boat found overturned and him all tangled up in rope. I was twenty-one when Joe Pete Conley, a man who had been courting me for five months, got lockjaw and died. That was June of last summer.

I was a danger to men, anybody could see it. When I told Mama and Daddy that, they sat me down. Mama said, ‘There’s women like that,’ and Daddy said, ‘Best you never marry. Best you just plan on taking care of us during our coming old age.’

Ever since Bernadette died, I had stepped around Oscar, telling myself I couldn’t care for him, not overly. I had to keep him safe. Not that he’d tried to court me. Likely he hadn’t even thought about it, mourning Bernadette the way he had. And if he had thought of it, could be he figured I was still grieving for Joe Pete Conley. But now there was Catherine Williams, come from out of the blue, a woman that had lived in a hotel and cast spells over men.

I kept all of that to myself when I went home and Mama asked about her. ‘She’s a Yankee,’ was how I put it.

‘Same as Oscar,’ Mama said. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s why he married her. Likely he wanted somebody that knew him when he was a boy, somebody that knows his kin.’ I was washing the supper dishes and she was drying, a little bent over, the arthritis kicked up bad in her back. Daddy and the boys were on the veranda with their feet propped up on the railing, puffing on pipes as they watched the day shift into evening, their bellies filled with oyster stew.

‘Well, she’s old,’ I said. ‘And she’s nothing like Bernadette.’

‘Don’t talk to me about being old,’ Mama said. She was gray-haired and sorrowful about it.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And nobody’s like Bernadette. But we’re going to welcome Oscar’s new wife tomorrow night because that’s how we do.’

‘She’s not overly fond of waltzes, told me that herself.’

‘That’s something Oscar will have to sort out. She’s his choice, not yours.’

I held Mama’s words in my mind early the next morning as I rode in the wagon to Oscar’s. I sat with Wiley on the buckboard. He drove the horses while Frank T. was in the wagon bed, likely dozing some. Overhead, the stars started to fade as they gave way to dawn. We lived on the bayou, and as the crow flies, it wasn’t all that far from Oscar’s. But we weren’t crows. It was a mile from our place to the ridge road, the trail rough in places. There was the fence gate that marked Oscar’s western boundary to open and close. After that, it was a half-mile of ridge road, us going east, a speck of light up ahead.

That came from Oscar’s barn. He was at work, like always, but the house was as dark as a tomb. The boys dropped me off at the veranda steps, and when I let myself into the house, Mrs Williams’ bedroom door was closed. It was coming up on four-thirty, and there wasn’t even a sliver of light to be seen from around the edges of her door.

The very notion of it was a disturbance. Dairy farm people didn’t laze about in bed unless they were sick or feeble, and Mrs Williams wasn’t either. Leastways, I didn’t think so. I lit a few kerosene lamps in the kitchen, got a fire going in the stove, and went to work cooking breakfast. About the time I put the biscuits in the oven, Andre stumbled out of his room in his nightshirt. His hair stood up in little spikes, and his eyes were puffy.

‘Honey boy,’ I said, pressing him to me.

‘She gone?’ he said.

‘Hush that talk, she’s your daddy’s wife.’

‘I don’t like her.’

‘Well, your daddy does and that’s what counts.’

‘She said I ain’t allowed to say ain’t.’

Acting like a schoolteacher was no way to start with a child. I held him to me, feeling the smallness of his back and liking how he put his face against my shoulder.

‘She’s your daddy’s wife,’ I said. ‘Now get your britches on and go on to the outhouse. Bang on the door and holler in.’

I had biscuits in the oven. I’d cooked the grits, cracked the eggs, fried slices of ham and there still wasn’t the first sign of Mrs Williams. The men came in from the barn and ate, Andre ate too. My brothers looked all woeful that she wasn’t sitting there for them to gawk at while Oscar made excuses for her. ‘This heat,’ he said. ‘It takes the starch out of a person when you first get here.’

The sun had risen bright when I heard Mrs Williams open the bedroom door. I scrambled a few eggs for her while she was in the washroom. It was the Christian thing to do even if she was lazy. Lazy was something this house had never seen before. It was after seven o’clock, and I had the breakfast dishes washed, Oscar was cleaning out stalls with Andre helping some, and Frank T. and Wiley were in the city, dropping off bottles of milk at people’s doors. When Mrs Williams sat down at the table, I put some biscuits and slices of ham on a plate along with the eggs and grits.

‘Thank you,’ she said. Then, ‘Coffee, please.’

‘It’s warming on the stove,’ I said. ‘Help yourself.’

It took her a while to understand that I didn’t intend to wait on her hand and foot. She got up and poured herself a cup. Her clothes were a notch down from yesterday’s. Her skirt was dark green, and her shirtwaist had only half the lace, but these were still Sunday clothes and finer than anything I’d ever hope to own. She was showing off, I thought. Then I told myself that was envy talking, an ugly quality if there ever was one.

She ate, and I scrubbed the frying pan, my back to her. I’d done nothing but wash dishes this morning. Mrs Williams had done a poor job in the kitchen last night. I couldn’t find half what I needed. She’d put the forks where the spoons belonged, and the dishes were stacked wrong on the shelf. Every pot was speckled with stuck-on dried food. Some of the plates were, too.

She said, ‘The scrambled eggs are very good. As are the biscuits.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘There is, however, something that you’ve served which is new for me.’

I looked over my shoulder. Her fork hovered above her plate. I said, ‘Grits. Those are grits.’

‘I see. A Southern dish.’

I didn’t know what she was talking about. Grits was food, not a dish. I said, ‘You all don’t eat grits up there in Ohio?’