The Shore (11 page)

Medora did not return to the kitchen after that. The task of going through her father's library, his papers, his records, was immense, and she was no more inclined to leave Andrew alone to it than he was inclined to be left alone; when they were in bed at night he whispered that the servants seemed to know, that they stared right through him, and Medora whispered back that they knew nothing, that they just didn't like him. Even so, she found it uncomfortable, the gazes of the people that she had known all her life, felt a judgment in them that she did not want to confront.

They settled the affairs of the plantation as quickly as possible,
selling the horses, dividing up the land to be rented to tenant farmers, disposing of what they could not or did not want to take with them of her father's estate. A pair of steamer trunks sat, fully packed save for daily necessities, in their bedroom for a full month before they were able to leave. Andrew's first suggestion had been that they go west, start anew like everyone else with a past to forget; Medora vetoed this immediately, due to the likelihood of her being recognized immediately as half-Indian and the possible consequences of such. She objected also to foraying farther south—too hot—and north—too many Yankees—leaving Andrew with one cardinal direction in which to search for their future.

“Not a city, please, not a city. Or a town, if you can manage. Find us a place in the countryside. I don't care if we grow tobacco and raise horses, I don't care what we do, but please, find us a place that I can think of as home.”

On the day they left Medora sought out every member of the household, said a private goodbye, but Calley was nowhere to be found. Medora knew that this was because she did not want to be found, and she could not determine if the cause was distaste for partings or due to lingering disapproval of her own decisions. It was with mixed feelings that she eventually resigned herself to leaving without seeing Calley one last time.

They took the train east until they ran out of country; the line terminated in Norfolk, and Medora did not hesitate in expressing her opinion of the grim city.

“Keep your peace, woman, we haven't arrived yet,” Andrew responded jovially, but for the first time she realized that she was at the mercy of his whims. He bought her a pot of coffee and some muffins before taking her to the ferry landing,
checked to be sure that their trunks had been properly stowed and then settled her solicitously in a place near the rail with a good view.

The mainland receded slowly in the spring mist, so that when the vague, marshy outline of Accomack Island appeared she felt as though she had entered the fairy realm she had read about as a small child. Andrew had bought land for a plantation north of the county seat at Parksley, the acreage already tilled and planted, the foundations laid for a house and the outer walls curing—a couple had intended to set themselves up there, much as they were about to, but the husband had fallen ill and was confined to a sanatorium in northern Maryland. Andrew engaged rooms for them at the health spa at Wachapreague, as the season was just beginning and it would be six months before their house was finished, and there Medora was left to her own devices for most of the day, while her faux-husband went off to tend to their business.

The role of lady of leisure did not sit well with her, and after the first week, which was occupied entirely with casual conversations with the three other women in situ and with thumbing through the frankly asinine books that were kept on hand as light reading for gentle ladies—Andrew had arranged to have her own library shipped only when the space for it was finished—she felt as though she would go mad.

She unearthed her old riding habit from the bowels of her trunk, asked that a horse be saddled—one with an interesting temperament, please, she would prefer something with a little more character than an armchair—and declined the offer of an escort. On that first day she rode out to the beach on the ocean side of the island, dismounted to walk along the sand
and watch the breakers lave the shore, and felt, for a moment, wholly content.

The first two years on the island passed quickly for both of them, Andrew occupied with playing plantation owner, Medora luxuriating in her new-found freedom. There was more room for eccentricity on the Shore, more of a blind eye turned to peculiarity. Even after their home was finished and furnished Medora continued to foray out to the wilder places of the island, to the beaches and into the marshes, collecting unfamiliar plants, speaking freely with the poor farmer's wives whom she met, unfettered by social convention. Her cook and the housegirls quickly grew used to her tendency to sit with them during the quieter times of day, to her presence in the corner of the kitchen, and it was because of this that they discovered her secret knowledge, and she discovered that Andrew had been unfaithful.

The former event came first, about a year after their arrival. It was women's conversation, in the evening after supper, with cups of coffee and the cook's pipe lit. One of the kitchen girls was a year married that month, and she laughed that all the older women had told her to enjoy the tupping because it wouldn't last, but damn her if she couldn't get her husband to keep his hands to himself; it was a miracle that she hadn't yet fallen pregnant. Medora had thought about this while the conversation wandered elsewhere, then stood to take her leave and drew the girl out of the room after her.

“I'm sorry if I've offended, ma'am, I didn't mean to be uncouth,” the girl began, anxiety in her voice.

“There's nothing to apologize for, sweetling, I just had a thought.” Now out of hearing of the kitchen, Medora turned to her. “Do you truly wish to keep from falling pregnant?”

The girl nodded.

“And do you truly know no way of keeping this from happening?”

“Only that he should leave the church before the final hymn has been sung,” she answered timidly.

Medora laughed at the euphemism, then led her up to the library, where her medicine chest was kept.

She told the girl to be careful with the herbs, to tell no one where she had gotten them, and so it was mere weeks before women began appearing at the kitchen door, poor women and ill women and women that couldn't trust or afford a doctor, asking if the mistress was in, asking if the mistress could help them.

In their third year on the island, James was born, a calculated mistake on Medora's part. He was a perfect baby, round and quiet, dark-eyed and dark-haired, but his birth marked the end of peace in their house.

If Andrew had taken up with another woman in the beginning, when they were waiting for the telegram and arranging her father's affairs, when she still despised him, she doubted that she would have cared. He was just her means then, the method by which she had escaped her home. But as she played the part of the happy wife she felt the role grow on her, until Andrew became as much hers as her own skin, not necessarily something she loved or thought about, but something she could not do without. Pregnancy and childbirth only bound her more
closely to him. In the months that she was round with James, Andrew was attentive, fawning almost, and ridiculously mindful of her health and comfort. This care had abated somewhat after James's birth, when he had seen the shade of the baby's skin, the satin darkness of his feathery newborn hair. She had been too busy with James to care how Andrew was occupied, counting his tiny fingers and toes over and over, stroking his fat cheeks and holding him even while he slept, even when she could have easily laid him down and taken some moments for herself.

Andrew began talking about his family name then, its long, proud history. She had stopped listening whenever she heard the word “honor,” much as she had when her father mentioned “duty,” until the day that the cook drew her into the cold room, shut the door so that no one could overhear, and told her that rumor had it her husband had been tumbling one of the female hands. She considered, and decided to keep her peace for the time being.

Ruth was a true accident, born two years after James. When Medora had discovered that she was pregnant again she had hoped that the baby would be a boy, would be fair, would satisfy Andrew and cause him to cease the dalliances that he still thought she was ignorant of, that the house staff kept her privately apprised of. Ruth was as dark as James, but Andrew seemed taken with her regardless, and for some months he kept to their bed, treated her again with tenderness.

It was when Ruth was nearly two years old that the woman who did their washing told Medora that her husband had been seen about with Gracie Cole, not taking advantage of her, as
he had done with the others, but courting her in earnest, if in private. Tumbling the servants she could blink at, so long as he kept them out of their bed; her father had kept the field hands' daughters in terror for as long as she could remember, it was behavior that she could accept as a given for a man of means. Women more common than herself, with no name and no fortune, were no threat to her, but Gracie was the daughter of a mainland gentleman, brought over every summer to enjoy the sea breezes. The young woman was white as notepaper, blond-haired and gray-eyed, slender and graceful: the perfect mother for the dynasty of which Andrew dreamed, a woman he would not be ashamed to take with him back to the mainland. All he needed to do was get rid of Medora.

On the night she chose to confront him she went to the study immediately following supper, locked the door and stared at a page of the
Medicinal Herbal
as the house closed up around her. When all was silent she shut the book, walked slowly to their bedroom. He was still awake, sitting at the secretary desk with his back to the fire, scribbling out business correspondence by the light of an oil lamp.

“Come to bed, my little wife?” he asked her merrily.

“How long have you been courting Grace Cole?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“How long? How many gifts have you given her—books, kid gloves, fancy hats? How many sweet nothings have you whispered in her ear?” He did not respond, kept his eyes trained on the page that he had been writing.

She continued, her voice lower but thick with feeling, “How many times have you promised to make her your wife once you've gotten rid of me?”

“I don't know what you mean. What would make you think this?” His tone was even, but his skin had gone waxy, his expression static; she knew he was lying.

“Did you tell her that you'd get an annulment? Sue for divorce? Were you going to have me committed as a madwoman? Maybe you told her that we never married, is that what you did?”

“Surely you can understand—”

“Surely I can?”

“I have a right to see my family name continued.”

“You have two children, two children as perfect as children can be. We can have more if you want more. What else are you lacking?”

“Legitimate children, for one thing. Pure-blooded children, for another.”

Her rage was incandescent, so that afterward she could not remember the particulars of what she said, what she did. She knew that their talking continued for over an hour, increased in volume with no thought for their children sleeping, that they stalked about the room, that a bottle of cologne had been thrown, a mirror broken. That she had scratched at him, and that he had hit back at her with a closed fist, that she had tried to get at him with the fireplace poker and he had wrenched her shoulder out of its socket in getting the implement away from her. She remembered the sting of her palm when she slapped him, that the words “half-breed daughter of an Indian whore” had been why she had slapped him, that when she had tried to slap him a second
time he had caught her wrist in one hand and her throat in the other, pressed on her windpipe until her vision went dark.

He had shaken her then, forced her downward. She felt heat on her back and side, and realized that they were against the fireplace, that the hem of her skirt was already smoking, that he was pushing her downward, choking, into the flames.

It felt as though the fire were under, rather than against, her skin, as if he had set her bones themselves aflame. Her left arm was pinned beneath her, she could smell her hair frizzling, she could not breathe. Then the cloth of her dress blazed, a wall of quick flame in front of her, and he released his hold on her throat.

She erupted from the hearth, trailing live coals as she rolled on the rug, smothering the flames, screaming in fear because she could not feel the pain yet. He was still for a moment, as if stunned, watching her and clutching at the hand that he had scorched in holding her there against the fire. He reached for her again and she surged to her feet, flung herself out the door and down the hall. She could smell the fire, she could feel the fire, even though she couldn't see flames anymore. She stumbled, fell bumping down the entire flight of stairs, staggered to her feet and fled onward: he would kill her, she knew it, if he got his hands on her again. Faces appeared as she ran through the house, familiar faces, shocked faces. The cook reached out to stop her but she sprang away, ran like a frightened colt, through the wide front door, down the sandstone steps, out into the marsh, still screaming.

1984

B
OYS

O
n your way to Stella's you see the boys again. They're climbing the apple tree on the green next to Onancock Methodist church, the shorter one pulling himself up into the branches while the taller pushes him from behind. As you pass by, the taller one waves to you, and you lift your hand to wave back but then smile instead, and hurry on. People already think you're a bit slow, even though you got through eighth grade just fine. No sense in confirming it by waving at someone no one else can see.

It's been a while since you've seen them, though they're never gone for too long. They've been around since your childhood, like the talking birds that perched on your bedroom door and the mermaids that held their arms out to you, calling you to join them in your grandpa's pond. But while the birds and the mermaids have faded away the boys are still with you. The taller one looks like he's seven, the same age as Cabel Bloxom, the kid you babysit, and the little one is just big enough to run around on his own. Maybe they're the residue of all the acid your mom dropped, all the grass your dad smoked, before they found religion. A remnant of magic in your DNA like the fairy
dust you believed in when you wore a pink tutu to school and wrote your name in yellow crayon.

The windows of Stella's are still frosted with morning condensation, and you have to resist rubbing your sleeve over them as you go in the back door and find your apron. You've been working the sandwich counter here since 1979, when you were fifteen: five long years in the same apron, grinning at the same customers, smacking down bologna and ham and cheese like you're dealing cards, every day of the week but Wednesdays. Most people would feel stifled, stuck in the town where they grew up with no hope of ever getting out, but you like the familiarity. Stella doesn't let anyone give you a hard time, even when you give them Cheddar instead of American cheese or forget that they were drinking Coke and not iced tea. She lets you stay in the back mostly. Some people still give you that look, the one that says they remember what you did. It isn't that hard to remember; your parents still won't talk to you.

As you tie your apron around your waist you wait for the feeling of your shoulders unkinking, the way they do every morning just as soon as you get in front of the sandwich board. Today the tension of the outside world stays with you, resting like a block of cement across the back of your neck. As you check the bread and get ready for the lunch crowd you think it was stupid to expect this to go away like your everyday worries always do.

Stella bustles into the kitchen, a ticket clutched in her lean brown hand, and smiles good morning to you.

“Could you do a couple salad eggs pretty for old Mr. Wallace? He was wanting deviled but I told him we wouldn't have any till lunch.” Jack Wallace had begun planting clams when he
was a barefoot teenager too poor to afford schooling; now well into his seventies and selling his harvest for nearly a quarter of a million dollars each year, he still came by Stella's most days.

“Yes, ma'am. I could devil a couple quick but they wouldn't be chilled right.”

“Anything you do is fine, he loves his eggs.”

She spikes the ticket above your workstation, then takes a tray of rolled silverware and turns to go.

“Miss Stella—” You roll a hard-cooked egg between your palms and skin off the shell, shy to talk. “Can I ask you a favor?”

“Something wrong, Izzy?”

“Can I borrow ten dollars against my next pay? I've got a bit of a problem and I don't want Donnie to know just yet.”

She gives you a look when you say it, but when she comes back to get the plate of sliced eggs, arranged carefully over lettuce and tomato wedges, she slips you two crumpled fives along with the next order ticket.

Ellie doesn't say anything at first when you ask for a ride to the pharmacy in Salisbury later that day. You can see all the words on her face, though. Why don't you ask Donnie? Why didn't you go to the pharmacy across from Stella's? What are you going to get, anyway?

“Eh, why not?” is all she says, and swings her daughter Chloe up under her arm. “I'll go get my car.”

Ellie went to the same school as you. She was one of the tough kids, who spent more time in the principal's office for bloodying someone's face than in her classroom seat. Her dad was a deadbeat and her mom was a psycho, so no one much cared what she
did as long as the cops didn't show up. Then her mom ran off for the mainland and she left school to take care of her sister Ollie. It wasn't until she got pregnant and you got thrown out that you became friends. She had a forbidding look to her back then, a terminal case of bitch face you'd heard it called, so when she and her husband Bo moved into the little house on the far side of the creek you were surprised at how friendly she was. It was a shotgun wedding, or so people said, but you pretend you don't hear her and Bo fighting on still nights, just like she pretends not to hear Donnie pretty much every night. Sometimes you wonder what would happen if everyone stopped pretending.

As you wait for her to come back—it's a good walk by road, even though you can see her roof peeking through the trees across the water—you watch Cabel, the boy you babysit, throwing stones into the bowl of an old handicapped toilet Donnie found pretty soon after you moved in. The yard is littered with junk, cracked or rusting or covered up with tarps, that Donnie's found or stolen but hasn't gotten around to selling yet. He fixes cars, off and on, but salvage is where he gets most of his money—or where he says he gets most of his money. You suspect he deals in things more illicit than stolen bathroom fixtures, but you don't want to know. You feel bad about the handicapped toilet—Ellie mentioned once that they were expensive, not the kind of thing that someone would junk if it still worked—but there isn't anything you can do about it.

Cabel is a caramel-colored boy, skin tanned darker than his pale hair, so thin that you can see the muscles in his back and shoulder twitch and roll as he lifts his arms to toss the rocks. His dad is a sleazy skirt-hound, Ellie told you, knocks up his girlfriend and then moves on to the next one; she knows because
she worked construction with him, before she got pregnant. You can tell when Cabel has been visiting him because he comes back with a meanness that hangs around for a few days. He's sweet, though, generally speaking: sometimes he brings you handfuls of raspberries and honeysuckles he's picked, or the shells of bird's eggs and glittering mica fragments because he knows you like pretty things, asks if he can play with your hair and falls asleep in your lap while you read to him. You've always had a soft spot for little boys. Donnie was like him once, you suppose, and Bo too. But something happens in the gap between boy and man to turn all that sweetness bitter. You wonder if it's a necessary hardening, like a tree's shedding of leaves as winter approaches.

Your eyes unfocus in half-thought, catch a slice of movement beyond the trees, focus with a snap as the boys appear. Maybe they were there all along. They look at you, and you look at them, and you want them to come over and sit with you as you wait for Ellie to come back. The twisting in your stomach has kept you from eating anything all day. But they watch you from the tree line, as if to say everything will be all right, or maybe that they do not know if everything will be all right. A rock clunks against porcelain. You decide to get up, to go to them, but hear the crunch of gravel under car tires.

Ellie drives a liver-colored boat that rocks as it hits the divots in the road. The cloth of the ceiling is caving in, and you tell Cabel not to pull at it as you strap him in next to Ellie's little girl. She's not quite two years old, with curling hair the color of cinnamon and wide, staring eyes that she turns on him warily as you buckle the strap. You pray that they don't start fighting.

The drive to Salisbury is long and slow, the air inside the car moist and heavy. The heat puts the kids to sleep in the first few miles, and for that you are thankful. Ellie chats with you about this and that, but there's awkwardness to the conversation, and eventually you both just sit quietly, watching the mile markers zip by.

A few miles outside of Salisbury Ellie turns down a side street lined with crepe myrtles and stops in front of a pharmacy. You sit for a moment, breathing the sticky air and willing yourself to get up, to go in.

“I'll go with you,” she says as she pulls the key out of the ignition. It's a statement, rather than an offer. Her thighs have stuck to the vinyl, make a peeling sound as she climbs out of the car. “The kids'll be fine for five minutes.”

Even though it's small, the inside of the pharmacy overwhelms you, and you wander for a few minutes before realizing that what you're looking for is going to be behind the counter, and your stomach plummets toward your knees. You can feel Ellie beside you as you walk toward the back, look for a moment at the tall, gray-mustached pharmacist, and then to the cabinet behind him.

“Can I help you, miss?” he asks.

“I need a pregnancy test,” you mumble, staring at the chips in the edge of the Formica counter, and he turns to the shelves behind him. Ellie steps up next to you, takes your hand and squeezes, and you're glad she came in with you. You can feel the heat rising in your face, and you wonder how Donnie can stand
to buy condoms. Knowing Donnie, he probably jokes with the pharmacist about what he'll be using them for. Men are allowed to joke about things like that, you've discovered. They're expected to, even, to strut and gloat a little bit when they have the opportunity, with the right audience. You could have gone to the local pharmacist, not bothered Ellie with driving, but someone would have seen you if you had. Even if the pharmacist himself hadn't mentioned it, Donnie would have known before dinnertime, come slamming into the trailer demanding to know why and when because it's not his fault. You're hoping that you're all worked up for nothing, that you're not pregnant, that he'll never have to know that you came here, bought this shameful thing.

The test comes in a tan box, but the pharmacist puts it in a plain paper bag before handing it to you and taking the ten dollars you borrowed from Stella. That kills you more than anything else; you could make those ten dollars stretch so far.

You wait until Donnie leaves for work in the morning, then open the test on the kitchen table. It's in a clear plastic box: a plastic ampule, an eyedropper, and a test tube in a stand over a little mirror. You read the instructions twice—it requires the first urine of the day, which you knew already, and takes two hours to register, which you didn't—then go pee into a clean juice glass. All night it felt like you'd burst if you had to hold it in another moment, but now that you're finally allowed to you're so nervous that it's five minutes before you can scare up a drop. Only three drops are needed, measured out with the eyedropper and shaken up in the test tube with the liquid from the
ampule. It looks so innocuous when you're done, the test tube just sitting there over the mirror. You leave it next to the sink, behind the sugar tin, slide on your shoes and walk the mile and a half to get Cabel so his mother can get a nap before she goes to work at the Perdue plant on the killing floor.

He's in a quiet mood today, and you get him to help you clean a bit before you sit down together on the kitchen floor with a set of tiddlywinks. You keep your eye on the plastic clock over the sink as he chatters to you and flips the winks, only half-hearing anything he says, and when the two hours have gone by you pull yourself abruptly up from the floor, walk over to the sink, and slide the sugar tin aside.

A dark ring has shown up in the bottom of the test tube, and even though you open up the directions and read again to be sure, you know it's positive. The rushing in your ears drowns out the sound of Cabel talking, and you grab the edge of the counter to keep from tipping over.