The Sisters (4 page)

“What’s happening?” Bertie asked. None of the men would answer her. They wouldn’t even look at her.

Everything was odd.

Somebody had tied the cow to the fence rail, right in the place where a slat was missing, so the cow could reach through to nibble at the little cornstalks, just ankle-high.

The plow was out in the middle of the patch Butcher had said this morning he was going to plant with more beans, but the mare was unhitched, wandering around through the cucumbers.

And every now and then, when the wind kicked up, Bertie could hear a muffled banging, as if the back screen door had been left unhooked.

Another man Bertie didn’t know stepped out of the barn. Even from her place on the porch, she could make out the shape of his badge. The sheriff. He took off his hat and stopped in the yard to talk to Mr. Mitchell, looking up once or twice to glance over at her. Mr. Mitchell shook his head and walked slowly back toward the barn.

The other man came toward Bertie and sat down on the top step beside her. “Bertie Fischer? That short for Alberta?”

She nodded. The sheriff reached out to take her hand. She started to pull it away, then thought better of it.

“I asked the men there to keep you out of the barn,” he said. His hand was warm. Strong and sad. “Your stepdaddy’s hanged hisself. They’re just cutting him down now.”

“Where’s my sister?”

The rain started in small spatters, and the sheriff looked up for a moment, as if he might read the answer in the clouds. “Looks like she’s run off,” he said. He reached in his pocket and held out a bit of crumpled paper to Bertie. “There’s a couple of empty whiskey bottles up in the loft. Neighbors said Butcher was a drinker?” He looked at her for confirmation he obviously didn’t need. “Found this right near him,” he said, nodding toward the note. “I figure he had it in his hand when he swung off, and then dropped it when…”

Bertie took the paper from the sheriff and smoothed it open on her knee. Just four words, not addressed to anybody. It was Mabel’s writing.
Gone away with Wallace
. An
M
for her name, the way she signed all her notes.

T
WO

Departure

June 1927

Juniper, Kentucky

MABEL

“W
AIT!
”
MABEL PULLED HARD ON
Wallace’s hand.

“We’ll miss the train!”

Already the whistle for the approaching 4:18 had sounded, and from behind the line of juniper trees, Mabel could see a few people gathered in front of the station. By now, Bertie would be sitting in the church with her diploma in her lap, waiting for the principal to finish his address on the importance of discipline and initiative so she could shove through the crowd of other people’s relatives to look for Mabel and Wallace. What would be the expression on Bertie’s face as it dawned on her she’d been left alone? Confusion or fear? Betrayal? Despair? Mabel pushed the image away. She couldn’t look at it. She wouldn’t.

“Mabel, we have to go now,” Wallace said. “Now—or we have to go back.” His chambray shirt stuck in dark damp patches to his chest, and his hair, soaked with sweat from their run, was the color of soiled straw. A few hayseeds clung to his neck, the reason she had stopped him. Mabel picked them off and held them out for him to see before shaking them from her fingers. Without a word, she took his hand again and they turned toward the station.

Mabel kept her eyes down while Wallace paid for the tickets, but still she could feel the stares from people already on the train and from the four or five others standing around, all of them, she supposed, wondering about this rumpled and dirty pair without any luggage between them. She wanted to look up, to see if anyone they knew might be watching them, but she didn’t dare. And then Wallace’s arm was around her shoulders, and he was guiding her into the car, past the cluster of passengers at the front, settling her by a window near the back, sitting beside her, drawing her head to his chest.

“It was the only way,” Mabel said. “Wasn’t it?” With another blow of the whistle, the train lurched away. When they got to Louisville, they would disappear in the crowd, get their tickets for Chicago, and leave another for Bertie.

Wallace’s voice creaked like an old spring. “Was it?”

Not once before had he hinted at doubt. Mabel lifted her head and looked at him. If he’d noticed her movement, he gave no sign of it. His eyes were fixed on something she couldn’t see, a scene playing out silently in his own mind. This is how it would be. She and Wallace would travel through the night and into another day, locked separately inside their questions. This is how it would be for the next two days, until the three of them were together again, safely in Chicago, when she could tell Bertie everything.

But how could she? How could Mabel tell Bertie even as much as she had told Wallace, which wasn’t all? Could her sister bear it? Just five days ago, she and Wallace had been so certain. So short a time ago as last Monday, they had agreed there was nothing else to be done. Now for every decision that had seemed inevitable, Mabel could think of three or four more she might have made. She might have found a way—made up some excuse—to send Bertie on ahead of them. But what would Jim Butcher have believed? What could Mabel have said that wouldn’t have set off questions, that wouldn’t have pricked his rage? Or she and Wallace might have hurried to meet Bertie at the graduation party, and they all could have left together, on the late train. But, no, it would have been too risky to delay, too dangerous for Bertie to travel with them. Or she might just have waited—waited to see if there was any other answer. But what then? What would another month, another week, another day have cost her sister?

It was the way Butcher had looked at Bertie. Even from the back, as Mabel stepped into the hallway to tell him his breakfast was ready, she could see it in how he was leaning into the room, the way his head tilted, the way his hand pulsed on the knob.

There was no decision then, only instinct. A light touch on his arm. A smile. A question about supper. Enough to break the spell, but for how long?

Years ago, when Butcher had looked at her like that, Mabel had been alone, no one to interpret for her, too innocent, like Bertie was now, to know what it meant. Just like Bertie, she’d been standing before the mirror in a pretty dress, one from Mama’s trousseau, altered to fit—rich green shantung for her first Christmas dance. When Butcher’s eyes narrowed to a dark stare, Mabel hurried to explain it was Mama’s dress, one packed away the day she got the telegram saying her soldier husband had died of influenza. Still Butcher stared, and, heart banging, Mabel asked him if he minded her wearing Mama’s dress. He shook his head. “It’s right you should have her things. Suits you,” he said, smiling, so she believed him. And when she came home that night, out of the dark cold after the dance, Bertie already in bed, he’d been so kind to her.

He’d built a fire and had made a pot of tea, leaving it on the hearth to keep it hot. She didn’t need to tell him how she liked it, with just half a spoon of sugar. Her hands were icy from the walk home, and when he passed her the cup, she was grateful for its warmth.

“Was your mother showed me how to make a pot of tea right,” he said. “Used to boil it like coffee till it was so bitter you had to stir in a whole sugar bowl.”

“It’s good,” Mabel said. “Just like Mama’s.” That wasn’t true. It was thick with tea leaves and he had let it steep too long by the fire, but the gesture had been thoughtful.

He asked her about the dance then, supposed she had been the prettiest girl there, pretty as he’d heard tell her mother was at that age. Two girls, young widowhood, having to hire out to scrub anything other people wanted scrubbing—all these had taken Mama’s looks before Jim Butcher showed up to court her, persuading her he could turn her little patch of ground into a working farm. Now, poking at the fire, he said he missed her, felt bad for not having treated her more gently. In the quick rise of golden light, his eyes were sadness as he spoke her mother’s name, “Imogene.” At that moment, for the first time since he’d come into their house, Mabel felt a little tenderness toward him. Maybe he wasn’t the schemer she’d been sure he was, but really just a clumsy, well-meaning man who drank too much, uncertain of himself, uncertain of the world, after the war. “Terrible things he saw over there,” her mother had said. “Things nobody should ever see. Having to do things nobody should ever have to do.” There were so many men like that.

It was past midnight when Butcher stood up, his cheeks flushed, and held out his hand to her. “Want to show you something.” He led her into his room, turned up the lamp on the bedside table. On the bed lay Mama’s stereopticon, the clamp full with cards. “Sit down,” he said, motioning to the bed. “I know how you like looking through this thing. Some pictures here you’ve never seen before.” He sat beside her and handed her the viewer. Mabel pressed it to her forehead, gasping at what she saw. The card was tinted, dozens of colors deepening the scene, and the lovely women, pinked with life, seemed so close she could touch them.

There were five women, three standing on richly carpeted steps, one leaning against what looked like a marble column, and the other sitting on the tile beside a large square bath, all of them draped in lush silks—rose, teal, saffron, emerald, bronze. On their heads they wore matching turbans, some of them decorated with peacock feathers. Behind the women were long windows with tops like upside-down tulips, and through the windows, blue, like blossoms of sky. Palm fronds peeked out from the edges of the scene, and a large gold urn and flat bowl sat beside the bath.

“Wonderful,” Mabel said. “Is it in Turkey? Bertie will love this.” She looked at her stepfather. “May I show her tomorrow?”

“There’s no hurry,” he said. “Look again.” He’d removed the first picture. Two of the women on the steps had opened the silk draping at the top, exposing their breasts. The tints of their flesh, the detail of their nipples, the depth of the optical trick made those round breasts as real as Mabel’s own. Before she could speak, Butcher pulled aside that picture, and now the first three women had completely removed their top draperies. One was reaching forward to untie another’s skirt. The woman beside the column had moved to join the one beside the bath. They had both disrobed entirely and now sat gazing intently at each other’s nakedness. One extended her hand as if to caress her companion’s breast.

A flick of Butcher’s hand, and now all the women were naked, their silks lying in shimmering heaps. Some had gotten in the bath, though they stood to show off their bodies. One pair sat on the floor, facing each other, their legs entwined.

Mabel threw the viewer aside and sprang up, but Butcher caught her by her waist and pulled her down onto the bed. “Prettiest girl,” he said, and pressed his mouth hard against hers. His throat swallowed her scream and his hard chest absorbed her struggles. He held her down with the weight of his body, and when he released the kiss, he clamped one hand across her mouth and the other across her throat. “Not a sound, now.” He pressed her throat harder. “Not a sound. This stays between us. Wouldn’t take a bit of trouble to kill that sister of yours.”

Both terror and ignorance had kept her from screaming again. Mabel knew little then of what happened between men and women, and so when she lay there while he tugged her party dress off her shoulders and over her hips, unlaced her corset and rolled down her stockings, she thought he was just going to look at her, perhaps beat her. Anything else was beyond her conceiving, so, when he turned her over on the bed and jammed her face into the wool blanket, she couldn’t comprehend what he was doing, imagining he must have sprouted claws to dig within her and tear out her insides. She’d seen him disembowel a deer once and thought now he must be disemboweling her.

He’d been less cruel to the deer. He’d killed it first.

In the dawn light, she was astonished to wake up, to find herself alive. In his bed. In his arms. Her hip bones felt as if they’d been torn from the rest of her body, perhaps broken, and there was such a burning inside her, she thought he must have driven in a lighted candle to sear her with the melted wax. But she was strangely clean, too. The soft scent of lavender rose from her skin, and she was wearing one of her mother’s linen nightdresses.

Though it was agony, she rolled to her side, trying to slip out of the bed without waking Butcher, but his arms tightened around her. His breath on her neck, he nuzzled against her. “Little wife,” he said. “In this room, you’re my little wife.”

“Oh, no, no.” Hot tears flowed down Mabel’s cheeks. Again she tried to pull herself free.

“In this room, I said.” Butcher clasped his fingers like a vise around her jaw and forced her to look at him. “Everyplace else, you’re my little girl.” Nothing, not even coal, was blacker than his eyes. “Say it. Say ‘Yes, Daddy.’” Mabel twisted away, but he jerked her back, holding even tighter now. “Say it!”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Like you mean it.”

She closed her eyes and tried to swallow, tried to recall her father’s face. What came to her was Bertie’s face—little Bertie, still sleeping, she prayed, two rooms away—Bertie’s face and Butcher’s words from last night. Two long breaths. Another swallow. A whisper. “Yes. Daddy.”