Yellow Crocus: A Novel (3 page)
Washed over with yearning and loss, Mattie could not bear to watch her world any longer. She sought out the soft bed in her strange room. She placed the baby in the middle of the mattress and then she lay down and wept. Burrowing her head in her arms, her tears flowed and flowed, like a hot summer storm, down her cheeks into the fluffy feather pillow. She ached for her son with such a force that it was difficult to breathe.
When her sobs subsided she raised her head to look at the stranger sleeping next to her. Tiny blue veins showed beneath translucent, pale skin in Miss Elizabeth’s eyelids. The fragile and dependent baby lay unaware of the world around her. Mattie touched tiny eyes, nose, lips; her hand trailed across the infant’s soft chin, her small, vulnerable neck. A wave of hatred washed over Mattie. She shuddered with repulsion.
Mattie laid her hand across the tiny mouth and pressed down until it covered two small nostrils as well. Her heart pounded fiercely behind her ribcage. In a few minutes this could be over. The infant squirmed, her lips parted, and a loud, sudden cry escaped from the small body. Mattie jerked her hand away.
“I trapped here, but I ain’t so desperate, little one,” Mattie whispered fiercely, “I ain’t gonna hurt you, little miss,” reassuring herself, not the oblivious child.
Mattie collapsed on her back. Exhausted, she longed to sleep, to escape into her dreams, but as she lay flat on her back, her mind filled with images. She pictured Samuel screaming in Rebecca’s arms, his back arched in utter protest. She wondered if Rebecca would remember to swaddle him just right, with his arm bent up, if he cried hard. She replaced the image of screaming Samuel with an image of him utterly satisfied on Rebecca’s breast. That was not much better.
She rose and went back to the window. She pressed her ear hard against the glass, listening for sounds of her son. Nothing. She only heard the loud swoosh of her own pulse.
“Rebecca know how to take care of a baby,” she whispered out loud. “She real good and she love Samuel. Rebecca and Poppy gonna take good care of him.”
Mattie prayed out loud, “Dear God, it me, Mattie. I know it mornin’ and I mostly only talk to you at night, but today I need extra help. Please watch over my Samuel. Make him happy to get food from Rebecca, but not so happy he forget about me. Help me to treat this here little baby good. And make her not need me for so long so I can get back to my family. Thank you for listenin’ to me extra. Amen.”
Mattie lay back down in bed and turned her back to the infant. She willed herself to sleep. When she awoke a few hours later, she found herself curled around Miss Elizabeth, like a mother cat encircling her kittens.
T
wo days later, the housekeeper intruded into the large bedroom just as Mattie settled in the rocking chair to nurse Miss Elizabeth. Mattie rose like a soldier coming to attention.
“Your mistress is recovered enough to see her daughter,” Mrs. Gray declared. “Bring the infant to Madam’s chambers at two o’clock.”
“Yes, ma’am,” responded Mattie. “Excuse me, ma’am. I don’ know what you mean by two.”
Mrs. Gray sighed and shook her head in disbelief. “That is a time,” she declared sharply, rolling her eyes. “Have you not noticed the chime from the clock in the parlor?”
Matte replied, “Yes, ma’am, I hear the sound it make every so often.”
“Every fifteen minutes there is a short song. Each hour it strikes according to the time. Can you count?”
Mattie nodded, working to hide her confusion, and replied, “Yes, ma’am. Up to ten.”
“Well, you shall have to learn more, or at least come to understand the partitions of an hour. You will be given a time to do your tasks and know when to do them by the clock.”
Mrs. Gray explained the workings of time to the woman who had previously lived by the movements of the sun. Mattie did her best to follow Mrs. Gray’s complicated instructions. She understood that she needed to count each time the clock struck. The number of strikes would be the hour.
“So,” Mrs. Gray went on, “when the clock strikes two times, it is two o’clock and time for you to return to the room where Miss Elizabeth was born. Do not sit unless you are invited to. Remember to answer ‘ma’am’ each time you are spoken to.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And do not exhaust her,” Mrs. Gray insisted. “She is still recovering from the ordeal of childbirth.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Ann, bobbing in a sea of pillows and fabric, eagerly waited to meet her daughter. Open draperies let in the warm sunlight and made the room bright. The marble bedside table supported a bouquet of bright flowers. Whirls marked the marble top: white and black swirling in an intricate dance, pushing close, mixing in some places, staying unique in others.
Smiling down at a small pillow, Mrs. Ann held it like an infant, rocking it back and forth. In her mind she practiced a greeting, “
Hello. I am your mother. You are my daughter, Elizabeth
.” At the sound of a knock, she hastily set down the pillow and once again smoothed down her covers.
“You may enter,” Mrs. Ann called out. “Good day, Mattie,” the young mother added, her hungry eyes intent on the bundle in Mattie’s arms.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” Mattie spoke deferentially from the doorway.
Every time someone called her ma’am, Ann Wainwright felt a fraud. Nearly a year after her wedding, she was still adjusting to the fact that she was married and living on a Tidewater plantation hours away from her real home. And now she was a mother and did not quite know what was expected of her. Conceiving on her honeymoon had pleased both her husband and her mother-in-law. That the child was a daughter was a disappointment they expected her to remedy soon enough.
As Mrs. Jonathan Wainwright, she presided as the mistress of the house, at least in theory. But she was hardly involved in the running of Fair Oaks: Mrs. Gray handled day-to-day matters, and her mother-in-law, Grandmother Wainwright, was loath to relinquish her role as hostess of Fair Oaks. Mrs. Ann had few opportunities to socialize either as a host or as a guest, since she was in confinement almost immediately after arriving at Fair Oaks. She had yet to make the necessary social connections that were essential for her establishing herself in this place.
Mrs. Ann beckoned Mattie over with a wave of her hands. The young mother studied her daughter in Mattie’s arms.
“She is not so beautiful, is she?” Mrs. Ann stated matter-of-factly.
“She young yet,” replied Mattie.
“I suppose,” Mrs. Ann responded. “I have never seen one so young before. Is everything going as it should?”
“Yes, ma’am. She strong. She a good baby.”
“Let me hold her.”
Mattie carefully placed Miss Elizabeth into Mrs. Ann’s eager arms.
“She is quite light. I imagined her heavier. Are they normally so red?”
“I don’ know, ma’am. This the first white baby I ever seen.”
“You have experience with babies?” Mrs. Ann inquired.
“Yes, ma’am. I been at births. I always take care of the babies around; I watched the young ones while their folks worked the tobacco when I little.” Suddenly self-conscious to be saying so much, Mattie stopped speaking.
“Mrs. Gray chose well when she selected you.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Mrs. Ann asked, “You have a son? Am I correct?”
“Yes, ma’am. He three months.”
“A son. How nice for you.”
Having run out of questions and answers, an uncomfortable silence filled the space between the two women. They stared at the baby held in an awkward embrace. After a few minutes Miss Elizabeth started squirming. Mrs. Ann jiggled her daughter up and down, then held the girl close against her breast. The infant turned her head toward her mother, opening her mouth wide, bobbing her face into her mother’s breast. Startled, Mrs. Ann jerked her baby away.
Alarmed, she inquired, “What is the matter with her?”
“She turning her head for food. She hungry, ma’am,” replied Mattie.
“I suppose so. Well, I cannot be of any help to her. Here, you give her what she needs,” Mrs. Ann directed as she handed her daughter over to Mattie.
Mattie took the infant but continued to stand next to the bed, uncertainty written on her face. The infant turned her head into Mattie’s body. Mattie slipped her pinky into the infant’s eager mouth. Mrs. Ann watched Mattie sway from side to side, comforting the infant but making no move to suckle her.
After a long, strange silence, Mrs. Ann spoke, “You may sit in the chair. I wish to see you do it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Settling into the chair where she first held and nourished Miss Elizabeth, Mattie gave the baby her breast. After Miss Elizabeth suckled for a while, Mrs. Ann spoke again.
“Yes, that is unseemly.”
A
ll the residents of Fair Oaks honored the Sunday Sabbath, though the house slaves did not forgo their duty to keep their owners fed and comfortable. After gathering in the drawing room to listen to a reading from the Bible, the house slaves prepared for the Sabbath dinner while the Wainwright family worshipped with the Episcopalian congregation in Charles City. For most of the year, with the exception of harvest, the field slaves were given a day of rest from sunset on Saturday until sunrise on Monday.
One Sunday afternoon, just past Miss Elizabeth’s three-month mark, Mrs. Gray and Skinny Emily interrupted the quiet of the nursery. Mrs. Gray, a fixture at Fair Oaks for nearly thirty years, had moved east from her modest home in western Virginia three weeks before her twenty-eighth birthday. As a newly widowed woman with no prospects for another marriage, she had found herself in need of a position that would grant her status in society as well as a residence. Her role as housekeeper on this grand estate gave her both. She prided herself on running the household well. Though her family had owned no slaves, she quickly developed the necessary skills to deal with them fairly and effectively. Bringing in a field hand to feed Miss Elizabeth had seemed unwise to Mrs. Gray, but there had been little choice after the wet nurse they had rented died suddenly of a high fever.
Mrs. Gray spoke crisply from the doorway, “Miss Elizabeth is old enough to be away from you for a few hours. As you are fortunate enough to live near your family, you may visit with them on Sunday afternoons beginning today. Instruct Emily on how to care for Miss Elizabeth when you are away.”