Light changes everything, p.12
Light Changes Everything, page 12
“Is that all you do here in town? Have parties and teas and folderol?”
“I have a position to maintain in society. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? That, Mary Pearl, is why Aubrey chose me. You had your chance. He realized how immature you are after that stupid letter you sent him.”
“I wrote you one, too,” I said, but regretted the words as soon as they passed my lips. “You won’t be getting it, though. I believe you’re clever enough to guess.”
“Don’t be so childish. Are you still leaving tomorrow? Ezra said his head aches, too, but he’s not lying about all day.”
“I know. He told me he doesn’t feel too bad. I’d like another hot bath. Wouldn’t want to take pneumonia on the train. Go ahead and have your dinner. I’ll eat a cold plate in the bedroom.”
“That won’t do. Everyone in town knows you’re here. I invited all the important people. They’d expect to see you. I’ll send Dorothy up with towels and some Epsom salts.”
I paused at the doorway with my coffee cup, remembering what it was like at home. If someone was sick they received extra kindness, not snubbing. Tears blurred my sight. “You’ve got no reason to be cross with me. I’ll be gone tomorrow before noon. Ma’s real happy for you, you know. All rich and married and happy. I always pictured we’d be glad for each other, like the sisters in a Jane Austen novel.”
“Decent people don’t read novels. Want to tell me where you were last night?”
“I slept with Ezra, on the floor in his room.”
“Why?” She set her coffee cup on the saucer a bit too hard.
“How did you know?”
“Aubrey checks the house each night. Makes sure the doors are locked, looks in on every room. It makes me feel safe here in town. He’s very thoughtful that way. He told me you’d gone … out.”
“Out? I had a bad dream. Figured I’d sleep better hearing at least one of our brothers snoring. I always have bad dreams when I’m sick. What did he mean, out? Do you believe I went out at night like some harlot?”
Her face changed from bitter to softening. “Well, no. I told him you wouldn’t. I thought I might be expecting a child. I … I found out this morning that I’m not.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Likely this isn’t a good evening for a party anyhow.”
Rachel nodded but her own eyes filled with tears. “Go on back to bed. I’ll send up Dorothy and she’ll call you when the bath is ready. She’ll bring you some breakfast, too.”
“Thanks.” Since she said nothing more, I went back up the stairs.
* * *
I have asked myself a thousand times since that morning if things might have gone differently, had I not had another bath. Not been sleepy from sickness and not gone back to bed. Not fussed at her. Not been so independent. Not agreed to stay with them. Not been too shy to tell Rachel I was afraid to be alone in her house. But I did all those things. All the things I wish I hadn’t done. When she told me, after bringing the breakfast and her maid Dorothy coming in with Epsom salts, that she and Dorothy were going to walk up the block and deliver her cancelation regrets in person to a highly important lady, I had shrugged and wished her well, told her not to strain herself, and sat to eat the breakfast she called “coffee cake” along with a fresh cup of coffee.
After the bath I slipped on a warm flannel gown and my wrapper and house slippers, and carried my things upstairs to settle in bed. I felt warm and drowsy.
A hand reached out of a dream about riding Duende through a field of corn up in Illinois, caressing my face. I heard my name. A cold wind through the cornfields touched my hair, called me. Whispered sweet words filled my ears, words in a moment more, as I came awake, that filled me with terror. I brushed at the hand and it resisted. Then it clamped hard over my mouth. He was strong and he was heavy, and he’d been ready before I awoke. Every horror I had ever been told about, every warning for every young girl, every nightmare came alive to me and I was flattened and torn asunder under an unbelievable weight and I choked and vomited coffee and cake as he groaned and I tried to scream for the pain and then fought to simply breathe and then my right hand seemed to find inhuman strength and tore itself from his grasp and reached under the pillow where I slept upon a single pistol and the deer hunting knife I kept always at my side. The horrible weight and pain abruptly rose up off me and I slashed wildly with the knife, aiming first at the source of my agony, and swinging upward toward Aubrey’s once handsome face.
He swore.
His look of shock was not enough for me. I wanted him dead. He backed away, jerking up his pants, swiping at his chest and the blood flowing freely from a vertical cut like a whip line that stretched from below his belt to his left eyebrow. His mouth agape, I screamed at last and reached for the pistol, but he was gone from the room before I could pull the trigger.
I heard Rachel’s voice below in the parlor, calling up the stairs, “Aubrey? Why are you home in the middle of the day?” and then just as quick, the sound of glass breaking in their bedroom, and his voice moaning.
“Rachel!” he called. “I had ink on my shirt and I came home to change because I have court at one. I bumped the mirror and it broke. Fetch a doctor.”
I cried and sank to the floor, wailing, but she could not hear me over her own cries. “No, he didn’t!” I called. “Rachel, Rachel.”
I dropped the knife on the floor and hurried back to the bathing room, sinking into the cold water, nightgown, wrapper, and all, sobbing and curling over my pain so that I nearly drowned. Rachel screamed from the bedroom, but I could hear him asking for towels and a clean shirt, then her light steps hurrying down the stairway.
Dorothy knocked on the bathing room door and brought in more towels and a steaming kettle. I was shaking and blue. My fingers had gone “all to raisins” as Ma would say. She said she’d cleaned up the vomit in my bed, and I could go back to it now. Said she’d left a bucket there in case my stomach came up again. Said not to worry about the blood on the floor, that “the missus sometimes had a flow in bed, too, although not so great an amount.” When she saw I’d gotten my clothes wet, she quietly disappeared and returned with something from Rachel’s closet.
Once I was suitably returned to bed, my hair stringing and my tears unending, Rachel came into the room. “Aubrey’s been terribly hurt,” she said, tears streaming down her own face. “You’re so kind to weep for him, too.”
I stared at the coverlet. What could I say to her? I wanted to kill him and her, too. My own sister. Where was my hunting knife? “Go away,” I said.
“Fine.”
She was at the door when I gasped out, “Rachel? He came in here.”
“Why didn’t you tell him I was paying a call? The poor man, he’s been gashed by that huge mirror that hung over my dresser. He was just looking for me.”
“I was asleep. Rachel—”
“He’ll likely have a scar. It’s terrible. For a prominent man who appears in court all the time. A scar on his face like a brawling cowboy! He had to have stitches on his—his person. They had to continue his case because of the accident. Of course, I canceled our formal dinner. You didn’t want to have it anyhow.”
“Rachel, will you listen?” My mouth only moved silently then. “I couldn’t—” Couldn’t what, fight? I was angry and devastated. There were no words to utter what I felt. I thought of the pistol under the bed and imagined a bullet rattling in my head, back and forth like a pebble in a jar, bouncing though my own skull, cauterizing my brain, and shutting out this day for all time.
Rachel smiled sympathetically and said, “Get some sleep. You look terrible.”
After she left, I cried new tears though I could not have imagined there were any left to cry. At suppertime, Dorothy brought me beef broth and toast, glancing into the bucket in case it needed cleaning. Ezra came in, sneezed a dozen times, and asked, “What is the ruckus downstairs?” His voice sounded far deeper than it had been yesterday.
“Ezra, you’re really sick now.”
“I sound bad, but I don’t feel it much.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t mind to pull me another bath.”
“Take it quick and I’ll have one after you while the water’s still warm.”
I nodded.
He said, “We’ll be good and shiny for the train ride.”
I wanted to blurt out things to him, things a boy of fourteen shouldn’t hear. I wanted to plot with him to kill Aubrey Hanna. I wanted to send him to fetch Ma and Pa and all the men from Aunt Sarah’s place. I wanted an army to surround this house and burn it to the ground. I felt so aching, so beaten, and bruised. Worse than being thrown from a horse. Tears filled my eyes again. If only, if only we hadn’t stayed here.
Ezra wrapped his arm around me, then pinched my shoulder. “Don’t worry, sis. I’ll get you to college. I’m not as sick as you got.”
Later, when he came from the bathroom smelling of lavender and Epsom salts, I stopped winding my hair in rags to get my reticule. I gave him ten dollars. “I want you to buy Zack a new wheeler toy. Get one for yourself or something else you want.”
“Golly. I’ll buy Mama a new kerchief.”
“Whatever you want.”
“You want to sleep in my room again?” he asked.
“Why don’t you sleep in here instead? This big bed will hold two people easily.” I shuddered when I said that.
He didn’t even ask why I pushed the chest of drawers in front of the door and hung my pistol belt from the bedpost. Nor why I found my hunting knife with a rim of brown on the blade under the bed like it had been kicked there. He just spit on it and wiped it on a dripping towel still wet from his hair. “There. Towel was too wet to dry it. Don’t want you to rust up,” he said, drying the blade against the sleeve of his nightshirt. “Old Rache is gonna fuss over that stain.”
“I don’t care.”
“Me, neither.”
I felt beaten. My jaw hurt when I moved it, like someone had nearly torn it off my face. “I’m real tired. You want to sleep feet to feet in the bed like we did when we were little?”
Ezra laughed and his eyes crinkled like Pa’s. “You ain’t more than a mite, sis, but first thing you know I’d have my big toe in your eye. I’ll take the floor like you did.” We lay there in the dark.
After a while, I said, “I wish we’d brought Zachary, too.”
“He’d have had a good time, sure enough.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Maybe he would.”
CHAPTER TEN
It hurt to walk for three days more, and although my cold was better, after I got to Wheaton I stayed in bed a day, claiming it was the ague. I didn’t write my family as soon as school started, like I’d done before. I hadn’t read Granny’s memories on the train, either. I just wept and wept some more.
When classes started I felt better, and right away I took to target practicing in a field. I’d gotten permission from Miss Kotterman, who seemed to know everything there was to know about Wheaton College, and who to ask, what to ask, everything. Prairie Longmore came along sometimes, clapping her hands when I hit a bull’s-eye or broke a bottle. Sometimes she brought her other friends to watch her take shooting lessons from me. They were impatient and whined about the cold, and pretty soon they all found reasons to go on home. I could see that Prairie wanted to go with them, like they were a string of quail, all following the leader. “Grip down,” I said. “Pay attention; don’t watch them leave. Now, do it again but don’t let the barrel fly up before you even pull the trigger. Expect it to rise and grip down hard.”
“We’re doing the debut in two weeks.”
“That so? That the final exam for all the dancing and folderol lessons? Watch my hand. Grip down and don’t let up.” I pinged a bullet off a branch that sent splinters flying through the air.
“I wish you could come but—” She stopped.
“But my family is not from here and they’d have to be old money and plenty of it, and I’d have to talk more citylike and stop carrying a pistol.”
“Well, yes.”
“Well, I’ll never not have a gun in my hand as long as I live,” I said. “So that’s that. I don’t really care to be invited and I don’t care to match all you young ladies like we were nuns in a convent. I don’t match anyone and I like it that way.”
She studied my face for a while, then said, “Well, don’t fuss at me. There must have been more trouble when you went home. You haven’t told me anything about your visit, and I’ve told you everything I did over Christmas holiday. We had the gayest times. What happened there in Arizona? You just aren’t the same.”
“There weren’t any parties,” I said, then I could only breathe slowly and stare down the front of my skirt. I pulled my empty pistols with both hands and twirled them forward and back and dropped them back in the holsters slick as any gunslinger. “Nothing like a little practice,” I said. “My cousin Gil got married. I don’t care about parties that much. If you’re cold we can go in.”
“All right. I’ll be really busy for the next couple of weeks, but I’ll see you in class.”
“I’ll see you.”
“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
“Someday. Not today, though.”
As I practiced shooting every afternoon, I prayed. I never stopped praying, even in classes. Angry, frightened tears often filled my eyes while I prayed, as I shot out Aubrey’s eyes with every bullet that hit the hay bales. While I bathed and looked I prayed for signs I was as barren as Rachel. I wished I’d made a steer of him when I’d had the chance. But, I reminded myself, girls carrying babies were often sick and tired, and I was neither. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Please.
I also took to reading Granny’s memoirs as I had promised. There was a story about a woman who “carried messages for the Union Army against the Confederates,” another who “carried money to the CSA baked in a pie that she even served a piece to some Yankee without giving him the part with gold in it,” and yet another who “carried messages for George Washington against the British.”
On the day Prairie and all her friends donned their white gowns and went to their ball, I found this passage:
If you ever find yourself in real trouble, you do what thousands of girls have done since Noah landed that boat. You just hold up your head and buy yourself some widow’s weeds and a weddin’ ring. You put on that ring and pull down your veil and move to a town where no one knows you nor the name you give ’em. You make a way for yourself seamstressing or making hats or gloves. Don’t hang your head to no one. Don’t use it as no excuse to go into that business, neither. Ain’t no woman in our family ever been in the streetwalking trade. There’s fine sewing in your blood just like that black hair of yours and those fine teeth. And that will make you a life along with your poor child.
My stomach lurched and my heart felt as if it turned black and leaden with fear that Aubrey’s attack would lead to my needing that advice. I went to bed that night, but slept very little.
At least in classes, I could forget for a while.
Some of the girls wanted to go to a melodrama and through wheedling and begging got me to go along. Being lonesome for some girls to talk to without Prairie, I went along but at the doorway, I stopped, afraid to go inside. All my life I’d heard how theaters were places where the lowest of all people worked, that it was the devil’s own nest of iniquity. I said to one of them, “I don’t think Wheaton girls are allowed in here,” but she just laughed and pulled my arm. We went through a dark maroon velvet curtain where it parted, and were engulfed in smoke and black smells, far worse than my picture-developing liquids. I jerked my arm from her grasp and dashed out the door, holding my hand over my mouth. It didn’t help, though, because the smell stayed in my head and I was sick in the street. I looked around and no one seemed to have noticed, but I ran for the dormitory in the last light of the evening and immediately got into bed. I felt as if I’d stepped into the doorway to perdition, and I shook with the shock of it, telling myself that I would have been sick no matter what and that didn’t mean anything. I was only sick because I entered that parted curtain where the air swirled with a blue haze of tobacco smoke. I felt as if I’d touched evil. As if Aubrey Hanna had been waiting in there. I pulled out Granny’s wrapped memoirs and the small Bible Ma had given me and clutched them to my bosom for comfort. I was glad no other girls had gone to bed yet. Under the warmth of those words and without reading any of them, I fell almost immediately to sleep.
In this term’s photography class, our new assignment was portraiture. We were to sit for each other and take plates, and practice shadowing and lightening in the darkroom with tools over the papers. One day when I’d agreed to sit for the students, nearly every person there took my image. I wore a nice hat and a fascinator I borrowed from Prairie, but she declared it looked so well on me, I should have it. Now that her debutante nonsense was finished, she’d been more friendly and made every effort to include me or sit by my side in classes. I suppose I should have felt flattered, but I just do not understand a friendship that changes with the weather.
The day when it was my turn to pose, everyone had their own opinions about the numerous lamps and reflection panels, the flash pans and powder. I put all my effort into composing my face so that it seemed at rest, not angry, not tearful, although that was how I felt. It was exhausting and all those lamps made the room so hot, but I promised myself it was nothing like summertime at home in Arizona, so I kept the sweat off my forehead with a hanky, and looked this way and that as each student requested.
Finally the last boy, Nation Hollingsworth, announced, “Fellows? Give me a hand, will you? Take away all but two lamps.” Those he placed both on my left side, and said, “Look toward the clock, there, in the corner, please. No, that’s too much, look at something on the wall closer. All right.” He moved a lamp. “You look tired.” He sounded as if I’d disappointed him by being exhausted.
