The Widows
Page 18
“Lily, this is George Vogel,” Daniel said.
George Vogel. The man Daniel had said two years before was his manager. The man he had said she should fear.
“Luckily for both of you,” George said, “Daniel quickly knocked out his opponent, the match declared over, before he ran out to find you.”
Luckily for both of you … there was a knife edge to the words. Lily started trembling.
Two thick, large men in suits got out of the waiting automobile.
Suddenly George was impatiently bored. “Abe, take care of this.”
Abe, the tall, gaunt man, stepped forward. Daniel shoved Lily’s attacker to Abe, who pressed his gun to the man’s back and marched the now-sobbing man toward the automobile.
Daniel came to Lily then, pulled her to him. She pressed her face to his chest, finally allowing herself to cry. When finally she could cry no more, she looked up at Daniel. Just the two of them remained in the alley.
“What … what will happen to him?”
“Jail, like you said. I’m sure just jail.”
But Lily sensed that Daniel, no longer angry with her, was sparing her. Suddenly she recollected reading a story once in the Kinship Weekly Courier—a murdered body found on the bank of the Ohio River, whatever means the killer had used to try to weight the body undone by the current. But the story also claimed there were no suspects. She wondered if her attacker would be dead within the hour, his body driven down to the Ohio River for dumping.
She pressed her face back to Daniel’s chest, breathing in the deep yeasty smell of his sweat, taking comfort in the tickle of his hair on her face.
“Goddam, Lily,” Daniel said. “You’ve got to listen to me, trust me. I can’t lose you.”
Lily reopens her eyes. Now they are dry. And her heart is back to a steady thrum. He hadn’t lost her. But she’s lost him. And their child. She can’t go back to being the frightened girl in the alley. She must find out who killed Daniel and why. Bring the killer to justice.
* * *
Lily is brushing her hair when Mama comes in. Mama looks weary, her face filled with lines that eddy and flow from eyes to cheeks to jowls and back round again to mouth. A thin gray strand has pulled from her usually neat bun, and her hand trembles as she tucks it back behind her ear. Of course Mama is worn-out, from tending to her.
Mama puts her hands on her hips and frowns at Lily. “Child, are you trying to rip out your hair with that brush? And I’m not sure you should be sitting up already—”
“What is today, Mama?”
“April 4.”
Lily calculates. Two days. “I’m ready. Mama, the woman who came to see me the day of Daniel’s burial—Marvena Whitcomb—it was her brother in jail the night I … that night.” Lily drops the brush to her lap. “Mama, I need you to check for me. The prisoner who was there that night—Tom Whitcomb—is he all right? Is he still there?”
Mama stares, not trying to hide her shock at Lily thinking of this prisoner at all.
“He was about to tell me something important about Daniel,” Lily says.
Mama crosses the room and takes the brush from Lily. As she brushes Lily’s hair, Mama explains, “Jolene fetched Hildy, and Hildy came for me. We sent a neighbor for Elias, and he moved you and the children here. When I went back to get fresh clothes for you, I noticed the jailhouse door was open. I looked inside; no one was in there, Lily. He must be long gone.”
“Dammit! Get Martin for me! I need to know why—when—”
“Lily! Right now, you need to rest. You can talk with Martin later.” Mama’s voice is pulled too thin, a thread about to snap. “Better yet, leave these things to Martin, to the men.…”
“I’m not sure I can trust Martin. I’m not sure who to trust, besides you and Hildy.”
“If that’s the case, then you’re best off letting this go.”
“Let Daniel’s killer go?”
“If that will keep you safe. Your children safe. It’s what Daniel would want.”
Mama puts the brush back on the end table. It’s a relief, feeling her hair smoothed. Mama sits on the edge of the bed and lifts a tress of Lily’s hair. “You’ve always had such lovely hair.”
“Thank you for taking care of me,” Lily says.
“I haven’t brushed your hair since you were a child—”
“I mean—”
Mama puts her fingertip to Lily’s lips. Mama doesn’t like to talk directly about such things. “I need to tell you something, about me and your daddy,” Mama says. “I didn’t want your father to go to Rossville last September, to help with the rescue. We fought about it.” Mama shakes her head. “Last words out of my mouth to the man was that he owed it to his family to take care of us. He walked out, with me shrieking at him.”
And just a moment before, she’d been noting how Mama doesn’t like to talk about difficult things. Maybe she’s wrong to see Mama as simple and fussy. Mama’d lost a son. As a widow, she’d had to stiffen her spine to take care of your child.
“All I’m saying, child, is what goes on between a man and a woman can’t be all sweetness, and if Caleb is looking down at me from the heavens, I’ve got to believe he’s remembering more than my quarrelsome ways.” Mama smiles. Her eyes are bright, but she, too, holds back her tears. “If Daniel didn’t tell you everything, well, isn’t that the way of things sometimes? Even if a man and a woman love each other dearly?”
Lily looks down. She’d never told Daniel about her first pregnancy. She’d always thought she would, when he was back from the war. But so often he’d carried hurt in his eyes, even when he grinned, and she didn’t want to add to it. Maybe he saw hurt in her eyes, too, from things that happened while he was away at war. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t told her about Marvena and Eula. Maybe he, too, always thought he would.
“What I’m trying to say is that whatever you may find out now that he’s gone, Daniel was a good man,” Mama says. “I know I was gruff with him sometimes … worried about you marrying a man so worldly, but after a while I loved him, too, saw how good he was to my daughter. What a good father he was. But he’s gone and you have to take care of you and Jolene and Micah. You don’t have to keep the role of sheriff, especially after this. No one will blame you if you walk away. You and Jolene can have this room. Micah can share with Caleb. You’d be a help to me, you know.” Mama’s lips quiver as she tries to smile. “You always were.”
Lily knows this is only part of the truth. When she’d lived at home, she’d helped, but she’d also chafed and rebelled, making Mama fret and speechify about what-will-people-think and knowing one’s place in a community.
Lily suddenly clasps Mama’s hands. “Mama, I need your help. Please go tell Martin that he must fetch Ada Gottschalk for me. That I need to talk with her—for Daniel’s sake.”
Mama looks shocked. Her hands quiver in Lily’s grasp. “Ada? But why? Why?”
“Her farmhand was the first one who found Daniel. But the farmhand has disappeared. I want to know if there’s anything she can tell me. Anything that can help me figure out exactly what happened the morning Daniel died.”
“Lily, please, let Martin do the questioning—”
Lily stares evenly into Mama’s eyes. “Mama, inside me now there’s a thin vein of hate. For everything. And it’s growing, and it’ll keep growing if I don’t settle on the truth of what happened. Please. Maybe Mrs. Gottschalk can help me find a bit of that truth.”
“If Martin refuses?”
Lily clenches her jaw. “I am not asking. I am ordering, as sheriff.”
Mama’s face sags with the fullness of her fear.
“I’ll be careful,” Lily says.
“That would be a welcome surprise.”
Lily smiles. Mama—however worried she is about her—is still Mama.
Mama sighs. “I’ll go talk to Martin.”
As Mama leaves the room, Lily sinks back into her bed. She’s pushed aside, time and again, a memory even more pain
ful than that of being attacked in the alley, in fact her most painful memory until Daniel’s been found.
On a fall day in 1918, Lily stepped out of the Kinship Opera House, now a makeshift hospital for flu patients, where she worked as a nurse alongside Elias. She leaned against the placard in front of the opera house—a hand-lettered sign that read: “Closed for Entertainment Until Further Notice, by Request of Mayor—” and gulped in great breaths of air, a relief from the smell of sick, dying, dead, on the cots inside. She had just witnessed another child die, a six-year-old boy.
Lily gazed across the town square. Many shops were shuttered; others displayed hand-lettered signs in their windows—“War Bonds Sold Here!” Or: “No Pro-Germans; Loyal Americans Only.” Or: “Krauts not welcome here!” Across the square, at her father’s shop, McArthur & Son Grocers, signs plastered the windows and exterior promoting war bonds and “Use Cornmeal; Save Wheat for Our Troops and Allies!”
Lily’s father had refused to put up anti-German signs, and that had cost him business. Just two weeks ago, a band of men came to the store and pulled everything that had the whiff of Germany: jars of kraut, bratwurst and blutwurst, spicy mustard, dark rye bread, packages of apricot Linzer cookies, foods he’d been bringing in from importers in Cincinnati for years, just for his loyal German customers. The men piled it all in the street in front of his shop, set the pile afire, a crowd gathering to whoop with glee.
When several of the men came back—this time to buy canned vegetables and cigarettes—he did not turn them away but looked them in the eye as he slowly counted back change. Even offered one of the men’s little daughters a peppermint dot.
Why would you serve them so? Lily had demanded at supper that night. She was at home with her parents while Daniel and Roger were away serving in the Armed Expeditionary Forces. Because they’re humans, too, Daddy had said. Wrongheaded and scared, but humans.
Now Lily roused herself from resting. Surely she could take a few minutes to go to the post office to check, as she did almost every day, if there was a letter from Daniel or Roger. There hadn’t been, for weeks. But suddenly she didn’t want to do that. She wanted her daddy. She wanted him to wrap his strong arms around her, tell her that Daniel and Roger would come back, that the grocery sign would be amended to “McArthur & Sons Grocers” when they joined the business after the war. After breakfast that morning, she’d realized she was pregnant with her and Daniel’s first child.
A reserve of energy, born of need, propelled Lily from the sign, across Canal Street.
Lily was in the middle of the street when the horses came thundering toward her. She jumped out of the way, barely missed being run over. Her father ran out of the store, grabbed her from the edge of the sidewalk.
The horses were pulling a cart, and on the cart were two men and a woman—Ada Gottschalk—weeping and screaming. The men laughed at her distress, held her back as she tried to scramble to the edge of the cart. As she begged, “Please, please,” her voice carried her thick German accent on just that one word. She and her husband were immigrants, coming to this land in their early twenties, optimistic about building a better life.
Sickness thickened in the pit of Lily’s stomach as she stared. Tied to the back of another horse was Ada’s husband, Hahn Gottschalk. He’d been stripped of his shirt—chest, back, arms, and face slathered with hot coal tar from the waist up, dusted with chicken feathers. His wrists were bound to the harness, his ankles lashed to the stirrups. His eyes were closed. But they fluttered open and he saw his wife piteously wailing. The men who had brought them hollered, “We brought this filthy German to you, Caleb McArthur, so you’d make him buy war bonds!”
Hahn struggled, but his wrists and ankles were bound too tightly. He opened his mouth to speak, and the men watched, grinning, eager to hear whatever he had to say so they could mock it or use it as an excuse for further brutality.
No sound came out.
“Lily, go fetch Sheriff Tate,” Lily’s father said softly.
Lily shook her head. “No, Daddy, let’s just go inside the store.”
But her father let go of her, stepped forward. Lily grabbed his arm. “No Daddy, no! Come inside; let them be; it’s not our trouble.…”
Daddy shook her arm free and turned and stared back at her. For a moment, Lily could hear nothing, could see nothing except her father’s eyes filled with shame, could feel nothing except the terror of realizing that his shame was not because of men who would treat another so brutally but because of her plea. Her cowardice.
Then he stepped forward and said, “You will let this man and his wife go.”
“He’s not bought war bonds! He’s not a patriot!”
“We are, we are, we’re just having trouble; he borrowed for a new plow; surely you can understand!” Ada cried. “Lily, please, remember how we helped you when you were hurt? Jumping from that tree? We took you to Dr. Ross’s farm … please tell them we’re good people—” One of the men slapped Ada to silence her.
“You will let this man and his wife go,” her father thundered again.
“What are you gonna do ’bout it?”
Lily looked up, saw one of the men standing before her father, shotgun pointed at his belly. Her father stood, cross armed, resolute. “You really want to shoot me here? In front of all of these people? That’s what you’ll have to do before you do more harm to these good people.”
The man glared at Daddy, spit at his feet, then walked back to the cart.
“Unlash the German then,” the man said. The one holding Ada let go of her. He jumped down and started untying Hahn as Ada crawled down from the wagon.
“Some of you watching, come help me get our friend and neighbor to the opera house!” Lily’s father called. He turned, looked at Lily.
She wanted to look away, her face burning with shame, but her father’s gaze held her. “You,” he said. Lily waited, knowing the rage she deserved. But then a sorrowful smile broke his face. “You go ready a cot and bandages for Mr. Gottschalk.”
A week later, Hahn was able to go home with Ada. That afternoon, Lily miscarried her and Daniel’s first baby.
* * *
Later that morning, Elias takes Lily’s pulse, nods with satisfaction, and then presses her abdomen gently. “Tender?” he asks.
Lily shakes her head. “Not too bad.”
Elias sinks into the rocking chair by Lily’s bedside. “I think you are well enough to go home in a few days.”
Lily frowns. She is restless and eager to get back to pursuing the details of Daniel’s murder. “I feel well. How about tomorrow.”
Elias’s brow furrows with concern. Finally, he sighs. “Fine.”
Lily gives him a soft smile. “Thank you for taking care of me,” Lily says. Though Elias is long retired and Kinship has a doctor, Mama has insisted that Elias is the best and he has not hesitated to drive in from the Ross family farm.
“Your mother gets most of the credit.”
“Her, and her sassafras tea,” Lily says.
That draws a chuckle from Elias, though Lily knows that each spring he gladly accepts a canning jar of the dark red tea. Puts “pep in his step,” he always tells Mama, making her smile.
Lily allows herself two small luxuries, first the joy of seeing Elias, for a moment, not drawn with sorrow. All that he’s done for her spins through her mind: amputating her toe to save her leg, holding her secret of the first lost baby from Daniel.
Then there’s the relief of tension finally breaking between them, of the return to companionable silence they long ago earned, through the long months of tending influenza patients sometimes back to health, often through the final moments before their passing, long hours in the makeshift hospital in the Kinship Opera House or in their homes if they couldn’t bring the patients in, with Lily acting as Elias’s second in command. They’d shared the task of telling folks that their loved one had passed. She’d been with Elias when his wife and daughter both succumbed to the flu.
Now Elias stands and pats Lily on the arm. “You should take it slowly. Let Martin handle the investigation into Daniel’s death—”
Lily looks away and pulls her arm from Elias. Their companionable silence is again snapped in two, punctuated by the shutting of the door as Elias leaves. Lily clenches her fists. Why can’t those she loves the most understand her need to find out what happened to Daniel?
* * *
That afternoon, Mama comes back with yet another cup of tea.
Lily smiles—Mama and her tea!—until Mama says, “You have a visitor. Ada Gottschalk. As soon as I told Martin your request, he left to get her. And he’s back already.”
So soon? Lily’s stomach suddenly burns.
“Can’t Martin ask her what she knows?” Mama asks.
Lily shakes her head. “I want to talk with her alone. I just need a minute to get ready.”
“Take your time. Drink your tea,” Mama says, then leaves the room.
But Lily ignores the tea. She gets out of bed, slowly covers herself in a robe, then walks to the rocker.
A few minutes later, Ada Gottschalk stands in the doorway. In shape and size, she’s the same petite, dimple-faced woman with the neat gray bun pinned to the top of her head that Lily recollects from the times she came over to Lily’s grandparents’ farm, to visit with Mamaw Neely, the same woman who has always been in the background of her earliest memories.
Lily forces herself not to look away from Mrs. Gottschalk’s gaze, turned from a warm blue to a hard gray. She’s aged more than the past seven years can account for. Lines crevice her brow, crackle her cheeks, making her round face seem hard and gaunt.