A Mother's Promise

by K. D. Alden

  They’d taken her baby, but she would find a way to see her and get Annabel back. Raise her: that was a promise. And one day, she’d have another. She would.

  Doc snapped his fingers again in front of her face. “All right, Ruth Ann?”

  “No,” she said, surprising them both. “I don’t want this.”

  He peered at her over his steel spectacles. Down his nose. “My dear girl, I regret to inform you that the choice is not yours.”

  Her mouth dropped open as he seated himself again behind his desk.

  He didn’t sound like he regretted anything except the time he was spending in discussion with her. He pulled out his watch yet again. She wanted to shove it down his throat. Or somewhere darker. “But you can’t just…you can’t do that.”

  Dr. Price steepled his hands upon his blotter, his thin-lipped mouth downturned. His gaze was gentle but firm. “I’m afraid I can.”

  “It’s my body.” Her voice was louder than she meant it to be.

  “Indeed? Forgive me, but your body, as you say, is fed, clothed and housed by the government of Virginia. Therefore, the state takes an interest in it.”

  So I’m just an alley cat, living on scraps and shame? “I work for that food, these clothes that I sweat through every day and the leaky roof over my head,” she said, as the sky rumbled in agreement. She pointed at the army of laundry trying to flee the coming storm. “I work.”

  “No.” Doc sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

  No? Whatever did the man mean by no? Was he feebleminded?

  His pale blue eyes honed in on her. “You defray the costs of your upkeep, which the state should not have to bear in the first place. So perhaps, young lady,” Doc suggested, “you may wish to cultivate some gratitude.”

  “Gratitude?” Her voice rose involuntarily. “Is that right.” Man’s clearly never worked a day in a laundry.

  “You need to calm down, Miss Riley.”

  “I am calm!” But she realized, too late, that she’d shouted. And at a doctor, of all people. Who was she to snap at a doctor?

  He eyed her severely. “You’re nothing of the sort.”

  Ruth Ann blew out a breath. She dug her fingers into her eyeballs to relieve the rising pressure there. She inhaled, counted to three. “I’m sorry. I ’pologize. I’m calm now. I promise. It’s just that—”

  Doc Price got to his feet. “Good. I trust you will remain so. Our interview is now completed.”

  In less than five seconds, Ruth Ann and her disrespect were outside his door, dismissed.

  The bruised sky began to spit on her as the laundry flung itself desperately toward freedom—with no luck. It was well pinned.

  Two

  No time to feel sorry for herself; she had to rescue the laundry before it got soaked. As Ruth Ann ran headlong into the torrents of wind, the sky deployed buckets of cold water and pitchforks of lightning. Thunder shook the earth under her horrid black shoes. She sprinted despite the fire consuming her toe. The toe that felt what she could not feel.

  The rain was blinding, the grass slippery underfoot. Her hair came loose and smacked wet mop strings into her eyes. She lost her footing, went down. Lay there with her face in the mud for a long moment, drinking in the disparate scents: tangy, grapefruity vegetation; the duskier, muskier earth it was rooted in; the drowned sunshine.

  It was too late for the laundry.

  As she raised her head, a small, ghostly pale hand with blackened nails appeared in front of her face, as if it had reached out of an unmarked grave. She screamed and recoiled, fell onto her back, panting.

  A girl, not a ghost, stood there. She was about Ruth Ann’s age and just as drenched. The girl looked vaguely familiar and wore the same gray work dress as Ruth Ann. She dashed water out of her huge brown eyes, then she covered her mouth and sneezed like a buffalo.

  “God bless you,” Ruth Ann said automatically. Not that she thought it’d do the least bit of good. If a body at the Colony sneezed her soul out and a devil wanted to pop into its place, it would do as it pleased, blessing or not. Clearly Satan possessed Mother Jenkins. Her soul—if the witch had ever had one—had been dropkicked into a gulley and pissed on by an angry mule.

  The girl grimaced. “You look like you could use some blessing yourself.”

  “What makes you say that?” Ruth Ann’s tone was wry. But she took the girl’s helping hand and pulled herself to her feet.

  “I’m Glory.”

  It was the very last name Ruth Ann had expected, since Glory looked about as glorious as a rat caught in a bucket of wet cement. Her hair clung to her skull, her dress was stuck like glue to every bone in her body and any color that might once have crept onto her cheeks had been thoroughly rinsed off by the rain.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Ruth Ann managed. “Ruth Ann. Riley.”

  Glory’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

  She wouldn’t want anything to do with her now that she knew Ruth Ann’s last name was Riley. That was for sure.

  “Yeah.” Ruth Ann turned to resume her trek toward the doomed laundry. Its former struggles had ceased; every piece hung like a sodden corpse, stretching the lines to breaking point. Mother Jenkins would be fit to be tied. Too bad nobody’d actually tie her. “Thanks for the hand up.”

  “Wait…” Glory sneezed again.

  “God bless you,” Ruth Ann repeated.

  “Did you just come from Doc Price’s office?”

  Ruth Ann stilled. Nodded. Jammed her toe against the top of her shoe again, relishing the pain. And again. Her toe popped through the abused, burned leather. She registered it in disbelief. Now there’d really be hell to pay. Shoes didn’t come cheap.

  “’Cause I’m headed there now. I’m late. Mother J told me I had to get the oven scrubbed clean first—she didn’t care if I had an appointment with St. Peter himself.”

  There was a long pause.

  Glory swallowed. “Do you…maybe know…why he wants to see me? I don’t feel sick.”

  Ruth Ann wiggled her purple toe. “You’re new, right? I remember now when you came. About three months ago? And you were…”

  Glory’s face flamed. “Knocked up. You can say it.”

  “Yeah. Well, so was I. Um. Doc Price prob’ly wants to talk to you about that.”

  “Why?”

  Ruth Ann shrugged. “It’s a medical thing.”

  “What kind of medical thing?”

  There was nothing Ruth Ann could do to help the girl. Heck, she wasn’t sure there was anything she could do to help herself. “I got to go. Mother Jenkins is gonna take the Belt to me as it is, what with the wet laundry and all.” Ruth Ann turned on her fat plum of a toe, dragging it through the muddy grass.

  “What happened to your shoe?” Glory asked.

  “Nothing.” She wasn’t going to waste her breath on sob stories. This girl wouldn’t end up her friend, anyway. She’d shun her, like everyone else, now that she knew her momma was creepy, crazy Sheila Riley. And who cared? She sure didn’t.

  “What happened to your toe?”

  “Nothing,” Ruth Ann said. “See you around.” Midstride, she stopped, somehow sensing the hurt in the gap between them. She turned around. “What happened to your baby?”

  But Glory’s face had hardened. “Nothing.”

  “You lazy, useless, stupid girl!” ranted Mother Jenkins as Ruth Ann shivered and dripped in misery on the mudroom floor. The matron didn’t even hand her a towel, much less tell her to go find some dry clothes.

  Mother Jenkins resembled a toad on stilts: bulging eyes set wide in a well-fed face, a bare blip of a nose and a broad, thin-lipped, foul mouth. She had no breasts to speak of; her girth was all in the belly, but she had curiously small feet. They might even be described as dainty, in contrast to her disposition. She was crusty on a good day. On a bad day, such as this one, Ruth Ann would swear that bats flew out of her behind, shrieking for blood.

  “Hours and hours of labor, wasted
!”

  I should know. My labor.

  “Cakes of soap, hundreds of gallons of hot water, down the drain!”

  Who d’you think boiled that water to heat it?

  “A whole day lost…”

  Please, ma’am, may I lose another? How ’bout a whole week? A month?

  “You’re disheveled, you’re filthy, you smell like a farm animal.”

  Moo.

  “And you have utterly destroyed a perfectly good pair of shoes, you slattern!”

  Not a word about Ruth Ann’s toe, which was almost three times its normal size and turning black. It looked like an eggplant sprouting from the ragged, open hole in the leather.

  “What in God’s name is wrong with you?”

  Don’t be takin’ the Lord’s name in vain, Mother J. Not that I’d care, particular, if He struck you down and left you smolderin’. I might even toss a match at your carcass.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the toad-hag screeched, spittle flying from her wide mouth.

  Long list. Pretty much everything.

  “What is your excuse for that…that mess outside on the lines? Tell me!”

  Wordlessly, Ruth Ann pointed up at the sky.

  “Oh, it’s the fault of the rain, is it? Really?”

  Not much I could do to stop it, now is there?

  “Impudent, impertinent, imbecile of a girl! If you weren’t so slow, you’d have finished the laundry yesterday, and it wouldn’t be hanging out this afternoon! Ever think of that?”

  No, Mother Jenkins. After all, I’m feebleminded. As well as being all that other stuff you say. Besides which, it rained yesterday, too. Ruth Ann wiggled her eggplant of a toe. The scream of its pain tuned out Mother J, not all the way, but at least a little.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Ruth Ann knew better than to say anything at all. Wordlessly, she shook her head.

  “I don’t care for the look on your face!”

  What look?

  But Mother Jenkins didn’t bother to get into specifics. There was a whoosh of air and then her beefy palm struck Ruth Ann’s cheek, hard, with an audible crack.

  Ruth Ann reeled backward, her flesh stinging. She put her own cold hand up and covered the heat with it.

  Mother Jenkins tossed three big sacks at her. “Now get outside, pull down that ruined laundry, and rewash every stitch of it. You’ll get no supper, and I don’t care if you work past midnight.”

  Ah, motherly love.

  Ruth Ann picked up the sacks and slipped out the screen door. She couldn’t believe her luck—she’d somehow escaped the Belt.

  The scuffed, black leather belt had belonged to Mr. Jenkins, back in the day. Back in the day when young Gertie Jenkins, to hear tell, had been almost pretty and had a deft way with pot roast and strawberry-rhubarb pie.

  Ruth Ann was sure that part was a fairy tale, because Mother J could, and did, burn toast and oversalt oatmeal. She inspired peas to jump to their deaths, rather than be overboiled in one of her cauldrons. And Ruth Ann’d bet that the future of her own busted shoes lay in being drowned in Mother J’s “beef” stew. She hated to cook—that’s why for the most part the girls did it.

  But in one of Crazy Sheila’s more lucid moments, she’d told of how Mr. J was the old woman’s knight in shining armor, how she’d been devastated when he died in a mining accident, along with their sixteen-year-old son. How it had changed her forever. That did make Ruth Ann feel bad. But not as bad as Mother Jenkins made all of them feel. Especially with the Belt.

  Ruth Ann slung the sacks over her right shoulder, which aggravated scar tissue from the Belt under the rough wet cotton of her dress. She squelched back into the grass, toward the lines of sad, sodden laundry. Every piece looked exhausted, drunk or dead. Every item a skin that some poor soul had shed to go to a better place.

  It was still raining, but not as hard. Still windy and gray, but the sky showed signs of light here and there. It was in a grumpy mood, but not throwing a black tantrum.

  As Ruth Ann unpinned and wadded several pairs of long johns into the first sack, she wished she could shed her own skin and float away. Off to Heaven…or maybe not. They all wore white robes in Heaven, didn’t they? Who did the laundry there? Who had to bleach, wash, dry and iron all those robes?

  A vicious crack of thunder followed by lightning reminded her that she’d likely be struck down for blasphemy any moment now. No, Heaven was no place for her. She was already fallen, like her momma before her. Even if not by choice.

  She unpinned a whole section of petticoats, revealing Doc Price’s office in the distance. You’re the daughter of a drunken, defective, debauched…derelict.

  She didn’t know exactly what the middle two words were, but they didn’t sound good.

  Doc was going to slice her open. Cut and tie her tubes. Fix her so she could never have another baby. And he didn’t give a rat’s behind that she’d said no. That she didn’t want to be fixed.

  She took an armload of dripping wet work dresses down and shoved them into the second sack. The first one was so full she could barely drag it a foot at a time.

  How could what he was doing be right? Was there anyone she could ask for help?

  Certainly not her mother. The last time she’d seen Crazy Sheila, about a week ago, she’d been in a straitjacket, spitting and cursing at anyone who came near her.

  I will see you again soon at my surgery. Doc’s tone had been so sure, so smug.

  Will you, Doc Price? I don’t think so.

  Just like that, Ruth Ann made up her mind. Nobody was cutting her open. She didn’t care how many degrees were on Doc’s walls or how many books he’d read. It didn’t give him the right to decide she couldn’t have more babies.

  Nobody’d asked her permission to put one in her; nobody’d asked her permission to take the child away when she’d pushed her out. She was about damn tired of being treated like the farm animal she s’posedly smelled like.

  Why didn’t the good doctor do something useful, like opening up Mother Jenkins and giving her a heart?

  Hang ’em all.

  Ruth Ann didn’t know how she was getting out of here, but she was. She would get out, find little Annabel at the Dades’ house and steal her back.

  Three

  At night, lit only by hanging lanterns, the outdoor brick laundry area resembled some forgotten corner of hell. Ruth Ann’s figure created a huge shadow-ghoul on the wall behind the big iron pot, set on bricks with a fire blazing underneath. Two large tubs squatted to the right, one containing rinse water and the other thin starch made with flour.

  The shadow-ghoul presided over great piles of what resembled sucked-out human hides. She sorted them, drowned them, swished them, soaped and scrubbed them, boiled them. Then she pulled them out of the iron pot with a broom handle, rinsed them, dipped them in starch and wrung them of the last of their borrowed humanity.

  Lord, you did give me an overactive imagination.

  But it kept her company in this dump.

  The clock had long since struck midnight; Ruth Ann’s arms felt like twin pillars of granite and her stomach growled and grumbled like one of Mr. Ford’s new motorcars. Yet she still had mountains of laundry to process.

  Outside in the distant darkness, a band of coyotes eerily howled in chorus, signaling the imminent doom of some poor creature. Closer by came the screeching, yowling and hissing of a cat fight. And closer still, the shuffling of slippers along the path to the laundry.

  Had she imagined it? Who would be awake at this time of night, and who would come to the laundry? God forbid it was Mother Jenkins with the Belt.

  Ruth Ann braced herself. She couldn’t take much more abuse today. She might snap. Become violent like her momma. End up in a straitjacket, shrieking like a banshee at the walls of a padded cell.

  The whisper of slippers stopped just outside the entrance, and Ruth Ann held her breath. How long do it take to drown a woman in a washbasin? Stop it. Stop
these thoughts! They come straight from Satan.

  The slippers belonged to Glory, who wore a long-sleeved, regulation, white-cotton nightgown exactly like the one Ruth Ann ought to be wearing at the moment. “Enjoyin’ yourself?” Glory asked, her head tilted to the side.

  If Ruth Ann hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn those big brown eyes were filled with a compassion she wanted nothing to do with. Despite the hollering of every tendon in her neck, every muscle of her shoulders, every nerve in her arms, she hauled another sheet to the hand-cranked wringer and fed it in. “What are you doing up so late?”

  Glory wrapped her thin arms about herself and stepped inside the room. “Hard to count sheep when you’re terrified.”

  Ruth Ann started to wind the crank. “Just count ’em poppin’ right into the slaughterhouse. Forget the fence.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  Glory’s eyes overflowed. She bent her head forward and her shoulders began to shake.

  Stricken, Ruth Ann dropped the crank, hurried to her and awkwardly patted her back. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! Didn’t mean it. Don’t cry…”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” the girl sobbed.

  She smelled of talcum powder and innocence. Ruth Ann helplessly eyed the crooked part in her hair, the path of white, vulnerable scalp that led to her pale young forehead. “Would it have made anything better? Shhhh, shhhh. Don’t cry.”

  Glory turned toward her and laid her head on Ruth Ann’s breast, leaving her unable to breathe at the strange intimacy.

  Slowly, unwillingly, but inevitably, she encircled the girl with her arms and rubbed her back. “Shhhhh. It will be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  The girl’s weeping only intensified. “No, it isn’t. He’s going to cut into us with a knife!”

  Ruth Ann fought down the burst of bile that image produced. She tightened her arms around Glory and closed her eyes, shook her head.

  “He is, Ruth Ann. He’s going to surgically remove any chance of family from our lives. No children, no grandchildren. No christenin’s, no weddin’s, no gatherin’s on holidays. No one to care for us when we’re old…Doc Price is cutting out all of that. He will surgically tie off my hope itself. Yours. It’s not fair…”