A Mother's Promise

by K. D. Alden

  Nine

  Ruth Ann writhed internally. It was true that Mrs. Dade was no monster. But it felt monstrous, just the same, when she took Annabel back, looked at her husband and quietly said, “Elijah.”

  It felt monstrous when Mr. Dade, with a quick nod, trudged to the wooden box telephone that hung on the wall and turned the crank on the right side to ring the operator. It felt monstrous when he spoke into the mouthpiece and asked to be connected to the Colony.

  “No!” pleaded Ruth Ann. Before she even knew what she was about, she’d rushed to the telephone and ripped the earpiece out of Mr. Dade’s astonished hand. She hung it up as he sputtered. She ducked, expecting him to smack her.

  “What in tarnation—”

  “Please! Listen to me. Listen to me and Glory ’fore you make the call. Please don’t send us back to the Colony. They’re going to do something awful to us—an operation!”

  “An operation?” Mr. Dade repeated. “What sort of operation?”

  “Doc Price says he’s going to fix it so we can’t have babies.”

  Mr. Dade’s mouth went slack. He exchanged a glance with Mrs. Dade, who looked equally shocked. “How…how would he do that?”

  Ruth Ann’s face flamed. “Slice us open at the belly and tie our tubes, like—like string on a parcel, I guess. I don’t rightly understand it, but that’s what he says.”

  Silence.

  “Why?” Mr. Dade asked, at last.

  “Why? He says we shouldn’t have babies, that’s why…that my momma is…de-botched and, and…degenerous? I think that’s what Doc said. And that I’m-a same. That people like us shouldn’t breed.”

  More silence. Some weird kind of struggle took place on Mr. Dade’s face as he looked from the photograph of his nephew Patrick to his wife. Then Mr. Dade said heavily, “Ruth Ann, Doc Price wouldn’t do this unless he had good reason. You been liftin’ your skirts again.”

  “What? No!”

  “You must be.”

  “I ain’t!”

  He shook his head.

  Mrs. Dade compressed her lips, avoided Ruth Ann’s gaze and stroked Annabel’s cheek.

  “I swear it. You got to believe me, Mr. Dade. I’m not like that!”

  “And yet my wife is raising your child.” He put up a hand as she once again began to protest her innocence. But as usual it was futile.

  Annabel slept, blessedly unaware of the aspersions being cast upon her biological mother’s character.

  Mrs. Dade got up. “Girls,” she said in brisk tones, “nobody from the Colony is going to drive here to get you at this hour of the night. Let’s make up the spare bed in the baby’s room for you. She’ll sleep with us, and we’ll ring the Colony in the morning.”

  Oh, swell. But Ruth Ann nodded. She was too tired and low-spirited to do anything else. And it was, frankly, a miracle that the couple wasn’t sweeping them out onto the road, given why she’d come here.

  “It won’t do you any good to run,” Mr. Dade said brusquely. “You’ve got no money, no food, nowhere to go.”

  She nodded again. No sense arguing—it was all true. Funny how fear, a bit of bread and a pipe dream about her baby had given her such wings of possibility…but now, once again, they’d been clipped.

  Defeated, she and Glory followed Mrs. Dade into Annabel’s room, her former room. “You know where the linens are,” Mrs. D said, retrieving another blanket from the baby’s cradle and swaddling her in it.

  “Yes, ma’am.” They were stored in a cedar hope chest in the hallway. Ruth Ann had been fascinated with its treasures when she was younger; she herself had never had a hope chest or any spare time to sew or embroider anything to go in one.

  “Make sure you tuck the corners, hospital-style, or your feet will get cold.” Mrs. Dade turned, and it was then that she noticed Ruth Ann’s bloodied, mismatched man’s shoe. “Dear heavens, child. Wherever did you get that shoe, and how have you hurt yourself?”

  Clarence. She knew a moment of panic. Don’t get Clarence in trouble! She had to ditch the shoe before morning, in case Mother Jenkins were to recognize it. Because there would be no avoiding Mother Jenkins tomorrow. Or her belt. She shivered.

  “It’s nothing, Mrs. D. Dropped an iron on my toe, and it got all swole up, so’s I found a bigger shoe.”

  “That’s a gentleman’s shoe,” Mrs. Dade said, in tones of disapproval.

  “Couln’t fit in my regular one. And the iron burned clear through the leather, anyways.”

  “But where did you get a man’s shoe?”

  “I—um. There was extras in a closet, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Dade eyed her dubiously. “I doubt that.”

  Ruth Ann remained silent. What could she say?

  “You need to get right with God, Ruth Ann. And you, too, Glory.”

  Amen to that. But how? How is it me an’ Him got so sideways to begin with? What is it I’m bein’ punished for? Lyin’ about how I got a shoe? Tryin’ to get back my baby? Stuff I ain’t done yet?

  Her daddy had left them, her momma’d gone around the bend, her sister and brother’d been taken and put somewhere’s else—all by the time she was five. Why? Why had God got so mad at a little girl like her?

  She didn’t understand. She doubted Glory did, either. Why didn’t anybody tell the boy who’d promised to marry her to “get right” with God? Why hadn’t anyone told Patrick to do that? Why hadn’t anyone sent him away to some colony for the…the violently depraved? Why was his “truth” more believable than hers? Why couldn’t men get knocked up and push a baby out o’ their behinds?

  Why, why, why?

  But when Mrs. Dade left the room, closing the door behind her, Glory unquestioningly, obediently, sank down to her knees, bent forward and clasped her hands.

  Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name…

  “Criminy. That’ll do us a lot o’ good,” said Ruth Ann sullenly, but flopped down on the bed next to her. “Our Father’s never been walloped with Mother Jenkins’s belt. Has He?”

  It was sacrilege. Glory opened her eyes. “Don’t say such things.”

  “Why not? You gonna tell me that we’re to learn something from all of this? Some valuable life lesson?”

  Glory sighed. “Maybe.”

  “Well, then what on earth is it?”

  “Beats the daylights outta me.”

  “Huh, just you wait. Mother Jenkins will be happy to do that.”

  Ruth Ann tumbled into a sleep that was like a black pit of nothing. She awoke with a start when the back door thudded shut: Mr. Dade, no doubt, on his way to use the outhouse.

  This would be her only chance to appeal again to Mrs. Dade, to make her understand. She slipped out of bed, leaving Glory ever-so-faintly snoring with her cheek pillowed by her hand.

  She felt horrid that she’d brought her on this ill-advised adventure. Glory had an innocence about her that Ruth Ann barely remembered in her own self. And the last thing she wanted was to watch it wither on the vine, drop rotten into the dust like her own.

  She’d wanted to whisk Glory away before that could happen, protect that shining, trusting quality. Why? Because she was drawn to it, and hoping to be warmed by its rays? Be blessed by the shimmer? Catch it and treasure it, like a lightning bug in a jar?

  She didn’t know. But she would try her best to explain it to Mrs. D.

  She hoped that Mr. D had been avoiding his greens as usual and would have an extra-long commune with nature.

  She slipped down the short hallway and knocked softly on Mrs. Dade’s bedroom door.

  “Yes?”

  Ruth Ann gingerly opened it. “Mrs. D?”

  Her former foster mother was propped against her white pillows, with Annabel resting against her breast, her tiny body curled peacefully into her curves. The sight made Ruth Ann ache in a way she hadn’t known she could. She felt the void not only in her womb but in her heart, in her very soul.

  There was something divine about the peace that radiated be
tween them; they were Madonna and Child. But Ruth Ann had been whited out of this picture, painted over. She’d been subtracted from the equation that equaled this sacred love.

  She was yet again the outsider. She wasn’t a person. She was an ache. Would she ever be anything else?

  “Come in, child. But, shhhh. Annabel just fell back asleep. She was a bit fitful during the night. Did you hear her?”

  Ashamed, Ruth Ann shook her head. See what kind of mother I’d make? One who sleeps through her own child’s cries. This is for the best, at least for now. For the bitter best. She steeled herself to say so. If she said the words out loud, then Mrs. Dade might be…grateful. In an odd sort of way.

  But the words stuck in her craw when she opened her mouth. “How long does she sleep, between feedings?”

  “About two hours. If I’m lucky, three. But this past night, she woke up almost every hour. Tummy troubles, poor mite.”

  “How…how can you tell? That it’s her tummy, and not something else?”

  Mrs. Dade looked at her with something like pity. “By the way she cries. The way she squirms. And the way she relaxes when I rub her tiny belly to soothe her.”

  Ruth Ann nodded silently. She inhaled as much oxygen and courage as she possibly could. “Mrs. Dade…I know that you…that God didn’t give you no babies of your own.”

  Mrs. Dade’s nostrils flared, and her arms tightened almost imperceptibly around Annabel. Otherwise she was perfectly still.

  “And I know that I have no right, especially after last night, to ask anything of you. But please, won’t you help us? Glory and me? Please don’t let Doc Price slice us open and take away…” She couldn’t get it out. Her mouth worked.

  “Glory, especially. She don’t deserve that. Her beau—he said they were gettin’ married, promised her it didn’t matter—”

  “The more fool she.” The rising sun toyed cruelly with the lines around Mrs. Dade’s mouth. Found and exposed the silver in her hair. “Free milk. The oldest story in the book.”

  “She ain’t a cow. She’s a good person, Mrs. D. She deserves a better life than this. She deserves a second chance…Maybe I don’t. Maybe Annabel is b-b-better off here with you. But Glory—”

  Mrs. Dade moved her feet restlessly under the covers, as if she were trying to step away. “What do you think I can do about anything? I don’t decide such matters. I’m a housewife, Ruth Ann.”

  “Please. You know people in town. Folks look up to you. They listen to what you got to say.”

  Mrs. Dade’s mouth tightened. “Not since my former ward disgraced my good name.”

  Ouch.

  Ruth Ann sucked in a breath and focused on the specks of dust illuminated by the sunlight streaming through the window. They drifted without purpose, eventually settling on the floor and other surfaces, so someone like her would have to mop them up.

  Sticks and stones…The words hurt, despite the old adage, but Ruth Ann was past caring about that kind of pain; she reverted to numbness.

  It wasn’t sticks or stones or judgment she feared: it was a scalpel. A gleaming, wicked, sterile, silver scalpel in the hands of a man with an M.D.

  “I never meant to hurt you, Mrs. D. You been good to me. You looked after me, when I was small. Maybe—” Her voice cracked. “Maybe you even loved me a little.”

  Mrs. Dade averted her gaze, then drew her knees up under the covers and shifted the baby. “And this is the thanks I get.”

  “Yes.” Ruth Ann said it urgently. “Annabel, this little angel…She is the precious thanks that you get. Maybe you feel I done you wrong, Mrs. D. But she came from it. Two wrongs—me and, and…” She couldn’t bring herself to say Patrick’s name. “Me and him. We did make a right. She’s a gift from God, a tiny miracle, and that’s a fact.”

  Mrs. Dade didn’t utter a word, but her face said it all: the tenderness in her eyes, in the index finger she used to trace Annabel’s cheek, in the softening of her lips as she bent forward to kiss her downy head.

  “And now she’s yours,” Ruth Ann whispered.

  Two tears, followed by a third, rolled down Mrs. Dade’s cheeks and then fell onto the flannel of her night rail, soaking into the fabric.

  “Now,” said Ruth Ann. “Imagine if Doc Price had ‘fixed’ me afore I ever came to you. Annabel would never have been born.”

  The back door thudded heavily as Mr. Dade returned from his call to nature.

  “Please, Mrs. D.” Ruth Ann put a hand on her arm. “Please help us.”

  Mrs. Dade slid her legs to the side and out from under the covers. She didn’t shake off Ruth Ann’s hand; it fell away naturally as she found her slippers and got to her feet. “I need to put the kettle on for coffee and start the biscuits and bacon.”

  It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either. Ruth Ann nodded.

  “You want to hold her, while I do that?”

  Annabel’s dark blue eyes fluttered open, and the baby stared right into Ruth Ann’s soul. She saw it all: the longing, the pain, the fear, the desperation, the raw wound of love that was afraid to blossom. How was that possible?

  Last night, she’d broken into this house fully intending to steal back her baby and run off with her. She’d thought of Annabel as a human doll, an extension of herself. But Annabel was a little being in her own right, and she deserved the comfort and security of a better life than Ruth Ann could give her.

  “Here,” Mrs. Dade said, holding out the baby.

  Ruth Ann’s breath hitched. “I…I can’t. If I hold her again, I won’t be able to give her back. And she’s better off with you, I know that. You just make me one promise, Mrs. D.”

  Her foster mother’s eyebrows rose in question.

  “You swear to me you’ll never leave her alone with him. With Patrick.” She spat the name.

  It was only then, at long last, that the unwelcome truth dawned in Mrs. Dade’s eyes, breaking the surface of her denial and creating eddies of shock. She tucked Annabel into the crook of her arm and put a hand over her mouth. Took a trembling breath through her fingers.

  Sensing the tension, Annabel began to wail.

  “Swear it.” Ruth Ann’s voice was hard and fierce to her own ears. “If you are gonna be her mother, you make me that promise.”

  She got the barest nod. But it was all she needed. Someone had at last acknowledged her truth…and would protect her daughter.

  Ten

  It was Clarence who drove Mother Jenkins to the Dades’ home, in the Colony’s gleaming black Model T. Clarence helped the old witch out of the automobile, then stood outside and waited, leaning up against the automobile, hand and stump in his pockets. He wore a tweed cap over his neatly clipped, coppery hair and no expression at all, save for a tiny furrow in his brow.

  Ruth Ann lit up at the sight of him, but carefully masked her expression as the old toad came inside, shot her a scathing glance and seemed on the verge of spitting on Glory. Ruth Ann’s stomach flip-flopped, and her heart slammed against her rib cage. What will she do to us later? Once Clarence delivers us back to the Colony?

  The urge to run again almost overwhelmed her, a primal flight instinct. But she had nowhere to go, nobody to turn to and no money or skills to earn any—unless she let men like Patrick have their way with her. Just the thought had her almost retching onto Mrs. D’s braided parlor rug.

  Mother Jenkins may have wanted to beat the stuffing out of them upon sight, but she restrained herself. After the single acidic glance, she ignored them and took tea on Mrs. D’s settee. She stiffly apologized for Ruth Ann and Glory’s “abhorrent” intrusion. Not that Ruth Ann knew exactly what that meant. It surely didn’t sound good, though, especially the “whore” part.

  At least Mrs. Dade finally accepted that she was no whore. Ruth Ann didn’t kid herself that she’d share that news with anyone else, however. Better to have a disgrace of a ward than a rapist nephew—who wanted that noted in the family Bible? Best to leave the blame on the outsider, that ungrateful ser
pent in the bosom.

  Ruth Ann had a brief, uncomfortable fantasy that, like a serpent, she had a forked tongue and could stick it out and hiss at Mother Jenkins. Sink her teeth into her. But she hated snakes more than she hated Mother J, so she shook it off with disgust and focused on counting the planks in the parlor floor.

  “You can be sure these two reprobates will be punished,” promised her tormentor.

  “They’re just young girls,” Mrs. Dade said mildly. To Ruth Ann’s astonishment and huge gratitude, she said nothing at all about them trying to steal Annabel. Glory looked as though she might kiss her.

  “They are old enough to know better,” Mother Jenkins said, with a severe glance in their direction. “And they could have been molested—or worse—on the road!”

  Don’t take no road for that to happen. But Ruth Ann kept her mouth shut.

  “Don’t be too hard on them,” Mrs. D said in soothing tones. “I believe Ruth Ann just needed to see for herself that her little one is in good hands.”

  “She’d already been told so.” Mother J shot her another venomous glare.

  Ruth Ann tried not to wither under it. She wiggled the toes of her right foot, clad now only in a stocking. She’d gone to the outhouse after speaking with Mrs. Dade and parted sadly with Clarence’s shoe, her only shot in a lifetime at Cinderella’s slipper. Clarence’s shoe deserved a better fate than to fester in the muck, but Mother Jenkins could never, ever know he’d helped them escape, and that shoe would have been a dead giveaway.

  So Ruth Ann slipped it off regretfully and blew it a kiss. She wished it bon voyage and sent it spiraling down under her bum. It sank without a trace.

  “Where is your shoe, child?” Mrs. Dade asked now, setting down her teacup with a frown. “The—”

  But she broke off when Ruth Ann widened her eyes and shook her head silently.

  “Wretched girl,” Mother Jenkins said. “Do you think they grow on trees?”

  Glory stifled a giggle, while Ruth Ann conjured such an image in her head. Button-up boots on the lower limbs, perhaps. Dancin’ shoes blooming in the middle. Bedroom slippers sprouting from the higher, wispy branches. Maybe a few stockings waving festively among them all.