Chapter 5
A leather flap closed the diary and locked into a clasp on the front. All the tugging in the world wasn’t going to open the book. I would need to find some sort of tool to jimmy it loose—after my imprisonment was over. And that would be tonight, I guessed. Meanwhile, I could never let anyone know I had found this diary. While I had no clue what had become of Charlotte, the condition of her book told me it had been in that crawlspace for decades.
Inside might be all the answers to every question I had. For now, all I knew was Charlotte had been born around 1954 to Penelope, who for some reason thought of her as a good-for-nothing burden. From snippets I’d heard, Charlotte had no friends at school, largely because Penelope forced her to dress the way she now forced me. Charlotte’s father, Franklyn, my great-grandfather, had died in a logging accident before her birth, and her only other parent continuously found fault with her. With no friends, no father, and a mother who obviously never loved her, Charlotte must have been miserable.
No boys ever paid attention to her, not that Penelope would have let her go out with any of them, yet somehow Charlotte ended up pregnant and gave birth to my father, Ben, in 1970. She would have been . . . wow . . . my age back then. Had some man viciously raped her? A large portion of the townsfolk believed Charlotte had been a virgin. No great shock if she’d had no friends. They believed Charlotte had experienced an immaculate conception and my father had been born of a virgin. That, they decided had made her son the Second Coming of Christ. That, or Satan’s spawn. My father had never known his mother and had said nothing about this. Why? Had Penelope institutionalized Charlotte after the birth, like in an insane asylum? Heaven knows that old crone could easily drive someone insane. She was licking around the edges of insanity herself. Had Charlotte died in childbirth or run away and abandoned her baby? Did she get sick later and die? Was she murdered? Did she even know who the father was? Or were she and the father still out there somewhere, alive and well?
My head spun. If Penelope or Simon or Cook knew what had happened to my grandmother, why wouldn’t they tell me? Were they too ashamed of her, or were they afraid the law would come down on them? I had to find out. I stuffed the diary under my mattress, grabbed Little Women off the bookshelf to read, and endured the long sweltering hours until I was called downstairs to dinner.
It was cooler downstairs. The tall windows and front door had been opened to admit an evening breeze that fluttered the pages of an open music book on the upright piano and set chimes to tinkling on the front porch. Late afternoon sun streamed through the open front door, chasing away the gloom that usually hung in the parlor and dining room like a pale fog. Sunlight brightened the colors in the carpets and embroidered furniture.
Cook served us in the dining room this evening at the long mahogany table spread with old-fashioned linens. She had set out the good china and polished silver. Penelope sat at one end cutting her slab of pork loin, her silver knife winking in the candlelight. I sat at the other end like an insignificant mar in the decadency of candelabrums, a mirrored sideboard gleaming against the wallpaper, and china hutches filled with crystal wine goblets and stacks of antique china plates. Velvet drapes had been drawn back leaving lace curtains behind them to filter the light. This house was irony itself—a statement of nineteenth-century wealth decaying with time and neglect. It was of no help to the house that its owner was a penny-pinching old lady who refused to invest in air conditioning or an extra bathroom, let alone paint and repairs.
“Do you think you learned your lesson today about boys and talking back to your elders, Emma?” the old woman asked without looking at me. She poked a mouthful of pork between her malformed lips and chewed as she sliced off another hunk. “Well?” she asked when I didn’t answer.
“I expect so, ma’am.”
“Then let that be the end of it. I’ll hear no more about boys and will expect you to keep a modest distance should any others venture onto my property in the future. Now stop staring at your dinner and eat. We don’t waste food in this house.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You don’t have to address me that way, Emma. You aren’t a servant.”
“Not a paid one, anyway,” I mumbled under my breath.
She dropped her knife with a clang on her china plate and glared at me, making Cook wince as she stood by, ready to clear our plates away. I thought all old people were deaf. Apparently not this one.
“What was that you said, young lady?”
“Nothing, Grandmother,” I mumbled.
“You would do well to watch your tongue around me, you brazen little tart,” Penelope snarled. “You’ll find I can be most unpleasant if you get on my bad side. Am I making myself clear?”
“As a bell, Grandmother.” I thought it best not to mention out loud that nobody had found her good side yet. The pork tasted like starched flannel.
Penelope popped a cooked carrot slice between her jaws and burnt my eyes with her glare. “I think you should remain silent for the rest of the meal,” she said loftily.
~ ~ ~
After dinner I slopped the pigs and went to collect Tashunka from the pasture. Simon was standing at the corral gate when I rode the mare in bareback with her halter rope.
“Hear you tweaked the old lady’s tail feathers twice today, child,” he said, straining to kill a grin.
“Yeah, and she’ll have a wrinkled bald behind by the time I’m done with her tail feathers,” I replied, slipping down from the mare.
Now he couldn’t help himself. He broke into a belly laugh, his square yellow teeth shining in the dying light like listing ship lanterns. He cleared his throat a couple of times, forcing himself to be serious again. “Now, Miss Emma, don’t you be lettin’ me hear such disrespect comin’ out yer mouth about yer great-grandmother else’n ol’ Simon might have to take a hand to you. Hear now?”
“Yeah, that’ll be the day. Hey, Simon, do you have a pocketknife I could borrow overnight?”
He got serious for real this time. “What you want a pocketknife for, child?”
I wanted to tell him about the diary, but his fear of being fired if he chose a side that wasn’t Miss Ross’s made me hesitate. I couldn’t take a chance on losing that diary before I’d even had a chance to open it.
“Simon? Do you trust me?”
“Well, yes, I reckon, Miss Emma. “’Ceptin’yer a child yet an’—"
“You either do or you don’t, Simon. And I’m not a child.”
He took Tashunka’s lead rope and turned her into her stall. “Just don’t wanna see you get yerself in no trouble, Miss Emma. An’ why you need it overnight?”
I cocked my head at him with both fists on my hips.
He sighed. “Okay, okay. Just don’t go cuttin’ yerself none or whittlin’ down the whole dang house with it. Don’t know what this overnight business is. You’d best not be thinkin’ ‘bout sneakin’ out the house, Miss Emma, or I will take a hand to you.”
I grabbed the proffered pocketknife and made a beeline for the house.
~ ~ ~
No matter which way I inserted the knife point and jiggled the diary’s lock, it held tight. The last streamers of sunlight needling though the oak tree to light my room were fading, and I feared running out of time before Penelope’s “lights out” rule went into effect. In frustration I used the knife blade to saw on the leather strap that secured the diary’s back cover to the lock on the front cover. Tough and thick, the strap resisted the blade almost as if Grandma Charlotte herself were standing in the room clutching her secrets with a level of ferocity born of desperation. Little crumbs of leather fell like sawdust onto my quilt. After half an hour I had only sawn halfway through the strap and my hands were cramping. I switched on the light bulb dangling from the ceiling and resumed sawing.
A voice shouted up t
he stairs from the second floor hallway. “Lights out was twelve minutes ago, girl. I can see a light under your door. You should be in bed now without someone having to remind you.”
Witch. That wrinkled up hell hag seemed to be everywhere at once. Not much slipped past Penelope. I’d have to be a friggin’ ninja to escape Saturday night for the river party. I pulled the cord to turn off the light, but continued to saw. My arm grew sore from it, and I couldn’t see the progress I was making.
Sometime after total darkness had settled into my room I felt the strap jerk apart. My heart kicked up. I opened the diary in the inky dark and felt a fat wad of brittle pages, wishing my fingertips could read what my eyes could not. There had been too much frustration today, too many setbacks and misery all caused by the old woman. She wasn’t going to stop me from seeing Brad, so why should I let her stop me from reading at least a little from my own grandmother’s diary?
I felt for my flashlight and drew it, the diary, and myself beneath the covers before switching it on. With my heart pounding and my ears straining to hear the slightest sound from the second floor hallway, I gingerly opened the cover of the book and snapped on the flashlight. In big block letters at the top of the page it read, “MY DIARY, BOOK TWO.”
Book Two? Where was Book One? What was I going to miss from not having read the first book? I had searched the crawlspace carefully with the flashlight beam and was certain I hadn’t missed anything else in there. Oh well. It couldn’t be helped now. I heard a bedroom door open downstairs and quickly switched off the flashlight. Faint footsteps from the hall faded as they tracked down the stairs to the parlor, probably on their way to the only bathroom in the house. Cook had mentioned the house had been built in 1871 and a bathroom wasn’t even added until 1946. She said I should be thankful I didn’t have to go out back to the outhouse anymore. Should I wait until the old witch came back up and shut herself into her big bedroom at the other end of the hallway? No. I couldn’t bear to wait one second longer. I flicked on the light, holding the book under the covers and read.
December 19, 1968
Dear Diary:
I’m so bummed out. Don’t think I can tolerate the mother-from-hell one more day. Nobody at school is as miserable and hopeless as I am. They don’t have to rise at dawn in some freezing attic room where ice forms on the inside of the window. They don’t have to pull on raunchy knee-length wool socks, a long scratchy wool dress right out of the last century, hiking boots and an old dark green coat before going out in the crunchy snow in the half light of dawn and milking the cow. There I am, blowing my breath in the cold, mucking out stalls for the draft horses, feeding them and the chickens and pigs, and grooming the harness horses while they munch hay. And all the while I must take care not to get any mud or barn manure on the hem of my coat or dress lest I want Mother to scream at me all through breakfast and half the way to school in that wretched truck with no heater. I pray to God night after night, asking Him to find a friend for me. Just one girl I can eat lunch with and talk to. Of course, all those girls in my class only want to talk about their stud-muffin boyfriends, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, smoking joints in the parking lot after school and going to parties. Either that or how they suffer in winter wearing miniskirts that barely cover their butts with their matching psychedelic blouses. I try to ignore their insults and laughter every time I get near them, but inside it really hurts. No boy has ever looked at me, except to snivel and make fun of my clothes. I will never know what it feels like to be asked out on a date, find a love letter pushed through the grate in my locker, be asked to a dance or to go out to a movie. With Mother refusing to let me out of the house dressed in anything approaching normal clothes, I’ll die an eighty-year-old virgin who’s never had a friend. Mother says the other girls are loose and easy in all their makeup and long hair with their bare legs showing up to here. She says half of them will be knocked up before they graduate, and the other half will contract a disease. She doesn’t say what kind of disease, just that it’s a nasty one having to do with boys. She draws herself up like a fighting cock and tells me I’ll never be one of those wicked girls even if she has to lock me in the cellar and throw away the key. Of course, I’ll never meet a boy in the cellar either and I’ll never get married locked away down there which means I’ll never get the you-know-what out of this house. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about suicide. I mean, check it out. Suicide would sure solve the problem of pulling off the ultimate escape. Way down deep, I can’t deny there’s some watered-down glimmer of hope that things will get better if I stick around and find my own way to escape.
“Emma, that better not be some kind of light I see under your door.”
Damn. I hadn’t heard a single footstep. That witch moved like a ghost. I snapped off the light and closed the diary, lying stiff under the covers in dread that she’d climb up the attic stairs and into my room. If I lost this diary now, I’d wage World War III on the old battle axe to get it back.
Not another sound issued from downstairs. I would have to wait for tomorrow to read any more. I felt a certain kinship with Grandmother Charlotte who must have lain in this very bed swallowed in the dark like me, alone and friendless.
Well, maybe not completely friendless. There was Brad. What a hottie. Whatever did he see in me? I folded up the pocketknife and pushed it under my pillow, lifted the edge of the mattress and slid the diary in there. With the flashlight set back on the night stand, I shut my eyes, studying Brad’s tan muscles, easy grin, and teasing blue eyes in my mind, praying the night would pass quickly.
Chapter 6
I overslept and awakened to shouting from the second floor hallway.
“Emma Ross. If you’re still in that bed it better be because you are too sick to rise.
Great-grandmother Grumpy was up and in her usual good mood today.
“You’re late getting out to your chores. If you’re not down at the barn in five minutes, there’ll be no breakfast for you.”
“Coming, Grandmother.” Wish she’d invest in a rooster. Save us all the strain.
I felt under the mattress to see if the diary was still there, then dressed and pocketed Simon’s knife.
Simon stood in front of the pig pen, pouring a bag of “pig grower” commercial feed into their food trough.
“This is your job I’m doin’, Emma,” he grumbled. “You up half the night whittlin’ on something?”
I handed over his knife and turned on the hose to fill the pigs’ water trough and mud wallow. “Didn’t sleep well. Too much on my mind,” I replied. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Your great-grandma is on the rampage today. Gather the eggs and do the kindlin’ an’ I’ll finish up yer other work. Don’t know what crawled up that ol’ lady’s shorts this mornin’ but you want to leave her tail feathers alone today ‘less you’re partial to gettin’ yer whiskers singed.”
Simon was right. Maybe Penelope was still mad at me about yesterday or just mad at the world in general, but she gave no quarter to anyone. Even Cook, who always had a cheerful greeting and a cheek-splitting smile for me, seemed cold and distant. The witch must have gotten to her too.
We sat down to hot biscuits and icky oatmeal and if I heard her right, the old woman even yelled at God during Grace. Don’t know what God had done, but I’m certain He felt well chastised by the end of it.
“You seem to have fallen short in remembering the rules, Emma,” The Queen of the Universe said through her clenched dentures. She handed me a long list. “You fiddle-faddle your chore time away consorting with boys which is not only lewd and unseemly, it is strictly forbidden. You stay up doing God-knows-what after lights out, even after being reminded. You are rude and sullen by turns and talk back to me like a parasitic hooligan. Me. The woman who has taken you in and provides you a roof over your head and food in your stomach. And now you sleep in like a lad
y of leisure and let poor old Simon do your chores for you. You’re acting like a worthless sloth with a nasty self-indulgent personality. What do you have to say for yourself?” She glared at me.
My growing collection of anger and resentment made the expected apology stick in my throat along with the oatmeal.
“Nothing? You have nothing to say for yourself? No excuse for your ungrateful and indefensible behavior?” Her eyes bulged and her skin turned an unhealthy purplish color. How far could an old woman be pushed before she stroked out?
Enraged or not, Penelope was enjoying this the same way a schoolyard bully relishes pushing a smaller kid up against the wall and stealing his lunch money. Finding fault and exacting revenge was a tonic to her sadistic nature and as natural to her as breathing. I had nothing to say.
“I think you just don’t have enough to do,” she continued. “By the time you finish everything on this list—and you will finish everything on this list by sundown—you’ll be tired enough to go to bed on time and therefore wake up on time. The rest of your impertinence and cheek should sort itself out. If not, I’ll take further measures to rectify that.”
My eyes widened as I scanned the list.
scrape out dried manure in the chicken house
rake the manure out of the pig sty
cut a three-day supply of kindling
sweep off the front porch
A Certain Twist in Time Page 5