by Julie Kibler
Upstairs, the smoke was so thick it was hard to spot an empty table. Lizzie and her ma leaned against a wall until Arch wagged a finger from the opposite side of the room.
On their way, an older woman grabbed her mother’s sleeve. “Elsie, we haven’t seen you in a coon’s age, darlin’. And who you got here?”
“It’s my Lizzie,” her ma said. “She got herself some religion, and I guess it done her good. She’s finally doing us right after I worked so hard to get her back home.”
The woman pushed her neck back and gawked at Lizzie, who nearly choked on her mother’s lie. She’d written Lizzie once. There’d been no work to it.
“Well, I’ll be. We figured you for dead by now, but good on ya. Watch out with these boys. They like you religious girls, if you know what I mean.” She winked and waved them on.
Lizzie forced a smile as other women stopped them with the same kinds of comments. She was surprised they remembered her after so long. She reckoned her reputation had been even worse than she’d realized.
Arch glowered when they reached the table. “About damn time. Folks wanted the table.”
“Oh, hush, Arch, you know I rarely get to jaw these days. The ladies want to see Lizzie. I want them to see she’s cleaned up good.”
Her mother didn’t care about Lizzie’s reputation—she simply wanted the townswomen to think Lizzie’s transformation was her doing.
Elsie sent Arch for punch, saying she’d spice theirs up. Otherwise the lodge offered only coffee and tea, for the county was dry everywhere but saloons. Liquor flowed freely, however, flasks glinting in every prism of the cheap chandeliers. As long as folks didn’t get out of hand, the lodge manager looked the other way. Arch splashed away half the contents of their cups along his return.
“Sorry, girls. Hard to carry three.”
“More room for what I really want,” Elsie said. She added a liberal measure of vodka to her punch, then stirred it with a finger she popped in her mouth when she finished. “Want a splash, hon?”
Lizzie pulled her cup closer. “You know I don’t drink now, Ma.”
“Oh, I’m teasing. I ain’t got enough to share.” Ma capped her flask.
It was hard to see and hard to hear, and the chaos set Lizzie’s brain awhirl along with the couples dancing a waltz. Between songs, someone hollered for the Shimmy, but the music leader shouted, “The Shimmy is not permitted!” He winked, then added behind his hand, “Later, folks!”
The crowd roared. Her ma chuckled, twisting her mouth and shaking her shoulders, and Lizzie smiled. Watching her relax wasn’t the worst. But after two hours and two cups of punch, Lizzie asked her ma to point out the ladies’. She was relieved to exit the rowdy room. She began to wish she’d stayed at the house.
But then she saw her reflection for the first time since she’d left the Home in the mirror over the sink. She hadn’t bothered with the tiny shaving mirror at the house. Her hair had come loose in wavy tendrils around her face, and her eyes glistened from the pulsing in her head that matched the music. Her ma had insisted she rub clay tint on her lips. She had to admit she looked nearly pretty. But she also wondered if she looked cheap. She rubbed at her lips, but the color had sunk in good. It wouldn’t budge.
Back at the table, her ma pushed her cup across. “Got you a fill-up while you was gone.”
Children had been permitted until nine, and the drinking had accelerated once folks with kids had departed. The music picked up, and the dance floor with it. Couples turned and spun, hopped and shook, and that dance they’d clamored for made the floor quiver, bosoms shaking and twisting every which way while the men hooted and hollered. Ma said the dance had been banned as lewd in many places. Lizzie could see why.
She began to feel as if she floated above the commotion, somewhere around the ceiling. She looked at her cup, and then at her ma, whose grin showed dark gaps where teeth had been. “Can’t even tell it’s spiked, can ya? Vodka is the choice of proper ladies such as yourself.”
Lizzie couldn’t even respond. She knew she should be angry, but she felt numb, nearly as if she didn’t care. But she would not drink more. She pushed away the cup.
Her mother laughed. “Loosen that rod up your back. You’re too straight for your own good now, Lizzie.”
A man approached, near Lizzie’s age, and not terrible to look at if she was noticing. Others had come by to ask her to dance and she’d politely refused, but he’d circled two or three times already. He tilted his head. “Still won’t dance with me, miss?”
“Missus,” she replied.
He looked around. “I haven’t seen a mister all evening.” He held out his arm.
“Mister ain’t been round in a decade,” her ma said. “Go, girl. Take a turn. Clear skies and no sign of lightning to strike you dead tonight.”
“Can’t,” Lizzie said. It was hard to get the words straight.
“I seen you dance all them years ago,” Elsie said. “You was good.” You’d have thought her mother wanted to dance herself, the way she wheedled. “Tell you what. You dance with this nice fella, and I’ll go to church next week.” She batted her eyelashes.
Lizzie’s mouth fell open. Was this a bargain worth striking, or one with the Devil? She knew deep down Brother JT wouldn’t approve. He was dead set against dancing.
But he didn’t know her people. He didn’t understand how tough they were to crack when they thought one way and you wanted to convince them of the other. These folks traded in deals—especially when the proceeds weighed in their favor.
It might be the only way to get her mother through the door of the church.
“All right,” Lizzie said. “But only the one.”
The man smiled and took her hand. As he led her to the floor, she looked back at her ma. She was laughing as if she’d pulled one over on Lizzie. But it was too late now. She’d have to hope Ma honored her word.
The man wore a decent suit of clothes and smelled clean, his breath hardly tinged with booze. He led her into the waltz, the fiddle player spinning a sweet tune, and she rose on her toes, the memory of how to follow coming as easy as the memory of her husband. He’d been a good dancer and had wooed her at a dance not so different from this.
She closed her eyes and let the music and this stranger turn her through the steps while, just for a minute, she relaxed into one of her few good memories of Willis, holding her hands, pulling her to his chest, spinning her under his arm, easily a foot taller than Lizzie, then pulling her close again, whispering how pretty she was, over and over, the first time a man had ever said so.
Her fingers trembled as warm hands grasped hers tighter, and her scalp prickled where he casually brushed it with his lips, inside a slow turn. Her leg went weak at the pressure of his elbow at her side, but she kept up, with vigor and grace she hadn’t felt in an age. She leaned her cheek against the wool of his coat pocket to inhale the tobacco scent and—
Suddenly, she remembered this was not Willis, and it was not twenty years ago. It was here, and now, with a spider spinning her into the same sinister web.
She left him on the dance floor, his mouth slack as she ran off without a word. She’d nearly fallen for it, this way men flattered their way in, saying sweet things with touches that ran chills up and down your arms and spine, to get what they wanted without having to give what you needed in return.
She’d nearly fallen for it again.
Soon, Arch came back from the alley, where the older men had smoked and joshed all evening. Her ma had kept her mouth shut after Lizzie stopped mid-dance, except a scoff and a short remark—“Guess I won’t be going to church after all.”
In the board seat behind them, returning to the house, Lizzie wept silently. She’d not let her ma witness her tears. Her plans would never work. She saw it now, plainer than ever. This life would kill her. If not this month, another. I
f not this year, next.
But as they pulled into the yard, Lizzie sat up straight at the sound of a scream. It came from the house or the barn, and confused her only for that, for she’d know it anywhere.
Docie.
Lizzie was more sure of that than she was of anything.
But her Docie? Here, in this house? How could it be? Lizzie sprang from the wagon seat, shushing her ma and Arch, so she could locate the screams. They seemed surprised, but unconcerned—as if a woman screaming were commonplace, even in their home.
But they did not know the timbre of her girl’s voice.
She held a hand behind her to keep them back. The screams came through the window sash, where it was missing a pane. Lizzie grasped the hatchet, its blade sunk into a chunk of wood near the doorstep, and pulled hard to release it, thankful for her newly hardened muscles. She crept onto the porch, twisted the door handle, and, with the hatchet high over her head, pushed the door open with her foot. The door was half-rotted and weighed nothing, constantly rattling in its frame and rarely latched when they were home.
In the corner, on the flimsy bedframe where she’d slept for weeks, Docie sat pushed and folded against the wall. She wore her little traveling coat, but it was skewed, buttons undone except one at the middle, with the shoulder pushed off one side. Underneath, her pretty sailor suit was torn at the neck, with her skirt hiked high, showing her stockings clear as day.
And those beefy hands, one pressing down on her knee, the other snaking between them, as if to yank down the stockings—like Docie’s cry, Lizzie would know them anywhere. The sight heated Lizzie’s blood to a boil in her head and ran it icy all the way through her. They belonged to a grown man now, not the twelve-year-old boy who took her down to the creek that very first time.
Her own stepbrother.
Lizzie roared. “You get off her before I kill you!”
Hugh reared back enough to turn his head, but he kept Docie pinned. “Who’s that?” he said, squinting as if he didn’t know her. Even two or three footfalls away, she smelled fumes wafting off him.
“Get off now,” she repeated.
“Hugh, it’s Lizzie,” her ma said, still behind Lizzie. “Let that girl go.”
That girl. She didn’t know her own granddaughter.
“She was waiting in my bed, asking for it, just like Lizzie always tempted me,” Hugh said.
Lizzie couldn’t believe her ears. His bed? She grasped the hatchet tighter and higher and glanced behind her. Her ma simply shrugged. Elsie would make no apologies, not for anything. Not for this, and not for everything that had happened to Lizzie, for all those years of abuse.
“You got one more chance,” Lizzie said, quiet and controlled this time, so as not to leave any doubt in the monster’s mind. She would do what she said. “Get off her. Get off the bed, and leave my girl be.”
He didn’t. He glowered and turned away, back toward Docie, burying his face against her. In this house, it would never matter who knew, who saw, or for how long. He was free to do as he pleased. Anything was permissible.
Lizzie rushed the bed, aiming the hatchet for his leg. But as she brought her arms down, hard, Hugh suddenly reared back and swung his hands in the way. The hatchet pinned one to the footboard, and the top joints of two fingers, the ring and the tall one, flew away from the bed.
Hugh’s face blanched white as Docie’s blouse. For a moment there was no noise, but then he rolled away, holding his hand to his neck as blood spurted everywhere, on everything. He mewled like a treed bobcat.
Lizzie stood still. The human body was tougher than wood in places, and as hard to chop at the bone. But she knew her strength now. She’d meant to hurt him badly. Kill him if she had to.
Docie huddled, free now, but Lizzie didn’t quite trust that Hugh was finished, even in his state. “Docie, baby, get off the bed.” Lizzie heard her move more than saw her. “Do you see my bag, honey?”
“Yes, Mama,” Docie whispered.
“Put everything in it you know is mine, then carry it outside.”
“O-k-kay,” Docie said, tears choking her voice now, making her sound six years old instead of sixteen.
“Arch?” Lizzie said, for she assumed the man was there, somewhere she couldn’t see. He huffed from the other side of the room, as if he couldn’t believe she’d done it, or worse, didn’t understand why. “You tend to Hugh if you want. Wrap his hand and stanch the bleeding if you want him to live.” She shrugged. “I don’t care if he does, but he’s your boy.”
Arch shuffled to a basket near the stove and rustled for the wool Lizzie had bought for her blisters. Hugh had stopped his mewling and lay silent in the floor, likely as not, in shock.
Or maybe the booze had deadened the pain, which nearly made her angry. She wanted him to feel it—all he’d ever done to her and nearly did to her daughter.
“Ma? You get back to the wagon to drive me and Docie to town.”
“I sure will,” her ma said. “Taking you right to the jail and telling them to lock you up. You can’t just go and do what you did here, acting like you’re the queen of innocence when we all know what you done before you went and got religion. I should’ve turned you in years ago.”
Lizzie went cold, ogling her ma. After all that had been done to Lizzie, not just by Hugh, but by Arch, too, with her ma knowing the whole time and saying nothing, it was unfathomable that she’d throw Lizzie’s own indefensible shame back at her.
But Lizzie prayed she wouldn’t say more, not with Docie right here.
“Okay, Ma,” she said, coming to her senses. Elsie would have said something by now if she was going to. “Take us to the jail. They helped us there once, and they’ll help us again. You all ain’t right in the head. They know it.”
Her ma sniffed but headed for the door. She stopped to gather a bundle of papers from a drawer. “Hurry it up,” Lizzie said. It felt good, in a way, to speak to her like that. Powerful. All those years, and these past weeks, she’d quivered under her, as if her ma had something on her that kept her small.
Lizzie waited another minute to be sure her brother wouldn’t come after them, then carefully set the hatchet just outside the door. She wiped her face and hands on a dishrag at the dry sink. Blood splattered her skin and dress, and some of those stains would never come out. Blood set fast, rarely giving in to the washboard or even the sun. The stains would remind her, whenever she saw them, that she was not as weak or dumb as her kin had made her believe.
She walked out the door and down the path and climbed into the back of the wagon, where her daughter waited to fall into her arms.
“Go,” she said. Elsie flicked the reins.
* * *
—
The road was darker and lonelier than it had been only an hour earlier, but Lizzie held Docie tight, and it was nearly all that mattered. She’d save her questions for later.
This, on the other hand, would be the last time she ever intentionally saw or spoke to her mother. She called up to the front of the wagon. “You said he’d left you and Arch. All this time, I’ve been sleeping in his bed. You knew he’d be back, didn’t you, Ma?”
Elsie slapped the horse’s side with a rein, as if hurrying them could save her. “He’s been in the jail.”
“The very one we’re headed for?”
“He done some stealing from the mill. They locked him up ninety days.”
“Ninety starting when?”
“Round about August.”
Lizzie could count months. “Round about when you asked me to come. And you knowed—you knew all that time, he’d be out this month.”
Elsie shrugged. “Knowed he’d be out today. They sent a note last week saying so. I knew you’d be bothered to see him, so we gone to that dance to give him time to get settled.”
“What had you planned to do then? Thro
w me out like you done every other time you didn’t need me anymore?”
“We’d of found the space. You done a good job around the house. Not likely he’ll be helping now. You crippled him something good.”
Lizzie snorted at the backhanded compliment. “Doing all the work you won’t do, long as I didn’t cause you no trouble.”
“You’re a good girl now, but you was starting to get that sass back,” her ma said. “I reckon maybe you need to get on back to where they can control you and that mouth.”
Docie, huddled into Lizzie’s shoulder up until then, tilted her head back, plainly puzzled.
“I ain’t never been sassy, Ma. You know that. I were nothing but a scared little girl, too cowed to stick up for myself. I never gave you trouble—none you didn’t lead me to yourself. Every dark thing I done, you walked me right up to it.”
Even the one Elsie hadn’t spoken aloud…Lizzie prayed to God she wouldn’t now.
Elsie laughed, low and quiet, and shook her head. Silence deepened between them until her mother dropped her chin. It was no acknowledgment, but it was the best Lizzie would get.
“I ain’t scared no more,” Lizzie said, “and I ain’t afraid to stick up for myself, and for my daughter. I’d do anything to keep her safe. You hear that? I didn’t learn that from you.”
Elsie whipped the horse’s side. “Git!” she called, her voice full of something nearly like shame. Lizzie took some satisfaction knowing her mother felt that, if not regret.
At the jail, Elsie told the sheriff what Lizzie had done to Hugh. He started to say it was good Lizzie turned herself in so he didn’t have to go after her, but Lizzie interrupted. “Sir, you let my brother loose from your jail less than a day ago, and now he’s attacked my daughter. He’s got nobody to blame but himself.”