by Julie Kibler
Her aunt wouldn’t take them again, so they took the train to the nearest station to her ma and Arch’s, outside Tyler, where they waited on a ride. A man said he’d take them for free, though she had money from her aunt. He took them into the woods, and when darkness fell, he took them to an old boxcar. He lived in sin with Lizzie all night, and they nearly froze with no covers. The next morning, he dropped them within a mile of her ma’s, but claimed he’d leave the trunk at the station. Of course, Lizzie didn’t see that again.
Ma gave them a corner, better than living in sin just to eat or sleep with a baby coming.
After a week, she birthed a baby boy. He was pale and never had anything but a thin cry, and within a few days he took on a gray, waxy look, as if he weren’t a real baby but a doll made of painted leather. He scarcely moved his little arms or legs or even his mouth.
Lizzie shivered that last night, pulling both babies as close as she could, Docie burrowing into her and crying to eat, their pallet far from the fire and her stomach empty but for bits of bread and gruel. Lizzie couldn’t feed them both. She looked down at her baby boy and knew she needed to make him eat. But he would hardly take her teat.
And this was her third truth: She let Docie suck all she wanted.
She watched her boy’s chest rise and fall until it stopped. When her ma got her up to help with the bedding she’d stained with her labor, she saw he was dead. She took him, and Lizzie tried her best to remember his features. In her mind, he still looked like that pale baby doll, still as stone.
Lizzie had no way to record the facts of either of her babies. Docie grew to know hers and had her records. But her little boy had nobody to keep track of his birth or death, and she was too weak to follow where her ma took him.
She didn’t know where her ma buried him, or if she buried him at all. The day after Lizzie lost her boy, her mother drove them away and said to never come back.
Lizzie wondered, had she made the right choice?
When they came for her and Docie in the jail, she thought about him.
When they said everyone was worth saving, she thought about him.
She knew a guilt she’d never felt before, and she knew something new: She had to always try. But then, when she took Docie back Home, after she tried so hard with her ma again, she remembered the biggest truth. She’d learned it again and again.
Everyone might be worth saving, but not everyone can be saved.
* * *
—
Lizzie lifted her damp face the day Mattie died, recalling her mother’s betrayals—each a knot in a long, impossibly tangled string. She took up her pen again and with her own hand carefully recorded what she hadn’t before, not because she couldn’t, but because it had seemed it wouldn’t matter to anyone at all. She wanted it to matter. And she knew whom to tell.
Dearest Mattie,
I gave my boy a name. You are the first to know it.
His name was Benjamin Thomas Bates.
And I will miss you.
Love all ways,
Lizzie
LIZZIE
Arlington, Texas
JULY 25, 1933
Eleven days later, Lizzie glanced in the dresser mirror before she went downstairs, straightening her collar and fluffing her hair and wiping the smudges from her glasses, which she couldn’t seem to keep clean—especially when she’d been crying. How could she hope to smile this time when the photographer posed them on the lawn? A bittersweet Homecoming day lay ahead, for Lizzie would stand without Mattie again. It was the day Mattie had longed for, and Lizzie’s promise to fulfill. But, Lizzie wondered, how could she bear to see it carried out?
The day after the news came, Miss Hallye—now just plain Hallye to Lizzie—found her in front of the prints Sister Maggie Mae had framed for the parlor. Each showed versions of the Home girls, looking so much the same, yet entirely different. The variations might have been less obvious if one didn’t know the stories behind their expressions.
Hallye had put a light arm around Lizzie’s shoulder—the first time Lizzie ever recalled the woman touching her, except for the dark night in the cemetery long ago. They’d looked at the photographs together. Hallye quietly told Lizzie she’d saved her small salary until she could afford three plots near her mother’s in Oak Cliff. She’d purchased three markers, for herself, her brother, and her sister, each engraved with their names and birthdates, waiting for the inevitability of time. She’d wanted to ensure that her final resting place was with her family.
After her first time out at her sister’s farm, the Upchurches insisted she move into their home, taking the bedroom vacated by Alla Mae when she married, and she’d been there ever since. Fifteen years on, she still wondered if it was mainly so they could keep an eye on her.
In her opinion, there was a line to being part of a family when they weren’t yours to begin with, she said. Sometimes the line was moved. Sometimes you moved it.
After her break with reality—and who wouldn’t have broken under that pressure?—people tiptoed around her even more. But she’d grown accustomed to it. She’d come to realize being broken had one of two results: death, whether physical or metaphorical, or becoming stronger where you’d fractured.
She and Lizzie had both healed strong, in her opinion.
Two years ago, Mattie had finally turned up for a Homecoming, bringing her youngest sister’s girl, who’d run wild ever since the sister died. The girl was in the sort of trouble they were accustomed to at the Home. Despite their abandonment of her and their long estrangement, Mattie’s family had tracked her down, sure she’d know how to handle it. They were right. She’d known the Home would care for the niece she hardly knew, just as they’d cared for Mattie three decades earlier.
The day Mattie arrived with her, the photographer was making a current photograph of the girls—from the newest to the women who’d made the Home their own for years. Brother JT hoped to inspire their existing sponsors and newer readers of the Journal to dig deeper for funds desperately needed to carry on the work.
That photograph showed younger women, some glowing with pride and babies on their hips. It showed older women like Lizzie and Ivy Bernard, still putting foot after foot in daily service, years of experience and hard-earned wisdom plain in their expressions. It showed the children, many of whom Lizzie or Ivy had rocked and soothed while their mothers worked. In some cases, they’d been left at the Home, with mothers unable to save themselves but determined to give their children a better chance. The kids sat in clusters on the lawn, most with bright smiles and emerging confidence.
Docie was grown, trying to navigate a world that seemed, in ways, easier than the one that dragged Lizzie nearly to damnation before she washed up on the shores of Berachah, with Docie barely clinging to her fingers. That history had saddled Docie with quirks and problems that never quite healed—just as Lizzie had her own permanent reminders—and a fragile innocence that seemed implausible in light of it all. Lizzie had nudged Docie from the nest, finally, a few years before, but whenever she returned, it was as if she’d never quite left, a funny little bird who loved to make them laugh, but all the while, a sorrow beat in her soul that kept her from truly soaring.
In the photo, Lizzie grinned up at Docie, who stood on the wide porch railing, leaning daringly away from the edge with a smirk. It seemed Docie had no fear that day, or ever really—as long as she was at Home with her mother. Everyone loved Docie. Few could bear to correct her. Maybe it was a mistake, but her innocence was irresistible. Lizzie worried it would be the ruin of her eventually.
Or maybe she’d be fine.
It took convincing, but Mattie had stood close to Lizzie in that one, their final picture together. It felt right, though she’d been gone more than two decades, living a life not entirely approved by the Upchurches, or even Lizzie at times.
Mayb
e things had turned out differently than anyone had hoped—even Mattie herself—but she’d made her way. And she’d known to bring her niece when the girl had stumbled. Mattie might not have believed in everything the Home proclaimed, but she believed in what they did.
Now, two years later, the Home was struggling even more. In the Depression’s vicious grip, everyone pretended to ignore the proverbial writing on the wall but quietly wondered how long the Home could stay afloat, and what they’d do when it sank. Their futures—all of them—had a murky horizon. The Upchurches wouldn’t let them down, near-term. Nobody would go without a home, earthly or eternal, as long as Brother JT breathed. But keeping that vow for nearly thirty years had been tough. A rougher season lay ahead, no doubt, and their new lives might not be as cloistered or soft.
Still, they’d gather today for one more photograph. They’d postponed the thirty-year celebration in May while Brother JT traveled. They suspected he thought it might be the last. The timing had turned out for the best, for Mattie was here again, though the circumstances were unexpected. Maybe, had they had the Homecoming in late spring, as always, she would have come. And maybe someone would have seen the signs.
But maybe was a treacherous word. In retrospect, it never did Mattie any good.
Docie whispered at Lizzie’s door now. Lizzie walked outside, where her family, the biggest she knew, had collected to see Mattie reunited with her first and greatest love. Little Cap had waited in the burying ground under the faithful protection of an oak tree for nearly three decades, the tree growing tall and strong while he remained eternally two years old.
Lizzie would do this for Mattie. And for herself. She would do it for Cap Dewey Corder and for Benjamin Thomas Bates. She would never see her own baby boy’s grave, but she would see that another mother—her dearest friend, her confidante, the sister of her heart—would rest next to her little son, exactly as Lizzie had promised when Mattie set off to find a life beyond the grounds that embraced him until she returned. She’d stayed away while she walked the earth, but she’d come home to him now.
Two stones would cradle the narrow box that cradled Mattie herself. An oversized rose granite memorial, commissioned by Mattie’s husband Jim, and paid for by years of Lizzie’s hard work at the Berachah Home, would read:
Mattie B. McBride, 1881–1933
Wife of J. F. McBride
Cap Dewey, 1902–1904
And nestled close, that other little one. It had been there twenty-nine years, with only one word engraved on its weather-beaten surface: CAP.
Lizzie stepped into line with the other girls, including Docie, the daughter she’d shared with her friend as best she could, and they carried Mattie. Covered by the promises of Lizzie, the Home, and the man who’d loved her, unfailingly and without judgment, Mattie was on her way to meet Cap there, beneath the sheltering trees of Berachah.
CATE
Arlington, Texas
APRIL 2018
I close the last of the notebooks I’ve been filling with words for months, writing and rewriting, page after page of the story I’ve pieced together of Lizzie and Docie, Mattie and her first and last true loves, and even Miss Hallye, with her hopeful, hapless stumbling, and maybe her very real secrets. Who will ever know?
Laurel knows I’ve been working on it—after she saw me lug the notebooks to my car when I left for Oklahoma City, she asked what they were, and I said I’d tell her soon. When I returned, I shared my therapist’s advice and how the story had poured out of me, though I’d slowed as it came to an end.
What percentage of my version is accurate, I’ll never know. I simply know I needed answers, on a real and metaphorical level, and if I could only find certain ones by answering them myself, by filling in the blanks around what I’d gleaned from the collection, from digging through decades of censuses and archived newspapers, and from hours of other research, online and in person, it was what I had to do. My only regret is, after all that, I’ve never found a single photo of Mattie—or at least, not one I knew was her. I’ll never stop studying the photos for hints.
As I read through the whole thing again over the last few days, I was surprised how well the story flowed—how true it rang. Perhaps enough is correct that the spirit of what I’ve had to imagine suffices. Perhaps, eventually, I’ll learn things that will contradict what I’ve merely guessed. In a way, it would be good to know. In another, I hope not. I’m satisfied.
Laurel will read it, and River, too, if they choose to. Perhaps it will help each of them know me more, over nearly two decades: my dreams, my nightmares, my frustrations, my fears, my nearly irresistible tendency to run, and finally, my decision—with their help—to face it all head-on and try to make it right again.
My own particular and unique version of making good.
The night at the Blue Door, after River greeted the rest of her fans, selling and signing her music from a little vintage suitcase while I waited over to the side, she came and stood before me, nearly close enough to touch, but holding back a fraction, as if she didn’t know whether I would bolt if she came any closer. She’d watched me slip into the venue, almost sure it was me from the moment I’d entered, but certain by the time she sang the last song.
“No pressure,” she’d said, smiling, “but would you like to get a drink and catch up?”
She imagined we had a lot to cover, twenty years on.
The sound guy had directed us to a pub open New Year’s Eve, not as rowdy as other places, just off West Reno in Bricktown. I assured him I knew exactly where it was, and River followed me after she loaded out. She travels light, with a minimum of equipment.
Over craft beer and cider, we worked backward. It was easier to reacquaint over the new. She works in Austin as a software engineer—genetic after all—but travels often, playing venues like the Blue Door. Her music isn’t really a way to make a living, she said, but it’s a way to make a life. I told her about my library, where I mesh my love of history with a paying job, too—due, in part, to her influence.
She’s been in relationships, some more serious than others, but only one ever hit her hard enough that she’s never stopped grieving. “I haven’t given up on it just yet,” she said, looking straight into my eyes, and the hair on my scalp and neck tingled, but not from fear. From relief.
She wanted to know what happened, naturally, and why I’d abandoned our fledgling relationship without warning. She admitted her hurt and anger, but ultimately, she said, she knew that if I’d left, there had been a reason.
She’d known something was different when she detected my distance at school, but it was more obvious the day she met my parents—the ring missing from my finger. She’d assumed Seth and I had more in common than I’d believed, but it had surprised her anyway. But Seth stayed in town and married within a few years—River had seen the two in a restaurant when she was home for the holidays. She’d dared to hope then, but my car was never in front of my house, and I never called. She’d decided it wasn’t about him, but about her.
I swallowed guilt, and said I was so very sorry—it had never been about her at all, but about my belief that everything was ruined beyond repair. Mostly me.
I told her about the night I was broken, and how broken I was for years, until the last year had necessitated critical healing. About Laurel, and the collection we’d bonded around—a community absorbed back into its habitat now, except for the little cemetery that still guards the remains of those with nowhere else to lie in repose.
“To think,” River had said, “all this time, you’ve been exploring places and people who disappeared, and all I’ve been doing is writing computer code and playing my silly songs.”
“It’s true,” I replied. “You really started something.”
I wasn’t sure I could talk about what I’d left out when I talked to Laurel, too—what I decided to do after the meeting with the pa
stors and my parents, after I took the money and walked away. I made a nonnegotiable choice the day I wrote that final entry in that leather journal. I wrote why I had to go away, and why I never intended to speak that history aloud.
Then I wrapped it up tight and left it at a broken altar, and I ran.
River said, “It doesn’t matter. It was your decision to make then, whatever happened.”
She didn’t need to know, unless I wanted to tell. “We all have our things,” she said. “This one’s yours.”
I’ll tell her one day, I think. I’m not running anymore, unless it’s to relieve stress and feel the wind on my face. I run because I love to—and I always end up back home.
As the dust settled around this history, River pushed her glass away and reached across the table and placed her hand over mine. I struggled to leave it there, under its warmth, with those rhythm-callused fingertips against my wrist, the ones I’d kissed so long ago.
It wasn’t that I was embarrassed or ashamed. It was that I knew I’d never leave if I didn’t break the bond right then, before I was too far gone. But I also knew it already:
I’d been too far gone forever.
She had a gig the next night in Tulsa, and more over the next week, and then she’d head back to Austin for work. She asked if, when it was convenient for both of us, she could see me again.
We’ve spent the last three months much the way we spent those three months in 1998—on the phone late at night, talking about nearly everything, with the added convenience of texting and email. Every few weeks, we meet somewhere in between. We stick to places where the buildings and people are very much alive. And we haven’t been stopped by the cops for breaking and entering a single time.
This Sunday evening, she’ll play and sing for a tiny congregation of believers and skeptics who meet in a Fort Worth pub. She’d already surprised me, telling me she’d recently become involved in a faith community in Austin that accepts her exactly as she is, arms open wide. Our many conversations about church had made her curious, and made her search until she found one that would welcome both of us, if and when the time ever came.