The Trials of Nellie Belle

by Sydney Avey

  Nellie held the correspondence between her fingers for a moment. Then she moved her eyes slowly across the elegant letters, embellished with loops, curls, and flourishes, that formed the words that sent Nadine into hiding.

  Dear Madam:

  I have carefully read your divorce complaint, in which you have named me co-respondent. As Dolly Dixon, I deny the accusations, but as Frank Boyd, I am highly flattered.

  Kindly be advised that you are slightly mistaken regarding the design of my entity and the nature of the intentions you presume I have toward your husband. In the interests of setting to rest any misunderstanding, I am mailing a duplicate of this letter to your husband.

  Sincerely,

  Dolly Dixon aka Frank Boyd

  “Oh my!” Nellie’s hand rose to her flushed cheek. Poor Nadine. She moved her fingers to her lips to suppress the giggle that was rising from her windpipe before it played inappropriately on her vocal chords. She would not have a laugh in her cousin’s living room at the mortified woman’s expense.

  Within weeks, the following entry in the Court Journal appeared:

  Nadine Carter vs. Ned Carter

  Dolly Dixon, co-respondent

  Dismissed without prejudice

  15 - A Sandy Footprint

  15

  A Sandy Footprint

  1921

  Ned and Nadine reconciled. Nellie saw little of them after that. She resolved never again to get herself so involved in someone else’s marital affairs. When a quarreling couple patched things up, as so often they did, discomfort with witnesses to their folly was not unusual.

  As Opal’s star was rising in the community, Nellie found herself less inclined to seek entertainment elsewhere. It was a delight to watch her daughter shine. In just two years, Opal had made such a name for herself that her students danced for private parties and appeared regularly on big theater stages up and down the coast from Marshfield to Gardiner, North Bend, and Portland.

  Nellie loved watching Leone perform. Always a featured dancer, she drew gushing reviews. The Coos Bay Times reported that during an interval at Marshfield High School’s senior ball “the tiny daughter of Mrs. Barry, the Marshfield dancing mistress, executed one of the modern dance interpretations, and elicited unstinted applause for what was a wonderful performance for a child of seven years.”

  “Seven! Where did they get that I’d like to know?” Leone huffed around the house. “I’m almost eleven.”

  “Someday you will be glad to have your age misreported like that,” Nellie said.

  “About your performance, Leone,” Opal said, “be careful not lose your technique in the free expression of these new dance forms. Discipline is still required, even in modern dance.”

  Leone narrowed her eyes at her mother. “The audience loved my performance.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Leone flounced off.

  It was true. Her scrapbook was bursting with reviews that never failed to mention the dance mistress’s talented daughter. Where she had performed in small auditoriums in Washington, in Oregon she danced on large professional theater stages. Marquees advertised Barry School of Dance programs: “Crowds Turned Away at Recital,” and “Dancing by Small Misses Draws Throngs.” Newspaper headlines announced sold-out performances.

  Leone read every news report to Nellie. Reporters lauded the costumes, scenery, and live orchestration, and never failed to single out Leone for special attention. With her proud mother and grandmother in the wings, Leone commanded the spotlight with fuse-like energy in her feet and radiance on her face. A good outlet for her exuberance, Nellie hoped. A little too hot to handle, Opal feared.

  Nellie’s hopes extended to Opal as well. She wished her daughter would be content with her success and pay no mind to the men who sniffed around the attractive widow. But one summer night in Portland, after the young misses had been whisked home by their chaperones, Opal had accepted an invitation to go dancing with a man to whom she had recently been introduced. A dapper salesman had impressed work-weary Opal with a box of candy and an ability to tell jokes in both English and French. In a weak moment, Nellie volunteered to take Leone home so her daughter could have a rare night on the town.

  What Felix Wolff lacked in stature, he made up for in fast footwork. Fast on the dance floor and fast with the bon mot, he put the hustle on Opal and won her heart.

  Nellie discouraged her daughter from accepting the little Frenchman’s proposal of marriage.

  “What do you know about him?” Nellie fumed.

  “His family came from Paris and set up business in San Francisco,” Opal told her mother. “They are socially prominent.”

  “What does that mean to us?”

  “Us? We aren’t marrying him, I am marrying him. He’s a good dancer, he makes me laugh, and I am going to marry him.”

  A justice of the peace married Opal and Felix, and they established their home in Portland. The house in Marshfield was sold, but Nellie refused to move in with her daughter and her new husband. Instead, she took a room at a boarding house a few blocks away and began traveling again. Her schedule made her accessible to Opal and Leone between assignments but on her terms. Work eased the ache in her heart over the invasion of the little Parisian into what had, for a short season, been the happiest time of her life.

  R

  Late one afternoon, Nellie huddled under the eaves of a hotel veranda in Gold Beach. She watched the Pacific Ocean pound the black-sand beach. If she focused on the forces of nature that put all things in perspective, perhaps the throb in her bunion would not command such undeserved attention. She let her thoughts roll with the tide.

  “Why don’t you get that taken care of?” Opal asked Nellie the previous week. Nellie had dropped by with a birthday gift for Leone, who was turning twelve.

  “I have never been to a doctor in my life, and I see no reason to start now.”

  Never? A bit of exaggeration maybe, but Nellie had pressed her point. “In my day, women had better things to do than to traipse to the doctor for every little pain.”

  In my day? Had she really said that? The rumble of the waves below the veranda muted other thoughts. Only this tiny flotsam bubbled up from the deep.

  Nellie made it a practice to edit out of her speech any suggestion that the passage of time was slowing her down or affecting her ability to keep up-to-date.

  Age is merely a state of mind. The body is a graveyard, but a wise woman exercises mind over matter until her appointed time, she told herself. Best to put her mind to doing what she could to comfort Leone.

  Poor Leone. During her visit, Nellie had pulled her granddaughter aside and questioned her about her new stepfather.

  “He’s okay, I suppose.” Leone shrugged and hung her head.

  Nellie smoothed the girl’s hair, triggering a flood of tears.

  “We were doing just fine! Why did she have to marry him and bring him into our house? He smells like cigars. I hate him!”

  Why indeed? Nellie shook the rumination from her head. Best to live in the present. Hugging herself against the cold, she moved to the railing. She never tired of hearing the rhythm of the tide. Deep within, she felt the earth inhale oceanic rumblings, hold its breath, and, in a long, slow swish of briny water, exhale some life-giving force back out to sea.

  Out to sea. Tears flooded her eyes. Was she losing her moorings? She opened her eyes wide and let the wind dry her tears.

  Down the beach, a spectacle of a different sort came into view. A figure trudged up the dune. As an Indian woman drew nearer, her brown face presented a network of wrinkles, her chin striped by three vertical green lines.

  The woman was clothed incomprehensibly in a black dress designed for a sylph-like frame. Layers of ruffles strained across her ample hips and fell past her ankles to drag in the sand. The bodice of the gown gapped in front, exposing a broad strip of brown flesh. Three of the largest safety pins ever manufactured bridged the divide. A towering flower-
covered hat perched atop her head, and soft, beaded moccasins adorned her feet.

  Three baskets rested against her back. As she placed her hand on the gate from the beach to the hotel, she looked up at Nellie and flashed a toothless grin. Ever curious, Nellie swept down the stairs to meet the exotic visitor, who was eager to show her the handcrafted baskets that Nellie knew commanded high prices in gift shops that dotted the coast between Big Sur and Seattle. After some good-natured haggling, Nellie became the proud owner of her first work of art.

  The woman continued on her way, and Nellie climbed the stairs back to the veranda, where she encountered the inn’s manager, Mr. Norris.

  “I see you have been dealing with old Three Stripe,” he laughed. “She’s quite the business woman.”

  “Tell me about her.” Nellie took a seat on a porch rocker and set the tightly woven basket down on a wicker table festooned with brochures, bowls of fruit and flowers, and a dish of hard candies. She traced her fingers over the intricate ocher parallelograms that twined in the cream-colored weave of ferns and grass and dyed porcupine quills. “What’s her story?”

  Mr. Norris set aside the small paintbrush he had been using to touch up weathered spots on the door frame. He wiped his hands on his stained buffalo-plaid shirt, sat down on the top stair, and pulled a pipe out of his pocket. He tamped, and he kindled, and he puffed, all the rituals a man performs to gain the undivided attention of a woman before he launches into an anecdote.

  “White men stole her from the Nez Perce tribe when she was fourteen. She is a ward of the court. She’s had a dozen children by a string of white husbands, all dead now. Kids are all dead too, of whiskey or consumption; they seem to inherit all the white man’s diseases but none of their immunities. The county built her a little shack on the hillside and she lives alone now.”

  “The least they can do for the poor woman.” Nellie rocked back in her chair, wishing she could remove her boot and massage her toe.

  The innkeeper nodded. “She earns her keep around here. She has a remarkable knowledge of herbs and roots. If she hears of anyone sick, she goes to brewing some of her herb tea and makes it her business to care for them. No one asks her; she just does it.” Mr. Norris removed his pipe from between his tobacco-stained teeth and punched the air with the pipe stem. “Believe me when I tell you there is an eighty-mile strip along this coast where there is only one doctor and no hospital.” He tapped his pipe on the step to loosen the contents. “And business is slow for that doctor.”

  Nellie made a mental note to ask Three Stripe if she had a bunion remedy the next time the Indian woman passed by on the beach.

  Mr. Norris dropped his pipe ash and dottle into a nearby flowerpot.

  Nellie raised an eyebrow. “Good for the soil?”

  Norris shrugged and returned his pipe to his pocket. “We had a flu epidemic here several years ago, and the boys at the logging camp got pretty sick. Kept old Three Stripe mighty busy when everyone else was afraid to go and doctor them.”

  A holler from inside ended the conversation. “That would be the missus. Duty calls.”

  A few days later Nellie was out for a walk. A motor bus arrived late and an old soldier who looked like he’d seen Civil War service got out. Coughing and hacking, he limped painfully down the road toward the beach.

  “A pensioner from the Indian Wars,” Mr. Norris explained to Nellie after she passed along the talk she overheard in town.

  “People are saying that he has pitched a tent near Three Stripe’s shack. That’s odd, don’t you think?”

  “Many of these old codgers drift through town, each telling the same story; unfaithful wife, heartless children, endless government red tape.”

  “So, he is entirely without funds?”

  “He likely has a small pension. He’ll pull through. Old Three Stripe will fix him up with some bird soup and herb tea.”

  R

  Some days later, Nellie strolled alongside the cold and misty beach to clear her head after hours of typing court transcripts. Once again, Three Stripe came trudging across the dunes. This time, she was wrapped in an old army blanket and carried a tin pail. Nellie looked at the milky substance in the pail, and then smiled and cocked her head.

  “Goat milk. Neighbor very sick man.”

  “Ah.”

  Three Stripe looked down at Nellie’s feet. She stared at the place where the shoe leather stretched thin and worn over Nellie’s bulging toe and clicked her tongue. The wind carried her words. “Olive oil.”

  “I don’t understand.” Nellie looked into the small, warm, dark eyes nestled deep within the folds of skin above the Indian’s cheekbones, eyes that spoke where spare words failed, the language of compassion.

  “For that bump on your toe.” Three Stripe pointed to the protruding bone. “Massage with olive oil, fifteen minutes, once morning, once night. Feel better.” And she resumed her walk.

  The next week, court adjourned for the year in the small town. Her business done, Nellie returned home.

  R

  When she returned the following fall, Gold Beach and Nellie were each much the same, except for one happy improvement. Although an ache in her shoulder and stiffness in her hip troubled her from time to time, the pain in Nellie’s toe had diminished greatly with the application of oil and regimen of massage. She hoped to encounter the medicine woman responsible for this miracle so she could thank her.

  On a trip to the post office to visit her temporary mailbox, Nellie crossed paths, instead, with the old soldier, although not as old-looking as the first time she saw him. He no longer winced when he walked. His clothes were clean, his hair trimmed, his cheeks ruddy with health. He smiled and tipped his hat.

  Nellie returned his gestures with a friendly nod. Three Stripe’s ministrations truly are miraculous. She walked out of the post office with a passel of postcards from far-flung corners of the Northwest, written by people she had met over the years, but it was the letter from Leone that held the most interest. Slipping the cards into her bag, Nellie undid the envelope, pulled out a piece of dime store stationary, and read the letter while she walked.

  Dear Grandmother,

  I miss you! Mother says I have a saucy mouth and threatens to send me to Saint Mary’s for high school. What twaddle! She probably just wants to get rid of me so she and Felix can go out dancing every night. If I am forced to go to Catholic school, I’m sure the nuns will assign me so much penance, no one will ever see or hear from me again. Please come home and defend my case!

  Your loving granddaughter,

  Leone

  Ah, Leone, girl after my heart. Nellie made a mental note to write a letter of encouragement to her granddaughter.

  That evening, Nellie chatted with the other boarders seated around the long dining table. Simple meals served family style suited the working class and professionals who wished to end their business day with some semblance of normality. Government workers, union organizers, and others on job assignments that required an extended stay avoided dyspeptic conversation. No debates about the League of Nations occurred at Mrs. Norris’s dinner table. Instead, the guests chatted about their travels and the comforts that waited for them at home.

  On occasion, Mrs. Norris indulged in town gossip. As they finished their dessert, she announced that the local Ladies Aid Society was privileged to have Mrs. Thrasher, a prominent figure in several women’s organizations, speak to their chapter on an issue of considerable concern.

  Nellie set aside her fork. “That was a delicious lemon cake, Mrs. Norris. May I inquire as to the nature of the concern?”

  Mrs. Norris looked around the table. The accountant checked his watch. The union negotiator yawned and smiled apologetically. The bank examiner placed his napkin on the table, rose to his feet, and thanked his hostess with a slight bow of his head.

  “I’m told it’s a matter of moral turpitude.” Mrs. Norris tried without success to catch the eye of the only other woman at the table. “I don’t know t
he details.” She began clearing the table. “At the very least, it will provide an excuse to get some air. Would you like to join me, Mrs. Scott?”

  “I believe I will. It’s been a long day of sitting for me.”

  Mrs. Norris looked once more in the direction of the other woman. “Mrs. Wells?”

  “Thank you, but I think not.” Mrs. Wells left the table, and Mr. Norris was about to do the same when his wife arrested him with a stern look.

  “Mr. Norris will take care of the dishes,” she said. Then she gestured to Nellie that it was time to go.

  The two women walked several blocks to a warehouse in town that served as both a meeting space and an election hall. On the way, Mrs. Norris quizzed Nellie. “Why do you suppose Ida wasn’t interested in coming with us? There might be a story here.”

  “I think Ida is here for a bigger story.”

  “I suppose our little efforts to preserve high moral standards pale in the face of what the Ku Klux Klan is trying to do.”

  Nellie’s heart began to pound. She slowed her step. “Is that what you think the Klan is trying to do, ‘preserve moral standards’? They are lynching people right here in Oregon. There is nothing moral about that.”

  “Well, let’s not get into that. Look, here we are.”

  Inside the dimly lit warehouse, wooden chairs scraped against the rough timber floor as a line of women jockeyed for the best seats. Others hung back, waiting to see if there might be space on the backless benches that lined the brick walls. Mrs. Norris grabbed Nellie’s elbow and guided her forcefully to the front row, where it seemed they might not find a seat. Mrs. Norris stood erect and silent at the end of the row until a pair of women noticed her.

  “Oh, Mrs. Norris.” One of the women spoke up. “I tried to save a place for you but …”

  “I have a guest.” Mrs. Norris breathed the words through tight lips.

  “Oh, of course.” Both women jumped up and fled.