“Return to hell!”
“Get thee back, Satan!”
“Witchery!”
“Infidel!”
“Devils!”
Once we were safely back at the station, my father—his face as red as his hair—threatened to return to town and take on the entire tomato-throwing troupe. But a second, smaller crowd at the station convinced him not to, along with Mr. Bob Ingersoll.
“Let them be. Remember, Michael,” he said, “anger blows out the lamp of the mind.”
Someone suggested that we wash up in the station, and that Bob give his speech over on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was decided. As we crossed the tracks, I said a silent farewell to my mashed potatoes . . . and the sweet butter I had been planning on drowning them in, since Mary wasn’t going to be there to stop me.
But once Bob began to speak, I forgot about my empty stomach. Like my father, Bob spoke with powerful excitement about freedom, education, and equality. For everyone. Black, white . . . even women. And like my father, he did not believe in God.
“What kind of god drowns his own children?” Bob asked.
I decided I liked Bob. Listening to him, I forgot all about my back bruised by beets, and the anger-twisted faces of the people on Market Street. His words were gentle and kind and welcoming to all. Sitting out in the woods being warmed by a brighter idea of what the world could be, I thought how wrong Father Coghlan was to worry my mother.
* * *
When the McGill brothers left their front porch and followed Joseph, Thomas, Nan, and Ethel down Erie Avenue laughing and shouting at their backs, my brothers and sisters didn’t know yet about the rotten vegetables and shower of spittle, or that Father and I were sitting on soft pine needles having our ears filled with Bob’s preaching on free thought. My brothers’ and sisters’ thoughts were on laundry. They’d gone to pick up what we Higginses called “hill laundry,” which my mother and Mary washed for people who lived on the hill.
But the McGill brothers knew about Bob. As it turned out, all of Corning knew about Bob.
Even so, those McGill boys should not have followed my brothers out of town. They should have known better. Thomas was small, but he made up for it by punching hard.
We all arrived home at the same time. My brothers were covered in blood, my father and I were covered in beet stains. Nan told us what happened with the McGills. I told them what happened with Bob. When I mentioned the part about God drowning his own children, Nan gasped.
“Everyone will hate us,” she said.
“I don’t care!” I shouted.
“Enough,” my mother ordered.
She commanded all of us to get out of our soiled clothes, and then placed Nan and me in charge of washing out the blood and beet stains. “Every speck of it.”
“Every speck?”
Her look withered me. There were a lot of specks. There were even entire splotches.
Nan and I scrubbed until our knuckles were sore and our fingers wrinkled by water.
And on Monday morning at school, when Emma walked right by my desk like I was invisible . . . I cared.
March 1, 1899
Thomas stops the wagon in front of the house to let me off before he takes it around through the alley where he’ll tie up Tam before heading back to the factory. He hangs the reins and stands, and I see he’s actually going to jump out and help me down from the wagon.
I quickly leap off.
I don’t need Thomas Higgins helping me out of a wagon. I don’t need anyone helping me out of a wagon.
“Very ladylike,” he remarks.
“Never my goal,” I mutter, grabbing my bag out from the back.
He snaps the reins and drives away. We don’t say good-bye.
I stand before 308 East First Street, a sloping white house sandwiched in between two other sloping white houses, all three of which have been made gray by the factory smoke. It seems the same suspendered little boys with dirty knees and rough and tumble little girls in braids run up and down the street as when I left, their faces and clothes also seeming gray. The flats of Corning . . . an entire neighborhood made gray by the belching black smoke of the stacks of Corning Glass Works, which rise up along the Chemung River like giant stalks of some hardy river plant.
Soon I won’t notice the smoke anymore. A few days, maybe a week, and this dirty fog will just be how the world looks. And all the gray brooms left out on gray porches, gray diapers flapping on gray laundry lines, and gray faces of those I pass on gray streets will be a mirror of my own gray face.
I spent most of my life pretending I didn’t care—about the smoke, about the squalor, about the gray people with no way out of their gray lives. But as I make my way toward the gray wooden steps into the gray sloping little house, the truth is, I care far too much.
Spawn of the Devil
We were now the spawn of the Devil. Every one of us.
Most days being spawn didn’t feel too much different than not being spawn. I changed diapers, washed breakfast dishes, hung sheets, and walked the five miles back and forth to school.
School, though, felt a little bit different. Not while I was doing my sums or conjugating Latin verbs, but all the times I wasn’t.
Mary said to ignore it. She ignored it. But, of course, no one called Mary a ratbag. Or shoved her into the woodpile when Miss Hayes wasn’t watching. Or worst of all, pretended Mary no longer existed . . . and Clara Martin was her new best friend.
And it wasn’t just Emma and school. Everyone in the whole town hated us Higginses. Every last one of us. They hated responsible Mary. They hated sweet Nan. They hated Ethel even if she was only a little kid. And they definitely hated my brothers, although admittedly, Thomas Higgins was quite easy to hate.
They hated us because we were spawn. Children of the Devil. The Devil being my father.
My father, who chiseled the angels that topped the graves of the dead, didn’t believe in God or the Devil. He believed in the work of men. The men in town believed in their work too, but they believed in God and the Devil more. I believed in my father, unlike all of Corning, where he had chiseled his last angel. No good Catholic—or Protestant—wanted an atheist near the graves of their loved ones.
It might not be pleasant to be spawn, but I was warming up to it. Spawn meant you believed in something. You fought for something. So be it if that made us different. I didn’t want to be like everyone else. Especially people like Emma Dyer, who thought Clara Martin was some great pumpkin.
Mary didn’t like being spawn, but she would never admit it. She was an expert at everything, even pretending nothing had changed. My brothers let their fists do their talking. Afterward, people might think of them as spawn as they passed by on the street, but following a few shiny blinkers they didn’t dare whisper it. Ethel didn’t mind it so much because she thought we were being called swans of the Devil, and none of us corrected her. Nan, though, her heart was too soft for the spitting and the shoving. I knew Bob said there was no such place as hell, but there were a few here in Corning I wouldn’t mind seeing fall into its fiery pit.
“Why did he do it?” Nan whispered at night. “Why did he invite that man here to speak?” She believed Bob brought the hate.
I wanted to tell her what Bob said, about anger blowing out the lamp. I wanted to tell her that he didn’t bring the hate, the hate was already here.
But I was afraid she’d be huffed. And I liked being all together. Me and Nan and Thomas and John and Joseph and all the rest of us, spawn of Satan together. Even if it meant having Father gone, looking for work. Like Bob, he was living his truth, and his truth didn’t live in Corning. Hopefully, it lived in Elmira.
My mother waddled out stomach first and plopped another basket of diapers next to my feet. Wiping the sweat from her forehead that came from a morning of stirring boiling diapers with a dolly stick, she cast a long look at my progress. I followed her gaze to my row of diapers on the line, pinned so crooked they looked like
old Mr. Keeler’s teeth, all skewed and cockeyed.
“Margaret Louise,” she sighed, her meaning so plainly clear. Nothing you do is done well. What more is there to say? You are hopeless.
Once my mother had returned to her diaper stirring, Nan popped up beside me. “Let me help, Maggie,” she said.
Nan whistled and hung while I handed her diapers and pins.
Another Sunday. Another day of chores. Another day in the lives of the spawn. At least on Sundays there was no school, no town, no shoving, or spitting. There was only the hanging of diapers with my fellow spawn. With the sun high and fall breathing out its last fiery breath of reds and oranges, and the earth still remembering the heat of summer warming my bare feet . . . they couldn’t touch us. Not here.
Until we heard a long moan. Not a cough, a moan. Another baby.
Babies were never unexpected, and excited me no more than breakfast or dinner. But this baby was coming too soon, and without Father here. And when I pointed these things out to Mary a few moments later, she got all wrathy.
“I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared by an owl, Maggie,” she said as she set the water boiling.
Nan scurried over and gave me a hug. Sometimes I wished she’d keep her dang sweetness to herself. It only deepened my worry.
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” she said, before following Mary into my parents’ bedroom.
Ethel looked at me. “Is she?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to say that she was. But she was. We all were, because we all should be. Childbirth might be natural, but so was a hurricane.
Mother’s water had only just broken, so we could have hours before anything happened. I wandered outside. Thomas and John were in with the chickens.
“What are you doing?” I asked, curling my fingers through the chicken wire fence.
Thomas didn’t look up. “What does it look like?”
I sighed. “Are you staying out here because Mother is laboring?” I asked.
“We are out here because it’s time to feed the chickens,” John said. “And after this, we will be out here because we need to feed the dogs. And then milk the cow.”
He gave me a wink. I smiled weakly back at him.
“But the real question,” Thomas grumbled, “is why are you out here?”
Joseph was saddling up Tam, probably to fetch the doctor. John saw me noticing.
“Maggie,” he said, opening up the gate and handing me the chicken feed, “Why don’t you finish up here with Thomas and then go in and help Mary with Mother.”
I picked at the feed until Thomas snatched the pan from my hands. “Go somewhere else and do nothing,” he snarled.
I headed back to the house because it’s where my feet took me. I heard the coughing before I even opened the door, so I didn’t open it. But Ethel did. She was holding Clio on her hip.
“Wash the breakfast dishes with me?” she asked.
“Did we have breakfast?”
My stomach growled. We both glanced over at the empty sink and then back at each other. We did not have breakfast.
My mother groaned behind her bedroom door. Ethel’s lips trembled. Clio began to cry.
“Take Henry and Clio to the barn.”
“Why?” she complained.
“Because I said,” I snapped. It was the right of all older Higginses to snap at younger Higginses.
My mother groaned again, and Ethel grabbed my hand.
“Maggie?”
“She’ll be fine,” I told her, my face the likeness of one of my father’s stone angels, hard and chiseled into a beautifully serene smile. But my words were complete gum—because I certainly did not know if she would be fine. Although I wasn’t about to tell Ethel the truth. I wished Father were here.
“Maggie!” Mary called. The pains must be getting closer. This baby might come quick. I was fast becoming Mary’s right hand during injury, illness, and deliveries. Unlike Nan, I had no fear of blood and could withstand the howling of pain.
“I’ll fetch you when the baby comes, Ethel. Now go.”
The baby didn’t come quick. After helping to warm the bath for when the baby arrived and collecting clean rags to catch the blood and fluids, I sat by my mother’s side and held her hand.
I liked this part. Sitting by her side. Sometimes I wiped her face with a rag. It was sweaty work, birthing a baby. The only time I didn’t enjoy it was when she coughed. Mary stopped what she was doing and stood in place, as if holding still would help my mother catch her breath. It wouldn’t, but I understood. I also sat as quiet and still as possible, blurring my eyes while she hacked so I wouldn’t see her mouth slack and her neck straining, her face as white as my father’s marble, and her red eyebrows tied together in agony. When a pain came in the middle of a coughing fit, she squeezed my hand so tightly I saw dark spots float past my eyes. Then, when the coughing and the pain finally subsided, she laid her head back against the pillow, where it seemed to swallow her. Mary jumped back into action. I continued to hold her hand.
My stomach ached. I was so hungry. It must have been past lunchtime. But no one was talking about food . . . or where Joseph was with the doctor.
I heard Nan and Ethel in the other room. And then Nan came in with Richard in her arms. She laid him at my mother’s breast. Like the rest of us, he was hungry and there was little milk in the house—there was little anything in the house. My mother fed one baby while she attempted to deliver another. How much could one body do?
“Maggie,” Mary said as if she’d said it a few times and I hadn’t been listening. Maybe she had, because she was standing in front of me holding a cup of broth and I didn’t remember her leaving the room. “Nan made potato soup.”
I wanted to eat more than anything . . . except hold my mother’s hand.
“Soon.”
Mary nodded. Her approval made me feel strong, stronger than the pull at my stomach as the smell of broth drifted from the cup to my nose.
The sound of Richard’s sucking in the warm, dark room carried me off into a dreamy place. A place on the hill where the houses were large and clean and there was space and light and sunshine. Where there was an abundance of chairs and long hallways with flowers. Where wide green lawns spread out beneath gentlemen and ladies playing croquet and drinking cool drinks and nibbling on tiny sandwiches. Piles of tiny sandwiches.
I saw freedom. From cramped rooms. From laboring mothers. From growling stomachs. From fathers off looking for work.
My father’s freedom of the mind was only one kind of free. On the hill, they had another kind of free. My father liked to say that in life it was chicken today and feathers tomorrow. But the people on the hill had chicken every day. Chicken every day—what would that be like?
My mother once knew. She didn’t speak about it, but she grew up in a big house in New Jersey just like the fine houses on the hill in Corning. But then my father blew through her town, a wild-talking Irishman dreaming of a better world, a different world. Maybe she thought her life would be different if she married him. Maybe she thought she’d be different too. Her parents did not agree, so she left them behind.
I looked around the crowded bedroom of the cabin. This was definitely different, but I wasn’t sure it was exactly what my mother planned on. What was I planning on? Being a doctor. Buying that big house for Henry—my stomach growled—tiny sandwiches. Living on feathers and dreaming of chicken, is this what made us spawn?
The door opened just wide enough for Joseph’s head to slip through. He and Mary exchanged a look. The doctor wasn’t coming. I knew instantly it was because of Bob. I was glad Nan wasn’t in the room.
Mother was squeezing my hand again. Mary rushed to the end of the bed. Richard had rolled off and was sound asleep next to her, not witnessing his mother’s hideous pain or the next Higgins as she slipped quietly into the world. Too quietly. I wondered where my wild-talking father was right now. Was he laughing? Drinking? Working?
My mother looked her baby over with heavy-lidded eyes, and then passed out. Mary gently washed the body in the pot of warm water sitting at the end of the bed to ready it for burial. I waited for the afterbirth. Once we finished cleaning up, I slipped over to steal one last look at her . . . reminding myself that a Higgins didn’t cry, a Higgins managed.
The baby was a beautiful thing, with long elegant eyebrows and tiny clenched fists. She could never have been spawn since she was so obviously an angel.
Promising
There were days I would love to live over again, like those where I roamed about in the woods with my sisters hunting mushrooms. And then there were days I’d love to skip altogether, like this one—a cold Monday morning with winter biting into fall, school looming with a classroom full of hate, and the only way there was past another tiny grave.
I was not surprised when Ethel refused to get out of bed, using the most fake croaky sick voice I’d ever heard. Although it was a surprise that Mary believed her. Or rather, Mary pretended to believe her, tucking the little liar back into bed and announcing she would also stay home from school.
Mary more or less missed every other school day anyway. No one said a word, least of all my mother. Most of Mary’s friends had already left school for marriage or the factory. She was the oldest in the classroom, not much younger than Miss Hayes. But Mary kept up her schooling, because . . . Mary was so promising.
This was what Miss Hayes always said.
Promising for what? Teaching more promising girls to teach more promising girls to teach more, and so on. Promising, a present continuous verb. But this tense was temporary, just like, it seemed, Mary’s promise.
“May I inquire as to your thoughts,” Nan asked, bumping my shoulder as we walked. The sun was building strength and warming the top of my head. It wasn’t winter yet.
“You may inquire,” I sighed, “but they’re gloomy and thus I shall not share them.”
What Every Girl Should Know Page 5