As I scrubbed a burnt saucepan, a picture of Mr. O’Donnell blew into my head like his wife had blown into our house. All the hundreds of shift changes at the factory. All the long walks home through the dark. Bent and heavy and finally home, he opens his front door and he shuts himself inside. With a wave of noisy children. With the empty coal bin. With the unwashed breakfast dishes. With the piles of ironing. With his sickly wife throwing together a thin dinner. With this screeching baby. And for a moment, I felt for him, old and ugly Mr. O’Donnell.
But then I imagined him opening his front door, tossing his baby out into the cold, and slamming it shut, just as my father had slammed his own front door shut a few moments ago. There were no doors between Mrs. O’Donnell and her baby. And none between my mother and hers. My father spoke so often of freedom, and tonight, like Mr. O’Donnell, he was somewhere out there, free. Liberty might be a lady, but I’m not sure I ever met a lady who was free.
Although halfway through the dishes, the heat of my anger cooled along with the dirty water in the dry sink, and I wished I’d gone. I’d grown used to being a disappointment to one parent, but I wasn’t sure I could live with being a disappointment to both.
One Less Higgins
Babies died. All the time.
Sometimes they died before they were born, their impression so small we only noticed them missing when we didn’t see my mother growing larger. Sometimes they died right after, like our last tiny Higgins. They arrived in the world too soon, never taking a single breath. We washed them. We buried them.
Of course I thought it was sad. But I won’t lie, it was also a little bit of a relief. One less body to clothe. One less mouth to feed. One less worry in a house crowded with worry.
Babies died all the time. But when they died on you after a year or two . . . or like Henry, after four, it was different. He was really there. And now he was really gone.
Having someone gone should make you feel empty, but it didn’t. It filled you up. My stomach was full even though I hadn’t eaten. My head was full even though I had no thoughts. Every inch of me was full, so much so that my feet dragged along the ground.
Last week, the first truly cold gale of winter blew in and he took to fever. My father heated the croup kettle until it boiled and I carried it steaming to Henry’s bed, where it rose the blanket like a covered wagon above his sick little body. The next morning, when we knew it wasn’t working, Joseph took off on Tam to beg for the doctor. But it was too late. By midmorning, Mary and Nan were laying him out on my parent’s bed.
I meant to help, but they were done before I could get there. The door seemed so far away.
Everything seemed so far away. The space in the house no longer taken up by his chubby little body was as large as the winter’s night sky, yet my knees knocked into every chair and table as I wandered through.
Henry. It had been four days. One day for each of the years he was ours.
“Where are you?” my mother cried out at night.
We laid in bed and listened with our eyes closed. She was worried about him. She couldn’t remember his face. She wondered if he ever existed. She thought she made him up.
I wished I couldn’t hear it. Our mother crying. Our father talking. He quoted poetry and philosophy to her. She cried harder. My father’s big ideas didn’t sound as big in the dark.
Mother begged to know if her son was with God. Henry wasn’t baptized. But Father didn’t believe in God. Not even for her. Not even in the blackest hour of the night.
We listened until we heard her sobs turn into gulps and fade into silence. And I was left to imagine that house I was to buy for us, the bedroom that would have been his very own, and the big featherbed . . . just for Henry and no one else.
* * *
The sweet tang of whiskey made me open my eyes. I was a little surprised at first because I thought I was still awake. Father motioned for me to be quiet and hurry.
Slipping out from under Ethel’s leg, I slid off the bed. The floor was so cold it felt wet. Nan turned in her sleep. I froze in place, waiting for her snores to settle, and then I scampered out of the room, avoiding all the known squeaky floorboards.
I didn’t bother to change out of my nightclothes, but instead stuck my bare feet into Mary’s boots, climbed inside one of the boy’s jackets, and followed him outside.
“I need your help, Margaret.”
He took off for the barn with me at his heels. I hadn’t seen him move like this, with clear-eyed purpose, for weeks. He’d either been off looking for work or camped in his chair mumbling into a book. Whatever he needed me to do, he knew I’d do it.
The night was black and the dew slowed my steps, but I could picture the way in my head just as easily as I could picture the knots in the wallboards across from the seat in the necessary. I looked back at the windows behind me. They were dark and empty.
Once inside the barn, my father lit a candle and handed it to me. He didn’t explain anything, but began to collect his tools, along with a couple of bags of plaster. He nodded at the wheelbarrow.
We hobbled toward town along the dark road. He carried the candle, the tools, and the plaster. I glided the wheelbarrow through dips in the road that turned into muddy rain puddles in the spring, and over jutting rocks that stung my bare toes in summer. I realized he was holding on to everything until we were a safe distance from the house so the sound of the tools bouncing at the bottom of the wheelbarrow wouldn’t wake anyone. I didn’t ask where we were going. Or what we were doing.
Something rustled under the cold dry leaves next to the road. I tried not to flinch, although my heart beat a little faster. I walked this road every single day of my life, but it was different at night . . . the woods were more awake, and it felt as if my father and I were on parade with a thousand eyes watching us from the shadows.
Finally, Father put his tools and plaster into the wheelbarrow and took over, handing me the candle. I focused on my new job as seriously as I did the previous one, holding the candle out so the light hit the ground in front of the wheelbarrow. The wax dripped, and I had to be careful it didn’t hit Mary’s boots.
“We’re going to the cemetery,” he said.
I stumbled, a splash of wax burning the soft skin between my thumb and finger.
“The cemetery?” I repeated in a whisper, although no one could hear us out here. We were half a mile from the house. Not even the loud metal shovel clanging against the floor of the wheelbarrow was in danger of waking anyone. My eyes couldn’t help glancing down at it, and I quickly looked away.
“You’ll stand guard. Alert me if anyone comes.”
I nodded in the dark. I had no voice to say, “Yes, Father.” Or “I understand, Father.” But I did understand . . . didn’t I? He used to work in the cemetery, before he became the Devil. It had been months since I’d seen him chip away at a block of marble. But maybe there was a commission? Maybe this was a job?
The soft trill of a screech owl reminded me of the hour, and I couldn’t help it, I glanced down at the shovel again. And the plaster. He saw me do it.
“She needs this.” His words came out of his mouth like a soft puff of air.
I now understood exactly what he meant to do and I clutched at the candle while my bare feet sweated inside Mary’s boots. I walked straight on, never taking my eyes from the puddle of light bobbing on the road in front of me. All I saw was the light. All I wanted to think about was the light.
We naturally slowed as we approached the cemetery. My father stopped the wheelbarrow and pulled the tools from it. I blew out the candle and took the handles of the wheelbarrow. We headed toward the entrance in complete silence.
Outside the iron gates, he stopped and dumped the tools onto the grass. Pulling out his whiskey, he looked around to be sure we were alone and then took a long swim in the bottle. Plugging it, he returned it to his trousers, pushed the wheelbarrow under a naked forsythia bush, and picked up his tools and plaster.
“
Stay here,” he said. “Only come in if you see or hear someone.”
I didn’t want to stay, but I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want him to go either. I wished I was home. I wished I was in my bed with Ethel’s cold feet against the back of my knees and Nan’s snores buzzing in my ears. I wished that shovel my father had slung over his shoulder was hanging on its rusty nail by the broken window of the barn. I really wished he hadn’t brought the plaster. I watched him disappear between the graves and into the dark.
It felt colder the instant he was gone. I wandered back and forth peering off into the dark down Mill Street, dreading the thought of seeing someone, yet at the same time aching to see someone, anyone that might put a stop to this.
The chssst of the shovel slicing through earth made me jump, and I grabbed hold of the frigid bars of the iron fence. Yesterday was Saturday. That made today Sunday. Did Father know this? Did it matter? I looked up. The night sky was full of stars. Some looked close enough to touch. Could God really be up there somewhere? My father said no. My mother never said, but I knew she believed it. She believed it all.
The shovel struck wood with a thump. I was shivering so hard I had to hold my lips closed so my teeth didn’t chatter too loudly. He knew what he was doing. He knew. It was all right.
Then came a crack of wood.
Henry.
My hands slid down the cold bars and my knees sunk into the wet ground. I let my face fall against the fence, the cold iron cooling each hot cheek.
He chose me. To be out here with him. To push the wheelbarrow. To hold the candle. To stand by while he dug up my little brother’s grave.
Not Nan, or Joseph, or Thomas, or Ethel. He chose me.
But why?
Because they wouldn’t do it. And I would. I was doing it. He and I . . . together, disturbing sweet, round little Henry.
We should not be able to touch you, my lovely, lovely boy, because you are gone—somewhere wonderful, I hope. I hope so much. But I don’t want to think where you’ve gone.
To the earth? To the worms?
It was wrong, this digging. Father was wrong to do this thing. He was wrong to choose me. And if he thought I was like him, he was wrong about that, too. Because I was not like him. I was not.
Oh how I wished another cold gale would blow through this town and take me away with it.
“Margaret!” he called out in a hushed tone.
I rose from the wet grass as if I’d been dreaming and stumbled toward him.
We headed home. He pushed the wheelbarrow. I held the candle. In its light glowed the white plaster likeness of my dead brother’s head, one fine strand of red hair fluttering in the night breeze.
“We’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll need a second cast to complete the mold.”
My feet dragged along the road as I tried to keep up. I will not return with him tomorrow. I will never do another thing he asks of me. Never.
March 1, 1899
My father called me home, and here I am.
Home.
At first everything seems foreign: the size of things, the colors, even the smells. But slowly, slowly it all melts into the familiar. The marble-topped table, the warm tang of burning coal, even the ache of seeing my mother’s sleeping body barely a wrinkle under the blanket—the shock of seeing this wasted woman gradually transforming into what my mother always looks like sick.
“I need to get back to work,” Mary whispers.
I nod. But I don’t move from the bedside.
Mary touches my elbow, and we shuffle quietly out of the bedroom, closing the door so Arlington, our youngest Higgins, doesn’t wake her.
“I never know what time Thomas, Joe, and Father will get home from their shifts,” Mary says. She talks on, about Ethel, the boys, the house, but I’m not listening. I’m busy choking on the crushing weight of shame, of disappointment. That I ever thought I’d be more than this. That I’d do more than this.
“Maggie?”
When I meet my sister’s eyes, she sighs. The small breath gives me permission to leap upon her in an enormous hug. “Oh, Maggie,” she says, pretending she thinks I’m being absurd, like this is a little too much for the occasion. Still, she hugs me back, feeling as solid as ever. I hold on to Mary, tighter. It’s time to let her go, but I can’t.
“I’m hungry!” Arlington shouts, and I finally release my sister. Feeling just as untethered as I did before I grabbed her.
“You’ll wait until dinner, Arly,” Mary informs him.
Dinner. That would be mine to make. Visions of the competent and quick hands of Mary and my mother pass through my mind. I do not have those hands.
Mary walks to the front door and I follow at her heels as I’ve done all my life. She doesn’t ask me if I’m all right because it’s not a question that matters. Dinner, diapers, laundry . . . birds needing plucking, fish needing scaling, potatoes needing peeling, there are ash pans to empty, beds to make, and floors to scrub. These are the things that matter. They’ve just never mattered to me.
She stops at the door. “Oh, I forgot,” she says, even though I know my sister well enough to know she’s never forgotten a thing in her life. “Father Coghlan visits after Mass every Sunday.”
She turns to leave, hoping to close the door behind her after dropping this bit of information, but I don’t hold my tongue.
“To drink too much whiskey with Father?”
“To visit her,” she answers. Her back to me.
“And this is allowed?” I ask.
She doesn’t face me. “Things change, Maggie.”
“Not Father, Mary. He doesn’t change.”
Mary turns around and looks deeply into my eyes. “I put the cabbage in to salt and trimmed the pork joints. How do you think you’ll cook the potatoes?”
“The potatoes?”
“Boil them, tonight. They’ll be fine with the pork that way.”
“All right, I’ll boil them.”
Now it is her turn to nod, which she does, right before she leaves me. With no last embrace. No long look back. No final words of kindness. All which Mary knows will only serve to break me down instead of propelling me toward the potatoes, where I belong.
Redemption
“Why can’t we sit up with Mary?” Ethel whined. “I bet it’s warmer up there.”
“Suffering is a way of participating in the passion of Christ,” I snapped. “Aren’t you even listening to the homily?”
We were sitting side by side in Saint Mary Mother of Mercy, a place I never thought I’d find myself, but now felt as though I completely belonged, because everyone belonged. Everyone but my father.
Father Coghlan moved back and forth twenty pews in front of us, swinging a smoking incense ball on a long chain and speaking in Latin. Directly in front of the swinging ball sat the rich of Corning, their names etched in fancy script on brass plates nailed to the side of the pews where they perched on red cloth cushions covering the long, hard benches. Mary sat up front with the Abbotts. She’d begun working for them as a maid after school and on weekends—the Abbotts overlooking the fact she was a Higgins because she could cook. Mary said we needed the money, and we did. But I also thought it was a way to avoid Henry’s memory, which lived in every corner of our tiny house.
It had been four months. Four months of Sundays spent here, in the back pew.
But I didn’t mind sitting here because I didn’t especially like being close to the empty-eyed white marble cherubs flying high over the sanctuary, reminding me of the lifeless cast of my dead brother’s head, which was covered by a cloth in my parent’s bedroom.
I glanced to my left and was comforted by the statue of the Virgin Mary smiling down at me, her hands praying and a light shining around her head. This statue I liked. This statue I tried to sit next to.
“Maggie?” Ethel whispered.
“Shush,” I told her.
“Do you think there’ll be oranges?” she continued.
I kept my attention on th
e Mass, ignoring her, because following the service there were always oranges. It was the only reason she came with me. I promised her oranges—hers and mine. I was here to feel the power of God. I was here to take in all the light this religion had to offer. I was here for redemption. Ethel was here for the oranges.
I sat up straighter and listened.
“Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum;
adveniat regnum tuum;
fiat voluntas tua,
sicut in caelo et in terra.”
I recognized the words. My stomach growled.
Ethel turned to me with happy, opened eyes. “The bread is coming,” she whispered.
She took a look at my face and quickly turned hers toward the flying cherubs.
Over Christmas, the Abbotts made the suggestion to Mary that we Higginses switch schools and attend St. Mary’s. And so my sisters and I started at the Catholic school, were baptized, confirmed our faith, and here we were, on line for Father Coghlan’s cold, white fingers to place the body of Christ on the tips of our tongues. My brothers also attended St. Mary’s, but they didn’t attend Mass. From the look of the crowd here, it seemed only women needed to be devout; men must be redeemed somehow through us.
The old priest was pleased we were here every Sunday. And every Sunday, he asked after our mother. To which I replied, every Sunday, that she was “quite well,” whether she was, or was not, well. I don’t know why I lied. Or even if it was a lie. I just knew my mother would want it reported this way, and so I did. It seemed not only did women need to be more faithful than men, they also needed to always be well.
This Sunday, Nan had stayed home to help Mother with the house and the boys, as we had a new little Higgins, a fat happy baby named Arlington. Next week it would be Ethel’s turn to stay home and help. They switched off each week. I didn’t take a turn because I was more pious than they were.
* * *
“Well, girls, do you feel the severity of religious discipline beating in your hearts anew this morning?” Father asked when we arrived home.
What Every Girl Should Know Page 7