I was thankful for the gray sky and the muggy rain. It was like a gift to have something to get puckered over. When the rain picked up, Thomas threw an old blanket over the pile and together we tied it down.
“Damn this weather,” he complained.
“I like it,” I said, happy to be disagreeing with Thomas on a day like today. It made things feel more normal.
My mother and Ethel climbed into the wagon with Richard and Arlington. The rest of us would walk. Our new home was above my father’s shop in town. I had no idea how this would work, but I was sure my mother would figure it out . . . as she did everything else.
The babies settled on Ethel’s and Mother’s laps, and Joseph gave a tug on Tam. Thomas and Clio walked up ahead of the wagon. But I wasn’t ready to go.
“I’ll stay behind and help Nan and Mary clean up.”
Nan and Mary had been commissioned to clean the cabin for whomever the new renters were. In the next few hours the only home I’d ever known would be cleaner than I’d ever known it.
“No, you won’t, Margaret Louise,” my mother said. “You’ll say good-bye to your sisters and then catch up.”
I was stunned. An offer to help in the Higgins household was never turned down.
She noticed my surprise and added, “I need you when we get into town.”
I wanted to believe her.
The wagon rolled away.
“Margaret Louise!” she shouted. And as usual, I understood her full meaning. Do as I’ve told you to do. Say good-bye and follow us to town. And don’t be longer than necessary.
I watched the wagon for a few moments. Mostly because I was afraid to turn around and see it . . . the emptiness of what once was full.
Too full.
But now I ached for the fullness—hens squawking and dogs barking, flapping laundry and teetering toddlers, the lantern with its broken handle. I didn’t want to see it all missing.
Nan’s and Mary’s muffled voices floated from the house.
I turned around.
The dead grass by the front door looked browner without any buckets or shovels sitting in it. A feather caught my eye as it drifted over the empty henhouse fence. Everything was gone.
I’d spent the last few days packing it up, and all morning hauling it out, so you’d think it shouldn’t be a shock. But it wasn’t over then. It was now.
Nan came out of the house with a pan of dirty water and dumped it outside the front door. “Maggie,” she smiled, clearly startled.
“I wanted to stay behind and help, but Mother said no.”
“Mary and I can do it,” she said, recovering her composure. “And I’m sure Mother will need you when you get . . .” She stopped, not knowing exactly what to call where we were heading.
“Nan!” Mary hollered.
“I’m outside,” Nan responded. Adding, “With Maggie.”
Mary popped to the door. “Hey, Maggie. I thought you were going with Mother?” She looked worried.
“She is,” Nan told her without taking her eyes from mine. “Mother needs her help once they arrive at the shop.”
The empty yard was strange. The quiet was strange. And now Mary and Nan were strange. I needed all this strangeness to stop. I must have looked exactly how I felt because Nan dropped her pan into the grass and hurried over.
“Now, now, Maggie,” she said, wrapping her arms around me. “Everything is fine.”
Fine. Fine was a bunch of gum. It was what we said to each other when nothing was fine. When fine was a long way off.
I sniffed and pushed Nan away. “May I go in and see it?”
“Don’t pile on the agony, Maggie,” Nan said.
“Let her see it,” said Mary. “It’ll give her some peace.”
And because Mary said it, I aimed to make it true. I stepped through the cabin door, and the emptiness of the room crawled into my belly. There was nothing but a broom and some buckets and rags. It didn’t look a thing like ours. Not like the place where Joseph chased John into the edge of the cookstove and busted open a gash in his head the size of a barn door. Or the place where I held tiny little Ethel on my lap for the very first time. Or the place where Henry was alive. Mary and Nan were scrubbing it all away. And for the first time I realized even the stars at night weren’t permanent. Something you’d think my little Henry Higgins would have taught me.
“Say good-bye now, and catch up to the others,” Mary instructed.
“Good-bye,” I said, because she told me to, and then I walked out fast, not wanting Mary to know that seeing it didn’t give me peace.
* * *
I was tuckered out by the time I caught sight of the wagon—still piled high with our life—standing outside of my father’s monument shop. Joseph and Thomas were hauling out the chest that always sat at the foot of my parent’s bed.
“There she is,” Thomas snorted when he spotted me. “You sure are all-fired lazy, Maggie. Making us do all the work out here in this heat while you drag your feet about town.”
I stopped and looked up at him standing in the back of the wagon. It reminded me of another wagon . . . filled with children clamoring for bananas.
“Not going to get all streaked at me?” Thomas asked.
And when I didn’t, he told Joseph to hold on, jumped out of the back of the wagon, and walked over to stand in front of me.
“Are you going to hug me?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to have to,” he replied.
“If you hug me, Thomas Higgins, it means things are much worse than I thought.”
He crossed his arms in front of him and laughed. “You are a bad egg, Maggie Higgins.”
“I’m about soured on holding the other end of this chest,” Joseph growled.
Thomas thumped me on the head and then turned and jumped onto the wagon, getting back to work. It was what my brothers did. Work. Hard. Like my mother. And my sisters.
I pulled my mother’s fire irons from under the blanket and placed them by the door to the shop. And then reached in again and yanked out her kettle and blacking brushes, creating a little pile by the door. Though I was sweating and tired, I kept working.
Ethel bounded down the side steps from the room over my father’s shop, our new home.
“Let’s be a team,” I told her. “I’ll pile things here and you take them up to Mother.”
Ethel loved the idea.
We unpacked like this until it was so dark that I couldn’t tell if the wagon was empty, and needed to search the bottom of it with my hands.
“I’ll take care of Tam and the wagon,” Joseph said. “You go on up.”
There was nothing left to keep me, and so I headed up the stairs.
It looked like sheet-cleaning day, as my mother had hung them up to create walls in the single large room. Thomas dragged things about under my mother’s direction while she breastfed Arlington, sitting at the marble-topped table lit up with candles. Clio played with Richard next to her in his high chair.
“Come see our room,” cried Ethel.
“Wash up for bed, first,” Mother said.
I looked around for someplace to wash.
“Basin’s on the shelf.”
Ethel and I washed our faces and hands, and then wiped up with a clean rag hanging from a nail next to the shelf.
It will be fine. This will be fine. See how she has the rag ready. Everything will be fine.
Ethel took my hand and led me toward a dark corner where our bed was set up . . . without sheets. Mary’s bed did not sit next to it.
“Mother?”
“Yes, Margaret Louise?”
“Where is Mary’s bed?”
“Mary will be sleeping at the Abbotts.”
I swayed in the dark, reaching out for the wooden post of the wall to steady myself.
“And Nan?” I choked.
“Your sisters have taken jobs on the hill.”
Her voice was strong, her tone final. I didn’t ask anything more, but climbed out of
my clothes and into my nightclothes and under the blanket next to Ethel.
“Maggie?” Ethel whimpered.
“Everything is fine,” I whispered.
March 1, 1899
I drag a stool over to the large pan filled with potatoes and get to work. By the time the hoard of Higginses arrives home from school and factory, my mother has still not woken up. Joseph greets me with a swat of his hat, Ethel and Richard with a hug, and Clio with a shout of disappointment when he sees I’m the one making dinner. Thomas grunts; he’s done his greeting. My father arrives last. He bows deeply before me, and my stomach twists at the recognition of his dramatic gesture. Like father, like daughter. And I’m happy to be forever surrounded by my brothers and sisters . . . better to dilute his presence.
Over a horrible dinner of boiled potatoes and overcooked pork joint—Clio was right to express displeasure—I hear the news. John is working in a mine somewhere out west. Emma has married a man from Utica. “She’s as fat as a cookstove with her first,” Ethel tells me. Old Mr. Keeler passed away in late January. And Mrs. O’Donnell gave birth to her fourteenth child last month. We don’t speak about my mother’s latest loss in the very same month. Always a baby. I’ve almost never known my mother alone in her own body.
Ethel begins cleaning up the kitchen while I check on my mother. She is still asleep. I’ve been home for almost four hours and we still haven’t met eyes . . . which actually feels like old times.
I pick up the bucket of scraps for the dogs and head to the front door. Richard and Arlington are rolling around on the wood floor knocking into things. My father is in his chair reading, not noticing them batting up against his shins.
“Wash your faces and teeth,” I command. “It’s time for bed.”
Neither of them responds.
“Richard? Arly? Do you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Hey!” shouts Joseph, stamping the mud off his feet in the front hall. “Listen to your sister.”
“Yes, Mary,” they respond.
“I’m Margaret.”
They look up at me from the floor.
“My name is Margaret, God rot it!”
“What?” asks Richard.
I trudge out of the house with my bucket, planning on slamming the door behind me, but when it comes time to yank it closed, I no longer have the energy. . . . I still have so much to do before I can crawl into bed. My bed. Next to Ethel’s. At least we each have our own now. Clio, Richard, and Arlington share our old one.
Returning from the dog pen, I meet up with Thomas on the front flags. He’s clean and shaven and wearing a hat.
“Where to?” I ask.
“Out,” he says.
“Out,” I repeat.
Out. Somewhere. Where he wants. Where he doesn’t have to tell me.
“Wait,” I tell him. “I’ll grab my overcoat.”
“What?” he says, just as feckless as his younger brothers a moment ago.
I shake my head in fury.
“Maggie?”
“I wasn’t really coming,” I tell him. “I was making a point.”
“About what?” he asks.
I whip the bucket across the yard at him and storm toward the house.
“You’re off your chump, Maggie!”
I don’t answer him.
“You missed me, by the way,” he snarls.
“You’d have been hit if I’d meant to hit you,” I snap back without turning around.
He slams the gate. I slam the front door. I know I need to retrieve that bucket, but I can’t bring myself to go after it now. Instead, I snatch up a clean dishrag and join Ethel in front of a stack of dirty dishes.
“Not much changes,” she says, handing me a clean, wet pot.
Me, least of all, I think.
Crossing Over
After the day Mary and Nan left for the hill, everything was different. I was different. I realized there were two of me. There was the me who thought before she acted, who worked hard, and who accomplished her tasks.
But there was this other me. A me who was filled with feeling. A me who struck out at Thomas. Snapped at Ethel. A me I couldn’t control. This was the me I needed to fight against. This was the me I aimed to stamp out.
During the next six months, I was given more than my share of hard work to practice with since there was only my mother, Ethel, and me to clean the vegetables, to wash the dishes, to hang the laundry, to change the babies. To cook and sweep and mend and all the hundreds of things that needed to be done. Neither Ethel nor I complained, of course, because we got to attend school, while Mary, Nan, Joseph, John, and Thomas paid for our newly rented house on the flats. A house with wooden walls instead of sheets and a real cookstove instead of scalding yourself while stewing meat over the open flame of the hearth in Father’s shop. Or rather, Father’s old shop.
The shop was gone forever, and my father’s independence with it. He worked for the two other stonemasons in Corning now—when he could make himself get up in the morning after drinking whiskey all night, or they didn’t throw him out before lunch for arguing with the customers over voting rights. Otherwise he sat in his old chair in our new home while he read and sipped and pretended that nothing had changed, nothing was different.
But I refused to sit by. Or even to be content with working harder. If I was to become this better me, I needed to gain fortitude. So to this end, I began to do the things I feared most. I wandered deep into the woods on mushroom journeys far from any paths. I strutted past the McGill’s with every last one of those ratbags standing out on their front porch howling insults at me. I visited Henry’s grave alone after dark. When I was able to accomplish these things over and over again without running, without hesitation, without even so much as an extra beat of my heart, I felt the right me growing stronger. But always ahead lay my greatest fear—crossing the narrow, iron span of the Erie Railroad tracks under which the Chemung River raced, deep and fast, far below—really far below. If I could cross the bridge, I knew I was truly in control of myself and nothing would ever rattle me again.
Across the Chemung lived the Edders, friends of my father’s. Their apple orchard, heavy with white blossoms this time of year, was dazzling. The smell alone made you woozy. But to reach it by the wooden wagon bridge was three miles around. My brothers preferred the shorter route over the high iron span of the railroad bridge. The space between the ties seemed not to hold any terrors for them. Those spaces held considerable terrors for me.
I’d often made the trip across with them, always between Joseph and John . . . never Thomas. I didn’t trust Thomas not to pretend to shove me over the edge and have me fall to my death by accident. Just the thought of falling—even while lying safely in my bed—had me grabbing at my bedsheets to steady myself.
But today was the day I’d planned to do this thing. It was actually the fifth Saturday in a row I’d planned to do this thing, I just kept losing my nerve. However, I’d learned the only way to accomplish a thing—a thing you were very afraid of—was to keep attempting it. The first time I headed out to cross the bridge, I turned around at the gate. The second and third times I made it all the way to the bridge, but knew I wouldn’t cross before it even came into sight. The fourth time, I stepped out onto the first tie. This morning, who knew? I felt strong.
I started out alone. Strangely, I was often alone these days. I walked the wagon bridge out of town and around past the road that led to our old cabin by the tracks. That life felt as if it had been a hundred years ago, and I wasn’t tempted at all to walk the old way to see it.
It was a beautiful morning. The air smelled like green leaves and wet dirt, two smells I loved. For a while, I forgot where I was going and got lost in the breeze and the sun and the chattering birds. My legs carried my body as if it weighed nothing at all, as if everything inside me—my bones, my organs—had vanished. But when the bridge came into sight, my blood began to pump in my temples. I couldn’t yet see the river, since it w
as a dizzying distance below, but the thought of the long, long drop to the water quickened my breath and slowed my steps.
I gathered strength in the familiarity of the sugar maples wagging in the sunshine, the springy soil beneath my feet, and even the rusty bridge standing in front of me.
“Hey, y’all, hey, y’all, hey, y’all!”
It was just Mr. Edder calling his cows to a fresh field, but he startled me near to death. I scanned the trees across the bridge, but couldn’t see him or the cows. I looked back from where I’d come. It was only three miles back over the wagon bridge. I should just . . .
“Hey, y’all, hey, y’all, hey, y’all!” Mr. Edder called out again.
I looked back at the train trestle, the midmorning sun making me squint. I’d been here before. Like this. And not crossed. If I did not do this—if I did not cross—I was not who I wanted to be.
With that thought carrying me forward, I stepped onto the first tie. And the next. And the next. And the next, next, next, next, next, next . . . until I froze. My chest ached, my legs were shaking, my breath rasped in my ears. Staring at the weathered wood at my feet, I blurred what flowed far, far down between them. My head threatened to float off my shoulders, abandoning me right here on the bridge.
I took another step, my heart fluttering like a maple seed spinning down from a high branch. I took another. Carefully. Slowly. I watched each of my feet plant themselves onto the next tie.
How far had I gone? Halfway? Was I getting close?
The questions swirled in my head like the river swirling beneath the bridge a hundred feet below. But I dared not look up. There was nothing in the whole world but the next tie, and then the next.
Except . . . for a shiver. Under my foot.
A tiny zinging like a low hum.
The train.
I looked up—not caring about falling because now there was something far worse than falling. I was halfway across. Not nearly close enough. The tracks shook as the whistle blew so loudly it seemed to be coming from inside me. I couldn’t see the train because the tracks twisted off into the distance around a hill covered in treetops. But it was coming, and at full chisel.
What Every Girl Should Know Page 9