Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction

by Russell, Vanessa

  Biting on my pen tip, I looked down at the blank sheet of paper, wondering if I should be so blunt this time. Perhaps being vague would suffice, but still insist on Jere coming to the rescue. I once thought of him as a sort of knight in shining armor. He could be so again, only this time to rescue me from his daughter - and vice versa. No, flattery wouldn’t be appropriate coming from a married woman, and Jere would see through it. I began writing and the words flowed same as the first, showing my desire to say what I wanted to say for so long. I took in a deep breath as I signed my name again, glancing toward the door and her likely reappearance.

  I smelled smoke. I sniffed the air. I was sure of it. Had Lizzie resorted to building a fire to boil our clothing? Surely not. That was backbreaking work and I would feel terribly guilty for not dealing with that machine sooner. I walked to the parlor doorway and sniffed again. It smelled like more than just wood burning. Hurrying to the back door proved only that Lizzie and Mama hadn’t given up on their wooden friend, bent over it with an oilcan to its wringer rollers like feeding a child.

  “I smell smoke,” I called out through the screen door.

  Mama straightened and looked around. Her gaze rose above me to the second story windows and her eyes enlarged in a frightening way. She touched her throat. “Lizzie, grab that watering can. There’s a fire up there!” She grabbed a bucket and dipped this into the washing machine’s filled belly of water. She and Lizzie took off running through the back door, down the hall, into the entranceway, and up the stairs, water splashing about their skirts and floor.

  I followed suit, my fear of fire since being burned as a child coming back to me in spades. Mama threw open my bedroom door and we all gasped at the flames eating away at the bed’s feather mattress and climbing rapidly, licking at the lace canopy. The extra oxygen brought in by the open door lent itself to the fire’s hunger and the bed and its four posters were quickly engulfed.

  We swiftly threw what was left of the water in our buckets onto the fire. I rushed to the bathroom and turned on the faucet in the bathing tub and here we replenished over and over. Mama, Lizzie, and I would fill, run, and throw, fill, run, and throw, all the while coughing through the smoke and bumping into each other in our haste. Oddly, no one shouted, or even spoke, expressions intense and tight-lipped to the dangerous task. They were braver than I, working much closer to the flame. At one point, Lizzie wet a towel and beat down fire that was rapidly covering the large fluffy pillows, her walking cane thrown aside somewhere. Sparks flew into her hair and caught hold of her dress and for one terrifying moment, I feared for her life. She became our center of attention until she was safe again. We labored hard until at last, after an eternity in hell, there was only smoking ash.

  Blackened bedsprings, exposed now, looked like the innards of a large overcooked animal. All fabrics including my beloved wedding ring quilt had been grotesquely shrunken into small black scrap pieces. The wooden headboard and footboard, and the night tables were deeply scarred. On the floor by the bed was a partly charred piece of paper. On closer inspection I recognized my penmanship. It was what was left of my letter to Jere.

  We tucked strands of singed hair behind our ears and began the long arduous task of cleaning and mopping. I knew better by now than to threaten Mary Sue, force her to clean this up, pay for the damage. She would only be intimidated, stay low like a smoldering ember, and then flare again. Evening fell before we collapsed, reaching a point where there was no more to do – in the bedroom that is. I had one more mission to complete before I would retire for the night in the spare bedroom. I returned to my desk and wrote a telegram. To hell with letters and waiting for spring. Tomorrow I would take Mary Sue back myself.

  “What do you have to say for yourself, little missy?” Jere asked Mary Sue. I had asked him to meet me in town at the same boarding house of last summer and we sat on the same front porch where he had proposed to me. I suddenly felt that for all that had happened since, I hadn’t gone very far.

  “Nothing,” she answered, her eyes remaining down as she and her father pushed the swing with their feet.

  “Nothing,” he mimicked. “Is living in a beautiful house with clothes you would never have seen otherwise, with schooling we could only wish for, nothing?”

  “It don’t mean nothing to me. I kept telling Miz Bess I wanted to go home but she wouldn’t let me go. I was some pet, being trained to do tricks.”

  I opened my mouth to dispute, but only knew too well that Mary Sue was baiting me. Her daddy was here now; let him handle her.

  “Little gal, I can tell you’re getting too big for your britches. What does mean something to you.”

  “You, first of all. You weren’t happy and Miz Bess made it worse. I hate her for what she did to you and not wanting anything to do with us kids. I wanted to get even with her for leaving us like she did. I watched you and you treated her good and was so patient. But she came to our place all high and mighty and looks down her nose at us like we’re pigs in a pen with uncurled tails, and then she takes off after one night, like she was afraid of getting dirty or something. She hurt you real bad, Daddy.”

  “It’s not like you think, Mary Sue.”

  “I know what I saw, Daddy. When you came back from driving her to Nashville, you moped around, yelling at us kids for the smallest things, sitting by yourself outside, rocking in the rocking chair like you was some old woman or taking off in the woods overnight. You even said it was our fault she left because there was too many of us. Or that we was mean to her. But we didn’t treat her mean at all.”

  Jeremiah shook his head. “I shouldn’t have done that. I was blaming everybody but me. I blamed your mommy for leaving me alone to raise you younguns. I was blaming you for looking and acting like your mommy: you forget nothing, you forgive nothing. I was mad at Bess, I was mad at all you kids, I was mad at the world. I’ve been simmering inside for years. But when I put it all in the pot and boiled it down, the only thing left was my toughened heart. It was my fault and nobody else’s.” He leaned forward in the swing, its needlepoint backing making him look out of place with his leather vest and weathered boots. He seemed in deep thought, rubbing his chin as if contemplating something.

  He smiled apologetically at me. “Well, I hate airing out my dirty laundry here but since you’ve had to wear some of it, I reckon I owe you a glimpse behind the clothesline.” Elbows on his knees, he looked toward the street like it was a road into the past.

  “I know what my daughter has done here is terribly wrong but she came from two parents that should never have been and we made her what she is today. Let me go back a ways.

  “As you know, I escorted Mrs. Catt to women’s conferences and meetings throughout the northeast, from Tennessee to New York City. From about 1909 to 1911, I did this quite regularly. I had a few speeches up my own sleeve and being part of a minority, I could talk the talk because I’d walked the walk. I knew what it was like to have the white man view you as inferior. But what kept me doing it was my true love.”

  Mary Sue snapped to attention, that familiar scowl between her eyes telling me she considered this news another force to reckon with.

  “I couldn’t shake that sweet, dimpled smile and how her eyes shone when she recited her poem at the Women’s Rights Convention. She spoke with such conviction when she started her poem and when she wasn’t allowed to finish, I, well, I decided to speak for her. Every time I spoke for women, I’d think to myself, ‘Ruby, sweetheart, this is for you.’ Sad thing was, I became so lonely after that, like something was missing all the time. At every convention I kept doing double-takes at someone resembling Ruby, thinking she might have shown up.”

  He scratched his sideburn and I noticed then how much silver had been penciled into his black hair since last I saw him. Yet and still, his face showed little aging. “Around about 1911 I spoke at one such conference right here in town. A girl I’d been sweet on in my younger years came up to me afterwards, telling me she thought I spok
e to her heart. She said she had no rights as a woman and I could tell her daddy was still a no-count moonshiner because of her pitiful sack dress and holey shoes. Rosemary had a pretty face though and I wanted her smile to fill up that empty space I had. If you want to know what she looked like, my little girl here is the spittin’ image. Those big blue eyes the color of the sky on a hazy day.

  “When I look at them I think of what my mommy used to say: if you have brown eyes, you’re as shallow as a mud puddle. But blue eyes show you’re as deep as a spring-fed lake. Of course I knew that wasn’t true because Mommy had those Cherokee brown eyes that could see right through Daddy and me, blue eyes and all. As it turned out, Mommy and Daddy knew Rosemary’s family, the Lorry’s. Over the ridge and in the next holler is where they lived. Always mad at the world, feuding with somebody about all the time, the Lorry’s were. Didn’t believe in worldly things, they said. Didn’t allow a deck of cards, liquor, or a bad word in the house. You were either a devil or an angel and the world – which only went to the head of their holler where their church was posted to keep out evil spirits – was short on angels. They wanted to make sure Rosemary turned into an angel. So they wouldn’t hardly let her go out of their sight. She hated them for it and the best way to get even was to marry the half-injun her daddy chased away a few years before. We didn’t have much time for courting and besides, as Bess can account for, I court fast and marry fast. Rosemary was eager to elope and that’s that, daddy’s good girl went bad.

  “We were scratched out of her Lorry family Bible. Their daughter had turned wicked for spite and had gone to live with the devil in a tee-pee. The more children Rosemary had, the madder she got because her mommy and daddy wouldn’t look at them. She dwelled on this and festered. I didn’t help matters none. She’d yell at me or bawl about the kids, or fume about her daddy, and I’d do what I saw my daddy always do: take off for the woods. Hunt or fish until I’d think she’d cooled off. Of course she always just seemed madder when I got back.”

  Jere looked over at Mary Sue and studied her expression as if determining if she should hear the rest. She indeed looked more grown-up in behaving and listening.

  “One day, when Rosemary was expecting our youngest, she up and dressed the younguns like they were going to church and waltzed the three hours to her daddy’s house. Sure enough, her daddy run her off, her little savages with her. This was right before harvest time in the heat of summer, so Rosemary stopped a ways from the house where she couldn’t be seen, and struck a match to her daddy’s cornfield. Mary Sue saw the whole thing. Then Rosemary sent him a note: ‘If you want the fire out, say you’re sorry and I’ll do a rain dance for you.’”

  Jere sat back in the swing and his hands became more animated.

  “He lost his crop and Rosemary went into labor from the long walk back, and bled to death. The worst of it is I could have stopped it if I had been there but my oldest boy and I was on a three-day fishing trip. I should have seen it coming. For days she had been on the warpath about her family having a reunion and she wasn’t invited. I didn’t want to hear anymore about how I was not a red man but colored yellow because I was afraid to go down there and scalp every last one of them. So I took off. I come back a day too late with a mess of fish, only to find a dead wife, seven motherless children, and a whole houseful of angry family blaming each other. Rosemary’s mommy was blaming Rosemary’s daddy, Rosemary’s daddy was blaming me, and I was blaming Rosemary.”

  He beseeched me with his lake-blue eyes. “Mary Sue came from a long line of ‘vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lorry’s’. But I say, forgive her, for she knows not what she does. Like I said, it’s my fault.”

  “I don’t need forgivin’,” Mary Sue said, pulling on a thread on her smudged school jumper. “And you don’t either.” The same dress she had worn the day she set the fire. I had gone to her friend’s house and practically dragged her to the train station direct from there. We’d been traveling all night.

  “It’s Bess’ fault,” Mary Sue said to Jere. “If she had been our mommy, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Jere and I both sighed audibly, but mine came from relief.

  I returned home to the truth about Lizzie. Mama explained that Lizzie had developed serious infections from the burns to her calves. Mama had been applying salve but Lizzie had told her too late and now red streaks were moving up her thighs. Lizzie began running a high fever and talking out of her head and only then could Mama call a doctor. Otherwise Lizzie flat refused to see one. She had no trust in doctors; had seen enough leach-sucking quacks, she said. She would only allow Phyllis to call on her, but a midwife was limited in healing burns. The doctor was on his way and would I please talk with him?

  I went to see Lizzie first: stretched out on top of her sheets, eyes closed, swollen legs loosely bandaged, barely visible in her red cotton nightgown.

  “She doesn’t want a lamp on,” Mama said from behind me. “Only all of these candles.”

  Her wheezing was a sound I recognized as possible pneumonia from my ambulance driving days during the war. Men who had lain too long from serious wounds and had breathed in too shallow. Now Lizzie. I could hardly believe my eyes as I held her feverish hand.

  Lizzie’s eyes fluttered open and she licked her large lips. “So your mama told you. She wasn’t supposed to unless it was life or death. You being here tells me something.” She spoke in her deliberate way, only lower and full of air, like she had just run in from the clothesline with an armful of laundry. How many times had I seen her do that? I now longed to see her do that again, healthy and humming her gospel tunes.

  “It tells me you’re being stubborn as a mule,” I said. “Why did you wait so long?”

  “Because I’s weary. Because there’s nothin’ no one can do. Because I’s nigh on eighty years and I’s not asking the Lord for any more. I’s done took more than I had a right to. So let it be. The doctor, if’n he’s worth his weight in salt, will tell you the same thing.” She closed her eyes.

  “Would you like a drink of water?” I asked, now really worried because she wasn’t concentrating on her words anymore.

  “See, you won’t let it be.”

  “You’re not being reasonable—”

  “Sing to me. Sing me Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, like Mr. Pickering talked about in his speech. I’s been thinkin’ about that song ever since. I saw dem. The Jubilee Singers. All been slaves befo’, black as coal. When I saw dem, I’d gone into town with my misses and dere dey was, standing on boxes in the square, a-singing proud, dressed up in fancy white folks’ garments. That’s when I knows I could be free too. I’d stayed on at the plantation after the war that freed us ‘cause I had nowheres else to go but den the Jubilees’ songs told me better. Not long after, Mr. Pickering, he found me along side the road with whip marks ‘cause I’d run away before.” Her voice dropped down lower and lower as she spoke and I eagerly leaned forward to hear her rare monologue. She attempted to lick her lips again, her tongue resembling a strawberry in the midst of chocolate. “Mister can’t save me now. But I knows one thing. You’s not his first love, but you’s his last. He jes don’t know what to do with it and you’s got to show him.”

  She paused and licked her lips again. “Miz Ruby?”

  Mama leaned forward into Lizzie’s vision. “Yes, Lizzie?”

  “The first time I met you was in this house,” Lizzie said. “You sez den you’s tired of spectating. Now you’s come back and don’t have to do that no mo’.”

  She linked her large-knuckled hands on her stomach. “Sing to me.”

  We did as best we could, each remembering words the other had forgotten until the doctor arrived.

  She was right about the doctor. He had little hope for her. “She’s old,” he said. “Just give her what she wants.”

  We sang every gospel song we knew, Mama knowing more than I did. For two days we sat by her side giving her what she wanted. Except one thing; her last words to me were “forgive the
chile”.

  I sent my second telegram of the month. I had a post office box address to Thomas’s childhood plantation, now owned by his brother. He had said he was headed there. I could only hope he got the message and had begun his trip back to New York.

  On the third day, I heard the front door opening and I took off running from my bedroom down the stairs, my heart heavy at the knowledge that Thomas had come home too late. And yet my heart beat strong in my chest at the thought of seeing him again.

  His looked somber in his black suit and the deep lines around his mouth made him look years older than he had when he left, less than a week ago. Most of that time would have had to have been on the road.

  “Thomas, you’re home!” I said hoarsely, holding on to him tightly. His coat was cold and damp from the late evening air.

  The staff from the morgue had carried Lizzie away that early morning. Mama and I were in shock and had hardly spoken or known what to do, any discussion sounding loud in this death shroud. Thomas would look after everything.

  He patted my back. “I came as soon as I got the telegram, but with the roads … where there were roads … ” He faded off and I nodded in understanding. “How is Lizzie?”

  “She’s gone,” I said into his coat.

  Grabbing my arms, he pulled me away and peered down into my face. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

  “She died early this morning, Thomas. She said to tell you she loved you like a brother.”

  He saw my tears then and brought me back to his chest. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “How could this happen. How?”