Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction

by Russell, Vanessa

  Another death; the same girl to blame.

  Thomas stood in the middle of his large bedchamber. The bed was gutted now; only the scorched headboard and footboard remained, connected by iron railings with blistered paint. Black marks etched the floor boards, one particularly bad spot looked as if it had rained oil, reminding me of where Lizzie stood, the hem of her dress burning, sparks flying, as Mama and I flapped and fought the fire.

  “Everything about this house I loved, is gone now,” he said. I wished his tears would match mine as I stood in the doorway, but instead his eyes were dazed, and his mouth and shoulders sagged. His poor posture pouched his stomach like he’d overeaten. The weight of his sadness hung heavily in my chest. I longed to relieve us both.

  “We could sell the house,” I said.

  He shook his head at me, unbelieving. “You love this house.”

  “I love you more.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You’d move from here? You seemed so entrenched I thought I’d have to dig you out of here to bury you.”

  “You’re what I’m attached to. I can live wherever you are.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying, my dear. I should never have married again; I can’t settle here. And now that Lizzie’s gone …” He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

  Fear clutched at me as I grasped my hands together to keep myself from running and clinging to him. “Thomas, have you forgotten I’ve traveled for years?” I felt better then, my own calm voice reassuring me. “I only rooted here because you asked me to. Old memories have bogged you down, not I, so please don’t blame me. This old place is too much to maintain on my own. I’d be just as happy in your old apartment. You are what makes me happy. I thought you knew that.”

  I prepared myself with a deep breath to ask what was really weighing on my mind. “Don’t I make you happy, Thomas?”

  He folded his arms to match mine and nodded his head, eyes on the floor. “Sometimes so much, it scares me.”

  “No need to be scared of me, Thomas. I’m not a ghost but I am your wife and I fully expect to live with you. Wherever that may be.”

  His mouth protruded in thought, reminding me of Lizzie’s. “Well, then, let’s just see if you do,” he said to the floor.

  I accepted the challenge. “Tonight is a good night to start. Our bedroom is down the hall; third door on the left. I’ll be the warm body lying on the right side of the bed.”

  He gave me a small reminder of the glorious smile I’d missed so much. “Let’s move on with it, then.” His heart seemed missing from the words but I didn’t care.

  Ah, to have his full attention on me, on the tiny pearl buttons on my nightgown, unbuttoning each one slowly with bright eyes as if anticipating a wonderful Christmas gift hidden inside. I gave him all I had, nude that I was. Worry and waiting had been replaced with want and need and I took control. If I didn’t learn to lead, I’d fall behind and lose him.

  I at last fell exhausted onto his chest and listened to his heart beat at a reporter’s pace and then slow to a writer’s steadied measured state. I held on as I slid to his side and heard him sigh. And I held on even tighter as later in the night his head cradled between my breasts and he cried like a baby. I knew then that he had come home to me for good, no matter where we were.

  Lizzie’s tombstone epitaph read what Thomas wrote: Helped many women who fled to her door/Liberated now to sing to her Lord. Its marble effigy of an angel stood as tall as any prominent name carved into stone in the cemetery. I had no doubt such a remembrance cost Thomas a pretty penny but ‘she’s family’, he said. Papa’s was only a few plots away and his plain headstone and gathered withered leaves tucked around the hard mound looked forlorn and ignored next to Lizzie’s brightly flowered resting place. Standing at one gravesite with recent memories of another was the saddest moment of my life. Poor Mama looked as if she couldn’t take any more.

  So much grief and guilt swirled around me till I was in a dense fog. Sobbing rang in my ears and I had to stop it. I grouped together the remnants of the old Ladies Legion and we sang, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. The song brought comfort to us all, just as Lizzie would have wanted. Somehow I believed she was watching, rocking and humming along with us.

  The fog lifted. I felt light on my feet. I saw Thomas clearly, standing by an oak tree, hands in his pockets staring back at the gravesite with his head tilted in his reporter fashion, like he wanted to ask Lizzie’s spirit a few questions. The sun filtering through the branches highlighted blond strands of his hair that age hadn’t captured yet. I felt a strong urge to hold him and squeeze out any left-over sorrow.

  I walked over and hooked my arm through his. “Penny for your thoughts.”

  “I do believe Lizzie just spoke to me,” he said. “I heard, plain as day, Lizzie’s voice in my head saying, ‘I’m going home. You will, too.’ Home is Georgia. I’m moving back home. We are moving back home. We’ll sell the house here. The Pickerville Herald offered me an editor’s job and by God I think I’m going to take it.”

  He nodded toward the fresh heap of dirt that would eventually settle down around Lizzie, as if to say, thanks for the tip. He took long strides toward the motor car and I had to advance my pace to keep up. “Lizzie was a wise old gal,” he said. “She knew the only way to get me out of there was for her to leave first.”

  I thought how Lizzie served this man like he was her master. “Why did Lizzie never marry?”

  “She did.”

  “Lizzie was married?”

  “She didn’t speak of this? Perhaps I shouldn’t either.” Thomas opened my door and shrugged. “Oh well, doesn’t matter now. Lizzie was forced to marry another slave when she was thirteen. To make more slaves, naturally. She started running away after that, saying one master was enough, and she sure wasn’t going to answer to two. She said all her life she was a lady looking for liberation.” He motioned for me to get in the car. “Looks like she finally found it.”

  I glanced over and saw Mama laying flowers on Papa’s grave. She wiped some of the fallen leaves away, reminding me of how she used to tend to his bed. She straightened and, wiping her hands on her long black woolen dress, joined her legion of ladies with a smile.

  In that moment, it seemed to me that death, especially such a painful one, was necessary to free the living.

  Spring winds whipped in and around our front seat of the Duesenberg as it motored toward Savannah. Behind the wheel highlighted in the morning sun, Thomas shone like a golden angel in his cream-colored shirt, tan trousers, and gold wedding band, blond and silver strands of hair carelessly blowing about. When sitting alone now and my thoughts turn to Thomas, this is the first image that surfaces, always radiating and fresh as a spring thaw.

  Thomas was saying, “You may not like my brother at first. You may never; I’m not sure that I do, but Joe’s an interesting enough character that someday I might write about. But I’ll wait until he passes on, because he’d kill me if he knew the truth. For the truth is, he’s hot-headed, cold-hearted, and lead-bottomed. He looks behind him so much, he knocks down every opportunity in front of him. I tell him he’s too busy looking at what could have been if the South had won. He loves to talk about himself, even if it’s bad, and he’ll tell you what he’s doing to make himself better and what you can do to make yourself better. But don’t you remind him of his sore spots. You’re a Yankee and wouldn’t understand. He has a sign at his gate that reads, ‘Welcome To The South, Now Go Home’.

  “You’ll like Harriet more. Only she can get away with telling him he’s dumber than a hoe handle but built like a Greek god. Then she gives him a hug and sends him back outside. She’s a strong woman who holds that plantation together with thread and feathers. She raises geese and ducks and stuffs their feathers into sewed mattresses and pillows. Joe says soon she can stuff them with dollar bills, if business keeps growing like it is. They’re living on that for now since Joe’s lost most of his cotton crop to boll weevil
s.”

  Two days later we pulled into their long winding driveway, weeping willows tiredly lining the sides. The one story white clapboard house rambled east and west of its center entranceway as if additions were added as family grew. Inside and directly across this large entrance hall was another formal entranceway facing the river. People used to come in that way when traveling by boat in the early days, explained Harriet, so it was considered the front of the house for many years until roads were better traveled.

  Joe and Harriet gave us welcoming hugs, Joe telling Thomas that he ‘looked like the rear end of hard times’. He had barbed-wire manners but I wasn’t surprised by what he meant. Thomas was not fairing well. My man of the world had not handled this trip the way he used to and looked exhausted. The night before was spent sleeping on the front and back seat of the motor car, what with no lodging within several hundred miles of Joe’s home. Not to mention mud splatters on our clothing from several events of pushing the metal beast through nature’s deterrents. We had experienced three flat tires but Thomas was prepared with sufficient inner tubes, an air pump and patches. Gas fumes permeated our skin from the gas containers required to travel with us to cover the long intervals between gas filling stations. This being my first long trip by motor car, it was no longer a wonder to me why there was so much discussion and campaign promises to build more roads. I was ready to march and petition myself for this worthy cause.

  Joe was not exactly a Greek god but more like a good example of the adage that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. He was muscular enough through the arms and shoulders, a necessity in running a plantation no doubt, but too well fed by his doting wife who referred to him as ‘my ol’ man’ and whose shadowed brown eyes followed him everywhere. She claimed he ran her ragged, and quite literally her bony structure looked that way in her patched house-dress, moving from one room to the next with cotton ticking in her hand. I suspected her once-upon-a-time good looks had been worn thin from over-use.

  The only similarities I saw between Thomas and Joe, was the jaw line and wide smile, but Thomas looked much more the southern gentleman, whereas Joe with his waxed hair and mustache and small blue eyes squinting against the smoke of his ever-constant cigarette pinched in the corner of his mouth, looked more the part of a salesman. And in fact, he was gradually “herding” motor cars into a field that no longer proved profitable for crops. These he would make like new again, he claimed.

  “I’ve sold these at five years younger than they really are,” he said with a wink. “Speculating the age of a motor car is like figuring the age of a woman; it hinges on how much she’s fixed up. One coat of enamel cosmetics and she’s sold for a hundred dollars more. I got the idea from a billboard on the side of a barn outside Atlanta. Now if I could only fix my wife up like that.” He smacked her buttocks like one might with a well-behaved horse.

  “Charfin’ on you,” she said evenly. She took his cigarette, placed it to her own mouth and inhaled deeply, and returned it to its owner’s corner. She seemed unaffected by him as if he was the lame leg she had grown accustomed to but wouldn’t dream of amputating.

  I lost sight of why we were there. Thomas wavered between being lethargic and nostalgic. He began to lose track of his story, the worst thing possible for a life-long reporter. Two weeks went by and still no news about a job at the Pickerville Herald, but I was more concerned that he wasn’t actively making inquiries.

  I read controversial newspaper articles to him, using them as sticks to stir his blood in the southern views of, no progress is the best progress. The news would read: Improved roads would only bring the northerners in and let our children out. The headlines boldly declared: The Ku-Klux Klan Hit Again. “Women were barred from the voting booth,” I read loudly.

  I tired quickly of southern patronage and even more so of their expressions. But Thomas only made it worse with, “Darlin’, you’ve come to the cow’s barn lookin’ for cotton.” He seemed content to remain in the bedroom of his youth reading Mark Twain or writing in a journal I’m not privy to, nor can I find where he’s hidden it. Or he reminisces over dinner and alcoholic drink with Joe and a cigar. On several evenings Joe and Thomas went to town, saying they had business there and did not return until much past midnight.

  Joe’s expectations of his wife had also become contagious. Evidence of this was revealed one night as I excused myself from dinner for bed. I had had enough of memories and how the future would never make up for the past.

  Thomas paused long enough in his rendition of the battle at Gettysburg to drawl, “Run my bath for me, darlin’.”

  His accent was bearing its native tongue more and more, especially with the drink. I turned in surprise just in time to see Harriet wear a smirk. She and I had already run out of things to talk about, being that her favorite topic was same as Joe’s: Joe did this and Joe did that. The sun rose and set on him and I was just too blind to see.

  “Yankees simply do not know how to take care of their men!” she’d said once during her sharing of assumed knowledge that the divorce rate was higher in the north. “Of course I’m not surprised,” she added, “since women suffrage began there.”

  “Mrs. Thomas Pickering,” Thomas later called from the bathing tub. This was behind a screen in the corner of the ample bedroom, added there with a small sink as an afterthought of modern plumbing.

  “Isn’t it enough I assumed your last name, without taking on your first too?” I answered.

  He handed me a cloth as I approached. “Have it your way. Wash my back, Bess Pickering. Come to think of it, start at my head and wash down as far as possible, then go to my feet and wash up as far as possible. Then wash my possibles.”

  I paused. “Pardon?”

  He laughed. “That’s what my mother used to call our privates. Possibles.”

  Another endearing expression to endure but at least the subject had changed. This energized me. “I’ll show you my possibles if you show me yours,” I said and pulled my gown up over my head and let it fall to the floor. I stepped into the millions of tiny bubbles, feeling his slick legs move aside to make room. I sank slowly into the tepid water, thousands of bubbles bursting around me in whispers.

  He grinned, obviously pleased with his woman. “This is getting interesting,” he said. I bit back my retort that our baseline for interesting topics had reached rock bottom in the world of Joe but I was determined to wash it all away and bring us back our own little world.

  I soaped the cloth and started with his face, moving down, as his hand roamed around. “Do as much as possible,” I teased. I cherished his hard-earned focus on me: intense eyes, swelling member, moisture on his upper lip. I licked this and tasted soap and salt. I dropped the cloth, desiring instead to touch and taste his slippery skin, the hair with the smooth, the hardness and softness of it all, the clean mingled with the sweat. The water sloshed and cooled as our movements and breathing quickened and our bodies heated. The tide rose and washed over us both, leaving us trembling and then shivering.

  “I love you. I want you to know that,” he said as his hand fell away and he closed his eyes. He looked totally spent, his once flushed cheeks now cooled to insipid. I stood dripping water from goose bumps and shriveled nipples, and helped him to stand, feeling closer to him than I had ever felt before, as if our pliable wet flesh had molded like clay on the potter’s wheel. I embraced and warmed as I dried us, limp and loose he was but enough of an upward turn of the lips to know he was contented. He remained naked and fell into bed. I tucked in beside him, still needing him, my recent awareness of such married pleasures yearning to make up for lost time.

  Katydids sang me to sleep and katydids roused me, carried on the cool night air blowing through the window sheers. I reached for him, enjoying his exposed buttocks, fondling, knowing now how to touch to bring him to me. Soon he was over me, in me, watching me, until I gasped, before he gave in to his own. He collapsed on top of me and finally I was satisfied.

  “What y
ou want to do is—”

  “How do you know what I want, Joe?”

  Joe rubbed his cheek hard, calluses against whiskers, like sandpaper on splintered wood. “What I do know, little lady is that your husband told me to teach you to drive an automobile. Au-to-mo-bile. Remember that is what they’re called down here. That is what I do know. And if you know more than that, then I’ll just stop wasting both our time.”

  That tweaked a memory of what I read once in the New York Times: The new mechanical wagon with the awful name automobile has come to stay.

  I sighed and tapped the steering wheel. All I knew was that I wished Thomas hadn’t gone into town. Or that he had taken me with him and we were searching for our own home, apartment, anything. I was reaching my limit with the haggard southern belle and her overbearing hankering-to-be Confederate soldier.

  He took my silence as surrender and continued. “Now this steering wheel you have a hold of is hard for a woman to manage. Your weak little hands will need leather gloves to get a good grip and use your whole body weight to press down on the foot brake. It can go as fast as fifty miles an hour if we want it to. This long stick sticking up here in the floor is to shift gears as you go faster. You have three speeds in this here transmission – well I don’t mean to use big words to a girl, but all you need to know is you have to shift three times.” He brought up three fingers, in case I didn’t understand.

  I went from lady to woman to girl. Why did I get younger in his dialogue? He wasn’t the only one who referred to women as girls nowadays. Why were we perceived as being more childish since we earned the vote? It suddenly became obvious to me that we must prove ourselves all over again just because we get to vote.

  “Joe, it may amaze you to know this, but I drove an ambulance during the war and although motor cars have changed over the years, I do know this is a Pierce-Arrow. Did you know that Pierce-Arrow trucks were used during the war? I saw them in the New York harbor, being shipped to England and France. As then, the headlights continue to be set inside the wings that give it a stately look in my opinion but the embroidered seats are a new fashion I think. Being a mere woman, I’ve also noticed that this particular Pierce-Arrow is well balanced, yet is slightly ostentatious, don’t you think?”