by L. S. Young
“Hello, Daddy,” said Lily. “We were just passing time, trying to stave off the cold.”
“You should be ashamed,” he spat at me, ignoring her. The smell of liquor wafted from him with each word.
“Daddy, you’re not yourself,” I said, my voice shaking in spite of myself.
“To parade yourself in the parlor of a great lady like Elizabeth Andrews. You!” He pointed a finger at Will. “Ain’t you mortified, to be chained to such a brazen woman?”
“You won’t speak so of Landra,” said Will quietly. “She’s to be my wife.”
“Pshaw. Her mama—”
“Mama is dead!” I exclaimed, pricked beyond bearing by the unreachable standard of her perfection. “She’s dead, and shaming Lily and me over carousing in her parlor won’t bring her back.”
“Thank God she’s dead!” he thundered, matching my volume. “She would roll over in her grave to see you dancing, with your hair down, like a common harlot. And before your own unlawful child!”
“Daddy, please!” I begged, but he had drunk himself into a stentorian mood, and nothing could stop him.
“That’s right!” he slurred, pointing to Ezra as he turned to Will. Will’s face was impassable. “Him what you thought was her brother is her bastard!”
I ran to Ezra and covered his ears. I wished there were someone to cover my own.
“You see she don’t deny it, and she won’t,” continued Daddy. “A disgrace, she is. Now you know all, you must feel a fool! So you can get out, away from here.”
I buried my face in Ezra’s copper curls, weeping.
“I won’t go until I see you silenced from spewing these obscenities before your daughters, and my betrothed,” said William.
“Obscenity? She’s the obscenity.” I could feel from his tone that he had nodded at me.
My face was still hidden, but Lily said when Daddy spoke those words Will’s hands clenched into fists. He walked to where Daddy stood swaying in the center of the room and hit him in the mouth. Daddy sprawled onto his back and lay there with the breath knocked out of him, his flask spilling the remainder of its contents across the parlor rug.
This break in the horror that had unfolded before us gave everyone time to act. Edith took Ezra to the nursery. Lily took my hand and led me past Will and down the hall to our room. I heard the front door slam momentarily.
“That was him,” I whispered to her, “leaving. He’s gone.”
Her face was a mask of pity, and I turned from her and prostrated myself on my bed. She stroked my hair as I cried.
“Don’t make yourself ill over it,” she said gently. “Perhaps it’s best he knows.”
I rolled over and wiped my eyes. “I wanted to tell him! I truly did, but Colleen always said I must keep it a secret or I’d never marry.”
When all my tears were spent, I lay in nothingness until dark and fitful sleep crept upon me. I woke to Lily shaking me a few hours later. Late afternoon sunlight spilled across the quilt.
“Wake up. Will wants to see you.”
“Still here?”
“Yes, he never left. He’s been sitting on the porch swing while you rested, but it’s getting cold now and will be dark soon.”
“Daddy?”
He was sick on the rug. He’s sleeping it off on the cot in the barn. Will helped me take him.”
“I can’t see him.”
“Landra, what if you don’t and he leaves?”
I contemplated this and sat up. “I need to wash my face.”
“I’ll tell him.”
I found Will, not on the swing, but in our hollow. He was leaned against my gnarled tree, smoking his pipe. He did not turn around as I approached, not until I was nearly at his side. His expression as he turned to me was kind and open, just as if I were meeting him for an evening tryst. It nearly reduced me to tears. He put his hand out, welcoming, but I stayed where I was.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Daddy told you to go. If he wakes up and finds you . . .”
“I don’t take orders from drunkards,” he replied smoothly, his pipe between his teeth.
“Well, that’s one of us.”
He smiled and held his hand out to me again. I still did not move.
“You won’t come to me? Are you angry that I knocked him down?”
“Will! Why are you here?”
“To see that you are all right.”
“And then?”
“To bid you goodbye until tomorrow.”
“Did you hear nothing—nothing that was said this afternoon?”
“What difference would it make?”
I stared at him, unable to say more. His pipe had gone out, and he emptied the barrel of ashes, tapping it against his boot. He cleared his throat. “My darling, I’ve made a promise to you. Besides, I’ve known. That is, I suspected.”
I sighed. “I hate Willowbend. Everyone talks about things that are none of their concern. Who told you?”
“The day I dined with the Harmons, last June. Some things were . . . hinted at, by Mrs. Harmon.”
I dissolved into tears at this, humiliated. Will came to me then and took my hands.
“Don’t cry, please! It’s mostly your way with him. Far more maternal than sisterly. You recall the first day I met you, I thought you were his mother. I don’t suppose you could suppress that part of yourself, being with him.”
I pulled my hands away. “You pity me then? You fancy yourself a sort of savior for ruined, unvirtuous women?”
“I love you. Yet, if you find the need to put a name to everything between us in our life together, we shall disagree.”
“And yet we shall not disagree on this? My child?”
He spread his hands. “I admire you, your spirit, your . . . your all-fired doggedness in the face of it. He’s a fine child, and you’re good to him. I would like to know who his father is.”
“Who do you think?”
He sighed, shaking his head. “I figured as much. I admit it doesn’t please me to know it’s Henry. I dislike him, to put it mildly, but beyond that I have no quarrel with the fact.”
“Are your prospects so dim you must settle for me?” I had been brought up to believe so firmly that no man would ever have me if he learned of Ezra that I could not seem to comprehend his acceptance.
“Landra, I have regrets, too. More than you, if I’m being honest. It’s just I don’t have a child to show for them.”
“But I do. I’m ruined,” I repeated. “Daddy and Colleen have said it for years. Besides that, I’m brash. I say what I think, and my mind’s made up on, well, almost everything.”
“You were practically a child when it happened, and now you’re a woman, and a good one at that. In regard to your brashness, I consider myself lucky to be in possession of a woman so bold.”
I thought with brief sorrow of the carefree day on which I had eavesdropped on him. I like a woman with vim and vigor. I seated myself in the crook of the gnarled tree and let tears wind their way down my cheeks. After a time, I felt the weight of Will’s hand on my shoulder and let it remain. Then came the warmth of his breath as he leaned over me, placing kisses on my cheek, the side of my neck, nuzzling my hair. We stayed in silence for nearly an hour, until the sun slipped below the trees. It seemed we had spoken all that needed saying. When I woke the next morning, I was surprised to find the emerald still on my left hand, its dark green fires glowing deep within. I was convinced it should have stolen from my finger in the night.
Chapter 12
Secrets
My feet were bare, and the sand was cool beneath them in the shade of the full-grown corn. Taller than both of us, it towered above, a perfect cocoon of secrecy, a respite from the baking sun. The corn fronds scratched my
arms and cheeks as we kissed between the stalks, and the sand was cool against my back as he laid me down. His hand supported the small of my back as the other pushed my skirts past my knees. Above him was the brilliant blue sky, cloudless, and the waving green fronds, rustling, like the sound of a book’s pages caught in the breeze from an open window. I gasped because I didn’t know it would hurt, but his lips quieted me.
We quarreled not long after. As soon as I knew for certain that I was pregnant, I went to Henry with plans to tell him. I had waited far too long, for I was only sixteen. I knew little of such things. That was the day I met his betrothed. Instead of returning to Ida’s, where at the time I was still a ward, I went home and grieved, telling Colleen I was too ill for supper. The following morning was a Saturday. I got dressed and walked the four miles back to the Monday estate.
Their gray-green, two-story Victorian rose above me in all of its glory as I turned onto the drive off the main road. The mansard roof was surmounted by a square cupola, a fountain gurgled in front of the circular brick drive, and the perfect lawn was deep emerald. Few people had lawns in Willowbend. Like us, most had a swept yard, with dirt, a kitchen garden, and a few flowerbeds, but that day the Mondays’ verdant lawn seemed to represent all that they possessed in opulence and all the possibility that I had squandered.
The head butler let me in. He was a tall, taciturn black man named Eli, who said very little to anyone, and I was no exception, even if he had seen me traipse in and out of that grand house since I was a child.
“Miss Ida’s worried sick bout you Miss Andrews,” he said.
I started at this unexpected speech. “I wasn’t feeling well, so I spent the night at the Pines. I’ll show myself up.”
He turned from me, nodding.
Ida was perched in the broad window seat of her spacious pink and white boudoir, wearing a violet silk dressing gown that complimented her peaches and cream skin. Tansy was fixing her glossy hair in large sausage curls with a hot iron. A painted cage containing two turtledoves hung on a hook beside her, and she was poking crumbs through the bars. She glanced up as I entered, saw the look of distress on my face, and cried, “Where have you been? Darling, have you been crying?”
If anyone had a flair for the dramatic, it was Ida.
I sat down on the white coverlet of her featherbed, sinking into it.
“I need your help.”
It was Tansy who spoke. “What happened?”
“I’m in trouble.”
Ida drew in her breath. “Not that sort of trouble, surely?”
My bottom lip began to tremble, and I felt myself dissolving into tears again. I had promised myself to put all weeping behind me the night before.
“That no good beau done got you in trouble and left you?” whispered Tansy angrily.
I shuddered. “He doesn’t know.”
“You best tell ‘im!”
“Tansy, I can’t! He’s enga—”
“I know what he done! But you best tell him all the same.”
“We heard of the engagement yesterday,” Ida explained.
I shook my head, my stomach aching. “I feel ill.”
“Well, who wouldn’t!” cried Ida, taking the tender approach. “Now, Landra, don’t you fret a bit. I know a woman you can see. Tansy took me there last year.”
“You? You never told me . . .”
“Oh, honey I couldn’t. Not after what happened to Simply Walker. As soon as I was late, I said, ‘Tansy you gotta take me to see that witch-woman everyone talks about. If you don’t, I’ll just die.’”
Simply Walker was a poor girl we knew from church. Her mother was dead like mine, and her father worked at the cotton gin and made his sons scratch what they could out of their half acre. Sometimes he hit her when he was in his cups. My father liked his whiskey, too, and when he drank he was mean but talkative, rarely violent. He only whipped us when he was sober. Simply had a black eye or a busted lip every couple of months, and when she came to church that way, the rich girls called her trash. Halfway through the year, her hair became unkempt and her clothes dirty, as if she’d given up. One day she came to church with a bruise on her face and her lip crusted with blood, looking positively wild.
Letty Hamilton asked her if she was all right, for meanness more than anything. Later Letty told us, “She looked right at me, with eyes just as dead as a corpse, and said, ‘Papa beat me. He’s mad I got a baby.’”
Not long after that, Simply stopped coming to church, and some months later we heard she’d been committed. Letty said her daddy had taken her baby and given it to the orphan asylum in Augusta and she’d gone plumb crazy and tried to kill herself. “Mad as a March hare,” Letty whispered to us. “Sheared her curls right off and tried to set herself ablaze with kerosene and matches! She’d a gone up like a firework if they hadn’t caught her!”
Letty was always telling someone else’s business, usually with a good deal of embellishment. I could just hear her with mine: “Landra Andrews went and got herself in a delicate condition by Henry Miller, and he jilted her for a rich girl over in Tallahassee! They say her daddy beat her black and blue and shipped her off to Montana!”
I was shaking my head at the very thought, and Ida called my name to get my attention. “Landra, stop that! You look like you’ve gone silly! Now listen, Tansy’ll take us, and everything will be—”
“Uh-uh!” Tansy shook her head vehemently. “Ya’ll two is gonna be the death a’me. If I tole you once, I tole you a hundred times to be careful, to watch out fo them menfolk, and here you wantin’ me to take you out to that woman fo help. I won’t do it!”
“I never! You are the most uppity—why it was you who first took me to see her!” cried Ida. Tansy gave one of her curls a sharp tug, and she cried out.
“I’m ashamed a ya’ll,” she repeated. “Just cuz I know where she is don’t mean I been in need of her.”
“Hush before I knock you into next week! You’re making Landra cry.”
Ida, when provoked, was full of her brother’s violent threats, but unlike Clyde, all of her threats were idle. I had never seen her lift a finger to harm Tansy or any other person she threatened. All the same, I was pricked by her heartlessness at such a moment. I wanted to remind her that Tansy was not, after all, a slave. She could leave at any moment if she put her mind to it, charged with being our companion or not.
“Shut up, Ida,” I said, lacking the patience for her temper. “She’s right. It’s my own fault. Mine and Henry’s.”
“Mens ain’t to be trusted,” said Tansy. “They jump on you like a rattlesnake on a rabbit.”
“What am I to do?” I asked her. She finished arranging Ida’s curls, securing them with an ivory comb, and placed the hot iron on a strip of flannel on the dressing table. Then she untied her apron and folded it.
“You two girls is gonna be the death of me,” she said again. “Come on, time’s a wastin.’”
The witch-woman was far less a witch than she was a midwife, with knowledge of herbal medicine and midwifery. She lived a few miles from any of the nearby homesteads, close to the river. The three of us rode crammed in Ida’s little open-trap carriage until the two-rutted lane turned into a footpath. Then we had to leave the carriage and go on foot through thick forest and underbrush. I saw more than one snake hanging from a tree branch as we walked, and animals scuttled away from us through the sharp Spanish bayonets.
The woman lived in a little hovel surrounded by elms and birches. There was a verdant herb and vegetable garden out front, chickens walking around freely—scratching and pecking for bugs in the tussocks of lemongrass—and a pen with goats in it. A girl not much younger than us was milking one of them. She was beautiful, her appearance an incongruous blend of features I had never encountered before: milky skin; a wide, flat nose; and coarse red hair
with stiff waves in it. She regarded us silently with small green eyes.
“That’s a quadroon,” Ida whispered to me.
I’d never heard the word, but it sounded cruel to me, impersonal, as one might describe a horse to be a quarter thoroughbred.
“Where your mistress be, girl?” asked Tansy, full of disdain. It was clear she felt her superiority as a lady’s maid in a great house over this girl living out by the river, apprentice to a midwife. The girl inclined her head toward the shack.
The woman who came out of the lean-to wasn’t the wizened crone I’d been imagining. She was tall and thin, with a curtain of rippling black hair that hung loose around her shoulders, and skin the color of strong tea.
“Lenore!”
I ran to her, throwing myself into her arms. She put me away from her so she could look at my face, placing a long-fingered hand to my cheek. “Well, haven’t you grown!” She pulled me into her arms again for a moment, and said, “Hello, Tansy,” speaking over my head to the girls behind me. “Trouble again, Ida?”
Lenore was Haitian, and her deep, accented voice poured out like golden honey, full and smooth. “Tell me it is not so?”
“No, not me. It’s-It’s Landra. You know her?”
She put me away from her once more and looked into my eyes. Her face had changed, stricken for a moment with shock, then a mask of indifference came over it. “What happen to you, girl?”