by L. S. Young
I hung my head and didn’t answer.
“Come inside.” She pointed at Ida. “You, wait with other chickens.”
Ida laughed.
There was purple coneflower planted beside the front stoop, and I sat in a rickety chair in a small kitchen as Lenore flitted around, crushing herbs with a mortar and pestle and peering into clay pots. There were herbs everywhere, some hanging to dry, others growing in pots or jars of water: calendula, chive, comfrey, lavender, tansy, tarragon, nettle, parsley, licorice, spearmint, black cohosh, and many more I did not recognize.
“What is your trouble?” she asked. She put her long arms up and swept her hair out of her face, weaving it into a single plait with rapid efficacy.
“I-I have an obstruction,” I replied. “I don’t feel well.”
“I see. Your courses have stopped?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
I said I couldn’t remember.
She hit her forehead, exasperated. “These young girls. I don’t remember. I don’t know! Don’t you know your own body?”
“Two months,” I lied. “Or three.” Perhaps it had been longer. The weeks since Henry and I parted were a blur. I had not known then, but I had suspected.
She grimaced. “So long. Remove your clothing and lie down.”
I took off my dress and lay down on the narrow cot beneath the window. The sheets on it were worn but clean. She examined me gently, inspecting my breasts, pressing on my belly, then prodding inside me. It hurt, and I moaned, turning my face away. At last she stood, wiping her hands on a cloth. I covered myself with the sheet.
“You are very far along. Too far for me to help you except for when your time comes. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
I kept my face to the wall, not answering.
“Who is he?”
I hesitated. “It was . . .” I pondered, considering a refusal to tell, but then I said, “My sweetheart. Henry, you remember him?”
“Eric’s friend?”
“He’s engaged to someone else!” At this revelation, I succumbed to my tears, rolling onto my side and weeping into my hands.
She sighed. “Your stepmother? She is kine?”
“I can’t tell Colleen,” I sobbed.
She helped me to sit up and handed me my frock. “You have felt it quickening?”
I shook my head.
“Tonight in bed, lie quietly and listen, here.” She touched my belly. “You may feel it. You are that far gone. Send for me when your time comes, and I will help you. I have never lost a healthy babe.”
I pulled my dress over my head tremulously. It was growing snug about the middle.
“Fine. Ida said there were other things I could do. Lye, perhaps.”
“No!” She gripped my shoulders firmly. “Listen, foolish girl! Do you want to die?”
I shook my head, my lip trembling.
“Then do not to listen to Ida.” She spoke my friend’s name with contempt.
I burst into tears. “But I can’t have it. Daddy will kill me!”
She turned me around roughly, buttoning up the back of my dress as I wept into my hands.
“You know how many girls come in here, say dat? Your stepmother, she is a good woman?”
“She fired you! But . . . she’s not unkind, always.”
“Go home to her,” she instructed briskly. “And send for me during your travail. It will be in September or October.”
That night I did as she had instructed. Once Lily and I had undressed for bed, I put out the light and lay on my back, for the first time allowing my hands to cradle the roundness of my small belly. Then I lay still, barely breathing, until I felt something like a flutter in the region behind my navel, and gasped.
“What’s the matter?” Lily whispered.
“N-nothing.” I lay there until I felt the bubbling movement again, delicate as butterfly wings, and then I wept, knowing I must tell Colleen.
How I ever broached such a subject with her is beyond my recall. I remember only that I told her, but refused to name the father. Although the obvious answer was Henry, she and Daddy feared it was any number of the men who visited the Monday household.
“I suppose this is what comes of sending you to live with a philanderer and a dope fiend,” she lamented. “All for the benefit of an education that shall henceforth be worthless. I’ve no one to blame but myself.”
I looked at her in surprise. It had never occurred to me that she knew what sort of people the Mondays truly were, in spite of their money, and that she had sent me to them nonetheless.
She and Daddy came to an agreement, without my consent, that I would return home and bear the child in secret and that it would be passed off as her own. She did not get up to town often enough for anyone to know different, she insisted. Daddy wanted to send me out West to his sister Sally and for the child to be given to an orphanage, much as I had feared, but Colleen insisted it would destroy me.
“Think of what happened to Simply Walker,” she whispered.
Poor Simply. It seemed her secret was known by everyone, and it was this which kept my stubbornness in check where my child was concerned. To be the talk of idle tongues for years on end, unable to hold my head up in town, was unbearable to me.
The memories of Ezra’s birth and the days surrounding it were ones I would soon have forgotten, but I could never extricate it from my mind. Unlike the events surrounding my mother’s death, it remained clear and vivid. I was only sixteen, and as soon as my labor began, I was terrified. I knew too well the tale of the doctor who had assisted my mother’s breech birth and killed her. The fear made the pain worse. It dragged on for hours as I writhed in bed, tears soaking my pillows. I held my belly and moaned, begging Colleen to send for Lenore. She did, finally, reluctantly. Colleen’s midwife was a stout Irishwoman, with big hands and ungentle ways. I was terrified of her, but Lenore had been kind to me.
She did not arrive for several hours. When she did, she came carrying a canvas bag and a birthing stool. With her was the young girl I had seen milking the goat the day I visited her home, her arms laden with bandages and sheets.
“I was helping a woman bear twins,” she explained. “This is my apprentice, Jill.”
My labor was long and hard, my delivery worse. There were no complications, but there was pain, and plenty of it. My fear made me tense, and the resolve not to scream lasted no longer than the twelfth hour and was forgotten forever by the end. In Ezra’s birth, I felt the loss of my innocence far more keenly than I had at his conception. His advent into the world was a violation of my will, a desecration of my body. I pleaded as I had heard Colleen plead so many times for the pain to stop.
When at last he came, my body was torn, and I was spent. Lenore placed him in my hands; I saw that he was male and his eyes were shut tight against the light, his small mouth open wide in his first cry. She told me I had done well. I felt myself initiated into that sacred rite which bound my mother to me even years after her death. Here was a helpless being that had given me pain beyond any I had ever desired, yet utterly dependent on me to survive. I did not feel love for him, it was too weak a word. My feelings were wild, primal, joyous, terrifying.
After the trials of birth ended, a warm haze descended, and I floated in it, suckling the babe I had labored for so long.
Colleen looked at him and was silent. She seemed sad. I could see the tracks of tears on her cheeks. Her sorrow appeared out of place near so much pain, wonder, and relief. I was angry with her for never partaking in my joys.
“What will you name him?” she asked at length.
“Ezra,” I told her, smiling. “I know how much you love E’s.”
It was not until a few hours later, when I woke, that I understood Colleen’s
sorrow. I had felt during my travail that I would never face anything so difficult again, but I had been wrong. The real trial was ahead, for Ezra was not beside me as he had been when I fell asleep. I pulled on my wrapper and stood on shaky legs. I found Colleen in her room. She was nursing him at the window.
“Give him to me,” I said.
“Landra, you know our agreement.”
I shook my head. “At least let me nurse him.” At the sound of my voice, he broke his latch on her nipple and gave a faint wail. “See? He needs my milk!”
She closed her eyes and murmured to herself, “How well did I know it would come to this?” then said to me, “Go back to bed. You labored for many hours, and you must rest.”
The room was swimming, and I obeyed, but not for long. The next days were pure agony. My milk came in with full force on the third day, and my swollen breasts ached, seeping each time I heard the baby cry. I lay in bed, hugging myself and weeping, refusing to eat the food Lily brought to me. Ezra also did not eat. Colleen did not have enough milk to nurse for more than a few minutes at a time, and when she ran out, Ezra set up a cry, loud at first, but weak and plaintive after he had gone some hours without enough sustenance. I drifted through the house like a wraith, thinking it would drive me mad. That evening, I burst into her room and tore him from her grasp.
She tried to reason with me, but I shrieked at her, “You’ll kill him! He needs me, let me nurse him!”
She was forced to relent. I crept into my bed and suckled him until he was replete then nestled him beside me and fell asleep. I woke twice more in the early hours, feeding him and resting. I did not think of happiness or of sorrow, only of his need, and my ability to fill it.
I was awakened the next morning when Daddy burst into the room with Colleen trailing after him.
“Get up!” he thundered. Ezra woke with a start and began to wail.
“You’ve woken my child!” I cried, curling round him protectively.
“Be silent and get up! Colleen, take the babe.”
“No!” I held him to my chest, but Daddy took him from me roughly and gave him to Colleen. I went wild then and slashed at his face with my nails, but he cowed me with a slap and pulled me out of bed by my hair.
“Solomon,” Colleen protested, her face stricken, “She’s only just . . .”
“Get dressed, Landra.” He pushed me toward the corner closet where we kept our frocks.
I obeyed him, pulling on my clothes and shoes with shaking fingers, frightened temporarily into obeisance.
“Put your coat on and go outside.”
“Solomon!” cried Colleen.
“Quiet! For once in my life, I won’t hear another argument from the women in this house! Get that crying child out of here!”
I found myself being pushed down the breezeway and out the back door as Colleen hurried away. Daddy prodded me all the way up the hill, across the field, toward the pinewoods. We walked the trail past Granny’s cabin, into the deeper woods where the secluded family plot lay, and stopped. Next to the row with Mama’s tombstone and the bare crosses of my dead stepsiblings, a fresh grave had been dug. I stared at it, uncomprehending.
“I dug that grave while you were up there in the house, moaning and screaming to bring forth that bastard child,” Daddy said, “in case it died, or you did. Yet, Providence saw fit to let it live, and you too. So I did not stay the hand of Providence.”
I began to breathe in short, quick breaths, my chest tightening. I felt warm, fresh blood trickling down my inner thighs and soaking my undergarments, brought on by the exertion of the long walk. “Please, Daddy,” I breathed. “How can you be so cruel?”
“Have I not shown you mercy? I could just as easily have taken that brat from you the second it came into this world.”
I gave a shriek, my fear edging me toward hysteria.
Daddy pointed his finger in my face.
“You do as your stepmother tells you, do you hear? She’s to nurse that child, whether it lives or dies. That’s her child. That child is no more yours than it is Lily’s or Edith’s.”
I shook my head. “No, no, no! He’s mine, and I shall have the raising of him. If you come near him, I’ll murder you! I don’t care if I go to prison for a hundred years!”
Even at the worst of times, my will was a match for his. He took me by the arm and swept a foot under my legs. Before I knew it, I was belly down in the fresh dirt, staring into the abyss of the open grave. His voice was at my ear, and for the first time I smelled that he had been drinking.
“Do not threaten me,” he whispered. “You’ll do as you’re told or be sent away to your aunt and never see the child again.”
He left me then. I lay shivering in the dirt next to the open grave, and wished, not for the last time, that I were in it.
In the end, it was pure chance that saved Ezra. Colleen began him on a supplement of goat’s milk just a few days after he was born, but by then, he had lost weight, and I feared for his survival. I wept morning and night, hovering over his cradle, eating and drinking very little. My milk began to dry up. That grieved me as much as my inability to care for him, so I forced myself to eat again and at night massaged my sore breasts, expelling the excess milk into a basin. When Colleen was resting or doing chores, I snuck into her room to feed him. It hurt so that tears sprung to my eyes, but I bit my lip and kept quiet.
Not a week after Ezra was born, Colleen came down with the grippe, or what they call now the influenza. It was the time of year for it. When the doctor visited, he said the baby and the smaller children should be kept away lest they catch it and die. Ezra could be fed on goat’s milk until Colleen was well. He did not know the baby was mine and that I could care for him perfectly well myself. I’ll never forget the moment Lily carried him from Colleen’s room and placed him in my arms. I unbuttoned my dress and put him to my nipple, and he latched on, sucking hungrily. I caught my breath at the pain of it and sobbed with relief as my milk came down, so plentiful that it soaked my bodice and the blanket he was wrapped in.
Colleen was ill for a fortnight, and by the end of that time, the twins were thoroughly weaned and Ezra was mine. He slept in a cradle at the foot of my bed, and I woke in the night to nurse him. He stayed in a basket at my feet as I did dishes, mending, and needlework. I did not go back to live with Ida. The days when I had dreamed of traveling and attending school were gone. My thoughts were of Ezra. When we had company or went to church, he was Colleen’s child. He sat in her lap and reached his chubby hands out to me, and she made jokes about how he was my pet, the most attached to me of all her children, as she had been ill so long after his birth.
When he was twelve months old, I weaned him, and then he sat in a chair at the table as I fed him mashed peas, sweet potato, and grits and taught him to drink milk from a tin cup. Daddy resented his presence in all things and at all times, but I was fierce as a mother hen in my defense of him, so he was mostly ignored. When he was two, I made him learn to sleep on a cot in the room with Eric and Ephraim, but there were nights when he crept on stockinged feet to climb into my bed, whispering my name.
Chapter 13
Monticello
Colleen returned home from visiting her sister in Massachusetts in January of 1891. I made certain I was the one to meet her at the depot so I could tell her the news of my engagement. She stepped off the train looking healthier than I had seen her in years. The climate in her home state had agreed with her, and she had filled out a bit and lost some of her gauntness, although her face still held the unnatural flush that came with her coughing fits. I kissed her and the baby, and when we had fetched her trunk and were all settled in the buggy, I showed her my ring.
“Will has asked me to marry him,” I told her.
She gave a genuine cry of delight and embraced me, crushing Effie between us unt
il she squealed in protest. When she pulled away, her eyes were brimming with tears.
“You have all of my best wishes,” she breathed. “Didn’t I tell you once that I’d catch you a good husband with your bit of beauty and fine voice?”
“Indeed,” I said dryly, my happiness at her response quelling. Any mention of my bit of beauty only served to make me think of Lily and her trim figure, large green eyes, and raven hair. “Yet he is not a businessman, as you so often admonished me to find.”
“No. But he is a good man.”
“I think he truly loves me,” I added, “and not only for my feminine wiles.”
“Why, of course he does. But dearest, the wiles didn’t do any harm, did they?”
My dearest niece,
I was overjoyed to hear of your engagement. I wish you every happiness in your upcoming marriage.
As I have no children of my own and you are the eldest daughter of my beloved sister, I feel it my duty to extend generosity upon the event of your wedding. Please allow your uncle and myself to provide refreshments, a gown, and any other items, whether finery or necessities, that might be lacking.
As greatly as I admire your modesty in proposing a parlor wedding and your frugal plan to wear my mother’s gown, I must insist that you have a gown of the latest fashion and finest fabrics. You will find enclosed a train ticket to determine the details of your upcoming nuptials.
With greatest affection,
Your doting aunt,
Maude
I both smiled and shook my head at this flowery missive. I had known Aunt Maude would be chomping at the bit to get her hands on my wedding. Much as I appreciated the generosity she had shown to Eric, Lily, and myself as the orphans of her dead sister, I had no desire for the sumptuous church wedding I was certain she envisioned for me. That sort of thing was for Ida. I had to visit, if only to convince her that a parlor wedding would do just as well, and cost far less. I only wished she had enclosed a ticket for Lily as well. The hustle and bustle of that little town, with luxuries like the opera house and the milliners, would mean far more to her at sixteen than they would to me at twenty, about to be married.