I found Lucinda downstairs at the fire, poring over a book. All of the books in the household had been her mother’s. Their pages stuck together and, when gently coaxed apart, revealed troves of accounts by Plato, and musings on Greek gods and goddesses, and numerology. Ten, one book said, was the number of completion. Lucinda had loved the roundness of the statement. In the winter before, when we weren’t so somber and we still laughed at the fire, she had admired the ten, tracing her fingers over its shape.
—That’s fair, she said. At ten years old I think I felt most whole.
—Surely you’ll feel it again at one hundred, Joanna said. A tenfold completion.
—No one should suffer to live to one hundred, Lucinda said. Imagine the jowls.
I had stared at their plain faces, nearly beautiful in the firelight, and wondered how I had been fortunate enough to live with these intelligent cousins.
But on this night we did not discuss numerology, though that was the book in her hands. Instead I coaxed her back to bed. At her door, I asked her, once more, to visit her father.
—Oh, go boil your shirt, she said.
I retired to my room with vexation.
• • •
In the morning I found Uncle stiff in his bed. When I went to close his eyelids they skidded over the dry of his eyes and stayed open. That’s what I remember. The dry, open eyes.
I went for Joanna’s room.
—He’s gone, I said.
She sat up in bed like a thing bitten.
—Our lady above, she said.
We stared at each other.
—Did you tell her yet?
—I didn’t. I can’t.
She looked at her hands.
When we told Lucinda she leaped out of bed and pushed open the door to her father’s room for the first time in weeks and stared at him from the threshold. He was a deflated thing sunk into the mattress. I regretted that Joanna and I hadn’t been able to fully move him to resettle the tick in the final days. The sun was shining and we could see the dust motes stirring in the air. Not one of us breathed. She closed the door and we tailed her downstairs and waited for her to cry, but she never did. All morning, she sat at the table and drank the blackberry brandy until she fell asleep in her chair and Joanna and I carried her back up to her room.
So one of us was dead and another one was drunk and Joanna and I sat on the steps outside and wept for our sweet uncle, who was, Joanna speculated, in Olympus, since Heaven had likely crashed during the war. Now that he was gone my purpose was rootless. I thought of Nash’s druthers and had a few of my own.
—I might have joined the Christian Commission, I said. They needed ladies in—
—You were needed here, Joanna said.
—Perhaps it would have been easier for us if I had—
—You mean you, she said. Perhaps it would have been easier for you.
She faced me.
—Selfishness is unbecoming on you, she said.
It seemed unfair for her to call me selfish when she snatched the ends of sentences from other people on all occasions.
But it could not be said.
That night we took Lucinda’s ash on her behalf. We slept by the hearth. When I awoke I found Joanna with fingers threaded around the statue, her mouth drawn even in sleep, and I remembered how, years before, she had only shown displeasure when her father came to visit and he requested privacy for them in the sitting room.
• • •
Sun set and rose and we sat in Uncle’s room, whispering.
—We cannot allow him to lie there, I said. It’s indecent. We have to do it today.
I worried about the odor. It could come on quickly. I’d read about the smell of the dead in the hot India sun after the Sepoy rebellion. But we weren’t savages in our country, even during a war.
The gnats were gathering.
—It’ll take a day’s work, Joanna began, but if we—
—Don’t touch him, Lucinda said.
She stood behind us in her stained chemise.
—Lucinda, I said gently, it’s time for us—
She stumbled forward, as if still drunk and held my face in her trembling hands.
—Don’t touch him, she said again.
Her teeth and lips were stained purple, and when she spoke I saw the flick of a black tongue. Her wide, sallow face was otherworldly, so unlike the woman in plum who left for the market just days before, trussed up and flouncing.
—No one will touch him without your consent, Joanna said.
—I don’t believe you, Lucinda said. Her voice was deeper, as if she were speaking from a cellar.
—You are his closest kin, Joanna said. He is not ours to move if you do not feel it is time yet.
Lucinda went downstairs in her chemise and pulled one of her mother’s books from the shelf. She wandered outside and gaped at the yard. The grass was scorched and we had not seen anyone pass by the road in a full season. She sat with her back to the house. Inside, Joanna kept a vigil with Uncle May and shooed the gnats. The horseflies were coming. We shut the windows.
—What can I do? I asked her.
I had expected her to tell me to start digging, to get Lucinda drunk, perhaps send for someone in town. Even a gimp-man would suffice in this circumstance.
—Pray, she told me.
Forgive me, my cousins long gone: I failed you. I did not believe in our goddess. Instead I prayed to our old one, the god of my parents, who could flood our earth wholly and collapse towers with a sound. I did not swallow ash if the others were not there. I did not believe in the sacredness of numbers. I did not write poems. I did not believe in coals. I did not appreciate, as I do now, the value of a hearth.
At dusk I brought a lantern to Joanna and the body.
—Perhaps we should inform Mr. Morrow, I said. And the Wilsons should know, too. We can go to town and—
—No one will protect us, Joanna said. You know what happens to young women in a war.
We’d all read about the women down south, and the rebels, and the public women that followed the camps. We knew what men would do.
I remembered the letter we’d received from Nash in the first year, and how he’d talked of the men in his battalion who had done horrible things to the enemy’s women, how, when the captain found out, the men had been sentenced to be hung dead by the neck. And the last good man, now dead in our home while Lucinda sat outside in the scorched grass, staring at the moon, her body a wisp of white in the dark yard.
What were my options then? It was too late for the Christian Commission. All of the men were crippled or old or dangerous and nearly always married. Of course, I fail to elucidate the final reality: I was afraid of leaving, and what came on was so gradual that there were only moments where I felt alarm.
• • •
In the coming days we stopped wearing day dresses unless one of us had to go into town for salted pork or sausage. We kept strange hours. One of us always sat with the body. The belly began to bloat. We ate ashes and read poetry. We drank brandy and kissed the porcelain head and feet. At night, Joanna and Lucinda pontificated at the hearth and I listened.
—Cronus devoured Hestia first, Joanna sermonized. She was born and swallowed by him within moments. Imagine the shock, the heartbreak of her mother, Rhea. The female is the cultivator, the man the destroyer. It is a truth that is perceptible, thousands of years ago and today, on our own hillsides.
Lucinda sat at the floor with her fingers laced around her knees and said nothing. She had not slept.
—For eons, Hestia was caught in the acid of her father’s belly. And do you know what she did during that time?
We knew but did not speak.
• • •
In the morning, I came down and found the number ten written in ash all over the walls. Lucinda sat at her spot at the table with unwashed hands. I went up to Joanna’s room.
—This cannot wait anymore, I said. Not one more day. He must be interred.
—It is time, I said, and for once Joanna did not cut off my sentence.
She rose with purpose and I followed her downstairs, but all she did was pour some tea and chew on a soda biscuit. I felt myself unraveling. The house was too quiet.
Lucinda dropped her chin to her chest. Joanna traced the pattern on her teacup with a fingernail.
—Joanna, I said. This cannot continue. This sort of life cannot sustain us for another minute.
She took my hands in hers. Fatigue nearly made her beautiful.
—Let go of Nash, she said. Let go of the whole lot. Give yourself the peace you deserve. We can—
—No, I said.
She dropped my hands.
—No?
—It cannot sustain, I repeated. You’re living in a shared madness. You cannot hate every man and call it Truth.
—And you cannot pine for one man and believe in the delusion that he will save you.
—Even if he doesn’t save me, another will come, I said. I am not plain.
She recoiled.
—I can take care of you both, I said. I can find a husband, and you can come with us. Both of you can come with us. It will not be such a terrible challenge.
I thought, at the time, that they had chosen to build this new sisterhood to get away from men, and perhaps they had chosen to get away from men because no men wanted them. I understand now that in Joanna’s case that wasn’t quite true. The wrong man wanted her. Yet even in a war, or if the war ended, I knew that I could find a man. Beauty provided unfair opportunities then as it does now.
Lucinda lurched from the table in her sooty chemise. From the window, I saw her swagger out to the back and begin uprooting grass near the hemlock tree. We had only one shovel. I found a spade and joined her. Soon I noticed that Lucinda wasn’t digging deep, but wide and shallow, too wide, and while I kept scratching at the earth, pulling up clods of roots and stones, she was taking the stones and piling them, building a border, and then she started tugging at the grass around the bed, plucking it clean. The sun was high overhead now. If not for the hemlock we would have browned.
At dusk we wrapped him in three bedsheets to keep him whole and carried him downstairs. Maggots had come. We had been so careful and yet they had appeared all the same. I held his blackened feet and swallowed back bile. We lay him in the hole, blanketed by twigs and leaves that Lucinda had gathered.
—It’s too shallow, Joanna said.
Lucinda went to the woodpile.
She lay logs over her father.
—Lucinda, I began.
—Do not speak, she said.
Her voice had taken on a hypnotic resonance that couldn’t be argued with.
She went back into the house and returned with a taper. We stood over Uncle May and waited. His eyes were sunken now, his head tilted away from us.
—May the fire ever nourish his soul, Lucinda said. She touched the taper to the brush and we stood and watched the flame sprout in the tinder. I circled the fire and saw the silhouette of his good face in the embers, his jaw agape, looking at me as if I were the only thing of substance.
All night, they carried wood and stoked the bones until all that remained was a black gouge in our earth. They came in at dawn and slept in front of the hearth. Lucinda woke before Joanna, in the late afternoon. I could hardly recognize her. Her face was whorled with ash. I stared at her, waiting for her to speak, but she turned away and pressed her forehead to the stones.
• • •
If memory serves, the days had shortened and the leaves were browning when we saw Bridget Scriven coming up the road. We scrambled for our day dresses and aprons. I found the chenille net on the sitting room table among piles of papers and dirty cutlery and wound my hair inside. By the time she came up the walk we were breathless and presentable. She had come to tell us that her son was dead, and she was considering a move, she said, to her sister’s in Harrisburg. With news like that it was impossible to turn her away from tea. She did not own a black dress or dye. She apologized for wearing deep blue.
—It’s understandable, in these circumstances, Joanna said.
Bridget had a severe, wide part that ran down the center of her head, and threads of gray had begun to snake their way through the black. She was not yet forty. I stared. Joanna could not look at our guest at all. But Lucinda had reignited.
—Harrisburg! she said. Don’t despair. It’s a new life in a handsome town. I think you’ll find comfort there.
—I expect so, Bridget said evenly. Is your father well?
She was staring at the ashed numbers on our walls.
—No, Lucinda said.
—Ah.
She saw the spoons glinting at the hearth now. My fingers curled themselves into my palms. A flush began to crawl up Joanna’s neckline and spread into her cheeks. I’d forgotten how terrified she was of strangers in our old life.
—You had a decent boy, I said.
—He was too good to live through it, she agreed.
She was staring at the statue. Hestia was looking worn in the daylight, almost haggard. Her porcelain face had a wan, weathered quality to it.
Lucinda’s broad features were working themselves into an accommodating smile.
—I’m sure we look in terrible disarray, she said.
—Not at all, Bridget said. She straightened in her chair.
—This is all the aftermath of a silly game, Lucinda said smoothly. It soothes us.
—What sort of game?
I don’t recall the exact of what was said after. But I know we began with Hestia’s story, and the value of the hearth, and later, once Joanna began speaking, we illustrated for her a gleaming paradise of sisterly love. And, weeks after, when Bridget was visiting regularly and had not moved to Harrisburg, we shared the ashes. And, a year after, Nash found me down at the springhouse, preparing for our Hestia meeting that evening, looking untouched by the war as if bewitched, laughing and gallant and every inch the brave soldier with his whiskers and his scuffed boots. He kissed me behind the springhouse and that is my last true memory of that time: the smell of him, the creases in his coat, the way Joanna looked at us and let her mouth cinch into noiseless wrath. But it did not matter, because Nash had his eyes on me like I was his patron saint, his goddess of the hearth and home.
Now I am old and my own mouth puckers and no man has looked on me in that way in many years. I had been in possession of an enchantment, at the time unwanted, now missed. I had spent the war in a corner of a fantasy of someone else’s making, swallowing ash and praying to a resurrected goddess, the goddess of plainness, who, at the time, I had not personally met. But even in these days when I am faced with a challenge, I take a spoonful from the hearth and swallow before the force of my lungs can recognize the noxiousness of what I have consumed.
11
The Ferrywoman
-KYRA-
December 2007
The cute orderly, the one I’ve seen before with a broken nose and sandy hair, he was the one skulking around the lobby of my grandmother’s nursing home. When I last visited he had been in the same corner then, too, reading. I like a guy with a routine.
I can’t help it. When I see a guy like him, I feel my hips pivot smoother in their sockets, my torso stretches, and there I am, angling all over him like a tulip stretching in a glass of water.
—I’m looking for Mona Clark’s new room, I said.
—Your grandma? She’s in one nineteen now, he said.
—Thanks, I said. And then I leaned his way and said, How’s my makeup? My grandma hates when it looks too obvious.
I licked my lips, first the top, then the bottom.
—Looks fine, he said. Looks just fine.
It wasn’t until I was swiveling my body down the hall that I remembered and pushed a hand into my stomach, hard.
• • •
I love the word zygote. When it happened it should have rung through my b
ody, as clean as an unmarred gong.
• • •
She was drinking a bootleg glass of wine when she answered the door. Her hair was piled into a perfect swirl of white on her head, like vanilla soft-serve. The weight of her mink coat dragged her down, her gnarled feet were sheathed in beaded slippers, and when she hugged me she reeked of old newspaper and Merlot. I felt nausea ripple in my throat until I gulped it down.
—Your mother didn’t tell me you were in town, she said.
—Winter break just started. Is this a bad time? I thought you’d like the surprise.
—Come in, she said. But you’re lucky that I do not have a prior engagement.
I had missed her careful diction, the loftiness with which her syllables drifted out of her mouth.
She settled into the deep groove of her armchair, leaving me to close the door.
This new room was bigger than her last, with better lighting and a window seat by the bed. Weeks ago, someone had given her flowers and now they shriveled in stagnant water. I ached to read the card looped around the neck of the vase, to see if it was from my father.
—Nice digs, I told her.
—Nice what?
—Nice place. Nice new room.
—I should hope so. I had to wait for two people to pass on before my name came up on the list.
Sorority Page 12