The Whip

by Kondazian, Karen

  “No, no,” he muttered. “You’re not a girl.” Then he brought his mouth to her nipples, sucking so hard it hurt her.

  She could feel his rough lips moving across her skin. She felt her breath, her body, her will, snap into a paralyzed stillness. She felt herself watching it all from far away.

  He lifted his head and met her eyes. “Oh, you’re gonna get it now.”

  Holding her eyes he dropped his hands to his belt and began to undo the buckle and the buttons on his pants. “Gotta do it Char—gonna break your cherry.”

  He pushed himself between Charlotte’s legs, slamming her against the stall door. She could feel the hardness of him pushing inside her. It was starting to hurt. But she didn’t resist.

  At that moment Beelzebub began to squeal and scream, trumpeting biblically on his hind legs. Then the whole stable was in an uproar—horses whinnying, neighing, thrashing. Beelzebub, king of them all, continued to rear and pound his feet on the ground. He lunged at the stall door with pinned ears, mouth open, head shaking and teeth glistening.

  The sound was tremendous; the whole stable reverberated with it. Lee lost his grip and Charlotte fell to the ground. He scuttled backwards.

  Pushing open the stable door in alarm, Jonas was shouting, “Charlotte…what the hell is going on?”

  He covered the distance to her in a moment. She was pulling herself up from the hay-strewn floor. She pulled her torn nightshirt together as she stood up…breathing hard, her body, her breath, her will, crashing back into her. Lee had vanished.

  “Are you alright Charlotte? What happened?”

  But it had all been such a blur; Charlotte, not certain herself, could not say.

  Twenty

  Charlotte sat next to Jonas on the wagon as they rode into town the following morning. He seemed distracted, lost in his own thoughts with a rare angry expression on his face. What was it he was feeling? She could not make it out. Something she had not felt from him before. His face was closed and his manner was stern. She wished he would talk to her now about the horses, the weather, or her chores. She wished he would scold her, though he seldom did that. She wished he would hum a little song to the horses or sing to her, like he always did. Anything. Anything to keep her mind off the events of last night.

  Last night…she hadn’t known what to say to Jonas. Thank God he hadn’t pushed the matter. He had just made her some tea while she cleaned herself up. But this morning she felt embarrassed, sitting there next to him, still not knowing what to say.

  Jonas flicked his wrist and the whip unfurled over the heads of the horses with a reverberating snap. As they approached a crossroad, he stopped the wagon. He turned his head toward Charlotte. In the sunlight, it somehow looked to her as though there had been tears in his eyes. She felt her heart make a jump in her chest that pained her. He must have seen this because he smiled at her, a spark of familiar mischief lighting up his face. She sighed with relief. She must have been mistaken; it was going to be alright—he was going to be playful.

  They entered the crossroads and with little effort, Jonas played the four reins, guiding the team of horses into a perfect ninety degree left turn.

  “Now how did I do that?”

  “You didn’t do anything,” she teased. “The horses know the road, is all.”

  “That so?” He laughed.

  He turned the team around in the middle of the road, then handed her the reins. “You do it, then.”

  “Sure.” She gave a confident sidelong look at Jonas. This was not the first time he had asked her to do something new and when she did it well—and if it had to do with horses she just about always did it well—he would shake his head in mock amazement. “You beats all, missy,” he’d say.

  She took the four reins in her left hand, cracked Jonas’ whip with her right and yelled out at the team just as he had. She gave the reins a confident shake. They were off. The team started to move back toward the crossroad. She glanced over at him. He sat there staring straight ahead, his face a mask. This she expected—it was part of the game—and she smiled to herself at the anticipation of his rueful praise: “Dang it Charlotte, can’t nobody beat you as far as horses is concerned. What a girl.”

  She shuddered with a sudden recollection: Lee last night saying to her, “you’re not a girl.” Why would he say that then? She didn’t understand him anymore. When they were younger, they knew each other always with a look, a smile, a whistle, without words. It was like they were the same person somehow. Now he was a stranger. Like he was… .

  She needed to focus. Which rein had Jonas used to turn the team around? They were tangled in her hand. The lead horses had already passed the midpoint, and she hadn’t started the turn yet. Impulsively, she yanked on one of the reins hard and the left lead horse turned, crashing into its team mate. The right wheel horse, confused and frightened, began snorting, neighing and kicking at the lead horse in front of him. For one of the few times with the horses, she didn’t know what to do. She yanked hard on the reins.

  Jonas started to turn his head, about to say something to her, but the little wagon at that instant hit a jagged rut in the road. It lurched and teetered and, with a great gasp of wood, tipped over onto its side. Charlotte cried out. The horses came to an abrupt, confused halt. Charlotte and Jonas were dumped into the dust.

  “You alright? You hurt yourself?” Jonas asked as he picked himself up.

  Charlotte was already getting up on her feet. She was alright. The horses were all right. The wagon seemed alright too, even if out of commission—it’s wooden wheels spinning in the air.

  “Why didn’t you help me?” she shouted. “You let it happen.” Tears were coming to her eyes.

  “Now you know this was your doing, Charlotte. I don’t have to tell you that. You know you weren’t concentrating. You weren’t studying how I drove, like you usually do. Your mind was other places. When you’re working with horses, you got to be thinking only of them. You got to be here with them, breathing with them…and tears is not going to help set this wagon straight.”

  Charlotte rubbed the tears hard from her face with her fist. He was right. She had let herself be distracted. She would never let that happen again.

  Jonas walked over to the horses to check on them. He stopped and looked back at her.

  “Life’s going to do that to you missy. Gonna upset your wagon, not just once but many times. And you got to choose who’s sitting next to you. Someone you can trust…or not.”

  Someone you can trust or not? He was talking about Lee, she thought with amazement. He knew her so well. He seemed to always know what she was thinking. Her eyes lighting with love and trust, she went to him. Together they moved among the horses, calming them. Then together they righted the little wagon.

  When that night Lee came to her again, she would not let him touch her.

  Twenty-One

  When people tell time by the sun and the seasons, time becomes irrelevant, foreign to one’s everyday thoughts. If you have children and watch them grow, then you know time…every day you see it moving, right there in front of you. But if you are alone, then time moves in other people’s world, not yours. And all you know or care about time is that your body awakens at the same instant, the hunger in your belly arises at the same moment, and the seasons and life move along, day in and day out, day in and day out, no different from any other. Then it happens one day that you look into the face of an acquaintance, or maybe into the face of a long lost friend, and you see something alarming, shocking, unacceptable. Time has left its decaying fingerprints on that face you used to know. And then you realize that it must be the same for you.

  Providence, Rhode Island

  1847

  Charlotte’s face was now tanned, her arms and shoulders muscular. There was no visible softness about her. Gone was the golden prettiness the other girls had envied, a lifetime a
go in the orphanage. Not educated enough to be a teacher, not willing nor winsome enough to be a wife or a saloon girl, she’d scrabbled together over the many years a small independent livelihood. She’d cared for several elderly women and done heavy work in an institution.

  Now she was working in the kitchen at Mrs. Bidwell’s Boarding House for Women. It was work. It was a place to live. It was a kind of life. But it was empty. And she was disappearing.

  On this dreary fall day, she was just another plainly-dressed, uncomfortable passenger in a rattling stagecoach on her way to Boston…a small valise in her lap, her hands twisting a handkerchief. What was it Jonas used to say? “This one mysterious life you got, what you gonna do with it?” Well, she had survived somehow. And she had turned thirty-five. That’s what she did with it. Got old. That’s what she had done with it.

  As she sat watching the clouds change shape through the coach window, the wheezing, chattering man next to her continued talking. His mouth had been wheezing and chattering the whole trip. She hadn’t paid attention to a word he had said, but now he was asking her a question…something about a state law that had been passed in South Carolina. Misinterpreting her blank look for interest, he continued on, “…you know that law that forbids Negroes and white cotton mill workers from looking out the same window.”

  Charlotte blanched.

  “Are you okay?” he boomed out. “Okay… it’s a new word, don’t you know? Very in vogue. No one knows where it came from, maybe from the Indians. And no one knows what it stands for but anyone who is anyone is using it now.”

  Charlotte was about to beg the driver of the coach to stop and let her off as she would rather walk, when the Boston Society for Destitute Children came into view, looking the same as ever—on the verge of decrepitude and in dire need of a coat of paint. The fields surrounding the weathered building were brown and desolate.

  And as always whenever she returned, her dark thoughts rose up. The most anguishing of all…the day Beelzebub had died. She’d cried and cried on Jonas’ shoulder, and then, soon after, she packed up her few belongings.

  “What will you do out there?” Jonas had said to her. “You’re a woman. You can’t tend horses. They won’t let you. Here you got a job doin’ what you love and what you’re good at.”

  “I’ve been at this place since I was a baby Jonas. Don’t know anything else. I don’t want to work here the rest of my life and then die here too. You know how you always say you’ve got to put your arms around life? That’s what I want to do. See what’s out there. I’m scared… but I’ll find a job somehow. I’m so sorry Jonas; I wish you could come with me. I’m going to miss you. But I need to do this. I’ll visit you often. I promise.”

  The coach stopped, and Charlotte hopped down, hurrying toward the stables.

  Miss Haden looked out her office window with her familiar disapproval. That woman. Here again. To visit Jonas.

  A little while later, Charlotte loomed, unannounced, in her office doorway.

  “It’s too damn cold out there for a man of his age,” Charlotte said. “He’s shaking. And no one’s been taking care of him. He’s very sick. He’s dying. Why the hell hasn’t a doctor seen him?”

  She advanced further into the room and leaned onto the desk, disturbing Miss Haden’s neat piles of paper. It was the same bloody desk, the same bloody office—down to the leather strap hanging from the hook on the wall. Well over fifteen years had passed and how was it possible that nothing had changed except for the gray hair that now threaded through Miss Haden’s head and her wire rimmed spectacles she was now wearing.

  Miss Haden stood up in one quick movement. “Remove your hands from my desk. Sit down.”

  “I will not sit down until you explain to me why you’ve left an old man out in the stable to die. He has been nothing but faithful to you. You take better care of your livestock. You would call a doctor to attend to a sick horse. Why not Jonas?”

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing a doctor can do for him now,” she said.”I need to get back to work.” She looked back down at her account book.

  But Charlotte didn’t budge. “How can you know that? How can you be so certain?”

  “He’s very old.” Miss Haden looked up again from her book, her pale pink-rimmed eyes peering over her spectacle rims.

  “Do you know how old he is?” said Charlotte. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “Of course I do. I hired him. He’s old. He’s a darky. A man of low ambition. Do you understand? I’m running the orphanage now. Mr. Meade is no longer here. And I’m busy. You need to leave.”

  For a moment Charlotte stared at Miss Haden’s pink rabbit eyes.

  “You are a whore bitch. You always were. How could you treat another human being with such disregard? With such disdain. With no respect. Like a piece of garbage. You’ve damaged everyone who has ever been under your care. Me, Lee, and now Jonas. And all the children. Fuck you. Fuck you forever.”

  Charlotte turned and walked out the door, leaving Miss Haden standing there frozen over her desk, speechless, the pulsing blue vein in her neck the only sign of life in her body.

  In Jonas’ shack behind the stable, he lay resting on his cot. Charlotte sat down on a little box beside him and gently stroked his face.

  How can it be that you could love somebody so much and still know so little about them? Jonas knew everything about her. He always seemed to understand things about her before she even knew them herself. But he never spoke of himself or of his feelings. He never spoke of the past. She had once asked him about his mama and papa and if he had ever been married and if he had any children. It was the first time she saw pain in his eyes; just a flash of it, then back to that mysterious little smile he always wore. “Past is past, missy. All that matters is this.” And he took a deep breath. “Remember that Charlotte.”

  She held his frail body in her arms and spooned water over his cracked, dry lips. “Try to swallow this. I’m here. I’ll be here. I’m so sorry I left you.”

  Jonas’ hand grasped her wrist. She saw in his face that unexpected last strength she had seen before in the eyes of Beelzebub on the night he died as he lay panting his last breath.

  Charlotte leaned down and kissed Jonas’ forehead. She heard him whisper, “I seen you grow scared of life.”

  He was right. It was true. She knew it was true. She sat there holding him in her arms. She watched him struggle for breath. There was nothing she could do but hold him…help him through this. There was a long moment of silence. And then she felt the spirit leave Jonas with a small rattling sigh. The light in his once twinkling eyes fading away. It was over so fast.

  Alone behind the stable, Charlotte dug the grave, venting her anger, her regrets, into the shovel; biting its metal edge into the fall earth. It was almost twilight when she tamped down a simple cross of wood she’d hand carved. Jonas Parkhurst. Friend. Father. 1847.

  On her knees, exhausted, past pain and anger…she rested her chin for a moment on her hand atop the grave marker. She closed her eyes, and from the velvety darkness of her own inner spaces, felt a warm comforting hand on her shoulder pressing down. Startled, she looked up. No, no one was there.

  She entered the stable one last time. It was eerie without the living presence of Jonas. His old whip hung on the hooks on the wall where he had always kept it. Charlotte reached up, took it down and placed her hand into the worn grooves of the handle. She raised it high above her head and then snapped it once. The sound reverberated in the silence.

  In another moment she was ready. She scanned the stable and walked out, the whip under her arm. She would never return.

  Twenty-Two

  At the Bidwell Boardinghouse, breakfast was in progress. A half dozen or so women, ranging in age from their thirties to their fifties, surrounded a long table in the fussily-decorated dining room—a room swaged and bedecked with ta
tting and lace. Lined up against the wall were legions of diminutive overstuffed chairs, fetchingly bowlegged, useless. At the head of the table sat the owner of the boarding house, Mrs. Alice E. Bidwell, poured to capacity into a lace-trimmed dress.

  The women gossiped with each other and pecked at their little plates of food.

  “Girls,” squealed a woman, entering the room with bits of paper waving in her hand.

  She was coiffed and dressed in a ghastly fashion, a frock the color of dried blood, breast-plated with elaborate bugle-beads and braiding. The woman sat down on the edge of one of the little chairs and fanned herself for a moment with the papers, overcome it would seem, with the news. She regained her composure.

  “Girls, I have clippings. From Godey’s Lady’s Book,” she announced, “and The Libertine.”

  An expectant silence descended as the woman started to read:

  FAST WOMEN

  One of our most promising lady writers, Mrs. R. B. Hicks, editress of the Kaleidoscope, thus deftly describes this new variety of womankind:

  “This fast age, with its fast horses and faster men, has brought about that rather fashionable monstrosity, the fast woman. They are a want of the age, these fast women, or the age would never have developed them. Fast young men wanted something to keep up with them, and, presto! We have the fast young woman.

  Accordingly we see them with dresses décolleté and bare arms, with loud-ringing laugh and questionable wit, with polka and redowa, and a thousand other accomplishments peculiar to themselves, attracting the blasé foplings, whose attention the true woman would instinctively shun. But, though they are so attended, and so applauded, and so exhilarated, there is no young fopling in their train who has not at least brains enough to sneer at them behind their backs. And thus it happens that these fast young women do not marry quite as fast as they dance. In the hymeneal race, we find them lagging behind; and, as their speed is all gotten up expressly for the hymeneal race, it must be exceedingly mortifying to them to find themselves beaten by dozens of quiet, genteel girls who never danced a polka in their lives. It is the old fable of the hare and the tortoise. We would advise them not to be quite so fast.”