There stood Cora Jenkins, her pale face mottled with heat. She had swept the hair away from her ears halfheartedly, although she usually combed and plaited it with such care. Her eyelids were puffed, as if some strange infection had bloated her taut young skin.
“Cora, dear, are you quite well? Come in and sit down.”
Cora came in but said nothing. Evie brought her into the sitting room and excused herself to put on the tea.
“You look very nice, today, Mrs. Dawson,” Cora told her when she came back.
They sat and listened to the water beginning its low hiss in the other room. Evie did not look nice in her old housedress and apron and dark-ringed eyes, but then Cora didn’t seem fully aware of having spoken. Evie thanked her anyway.
There was a short silence between them, and they could hear the imprisoned water in the kettle growing angrier.
“Would you like a cookie? I left them in the kitchen.”
“No, I . . . My stomach hasn’t been well lately. I can’t keep things down.”
Evie tsked her tongue. “Not that nasty flu again? You should be resting at home.” When Cora didn’t answer, Evie prodded her. “It’s not that I’m not happy to see you . . . but why have you come all the way out here when you’re feeling so poorly?”
Cora looked up, over to the kitchen doorway and back again to Evie’s face. “Have you not guessed? Does no one know yet?”
Evie leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
Cora’s shoulders were rounded over her lap, and when she closed her eyes, she forced out the tears Evie hadn’t noticed in them before.
“I haven’t bled,” she whispered to the floor. “I’m going to have a baby.”
Evie was still. She had never faced such a problem before. It happened, of course, she knew it happened, to other girls in faraway towns and big cities. Bad girls? Girls who did not know any better? In either case they were sent away on trains before their bodies began to balloon, shuttled off in secrecy, alone but for the company of the other fallen girls. She pictured them all in dormitory beds like those of a hospital or a boarding school, slow, panting girls awaiting their confinement row on row in snowy nightgowns. Every so often one would be led away to give birth, and the others would remain, rolling over to lie on their other sides and waxing like pale-limbed moons. And here was Cora, just like them, with no outward sign yet of her condition, save for the fact that she was crying.
Evie said only, “Cora, you have to tell this to your parents.”
She shook her blotched pink face. “They’ll send me away. I’ll be disgraced and ruined, and no one will want me. And”—she swiped a hand across her face—“I’ll never see my little one. They’ll take him away before I ever set eyes on him.”
“I don’t think they would do that. A wedding would make more sense. Have you not even told the father?”
Cora shook her head. “I don’t want him to know. He’s not . . . I can never marry him. And I was only with him because . . . because . . .” She put her head in her hands. “I just wanted him to see me as a woman. A lover. That’s all I ever wanted.”
Evie stiffened. “What do you intend to do?” Her question sounded hard to her, but she could find no way to soften it.
“I don’t know yet,” Cora said. “But I’ve been thinking about it. That’s the reason I came to you.”
She tried to rush on before Evie’s mind could get ahead of her. If she presented her idea quick enough, she was hoping, she could force it in. In that moment of hesitation, before the wall of refusal went up, she’d sneak it past, and maybe it wouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
“I could stay here with you,” she said.
“With us? What would we tell your parents?”
“Shh. Shhh.” Cora put up a finger as if she were talking to a child, still trying to float her idea up overhead, prevent Evie from making the wall piece by piece with her questions, her doubts of stone.
“Yes, stay here with you. Just think of it. I could help you. We could tell my parents something, like . . . I’m just here to keep you company, because you’ve been sad. And I could keep you company, and help around the house. You could even tell her I’m helping you with a new business, like sewing or selling your pies at the store, and then—”
“For how many months? It would never work, Cora. You have responsibilities at home, too. They’d never say yes.”
“Wait, wait, I haven’t finished. We could tell them you’ve been ill, even, that you need someone to care for you so George can farm—”
“My own mother could do that. Or June. They know this.”
Cora’s pupils widened, and the extra darkness in them gleamed as she worked out her plan.
“We could tell everyone you’re expecting. That your father told you you must stay in bed for the duration. And I’ll come and wait on you, and keep the house clean, and do your cooking and chores. Even your mother might want extra help for that. And then, in the end, when the baby is born, you could . . . you could keep him.”
She had kept her voice calm. She must not be upset. If she seemed sad about any of it, the plan would not come to pass.
Evie sat quietly for a minute. She hadn’t thought of it until Cora said the words. Now she understood why the girl had come here for help, had chosen Evie. She was hoping to offer her something she could not refuse, something she wanted so badly it would outweigh all the lies.
“Cora,” she said softly, “I can’t take your baby.”
Cora’s face contracted to a strange maze of wrinkles, which the young could amass only with a horrible effort.
“Yes you can. You can. Don’t you see? You could raise him, and then I would still be able to see him once in a while. I could watch him grow. It wouldn’t be the same, but . . . he’d have a good mother, you see? He wouldn’t have to be ashamed. No one would have to know. And I know you would love him, I can imagine how well you would love him—your Benny was the happiest boy in the whole world.”
Finally Cora’s tears came down, and Evie felt her own eyes well like a mirror.
“We are not going to do this,” she said firmly. “We cannot perpetrate such a lie.”
“What does it matter if we lie? When has anything good ever happened in the world just because someone told the truth?”
Evie put a hand to her forehead. Her skin was hot with indecision. “I think if you leave your baby here, even if we could get away with it, we would both be sorry.”
“If you don’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll do. I have nowhere to go.”
Evie got down on her knees in front of the girl and took her hands in her own.
“You need to go home. I told you, the best thing is to tell your mother and father. They’ll know what to do.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t tell them. They’ll want to make a wedding, and I just can’t.”
Evie squeezed the cold hands with her own hot ones. “Why, Cora? Who is the father?”
But Cora mashed her lips together and said no more.
* * *
* * *
Cora had gone. In her mind Evie pressed the future over her past like a piece of tracing paper. All she knew of raising a baby was Ben, and when she imagined taking Cora’s child, she kept seeing her own. She struggled to make the baby a girl, with red-gold hair, but her concentration would weaken and the dark outlines of Benny come through the paper.
There was the baby in a high chair, drawn up to the table at suppertime. Evie put squares of bread and cheese on the baby’s tray while George pulled faces at her. She’d laugh, losing little chewed buds of her meal onto the floor. Then Evie was sitting up at night when the baby was sick, checking the hot forehead too often, until she’d taken so much of its heat into her own hand that she could no longer feel the difference. The baby cried in her ear, and then Evie skipped some years and was send
ing the little girl off to school with a pail and a new-made dress, copper braids down her buttoned back.
In Evie’s future, Cora never married. Instead she stood endlessly behind the counter at Jenkins’s store, waiting for her own little girl to come in with a nickel for the candy jars.
Her mind jumped again to the age of nine. By then the little girl would be learning to sew and could be trusted to cook on her own. What a help she would be. She might come home from school crying because the boys had teased her and pulled her hair. Evie would unwind her braids and gently brush out the sunset waves, clucking comforts at her. By now Evie could see this nine-year-old clearly, rescuing a lost kitten, bathing it by the fire with a wet washcloth. Cross-stitching a sampler. Sneaking into the pantry before supper. Jumping down the steps off the porch while Evie chastised her. She could see it all distinctly, but she could never see anything past the age of nine.
* * *
* * *
“Chris-teeeen-a.”
She heard the singsong of her name and turned to see Jackson grinning at her. He had walked up so silently behind her in the grass that she’d had no inkling of him.
“Hello.” She turned back to the bush she was harvesting, fingers fumbling along the raspberries.
“May I have one of those?”
She held her basket slightly away from him. “Help yourself. They don’t belong to anybody.”
Wild raspberry bushes had been growing against part of the graveyard fence for as long as Christina could remember, and the children often visited them after church and picked them clean while their parents stood talking.
Jackson reached into Christina’s pail and crushed a handful into his palm. She slapped his arm away, but he only opened his mouth and crammed the berries in, and after he swallowed, he licked the juice from his palm and wiped his hand on his pants. Christina wondered if he was taking some boyish pleasure in trying to disgust her.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said.
“Oh, well, and what about you? Aren’t you going to leave any for the children?”
“I just felt like making a cobbler. You know there’ll be plenty more ripe tomorrow, and the next day. . . .”
“Hmmm.” Jackson surveyed the bush. He leaned in toward her, reaching past her shoulder to a perfect round berry she had missed. While she inhaled the smell of his skin, he pulled the berry away easily, leaving its naked white stump behind.
“Shouldn’t you be working?” she asked him.
“I am. Sort of. Had to bring one of the horses in for shoeing. I’m waiting around until she’s ready to go. Have a list for the store as well, so I guess I’ll stop in there and see your friend.”
Christina resumed her picking, skin prickling under her dress. She found herself looking at the raspberries closely. The longer they hung on the bush, the more tender they grew, until they practically fell open, flattened out in your hand when you took them away. She had never really noticed before, the little frightened white hairs poking out between all their goose bumps.
“Speaking of the store . . . noticed you having a nice cozy chat with Mr. Dream Peddler the other day, didn’t I? Sitting outside on the bench, the two of you, like old friends.”
For the first time ever, Christina found herself silently agreeing with Cora’s complaint that the town was too small. “If you say so.”
“What would a sweet girl like yourself be doing mixing with him?”
“Nothing. He asked me to sit down. It would have been rude to go on past.”
“I see. You a customer of his or something? I wouldn’t have pictured it.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
Jackson edged closer to her, pretending to feel inside the bush, and she felt the hair rise all along her arms, like the little white hairs on the raspberries. “Come to think of it, maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t know. Maybe you’ve been going to him regular all this time, since the day he first got to town, and buying up crazy wild dreams.”
Christina didn’t like this. Her skin wanted him near her, but her mind pushed at him, helpless.
“Hey, Christina? Have I ever been in any of your dreams?”
“No,” Christina said truthfully.
“That’s too bad,” he said.
“I guess you’d better go on and get your list at the store, then. Maybe Cora would like to see you.”
“You trying to get rid of me so quickly?”
Christina straightened her back, but she didn’t answer.
“I’m surprised. I thought maybe you liked me.”
“What made you think that?”
“A little bird told me.”
Christina hoped he would think it was the heat, this flush creeping up her neck. “I guess I don’t dislike you.”
He slipped one hand into his pocket. In the other he still held the berry he’d taken, between his thumb and forefinger. The air around them shimmered with cricket song steaming off the grass.
“So maybe you’d invite me to try the cobbler when it’s ready? I can be over after suppertime.”
Christina’s heart hammered like it was begging to be let out of a dark closet. This was happening. She’d always thought if she ever had a chance with Jackson, a sign that he wanted her, she’d have felt differently. Shivery, happy, not just dreading and sick. He stood close to her but looked away. He looked to the side, at the road, at the distance beyond.
“Open your mouth,” he said.
She surprised herself by obeying, as if his voice tugged invisible lines that twitched her body to move.
He lifted the berry to her lips and pressed it gently into her with his thumb. When she closed her mouth, the berry broke on her tongue. He looked into her eyes then, but it seemed to her he was looking a question when she was expecting an answer. He leaned in quickly, past the looking into feeling, to feel her, and when she realized his movement would turn into a kiss, she backed away. She put a hand up and swallowed, as if she hadn’t quite gotten the berry down.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Cora let me.”
“She did not.”
He laughed. “You take everything so seriously.”
She couldn’t tell if he meant she took kissing too seriously or the things he said. She turned back to her bushes, pushing their spindles apart, looking for the berries that hid from her. She plucked them out busily, as if they were beetles harming the plant. She was aware of Jackson still standing at her shoulder. Even though she felt certain she had just ruined everything, she was still content to be near him, humid air lapping at the narrow space between their bodies. Every time his arm shifted, the hair on her own did as well.
He spoke. “Can I just ask you something?”
“I guess.”
“Did she tell me the truth?”
“What truth?”
“When Cora said you cared for me . . . Was she only teasing?”
Christina kept her eyes on her work. If she looked up, she knew she would lie. To the leaves only, to the basket, could she tell the truth.
“Don’t you know just about all the girls in town like you? I thought that’s what you wanted.”
Jackson touched her arm lightly. “It must mean something, if you do. If . . . all of them. It must mean something.” She felt his lips brush her forehead, absentminded now, the opposite of his intent in leaning toward her a moment before.
“Must go back and check on the horse,” he said, and left her.
She spent the rest of the afternoon making up the cobbler and puzzling over what he’d said. After all the raspberries she’d eaten, their seeds stuck in her teeth. In the pockets of bone, she felt them, and she ground her jaw in an effort to work them loose. Her mother told her to stop it; she looked like a co
w with its cud. She set the cobbler out to cool on the windowsill and said nothing to her parents of the possibility Jackson might come to call, but she checked her hair in the mirror after drying the supper dishes and sat out on the porch alone. She fanned her skirt around her on the seat, and with her tongue she felt over all the seeds still in her mouth. The scent of the raspberries cooling nudged her now and again, but Jackson never came.
* * *
* * *
The store bell tittered at Rose Whiting and her cracked brown bare feet pressing over the floorboards. The sawdust lifted with her first steps and left two empty footprints behind her.
Cora smiled tightly at Rose, glanced down and away again, looking for something at the long counter to fiddle with. Rose’s summer feet always made Cora queasy, and now she felt it even more. Even though she should have been used to it, when none of the children wore boots this time of year either. Their feet blackened day by day, Saturday-night scrubbings with a brush did little to clean them, and under their Sunday church boots and stockings their raw, tingling skin was still stained. When Cora was a little girl, her mother had made her wear her boots all year. Bare feet were countrified and uncouth. Cora remembered her playmates taunting her, saying she was a heavy foot, and when she couldn’t run as fast as they, she was jealous. Until nighttime came and she took off her boots and felt the soft-underbelly whiteness of her own clean feet, slipped in between her nice clean sheets.
But Mrs. Whiting was not a child. As each foot swung out from the folds of Rose’s long dress, Cora could glimpse it black-toed, sometimes bleeding, jumping as if in a wasted hope that it might escape its cruel mistress. In summer Cora wished she could avoid Mrs. Whiting altogether, wished someone else could be minding the store. If she looked at Rose’s face, she faltered under the gaze of her strange flecked brown eyes, but to look down would mean the assault of those charred-looking feet.
She settled for somewhere in the middle, the waist region of Rose Whiting’s dress. “May I help you with something?”
The Dream Peddler Page 24