Unbroken

by Jessie Haas

  My eyes opened against the dark. Happy. I didn’t think I would ever feel happy again.

  They are dead.

  But they’re all right. She was letting me know. She was telling me. It was clearer than a dream, and realer than a dream, because I knew all the time that they were dead. I said they were dead. It wasn’t just a wish because if I’d had my wish, she wouldn’t have driven away.

  I wanted to get up and tell someone. They came. They’re all right.

  Outside in the dark all was quiet. No neighing. Maybe the colt had seen them, too.

  three

  I awoke in sunshine. Swallows dived past the window, and the mill saw was singing.

  I sat up under the sloped ceiling, with a heavy head and aching eyes. A stripe of cold ran down my back. My arms and legs had a cringing feel to them, as if they wanted to curl up tight.

  But my heart felt clear and as open as the window. I could see her so precisely, in her bright calico dress just like the one I wore now. I could feel the press of her hand. It was real, not a dream. She had come back to tell me she was all right.

  The shawl was still wound around me. I unwrapped it and walked to the window. Far below, the colt grazed intently, as if making up for lost time—snatch snatch snatch. The sunlight made a streak over his round back, sliding as he moved. Below him the willow branches stirred, the little river sparkled and splashed.

  Mother loved this view. She must be out there somewhere, folded invisibly into the air.

  I turned, spreading my arms as if to catch something. Nothing stopped them, though, and the sunlight dazzled my eyes. I was desperately thirsty. A cup of tea …

  When I came down to the kitchen, Dr. Vesper sat at the table. For a second my mind seemed to disconnect. Was she better? Was she only sick now, not dead?

  He looked up wearily. “Morning, Harry. Tea?” The pot stood on the table. There was the smell of biscuits on the air and a plate with crumbs and jam in front of him.

  I sat down. He poured out tea for me, then got up to take the biscuits out of the warming oven. He was making a guest of me in my own home. Around the happy freedom in my heart something seemed to tighten.

  “Althy went home for a minute,” Dr. Vesper said. His voice seemed deeper than usual, rasping and slow. It was made that way by sorrow. I wanted to tell him, “I saw Mother last night.”

  But he went on. “I need to tell you some things, Harry, and I have to be quick. Somebody needs me.”

  I sipped the tea. Too strong. We like it light, so the perfume comes through, and not the bitterness. This tea seemed to bite the back of my mouth.

  “I’m the executor of your mother’s estate,” Dr. Vesper said. “You need to know how things are left, Harry.”

  How things are left? I could think only of the closed door beyond the sitting room, the dimness and stillness that seemed to spread from there.

  “You’re to go to your aunt Sarah,” he said.

  “What?” Aunt Sarah hated us. She was my father’s sister, and I’d seen her only a few times in my life.

  “It’s what your mother wanted. She said it to me, and she set it down in her will. ‘Sarah’s ways aren’t my ways,’ she said to me, ‘but she’ll be good to Walter’s child.’”

  “When? When did she say that? She didn’t say it to me!” How could she not have said it to me? How could she have wasted precious moments of breath on them—Mrs. Brand, Dr. Vesper—while I was sent away?

  Dr. Vesper looked straight at me. His eyes were bloodshot and red around the rims. “There’s no reason not to tell you now,” he said. “Your mother never expected to live to see you grown.”

  Around my head the air seemed to hum. “Why?”

  “She had a bad heart, Harry. She didn’t have much time left.” He stopped abruptly and looked down.

  “But why—” I couldn’t even whisper. My throat squeezed shut.

  “Your mother was …” His voice went down too deep. He paused and took a breath. “She said to me, ‘Harry and I are going to be happy while we can. When we have to be sad, we’ll be darned good and sad, but right now we’ll be happy.’ But she made her plans, too, and you’re to go to Sarah.”

  “I can’t stay here?”

  He didn’t hear it as a question. “That’s all right,” he said in a reassuring voice. “The house will have to be sold anyway. I’ll take care of that, and pay the debts, and anything left I’ll put in the bank for you.”

  Sold? Our house? But she was here. This was where I saw her, driving past our white rocks. Here.

  “Can you write Sarah a note, Harry?” Dr. Vesper was asking. “I’ll stop by the farm this morning and tell her everything, but a little something from you might help things along.”

  I stood up numbly and walked to Mother’s desk in the sitting room. With my back to the bedroom door, I took out the paper, opened the ink bottle, and wrote:

  May 27, 1910

  West Barrett, Vermont

  Dear Aunt Sarah,

  Mother died about four o’clock yesterday

  afternoon. She left me to you.

  Dr. Vesper will bring this letter and explain.

  Your—

  Your what? The pen stopped, making a blot. Your …

  Your affectionate Niece,

  Harriet Gibson

  Dr. Vesper came in behind me. I folded the note and gave it to him.

  “Harry,” he said, stopped, and cleared his throat. “Harry, just so you know, I’m named in the will if something happens. Sarah isn’t the only one you have. I’m named, too.”

  Then the kitchen door opened. Mrs. Brand was back, and Dr. Vesper, with a harried glance at the clock, departed.

  “Do you want to sit with her?” Mrs. Brand asked.

  Sit with her? Oh. Go in and sit beside her body. “No.” I closed my eyes. “No. I … have to go back upstairs.”

  “Did you eat anything? Have some tea.”

  I shook my head and went past her. My heart felt swollen and heavy, and my head was heavy, and my throat had closed tight.

  In my room I stood still. The sunlight reached toward me across the bare floor. Through the screen I could hear the swallows chortle to one another.

  A bad heart?

  Sold?

  The air seemed thick, impossible to push through.

  Debts? What debts did we have?

  We. I always said “we.” We always said “we,” but part of her was I, and grown up, and keeping secrets. Debts, and a bad heart.

  But she sent me to the Academy. How did she pay for that?

  She drove me there and back every day.

  She didn’t have much time left.

  My thick, heavy feet moved me toward the window. The bright grass. The sparkling river. The willows tossing and the swallows diving for flies …

  It will have to be sold.

  Mother and I made our own little world. What I wished and what I thought, my talents and my grades at school, mattered more to her than anything.

  Without her I was no one. I must do what her words on a piece of paper told me. I must do whatever any adult told me. I couldn’t even stay here, in the world we had made together. The house was her, the house was us, and it would have to be sold.

  My hands seemed to rise by themselves, independent of my arms or will. My wrists felt numb and tingled, but above them, disconnected, my hands were strong. My fingers spread wide and pushed slowly into the screen, each fingertip making a separate indentation. With a pop and a scritch the thin, rusted wires began to separate and then to break.

  I looked down on the bottle blue backs of the swallows. Down, down, on the bright green grass. Down, to the bottom of my skyscraper.

  Folded invisibly into the air.

  The saw blade paused for breath, and in the little silence I heard hoofbeats. My fingers jumped back, and broken wire stabbed them.

  Up from the river the colt came galloping. His head was high, his nostrils wide, his ears flat back. He swept in a wide loop
around the pasture, then stopped at the very edge where the land dropped down to the river and gazed out over the tops of the willows.

  Playing. All by himself.

  His head turned. He looked toward the pasture gate, thinking of his mother. He was just her color, bright chestnut. Beautiful. “Keeping a horse just to drive that girl to school is bad enough,” the West Barrett ladies used to say, “but a useless colt into the bargain?” When I overheard that, I told Mother, and we laughed.

  “Harry and I are going to be happy.…”

  Tears were running down my face. “I just wanted to ask you,” I said, into the glittering, empty air.

  No answer came. She wasn’t ever going to answer my questions again, and I was stuck here. I had been going to jump, and now I wouldn’t, because of the bright running colt, and my fingers were stuck in the screen. The broken wires stabbed into them like porcupine quills.

  A tearing sob burst out of me, another, another. The colt stared up at the high window, and shied, and ran. And up the stairs two at a time came Althea Brand. She burst into the room and cried, “Oh, good Lord in heaven!”

  I looked over my shoulder to see her standing back a little, one hand up to her mouth.

  “I’m stuck!”

  She looked behind her and then came forward slowly, as if I were dangerous. I felt my hot face streaming with tears, my hot, throbbing fingers, but inside, a cold little shock. This is too much. This is more than she can do.

  The tears stopped coming, all by themselves. I sniffed hard and saw her wince.

  “I’m sorry. Could—could you wipe my face?”

  She came closer, fishing in her sleeve, then drew out a dampish handkerchief and mopped my eyes and nose. When that was done, she looked at my hands, and her normal expression of practical competence began to reappear. “Will the sewing shears cut that screen, do you think?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then—” She started to turn, then stopped and looked hard at me. I looked back at her, knowing I must not be a reassuring sight. But I felt a hardness inside that was like her hardness, stiffening me all up the center.

  “I will not jump out the window,” I said.

  She nodded once, as if that settled that, and went away.

  I pushed my fingers forward to keep the screen from stabbing deeper. I watched the colt graze, listened to Althea’s quick steps downstairs, feeling straight and quiet, suspended between one state and another.

  You will have to be careful.

  The thought presented itself that way, as if somone else were speaking. I belonged to no one. I must not ask too much and drive my friends away.

  Althea snipped the screen away from my fingers and picked out the rusty, embedded fragments. “Come downstairs,” she said, looking at the ten splayed rips in the screen as if the destruction pained her. I looked back at them as I followed her, ten spots of brightness, where the sky and willow branches showed through clearly.

  She sat me at the kitchen table, pumped a basin of cold water, and made me soak my fingers. “You stay put!” she said, darted down the road to her own house, and came back with an old pair of cotton gloves and a tin of ointment. She dried my fingers on a clean towel and began spreading the yellow, strong-smelling stuff over the cuts. On her left hand her two gold rings clicked together. The wide ring on her middle finger was grooved by the other, narrower one, which had rubbed against it for years.

  “The wide one was her husband’s ring,” Mother told me once. “She’s worn it since he died.”

  He died. Everyone must have died on Althea Brand, because she was alone, and she’d been alone as long as I had known her. Once, or twice, or many times she must have felt the way I did now.

  I looked up at her face. It was paler than yesterday, holding something back. Maybe she was trying not to remember this feeling, or maybe it was always with her. Did it ever go away? Did you ever feel better? If you did feel better, maybe you hated yourself for that.

  But I saw Mother. Last night I saw her.

  Althea’s yellowish old ear was near my face. Barely above a whisper I said, “I dreamed about her last night.”

  Althea looked up. Tears brimmed in her eyes, but a brilliant, wavering smile lit her face. “Did you? Then she’s all right!”

  I couldn’t speak. I could only look.

  “They come back to comfort us. That’s what I believe.”

  “I woke up. I was so happy—” I clamped down to keep from crying.

  “But you weren’t fooled, were you? You knew she was gone. But she’s all right. We can’t understand it, but they are all right!”

  Althea’s face made me cry, she looked so happy, so reassured. As my tears started, she reached forward and gathered me into a hug, the first time ever. “You’ll be all right, too, Harriet. I promise!”

  I still couldn’t eat. I made tea, our way, and sipped that.

  “You’ve got to get something down you,” Althea said. “I’ll beg some milk from Julia Could and make you a cornstarch pudding.”

  I shook my head. “She won’t—”

  “Oh, yes, she will!” Althea said. “She’s dying for the news. She won’t get it from me, but she won’t care to miss the chance.”

  “I don’t even know. What happened?”

  Althea’s eyes dimmed. “I don’t rightly know, Harriet. A Model T came down this road, and I’d no more than watched it out of sight when back it came, and the reverend driving lickety-split behind it. Before I could get over here, the Model T man was off again after the doctor. Don’t even know who he was.”

  “He left his gloves. On the sitting-room table.”

  “Andy Vesper will know,” Althea said. “Now, this may take a few minutes. Will you be all right by yourself?”

  She looked at me kindly. She thought I should go sit with Mother.

  “I’ll go check on the colt,” I said.

  The sun was high and warm on my head as I walked down the road, past the white rocks, through the heavy stream of scent from the mock orange bush. Those creamy four-cornered blossoms were Mother’s favorite flower.

  The colt came to the barway when he saw me there. He sniffed my pockets and hands. The lanolin smell beneath the gloves made him flip his lip in the air.

  Then he sighed, looking off over my shoulder with a troubled expression. His muzzle pressed heavily into my palm. I could feel the teeth behind the velvet. His ears pricked toward the road, drooped back, and again twitched forward. His hope made tears run out of my eyes. More tears. I was so tired of crying.

  I rested my forehead on his neck, feeling his animal warmth and the heat of the sun on his coat. He was all I had left.

  My head came up so suddenly that the colt shied. Did I have him? Or was he among the possessions Dr. Vesper expected to sell?

  I looked up at the house. It was full of our things—books, dishes, dresses and boots, and uncounted odds and ends. Was any of it mine?

  I looked the colt over. He was in an awkward phase, front and back halves growing at different rates. But he would be a good Morgan. The men who kept trying to buy him proved that.

  “A horse is not an extravagance,” Mother always said. “Without that mare I doubt you’d get an education.”

  Two horses were an extravagance, but we couldn’t bear to part with him, and we were two people. “Someday we’ll go our separate ways,” Mother said, “or you can train him and sell him to pay for your college.”

  Now he was untrained. He couldn’t take me anywhere, and he wouldn’t bring in much money.

  And if he wouldn’t bring in much money, perhaps I would be allowed to keep him.

  With stinging fingers, I broke off a branch of mock orange and carried it into the house. Althea Brand turned from the stove and made as if to move her pudding off the burner.

  “No. I’ll go in by myself.”

  The sitting room was quiet. Sunlight streamed in the window, and the sewing machine, silhouetted against it, looked like an animal grazin
g on the folds of fabric. Who would finish that dress? Was that one of our debts? My debts now.

  I stood with my hand on the back of her chair. Here she sat every day, between my going to school and my returning. The pine-scented breeze coming through the screen was the air she used to breathe, while she bent over the fabric and pulled it through the machine, while her feet steadily rocked the treadle.

  When I was little, I played beneath the machine or just sat there, tracing the iron lacework of legs and treadle with my fingers. Once a week I dusted the carved oak flowers and ribbons on the drawers. The sewing machine was our grandest piece of furniture and our most essential. Mother went to it late at night sometimes, saying, “I’m going to print us some money, Harry!” Sometimes I would go to sleep to the rock and thump of the treadle and that cough she got when she worked too hard.

  If she had died of that cough, I would want to break up the sewing machine with an ax. I would want to kill myself, for my blindness and childishness.

  But she didn’t. I’ll keep the sewing machine, I decided. She made our living with it. I should be able to make a living, too.

  With that thought uppermost, I pushed open the bedroom door.

  The hush stopped me. I could almost feel it on my face. Mother lay with her hands folded across the front of her green dress. Her face on the pillow looked like a wax carving, and not a good likeness either. The distant, reserved expression was all wrong.

  I was surprised at how cool I felt. This wasn’t Mother. This was what she’d left behind.

  Her hands were like herself, though. There was the burn she got cooking last winter. Her wedding ring hung loosely on her finger. That hand was the one she’d reached to me last night. I remembered feeling the ring.

  I stretched my eyes wide against the smarting tears. Maybe she would come again tonight. If she didn’t, that must be the last touch I remembered. I slid the branch between her hands, keeping it flexed so my fingers didn’t even brush her dress. Then I laid my head beside hers on the pillow.

  “Good night, Mother,” I heard myself whisper. I went out to the kitchen before I could think about that.

  Althea Brand stood at the stove, stirring briskly, while tears ran down her face. I didn’t want to cry anymore. I stood back, hugging myself, and she didn’t know I was there.