Unbroken

by Jessie Haas

  “Here!” I said, snatching the green teapot from its shelf. Father gave the pot to Mother. It came from Boston, and before that, from China.

  “Mother would want you to have it,” I said.

  Althea’s eyes filled with tears. She sat down suddenly at the table. “Thank you, Harriet. I’ll think of you both—” Her voice choked off.

  Aunt Sarah let out an audible breath. “What about these tomato plants?”

  “I don’t know.” I would have given them to Althea, but hers were already started.

  “Bring them along,” Aunt Sarah said. Uncle Clayton came to the door. “Clayton, those tomatoes!”

  He clumped across the kitchen. Aunt Sarah went out.

  I’ve forgotten something! I thought. Without knowing why, I hurried through the sitting room and opened the door. Mother’s bed was bare now, too, and the thick hush was gone from the room. It looked empty and shabby.

  I didn’t even think, just pulled open the top bureau drawer. There atop the stockings was the shiny leather wallet. “Your father’s pocketbook,” it was always called, and she never would make or buy anything prettier to carry her money in.

  I pushed it into my pocket and walked out.

  When I went to the barn for the colt’s halter, I saw other things I’d been forgetting: brushes, bridles, liniment, and buckets. Uncle Clayton would have all those things, but these were mine, and there was my saddle on its peg. I began packing the gear into the buckets. It was dark and cool inside the barn. Behind me I could sense the warm sun and Aunt Sarah’s hurry.

  My calm surprised me. I had just come from my mother’s funeral. How could I be doing this? John Gale came to the barn door. I gave him the two buckets, took the saddle and halter, and followed him to the wagon, wondering: What happened to Belle’s harness? Did anyone take it off her, or was it not worth saving?

  The colt stood at the gate, leaning so hard that the top bar made a cracking sound. He barely noticed me putting on the halter; all his attention was for the other horses. When I let down the bars, he jumped over them, almost pulling me off my feet.

  “Whoa!” I couldn’t stop him. He circled me, his head turned toward the horses. I meant no more to him than a post. “Whoa!” I cried. My voice came high and shrill. He would know—everyone would know—that I was afraid.

  “Hang on!” Uncle Clayton said, somewhere on the edge of things. “By jing, he’s a wild un! Keep hold—”

  “Easy, boy.” Big brown hands appeared above mine on the rope. “Easy.” John Gale.

  I didn’t want to let go, but there was no room for me, and no need. Gale gave a couple of rough jerks on the halter, and the colt seemed to notice that someone had hold of him. His bright eyes remained fixed on the other horses, but he pranced beside John Gale without pulling. There was nothing left for me to do but follow them up the hill. My legs felt loose, and my throat hurt. The colt had always been so easy to handle. His wildness now felt like betrayal.

  John Gale tied the colt’s rope to a stout ring at the back of the wagon. The colt pushed against the tailgate, straining toward the broad rumps of the team. “Someone ought to ride with me,” Gale said, looking doubtfully at me. “In case he gives me trouble.”

  “Clayton,” Aunt Sarah said.

  Then I must ride with Aunt Sarah. I walked quickly to the buggy, determined not to stop, not to look at the house.

  I saw it anyway, gray and fragile as a wasp’s nest, the worn clapboards gleaming in the sunshine. The geraniums looked out the kitchen window, and Althea Brand stood in the doorway, small and shabby like the house, clutching the teapot to her stomach. I waved and felt tears starting.

  No. I pressed my hand hard against my mouth and climbed into the buggy beside Aunt Sarah. She turned the horse, and we started up the long hill.

  five

  Mother and I spent our lives in West Barrett and downhill. Only in August did we go up, to comb abandoned pastures for blackberries.

  But we had come from uphill. The house I traveled to now was the one in which my father had been born and raised. Close to it was the little place he’d lived in with Mother and where I was born.

  We climbed slowly through the pastureland, past farms and cornfields. The road was rutted from the recent mud season, dry enough for easy travel but not yet dusty. A couple of miles up, birches were beginning to take over some of the pastures. Their white trunks and lacy leaves made the grass look rich and green. We passed a cellar hole. The house had collapsed into it, and columbines grew over the silver clapboards.

  “Whoa!” Aunt Sarah said suddenly. She pointed.

  “What?”

  “There!” she said, pointing harder. Down across a pasture a red-brown animal wandered through a birch grove.

  “A—a deer?” I’d never seen a deer.

  “We see them once in a while now,” Aunt Sarah said. “She’ll be in your uncle’s bean field next!” She drove on.

  We came out into the open now, and an empty green hillside stretched above us. I could see stone walls, and after a minute I saw a house.

  It was yellow-gray, the color of goldenrod gone to seed, a two-story Cape with a big front door and a long ell. Beside it stood a gray barn fronted by a muddy yard. Cattle grazed on the slope below.

  We crawled up the edge of this pasture until we came to a lane, and then along the lane to the farmyard. The horse stopped of his own accord at the barn door, and Aunt Sarah got out. Numbly I followed.

  John Gale’s wagon stopped behind us. The colt bobbed his head up, bumping against the tether. His eyes blazed. He’d never been outside West Barrett. The shelf of pasture and the riverbank had been his world.

  Hugging myself, I walked back to him. He paid no attention, just twisted and turned and blew hot breath out of huge, reddened nostrils. Could I approach him? I seemed to see myself from above, and I didn’t think so: thin and small and thirteen years old. A girl. An orphan.

  As I hesitated, Uncle Clayton let himself down from the wagon seat and came back. He untied the rope, and the colt wheeled around him, coat flashing in the sun. His hooves cut the packed dirt.

  Out in the pasture a horse whinnied. The colt flung his head high. He listened desperately for a moment. Then his eye seemed to soften with gladness, and he sent a ringing neigh out across the hillside.

  He thinks it’s Belle. My tears released again.

  Through a blur I saw Uncle Clayton stumble toward the barway in the colt’s wake. He slipped back the rails, let the colt through, and unclipped the rope.

  The colt thundered down the hill in a violent blur of speed, neighing crazily. A blaze-faced work team trotted to meet him. He nearly crashed into them, and all three stood nose to nose. The colt sniffed first one, then the other. Then he raised his head and looked uphill.

  Aunt Sarah had led the white horse to the barway. No horse could look less like Belle, but the colt screamed and raced back. The white horse ignored him, buckled his knees, and rolled.

  The colt pranced around the rolling animal. His tail stuck straight up and streamed over his back. He still hoped … somehow he still hoped that one of these horses was Belle. I hugged myself.

  “Hey!” said John Gale, on the wagon seat behind me. “Look!” He pointed toward the top of the barn. I followed his hand and saw a weather vane, a trotting Morgan, with high head and flowing tail.

  “Oh.” I looked downhill at the colt again. The weather vane Morgan was mature, deep-bodied, and my colt was young and weedy, but the look was there.

  “Yes.” John Gale drew a breath and let it out slowly, gazing around him. “Decent land,” he said, “for hill land.”

  To me it looked shabby, as if there were more work here than two people could do.

  I got two of my carpetbags out of the buggy and, weighed down with them, followed Aunt Sarah into the kitchen. It smelled of vinegar. The table was covered with oilcloth, and a yellow flystrip hung down, several dead flies sticking to it. But every surface shone. It was clean, with tha
t peculiar smell cider vinegar makes when you wash up with it.

  Aunt Sarah crossed the kitchen and opened a door onto a set of stairs. They were closed in and dark, turning a corner three-fourths of the way up and continuing a little more steeply. Any light from above was blotted out by Aunt Sarah’s bulk.

  My breath came shallowly, not seeming to get past my throat. I pressed my palm to the center of my chest and followed.

  We came out into the light, in a narrow, steep-shouldered room not much different in shape from my room at home. Everything seemed gray: plaster walls, iron bedstead made up with a gray wool blanket, limp gauze curtains at the window. The vinegar smell was strong here.

  It’s like a hired man’s room! I thought.

  Aunt Sarah put the bags on the bed and turned to me, with the nearest thing to a smile I’d seen on her face. “This was your father’s room,” she said. “I thought you’d like to have it.”

  A hot feeling flooded my chest. I couldn’t speak. I crossed the bare floor, listening to the sound of my bootheels, and looked out the window. The barnyard was below. A red hen scratched in the dung.

  “Thank you,” I made myself say. My voice came hard and raspy.

  There was no answer. I turned. Aunt Sarah just stood there, not gimleting me with her eyes, as I’d expected, but looking at the room.

  All at once she noticed me staring. “It’ll look prettier when you’ve put your things around,” she said, and turned toward the stairs.

  My things. I sat on the bed beside my carpetbags. I hadn’t brought my rug. I hadn’t brought the little jug we filled with wildflowers all summer. I’d left all the pictures on the walls. What did I have in these bags except clothing? I didn’t want to open them. My hands felt too weak to work the buckles.

  Downstairs I heard shuffling feet. Uncle Clayton and John Gale must be walking the sewing machine in. A thump. Now their steps sounded lighter, heading out the door. I went down to say good-bye.

  John Gale stood at his horses’ heads, looking uncomfortable again. I tried to think what Mother would do, and then I walked over and held out my hand.

  “Thank you.”

  He stood holding my hand, looking down at it. His hand was hard and rough, with dirt ground in so deeply that scrubbing couldn’t take it out, though otherwise he seemed like a clean man.

  He heaved a sigh, as if trying to push a weight off his chest. “Miss Gibson … Miss—” He shook his head. “I’m as sorry as I can be.” He gave my hand a squeeze and then climbed up into his wagon and turned it.

  I stood watching it rattle down the lane. He turned down the rutted road to the valley and his own concerns. He would pass our house in West Barrett and the flattened place in the grass, go down the broad street by the Academy.

  Aunt Sarah said, “Clayton, what time is it? I don’t know whether I’m afoot or horseback!”

  Uncle Clayton began fishing his watch out of his pocket. It seemed to hang on a very long chain. “Ha’ past four,” he said when he’d flipped the watch open and blinked at its face for a few moments.

  “Then you’ve got time to fix that pigpen gate before you milk.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Go change your clothes, and I’ll fix something to eat.” She seemed to push us before her into the kitchen. Uncle Clayton disappeared into another part of the house. Aunt Sarah tied on an apron and began slicing bread.

  “Shall I help you?”

  She raised her head as if surprised and looked at me for a moment with the knife poised over the loaf. “No. Thank you. Take a look around, why don’t you? See where you’re at.”

  My fingers twisted together, making all the little, inflamed stab wounds sting and throb. Look around. Was that what you were supposed to do on the afternoon of your mother’s funeral?

  I looked into the next room. It should have been the dining room, but Aunt Sarah had arranged it as a sitting room, with rocking chairs, a knitting basket, and a sewing machine in one corner. Not Mother’s machine. I didn’t see that anywhere.

  A door at the back of the room opened, and out came Uncle Clayton, in overalls. Without the jacket I could see how his shoulders sloped. They didn’t make a broad shelf, like Dr. Vesper’s or John Gale’s. They just fell away like the shoulders of a milk bottle.

  He seemed embarrassed to see me and gestured vaguely at the room. “Yup, this here’s the sittin’ room … have to get an extra chair in here, I guess.”

  He opened another door. I glimpsed a hall, bright with sunlight. The knees of a stairway intruded on the left. Beyond was another large room, piled nearly to the ceiling with furniture. I saw beds, tables, couches, a forest of chairs, and, just inside the door, Mother’s sewing machine.

  The hallway was cold. Cold air flowed down the stairwell and brought with it a smell of vinegar and soda. From deep in the thicket of furniture came a scrabbling sound, like tiny claws on bare wood.

  Uncle Clayton waded into the furniture. Dust streamed up through the sunbeams as he put aside a set of hatboxes and three kitchen chairs. He came to grips with a straight-backed rocker and tried to lift it out. It caught on something, and his shoulders worked as he heaved at it.

  “Clayton! You’ll break it! Wait a minute!”

  Uncle Clayton stepped back obediently. Aunt Sarah shoved something, tilted something else, and lifted the rocker straight up in one firm hand.

  “There! If you’d use your head for something besides a hatrack— Now take it from me, will you?”

  Uncle Clayton started forward guiltily and took the chair. As I stepped out of his way, I gained a new angle on the room. There was a fireplace. Gray and sepia faces frowned down from the walls: two men in uniforms from the time of the Civil War, a severe, heavy-jawed woman with practically no hair.

  Aunt Sarah pushed Mother’s sewing machine an inch or two deeper into the room and closed the door. “Come and eat,” she said, as if none of this required explanation.

  Was it like this when my father was a little boy? I’ll have to ask Mother, I thought, and then remembered.

  six

  The mirror in my father’s room was murky and speckled. The girl who passed in front of it was the girl I’d glimpsed approaching the colt, the orphan. Her hair was done in two tight braids. Her face was a pale blur, with large dark eyes and a small mouth.

  What kept catching my eye, and surprising me, was her dress, a leafy print with bright red berries. Didn’t the orphan have anything more suitable?

  Even away from the mirror I watched that girl. She sat silently at the table. She didn’t ask for anything, took only what was passed. She couldn’t seem to mark time properly. Did several days pass, or just one long day? In bed she lay with her eyes wide open. The lump in her chest was too hard for crying.

  One morning the girl’s aunt asked her to collect eggs. She tried to listen as she was told where to look. But out in the barnyard she remembered nothing. She stood among the crooning, scratching hens with her basket hanging at her side.

  A hen strolled from behind the manure pile, clucking loudly. The orphan retraced this path, and in a sheltered spot by the side of the barn she found an egg. She picked it up and turned around.

  A rooster’s head, with gray, closed lids and gaping beak, lay on the manure pile.

  I dropped the egg.

  “Harriet! For crying out loud, give me the basket! Now follow me. I’ll show you where to look.”

  Nooks and crannies all over the farm—that was where to look, because the hens roamed everywhere. Aunt Sarah even climbed into the haymow. She stooped and peered under the buggy. “Crawl in there for me, Harriet, will you?”

  I crawled in. The egg felt warm. I would have liked to cradle it for a while, cup my hands gently around it. But this egg must go in Aunt Sarah’s basket.

  “That’s all, unless they have a nest I don’t know about.”

  I forced myself to speak. “Thank you for showing me.”

  She was counting her eggs, head bent and chin compr
essed into two large pillows. “That’s all right.” Her voice seemed forced, too. “Time to start dinner,” she said after a minute. “We always have a big dinner on Sunday.”

  Sunday dinner. It was Sunday. I watched Aunt Sarah go away, puzzled at her stiffness. It was as if she were shy and on her best behavior. But this was her home. Why would she put on company manners?

  Nearby, hens mused over things they found in the dirt. Roosters crowed. The horses and cattle grazed far down the field, the colt glowing among them like a new copper penny. He didn’t answer my whistle.

  I wandered to the sunny front of the barn and sat on the chopping block. A gray rooster approached. I’ve met some mean roosters. I pulled my feet back, wondering what this one intended.

  He tilted his head and looked at me. Then he noticed a tiny feather on the packed dirt. He viewed it through one eye and then the other and began to chortle. Ohhh, my, looklooklooklooklooklook! He pecked the feather, ejected it with a headshake that set his dewlaps wobbling, then pecked it again.

  I felt a deep breath lift my ribs. The sun warmed my face and shimmered on the rooster’s feathers. Ohhh, looklooklook!

  I raised my head, and saw for the first time that I was looking down on mountains. Or ridges, anyway, row on row of them, like ocean waves. They receded into the distance, each one a paler, more transparent blue. In the valleys morning mist still lingered, rising like whipped cream out of a bowl.

  A high place. I thought of my skyscraper bedroom, where I had looked down on the backs of swallows. I looked quickly away, at the mustard-colored house and drab barn and the hill rising behind it, fringed with birches.

  It was silent here. No mill saw, no river, no road for anyone to pass on. Somewhere along this ridge were the little house we lived in when I was too small to remember and the school where Mother was teaching when she and Father met. But were there any people, anywhere?