Speak Through the Wind

by Allison Pittman

  Gloria tried to stop her from leaving, but Kassandra knew Mae wouldn’t want to be a part of the conversation should it turn maudlin. For as long as Kassandra knew her, Mae had found true comfort in serving others. Besides, she had a suspicion that some of the leftover fabric would soon become a sunbonnet for the trail.

  Later in the evening, after an uninvited and rather unpleasant visit from Jewell, Kassandra and Gloria sat in the darkness of the little cabin. They talked a little about their pasts, but often they were silent, listening to the sounds of sleeping babies nestled in baskets around them.

  “You’re the only friend I’ve ever had, Sadie,” Gloria said wistfully. “I’d almost want to stay just for that.”

  “Nonsense,” Kassandra said. “You have a child. You have to do what is best for him.”

  “Do you miss your little girl?”

  “Yes. I wish I could say every day, but I don’t. Sometimes—and this is terrible—but I will think about her and realize it is the first I’ve thought about her in perhaps a week or more.”

  “I hope I’ll be able to be that strong,” Gloria said, “when it’s time to leave Danny.”

  “Oh, Gloria, why would you even think about leaving him behind?”

  “Because I don’t know how to live that life.” Gloria gestured to the pile of clothes strewn across the chair. “This is what I know. This is all I’ve ever known. It’s what I was born for.”

  “Nobody is born to be a whore,” Kassandra said. “It’s something that happens when your choices are taken away. You have a choice now.”

  Early the next morning they all gathered to bid farewell, and a definite sadness was left in Jewell’s house. Yolanda and Donna missed the send-off entirely, sleeping late into the afternoon, but the rest of the women puttered around the parlor and kitchen as if in constant search for something.

  “I think I’m even gonna miss them babies,” Jewell said, smoking a cigarette and staring out the kitchen window.

  “You won’t think that way tonight when you get to sleep through without hearing one of them crying,” Mae said, punching down a lump of bread dough.

  ”I’ll miss all of them,” Biddy said. Her fondness for Gloria had grown akin to hero-worship, and only Kassandra knew how badly disappointed she was at having been left behind. “Mae, do you think tomorrow you could start working on the dress?”

  “Of course I can!” Mae reached out and left a floury pinch on Biddy’s cheek. “We’ll start first thing.”

  Gloria had given Biddy her best dress—a beautiful green with black velvet trim—and Biddy’s grateful reaction to it worried Kassandra even more that she was becoming enticed by the life that accompanied it.

  The house was quiet that night. Jewell imposed a sense of mourning. Whether it was the loss of Gloria or the reminder of the life none of them would ever have, she didn’t say. She declared she wasn’t in the mood for music and fun tonight, and therefore nobody else was, either. Yolanda and Donna simply took the festivities up the mountain to the miner’s cabins, accompanied by several bottles of whiskey

  “I’m movin’ them two out back first thing in the mornin’,” Jewell declared, watching them cross the yard, looking like two bright silk birds picking their way across a barren field. “I want my own bed back.”

  And so she did. That same evening, they all worked together lugging trunks full of dresses and arms full of various other luxuries out to the two cabins behind the main house. Jewell was all for dumping the mess in the middle of the cabin floor and letting them sort it out later, but Mae and Biddy insisted that they put the rooms together nicely, giving the girls something pleasant to come back to.

  Kassandra noticed the curtains hanging in the window of Gloria’s cabin and remembered a promise she had made to Gloria. “Don’t let Jewell have them,” she’d said. “Take them to your room and keep them for yourself.” At the time such a promise seemed silly, but now, with the void left by her departure painfully raw, she took the yellow sprigged fabric down and clutched it to her.

  Later that night, as Kassandra lay in bed, there was a knock at her door and Biddy stepped in, carrying a candle that took the room from darkness to a soft, promising glow.

  “What are you doing here?” Kassandra asked, scooting over and patting the mattress beside her. “You have your own room now Don’t tell me you have grown afraid of the dark.”

  “Oh, no,” Biddy said, setting the candle on the table by the bed and crawling under the covers. “I was just thinking, then I got a little sad.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “Would you ever want to leave this place, Sadie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “I have not given it that much thought,” she said, though the seeds of her desire had been planted the night Gloria’s Danny was born, and she’d thought of little else since. “I think I would like to go back to New York. To my daughter.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Biddy whispered. “I wish my mother could come back to me.”

  “I do not know if my daughter even knows that I am alive,” Kassandra said. “Or what she thinks of me. But I need to find out.”

  “Do you want to get married?”

  “No, no, Liebling,” Kassandra said, laughing. “Not any time soon.”

  “Why did you become a prostitute?”

  “Ha! That is a very good question. And one with a very long answer. Too long for this late hour.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  Kassandra sat up in bed, and Biddy did the same, tucking her thin legs underneath her, facing Kassandra in the candlelight.

  “I was not much older than you, dear. And I felt I didn’t have any choice.”

  “Do you … do you think I’ll have a choice?”

  Her eyes were huge in the dim light, her soft brown hair loose in waves around her narrow shoulders. Though hidden now beneath the loose nightgown, her body had developed quite womanly curves, and the men who came down from the mountains were beginning to notice. Some were new arrivals, ignorant of the taboo against touching Biddy; others had been around long enough to have forgotten. The easy antics of Yolanda and Donna had fueled their lust, and it was a common occurrence now to hear some whoops and whistles whenever Biddy entered or left a room.

  “Of course you’ll have a choice,” Kassandra said, reaching out for Biddy’s’ hands. “Don’t get into this life, Biddy. You will never be able to leave it behind if you do.”

  “There’s that boy, Ben Danglars—”

  “My life was ruined by a boy named Ben. Stay away from him.”

  “He seems nice.”

  “They all do. But when they see you here, in a place like this …”

  “Is that what happened to you? Were you a prostitute when you met Ben?”

  “No, dear, I was just a young girl like you. A good Christian girl in a good Christian home, waiting for something exciting to happen to me.”

  “Isn’t that what you are now?” Biddy asked with a coy smile.

  “I guess so, minus the Christian home. And being young.”

  “You are younger than my mother was when we left.”

  “True, but I do not think I could ever go back. Not really. I cannot imagine facing … him.”

  “The man who raised you?”

  “The man I disappointed. Again. He forgave me once for falling into this life. I don’t know if he would forgive me again.”

  “I don’t mean any disrespect,” Biddy said, “but he doesn’t have to forgive you. Only God does.”

  “But when I confessed to him last time, and we prayed together”—she clasped Biddy’s hands tight—“it was just such … peace. I don’t know if I could ever feel that way again.”

  “But Sadie, surely you know that feeling of peace came from God’s forgiveness, not your reverend’s.”

  “But how much can I ask him to forgive me? And my daughter? How can she ever …” Kassandra’s voice trailed off at
the thought of someday explaining to her daughter just where she had been for the first five years of her life. “The thought of it alone makes me never want to go home.”

  “Saint Peter once asked Jesus how many times a sin should be forgiven,” Biddy said, her voice slow and patient, as if she were talking to a child. “Jesus said until seventy times seven. That’s a lot of forgiveness we should have for each other. Imagine how much more than that our Father has for us.”

  Kassandra looked into Biddy’s smiling eyes. “You, my child, have an old soul. How did you get to be so wise?”

  “My mama taught me. And my papa. But it’s nothing you don’t already know, Sadie. God loves you. He sent His Son to die because He loves you so much. But you know that.”

  “Yes, I know all of that. I know what it means to have a Father in heaven. But I also know what it means to disappoint Him. You are such a fine young girl, Biddy. I’ll bet you never disappointed your parents even once.”

  Biddy gave a small laugh and looked away. “I don’t know about that. But my mama always let me know that I had my God to answer to—even besides them. And now that they’re gone … well, I still have Him.”

  “And that brings you comfort?”

  “That’s what kept me alive,” Biddy said, with a countenance far beyond her young years.

  “But you see?” Kassandra looked beyond Biddy’s face, unable to hold up under her gaze. “I do not feel like I have Him anymore. Or that He has me.”

  “There’s another verse,” Biddy said, thumping the palm of her hand against her head. “Oh, I wish I had my Bible. Jesus is talking, and He says something about His sheep hearing His voice—”

  “My sheep hear my voice” Kassandra began. She closed her eyes, and the words poured from her as naturally as any thought. “And I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.”

  She opened her eyes, and Biddy was smiling at her.

  “You know that one, too?”

  “Reverend Joseph would give me candy for reciting Scripture. It is how I learned to speak English.”

  “So, it’s all in your head, but we are supposed to hide His Word in our hearts so that we do not sin.”

  “It is not that easy, child. After everything that God has done to me—”

  “Stop that, Sadie!”

  Biddy’s reproach was so strong that anybody listening in on the conversation would have been hard-pressed to know which of the two was the adult.

  “You said yourself that you could remember every step of your life that brought you here. You said that we always have choices. You and I are both here at the same place, at this same time. But I know that my God brought me here. I didn’t have anything to do with it. And I don’t know why He wants me here, but He does. And I’ll stay until He finds a way for me to leave. But you—”

  She jumped off of the bed and paced the room with her hands balled into fists punching the air.

  “You got yourself here. You can get yourself out.”

  “You think it is that easy?” Kassandra said, feeling a bit ridiculous defending herself to this child. “How do you think women get here in the first place? They do not have any money. They do not have any means—”

  “God will provide, Sadie. If you ask Him to. If you stop blaming Him for bringing you here and start asking Him to forgive you for getting here on your own. No father can deny his child—mine never could.”

  Biddy stood in the middle of the room, looking so small despite the power behind her words, and something in Kassandra broke. There was always a morning, after the night of the first snow, when she would walk out of the house and be nearly blinded by the whiteness. The air was so clean and clear she felt she would shatter it like glass if she spoke even a single word. And so she would add her own silence to the silence around her, becoming as still as the branches too laden with snow to move.

  She felt that still now. As if her heart had stopped. As if every drop of blood rushing through her veins had paused, poised to be given the order to move on. One word out loud, and that clarity might disappear.

  All of a sudden, she didn’t care that she’d been brought down by a child. She wouldn’t waste another breath defending her sin. Stripped of any shred of dignity she fell to her knees, her face buried in the mattress, in the prayerful position she’d assumed every night as a child. She reached up a hand, silently imploring Biddy to pray with her.

  “No,” Biddy said, bending down to kiss Kassandra’s hand before placing it gently on the mattress. “You need to come to God alone.”

  Kassandra didn’t know how long she stayed on the floor by her bed, and she could never clearly articulate—even to herself—the words that went through her mind as she knelt there. There was just a sense of begging. For forgiveness. For cleanliness. To take the last ten years of her life and cast them away. To take her back to the day she left with Ben Connor. No, the day she kissed Ben Connor. No, the day she felt that the home God had given her and the earthly father He had provided for her were not enough. Better yet, to the joy she felt when she first prayed and knew she was a child of God, never wanting that joy ever to be overshadowed by anything again.

  She stood up after a time and walked over to the window. It was open to the night air that cooled the stuffiness of the room in the summertime. She laid one hand on the sill, then the other, and knelt beside it, her elbows braced in prayer, her tear-stained face drying in the breeze. She looked up and could see every single star with such distinction; they appeared as close as flickering candles on the lawn. The wind blew through the trees, making a constant sound that she knew would carry her words clear up to heaven.

  “Father God,” she said, feeling her words carry up and up and up. “You know my sins. You know my heart. You trusted me with this body, and I sold it away. I have never turned to You. Never trusted You. You said, My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, and I have made every decision in my life based on my thoughts and my ways. Forgive me now, my Father. Draw me close to You again.”

  She paused and felt her spirit being lifted up with her words. There was a lightness to her that she hadn’t felt since she was a child—even when she was a child of the streets, oblivious to the idea of sin and shame. She felt clean and whole and new. Restored.

  “Thank You, Father,” she said, unclasping her hands and opening them wide, holding them out the window as if to cleanse them in the beauty of His creation.

  Now she could go home. Now she could face her daughter, face Reverend Joseph, face Mrs. Hartmann as a restored child of God. She would take her little girl’s hand, and together they would seek God’s direction, wherever that might lead.

  Exhausted, she stood to her feet and closed Gloria’s curtains across the open window She got back into her bed, pulled the covers just up to her chin, and was about to drift off to sleep when an unusual noise got her attention. It was a slap, slapping sound, and it was coming from the window. Looking over, she saw that both of the curtains were fluttering in the breeze, but one side seemed weighted down, and it was the sound of its hem hitting the wall that had captured Kassandra’s attention.

  She got out of bed and once again knelt at the window. She took the curtain in hand and saw that the hem was at least two inches wider on this curtain than the other; the stitches were wide and loopy, made with a dark thread—it looked blue in the moonlight—against the pale yellow fabric. How had she not noticed that before? She was just about to go back to bed when she realized something wasn’t quite right about the texture of the material. No, not the texture, but the weight of it. She pinched her fingers around the edge and realized there was something sewn in the hem.

  She went to her bureau and got out the little pair of scissors from her mending kit. Back at the window, she knelt down, looped one stitch ove
r the scissors’ blade, and ripped. Then another, and another. As each thread fell away, Kassandra’s mouth grew wider and wider.

  Cash. This was the money Gloria spent months promising to give to Jewell, the money little Biddy had been sent to steal. And it had been given to her. Just to her, with the promise between friends to take a pair of curtains.

  “Oh, danke, mein Gott!” Kassandra said, clutching the bills to her breast.

  She got to her feet again and padded to Biddy’s door. She knocked softly, then opened the door to the darkness of Biddy’s room.

  he house hadn’t changed much, besides seeming a bit smaller than she remembered. The trim around the windows needed painting, and the steps could use washing, but the iron picket fence still stood out front, and the gate still creaked when she grasped the handle and opened it.

  She stood at the door for what seemed like an eternity;

  Her dress was a deep blue wool with a high neck and tight-fitting sleeves. The hand poised to knock was encased in a tan kid leather glove, and her hat was woven straw with a ribbon tied just under her left ear and a long feather dyed to match drifting down her back.

  Part of her was ready to walk away, but she paused, bowed her head, giving her hand over to God.

  And knocked.

  She heard a series of quick little footsteps on the other side of the door and saw nothing but the entryway behind it when it swung open. Then she looked down, and the hand that she had used to knock now grasped the door’s frame.

  The child was beautiful. Looking into her eyes, gray and spaced a bit wide above her nose, was like looking into Kassandra’s own. Her hair spilled in perfectly curled ringlets that sprang naturally from her head. She had a smattering of her father’s freckles, too, just across the bridge of her nose.

  “Yes?” the child said, catching the tip of her tongue in the gap where her two front teeth should have been, making the word sound like Yeth.