Pretending not to see the policeman, she ran in his direction, not veering off until he was nearly upon her. She screamed, but he grabbed her, shook her by the arm, and peeled the apple from her hand. She struggled. “I’ll give it back. I promise, I’ll never steal again.”
He pulled her down the street to shaking heads, whispers from stoops of “caught again” and “poor lass.” In front of her building, when he’d shown the occupants on the street he meant business, Bridget quit resisting.
“I have to go West,” she said. “I have to go on your train.”
He studied her, frowning. “She won’t have it.”
He had red hair too, and his accent sounded like home—though home and its sounds seemed from another lifetime. Was that why he had patience with her?
“You have to make her let me go. She’s dying.” She’d not cried in front of the man before and slapped at tears she hated now. “When I’m gone, you have to help her to the boat. She has a ticket. One ticket.”
“Oh lass,” Grandma Teegan moaned and coughed at seeing the policeman and his grip on Bridget. “Oh lass,” the words full of defeat and heartbreak.
Bridget pulled free. Grandma Teegan’s face looked as stricken as it had the day her grandson Rowan died. “It’s not your fault,” she said.
“How many times?” the copper asked. “Next time it won’t be me arresting her.” He sighed and took off his cap, tucking it under his arm. “Me mum,” he said, “I can’t let her go free again. The whole street be crying me foul. She don’t smoke, drink beer, sniff the powder. She ain’t in a gang of street rats. But all that be coming for her. She best take the train—”
“Na.” Grandma Teegan moaned the word and was struck with coughing.
Bridget knelt and dropped her head in Grandma Teegan’s lap. Had she gone too far? Would the policeman lock her up if Grandma Teegan didn’t agree? Even then, Grandma Teegan would at least be free of her.
“Look at ye,” the man said. “Ye pass this winter and what of her? It’ll be jail soon enough.”
Pass this winter? Bridget licked her lips, then wider, searching for the taste of Mum’s tears. Was the copper seeing the death shadow? “I want to go. I want to go,” she said again. “The train goes West. I’ll find Mum and Pappy. I know I will.”
Grandma Teegan made a gasping, wet noise. Tears filled her eyes, bubbled over, and disappeared in her wrinkles.
Bridget licked again, promising herself she did taste Mum’s tears. They’d lain together in the grass, watching clouds. Shoulder to shoulder, their hair spilled into one color, and they couldn’t tell the long curls apart. Mum rolled to her side, stared into Bridget’s face, and a tear dropped onto Bridget’s lips. The salty taste of that tear and their matching hair were the two best memories she had of Mum. The rest was all Grandma Teegan.
“I have to get on the train,” Bridget said. Her heart was ripping. She’d find Mum and tell her how she’d been brave enough to let Grandma Teegan go home. She’d also tell Mum about her brother Rowan, although she wouldn’t admit the death was her fault. “Please. He’s going to put me in jail.”
The cop nodded.
“Mum wants me to go West,” Bridget begged. “Grandma Teegan, you can’t put me in jail.”
The next day, they stood together in a large room before a wide desk, Grandma Teegan more stooped than upright. Her white head was bare, her long braid sawed off with a knife and wrapped in her red shawl—the bundle tied around Bridget’s waist. A man sitting behind the desk shoved papers across to be signed. Bridget held her hands over her mouth to keep her trembling lips quiet. She watched as Grandma Teegan, with her hands shaking so hard Bridget didn’t think she could do it, the great-grandmother she’d lived with and loved all her life, picked up the pen and signed her away.
Seventeen-year-old Effie sat on the porch steps of her family’s Minnesota farmhouse. Out over the pasture not a bur oak, slippery elm, or any other tree had been left standing to mar the surface. Or for an Injun to hide in. Sticking a hand out from a trunk, then pushing a foot through bark—as Granny described it—emerging fully formed with a nearly-naked, painted body. Complete with raised tomahawk.
Even the massive oak, once standing only yards from the porch and holding a swing and giving picnic shade, had been taken down. All that remained was a thick round stump, waist high for Ma’s washtub. The tub sat there now, glaring in the sun. The same tub in which seven years earlier Baby Sally had drowned.
Effie’s stomach churned. Seven years and yet it might have been seven minutes since the terrible afternoon she’d fallen asleep while tending the toddler.
The screen door behind her banged, followed by two quick raps, one on top of the next. She turned to see her little brothers, the four-year-old twins, opening and slamming the door just for the noise.
“Stop,” she scolded. “Let Granny sleep so I can have a moment of peace.”
When they banged the door again, she half stood as if she had the will to get up and give chase. They squealed and ran inside. The door rapped closed.
She slumped back down, her gaze fixing again on the washtub. For the last year, she’d been able to shift Baby Sally’s death to a smaller room in her mind. She’d been in love and dreamed of a future with nineteen-year-old Jury.
She swallowed against the knot in her throat, wanting to run off the porch and away. But where to go and cry without being seen by Granny, her parents, or one of her brothers? She wasn’t going alone into a pasture—even one stripped of its trees—and sharing a tiny bedroom with Granny meant she had no private space even inside the house. Only the small, dark place beneath Baby Sally’s black burial cloth.
The screen door squeaked open again. She started, ready to take the twins in hand. Instead, seven-year-old Johnny came out, his sweet face pinched with sadness. He sat down beside her. “I couldn’t find you.” He didn’t ask for the hundredth time how to tie his shoes or why night was dark. Or even why Granny screamed. “I couldn’t find you,” he said again.
Her sadness was affecting him. She tried to smile. He’d been hers to care for since infancy when Ma shoved the newborn into her arms.
“I been right here,” Effie said. He didn’t deserve to carry her grief. “Show me your marbles.”
He sniffled and curled, putting his head in her lap. “Skeet,” he said, his bottom lip trembling.
She brushed hair off his forehead. Yellow-white hair like her own and in need of her scissors. “I’ll make Skeet give them back. Okay?”
He moved, wiping his teary cheek on the skirt of her only good dress. It was Sunday, and though for the second week the family wasn’t showing their faces in church, Granny coaxed Effie into the green silk. Then Granny insisted the old preacher, who came down the lane days earlier in a rickety buggy pulled by a rickety horse, read from his Bible. He arrived two days after Effie heard the news about Jury. One day after Pa sent her to Jury to “do what you must. Wife him, need be.”
Johnny pinched fabric on Effie’s skirt and used it to wipe his nose. Granny would scold when she saw the stain, angry that Effie hadn’t bothered to change back into a farm dress after the Bible reading. The green had been Granny’s, and she’d paid twenty-five cents to have the seams let out and the hem let down for Effie.
A cow lowed in the distance, and Effie’s gaze lifted again to the stark and barren pasture. She ached for the shelter of the black cloth she kept under her pillow. She’d draw it over her head and shut out the world so she could weep in private. Suppose she was pregnant? What then? How long could she hide her condition? And where could she go to escape when she no longer could? Pregnant and no husband? There was no greater shame, not just for her, but for the whole family. She couldn’t hurt her parents, especially Ma. Not again.
Only ten days earlier, the whole world had seemed fixed to pop wide open for her. She thought she’d soon be leaving on Jury’s arm. Thought the two of them would live six miles up the road, not far from Johnny and the others, but far
enough away to allow her to sleep at night and escape Homeplace’s ghosts.
Then Pa returned from New Ulm with their weekly supplies, his face wound tight. He dropped a sack of coffee beans on the table and turned to Effie. “Jury ain’t marrying you.”
The words gusted in her head, quick and strong. Standing at the sink washing dishes, she’d needed to grab the sides and hang on.
“He’s marrying someone else.”
She’d loved Jury long before he even noticed her. All through the winter, he’d come Sundays to court. Courting not just her, but her parents, her brothers, even Granny. Well-mannered as a man fixing any day to ask for her hand.
She dropped her eyes to the pans still needing scrubbed. Jury was marrying someone else? The hurt struck deep, knifed her where all along she’d known she wasn’t good enough for him. Couldn’t ever be enough. She’d let Baby Sally die.
Johnny, his head still in her lap, turned over. “Now this side,” he said, pressing his other cheek to the silk.
She rested her hand on Johnny’s shoulder. She’d been his mother, changing his diapers, feeding him until he was old enough to hold his own cup, and keeping him from the washtub. She was still his mama, drying his tears, scolding him when he got too close to a horse, teaching him his letters. She knew how to be a mama all right, but how could she put a roof over a child’s head and food in a child’s belly? She had no hope of ever getting a job. She couldn’t read more than the word “soda” or “salt” on a can. And no respectable family would have an unwed mother in their house, even as a maid.
She stifled a moan. She couldn’t bring such awful grief to Ma. So that Ma couldn’t walk down the street in town without people gawking even more. Ma, who’d already lost a baby daughter to drowning, given birth to a boy people thought simple, and lived with a crazy mother-in-law. A woman surely unfavored in God’s eyes.
The door to the house opened, and the old preacher stepped out. Since Reverend Jackdaw’s arrival, she’d been so consumed with losing Jury and possibly being pregnant, she’d scarce paid the man any attention. He was nearest Granny in age, and Granny was the only reason Pa tolerated the man sleeping in the barn.
The afternoon Rev. Jackdaw arrived, Effie had also been sitting on the porch, Granny sniffling and rocking behind her. Pa marched from the barn at the sound of a squeaking buggy and a horse clopping down the lane. He listened to three words of the man’s complaint and pointed down the road toward New Ulm. “Blacksmith on ahead. Take your troubles there.”
The preacher spied Granny wrapped in her quilt. He jumped down, rushed up the steps, and lifted Granny’s hand. “Rev. Jackdaw,” he said. “The Lord’s blessing on you.”
Granny sputtered.
“I see by the light in your eyes, Sister. You are one of God’s elect.”
The tip of Granny’s tongue poked around the teeth on the right side of her mouth and out the gaping hole on the left. She found her voice, insisted he stay for coffee. A piece of pie. A prayer for her nerves. When Pa objected, she pointed at him. “That one wath off fithing with hith pole.”
Pa turned and headed back to the barn.
Granny wasn’t on the porch now, nor Pa, only Rev. Jackdaw stepping up too close. His body blocked the sunlight, casting her and Johnny in shadow. She thought he wanted to pass, but he only stared down at them, his large, worn shoes inches from Johnny’s small fingers. She pulled his hand to safety.
“There’s wisdom for you in the good book.” He fisted his Bible, holding it in the air like a rock or hammer. “Passages to deliver you from your suffering.”
He recognized her suffering? She could feel Johnny beginning to tremble. “It’s all right,” she soothed, but he scrambled up and ran back into the house.
Rev. Jackdaw peered down his long nose. “Just desserts that one.”
“No,” Effie said. The man had no right. People thought the seven-year-old simple, but only Granny and Skeet—older than Effie by two years and heavier than her by thirty pounds—used words like imbecile and stupid. Said them in Johnny’s presence. Granny didn’t mean any harm; she couldn’t help the holes in her mind. How it clutched coins of reason one minute and lost them the next.
“Johnny gets scared,” Effie said. The preacher had one eye old and one scarred, twitchy, and mean. “You scare him, that’s all.”
“Follow me,” Rev. Jackdaw ordered. “I’ll deliver your soul.”
His manner, sharp as his voice, proved to Granny that God Himself had come down the lane and slept the last week in their barn. Effie didn’t agree, despite the man’s age and the long white beard. Still, suppose the half-twisted face and the shaking Bible could help her?
He struck out across the yard, his long shadow reaching back for her. “Follow me.”
“If-fee!” The cry came from deep in the house. Granny was awake. Then more insistent, “If-fee!”
She ached to run screaming down the long lane to the county road. Only Pa knew the full story of Jury. But even he didn’t know how scared she was, or how she contemplated jumping off the Redstone Bridge. Wasn’t that the best way out of her misery and the only way to save the family from more shame?
“Effie!” Ma’s voice this time. “I need you in here.”
Effie hurried after Rev. Jackdaw.
They used the cow path, walking along the crest of the pasture hill, she several steps behind. At the pond, its banks swollen by snowmelt, they stopped. Large startled frogs—last year’s survivors—jumped from the crusty edges, splashed, and disappeared under the water. She sat a few feet from Rev. Jackdaw, his teeth yellow and horsey under his beard and his strange eye. She struggled not to turn away in disgust. Instead, she concentrated on keeping as much of her skirt as possible bunched in her lap, off the ground and away from ants.
Rev. Jackdaw opened his Bible and began to read, each verse louder than the last. Suddenly, strange sounds sprung from his mouth—not words at all, but some goofy language of his devising. She’d heard of people speaking in “tongues” at revivals, but this jumble of sounds reminded her of the Pig Latin she and Skeet spoke. A way of cursing each other without Ma understanding the bickering.
Rev. Jackdaw continued spouting, shiny bits of spittle flashing in the sunlight, his voice rising and falling as he lifted his Bible heavenward.
Several minutes passed. Effie began doubting that what she saw was a show. The sounds went on too long, without hesitation, and he’d forgotten she was there. When he remembered her finally, his bad eye, looking blind only a minute earlier, burrowed into her.
“Lord, save her from her sins of the flesh.”
She froze. The sky was a hard blue, and yet she felt certain the heavens were thick with eyes. How could he know her sin without God having seen and told him?
Over the next hour, the preacher’s attentiveness held her like a pair of hands. The choice was hers, he said. Salvation could open her chest and put in the glow of a stained-glass window. Or she could refuse the invitation and send her soul to the fire of ever-lasting damnation.
She couldn’t undo her past, couldn’t bring Sally back or take back the hour in Jury’s loft. Not by herself. If she didn’t even try to be saved by this man, who was willing to do it, what other hope did she have?
He drummed his fingers, nails chipped and dirty, on his Bible. His shirt smelled of days without being washed. “Are you ready to accept baptism?”
She nodded and rose to her feet. Her family, especially Pa, needed to witness and know she’d been saved. “I’ll run and get the others, change my dress.”
“Don’t you know,” the good and the bad eye settled on her, “it’s better to pray and receive in private?”
Her face burned; she’d acted childish. She looked down, pinched the green silk of her skirt. “I couldn’t . . . Granny.” She kept from adding, It’s the only decent piece of clothing I have.
“Why take ye thought for raiment?”
He plopped a heavy hand on her head. She thought he meant to bl
ess her, but he pushed until her knees lowered to the grass. He prayed, long and loud—his hand still heavy—that on the day of her baptism into eternal life she might be saved from her heathen shyness and false pride in her mortal body.
He drew her up by the elbow and began removing his shoes.
Her fingers found the buttons on her bodice. Rev. Jackdaw was a holy old man, and she was in need of being saved. She slid the dress off her shoulders and stepped out. Standing in only her underslip, she let him take her hand and tug her into the pond.
The icy water stung her ankles and calves. She winced. Then winced again with each step and the cold crawling higher on her legs.
With his arm around her waist, he pulled her forward. “Do not fear the Kingdom of God.”
She couldn’t stop now. Her dress was off, the water above her knees. She’d already begun moving away from this miserable world and into another full of promise. When the water reached her waist, he stopped. He prayed with more force, his words again lurching and strange. She thought of a gaggle of geese and then again of the Pig Latin she used to fight with Skeet.
When Rev. Jackdaw leaned her back, cold water raced up her spine. She jerked and clutched his arms to keep from going too deep. He draped his body over hers and held her so close she felt his chest pounding. The awful backward bending and the cold replaced by her fear of drowning, she clung to him. Baby Sally died in less than half a washtub.
He cupped water and dripped it over her forehead. Her legs trembled with the cold, the continued bending back, and fear. She turned her head away, trying to keep his unwashed beard out of her face. The horsey teeth chomping words she still didn’t understand.
His arm pulled out from beneath her. She sank. Water rushed over her. Her arms slapped and splashed. Pond water filled her mouth. She twisted and managed to turn over. Her feet found the slippery bottom. Spitting and gasping, she splashed for shore.
On the bank, her thin slip dripped and clung to her skin. He came close, as though he’d pray over her again. Hunched and hugging herself, she quaked with cold. “You made me fall.”
River People Page 2