The Evidence Against Her

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The Evidence Against Her Page 25

by Robb Forman Dew


  “For goodness sake, Edson,” Agnes said. “What are you doing? You look like you’re about five years old.” But he just shifted his eyes in her direction and didn’t answer.

  “Oh, leave him alone, Agnes. He’s not worth anything today.” But her mother’s voice was fond, not vexed. Agnes settled at her mother’s dressing table. “Mack sent him in and wouldn’t let him help with Dilly and Buckeye. So he’s been lazing about feeling sorry for himself. Moping because he can’t go into town.” But even then it was clear she was teasing him. Edson didn’t say anything.

  “I know just how he feels! I know they’ll have a party at Scofields. And I’m not feeling so well myself, Mama . . . ,” she said incautiously. “But at least I know why I’m a little nauseated. Oh, before I knew what was the matter with me! Well, for a while I couldn’t eat at all. I could hardly keep water down, and there I was—”

  “I can tell you,” her mother interrupted, lifting her hand, palm flat, in a signal to stop. “One of the things I’ve learned in this lifetime is that there may not be anything more tedious than hearing some woman talking about being pregnant. What on earth did she expect, after all? Do you know those people who as soon as you’re alone with them . . . Why, the first time I even met Louise Dameron . . . I had scarcely said hello before she launched into details of Bernice being born. I’ll tell you, that was the first inkling that I was going to have to accustom myself to an entirely different idea of good manners than what I was used to in Natchez. Who in the world would want to hear about it?” She gazed distractedly at Agnes, seemingly having forgotten why she was launched on such a subject in the first place. She shook her head gently and rested her hand on her own stomach with a sudden attitude of concentration. But after a moment she leaned her head back and resumed her story.

  “Anyway, what Uncle Tidbit didn’t understand . . .”

  Agnes settled back in her chair and directed a disapproving glare at Edson, but he wasn’t looking her way. It hurt her feelings more than she could account for that Edson didn’t remember that the two of them had been locked in solidarity within the family for as long as he had been alive. And she was deeply injured still by her mother’s lack of interest in the child that would be her first grandchild. Agnes herself, of course, was equally uninterested in—had scarcely spared a single thought for—the child who would very soon be her youngest sibling.

  “‘I’ve never heard anything so foolish, Tidbit,’” her mother was saying in a trilling, timid sort of voice. “‘To say that Albertine is doing all the screaming . . .’” Her mother put her hands on her hips and drew her head up, arching her neck in a posture of condescension so that she almost created a double chin, and her voice dropped into a gruff, low register. “‘Blast it, Miss Butterbean! Screening! Fresh screen, because the flies are so bad in the dairy.’”

  But then Catherine slumped back into Miss Butterbean’s apologetic fluttering and gave a delighted, fluting laugh. “‘Oh, Tidbit, if it’s just fresh cream she wants, then there’s certainly no need to raise her voice. Why, there ought to be plenty of cream for anything at all she could want to do.’ . . .” There was a long pause, but Agnes was irresistibly drawn to her own reflection in the canted mirror, and she didn’t notice. “I’m feeling a little strange,” her mother finally said.

  Agnes wasn’t paying attention to her mother’s words, but when Catherine’s voice dropped into its own register, Agnes turned to see what had happened. Her mother was looking back at her as though she had been startled. “What’s the matter, Mama?” Agnes was alarmed, and she stood up, but she wasn’t sure what to do. Edson remained exactly where he was.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t remember this, exactly.” Her mother’s hand once again rested tentatively on her stomach, just her fingertips moving lightly across the blanket. Then her face suddenly closed down in concentration, and she was only looking straight ahead. She was a little breathless when she looked Agnes’s way once again.

  “I expect you’d better see if you can reach Dr. Hayes, Agnes. Leave word for him, anyway. But I don’t like to . . . With Howie it was off and on for days. But I just don’t quite remember this. See if Louise Dameron or Mrs. Longacre could come.”

  Dr. Hayes didn’t get word, since he was on his way home from Chillicothe. But when he approached the Claytor place a little before midnight he saw not only the Claytor house still lit upstairs and down but also the Damerons’ house, farther along the way. He was weary, but he turned into the Claytor drive to see if the baby was coming, and Dr. Hayes arrived a scant half hour before the baby was born. A big, handsome baby, vigorously healthy, but Catherine was spent, although the delivery had gone smoothly.

  Mrs. Dameron had whisked the baby off to the warm kitchen, cleaned him up, swaddled him in a beautifully crocheted blue blanket, and brought him back into Catherine’s room, smiling with deep pleasure when she bent to give him to his mother. “Look here! Here’s this beautiful boy you have. Catherine, just look at him! You’d think he’d been born a week ago!” Catherine let her eye graze the bundled infant, the unusually smooth-featured face, the beautifully shaped head.

  But Catherine had made a listless gesture to wave Louise away. “No, no. Not right now. Not right now.” And she had fallen into an absolute sleep almost as she was speaking. Mrs. Dameron handed the baby to Agnes and began to straighten Catherine’s bedding while Agnes held the baby cautiously, waiting to give him back to Mrs. Dameron. But Mrs. Dameron turned and smiled at her. “You see. You can get some practice. He is a lovely baby, isn’t he?”

  Agnes smiled and nodded and realized that Mrs. Dameron meant to leave this infant with her while Catherine slept. When Mrs. Dameron had first arrived, she had hustled Edson up to bed, but she hadn’t said anything to Agnes, who would have welcomed being sent off with Edson. She hadn’t wanted to stay at all, especially by the time Dr. Hayes arrived and the whole thing seemed to be getting out of hand. But she realized her help was expected, and besides, her mother had grasped hold of Agnes’s skirt, and Agnes couldn’t possibly have disengaged herself. She had leaned over and self-consciously smoothed her mother’s hair, which her mother never would have stood for if she had been aware of it.

  No one else had seemed in the least dismayed, though. In fact, Dr. Hayes and Mrs. Dameron had talked softly about the health conditions at Camp Sherman even as the baby’s head crowned, and Agnes wanted to shout at them both to pay attention. She thought her mother might die of this, although Catherine herself complained very little. But no more than forty-five minutes after the baby was born, it was as though nothing at all had happened. The room was calm and quiet, and her mother lay in bed covered modestly by fresh sheets.

  So when Catherine waved away the baby, Louise Dameron had turned and smiled at Agnes, and Agnes had had no choice but to gingerly accept him, although Mrs. Dameron seemed to Agnes to give him to her as casually as Howie and Richard handed off a football. She had held him while Dr. Hayes went to the kitchen to wash up and while Mrs. Dameron expertly changed the sheets without dislodging Catherine. When Dr. Hayes came back into the room, Agnes was aching from the tension of not dropping this child.

  “I think I might as well stay the night, Agnes,” he said. “Your mother and the baby are fine, but I’d just be coming right back out here in the morning. Do you think you could find me a blanket and I’ll just stretch out on the sofa in the parlor across the hall.”

  “Oh, yes. There’s a cot in the sewing room that would probably be more comfortable. And I’ll bring fresh towels, too, and I’ll go tell Edson. Mrs. Dameron made coffee, Dr. Hayes. And there’s cake . . . there’s cream. And deviled eggs in the icebox.”

  Agnes put the swaddled baby in his bassinet beside his mother’s bed with great relief. Holding him was filled with dangerous possibilities. She had clasped her little brother and smiled at Dr. Hayes and Mrs. Dameron with feigned knowingness, and thought that this certainly couldn’t be what it would be like when she had her baby. Agnes tried not to s
eem shocked, although she was a little scornful—and even embarrassed on her mother’s behalf—at what seemed the violent indelicacy of this baby’s birth. But she did know better than to say so.

  When she looked in on Edson and called his name from his doorway, he didn’t answer or even move. Agnes approached his bed in the little bit of moonlight, but he seemed oddly without substance beneath his blanket. Edson usually slept in a turmoil, his mother always said. And it was true. Agnes had been amused some mornings—been annoyed on other days—when she had come to get him up and found him cocooned in sheets and blankets as though he had held one end and spun round and round, spiraling the bedclothes around him. But the sheet and blanket lay smoothly in place, the margin of the top sheet was still neatly folded over the edge of the wool blanket, and only Edson’s head and shoulders were visible against the pillowcase. Agnes leaned over him, meaning to surprise him awake with the news, but she jumped when she saw that his eyes were open and he was looking directly at her as she came into his line of vision.

  Edson thought he had spoken to her—thought he had explained how thirsty he was—but he didn’t try to move. He felt as though each joint of his body—his elbows, his knees, his ankles, his shoulders—were pinned to the mattress by a powerful force that he could not characterize. He didn’t make the effort to try to convey it, but he knew he could not move. He thought he had spoken to Agnes, who was peering down at him, but he hadn’t said a word, even though his head rang with a cacophony of roaring, unspecific noise that seemed to him to be a reverberation of his own words.

  “Are you all right? Edson? The baby’s here. Are you all right?” She put her hand on his forehead for a moment, and then he did make a noise, although he wasn’t aware of it. He made a low moan in the back of his throat when her cold hand grazed his tender flesh.

  “I’ll get Dr. Hayes, Edson. You stay still. I’ll get Dr. Hayes.” Edson found it odd to see Agnes receding, and then she seemed to tip right out of the doorway. She tipped over the very edge, and he closed his eyes and gave himself over to the sensation of drifting downward, slowly drifting through water in which small, surprising flecks of light and clear, pale blue and green asterisklike creatures blossomed forth and floated upward, slowly streaming by him.

  Dr. Hayes came downstairs after looking in on Edson and had a brief, hushed conversation with Louise Dameron. “. . . certainly not much choice . . .” was all Agnes heard Mrs. Dameron say. And then Agnes once again found herself in charge of the baby, and she was caught up in preparations for the two of them to go to the Damerons’ for the night.

  “Oh, yes, Agnes,” Mrs. Dameron said to her in a tired effort at heartiness, “it’s always bad luck for a pregnant woman to stay in a house where a baby’s just been born. It may be an old wives’ tale, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. And if Edson is sick . . .”

  “But I’m sure he only has the same thing I got just before graduation, Mrs. Dameron. And Howie and Richard. Even my father got sick. The baby and I’ll be just fine here,” Agnes objected. “It only lasts about three days . . . .”

  “Well, that’s a good thing. But we don’t want to take the chance that the baby might catch it. And you’ll have him all to yourself for a day or so. I’ll tell you, Bernice will be as jealous as she can be.”

  Agnes was swept off to the Damerons’ house, where Mrs. Dameron settled her into William’s empty bedroom with the bassinet beside her bed. Mrs. Longacre and Bernice had been downstairs to greet them when Jerome Dameron finally got them home, and Agnes didn’t think Bernice seemed jealous in the slightest.

  William’s room was right across the hall from Bernice’s, and Agnes was miserable all the rest of the night whenever the baby fussed. She gave him sugar water just as Mrs. Dameron had instructed her, but she found herself overwhelmed and frantic whenever he refused the bottle and continued to cry. She was desperate not to be held accountable for failing to see to him properly.

  • • •

  In the morning, when Catherine was finally and fully awake and learned that Edson was very sick, she began to gather herself up and untangle herself from the blankets, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.

  The doctor and Louise Dameron, who had come straight over as soon as it was light, both reached out to detain her, but Catherine became truly determined—alarming both the doctor and Mrs. Dameron. Catherine was washed over full force by a powerful need to see and to protect her own child. She was overcome with a prickling sort of energy bordering on rage, and she wouldn’t pay attention to what Louise Dameron and Dr. Hayes were trying to impress upon her.

  “Just let me be! Just let me be! Of course I understand how bad this flu is! Of course I do! And that’s why I’ve got to go up and see Edson. You don’t understand what I’m saying . . . . You don’t seem to understand a thing in the world!” She declared this with such contemptuous finality that Louise Dameron and Dr. Hayes were taken aback, and they stepped aside to let her pass.

  Catherine sat beside Edson, lifting him to prop his pillows so that he could breathe more easily. She did heed Dr. Hayes by trying to ease Edson’s breathing with short, periodic applications of a bit of cotton soaked in chloroform between his teeth. Every fifteen minutes she would administer the chloroform for no more than one minute. And it did ease Edson considerably. He wasn’t frightened by the dreamy, floating descent through blue green water with the fantastic colored shapes squirming upward in brief bursts of varicolored light. And he was soothed when he came back to himself and felt the unusual comfort of his mother’s hand holding his or heard her voice.

  Mrs. Dameron went home and went to bed, only telling Agnes that Edson was very sick and that she would have to wait until later to see him. Dr. Hayes was so tired that he was nearly asleep on his feet, and he retreated to the bed in Agnes’s room across from Edson’s and slept in brief spells. And Catherine sat leaning over her son for hours, speaking softly in the quiet house as she told meandering stories, sang any song she could remember, told Edson once again the history of all his family, naming relatives finally in a kind of cadence, as though she were muttering through a rosary. Catherine didn’t want her son to be stranded alone in the spells of delirium that overtook him off and on during the day. She looked at his face gone oddly brown against his fair hair, and at his eyes seeming huge and sunken, and she was certain that this was the one person she needed more than any other in her life.

  She thought her voice would hold him in the room, and she couldn’t stop speaking without hearing the terrible struggle of his breathing, and so she talked on and on. When Dr. Hayes came out of a brief, deep sleep he crossed the hall and simply stood leaning against the doorframe.

  Catherine’s words dropped away for minutes at a time and finally stopped altogether when she leaned her head against the wall and fell into a deep spell of sleep herself. Dr. Hayes disengaged Catherine’s hand and held the boy’s hand himself; Edson didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t know that Dr. Hayes was in the room. Edson died in the early evening and was never aware that it was anyone but his mother with him as he drifted on and on, tumbling slowly through the translucent green water until at last he was too tired to struggle for another breath.

  Chapter Eleven

  WITHIN TEN DAYS Catherine Claytor, too, had died of complications of the flu, and Agnes was overwhelmed with an agitation she couldn’t accommodate. She mourned in dreams. Time and again she would wake up with the panicky sensation of being unable to find her mother and her brother. It seemed to her that all night she trailed along hallways and through rooms that in her dreams were familiar but which didn’t exist in the actual world. There was some bit of information she intended to tell them, some little thing she had forgotten. But her mother and her brother eluded her—not purposefully, but Agnes just missed them every time. Her mother and Edson would have just vacated a room she entered, just retreated down a staircase she approached, and, as she failed to find them, the urgency of her message increased and made her fra
ntic. She invariably awoke, however, to the crying of the baby, and she had no time to indulge in her particular anguish or even to name it.

  Louise Dameron and Lillian Scofield and Lily and her parents were—each one privately—a bit taken aback by what they collectively admired as Agnes’s remarkable fortitude. It left them uncertain what to say to her. There was no clear etiquette to cover this situation. Any sign of grief on Agnes’s part would have been clarifying. Warren had been unable to return from Washington, and as it was, no one knew how to approach Agnes. No one knew what might be unbearable to her, what she might be relieved to talk about, and so no one ever referred to her mother or Edson, leaving it for her to initiate any conversation about them. Growing up in the Claytor household, however, what Agnes had learned best was never to reveal how she felt or what she thought to anyone outside her family.

  Agnes remained at the Damerons’ during her mother’s illness, but after the funeral she and the baby were settled at Scofields. Certainly Agnes—newly married and expecting her first child fairly soon—couldn’t stay out in the country by herself. Couldn’t possibly take care of an infant all alone in her condition. It was agreed all around—among the Damerons and Scofields as well as the Butlers and Dr. Hayes, too, who had been consulted—that Mr. Claytor was in no state to arrange for the care of his youngest son right now, in the wake of the loss of his wife and little boy.

  Dwight Claytor had been urged to keep his older sons in Columbus in the aftermath of Edson’s death and during their mother’s illness because of the risk of contagion. But he brought Howie and Richard home for their mother’s funeral and the belated service held for their brother. There was some discussion of Mrs. Longacre setting the nursery up once more out at the Claytor place, and possibly overseeing the baby’s care until Howie and Richard were back in Washburn and permanent arrangements could be made. Dwight Claytor agreed to whatever idea was put forward. He seemed dazed and oddly passive, incurious about the baby. But in the circumstances, no one was surprised, and Dr. Hayes felt quite certain that it would simply take him a little time to absorb his loss.

 

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