The boy is too fast. He slips past Cathy, aiming for the dining room, stopping in his tracks at the door.
No one moves. We all stare at Toby staring at Alice on the table. He turns his head: to me, to Lionel, to Cathy.
Cathy circles round him to pull the door tight. “Come here, my boy.” She drops to her knees and draws him to her, enveloping him in the billows of her skirt. He arches back, quivering and tense as a bow, and lets out a scream. He bats her hands from him, clawing at her cheek, kicking to be let go. She fingers a scratch on her jaw, then slaps him.
“Cathy!” Lionel presses past me.
The boy totters back from her, chest welling, face purple with shock and rage.
“When will she leave us alone?” Cathy’s hands fist her skirt. “When will she ever leave us be?” She clamps her jaw and stands, wiping at the scratch now beaded with blood. “I want her buried.”
Behind the house, skirting the pebbles and rush that line Turee Pond, Lionel and I lug the coffin. There are piles of burnt wood where the glass house once sat. The path we follow is muddled with chokeberry and Queen Anne’s lace. The icehouse crouches between maples and oaks that tint the light pale green and hold in the clammy air. The coffin bumps my thigh.
“Nearly there.” Lionel steps over a twist of root.
Up a small hill, to the family plot, to a burst of sunlight and shimmering air and a deep hole to the right of Father’s, Mother’s, and Lydia’s. The grass of Lydia’s grave is scattered with twigs and feathers. I turn my eyes to the dark rectangle mouth that will soon swallow Alice whole.
We set the box on the lip of the grave. The yardman, Elias Morton, stands nearby. Lionel sent for him. Paid double to make certain the job was done quickly. His white hair curls from under his stovepipe hat, settling on the fray of his collar. His milky eyes follow Lionel and ignore me.
No words. The men take a handle each, crouch low, and drop the case into the ground.
I let out a breath, rake up a fistful of earth, then open my fingers so it sifts and scatters on the pine box.
“I’m sorry, missus.” Elias stares at his boots. “So sorry.”
Lionel stands with his hands on his hips. “She’ll be better now.” He looks at me across the pit. “She never forgave you for leaving her with us.”
I choke down a sob and turn away. I cannot watch the rest, when I know how the dark terrifies her, and now she will be encased in it. When I know my brother is right. I do not deserve forgiveness.
Chapter Three
Perhaps I should get up from the bed, open another window, the one facing the kitchen garden. I’ve been lying here since we buried Alice, watching the shadows slip across the room and the sun darken to a thick burnt orange. But Cathy’s down in the garden, her voice a burble and sometimes a coo and sometimes “Toby, stay out of the tomatoes,” and “Toby, Toby, where are you?”
Toby laughs and shrieks as only little boys can do when hiding from stepmothers amidst plants and hedges and the knife-edged shadows of a sinking sun.
Lionel and Cathy have given me this room at the back of the house. Alice’s old room. The windows face both the kitchen garden and Turee Pond. The bed sits next to the glass with a wide sill to hold my morning tea; the writing table has three drawers and a squat shelf. My childhood wardrobe has been dragged from the barn and repainted in robin’s-egg blue. Pink roses snake down the wallpaper. Cathy’s set a clock and a vase of posies on the fireplace mantel.
A fine little room trying so desperately to be cheerful.
“You’ll be more comfortable down here,” Lionel said. “And Cathy’s bought all new linens for you.”
What he meant was they would be more comfortable with me—the widow with no means—not underfoot. I haven’t determined yet how many thank yous and sorrys will be enough.
It comes then, a rip and tear to my heart, that this is not a temporary situation: this is what happens when one’s husband is killed with half his regiment on Monett’s Bluff.
I can still see the casualty sheet, posted atop the others until the watered silk walls of a room once elegant bulged with names of the missing and dead.
The ward attendant tapped the sheet and bellowed, “Forty-seventh Pennsylvania. Twenty-ninth Wisconsin. Eighth New Hampshire.”
A soldier in nothing but frayed gray trousers lurched up from the floor and yanked my apron for attention. “That’s my brother’s regiment.” He scratched under the bandage on his face. “That’s Franklin’s men! He’ll have got ’em good. Is he on the list? Can you look? Can you tell me if my brother’s on the list?”
“Stop scratching. It won’t heal.” I kneeled to him. Put my hand atop his to still it.
“Will you look for me? Look for my brother, Franklin Branch.”
The room felt wadded with cotton, all the sounds muted but the constant thump of my heart and the soldier’s voice. Will you look? Will you, Nurse?
“Eighth New Hampshire?” I stepped over and past the wounded, holding my skirts tight against me in the narrow hall. Jostled between cots and surgeons and soldiers who stood or swayed—too well for a bed, too injured to be returned to their troops. Crying and moans and the uproar of more carts and more men echoing from the street to the vestibule. I stood on tiptoe to see over the men who’d gathered in front of the lists. Started at the A’s.
There. Benjamin Abb—. One name amongst scores, the last three letters cut off in a crimp of glue.
It was late before I returned to my billet. All day I’d sent missives for the wounded and dying, my fingers stained with ink. Now I sent my own.
City Point May 4, 1864
Dear Lionel,
Benjamin is dead. Tell Alice. She will not lament his passing. For me, I tell you plainly I cannot mourn a man I did not love. He quashed that sentiment too soon and required it again too late.
I am enclosing a rebel two dollar bill for Toby. His birthday is next Friday if I have my days straight.
Thank Cathy for her letter of last week, it brought cheer. The lemon drops were a marvelous surprise.
As ever yours
—M
Lionel’s return letter was placating and kind. Alice’s was honest.
Here. May 25.
I didn’t do anything wrong. Come home.
—Alice
AND—I’m not sorry. About Benj.
The columns of roses on the bedroom wall dissolve and reform into the white of Alice’s skin, the brown-purple bruises, the blood-tangled hair that took so long to plait.
She didn’t suffer.
She did. Of course she did. All her life.
I gasp for air and bolt up. Hold in a moan and rock forward, elbows jabbed to my thighs. I want to crawl out of my own skin, away from the sear of guilt. I left her here, when I should have come home.
There’s a soft knock on the door and a turn of the knob. A small shoe slides in the opening. I grab my wrap from the end of the bed and pull it round me. Toby slips just inside the door.
“You should wait for an answer first.”
He twists the seam of his breeches pocket, then lets it go and wipes his finger along the edge of his nose.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am. I should wait for an answer, then you will let me in.” His gaze circles the small room, stopping on the round clock atop the mantel. He points at it and contemplates the black scrollwork hands, the bulge of the face, the gold gilt numbers.
“It’s eight and six,” he says.
“Yes. Eight thirty.” So, I’ve slept. The sky is tinged butternut and gray.
“You missed dinner.”
“I did.”
“We had raisin pudding.” He scratches under his chin. His nails are mooned black with dirt.
“What do you need, Toby?”
He shakes his head then turns around, picking something up from the hall floor, and backs into the room. He grimaces, gripping a tray by its corners so as not to upset the bowl balanced at its center. The spoon s
lides to the lip.
“Let me.” I rise from the bed, take the tray, and set it on the desk. The broth is tepid, no steam; a dab of grease floats on the surface and then clings to the interior of the bowl.
“Do you like beef tea?” I ask.
He pulls his chin into his neck and shakes his head.
“We have something in common, then.”
“Mama said it’s fortificious.”
He calls Cathy “Mama”—I suppose it’s expected. Still, it has only been three years. He was five when Lydia drowned. Old enough to remember her, I think. Is there a prescribed passage of time that must pass before the mantle of mother moves from one woman to the next? Perhaps the word comes prior to the affection, for I see little of it between the two now.
My nose curls at the smell of the broth. I unlatch the window. I’ll tip it to the ground once everyone’s abed. “You can give your . . . Cathy . . . my thanks.”
Toby sets one foot on top of the other. He frowns then, and blinks. His lashes are so long. “Where’s Alice?”
“She’s gone away.”
“But she just came back.”
“Oh, Toby.” I kneel and touch his shoulder. “Alice is . . . She isn’t coming back. She’s with God now.”
“But I saw her.” He swallows gulps of air. His eyes widen, the pupils slipping to black dots. “Who’ll keep away the Bad Ones?”
Alice in the corner, twelve years old, balanced like a stork on one foot, finger scraping the paint and plaster, not turning around. “They’re out there,” she said. “Right outside the window.”
“There’s nothing there. Please Alice, come downstairs. Come down, don’t wake Mother—”
“There are no Bad Ones, Toby.”
“Yes, there are.” He points to the glass, now flat and black but for the flicker of gaslight reflected from the hall. “Out there. It’s why she slept in the glass house. To keep guard.”
Alice believed night creatures lived in the pond—fiends that came from the Narrows, where the pond pinched and bent out of sight. She drew the creatures in the corners of her notebooks. Wire wings stitched in mismatched feathers—white tufts from an owl, black plumes of the long-tailed duck, the emerald offering of a mallard—six red beetle legs with single talons, a dragonfly body with horse’s tail, eight eyes split into honeycomb patterns.
We weren’t allowed to go there as children. It is deep, the slip from the edge a surprise, the stone too smooth for scrambling feet and hands.
Alice drew the Bad Ones sanding the surfaces every night, lingering on lily pads near the deepest crevice, waiting for a poor soul to slip.
Elgin Miller’s son—1812, 10 years old
Marjorie & Hester Bickford—1834, 8 & 10
Israel Foley—1737(?) 72 and perhaps drunk
Mayhew Greenleaf—1788—wheelwright
More names, written in neat ink on the back wall of her wardrobe, so small she used a magnifier to add each to her roll of the dead. The wardrobe now in Toby’s room. All the names she’d created or recorded from the stones in the town cemetery now covered with paper and glue.
Stephen Lang—1854—24 yrs old, to wed Timothy Lamprey’s daughter
Mildred Larkin—1855
Theresa Messer—1855
The summer Mother died, wasted and anguished with pain. The summer Alice turned fourteen and suddenly refused to speak.
Lydia Snow—1862
I did not make the funeral. We are too much entangled in war, I wrote. Alice will be of good use for the boy, as I am of good use for the Union.
Alice’s return letter was a drawing of me splayed on the lily pads, the creatures crouched on my abdomen and poking the sockets of my eyes with the tip of a gnarled walking stick.
Smoketown Hospital, MD Nov 1862
Dear Alice,
Your letter (drawing) was much disturbing and I am distressed enough as it be. If this is my punishment for not attending Lydia’s funeral, if this is so—to have this horrible drawing seared in my mind—then it is too much. If this is to tell me you are angry, it is too much. I am full here with terrible enough scenes, and men in pieces and many ill with dysentery and some will not make it home.
Sister, you must look to the sunlight. You do remember that, to look away from the dark. You must be a good aunt now for that little child.
I must go. It is far late. I am sending two dollars and this bead bracelet as a token of my everlasting love to you. It is simple, yes, but it sparkles in the light.
As ever yours
—M
There is no air tonight. I’ve left the windows thrown open on the off chance of a whisper of breeze. I twist on the bedsheets, searching for a spot less hot than the space I just occupied.
The clock ticks, though I cannot see the time. Late, I know. I sent Toby from the room, listened to the squeaks and groans of the floorboards as Cathy took him to bed, took herself to her room. Lionel calling a goodnight from the landing and knocking the balustrade with his knuckles, just as Father did for us. Then later, his footfall on the stairs. The latch of the kitchen door as Saoirse locks up, then treks across the gravel drive to the road and the cottage at the crossing she shares with Elias.
I squeeze my eyes shut, clench my fists to my stomach, wish for sleep. Listen to the tick of the clock. But images sift and turn: strange Kitty scuttling along the stone fence, the pipes of the asylum basement, the lavender I crushed to powder, the marbled green of Alice’s stomach as if she were transforming to stone.
I breathe through my nose, in and out, my limbs so heavy against the bed. Bones without muscle.
Tink tink tink.
The noise comes from the hall. I pull my robe from the bed iron, shrug it on, then lift the candle and turn the doorknob.
The light slips across the parquet on the floor, creeping up the walls and through the pattern of irises and mourning doves. I can see us all, hear us—Lionel and Alice and I, tumbling down the stairs to the landing. A snow day. Father waiting out front with the sleds. Mother leaning off the top railing.
“You make sure Alice has her mittens,” she calls down, her voice still strong, her cheeks ruddy with life.
Lionel shoves his arms in his coat, then winds a wool scarf round and round his neck. He’s taller than me, whisper thin, and knobby at the knees and elbows. When did he grow so?
I lift Alice’s coat from a hook. “Come on. Father will turn into a penguin.”
“Where’d you hide all the mittens?” Lionel leans over the storage bench, digging through and then lifting out the pairs. He twists round, kneeling to Alice. “Hold out your hands, little bluebird.”
I button my jacket to the neck and grab my wool cap. “Don’t forget her hat, Lionel.”
“I won’t forget the hat.”
“I don’t want a hat,” Alice says, and shakes her curls.
“You’ll take your hat,” I say.
“I’ll be ten on Friday and you won’t be able to tell me what to do anymore.”
“That’s right.” Lionel stands with his palms on his hips. “You’ll rule the house and all the world. And Marion will have to listen to you instead of us having to listen to her.”
I watch the ghosts of us that linger still, that rush out the door and let in the blistering cold. Trudging to Wagon Hill in our snowshoes and Alice bobbing along on Father’s shoulders. Lionel and I dragging the sled and blowing air that freezes to spirals.
A scrape of a chair in Lionel’s study pulls me back from the memory. A swirl of tobacco smoke floats through the half-drawn door just across from the stairs. Then he is there, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe. He’s in robe and slippers, his hair mussed on one side. “Am I making too much noise? Or are you looking for a drink too?”
“Do you remember taking the sleds to Wagon Hill?”
He blinks and squints at the wall, his eyes flicking back and forth, as if he’s flipping the pages of a book. “Huh. I haven’t thought . . .” He swallows and gestures for me to ent
er. The room is as small as mine, stuffed with an overlarge desk, two low leather chairs, and a round rosewood table upon which lie his pipe and an empty glass.
“Take a seat.”
The chair is well worn, the arms cracked and darkened with oils. Lionel’s had more than one drink; his movements are too thought out. He leans close to the cabinet. “I know you’re not a sherry drinker. Whiskey or rum?”
“Whiskey.”
With a half smile, he pulls the bottle from a shelf and holds it to the light. Makes a show of pouring the liquor for us. “It’s a little rough. You’ll need sugar.”
I take the glass from him. He holds up a finger, then removes a sugar tin and tiny spoon from behind a row of books, flicking open the top. “Now you’re an accomplice to my sugar thievery.”
“I haven’t had sugar since I don’t know when.”
“Now you shall.” He stirs the sugar, then taps the spoon to the glass. Tink tink tink.
I let out a short laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing. It’s been a long day.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“Let’s drink to Alice.”
He flops back in the chair. His whiskey spills on his hand, and he turns his wrist to lick it off. “Sorry. To Alice, then.”
The sugar doesn’t help; the whiskey burns my mouth and sears my throat.
“How’s your room?”
“I’ve been billeted in cow sheds and attics. The room will do. Your generosity . . .”
He stops me with a wave of his hand, then closes one eye and stares at his glass.
“It’s all been such a muddle,” he says. “Since Lydia drowned. She was very good to Alice. Patient. She was always so patient.”
“Yes.”
He glances at a bookshelf. A tintype lurks behind a manual on brass bolting. Lydia in a gingham dress, white-blond hair, a spray of flowers held in her lap, a peacock brooch on her breast. She is about to smile; the edge of her lip is blurred. She will have held it until she was told to relax and then laugh. She laughed at so much.
“All a goddamn muddle.”
“You have Cathy now. I’m glad for that.”
He cocks his head, watching me, first one eye shut, and then the other. “Yes. Cathy.”
After Alice Fell: A Novel Page 3