by Jan Watson
The clothing from the upended box was folded neatly on the dresser bench and there was not a mouse in sight. Timmy had earned his quarter. Lilly pulled her dress over her head. Between sips of milk, she patted perspiration stains from the underarms of the garment with a rag dipped in cold water. Wearing her good dresses to work was simply not doable. Besides being uncomfortable and unprofessional, they would be ruined—not to mention, at the rate she was going, quickly stretched out of shape.
Lying back on the bed, she closed her eyes. What was she to do? She couldn’t very well go to work in her chemise. The rapid growth of this baby had caught her off guard. She was nearly this far along when she lost her first pregnancy, but she’d remained as flat as an ironing board. It seemed she should have had plenty of time to get her wardrobe ready. You would think a doctor would have more sense than to believe any two pregnancies would progress alike. She was probably right that this was a hefty boy baby.
She smiled to think how Tern would laugh, how delighted he would be. “Lord, thank You for this wondrous blessing,” she prayed. “Forgive the foolish risk I took this morning. Help me to keep this little one safe. Help me to nourish and sustain him.”
Without rising, Lilly took her Bible from the nightstand and, holding it aloft, flipped through the concordance in the back. Goodness, why was the print so tiny? The word womb was followed by several Scriptures.
She turned to the first one listed, Genesis 49:25, and read aloud: “‘Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb.’”
Against a sudden spurt of tears, she closed the Bible and laid it on the bedspread, covering her eyes in the crook of her elbow. Scripture often reduced her to tears in this way. As a girl, she’d wondered how God had time amid unending wars and upheaving weather and His million daily tasks to speak to her, an insignificant bug of a girl. The Word, His Word, brought the Lord so near, it frightened her but at the same time delighted her.
She remembered explaining this to her mother, who’d only said, “Hmmm” as she stirred a steaming pot on the stove. Mama had waited until pitch-dark to answer Lilly’s questions.
As if it were yesterday, Lilly could feel the dew-soaked grass against her bare feet as Mama led her deep into the meadow beside the barn. She spread a worn quilt atop the tall grass and bade Lilly to lie down beside her.
In her patient way, Mama had waited until the world receded, drawing away like a skim of cream until there was nothing between them and heaven but a trillion shining stars. She took Lilly’s hand in her own. “You are not a bug to the Lord, my darling daughter. You are a brilliant star, an integral part of God’s holy universe.”
“But bugs are important too, right? God made bugs, too.”
Mama had laughed and drawn Lilly so close that she could feel the beat of her heart against her cheek. “Girl, someday you’re going to ask one too many questions.”
“But how do I know, Mama?” Lilly persisted, reaching out to touch a star. “How do I know I’m more important to God than a katydid or a grasshopper?”
“We know because God didn’t give His Book to the bugs. Just hush, and let Him reveal Himself to you.”
Now, as Lilly rested on her comfortable bed, Kip jumped up beside her, settled down, and laid his head on her chest. Usually when she was lying on her back, he would stand on her chest with front feet on her breastbone and hind feet on her belly, gazing down until she gave in and got up. He was being uncharacteristically gentle. Lilly scratched behind his ears just the way he liked. “So you’ve already figured it out, Kip. How did you get so smart?”
Kip rolled his eyes as if to say, “Who do you think you’re fooling?”
The dog had begun snoring and Lilly was drifting into a pleasant dream when the sound of weeping woke her. Disoriented, she sat up. Kip headed out the door. She could hear his nails clicking on the polished wood floor down the hall to Mazy’s room. Pulling on a plain princess wrapper, Lilly followed fast behind.
Mazy was a sodden heap in the middle of her unmade bed. A Turkish towel was knotted on her head.
“Mazy? Whatever is the matter?”
“I’m ruined, Lilly, simply ruined.” Turning her face into her pillow, she sobbed, “I can never go outside these doors again. I’m going to die a lonely old maid right in this room.”
“Sweetheart, it can’t be as bad as all that. Let me see.”
Mazy swept the towel from her head dramatically. Her hair was indeed different, just as she’d wished, but it didn’t lie like shiny silk upon her shoulders. Instead, a frizzy halo of yellowish stubble sprung crazily from her scalp. She looked like an angel gone awry.
Lilly clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh, Mazy.”
“See? I told you,” she said, hiccuping amid fresh tears. “Today’s word is disaster. Now I’m broke and bald both.”
“Are you burned? Come in the kitchen, where I can see you better.”
Mazy bent over the sink while Lilly poured water mixed with baking soda from the same box she’d used on Timmy over her head. “Your scalp has first-degree burns, Mazy. We’ll be lucky if your hair doesn’t all fall out.”
Mazy wailed, “Why did you let me do this, Lilly?”
“Just be glad Mama isn’t here,” Lilly said, wrapping her sister’s head in a fresh towel. “She’d turn you over her knee.”
“Doc Still?”
They both whipped around. Mazy’s towel fell to the floor. Forevermore, there stood Chanis Clay in the door Mazy had left wide open.
His hand rested on the butt of his gun. “I heard someone yelling.”
It seemed neither of the women could find their voice. What a picture they must make, two soggy sisters in a cloud of soda powder. Poor Chanis. He might as well see what he was getting into if he pursued Miss Mazy Pelfrey.
Mazy lifted her chin. “I’ve been to the beauty parlor,” she said inanely.
Chanis nodded, his face poker blank. “You’ve cut your hair.”
You can tell he has sisters, Lilly thought.
“I can’t go out with you again for at least a year,” Mazy said.
“Let me go get my sister,” he said. “She’s studied fixing hair and all that girlie stuff.”
Mazy’s chin trembled. “This is the ugliest I’ll ever be, Chanis.”
“Then I’m a lucky guy,” he said, turning on his heel.
Mazy kicked at the towel. “It’s not fair. Men always get to leave.”
Lilly slid the towel around the floor with one foot, mopping up the mess they’d made. “Sometimes it seems that way.”
“Why is it, Lilly, that he can look so good doing nothing but standing there, and meanwhile my head looks like a circus clown because I wanted to be pretty?”
Lilly sidestepped Kip, who was busy tracking something through the baking soda dust. “Are you and Chanis getting serious?”
“He makes my heart go wobbly. That must be serious.”
Lilly did not want to get into this today—but opportunity had knocked. “Mazy, has Mama talked to you about . . . things?”
“I’m afraid so. It is more than strange to contemplate. I suppose that’s why your heart gets wobbly—else it would never happen.”
Lilly took her sister’s heart-shaped face in her hands. “The wobbly part is what gets girls in trouble. That part’s for after you are married.”
“Don’t worry, Lilly. Daddy talked to me too.”
This was bound to be good, Lilly thought.
Mazy giggled. “You won’t believe what he did. He took Molly and me to the fishpond and said he’d pitch us in if we ever brought trouble home.”
“You’re right. I can’t picture our sweet daddy threatening you. What did you and Molly say?”
“Nothing. We just pushed him in the pond and hightailed it home.”
Lilly laughed so hard she nearly got a stitch. “Oh, my
goodness, I wish I could have seen that. How did Mama react?”
“She never knew. He came in all covered in mud, carrying a turtle for supper. It was tasty.”
Suddenly a darting gray mat of fur trailing a long hairless tail ran over Lilly’s foot. “Yeep,” she yelled as if she’d never seen a mouse before. Mazy jumped, screaming, onto a chair. Kip barked, pounced, and missed.
Lilly hurried to open the screen door Chanis had closed. Sensing his chance, the mouse raced right through.
Whap! The business end of a broom wielded by Armina dispatched the poor thing to its reward.
Armina narrowed her eyes at the sight of the messy kitchen. “I can see you’ve been a-needing me.”
Chapter 17
Tillie Tippen’s house was only a short distance farther on, once Lilly walked the quarter of a mile into town. Truthfully, she’d been glad for the excuse of collecting the laundry to get away from the hubbub in her kitchen, where Armina fussed with broom and mop, Mazy primped, Chanis’s sister heated curling irons, and Kip mourned the one that got away.
At the clinic, smoke billowed from charcoal pots of heated brimstone placed strategically all along the foundation. Mr. Tippen’s wagon was gone. Lilly supposed he wanted to fumigate the walls before he put up the new window. Hopefully he wouldn’t fumigate himself.
The Tippens’ white two-story house was grand considering the leaning shotgun houses of their neighbors. The wide front porch was painted gray and sported two white rocking chairs and a matching swing, suspended by chains from a beam. A banty hen and six half-grown chicks scoured the bountiful flower garden beside the steps for errant ladybugs or hapless wiggle worms. In the side yard, drying laundry fluttered lazily in the sparse hot breeze of the day.
Lilly was too early. She should have waited until evening. She knocked lightly.
“Well, look who’s here,” Tillie Tippen boomed when she opened the door to Lilly. “Come in and set yourself down. You’re looking a little wilted from this heat.”
Lilly was surprised anew each time she heard Tillie’s loud, gruff voice. She was short, less than five feet, and portly—built like a rain barrel. Half of her had to be lung. Lilly wondered how she managed the high clotheslines. Maybe Mr. Tippen hung the wash and took it in.
Before Lilly could say, “I came to collect the laundry,” she was seated in the parlor, a glass of sweet tea in her hand and a dessert plate of Tillie’s town-renowned yellow cake with coconut icing resting on her knee. As her eyes adjusted from the glare of the sun to the dim interior of the room, she noticed she wasn’t the only visitor. Anne perched on the horsehair sofa directly across from her. Lilly raised her eyebrows in question.
“As I was just telling Tillie, it’s good to have a husband like Cletus, who don’t mind me taking a minute for myself,” Anne said.
“Anne helps me on wash days—but generally Amy comes along. You should have brung her. You know that child’s the best part of Monday for me.”
“Maybe next week,” Anne said, standing. “I’ll just go out and take Doc’s linens off the line. They’re more than dry by now. Do you want the sheets and pillowcases sprinkled?”
“No, she don’t like the bedclothes ironed,” Tillie said as if Lilly were a lamp or a chair. “You can put them and the towels and kitchen things, everything that don’t get ironed, in that white wicker basket.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt your work,” Lilly said.
“I love me a bit of company whatever time of day it comes,” Tillie said, taking Anne’s place on the sofa. “Turnip said somebody broke your window.”
“Yes, he’s repairing it now. I closed the office for the afternoon.”
“Turnip’s good at fixing things—unlike some husbands I know,” Tillie said, jerking her head toward the window, where they could see Anne taking pegs from a sheet.
“Tillie, this cake is delicious, so light, and the icing is divine,” Lilly said, hoping to divert gossip to recipes. “I’ve never tasted better.”
“It’s the coconut with a sprinkle of orange zest; makes all the difference.”
Tillie straightened the doily on the arm of the sofa. “You know Anne’s my sister, don’t you? She’s sixteen years younger, so I feel more like her mother. She’s got that broken-down house to take care of, and little Amy, plus you know she works every hour at the clinic she can get.”
Tillie’s face gathered in a knot of indignation. “Still yet, she needs the money I give her for helping me on Mondays. Ornery, layabout Cletus Becker—I don’t know why she stays. It’s the same song the old cow died on over and over again. It’s not to be put up with!”
Lilly was at a loss. She took a sip of tea to wash down the sudden lump in her throat. Her silence seemed to egg Tillie on.
“Cletus gambles away every last cent she earns—and her owing back taxes on that ridge rock he calls a farm. Humph! Turnip’s going to the bank tomorrow.” Tillie kneaded her hands in her lap. “It’s not that we don’t have the means to help, but how long can we keep it up now that Turnip can’t work down the mine? That black coal dust settling in his lungs has just about kilt him.”
She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t say anything—Anne won’t like me asking—but I hoped maybe you could put her back on at the clinic. She ain’t worked in what, a week?”
“I’m sure things will pick up soon,” Lilly said, thinking about the folded bills she’d seen Anne hiding in the oven. “The hospital beds never stay empty for long.”
Lilly regretted having put Anne in such an awkward position—having to pretend to not have work so that she was free to care for the baby. She suspected Tillie minded more of her younger sister’s business than she should.
Tillie refilled Lilly’s glass. “Now about your skirts. Do you want me to cut out the fronts and bind around the hole, add some ties? Or I could set buttonholes around the waist and sew buttons to match on your blouses. Have you seen that done?”
“Forevermore, Tillie, I just came for the laundry. I haven’t told a soul.”
Tillie leaned forward and put her hand on Lilly’s knee. “I can help you hide it for a short time by adjusting your skirts, but I’d say that pot you got a-cooking won’t stay under the lid for long.”
Suddenly it all seemed very real and permanent to Lilly. She was almost glad that someone knew—even if that someone was the biggest talebearer in Skip Rock. “I had hoped to tell my husband first.”
“Of course you do, honey. But shared joy is a double joy. And what if, God forbid, something goes awry? Shared sorrow is half a sorrow. I can hold my tongue when need be. But folks will guess soon enough. You got that look. It’s written all over your face.”
The honey weakened Lilly. She wished she could put her head on Tillie’s shoulder, let Tillie pat her back as her mother would do. “I guess you should get started on those skirts, then, Tillie.”
“I’ll do one directly and have Turnip bring it by so you’ll have it for tomorrow. I’m a good hand with my Singer sewing machine. Come back by one day and we’ll look at patterns for your maternity clothes.”
After supper, Armina was across the road gathering her night things, Mazy was weeping again, and Lilly was taking the charts from her linen bag when she heard Kip at the back door, barking. What now? Lilly wondered as Mrs. Blair rushed Timmy through the door. The boy looked peaked and out of breath.
“First he can catch his breath and then he can’t,” Mrs. Blair said. “He says he swallowed a dime.”
Timmy’s eyes were as big as the quarter Lilly had given him earlier. “It’s a-resting right here, Doc,” he said huskily, pointing to the area on his chest that would be in line with the bifurcation point of the right bronchus. “It’s stuck.” The effort to speak sent the boy into a fit of sneezing so violent it left him limp in his mother’s arms.
“Do something, Doc! He’s going to die before my eyes.”
The kitchen grew still as death. Armina and Mazy came in, standing back, watching with eyes as big
as Timmy’s. Even Kip was still. Lilly’s mind scrambled backward to a time in medical school when she’d seen a case such as this one. A policeman had come into her mentor’s office complaining of swallowing a coin after he tossed it up and caught it in his mouth. He’d accidentally thrown the coin back into the pharynx, where, coming in contact with the posterior nasal orifices, it excited a strong disposition to sneeze. The spasmodic inspiration that followed drew the piece through the windpipe and lodged it at the separation of the bronchus. Sneezing made the coin rise but also made suffocation imminent; thus the man would be forced to let the piece fall back. Fortunately the officer didn’t realize how close to death he was before he was induced to vomit, which brought forth the coin.
Lilly grabbed the castor oil and poured a tablespoonful. Timmy grimaced and clamped his mouth tight, as any child would, as soon as he smelled the vile oily liquid.
“Timothy Blair, open your mouth and swallow,” Mrs. Blair said.
Tears squirting out the corners of his eyes, Timmy opened and swallowed, soon retching and coughing violently until the dime flew out and hit the far wall. The retching was followed by copious vomiting that Lilly nearly caught in the dishpan. Nearly.
“Did you learn your lesson, Son?” Mrs. Blair asked when Timmy had recovered.
“Yes, ma’am. I should not have bought chocolate bars with that quarter. I should have saved it for Sunday school.”
In the middle of the muddle, Turnip Tippen came by with Lilly’s altered outfit. “You got a nice new window and lots of dead termites,” he said proudly. “Say, Armina, how’d you find them morels I brung you?”
“A-sitting on the porch.”