Reliance, Illinois

by Mary Volmer

  Her rosebud ears, mine. The pink hollow at the base of her neck, the shadowy recess of her collarbones, the tiny branching scars on her right knee, the smooth pale mountain of her anklebone—mine. Mine. Mine. Mr. Dryfus had no right to look so at her hands!

  But that night as I watched him sitting there alone, a funny thing happened. Everything that had become familiar about him became strange in a brand-new way that’s hard to describe. It was like when you stare at a simple, ordinary word so long it stops meaning what it used to mean—stops meaning anything a word can say, at any rate. That happened as I watched Mr. Dryfus. His pipe had gone out. He cupped the bowl in his palm as you might cup a chick to keep it warm. His body bent like a question mark over the table. Lamplight cast shadows across his face, and his eyes, grasping at some worry or thought, glazed. He seemed so fragile, so unsure, and alone, which was pretty much how I felt most of the time; I wanted to reassure him somehow, or maybe just hold him in my mind just as I saw him at that moment, like a photograph. Whatever the case, I felt my heart reach out with tender recognition that vanished when I heard his voice. “Young lady?”

  I froze.

  “Young lady, I know you are there. A word?” He cleared his throat. “Please.”

  I slipped to the doorway, but no closer.

  “I would like to know. I would like to ask. Your sister . . .” He stopped.

  “My sister?” I said more harshly than I intended. Whatever deal Mama had made to make him keep me was not binding. I knew he could still get rid of me.

  “I wonder. I must know.” He examined his pipe; heat from the dampened coals prickled my skin.

  “Must know what?” I asked, then added. “Sir.”

  “Is she happy?”

  Happy was not a word I associated with Mama.

  “With the arrangements as they stand,” he revised. “I have noticed.” He stopped. “Well, she does not smile much. I suppose I mean to say, would anything make her happy?”

  “You mean a gift, sir?”

  “A gift! Why yes, of course, a gift,” he said, trying on what was obviously a novel idea to him. “Does she want anything?”

  “Like what, sir?”

  “Flowers? A dress? Anything, within reason. Flowers?” he supplied when I did not answer fast enough.

  “No, a dress,” I said. “She would like to make a lady’s dress.”

  “And this will make her happy? Well.” Relief washed his face. “And your sister, would she—”

  “Mr. Dryfus? What happened with Miss Rose?”

  “Miss Rose?” He blinked. “Why does it matter to you?”

  Really, it didn’t. Miss Rose meant nothing to me, at the time. I had no inkling she ever would. It was just, well, I suppose I no longer wished to speak of Mama’s happiness.

  “Nothing happened. Nothing of consequence. They threatened to throw her in the jailhouse. She demanded it, in fact. But they did not. She is a demonstrative woman.” There was, I think, looking back, a hint of admiration there. “But New York is more forgiving of suffragettes and spectacles.” He stopped. “A dress, you say?”

  7

  Two days later, with a warm breeze nuzzling the rims of our bonnets, Mama and I followed Hanley down Main Street to the dock market, where cloth and ribbon would be cheaper than in the shops. William was still away. I looked south in the direction he’d walked but saw only the river, like a line-drawn prof ile, stretching away from me. The leaves were turning. The Missouri f ields, shorn to stubble, were bare, but the carts that passed were full of sweet-smelling apples and squash of every imaginable variety; the last days of fall seemed to balance there between this bleakness and bounty like an egg on a high, cambered roof.

  “Samuel Fromme,” said Hanley happily, “lost both feet above the ankle. Richard Hansel lost an eye; Ansel Willerby, a leg. And pinkie f inger.” He held up his pinkie, tried to poke me in the side and I gave him a shove.

  “Madelyn,” said Mama as Hanley pointed out another house of crumbling brick, sagging between two neighbors. Actually he was pointing to the grate beneath the porch steps. “Down there,” he said, “that’s where Mrs. Gandershan keeps—”

  “Gandershan?” It was one of Hanley’s chums, Adam, coming up behind us. What I knew of Adam Harrison I didn’t much like. Cocksure little runt. His daddy worked at the brewery with Hanley’s sister’s husband, a man named Robey, whom Hanley lived with but never talked about—which was funny given that Hanley talked so much about everything else. Adam was always smirking at Mama and bossing Hanley like he had a right. I suspected the bulk of Hanley’s bruises had been won defending Adam’s big mouth. Hanley never seemed to notice he was being bossed. But then, nothing much ever seemed to bother Hanley.

  “Keeps her son down there,” Adam said, f inishing Hanley’s sentence. “I heard he eats raw oysters, shell and all. Crunches them up with his back teeth. Lost his front to shrapnel.”

  “Don’t believe a word you say,” I told Adam, but all this talk of lost limbs made me wonder. “What about Mr. Dryfus?” I asked Hanley.

  “What about him?”

  “Was it the war? Did he hurt his leg in the war?”

  “Mr. Dryfus? Nah,” he said. “He never fought.”

  “Then what happened to his leg?”

  “Don’t know. Born that way I think. William went to war.”

  I knew this but saw there was more in the look that passed between Hanley and Adam. “There’s talk . . .” Hanley said, looking sheepish.

  “What talk?” asked Mama. She rarely addressed Hanley for any reason, and I think this shocked him into a quicker answer than he might have given.

  “That he tried to kill himself. After the war. I don’t know what happened. He was in a prison camp south of Cayro. Then his mama died. Cholera, you know.”

  “Not the way I heard it,” said Adam.

  “Yeah?” I said. “What’d you hear?”

  “Me? Don’t believe a word I say, do you?”

  I didn’t press because I could see from the mean little gleam in his eye I didn’t have to.

  “I hear he killed his mama,” he said. “Snapped her neck like a chicken.” Looking right at me, he mimicked the action, and made a cracking noise.

  “Nah!” I said, trying to make light, but Adam wasn’t done.

  “Then he f ills his pockets with stones and jumps off the bluff into the river. Niggers found him in the levy pilings near Carondelet. Then he got thrown in with the lunatics.”

  “I never did believe that,” said Hanley.

  But he’d heard it, I thought. It wasn’t just the details that gave weight to Adam’s story. I remembered Clara’s worried face when William walked away downriver with his camera, alone. And I saw him again, saw him wretched and face down on the levy pier.

  Adam pulled him away toward a ball game raising dust beyond the warehouses. Mama stood watching them go. I stood watching Mama, a heavy lump in my gut.

  “I don’t trust that boy enough to spit at him,” I said, but something in Mama’s expression made me work to keep hold of my doubt.

  “You stay away from William,” she said. I said nothing. “Madelyn, hear me?”

  “Why? You don’t believe . . .”

  She turned, looked me in the eye. “Doesn’t matter what I believe. We ain’t talking about that. Listen to me, now. Never was no good trusting a man who ain’t the same man one day to the next. One minute to the next. Look at me,” she said. “Now I seen you sashaying around him. You got no idea what—”

  “I don’t sashay!”

  “Madelyn,” she said, but walked on. Lace curtains heaved through open windows; sun glanced red off the muddy river. We rounded the bend overlooking Market Street; voices and shouts rose with the stink of charred meat, apples, bundled lavender. Every tall bearded man I saw was William. William unloading pumpkins and squ
ash from buckboard wagons; William throwing dice against an abandoned warehouse wall and lounging on flatboats bobbing off the docks.

  “Because you like him, is why,” I mumbled, when I caught up to her, then again, louder. “Because you like him.”

  “You got no idea what you’re talking about. Behave now.”

  What she meant was “don’t draw attention, don’t embarrass me.” Trips through Susanville had been tense affairs. Her reputation preceded her, whispers and dark stares followed. She used to walk then as she was walking now, as if one misplaced step would crack the earth in two.

  Dogs and small children scavenged underfoot; glass-factory boys, scrawny and f ierce, rolled dice for chew; near the butcher’s block, a happily oblivious hog munched slops. A little black boy mounded dust at the feet of a woman selling fortunes and cut pearl buttons. I saw William trying on a hat, William carrying a saddle, William admiring the young women whispering conf idences behind Chinese fans.

  Mama’s eyes followed these women. She pulled me close enough to link elbows, as if we, too, were but friendly intimates.

  Atop a packing crate, a man sang the virtues of temperance to an audience of lubricated naysayers. I was keen to stop—it had been a year since I’d heard a good stumping—when the spice of cooked meat erased every other hunger. “Sausage!” I tugged Mama back.

  “Not now.”

  The German butcher, his great belly challenging his trouser seams, had the biggest, whitest teeth I’d ever seen.

  “Why not now?” Because I’d suggested it, was why. Because I was supposed to follow her, to stay off her dress one minute, link arms like friends the next, as suited her.

  “Later,” she said, tugging me forward.

  “When later?”

  “Later, later. Don’t be diff icult.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Mama was always hungry. And I was more diff icult when hungry. I stood my ground. She was tired all the time, and I felt in her now a different species of silence than I was used to, a deliberate and directed silence that scared me, and made me mad.

  Mama said nothing, for we had arrived at a lace-and-ribbon stand, manned by a frowning fat woman with bright red cheeks.

  “May I help you?” She sounded doubtful.

  The stand, really more of a canvas tent, housed hinged display cases with drawers to store ribbons and lace and hooks on which to display the reels. I could tell she thought us inferior to the establishment.

  “No, Ma’am,” said Mama. “Thank you.”

  Red Cheeks was no more a Ma’am than Mama was.

  “Why don’t you wear your lace?” I asked her.

  “I’m saving it.”

  “For what?” I said.

  She stared into the mirror. Red Cheeks hovered like an old hen.

  “You could sell it. Yours is nicer,” I said pointedly. “I bet we could make it all the way to New Orleans on the money.”

  Mama tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, tried on three different smiles.

  “Or New York or California. Or Rome,” I said.

  She spoke without turning. “Am I pretty?”

  It was the fact she asked, no less than the way she asked, with urgent, worried eyes that stunned me silent. She had never asked me before. The answer, so obvious.

  “Madelyn?” She turned, her eyes gleaming, the dark hair framing her face backlit by the sun. I could feel tears rising with the word on my lips, and didn’t know why.

  “Beautiful,” I whispered.

  She turned back to the mirror. “Yes, well, course that’s what you’d say.”

  “Fine!” I said, tears vanishing in a rage whose source was just as mysterious to me. “Fine! Then I won’t. I won’t ever say it again.” And picking up a bit of lace, I roughed my f ingers over the webbed pattern. Red Cheeks bristled. Two young women giggled into the tent. “If you don’t want me saying it, I won’t say it, not ever.”

  “Madelyn!” Mama hissed.

  Red Cheeks lifted her voice. “You will be paying for . . .”

  “I’ll call you ugly if you like,” I said, giving in to a powerful ugly rising inside me. “Ugly!” I said. “Ugly, ugly, ugly.” Mama’s face helpless, imploring, fueled me. Red Cheeks’s open mouth and the titillated silence of the young women fueled me. I felt capable of hurting Mama, wanted to hurt her, to blacken her expressionless beauty, to be too loud, too large to ignore. “Ugly, Ugly, Ugly!” I said, mangling every piece of lace I could get my hands on.

  “Madelyn, stop!” said Mama.

  “John!” Red Cheeks squawked.

  I smelled onion breath and the thick hands of a stocky little tailor grabbed my arm. “Yyyou!” Red Cheeks railed. “You tell me you’re going to pay for . . .”

  But Mama was busy landing her elbow in the tailor’s gut, then yanked my other arm so hard we stumbled back against the thin leg of the support pole. Cloth walls shuddered and crumbled into the street. For a moment, we sat in a heap beneath the canvas. When we emerged—with Red Cheeks, the tailor, and the young women—to face an audience pointing and chewing on smiles, Mama slapped me. Hard. So hard I heard a high, raspy ringing.

  I didn’t look back at her, didn’t think. Closed my mind and ran as fast as I could past the butcher and the warehouses, past the levy pier, the hulking gray glass factory and the Negro shantytown huddled near the inlet of Jones Creek. And because I was running with the river, it seemed as though I was running very fast and far and half expected—climbing exhausted up a steep rise in the bluff—to f ind an open landscape, empty as I felt, stretching into the distance.

  Instead, I looked back to f ind that I had been running along a bend; the river curved to a crescent, and there, still on my heels, gaping like misshapen teeth in a wrinkled half-smile, were the town’s mottled rooftops.

  Frankly, I nearly cried with relief. Self-righteous anger, just now so delicious, soured. Only seeing how easy it would be to return allowed me to imagine myself bold enough to continue.

  Not even this conf idence lasted, for though she had not followed on foot, Mama’s voice trailed behind, muddying my resolve. Practical inconveniences began poking their heads into the sun: Where was I going? What would I do when I got there? I peeled off my shoes, and with a shriek that sent a broom of blackbirds from the thicket, hurled them off the bluff, only to become aware of how sharply the jagged shale cut my feet. The dull sweetness of the dogwoods, once so pleasant, now reminded me how hungry I was, and would be, and this last thought f inally made a sniveling fool of me.

  In that moment, I became supremely conscious of how responsible Mama was for my each and every woe—and for the woes of the world beyond, I was sure. A litany of sins marched across my mind’s eye and attached themselves to Mama’s skirt in an eager, growing chain: Dot’s death? Obviously Mama’s fault. My angry red markings, the mosquito bites bubbling from exposed skin, the thicket scratches on my arms, my throbbing temple . . . she was to blame for the newsprint staining my face and hands, for the dull, horrid food. And yes, I saw now, for the war, and all wars hence!

  Cross-legged on shale, I sat for what seemed like a long time, holding desperately to my indignation, glaring across the wide, indifferent river. That morning the thought of William out here too, somewhere, alone with his bedroll and camera, might have been a comfort to me. “What do you say, Maddy?” he might have said. “Shall I take you away with me? Shall we travel the world together? London? Paris? Rome?”

  Now the romance of this fantasy was marred by Adam’s tale and by my own deepening gloom. I was hungry. The sun was sinking; I was getting cold. A circle of vultures overhead tightened, broke ranks, and circled again. Around the bend came a man poling a skiff. I listened, but the river’s pungent breath soon squelched all but the low gasping hum of his song. Then he disappeared, song and all, beyond the island, and confronted with nothing but the immensity of the fa
r horizon, my courage withered. Defeated, I roused myself and made my way from the rocky bluff trail I’d been following down a switchback path to softer ground, and turned upriver, walking slowly back to Mama, back to Reliance.

  Before long, I reached a shoal wide as two men lying head to toe. The trail stopped here and picked up on the other side. I’d have to climb the bank to get around, but rested a moment, watching steam snake from the warm shallows where current eddied. Tree roots reaching from the bank-caught driftwood, a dented tin bucket, a molding leather boot. Milkweed rimmed each in white. And there, in the shadows on the far side of the shoal, two hulking vultures jockeyed for position over some other thing tangled in the roots.

  It was big. A goat? A calf ? Shrugging their shoulders, the vultures heaved toward the sun. A dog, maybe. But before I’d taken two steps closer, a chill shivered through me.

  A young woman bobbed there in the water. Scum greened her black hair. A tattered yellow dress bunched between her legs. Leaves masked all but one blue staring eye. Her left arm wedged in the root stems; her toes bobbed like knobs of birch in the dark water.

  She might have been sleeping there. She might kick and splash. She might sit up to scare me.

  I can’t say it occurred to me that she might be the young woman who’d gone missing weeks ago. Instead, I remembered a bloated milk cow I’d found stinking up Dot’s corn patch a few years before. The young woman did not look as dead as the cow had looked, especially with that one open eye. As dead as Dot, ash faced, in her bed. I remembered wondering who might be missing that cow, but don’t think I wondered the same about the young woman—until I bent closer.

  A thin gold chain hung around her neck. I reached down to grab it, jerked away again at the cold, catf ish feel of her skin, then using a stick to pull the chain clear, unclasped the latch and held it in my hand. On the end was a charm made of two interlocking circles. A f igure eight.

  I stuffed it, quick, into my pocket.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I whispered to that terrible eye. “You not gonna need it. Don’t be looking at me like that because—”