‘Dear heavens.’
‘Expecting at Christmas or thereabouts.’
Mrs Williams closed her eyes. This house was a-swirl with things not said, Oscar sheltering her from anything that was a few shades off of being pretty. She opened her eyes and when she did, she laid her hands flat on the table. Her skin was white and soft, not red and roughed up like mine. The ends of her nails had been filed smooth and curved a tad on the sides. Her wedding band was nothing like Bernadette’s. Bernadette’s had been thin, Oscar having just bought four Jerseys to add to his farm. But Mrs Williams’ was wide. He’d been willing to spend whatever it took to claim her.
I said, ‘He got you that piano, you know.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Mr Williams went to the city just last week, got it for you then. Had it delivered the very next day.’
‘He did?’ she said, her eyes going wide some. ‘I thought it had always been here. I assumed that Andre’s mother played.’
‘He got it for you.’ Along with that pretty wedding band, I thought. Then, plain as day, I recalled what Oscar told Mrs Williams after she played that moonlight song of hers. It was like he was right here, saying them words again: ‘I’d stand outside your window and listen.’
When Bernadette died, Oscar kept away from other women. But from out of nowhere, letters started flying from here to Ohio. Maybe he’d carried Catherine Williams in his mind for years. Maybe when him and Bernadette sat out at night looking up at the stars, he’d been thinking of this woman with that smile of hers and her figure that turned men silly.
I stood up. ‘I’ve got dishes to wash.’
I washed and she dried the dishes. I didn’t want her help. I didn’t want her standing so close to me, the two of us looking out the same kitchen window. I didn’t like thinking this woman might have flooded Oscar’s thoughts when he was married to Bernadette. Mrs Williams hadn’t asked if she could help, she just took up the dish towel like it was the most natural thing in the world. I kept my mouth shut, saying only what I had to about where the frying pan went and how the spoons and forks had their own places in the drawer. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to figure out that it wasn’t true about Oscar, him thinking about her for years. I wanted to be able to tell myself that my imagination had gone in the wrong direction. Most of all, I didn’t want Catherine Williams handling Bernadette’s things.
She didn’t wear an apron and that didn’t sit well either. It’d be me scrubbing the dirty spots from her skirts, me washing and ironing her shirtwaists. I heard Mama’s voice in my head telling me that Oscar was paying me to do such work. If the new Mrs Williams wanted to dry dishes, that was her right. This was her house, not mine. Maybe so, I argued back in my head. Didn’t mean I had to like it. Didn’t mean I had to talk to her. Not that Mrs Williams noticed the argument I was waging with Mama. She looked out the window like there was something at the sand hills that only she could see.
It was eight o’clock when Oscar, Andre, and the orphans left for St. Mary’s in the two wagons, the beds packed with containers of milk. As soon as they were on the other side of the sand hills, taking the beach road with the dogs trotting along with them, Mrs Williams sat down at the piano. She had sheet music spread out in front of her but she didn’t play that moonlight song, and I was glad for it. I hurt bad enough as it was.
Mrs Williams didn’t seem to care when some of the piano keys stuck. She just kept on and made the music flow through the house. It flowed through me, too, like it had yesterday, but I didn’t let on. I kept to my chores.
When Oscar and the boys got back around nine, St. Mary’s being nothing but a quick trip, Mrs Williams stopped right in the middle of a tune and went outside. She stood on the edge of the veranda and watched them unload the empty metal containers from the two wagons.
I fried slices of ham and boiled a dozen eggs. Oscar’s cows might not know it, but Sunday was a day of rest calling for a light dinner and an even lighter supper. I had just turned the ham slices in the skillet when Mrs Williams came in from the veranda and went to the bedroom. When she showed up again, she had on one of her fancy hats with feathers and bows. This one was wide-brimmed and made of straw. Without a word, she left the house and took the narrow path that went to the outhouse, holding her skirt above her ankles.
I didn’t know what to make of it when she went on by the outhouse and headed toward the barn. The orphan boys had unhitched the horses and were taking them to the stables on the other side of the barn. Andre was with them, and so were the four dogs. Maybe she took the unhitching of the horses to mean that Oscar wasn’t going to carry her to church, her not knowing the horses needed water and they won’t lower themselves to drink out of the cow trough. It wasn’t like her to pay a visit to the barn, I didn’t know if she’d ever been there. But there she was at the barnyard gate, having all kinds of trouble with the wood latch. More than likely it was swelled up from the sea air.
After some doing, she got it open and knew enough to close the gate behind her. She picked her way through the yard and held her skirt so high that her white stockings showed. When she got close to the trough where Maisie was, she hurried up like she was scared. She didn’t know that milkers weren’t given to chasing women, especially a milker with a swelled leg.
A handful of minutes went by before Oscar and Mrs Williams came out of the barn. Oscar held a bucket. By then, the boys and dogs had left the stables and were on their way to the barn. Oscar and Mrs Williams met them outside of the barnyard gate and they had themselves a big meeting with her in the thick of it. Oscar gave the bucket to Andre and then Oscar put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. See you next Sunday, I guessed they were saying. The orphans were finished for the day and would walk home now. That was how they did, Sunday after Sunday, taking the path from the barn to the sand hills and on down the beach to St. Mary’s. But this weren’t the usual Sunday. No, sir. The orphans headed for the hills but not alone. Andre went with them and so did Mrs Williams.
I could hardly believe my own eyes. She waved the boys to go ahead of her since the path was too narrow to walk any other way but one behind the other. James, being the oldest, led the way. Andre marched behind the orphans, holding on to the bucket, knocking it against his knees. Mrs Williams took little steps in them fancy shoes of hers. She held back some like she didn’t want to get too close to the dogs. She didn’t know they were herders and that they’d keep to her heels no matter what.
Closer to the hills now where the breeze was strong, Mrs Williams’ skirt mashed against her legs. She plodded and sank in the soft, deep sand. Her hand on her hat, she followed the boys. At the pass between the hills, they waited for her to catch up. Once she got there, they took off again, the walking easier since they were on the planks. Straining my eyes, I watched as they slipped out of sight, Mrs Williams the last to round the hills.
The orphans were going home. Like always. But that bucket of Andre’s, I knew what it meant. Andre and Mrs Williams were getting sand hill sea daisies for Bernadette, and Oscar had watched it all. He was at the barnyard fence, standing there like he didn’t want to do nothing but wait for her to get back home.
I turned the ham slices one last time. The butter popped loud in my ears. I took off my apron and hung it on a nail by the icebox. I moved the skillet off the stove and covered the ham with a lid. I got my bonnet and tied the strings under my chin, then started for home, taking the path through the back pasture and stirring up a crop of skeeters. Oscar wasn’t nowhere in sight now. His good sense must have gotten ahold of him and told him to get back to work. I didn’t stop at the barn to tell him I was heading on home and how I’d see him bright and early in the morning. I didn’t feel like it, not one little bit. Not with Andre going off with Mrs Williams.
High up, the clouds were puffy but flat bottomed, and the breeze blew from the gulf. Some of Oscar’s cows stood in the ponds to escape the skeeters. Others were clumped up in the side shade of the salt cedar tree. They watched me a
s I passed by, my unlit lantern in one hand and the empty basket in my other. I opened and closed the back gate, and stepped over the rusty lace-factory train tracks.
At the bayou now, I stood at the place where the land thinned down into mud and marsh with salt grass poked up in the shallows. Dragonflies darted, flashes of shiny green. Seashells were scattered every which way. Oscar called them whelks, him liking to know the fancy names for such things. He had a skiff here; it was tied loose to the dock, rocking a little as the water lapped. Daddy had helped him build the dock when Oscar bought the dairy. ‘If I’m going to live on an island,’ Oscar had said, ‘I’m going to have me a boat.’
Him and Bernadette used to take the skiff out on Sunday afternoons if it wasn’t overly hot. After Andre was born, he went too. ‘Just for the doing of it,’ Bernadette said. Now the skiff looked like something that nobody cared about. The keel needed to be scraped. It was covered with thin-shelled barnacles at the water line. The latches that locked the oars in place were crusted with rust. And nobody’d want to get in that skiff, not with rainwater pooling in the bottom and white bird droppings dirtying the seats.
Daddy had wanted to pull it out of the water: it bothered him to see it this way. But Mama told him no. ‘That’s Oscar’s doing,’ she’d said. ‘Maybe it’d hurt him worse to have it on dry land. It’s a lonesome thing, an upside-down skiff with grass growing around it.’
I looked past the skiff to where the mud flats glimmered. The bayou was smooth and sparkled under the morning sun. There were other skiffs out there. Packs of seagulls circled behind them like the fishermen might go soft in their heads and share their catches. Pelican Island showed from here and so did the mainland. A good ways off to my right, a train crossed over West Bay. It was going to Virginia Point on the mainland, its black smoke leaving behind a dirty trail like it wanted to let folks know where it’d come from. There were people on that train; they were leaving Galveston. Maybe some of them were going to places they’d never been before.
My family’s house was the other way, to the west. It was close to the bayou and was raised up on stilts a few feet higher than Oscar’s. From here, the house looked old and rickety, Daddy not believing in paint. He was partial to trees, though, and had planted a few extra salt cedars around it just because he thought it gave the place a cooling appearance. I grew up with those cedars and I figured I’d be looking at them same wind-bent trees when I was old and rickety myself.
I put down my lantern and basket, and edged closer to the marsh. Mud sucked at my boots. I hitched up my skirt to my knees and tucked it around me so I could squat down without dragging the hem. The bayou looked different from here, me low to the ground. It was wider, the stretch from here to the mainland longer. I reached out and tore off a blade of salt grass, then got up and went back to drier land, slipping a little in the mud. I turned around and watched water rise up where I’d been standing and fill my shoe prints.
When I was a girl in braids, there was nothing I liked better than the smell of salt grass. Now, I put that thick blade of grass I’d torn off right up to my nose, smelling its greenness and smelling the sun. And mud, its sour smell was part of it, too.
I wouldn’t be staying on much longer at Oscar’s. I saw that as plain as I saw this bayou. I couldn’t stay to watch Andre turn away from me. And I couldn’t watch that unsettled thing brewing between Oscar and Mrs Williams. He was going to have to find somebody else to cook and clean for them. I didn’t know who but that wasn’t my worry. No, sir.
Tomorrow I’d come right out and tell him to start looking for somebody new. One week, I’d give him one week. And if he asked why I was leaving, I’d tell him the truth. Leastways I’d tell him part of the truth. I wouldn’t say that me and Mrs Williams didn’t get on. I wouldn’t tell him that I saw him in a different light, him being with this new woman. Or that as hard as it’d be to leave Andre, it’d be a harder hurt to stay. I wouldn’t say none of that. But should Oscar ask, this part of the truth I’d lay right out flat. There was no room for me in his house. I’d run my course.
CHAPTER NINE
The Cemetery
I felt Nan Ogden watching from the house as I fumbled with the latch on the barnyard gate. The soft soil in the yard was churned with hoof prints, and flies buzzed around a pile of dung. Water streamed from the chin of the cow that stood at the trough, her unblinking eyes taking note of my every move as I closed the gate and walked toward the barn door. I’d never been so close to a cow, and her size was alarming. So, too, was her udder. It resembled a balloon but one that was lined with swollen blood vessels. I hurried past her.
Andre’s request at the breakfast table to see his mother had chilled me. So had Oscar’s temper. I thought him to be a man of endless patience, but I heard the clipped anger in his voice when Andre insisted on going to the cemetery. I saw, too, the collapse of Andre and at that moment, he was very small and very young. It reminded me again how my presence had upset the balance of this household. When I pressed Nan Ogden to tell me about Andre’s mother, she was sullen and stubborn. She told me only fragments but that had been enough. Bernadette had died of malaria, and she had been expecting a child. Upon hearing this, I felt a sudden ache in my heart for Oscar.
There was pain in Nan’s eyes, too, as she spoke about Bernadette. They had been friends, and I had taken her friend’s place.
During meals, Nan wouldn’t look at me. When I played the upright, she stomped around the house as she went about her duties. I heard the mocking scorn in her voice when I didn’t know that the skillet hung on the peg by the cookstove rather than by the cupboard. But if Nan thought she could unnerve me, she was mistaken. I had faced the women of Dayton. I had held my head high as I took walks past their homes, knowing they shunned me and that they called me harsh names.
Names that I deserved, I thought now, as I stood just inside of the wide doorway and waited for my eyes to adjust to the barn’s dimness after the sun’s glare. I heard a soft whishing sound before I saw Oscar in one of the empty stalls. His back to me, he pitched straw from a wheelbarrow onto the floor, his movements rhythmic and smooth.
I took a few steps into the barn. Its coolness surprised me and so did the smell of fresh hay with a slight undercurrent of dung. The three rows of stalls were empty. Other than the cow at the trough, the rest were in the pasture behind the house. For a moment, I watched Oscar work, his back bending and straightening as he lifted and threw the straw.
He had lost his wife eleven months ago. He might have expected that our marriage would help him to forget her. I imagined, though, that it made him miss her all the more. On Friday, my first day in his home, the evening meal had been awkward, the memory of the Central Hotel magnifying in my mind. Neither Oscar nor I seemed to know what to say. I had managed to burn the fried fish that Nan had left, and the rice had solidified into thick clumps. Andre complained but with good cause, I had thought. When dinner was finally over, Oscar left, explaining that he had his evening chores. ‘If you’d see to Andre, I’d appreciate it,’ he’d said. ‘He’s to wash good, say his prayers and be tucked in by seven-thirty.’ Without looking at me, he’d said, ‘I’ll likely be late, Maisie being poorly with that leg of hers and me being gone these few days. No need to wait up, most likely you’re plenty tired.’
I washed the dinner dishes, my hands stinging from the sharpness of the soap. Under the kitchen table, Andre played with his building blocks but I felt him watching me. This would be a good time to give him my gift, a shiny penny, I thought. Then no. I’d wait until I had him settled. That would end his day on a high note.
I had never put a child to bed before, and I depended on him to tell me what to do. In the washroom, which felt too small for the two of us, Andre stiffened when I cleaned his face with a washcloth. Soap got into his eye and he yelped, hopping up and down. In my hurry to rinse his eye, water splashed over the side of the basin, soaked his shirt, and pooled on the floor.
In Andre’s bedroom, I a
sked him what he wore to bed. ‘My nightshirt,’ he said, his tone a mix of wonder and disbelief that I didn’t know such a thing. The eyes of Jesus on the crucifix followed me as I turned down the bed. I couldn’t give Andre the penny, I realized. Not here. I imagined him peering at it as I held it out to him, his nose wrinkling, then looking at the photograph of his mother on the nightstand. I’d find a better time, I decided. And a better place.
Once Andre was in bed, I told him to say his prayers. ‘I don’t say them in bed,’ he said. He got up and knelt by the side, the hem of his bed shirt under his knees and his hands pressed together. The bottoms of his feet were dirty. He looked up at me as though waiting for me to begin. When I did – ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ – he shook his head from side to side, saying, ‘That ain’t right, you’re saying it wrong. I want Daddy.’
‘That isn’t right,’ I said.
‘What isn’t?’
I resisted the urge to snap. It had been a long day beginning with the Central Hotel, then the beach road, the house, Nan Ogden, dinner to prepare and dishes to wash. Now grammar lessons. ‘Please don’t say the word ain’t,’ I said. ‘Now let’s say your prayers. Your father is working in the barn, he’s busy.’
After Andre’s prayers, one that was unfamiliar to me, I made him sit on the bed so I could wash his feet with a washcloth. That finished, he asked for a drink of water and after I brought him that, he needed to visit the outhouse. ‘How about the chamber pot?’ I said.
‘But I ain’t sick and it ain’t raining.’
‘You aren’t sick and it’s not raining,’ I said.
‘Huh?’
‘Please don’t use the word ain’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s incorrect grammar.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Grammar refers to the correct way to speak.’
The Promise Page 13