When she first returned to Hartman, she’d thought she was over him. It had been years, after all. She’d survived a war, made a career out of the skills she’d practiced on the dead and dying. She’d had lovers, men who could be—or needed to be—discreet. If they didn’t touch her heart, it was easier that way. When Clara called, she’d just ended her latest liaison, a doctor who’d become too attached.
July in the hospital was a hot, sticky affair. The window in the break room looked out over an air shaft, and a fly was buzzing against the pane, desperate to get out. She threaded the telephone cord through her fingers. In her sister’s voice she heard the rippling waters of the creek, dark shot through with gold, calling her home.
“I’ll come,” she said, staring out the window.
She’d thought she had something to offer. She wasn’t that girl anymore, the daughter with something to prove. She was grown, a woman, and she’d gone farther than any of them ever would. She’d meant to help, of course, but to show them, too, a bit of what they’d missed.
Clothes were something she thought little about, but she’d dressed carefully for this trip. She’d bought a blue silk suit that she knew brightened her eyes and a soft gray cloche that accented the sharp angles of her hair. When she’d boarded the station at New York, the conductor had whistled, long and slow. She’d had his admiring attention throughout the ride, and when she stepped onto the platform she felt only pity for the sister who greeted her. Clara was thinner than she remembered; she’d lost the girlish roundness that had made her so attractive.
“You look like a million dollars,” Clara said, half laughing, half crying. “I’m afraid to touch you, you’re so fine.” But she did, leaning in for the careful hug Gert permitted. Up close, worry lines cobwebbed out from the corners of her sister’s eyes, and a furrow creased the space between them.
It was over Clara’s shoulder that she caught her first glimpse of him. He stood just off the platform, arms crossed, leaning against the car. When Clara released her, he came forward, and she saw how the same lines that marked Clara spread across his face. She thought, with satisfaction and a bit of regret, that she’d made the right choice. He didn’t offer to hug her, just smiled and said it was good to see her again, then picked up the bags at her feet, turned, and walked away, leaving her with the distinct impression that she’d been judged as well and found somehow wanting.
They didn’t speak again. On the car ride to Richard’s, where Gert insisted she be taken first, Clara filled the silence with talk of the new baby and Richard. Gert remembered her little brother as a scrawny, fearful child, one they’d tried to protect from their father. She’d been fifteen when he was born, her mother’s change of life baby, and she’d pitied him. He’d been barely six when she’d left home for good. She could not reconcile the image of that small boy with the cursing man who met her at the door and barred her way.
She thought Frank would knock him down. There was rage there, but at what she couldn’t yet say. She told Clara to stop wringing her hands, stepped between the men, backed Richard off with the tone of voice she’d used on soldiers twice her size. When Frank brought her bags in, she sent him and Clara home. Despair was her vocation, and she was practiced enough in it not to need help.
She found the infant in the back bedroom of Richard’s house. When she picked it up it mewled. The cloth diaper was overflowing with soft yellow stools, and she had a moment’s regret for the fine blue suit.
She cleaned the child up, stripped the sheets and left them in a corner until she could attend to them. She took the baby with her into the bathroom and laid it on the mat while she scrubbed the tub and ran a bath. She ignored Richard, who stood in the doorway, watching, and studied the child. It was small, and the yellow had spread to its limbs, but it wasn’t the worst case she had seen.
She found a stack of clean diapers on the floor next to the bed, carefully pinned one on the baby, then left it on the bare mattress of the crib while she went to prepare a bottle.
Her brother followed her.
“What’s it’s name?” she asked.
“Andrea,” he muttered. “Will it live?”
“Yes.” She heard his exhale, then the scratch of a match being struck. “Outside,” she told him without looking up, and he didn’t protest.
She spent the next four days there. The living room received the most light, so she cleaned the windows and dragged the crib in. When her brother staggered back in, he saw the infant, still naked except for its diaper, sleeping peacefully in sunlight.
“Catch its death,” he slurred, but she didn’t bother to answer, and he collapsed on his bed, shoes still on. She left him there.
She knew all the hiding places: the tank of the toilet, the wedge of space behind the furnace, the shoe box at the top of the closet. She’d taken his wallet and secreted it among her sanitary napkins at the top of her suitcase. When he raged through the house, he overturned the box but looked no further. His hands shook so badly he couldn’t unlock the door.
She stayed beside the child the entire time, leaving it only to prepare a bottle or make coffee. When the dry heaves started, she pointed to the bathroom and told him that if he missed, he’d clean it up himself. The coffee cup he threw went wide, smashing at her feet on the wooden floor.
On the third day, when he began to weep and cry for the dead wife, she ceased making coffee and switched to chamomile tea. She laced his cup with a mild narcotic she’d been prescribed after the war to help her sleep, and only when he’d closed his eyes did she lock herself inside the baby’s room and let herself doze. She made herself wake every hour to check on them both.
At midnight, she’d turned over to find the baby staring at her, dark eyes opened wide. She’d reached over, brushed a finger across its brow to check for fever, and it smiled at her. A reflex to gas or air bubbles. Gert withdrew her hand, but it continued to smile.
“Don’t,” she heard herself say. “I’m not your mother, you hear me?” She heard the exhaustion in her own voice. She left the room, checked to make sure her brother was still breathing. When she came back, the child was fussing. She changed it, carried it downstairs with her to the kitchen. She’d scalded the bottles earlier and left them to cool on the counter. Now she opened the icebox, took out the milk she’d had Clara pick up from McCallister’s farm, and mixed it in a pan with blackstrap molasses. When it was warm enough, she poured it into the bottle—tricky, one-handed—and took the bottle and the child upstairs. She’d had the idea of putting it back in the crib, but each time she tried to put it down it fussed. At last she settled herself on the floor, the babe in her lap, wide dark eyes staring. She plopped the nipple in its mouth and it sucked immediately, tiny starfish fingers splayed against her hand. When the bottle was three-fourths empty, it fell asleep. She tried to rouse it to burp but it wouldn’t wake, a warm limp weight against her shoulder. It smelled of milk, and of the molasses, and beneath that a soft damp scent all its own. She found it hard to put down, even though it was sleeping, and sat for some time, its head tucked beneath her chin.
By the fourth day, Richard’s hands were steady enough to hold the plate of toast she brought him, and when the first bite didn’t send him retching to the toilet she packed him and the babe up in a taxi and brought them to the big house. Richard needed nourishment, and she needed rest.
She’d told Clara to settle the child on a blanket in the late afternoon sunshine and taken her brother up the stairs to one of the spare rooms on the second floor. She’d helped him to bathe and shave, his hands still not steady enough to trust with a razor. She’d put him to bed in a clean pair of pajamas, his hands scuttling like nervous crabs over the top of the quilt.
“Stay a moment,” he’d said, and she’d sat on a chair beside him. She’d heard the same words a thousand times, but she listened anyhow. They liked it when you listened, she’d found. It made them more pliable later, that they thought you cared. When he reached the part in the words where he
thanked her, she stood up.
“You’ll be all right,” she said. “You’ve got the babe to live for.”
“Ah, but who do you have, Gertie girl?” he asked, and she turned to the door without answering.
The light was starting to fade when she started down the stairs. The house was redolent with the scent of peaches; she’d forgotten what fresh peaches smelled like. She went to the kitchen, meaning to ask Clara for some clear broth for their brother and perhaps a bite for herself. A peach, maybe. A bit of bread with real butter.
But she heard humming in the front room and followed it, curious. She stopped in the doorway. He was holding the child, its dark head tucked under his chin, and when he looked up the cat-shaped blue eyes met hers, and she was gone, drowning. He reached a hand toward her and said something, but the words vanished as he spoke them. She thought she’d lost the capacity to feel like this, but now she was all feeling, no rational thought at all. If he’d touched her then, she would have walked out the front door with him, taken the child and nothing else. The three of them, the way it had been supposed to be.
There’s a noise behind her, a footstep. Someone is gasping for breath. She raises her eyes, and sees in the mirror above the fireplace mantel her sister, ashen, and her own white face.
SHE turns away from the mirror. “Mind your business,” she says aloud, but there’s nobody but Buddy to hear. He purrs and twines beneath her feet, batting at her ankles with his oversized paws. She picks up the phone book, puts it down again. The cat is driving her to distraction. When she picks up the phone book for the second time, he jumps on the table, swatting the pages as she flips them.
“Enough of you,” she says, and carries him out to the porch. She doesn’t run him off, though, and he stretches out in a patch of sun, boneless and content in its warmth.
She watches him from the window as she dials the number, absently curling the phone cord through fingers thickened by age and arthritis. She’s still thinking of what to say when Catherine McCallister answers the phone. Her voice, amplified by years of scolding schoolchildren back into their bus seats, booms through the receiver into Gert’s ear. They exchange pleasantries about the state of the weather (good) and the size of the collection plate at church last Sunday (poor) before Catherine gets down to business.
“Well, hey, Miss Gert, what can we do for you?” she says. “Tell me my Cortie’s not being too much of a pest. He’s up there so much I’m surprised you haven’t run him off before this.”
“Not at all,” Gert says. “Actually, your son’s been quite helpful.”
Catherine snorts. “I’ll bet. I’ve raised five boys, Miss Gert, and despite what they think, I’m no fool. If one of them is off busting his butt for free, it ain’t you he’s looking to impress. No offense.”
“None taken,” Gert says.
Catherine lowers her voice. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s gotten into him. We’ve hardly seen him all summer, and suddenly he’s moping around the house like a cat with its tail run over. I made my roast beef for dinner last night—the one I bring to the church picnic every year—and he hardly touched it.”
“Really,” Gert says, but Catherine’s not listening.
“Now he’s talking some fool nonsense about goats. I tell you, Jim just about had a heart attack. We had a buck growing up, and the smell alone is enough to put you off them. I’m not saying dairy cows are fresh as a daisy, but goats? No, thank you. Not to mention the trouble they get into.”
Gert looks out the kitchen window. There are gnaw marks on the porch banister and tiny hoofprints all over her lawn.
“I understand perfectly,” she says. The glimmer of an idea has occurred to her, and it takes shape as she listens. When Catherine pauses to draw breath, Gert jumps in before she can change her mind.
“Actually, Catherine, I have a problem,” she says. “And I was hoping Cort could help.”
“Well, of course, Miss Gert. Just say the word—what do you need?”
Gert picks her next words carefully. She knows how Catherine has raised those boys, and while she’s always been in favor of a stern hand and a strict approach, in this case it could work against her. If she reveals too much, Cort might not make it over to the farm again in her lifetime. Too little, and he might not be motivated enough to return while there’s still time to make a difference.
“It seems some visitors here made quite a mess of my front porch,” she begins. “Not to mention my front lawn.”
“These visitors—they wouldn’t happen to be friends of my son’s, would they?” Catherine says shrewdly.
“Not exactly,” Gert hedges. “More like acquaintances. Anyhow, what with the mess and the fact that it’s high time the cottage was painted, I was hoping you might be able to persuade Cort to help me fix the place up.”
They spend the next fifteen minutes negotiating time and rates. Catherine’s all for giving her son into slavery, but Gert thinks a little money might sweeten her trap, so she holds out for giving Cort a fair rate. Once that’s decided, she has to persuade Catherine to let the boy come in from the dairy barn for lunch before sending him over.
The extra time gives Gert the opportunity to prepare her attack. And so it is that when Cort arrives, he finds her sitting on the porch, cool and fresh in clean khaki shorts and a white shirt. She’s fanning herself with yesterday’s edition of the newspaper, a pitcher of lemonade by her side.
“Lemonade?” she offers, waving him to the other chair. She pours him a glass without waiting for an answer. She passes a plate of oatmeal cookies, and he takes one and sniffs at it suspiciously. She doesn’t blame him—they look like hockey pucks. She never did learn how to cook, but she sees how it could come in handy.
Cort takes a bite of the cookie. To his credit, he doesn’t spit it out; just places the remainder on the armrest of his chair and swigs some lemonade.
She judges him to be sufficiently softened up, and begins the attack. “I assume your mother told you about our conversation,” she says.
Cort nods.
“I’ll have you know I didn’t mention the abominations you’re keeping up on the hill.”
Another nod.
“Nor did I mention the fact that they tore up my lawn and damaged my porch.” She waves her hand around in the general direction of the gnaw marks and hoofprints.
When the boy still doesn’t say anything—just sits there looking glum—Gert’s small reserve of patience runs out. This is another reason she doesn’t meddle—it takes too much energy.
“Well?” she says. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“Begging your pardon, Miss Gert, but your cottage was in tough shape way before my goats came along.”
Gert exhales a great gust of air through her nose. It is times like these that she misses her sister the most. Clara could take the most recalcitrant man and sweet talk him into doing her bidding, all the while making it seem it was his idea in the first place.
“I admit, the cottage needed some work,” she concedes. “But your animals didn’t help matters. And I saw on my walk this morning that you’ve still got them corralled on my property.”
Cort shifts in his chair. “I’m working on moving them,” he says.
“Maybe you don’t have to. I have an idea we could help each other.”
The boy doesn’t say a word, just sits there, looking at her. Gert ignores his lack of enthusiasm and carries on.
“I need someone to perform some general chores. Nothing too difficult—painting, landscaping, that sort of thing. In exchange for your help, I’d be willing to let those goats stay here—and give you some much-needed advice about their care.”
“I don’t know, Miss Gert.”
“I’d also pay you a fair wage,” she adds. “And you could work at your own schedule, provided we agree upon the tasks to be completed each week.”
“I don’t know,” he says again. He looks into his lemonade glass as if he expects to f
ind an answer there.
“Of course, I’d need some help with the big house, too,” she says, playing her trump card. “There’s quite a bit of work to be done there. I can guarantee through the end of summer—say, September first? That’s four weeks. It should give you plenty of time to accomplish what you need to do.”
He looks at her straight on for the first time. His eyes are brown and guileless, and it’s clear he knows what she’s thinking. “That’s a long time just for some handyman work,” he says.
“September first,” she repeats.
He takes a sip of lemonade, and she can see him working through the idea of having a legitimate excuse to be on the property every day. She counts to ten, then counts again. On the third count, she decides she’s waited long enough.
“Well?” she says.
“What the hell—heck, I mean.” He sets his empty glass down beside his chair. “You’ve got a deal.”
“Good. You can start today.”
“I thought you said I could work at my own schedule?”
“I spoke with your mother, Cort. You have no schedule. I’ll expect you back here in an hour, no less. You can start by scraping the cottage. You’ll find a ladder behind the garage.” She stands, collects their glasses and tray of cookies, and walks inside to the kitchen. As she’s rinsing the plates, she listens. There’s only silence outside. She moves to the screen door and sees Cort sitting where she left him, morosely contemplating the few morning glories that escaped the goats’ rampage.
“You’d better get going,” she tells him. “With all you’ve got to do, why are you still sitting there?”
“I’m just wondering if your cookies are as poisonous as your flowers are.”
“Shoo, you,” she says, opening the door to flap her dishtowel at him. He gives her a small smile, the first she’s gotten out of him today, before he stands, stretches, and clatters down the steps.
“Mind you’re back here in an hour—no less,” she calls after him, and he waves a hand in response. She finishes washing the dishes, and when she takes the kitchen towel outside to dry in the sun, she walks past the mirror without a glance.
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