Crooked Branch (9781101615072)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  “Good? Hanging good,” I decide.

  “How’s the munchkin?”

  “She’s awesome, Dad. She’s so cute, and getting more alert now—she still sleeps most of the time, but when she’s awake, she’s really awake. You should see her.” I smile at Emma, and she gurgles.

  “Ah, I wish we could be there,” he says. And then there’s this long uncomfortable beat, because there is nothing preventing him from being here. Nothing at all. “You know how your mom hates to fly.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s a long haul up there in the Prius, but we’ll do it! We’ll do it soon!”

  “Yeah, no, I know.”

  “So how’s motherhood treating you?” he asks.

  “Good, I guess. It’s hard. Harder than I expected.”

  “Yeah,” Dad says. “The women have it so much harder than the men. Such a tough job, and so easy to get it wrong.”

  I take a deep breath.

  “But not for you, Majella,” he quickly corrects himself. “You’ll get it right, kiddo. I have every faith.”

  “Did Mom tell you about the diary I found?” I ask.

  “Yeah, she’s been looking up a bunch of stuff in all her geneometry crap.”

  “Genealogy,” I correct him, but only under my breath.

  I wander into the kitchen and look around like I’m going to find the diary on the counter, even though I know I left it in the attic. I can hear some birdsong on his end of the line. He must be outside on his condo balcony, overlooking the golf course.

  “So talk to me about the house, how’s the house coming?”

  “I don’t want to talk about the house, Dad,” I say. “I’m exhausted. I know it’s boring, but all I really want to talk about is how hard this mommy-thing is, how much I miss you and Mom.”

  There’s a snag in his breath. I can hear him scratching his neck. He plomps down in a chair, I can hear him rearranging his limbs beneath him.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t great timing, I guess, the way we left,” he says.

  “No.”

  “But you’re doing all right, hey? With Leo, and everything?”

  “Not really, Pop,” I say. “I feel so isolated. It’s not natural, living like this. It made more sense the way people used to live back in the day, all in little villages with lots of family and the rest of the tribe around, and everybody would pitch in at whatever they were good at.” I’m leaning my elbows onto the concrete countertops, staring out the kitchen window and into my neighbor’s shower. “If you were a bad mama back then, it probably didn’t matter, because there were all these women in the tribe there to show you, to help. I don’t know what I’m doing, and there’s nobody I can ask questions. I’m so on my own.”

  “You can always call us, Majella, me and your mother.”

  Emma squeaks in her bouncy seat, and I turn to look at her.

  “Come on, Dad, you know what Mom’s like,” I say, walking back to Emma and bouncing her little seat with my toe. “Mom will tell me the exact shade she had her toenails painted last week (Totally Toffee), and how many kids the pedicurist had (four!), and how much she paid (only seven dollars, can you believe that? Not including tip, of course, and she forgot her cash, so she had to put the whole thing on her debit card), but she never wants to talk about real stuff. I can’t tell her that I’m lonesome.”

  There is a crackling noise as my father’s hand passes across the mouthpiece of whatever phone he is holding in Florida.

  “You’re lonesome?” he says, and I can hear a split in his voice, all jammed up with emotion.

  I shrug. He cannot see me shrug. He is in Florida.

  “Yeah, you know,” I say. “It’s just, I’m home alone all day now. Leo’s great, when he’s here, but he has to work. And all my friends. They work.”

  “But you’ll be back to work before you know it. And hey, you were alone a lot before—you’re a writer. Don’t writers spend loads of time alone?”

  “I guess so, but no, Pop, this is different. I used to be out all the time, doing my research and stuff.”

  Emma coos, and I bend down to kiss her toes. She kicks automatically at my waiting hand. She’s beneath the window, and the sunlight glows down on her perfectly round head, her sloped nose, her full cheeks. How am I not going to ruin you? I think, and then we both begin to cry. My dad hears me sniffling.

  “Pop, I gotta go, Emma’s crying,” I manage.

  Before I hang up, I hear him say, “Call me later, hon.”

  There is no thinking, no rationale, and certainly no conversation when Emma cries. My body responds to her in a way that is purely primal, that I have no willful control over. She cries: my blood pressure climbs. My limbs become tense, my neck locks into a rigid posture. My uterus contracts, the stitches in my incision do their best to give with the spasms. My breasts fill with milk. My brain shuts down, replaced by some kind of repetitive variation on the mantra: please stop crying please stop crying please stop crying. Sometimes Leo tries to talk to me during these times, and I look at him, desperate to find words on my tongue, desperate to locate myself in my brain, so that I might respond to him in some appropriate way. It’s impossible.

  I lift Emma from the bouncy seat and swing her in my arms. I walk the house with her, swinging, shushing, singing, crying. I watch the clock, just to give my brain some other focus, something outside this biological circle of friction. The minutes tick by. Forty-seven of them. While Emma mewls and whimpers and screams and then whimpers and wails again.

  “I didn’t mean it, Emma, it will be fine,” I try to tell her. “We’ll be fine—I’ll be a good mama, I won’t ruin you, I promise. I’ll take good care of you.”

  She stops crying and makes a tiny, shuddering sigh in my arms. Then a face that threatens.

  “No, no,” I say. “I will, I’ll take care of you.”

  And that is the thing that calms her. I make a song out of it—an “I’ll Take Care of You” song—and I sing it until she falls asleep in my arms. This moment is my greatest victory of motherhood, and also probably of my life. Better than the day I got my first byline in Gourmet magazine. Better, perhaps, than my wedding. It is so wonderful that I don’t want to put her down, in case she wakes up and starts screaming again, which will obliterate my triumph.

  I lift her gingerly to my shoulder and we walk some more around the house. We walk upstairs, and then upstairs again. It’s probably not a good idea to bring her into the attic. It’s filthy, and there are tripping hazards everywhere. I turn around to head back down, but first—there’s the diary, sitting atop the old steamer trunk, still drunk on sunshine and dust. I navigate carefully across the floor and pick it up. I jam it into my back pocket so I can hold the railing and won’t somersault down the stairs and land on Emma at the bottom.

  After a while, I manage to settle her into the crib without waking her, and then I head back to the unfinished living room, where I can now permit myself to unmute the television. There are no words to describe what a lucent feeling of pleasure it is to unmute the television. Some soap opera is on, and I don’t want to watch it, but the sound of an adult human voice is like an anchor. I think about calling Dad back, but I’m not ready.

  Leo has been encouraging me to pick up a writing job or two, to start freelancing again. He thinks I can do research during the days and the evenings while Emma sleeps, and then write during the mornings when he’s home, before he goes in to the restaurant. Before Emma, I had more work than I could manage. But Leo doesn’t seem to understand what’s happened to my brain. Writing requires focus, and I have none. I can’t imagine I’ll ever be able to form a coherent written sentence again.

  I ponder all of this from the couch. The office doors are open, the computer just beyond. The baby monitor is silent. I haven’t even checked e-mail in almost a week. But my brain refuses. It’s like concrete. I
don’t even want the frustration of trying. For a few minutes, I watch the laminated couple on the television screen, with their silent, well-dressed baby. The mother is lipsticked and ironed. Her hair has a bouncy shine. I flip the channel.

  I’m still too sore to maneuver my hips off the couch beneath me, so I lean forward to pull the diary out of my back pocket. Then I lean back, and arrange pillows all around me. I flip open to the inside cover, and trace my fingers along the name written in uneven scrawl over and over again: Ginny Doyle. The madness is so viral it has leached into the childlike handwriting of its host—the loops of the letters look frenetic, they lean a little too precariously. I flip to the first brittle, yellowed page and begin to read.

  12 March 1848

  The infernal crunching, it’s followed me here.

  I stop reading and sit up a little too quickly on the edge of the couch. My incision throws a quick jab, which I barely register, because I’m so astounded by what I have just read. I don’t know why, but I flip back to the inside cover—what am I looking for, a hidden camera? I shake my head to try to sluice out the confusion. Then I lean back, and flip again to the text. I read:

  12 March 1848

  The infernal crunching, it’s followed me here. I thought coming to New York would be the answer for us, like it would wipe things clean, but it’s been so much harder than I imagined. I’ve lost so much, and that’s all I can think of. Not what we’ve left, but what’s gone. My children need me, but I’m all hollow for them. All that’s in me is sorrow.

  I’m tormented by so many memories. I wake up sweating in the nighttimes, and I have to throw open the windows to the chill night air, just to calm me. And the children do be waking up, and crying and shivering, and asking me to close the windows, but I can’t. I need to open them, and to sing and clap loudly, to strangle out those memory-noises: of screaming, of struggling. Of wicked crunching. I’m going mad in the head altogether. I need to be strong for the baby, for the children.

  Everything I’ve lost. God help me.

  18 March 1848

  I’ve confessed. I thought it would be a tremendous balm for my soul, but I’m still plagued by my conscience, even though the priest here is lovely and friendly—nothing like the sort of commanding fellas we get at home. So much softer than Father Brennan ever was. He never asked me for any details about what happened, only gave me a penance, and said that it must’ve been an awful weight for me to be carrying around. He said God would forgive me if I did the penance, but forgiveness seems too much to ask.

  The phone rings while I’m reading, and I glance up at the caller ID on the television screen. It’s Leo. He’s probably calling to see if I’m getting any writing done while Emma naps. I let it go to voice mail. I know he’ll be too busy to chat when I ring him back later, but I just don’t feel up to my unwieldy explanations. I feel the tiniest prickle of guilt, but I shrug it off.

  25 March 1848

  Even now, the crunching persists. I think the baby can hear it too, because he cries at night right after it starts, and he won’t settle again until I lift him out of the cot and sing him back to sleep. Maybe it’s not in my head then, if he can hear it, too? It’s so difficult to sort things out in my head.

  1 April 1848

  Tomorrow is Good Friday. I can’t imagine what Easter will be like this year, after so much terror and grief. If it weren’t for the children, I don’t know could I go on. Even after everything that’s happened—when I look at the baby especially, I know I’ve done my best, and that’s all I can do, the rest is up to God. I had no choice but to save him, surely. Surely my hands were tied.

  The red light on the monitor begins to flicker. Emma is awake.

  Chapter Six

  IRELAND, MARCH 1847

  The day was warm despite the damp, and as the sun climbed higher into the midday sky, Ginny stepped out of the cottage and climbed toward the ridge at the top of their field. Saint Patrick’s Day had passed in hunger and silence, and there was still no word from Ray. Maggie’s cairn was beginning to look like another small house beside their own, and the meager spring sunshine leaked down over it. Ginny stood at the top of the ridge, shadowed her eyes with her hand, and peered down toward the bottom of their land at the road beyond, but it was empty. Not a soul walked there; no shadow of a bird fluttered down from overhead. The only sound was the thuggish wind raking down over the barren fields. Ginny stepped over the ridge and started down the slope on the other side. The lower field was soppy, and when she neared the road, her footprints began to squelch, and fill with water. At the high rock wall, she leaned her elbows up, happy to be away from the cottage, just for a few moments. Her children were hungry inside.

  Winter had been savage. Willie and Thomas Harkin had been brought up on charges, along with four other young lads from the parish, and they’d all got transported to Australia. They were the lucky ones, who got gone before their parents and sisters all perished from the hunger. Mary Reilly and her brood were evicted, their house destroyed, and all the neighbors warned by Packet’s men against taking them in. Where they’d vanished to, Ginny hadn’t the heart to imagine.

  There was a time when she had known every bit of news and gossip from this parish—every wedding, every child born, every passing. Now the people were gone in great troops, men and women Raymond had known all his life, just gone. Like flocks of geese, lifted up into a skyward vee, and then vanished.

  Ginny turned and leaned her back against the rock wall, to stare back up at the ridge above her land. She was making a habit of this, of coming here every day for a few minutes, just to stretch her limbs, to move her body over the land, to get away from the seeking mouths of her desperate children. Their need had grown too strong for her in these last days, their hunger too acute to endure. The very sight of her children pained her now—how gaunt and wasted they were. She couldn’t abide their needful eyes.

  They had eaten the rotten potatoes until they were indigestible, even the seed for next year’s crop. They had eaten all the turnips and the cabbage. Then Michael began to disappear for a day at a time, and he’d come back with a fish he’d poached from God knew where. When he did that, Ginny was overcome by terror and gratefulness. They would eat the fish in great secrecy and fear—nearly raw. She was in dread that the smell of it roasting would give them away, and Packet’s men would come and seize Michael, and take him to jail or transport him for thieving. Two grown brothers in the parish had already been hanged for stealing a sheep to feed their starving children. Ginny and her children had eaten everything, all the oats and meal and veg and borrowed fish, until there wasn’t a crumb of food left in all the world. Then they ate a water soup she made from dandelions and nettles.

  Ginny closed her eyes, squeezed them shut hard, until she could see a floaty mass of colored specks inside her head. She tried to conjure Raymond’s voice, the sound of his confidence before he’d left.

  Say February. March at the latest. That’s what he’d said. March was drawing to an end now. Any day, they would get word from him. He’d send a letter to Father Brennan. He would send money inside. If her children could only hang on a few more days. Please God.

  The wind carried a stifled song to her ears and she turned, stepped toward the gate in the wall, and leaned out so she could see up the road. There was a figure approaching, an impossibly thin man drawing toward her. As he drew closer, she could see: he was so rickety, he’d hardly the strength to stand upright. On his back, he carried a roughened sack, its top gathered together with a bit of twine. His eyes were like open graves—they didn’t see her, didn’t latch on to her, even after she waved, she saluted him. He didn’t even know she was there. She shrank into the wall, pulled her body into a knot. He was raving as he passed.

  “Mo leanbh,” he wailed. “My baby.”

  Ginny flinched from him, but he never even glanced her way, just continued trudging on, and as he went past, sh
e could see the bony fingers of a little hand protruding from the sack slung over his shoulder. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she crushed the skin of her face with her fingers. She tried squeezing her eyes shut, but it was no use. She couldn’t unsee his face, those fingers. She couldn’t unhear his cries.

  She watched the horrible specter of a man until he disappeared over a rut in the road, and then she bent down beside the wall and she retched, but nothing came up—not even the sticky yellow bile that was normal now. She was empty.

  She stood absently for some time in the vacant yard, staring back at the ridge with her stomach quivering. She began to dread going back to the cottage, to her hungry children. Time passed so strangely now. Without the regular busyness of food, the hours were drawn and purposeless. Mealtimes came and went without any chatter or preparation or cleanup. Ginny tried feeding her children on songs and prayers instead. But they were growing listless. The most terrifying thing was when they had stopped complaining of the hunger. Even Poppy no longer asked for food. They had ceased growing as well, and now their skulls were starting to look huge on their little bodies. Their hair was falling out. Still, they were her children, and she could feel their souls, strong and glittering inside their withered bodies. She could sense them in there.

  Ginny heaved her body away from the wall and started back toward the ridge, and the cottage beyond, but a voice from behind called out, and she spun on her foot, hoping to God that whoever owned that voice was bringing news. A letter from Raymond.

  “Dia duit,” a woman hailed her from down the road. The woman waved her hand overhead, and Ginny waved back.

  “Dia is Muire duit,” Ginny replied, and then waited until the woman drew level with the gate. She didn’t recognize the woman, but she was well dressed, her petticoat black instead of red, and she’d a traveling bonnet curled over a fine head of shiny black hair. Even for all that, she looked weary and her brogues were well-worn, covered with the muck of the road. Her young face was damp with sweat.