The Shrouding Woman

by Loretta Ellsworth

  I saw the newly opened black-eyed Susan scattered among the white spires of baptisia, a harvest of colors and sweet smells that wove endlessly through the prairie. I pushed away a towering compass plant and had taken a step when I heard a piercing cry below.

  I screamed and jumped. There at my feet was a baby fox, cowering in a small ball of fear.

  “What are you doing all alone out here, little friend?” I bent down, and the pup let out a loud squeak and stared at me with wide eyes.

  “It’s all right,” I said soothingly. I looked for signs of a mother fox hiding in the tall brush but found none. I thought of what Mama would say.

  “If you touch a wild animal, the mother will smell you and reject her baby,” she’d warned me on several occasions.

  “I’d like to help, but it’s best I leave you.”

  The pup continued to stare at me, and I noticed a white spot on the tip of one of its black ears. Its rust-colored coat blended into the prairie. I backed up behind the compass plants, watching the fox, hoping to see it walk away. It didn’t move. I stepped farther back, sat down in the prairie grass, and waited.

  I looked up at the sun, which was now straight above me. I had been gone too long already. I pulled the stems off the thimbleweed plants that grew down among the grasses and played “He loves me not.” I could barely see the pup through the brush. It shifted every now and then but didn’t stand.

  I thought of Aunt Flo mending a bird’s injured wing and helping Mae place it back in the nest. Would she scold me for bringing home an abandoned baby fox?

  The Indian grass crinkled to my left, and I looked up to see a big muskrat slinking along the brush, its wide jaw open. It was headed straight toward the pup. I jumped at once.

  “Scoot!” I screamed as loud as I could. The frightened muskrat turned and ran in the opposite direction.

  I walked back to the pup, reached down, and picked it up. It let out another cry and squirmed its black feet against my hands. I wrapped it tightly in my apron and headed home.

  I passed Mama’s garden, still struggling to recover from the early summer storm. Mae was sitting on the cellar door. She ran to meet me, her brows narrowed down toward angry eyes.

  “Where have you been, Evie?”

  “It’s no concern of yours,” I replied as I went around her.

  “Aunt Flo is boiling the fat in the kettle and needs someone to pour the lye while she stirs. You were supposed to be back long ago,” Mae yelled behind me.

  I stopped in my tracks.

  “This is why I’m late,” I said, and showed her the bundle in my apron.

  “Ooh,” she said, and nodded approvingly. “Are you going to keep it?”

  “If Papa lets me.”

  “What about Aunt Flo? Aren’t you going to ask her first?”

  “Aunt Flo doesn’t need to know about this yet. I’ll fix a spot in the barn until I can come back later and figure out how to feed it. I’ll ask Papa when he gets home.”

  “But Aunt Flo could help,” Mae whined.

  “No,” I insisted. “What Aunt Flo doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Now promise you won’t tell.”

  Mae made a cross on her chest with her finger, our sign for heavenly promises.

  “Good. Follow me,” I commanded as I walked to the barn and secured a safe area with a small amount of leftover fencing to keep the fox in. I set the soft creature down on some straw. It stood for a moment as if it didn’t know what to do, then ran to the corner and hid.

  “Keep an eye on it so it doesn’t get away,” I told Mae before I went to the house.

  The heat from the stove hit me as soon as I opened the door. Aunt Flo was stirring the mixture in the large kettle.

  My job was to break the cooled soap into bars and set it out to dry in the sun. After they dried, I would store the bars in a box. The hardest part was pouring the mixture from the hot kettle into the cooling tub, which was why Papa usually helped make soap.

  Aunt Flo turned and saw me. Drops of sweat ran down the sides of her face. She looked puzzled.

  “Evie, where are the flower petals?”

  I looked down at my empty hands.

  Making Soap

  “I didn’t find any petals,” I mumbled sheepishly.

  Aunt Flo straightened up and put her hands on her hips. “We will talk about this when your father gets back. Go outside and check the soap.”

  There was a tub already cooling in the sun. I ran a knife through the soap; it was still soft.

  I took an old bowl from the cellar, filled it with water from the well, and brought it into the barn, where Mae was trying her best to pick up the baby fox while it bit at her hand.

  “Let it be,” I yelled at her. “Here’s some water. Maybe it will take a drink if you haven’t frightened it too much already.” I put the water down, and Mae scooted the fox over until it fell into the water bowl.

  “Be careful, Mae.”

  The fox jumped out and ran to the corner again.

  “Where did you find it?” Mae asked.

  “On the prairie. It was almost a meal for a muskrat.”

  “He’s lucky you saved him. That’s what his name should be. Lucky.”

  “Lucky,” I tried the name out, and agreed.

  “He’s awful skinny,” Mae noted.

  “He’s probably an orphan.” Mae had already decided it was a boy.

  “What do you feed a fox?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe scraps from the table,” I suggested.

  A loud voice startled us both. “Evie, what are you doing in the barn?” I turned to see Aunt Flo behind me, a look of exasperation on her face. “You disappear quicker than whiskey at a wedding dance.”

  Mae moved aside, and Aunt Flo saw the fox. “So this is what you’ve been up to.” She bent down and examined the pup.

  “You shouldn’t take a wild animal away from its home, Evie.” Her voice was stern, and I was certain she was going to make me take it back to the prairie.

  My voice squeaked. “It was orphaned. I waited for the mother to return, but she never did.”

  Silence filled the barn. Mae and I looked at each other, waiting for Lucky’s sentence.

  Aunt Flo stood up. “You will feed it here for two weeks. Any longer and it won’t be able to return to the wild. Give it hard-boiled eggs, fruit, bread, and water. After that you can leave food for it at the edge of the prairie every day for another two weeks. Then it will be on its own, able to survive.”

  “What if the badgers eat its food?” I objected. Badgers were known scavengers of the prairie.

  “You can put blueberries around the edge. The badgers have a sweet tooth and will eat the fruit and leave the other food alone.”

  I thought about waiting to talk to Papa. But in my gut I knew how Papa felt about wild animals when he had livestock to be concerned about. Finally I stood and faced Aunt Flo. “All right,” I conceded. I turned to Mae. “At least Lucky will have a chance this way.”

  “That’s settled, then,” Aunt Flo said. “Now come help me add the lye before the fat hardens and the soap is ruined.”

  “I’ll get some bread and fruit for Lucky,” Mae said.

  I followed Aunt Flo into the house. I wasn’t happy with her decision, but I wasn’t about to argue for fear that she’d make me turn Lucky out right then and there. I also knew Papa would go along with whatever Aunt Flo decided.

  I worked hard the rest of the day. I brought up the bucket of fat cracklings from the cellar. Aunt Flo added the lye, and I stirred the cracklings in the big copper kettle and removed any meat I found, making it smooth and clean. I kept stirring until it left a creamy glop on the spoon.

  Aunt Flo touched the spoon to her tongue. “It’s done,” she announced when she decided it had the right taste. We both heaved the kettle over to the waiting pans and emptied the contents. Then we started all over again.

  Papa returned and helped us with the soap making. There were several times when we were alone and I
could have talked to him about Aunt Flo, but I chose not to. The urgency I’d felt before had dissolved into a nagging worry, like a thorn just beneath the skin.

  Besides, Aunt Flo hadn’t mentioned my long absence to Papa, and I didn’t want to give her cause to bring it up. I also didn’t want to ruin my time with Papa in an argument or a lecture on responsibility. Lately he’d taken to getting up earlier and working later, as if hard work was his only comfort. I had grown used to hearing his heavy footsteps on the floor of the parlor and the squeak of the rocking chair that he resorted to in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep.

  Mama’s rocking chair, I thought as I recalled the evenings spent with Mama crocheting in her chair while Mae played at her feet.

  Over the next two weeks I didn’t complain much about anything, even when Aunt Flo made me rework my stitches in the mourning picture I had embroidered for Mama. I had started it the week after Mama died but kept putting it down. Finally it was finished: a garden of white lilies accented with a yellow monarch butterfly. I set Mama’s tombstone in the back with her full name across it. But Aunt Flo took one look at the back, where threads hung down and crossed over large spaces, and made me redo the butterfly. She said the back ought to be as neat as the front and suggested that if I wanted to hang it in the parlor, I should show my best work.

  I tore out the stitches even though I didn’t think Mama would mind a few loose ends.

  That same day Aunt Flo made good on her word and had us turn Lucky loose.

  “It’s been fourteen days,” she reminded me. Mae and I reluctantly took Lucky to the edge of the prairie and fed him the last meal we would be able to watch him eat. Mae whimpered that she’d miss Lucky even though he still bit at her fingers when she reached for him. I shuddered at the thought of what might become of a small fox alone on the prairie.

  Finally we ran home. Lucky followed at first but couldn’t keep up, and that was the last we saw of him.

  For two more weeks we left food at the same spot each night, and by early morning it had disappeared. Several days later I thought I caught a glimpse of Lucky. I snuck to the spot and left food scraps, but Aunt Flo saw me.

  She reminded me of our agreement.

  “That fox will never make it through the winter if you don’t let him survive on his own.” She added, “He has to learn to hunt for his food.”

  I knew Aunt Flo was right about Lucky, but her hard lessons didn’t endear her to me.

  On Sunday before the church meeting, Reverend Johanson and the whole community paid Aunt Flo a special honor. They’d heard about her laying out Mr. Severson, and everyone complimented her on doing such a fine job. Aunt Flo was bewildered by all the attention but acted polite enough.

  “Back on the homestead I wasn’t used to talking to more than two people a week,” she said. “I’m a bit flustered.” I didn’t understand why, but that seemed to make everyone like her even more.

  Reverend Johanson looked right at me as he filled the church with his booming voice. “Summer is a time to move ahead and reap new life and leave our burdens behind,” he said with divine inspiration.

  I wanted to believe him, but the thought of Mama still turned my heart upside down.

  The Custom

  It seemed as if Aunt Flo had taken over our entire household by the middle of summer. What’s more, she didn’t act a bit neighborly like Mama did. She was friendly enough when Edward’s mother came to visit, but she outright told her that she didn’t have time to sit and chat much, and especially didn’t like gossip, which sent Edward’s mother off in quite a huff.

  I worked this matter into a conversation with Papa, but it went right over his head as though it wasn’t the terrible thing that it really was. Papa shrugged and said, “That’s just Flo’s way.”

  Then there was the matter of Mama’s butter churn, which had been a wedding present. Aunt Flo used it to make honey butter.

  “Mama always makes it plain,” I told her.

  Aunt Flo smiled, handed me a slice of bread, and nudged my shoulder. “Give this butter a try. I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do, Evie.”

  I put the bread down. “Do you expect me to like all your traditions?”

  Aunt Flo looked confused. “Are you talking about butter?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about it.” I went to Mama’s garden, where I curled myself up beneath the cornstalks. It wasn’t the butter that bothered me so much. It was the memory of making the butter with Mama. Mae would add the cream while I turned it over, then we poured off the frothy buttermilk into waiting cups and sprinkled salt on the hardened butter. Afterward we clinked our cups together and toasted our good fortune.

  Aunt Flo hadn’t even asked us to help make the butter. That night I emptied the churn when no one was watching.

  The next morning Aunt Flo was plumb befuddled by the empty churn and butter on the floor.

  “How did this happen?” she asked.

  Papa looked at me, his eyebrows raised in suspicion.

  I shrugged. “I think I saw Mae playing around it. She probably knocked it over. You know how careless she can be.”

  “I did not do it!” Mae protested.

  “You might not have meant to do it,” I added, “but accidents happen to little girls who run in the house.”

  My comment set Mae to bawling inconsolably until Papa finally sent her to the loft. Later I felt so guilty that I snuck her a piece of bread and jam. Good old Mae was used to my mean streaks and forgave me on the spot.

  The following day, Aunt Flo came out to the garden as I dug up the weeds crowding the flowers. The hearty daylily was one of the few flowers that had survived and was in full bloom, in a dazzling combination of orange, yellow, and pink. I had hopes for the squash, but most of the garden was limp.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” I whispered to the withered cabbage plants that were failing despite my best efforts. Some days I felt as if I could look up and see her working across from me, bending low over the rows of beans in the flowered bonnet that she always wore to fend off the morning sun. But as soon as my mind convinced itself that she was there, I would look up and the vision would vanish and I’d be left alone again.

  “You are doing a fine job on your garden, Evie,” Aunt Flo called out. She carried wild daisies in her apron to make into a hair band for Mae. She twirled the stems together as she spoke.

  “It’s a sight,” I replied as I glanced at her, then returned to my task of pulling weeds. “The leaves on the green beans are brown, and the squash aren’t any bigger than peas. Besides, it isn’t my garden.”

  “You take good care of it. Perhaps now the garden will be yours.” I looked up at her. She stood near the edge, as though she wanted to come in and help but was waiting for an invitation. Her face held a wistful expression as she fluffed the white petals. It wasn’t in my nature today to be kind back.

  “I don’t want it to be mine. It belongs to Mama.”

  “You have your mother’s looks, but your father’s disposition.” Aunt Flo laughed. “In the old country, we hand down to our children our belongings and our land. It is our custom.”

  I stopped pulling weeds and looked up. “Is it a custom to be a shrouding woman?”

  “Yes.” Aunt Flo nodded as she twisted the green stems. “My mother was a shrouding woman, as well as her mother before her. I learned when I was young, like you, and have been doing it most of my life.”

  I cringed at the thought.

  Aunt Flo seemed to sense my concern. “What is it, Evie? Is something bothering you?”

  I stood up, dropping a handful of weeds. The words were forming, although I was afraid to hear the answer. It squeaked out on its own. “And who will you pass the custom down to?”

  Aunt Flo tilted her head in a thoughtful manner. “I was married once. We built a homestead in the Dakotas and planned to raise a large family, but my husband died.” She smiled sadly. “We didn’t have children. I guess it will end
with me.”

  I let out a huge sigh of relief. “If you had a child, would she become a shrouding woman?”

  Aunt Flo looked down at the flowers. “I don’t know. It’s not something I think about. Perhaps.”

  “You don’t expect it of anyone? It is a choice?” I asked to be certain.

  She looked back up at me, the corners of her mouth firm. “Shrouding isn’t for everyone. Only those who are called to the profession.”

  I raised my eyebrows in disbelief.

  Aunt Flo twirled the delicate flower stems together. “A shrouding woman’s profession is a noble one,” she said, her voice lighter than before. “She is the caretaker of the dead, preparing them for burial, providing her service to the family of the deceased.”

  I wiped my hands on my apron, smearing it with a green stain. I was possessed with a sudden curiosity I hadn’t felt before. “How do you prepare them for burial?”

  “I give them a look of peace.” She sounded pleased, and a gentle smile touched her lips.

  “Do you enjoy doing it?” I blurted out, unable to stop myself.

  “It is something I take pride in doing, just like you are proud of your garden.”

  I stuck my hands into the dirt, feeling the coolness of the black soil.

  “Mama said the soil gives life,” I replied.

  Aunt Flo held up a perfectly round green-and-white hair band dotted with yellow specks. “That is true. It is also where we bury the dead.”

  I looked down at the soil and drew my hands out of the dirt.

  Aunt Flo stepped forward, still careful not to enter the garden. “Perhaps someday you will understand it, Evie.”