by David Risen
The old man sinks inside himself as he turns her declaration over in his head. Then he pulls a silver flask out of his blazer, screws off the lid, takes a drink, and then he extends the flask to her.
She shakes her head tightly.
He screws the lid back on and stuffs it back in his coat pocket.
“You’re lucky I happened by. Most folks around here are all in church.”
“And you?”
He gives her a look of shame.
“Don’t get to church much anymore. Not since Edna passed away. Guess I just don’t feel much like celebratin.”
“Edna?”
“My wife.”
And now she doesn’t feel quite so threatened.
“My condolences,” she says.
The car bumps on in relative silence for a moment, and then the old man turns slightly toward her and says, “Do you mind if I swing by my house for a minute?”
Warning bells in her chest.
“I’d prefer to get as far away from that field as I can before the owners return.”
He nods. “Ain’t nobody gonna bother you as long as you’re with me, and I still have some of Edna’s things. I think you might be about the right size for ‘em.”
She doesn’t respond.
“If you show up in town lookin like that, nobody’s gonna talk to you.”
“You still have her clothing,” she says, trying to change the subject.
“Didn’t have the heart to throw it out. After the babies are all grown up and mindin their own business, your wife’s about all you’ve got to talk to. When she’s gone, they ain’t much left for you.”
Amelia says nothing else. The man took her lack of answer for approval, because five more bouncy minutes later, they pull into the grown-up easement before an old, wood sided two-story with a stone foundation.
The house is in a state of disrepair with the paint chipped off the wooden siding and gables in places, and the tin roof rusted to the point that Rider wonders if it even keeps the rain off the old man’s head.
The man climbs slowly and painfully out of the car, waddles around to her side, and opens the door for her.
She gives him a stern look.
“Isn’t this a bit – unseemly?” she says.
“How’s that?”
“A young lady such as I should not enter the home of a gentleman who is not related to her without the benefit of a chaperone.”
He waves. “Oh, horse whiskers! I don’t mean no harm. Besides, they ain’t no old biddies around to bristle up about it.”
Amelia studies him carefully.
The old man has an honest face, and something about him reminds her of someone.
“I beg your pardon, but I don’t believe I asked for your name.”
He chuckles.
“Name’s Cy Farmer.”
Another empty memory flashes through her head.
“That sounds familiar.”
He squints at her. “My name?”
“Your family name.”
He nods. “Well, there’s a few of us around here. All this land use to be the Farmer Plantation when Daddy was a young’un.”
She climbs out of the model T and curtsies. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
The man cocks his head, picks his bowler hat off his balding head, and scratches his crown.
“You sound like you’ve got a fair amount of education in you. You must not be from around these parts.”
She doesn’t know how to respond, so she only smiles blankly.
He sits his hat back on his head and nods.
“Well, I guess you don’t have to tell me. I’ll show you where the clothes are.”
He turns and waddles across the weed-ridden front yard and up the three creaky steps to the wrap-around front porch.
She follows a few steps behind, still unsure of him.
He pauses at the front door long enough to turn and wink at her.
“I’m sorry in advance about the mess. They ain’t been a woman around in a while, and I’m not the best housekeeper in the world.”
Before she responds, he turns and opens the door.
The fusty odor of aged timbers rushes out and nearly bowl her over.
He escorts her inside the dark house.
The contrast between the brightness of the late morning to the damp darkness of Farmer’s old house dazzles her for a moment.
She hears a click and all of the lamps in the foyer blare on at once, and the light is much brighter than anything she recalls.
And now Rider knows there was something very odd about his host.
She gasps at the light and covers her mouth.
Cy Farmer gives her an amused look again.
“How did you do that?” she says.
He chuckles. “You talk like the Queen of England, but you ain’t never seen a motorcar or electric lighting?”
Amelia barely hears him.
She feels Mr. Farmer’s eyes burning into her back a moment longer, and then he steps around her and rests his hand on the oak banister and props his right foot on the first step of a wooden staircase ascending to the second floor.
“I’ll show you up to where I keep Edna’s clothes.”
He turns and starts up the stairs, and she follows a few steps behind. He directs her left off the staircase to the end of a narrow hallway of scratched-up hardwood floors and to a raised-panel door.
He glances back at her, and draws a deep breath.
She has the impression that he hasn’t stepped inside the room in a very long time, and even opening the door causes him much grief.
He turns back to the door, turns the oval brass knob, and pushes it open.
Amelia passes him and enters the room.
She finds herself standing in an airy, oval-shaped bedroom with a gaudy, wooden canopy bed in the center of it standing atop a platform.
Mr. Farmer brushes by her and opens a chestnut wardrobe a few feet beyond the foot of the bed revealing a legion of dresses – any one of which was nicer than her current attire.
He turns and nods.
“Underclothes are all in the chest at the foot of the bed.”
She steps up to the wardrobe and surveys her options.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Mr. Farmer says, and then he turns and waddles out of the room closing the door behind himself.
Once alone, Amelia rakes through the dresses in the wardrobe – finally settling on a yellow and white one with white gloves.
She drapes it across the mattress of the bed, and then she steps over to the oak trunk before the footboard.
She opens it, and finds undergarments within. But all the articles of clothing inside are alien to her, and the skimpiness and form-emphasis of them embarrasses her.
She chooses a white bra and a pair of panties and drapes them over the footboard, and then she shuts the wooden lid.
She eyes the stained wooden door to be sure that it is closed, and then she peels off the gray dress she pilfered from the farm. She takes the white panties from the footboard, steps into them, and pulls them up.
As she did so, Rider notices a number of bruises on her body that he didn’t see before.
Finger-shaped contusions on her breasts.
Dried blood on the upper insides of her thighs.
His host marvels at how much more comfortable the panties are than she expected.
She looks up and notices another piece of furniture to the left of the bed covered with a white sheet.
By the shape of the object beneath the sheet, she can tell that it is a mirror.
She pads across the cool hardwood floor and pulls the sheet away from it.
If Rider had a jaw, it would have fallen to the floor.
The woman staring back at him has long, full auburn air, and she wears no makeup.
But the image in the mirror is none other than his nun-impersonating anonymous friend.
Amelia’s mind reels with images that make no sense.
<
br /> She sees herself climbing a wooden ladder and mantling up into a hayloft – nude and cold. Both dull and sharp pain ebb in her pelvic region, and she can’t see through her tears.
She stands in the hayloft and stares at the bare, wooden walls comprised of horizontal planks for an indeterminate amount of time.
Then she turns left and makes her way to an opening in the loft.
Outside the opening, a clear night sky presides over the plowed field, and a hundred feet away from the stable, trees swallow the clearing. The emotions spinning inside her overwhelm her.
Fury.
Gloom.
Hatred.
Resolve.
She leans out of the opening and grasps a rope dangling from the crane installed at the peak of the roof – a crane her father uses to hoist bales of hay into the top of the stable.
She ties the rope around her neck....
She stares back at her own reflection from a vanity inside a small, damp bedroom. She wears a white dress, ruffled at the throat and cuffs, and she brushes her hair in long, gentle strokes.
She hears a rustling from the bed behind her. She cranes her head around to find a young man lying on the bed with hair the color of coffee and a face like a prince. He wears a white, button-up shirt with long sleeves and brown trousers.
Thick shafts of white sunlight cascade into the room from the two half-circle shaped windows to the left of the bed.
As she looks at him, feelings of kinship and gratitude swell inside her and her eyes well up.
He opens his eyes and sits up.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she says.
He gives her a look of concern.
“What happened with your father?” he says.
She gives him a tired smile. “You succeeded, I think.”
He looks down at his lap. “Then why are you still here?”
Back in the oval bedroom in 1928, Amelia’s senses expand. She feels the energy of everything around her.
High above the old house, a robin, native to this part of the country, flutters to an old willow tree with a beak full of juicy earthworm where her chicks wait in the nest.
A garden spider, sensing a storm pushing in from the west, eats at her web preparing to hide unnoticed between the cracks of the face boards at the base of the roof until danger passes.
Just outside the oval bedroom, Cy Farmer stands with his face pressed against the wall – his right eye pointed through the peephole in the wall watching her mill about in the room wearing only panties. Lewd thoughts race through his mind as he fumbles with his belt.
She spins around and glares at him – terrified by the look of hatred and betrayal in her own eyes.
Cy can’t breathe. He feels as though a rope tightened around his neck.
He claws and bats at his bowtie.
He falls to his back squirming and gagging.
Amelia feels wrath boiling off her.
Cy Farmer’s suffering fills her with sick satisfaction.
But as the old man wanes, his mind retreats into a more honest part of himself.
She watches him pacing around the rickety walls of his old house at night talking to the absent spirit of his departed.
His love for her burns hot in her bosom – his honor, allegiance, and fidelity.
She pulls back from him covering her mouth, and her eyes well up.
She dashes out of the room and into the hallway. Cy Farmer lay in a defeated heap on the hardwood floor.
The sunlight glows red through his eyelids.
Rider tries to open his eyes only to find that he’s still not in control. Moments later, his host opens her eyes slowly to the sight of the porous brown vinyl headliner of the car. The cones in her eyes aren’t operating yet casting everything in the car in a kind of blue hue.
She looks down at her chest. Rider’s host wears a western-style blue shirt with snaps on the pointed flaps covering the twin breast pockets.
She sits up and lifts the seat and finds herself face-to-face with a boxy dashboard. The fuel and speedometer gauges embedded deep within two cone-shaped bezels peer back at her like eyes. On a rectangular wood grain panel on the passenger’s side – just below the tan dashboard and above the ashtray and glove box, a chrome pony kicks the cursive, italic lettering that announces “Pinto,” with a little ponytail trailing off the last letter like a flourish.
A peck at the driver’s window.
Her head follows the sound.
The bushy, black hair of the cop standing outside of her window explodes out of his cap like a Bozo-the-clown wig, and a thick, Tom Sellick style mustache ate his upper lip making him look a bit like Jim Croce.
She rolls down her window.
“You can’t sleep here, lady,” he declares, his voice heavy with a thick, New England accent.
“I’m sorry, officer,” she says. “I’m just waiting on the convent to open. I must have drifted off.”
She looks at the thin, gold-banded Timex on her wrist. The hands indicate 10:43.
“May I see some ID?” he says.
She reaches down to the passenger’s side floorboard and drags a large, light brown purse made of soft leather up and into her lap. Then she unfastens the belt-buckle shaped, brass fastener at the top.
“I work at the hospital,” she offers. “I’m coming off a sixteen-hour shift. I guess I just ran out of steam.”
“What do you do there?”
She fishes a tan, leather wallet out of the purse and unsnaps it.
“I’m an emergency nurse.”
He gives her a cynical look as she passes him her paper driver’s license.
He takes it, his eyes dance over it for a moment, and find her face again.
“This address correct?”
She nods.
He stares at her a moment and then hands her license back. She replaces it in her wallet and snaps it shut.
“Well, if you have a place to go, you should go there.”
“I’m here to speak with a Sister Ruth Hunter.”
He nods and pats the top of her car.
“You’re a pretty, young lady, Miss. Long. Sleeping here in your car is a very bad idea. I’m gonna go have a bite to eat. When I come back, I don’t want to see you here.”
“Sure,” she replies.
He holds up his hand to signal that he isn’t finished. “If I come back, and you’re sleeping in your car, I’ll tow it and put you in jail for vagrancy.”
She nods.
Though he’s a condescending asshole, he really does believe he’s protecting her. His mind ticks away with images of bloody women with torn clothing.
“Yes sir,” she responds.
The cop makes an about face and stalks off to conquer the Chilidog he had been lusting after all morning.
Amelia stuffs her wallet back in her purse, buckles it, and opens the door. She loops the padded purse straps over her right shoulder, and climbs out of her car.
She starts across the road to the dumpy, brown brick building on the other side. The elephant bells on her tan corduroy jeans swish against her burgundy platform shoes as she presses forward.
As she nears the building, she finds the silver lettering affixed to the right-hand side of the front façade.
SISTERS OF DIVINITY CONVENT
She pauses at the aluminum-framed glass door. Butterflies churn in her stomach. She is either about to have a momentous breakthrough or make the biggest mistake of her unnaturally long life.
She eyes the fliers in the window.
Fight Poverty
Donate time or money today!
TEENAGE PREGNANCY ANONYMOUS
Counseling • Parenting Classes • Tutoring • Group Therapy
-Inquire Within-
One Small Step
Center for Children with special needs
Financial Aid Available – Trained professionals – Excellent Results
Amelia draws a deep breath and releases it slowly. Then she pulls the do
or open and steps inside.
She finds herself in a casual waiting room. The cinderblock walls are painted glossy beige, and an avocado-colored tile covers the floor. Four chrome framed chairs with green leather cushions sit against the wall to her right. Two window unit air conditioners buzz above them.
Directly across from her stands a wooden desk – like the kind a schoolteacher might use. A square archway parts the walls behind the desk dressed in long strings of red and blue beads hanging in lieu of a curtain.
If he had a face, Rider would smirk. This was the Catholic Church’s attempt to de-vilify the nuns by presenting a group of hipper, prettier nuns who no longer wore habits or smacked little hands with thick rulers for the slightest infraction.
The only items in the room indicating that this is a Catholic establishment was a framed portrait of Pope Paul VI sitting in his kingly throne adorned in white and a ceramic crucifix hanging above the beaded archway.
“Can I help you?” a sharp voice asks to her left.
Amelia’s head follows the voice. A college-age woman with red hair smiles soullessly back at her like an airhead.
Amelia shuffles her feet nervously.
“I’m here to see Sister Ruth Hunter?”
The young woman frowns.
“Mother Superior is a very busy woman. Do you have an appointment?”
Amelia feels silly. She shakes her head.
“Perhaps I might be able to help?”
Amelia gives her a nervous look. “My friend told me I should talk to Sister Hunter.”
Sister Mary Francis furls her brow with impatience. “Mother Superior oversees a homeless shelter, a school for handicapped children, a health clinic, and any number of other programs. If it’s something pertaining to any of these, I’m sure I can help.”
Amelia turns halfway back toward the door. “I really don’t feel comfortable....”
A look of frustration flutters on the nun’s face.
“You think I’m too young.”
Amelia sighs and looks at the glass door and then back at the nun. “This was a bad idea.”
She huffs. “Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ve heard it several times over.”
Amelia shakes her head. “It’s not about you, really.”