The House Girl

by Tara Conklin

  O more than anyone deserves it. He does of course he does.

  …

  Listen to the pigeons, they chatter and gossip and spit.

  Can’t work, can’t think, can’t breathe.

  …

  Is it so much to ask for? Is it so much? O does not understand, he cannot. Always something appendaged to me, always this noise, or this fear of noise. Be cautious, quiet, still. What if I want to scream too? What if my hands feel too heavy to lift even the slightest weight, a paintbrush or a baby?

  …

  She is the loveliest thing I have ever seen.

  • A sketchbook with a hard black cover and creamy sheets of thick paper. Inside, small pencil sketches of faces done in the same style and with the same familial labels as those hanging in Lina’s room.

  Joy, my favorite person my favorite name—Sister’s cousin

  Porter, my anti-O—Cousin, brother, twin

  Lark, a beauty—Cousin thrice removed

  Tisha, too much like me—Niece’s nephew’s daughter

  And a series of rough sketches of a baby, only a few months old, indistinct in the way small infants are, but Lina recognized them as herself and her breath caught. Below each, Grace had written simply:

  Daughter. Daughter. Daughter. Daughter.

  On the last page, no sketch, only the words:

  Nothing is as I see it. What do I see?

  • Four loose pieces of paper, undated, all written in Grace’s neat curling script. The first of them read:

  Oscar,

  If you want to keep the fucking frogs, keep them in the plastic tub not MY tub. I do not like their fucking sliminess.

  The second:

  19 weeks, so I am told. My belly is getting big.

  O happier than I’ve ever seen him, perhaps this is enough.

  The third:

  Lydia

  Laura

  Aurelia

  Zephyr?

  Caterina

  *Carolina

  The last, a scrap torn from a longer document, the final sentence incomplete:

  I cannot bear to leave her. I cannot bear to stay. I am—

  Lina heard a sound, the grating of the lock downstairs, the front door closing and her father’s footsteps in the entry, the dull weight of him moving through the living room, into the kitchen. She rose from the stool. She did not want Oscar to find her here; it seemed a trespass. She should not be reading these notes, they had not been marked for her. Quickly she replaced the loose pages into the sketchbook, reordered the books on the table, and left the studio. The noise from downstairs stopped, and Lina tiptoed silently to her room. Inside, she leaned against the door and it seemed she held a bowl of water on her head and must move carefully, breathe slowly, or the bowl would dislodge and come crashing to the floor. Nothing is as I see it. What do I see?

  Josephine

  Josephine started on dinner, the pork sausages she’d finished making last week, ready for Mister when he quit the fields. Mister would come inside but the rest would squat to eat among the tobacco plants, the food barely past their mouths before they’d take up picking again.

  The sausages frying on the griddle, a pan of hoecake baking in the coals. Tonight. An image of Louis came to her, the sound of his voice gravelly and deep as a man’s but shot through with high notes, little squeaks that had made her giggle, and he had smiled too, powerless to stop them. How many days had passed since that day? How had he changed? And how had she? Would he still look at her as he did then, with a shy wonder?

  Josephine pulled the last two ears of summer corn from the basket under the table and they felt small and light in her hands.

  Right now Nathan labored in the fields, sweat running off him, his hands chapped and cut from the thick tobacco stalks. It was hours still until Josephine might steal down to the cabins to speak with him about the undertaker and his daughter.

  Josephine husked the corn, pulling the green leaves down to reveal the pearly kernels hidden there, some starting to wrinkle and pull into themselves now, so long after picking. Steam rose from the pot and she dropped in the ears with a splash and a hiss of water hitting the coals. At that instant, a memory descended upon her, a memory of an ear of corn in an apron pocket.

  Josephine closed her eyes.

  It had been high summer when she ran before, an August night sticky and close, a full moon casting the road and the fields in bright relief. She had left without shoes, but had thought to pack some oatcake stolen from the pantry, and an ear of corn, so abundant at that time of year, Missus would never notice just one gone. An ear of corn in an apron pocket.

  She had taken the main road toward town, ignorant of the regular patrols that searched that way for runaways. Somehow she had passed unseen, scrambling down the bramble-filled bank only once, when dust thrown by a fast-approaching horse appeared in the distance and she thought surely no good could come of a man in a hurry. The white man rode past her in a fury of hooves and flying dirt, pebbles and earth showering over her as she crouched in the bushes. She had dusted off and continued walking, sure now that she must be close, close to somewhere.

  But the road continued, bordered on both sides by undulating fields of corn, wheat, some tobacco too, only the chirrup of night crickets to remind her that other living things existed in this desolate plain. Josephine would have walked all the way to the center of town, or surely been set upon by patrollers, but she heard a voice.

  “You, girl, over here.” It was a boy’s voice, almost feminine in its high-pitched notes, but hoarse as though talking was something to which he had grown unaccustomed. She turned her head, narrowed her eyes and saw, standing in the field alone, a boy no older than herself. He stood shirtless, straight-backed and rigid, his neck in a wooden yoke, his hands fixed in holes to the side, one at each ear. Just above his knees a second yoke held his legs, and this board was wide such that the boy could not walk or sit, only stand or fall in that one place amid the tall green corn. Heat and sun had weathered him harshly, his hair was matted thick with dirt, traces of salt marked his skin white where the sweat had run and dried. His hands hung like alien things, the fingers bloated, the skin purple and blistered.

  “Come here, girl. Scratch my back, would ya please. It itches like the devil. Please.” Josephine looked around her, thinking there must be someone keeping watch, but she saw no one, only the corn stalks, and a bat flapping black against the silver sky.

  She did as he asked, as best she could; she ran a finger down the flayed flesh of his back, hardly a ribbon of skin left, and it seemed to soothe him. Her finger came back sticky with his blood and she wiped it against her skirt. He let out a sigh.

  “You done a good deed for a dying boy,” he said and laughed. “You can sleep easy now, rest a your days. You’re heaven bound.” He grinned at her, his mouth a graveyard of dark space and gray stone.

  “What’d you do?” Josephine whispered.

  “Nothing. Not a thing. I ain’t done a thing since I been born,” the boy said, and laughed again, loud and raucous until it ended in a flurry of coughs, his throat straining against the yoke as his head pitched forward with the force of them. “You best get moving along,” he said finally, and he glanced at her stomach, full and round beneath the apron. “Patrollers come by. I seen them two, three times already tonight. They don’t pay me no mind but they’d chase you down, oh they would indeed.”

  “I don’t know where to go,” Josephine said. This realization was sudden in her, the boy’s blood sticky on her hand, his suffering absolute. The field was open, exposed, and the moon bore down like a face watching from above. Fear swept over her, drying her mouth, weakening her legs where before they had been steady.

  “Go to the undertaker’s. The undertaker and his daughter. You can make it there ’fore morning. Take the right fork in the road, you’ll see his wagons. There’s help to be found there. But you better run, run, run! Run! Run!” And the boy started screaming, his voice emptying into the field
s and the road and beyond.

  Josephine left the boy behind but the sound of his voice stayed with her, echoing beside her for miles. As she walked, she whispered to the boy, soothing him as he stood condemned in the cornfield, and soothing too the child within her. A girl, she believed it to be, and she felt strong twists and turns within her belly, rounded pokes of small elbows and knees as she walked on. She continued in her whispering, patting her belly with her right hand to keep the time of her steps and to assure the child that soon they would reach the undertaker’s barn, just as the boy had told them. Help could be found there; soon they would be safe. The moon above revealed her, the misshapen curves of her shadow falling long on the road. There is nothing to fear, she whispered to the boy in the cornfield and to the baby inside her, but her voice shook in its whispering.

  Night progressed and the sky clouded over, the moonlight dropped away, and Josephine reached the fork in the road. Take the right, the boy had told her, and so she did, pausing only once to look behind her into the gray dark. As she stopped, a single drop of rain fell onto the road. She saw the blackened spot it made, and a cool breeze rose up, chilling the sweat on her face and arms. Josephine hurried along, her hand patting faster against the underside of her belly. The baby no longer twisted but now, she supposed, slept with the rhythm of her steps, her bare feet moving faster, faster over the pebbles and dust.

  At last she saw it, yellow as a second moon: a lone lantern in the cool, prestorm night. A barn, the wagons, just as the boy had told her. Josephine approached silently across the grass, not using the path to the main house, and then she saw the wooden boxes laid out against the side of the barn, just under the eaves, stacked one atop the other. Caskets. The undertaker and his daughter.

  Softly Josephine knocked on the barn door and it swung open wide. A young white woman stood in the doorway, her eyes soft and brown as a horse’s flank, and Josephine stood for a moment outside, the woman inside. Worlds separated them, it seemed to Josephine, and how was she ever to cross that divide, the threshold between the barn and the night? But without a word the woman nodded and smiled and took Josephine’s hand, and pulled her inside. There was a man in the barn, his eyes like the woman’s, the sleeves of his shirt rolled to the elbows, his forearms strong and brown from sun, and he looked once at Josephine, his eyes going to her stomach, and his face changed in a way Josephine could not determine, whether from soft to hard, from certain to hesitant, she couldn’t say, the light was too dim. Then the woman took Josephine’s hand and laid her down to rest on a pallet of straw, the smell of animals comforting and close. This must be the place the boy had spoken of, Josephine had thought. It must be that help could be found here. Josephine had continued in her whispering but now it was the young woman to whom she spoke, not the boy or even the child inside, and the woman looked at her with those soft eyes and stroked her hair, nodding as Josephine told of Bell Creek and her journey away from there. Josephine talked until exhaustion overcame her and it was the woman’s face she saw last as her eyes closed.

  On that long-ago night, Josephine had fallen asleep in the undertaker’s barn as though she were rolling off a cliff, a silent and complete surrender, trusting that someone below would catch her.

  JOSEPHINE PLUCKED THE COBS FROM the hot water and set them, steaming yellow, onto a plate. Inside Mr. Jefferson’s chest of drawers, just a small one, Josephine kept the face of that boy in the field and the sound of his screams. She kept the feel of her own rounded belly, the ghost memory of those movements inside her.

  Mister walked through the door, the stench of sweat and earth reeling off him in waves as he moved through the kitchen and into the dining room. Josephine followed him and placed the plate on the table next to the sausages already there. She turned to fetch Missus Lu. Mister and Missus always ate the midday meal together. It was the only time they sat face-to-face, the only time they spoke a word to each other, that Josephine could tell.

  “Leave your Missus be for now,” Mister said. “Tell me, what did the doctor say?”

  Josephine stopped in the doorway and turned back to face him. Mister’s hands were in his lap and sunlight from the windows cut across the long table and hit his face so every line seemed drawn there with Missus’ sharp pencil. There was no color in his skin, only the grays and browns of exhaustion and physical labor under the sun. His eyes merely suggested blue, the color tending to navy, not the indigo that Missus Lu had spoken of, that had once so bewitched her. Papa Bo’s eyes had been a deep brown; the blue must have come from Mister’s mama. Josephine never heard talk of Mister’s mama, or his dead sisters.

  “The doctor, he said Missus is almost certainly dying. He believes she has a tumor, here,” and Josephine touched the back of her neck. “He can’t say how much longer she’ll have, maybe months, maybe more or less. He’ll return in two days and we’re to send for him if her condition changes. We’re to send for him at once.”

  Mister said nothing. Steam rose from the corn in great white billows. The smell of the sausages, their drippings visible on Mister’s plate, made Josephine’s stomach grumble, the pangs loud in the silence of the room, the air thick with Mister’s contemplation.

  Josephine thought of Lottie’s ghosts who danced by the river. Did Papa Bo dance there too? Did he carry his stick, the one tipped in silver? The one he used to beat Mister? Again her stomach rumbled, or perhaps it was the blood rushing in her ears. Mister’s shoulders bent over the plate, and she saw Papa Bo there with his stick, raising it high above his head to bring it down across Mister’s back.

  Mister cut into the sausage and raised the fork. He opened his mouth but then stopped and threw the knife and fork down with a clatter that made Josephine start. He pushed his chair away and stepped toward the door, looking up at Josephine with a deep confusion, as though nothing she had said could be true, as though the world that had once seemed so bright—a lovely young wife, an inheritance, a farm of his very own—was now shrouded in mist and peopled only with ghostly apparitions.

  He is a good man, Missus Lu believed. Josephine did not know how goodness came to a person. Papa Bo’s preaching voice had rung loud and heavy day in, day out, as if a battle raged within his chest between God and the devil himself. Was he now up in heaven with the angels and the Lord? Had he found his salvation in the end? Perhaps if Mister’s mama had lived, perhaps if he had not come to Virginia, to Bell Creek where the earth was worn out, where Missus would never be happy. Perhaps if he had never married Missus, never even glimpsed her round cheek, the sly arching brow of her at sixteen, itching to flout her daddy’s will.

  Mister was beside Josephine and then gone, her skirts ruffled by the breeze of his passing. She heard the rattle of the door latch and his boots booming across the porch and down the front steps to the dirt path. Josephine followed and watched as he emerged from the barn, leading his horse. He mounted and spurred the horse along the road to town.

  As he disappeared from view, she heard Missus’ voice calling from inside, “Josephine! Josephine! What has happened?”

  Josephine returned to the hall and Missus was descending the stairs. She had combed her own hair and fixed it up in back.

  “Whatever happened? Why all this slamming?” Missus had returned to herself. Though the cut blazed raw on her face and the back buttons on her dress were not fully fastened, she spoke now as mistress of her house. “Josephine, why did Mister see fit to gallop away like the hounds of hell chased after him?”

  Josephine hesitated. How was she to answer? Keep her calm, Dr. Vickers had said. Josephine searched her mind for an explanation that would not see another knife gone from the kitchen, another afternoon of fits and rages.

  “He was sorry at having missed the doctor’s visit, not having time to see the doctor,” Josephine said with care. “He wished to see Dr. Vickers himself.”

  “And what will your Mister do then? Shout and scold? It will do no good, I will still be as I am now.”

  Missus gazed out th
e open front door, at the spot by the barn where the dust thrown by Mister’s horse still lingered, clouding the air. “The weather is fine today for working,” she said. “Jackson is keeping them in the fields then?”

  “I believe so, yes, Missus.”

  “Widow Price has had troubles aplenty, so I hear.” She turned to Josephine. “I want you to go to Jackson, tell him they are to work as usual, there is to be no relaxing just because Mister has left on an urgent errand. Tell him Mister has left on an urgent errand, and he will return shortly …” Missus’ voice trailed off. “Go, Josephine. Now.”

  THE FIELD HANDS WERE WORKING some distance from the house. A hazy sun shimmered overhead and the day’s heat lay heavy across the fields as Josephine struggled through the rows of leaves, a forest of green tobacco stalks reaching almost to her shoulders. All the field hands were there, even Therese, whose back bent almost parallel to the ground, a dark blue cloth wrapped around her head so that Josephine could not see her face. Her working days could not be many more, Josephine thought, and then what would become of her?

  Josephine called to Jackson and he lifted his head. He stood beside Therese, who lagged behind the others at the far end of the row.

  Jackson called, “Nathan!” and pointed to Josephine, as though his business with Therese could not be interrupted by traversing the length of the field to where Josephine stood.

  Nathan laid down his bundle of leaves and walked to her, flicking sweat off his face with the fingers on his right hand. He limped with slow jerky movements as if learning to walk anew with each step. The others kept on, backs stooped, arms pumping in a constant awkward rhythm of grasp pull drop. Winton moved between the rows, picking up the stacks of leaves, twisting the stems to secure each bundle, each like a fan of many hands, palms pressed together and wrists tied.

  “Uh-huh,” Nathan said.

  “Missus wants me to say that Mister’s been called away on an urgent errand, and y’all should stay in the fields till suppertime as usual. She wanted me to tell Jackson that.”