In the kitchen, a teakettle steamed. As Ginny sifted a spoonful of crushed tea into a blue china teapot, she surveyed him.
“I never meant to hurt her.”
“Meant or don’t mean, I seen what you did. I seen how cruel.”
“I only meant—” Charles stopped. “How does a woman grow up on a goddamned farm and not know she has shit on the sole of her boot? My sister, Belinda, wrings chicken necks all the time—guts them, plucks them, cooks them, and eats them.”
“She ain’t Miss Belinda.”
“No, Miss Belinda never had slaves to do her every bidding,” he said.
“She do now. Don’t reckon she’s out killing Sunday chickens these days,” said Ginny.
Charles plunged his hands in the dishpan, wiped them with a half-clean towel, and ran his fingers through his hair.
“She tell you she got a baby in her?” Ginny said.
“Of course she did.” Charles whirled on her. Ginny did not move.
“I’m gone tell you a story. About Miss Emily, when she was just a baby child, not much past walking good, maybe almost three. Right soon after I first come here, me still a child myself. Maybe ten, eleven, I don’t know. Ain’t never knowed how old I am. We’s out back playing chase and her laughing like to lose her breath. Old Sarabel out there chasing up a hen and Miss Emily, she think we all just playing some game. She think that chicken playing chase, too. Well, Sarabel, she got hold of that hen, whop it on the stump, and ax that head in half a breath. Jump back out the way. Chicken flop straight into that baby’s face with its old bloody, headless neck. Knock her down, wings flapping in her face, blood flying, claws scrambling on her skin, and her screaming and screaming. I’m yanking that baby out from that old hen and flying in the house. Mistress come running out, grab that girl away from me. What you doing to my girl? she say. Sarabel, she running behind me, crying and trying to explain, but she bawling too hard. Mamie, she running from the kitchen, fetching water, grabbing towels. She seen it from the window and she can talk, not like me and Sarabel, and she tell Mistress the whole tale. Mistress rocking that baby, smoothing her hair and patting at her little back.”
Charles pushed his hands against the worktable, shaking his head. He took one deep breath, exhaled, his shoulders going slack.
“That little girl, she go still then. Real still. Don’t make one sound for nigh on the whole day, just a little whimpering, sucking her thumb. Mistress say fry that chicken, Sarabel. Crisp. And salt it up good. And don’t never let my baby see you kill no chicken ever again, you hear. And we didn’t. Not then. Not now. ’Specially not after she see her mama die and all that blood everywhere. She be eating chicken ever since, but chicken fried up crisp on the table don’t look like chickens running round out there, laying eggs she love to gather, pecking up the feed she throw. Her mama give her a little yellow biddy for her own right after that, let her keep it on the porch in a crate till it get too big, so she don’t be afraid. And she never was, till now.” Ginny reached across Charles for the sugar bowl. “Wasn’t long after that she see her mama die.”
Ginny poured boiling water into the blue teapot, set a cup and saucer on the tray. “Beg pardon, sir.” Ginny brushed past Charles, whose face was hidden in one hand, the other still gripping the edge of the worktable. “Jessie and me’ll get her to bed.” She disappeared down the hall.
After several minutes, Charles went out the back door. In the shed, he took down the crosscut saw and motioned to Benjamin and Lucian. At the stump, Charles studied the dark stains. He handed the saw to Benjamin and watched as the two men bent over the blemished surface of the wood. When the stump was smooth and clean again, Charles returned to the kitchen. On the worktable he saw Ginny’s tray, Emily’s cup of tea untouched.
* * *
Sometime before dawn Emily stirred, her nightgown a sticky wad around her. She struggled, exhausted, between waking and sleep. She tugged at the gown and half rolled toward Charles’s side of the bed. A jolt of dizziness disoriented her. The rocker creaked and Emily raised her head, pain shooting through the side of her face. Charles sat close to the bed with his face averted. He looked spent and haggard. Emily watched his Adam’s apple move. Charles stood and disappeared without looking in her direction. Emily puzzled at the pattern of yellow spots on the ceiling above her. When she closed her eyes, the spots shifted to the interior of her lids. She watched them sway as her closed eyes moved, back and forth.
Ginny brought in a tray with toast and tea.
“Ginny, what’s wrong with me? And Charles? Ginny, he—I think he was weeping. Did I lose my baby?”
“No, honey, you just had you a little spill. Hit your head real hard. Might near dove through the ground. Dr. Charles been here all night. Wouldn’t budge. You eat now. That tea gone be cold.” Ginny pulled the rocker closer and sat.
“I’m gone tell you a story now, Miss Emily. Seem like I’m full of stories about you that you don’t recollect.” Ginny recounted her tale, including the terrible nightmares that ensued and how Emily began to wet herself and her bed afterward. Emily remembered her humiliation. It had lasted a long time. Especially after her mother’s death. Then Ginny told her the details of yesterday. She softened the account as much as she knew how. Both women were silent, the rocker creaking as Ginny swayed.
When Charles returned, Emily touched his face and, out of habit, smiled.
CHAPTER 19
Emily had come to Charles a virgin. Charles had come to her full of knowledge and had intermittently taught her pleasure. She had not questioned his desires nor his skills, assuming them to be the innate gift of a being man. Though he had often simply used her, Charles had frequently enflamed her, had taken her innocence and kindled a burning desire with his mouth and his hands and his body. Then had come pregnancy and fear and sleepless nights and worries at his often long absences. Still, there were moments when he delighted her. And since the shock of this discordant summer, he had taken her often, saying how a pregnant woman had the greatest pleasure since she needn’t worry about getting pregnant.
Outside the window, the dew lay like a thin sheet of summer snow across the ground. Emily lay satiated across the bed, staring out at its pale shimmer. She smiled when Charles pulled her to her feet and told her to cover her body and ride into town with him.
Old Mrs. Gossard, a widow, living alone, had fallen on her porch. A neighbor found her lying on her side, her leg apparently broken. A slave boy had come to fetch the doctor. Charles needed Emily to help in binding a splint. Emily and Charles found her moaning in pain. No one had dared to move her.
The old lady had broken a hip, not a leg. Now, she lay whimpering in her bed, where the slave boy had helped Charles settle her. He gave a note to the boy, who went running to the pharmacy. Charles shook his head at Emily. The widow was still in her nightclothes, a blessing because moving her had caused excruciating pain. Emily lifted the covers and loosened their weight around the old woman’s gnarled feet. She followed Charles into the hall.
“I have laudanum coming, or at least, I hope I do. There is almost none to come by with it all gone to the troops. There is nothing I can do other than possibly diminish the pain. She will never leave this bed. I doubt she will live more than a few weeks at best. A broken hip in the elderly is a death sentence. She will need a companion and—”
“My father can spare someone. I am sure of it. I will go and ask him now. He should be at his office after morning court.”
Emily found her father in his office, as expected, and open-armed for her. He sent a boy from the rear of the courthouse for one of the house slaves to go at once, prepared to stay. When Emily returned, Widow Gossard had quieted in a laudanum fog.
“I must speak to Horace at the pharmacy before we go,” said Charles. “He’ll need specific instructions on dispensing the drug. I don’t want her in pain and he may be hesitant about the quantity without my say-so. Especially with the shortage now.”
Charles helped Emily into
the buggy. As they passed up the street, various townsfolk nodded or waved. Emily remained in the buggy while Charles entered the pharmacy.
The sun was soft and warm on Emily’s back. She was feeling soft herself, thinking about her husband: the way folks greeted him, the way he handled Widow Gossard’s frail body, so concentrated to spare her pain. Emily settled back against the leather and closed her eyes. When she opened them, Charles was coming out of the pharmacy. Beside him, holding his arm, was a laughing woman she had seen before but did not know, a woman whose bodice was cut too low, whose laugh was too loud, whose familiarity in tapping Charles on the sleeve with her fan was too bold. The woman looked her way and went silent. She dropped Charles’s arm and smiled up at him, tipping her folded fan against her cheek.
“Well, Dr. Charles, you have a good day now,” the woman said. She lifted her skirts unnecessarily high, exposing her slim ankles as she swirled away. He tipped his hat and climbed silently up into the buggy.
“Who was that woman?” Emily said.
“A whore.”
Emily’s stomach wrenched at the scene and at her husband’s glib manner.
“You know her, obviously.”
“Yes, I know her,” Charles said. “Or were you referring to the scriptural sense.” He laughed, almost to himself.
Emily reddened, her hands gripped tight in her lap.
“Whores get sick like the rest of us, Emily. The practice of medicine is not just for the good and the godly.”
Emily tried to think of something to say. Nothing came. Her head swirled with her mounting awareness of inconsistencies in his excuses as to his whereabouts. He had such a way of brushing them off, making them quirks of her memory, as he had done when she confronted him about her encounter with Mrs. Bellingham, who had not in fact been ill. Even at the time Emily was certain that she had not confused the name, but had no way to refute his insistence that she had. There were constant reasons he offered for his increasing absences, including a mounting number of patients. Either that or no excuse at all, just a silence she felt an intense dread to break. She had been raised to avoid confrontation and it paralyzed her. Without evidence and without becoming the kind of needling sort of person she could not envision becoming—no, in truth, feared becoming—she had no real means of challenging what she believed to be his untruths. Somehow she had not considered whores. The idea was too far beyond her cultural sense of decency. Yet here it was. She opened her fan, closed it again, and laid it in her lap, her hands folded.
“Hope the rain comes soon,” Charles said. “Fields are drying up. Guess it’s a good thing, after all, that I’m not dependent on the land for my well-being—our well-being, that is. At least not directly.”
“Yes.” Emily kept her eyes straight ahead on the road. Her body was stiff. “I’m sure that Papa would be glad of some rain.”
“Good of him to send some assistance.” Charles took her hand. It was unyielding.
“Yes, I’m glad he could spare Clara. He would have sent her even if he could not, you know.”
“Yes, I expect he would.” Charles released her hand and flicked the reins.
Nothing more was said, but when Charles reached for her that night and laid his kisses down along her spine, his tongue warm and wet in the small of her back, his hand cupping her buttock, Emily stiffened. Though she embraced him, drew him into her, though she blamed her lack of response on the pregnancy, something within her had crept into hiding, something Charles could not coax out.
When his breathing slowed into a light snore beside her, she turned her back and wrapped her hands beneath her rounding belly. With the edge of the tangled sheet, she wiped between her legs. Her breath caught in her chest and she covered her mouth with her hands to muffle the sound that threatened to escape. Tears trickled through her tight lids as her body shook with silent weeping. In the night, she woke to find her face still wet, the tears continuing even in her sleep. She wiped her eyes, turned the damp pillow over, and stretched her body as near the edge as she dared.
* * *
After breakfast, Emily held Charles’s plate, staring at the biscuit crumbs caught in a dark stain of molasses. She half turned toward him, then changed her mind. Holding the plate before her like a sacrament, Emily went to the door and brushed the crumbs onto the swept dirt of the yard. The chickens materialized in a lopsided run, a blur of white, rust, and yellow, squawking, pecking, beating against one another. Emily watched as if she had never seen chickens fight over crumbs, or did not see them now. Plate in hand, she returned to the kitchen, her hands sticky brown with molasses. Charles was gone.
September heat blanketed the house like so much wet cotton. Emily swatted at flies and stared out the window. In the late morning, she put a pot of water on the stove to brew coffee, in case Charles came back from the office. He preferred black coffee to tea, no matter the extra time it required Ginny to roast the beans over the fire, stirring constantly to prevent them scorching. Charles ambled in just as Emily removed the beans from the grinder and dropped them into the boiling water.
“Only a couple of minutes now,” Emily said.
“I’ve been thinking on your fear,” Charles said without preamble, “and frankly, I haven’t the patience for it. You are alone far too much. Gives you too much time to stew over things. Your fears and your anxieties are a real burden to me, Emily. Between you and Belinda I can’t concentrate on my work. I have decided you should stay with my mother until you deliver. You’ll have all the help and support you need. My mother is a sure hand at birthing, and you can take Ginny with you.”
Emily stared at him, the pot growing heavy in her hands. He ignored her.
“Maybe you could even be of some comfort to Belinda,” he added. “Maybe, she to you. Maybe you can help each other lighten up your grief a bit. It’s been long enough. Benjamin and Ginny can go back and forth to look after my needs and the house. I will come by as often as practical, aside of course, for emergencies—check on you on my way to and from the office.”
Emily set the pot on the stove. “I don’t know what to say, Charles. I’m trying. I really am. Could you just put your arms around me, hold me for a moment?”
He patted her shoulder stiffly. “For God’s sake, Emily. I have work to do.” He reached past her for the coffeepot.
There was nothing to say. She walked out of the room. In the minutes that followed she heard him pouring his coffee and his careful slurp at the hot liquid. In the parlor, she sat immobile. This room, her house, her life had become unfamiliar to her, would now be taken from her. Over what? Not her fear. No, something else without a name had torn between them, flapping its silent way through the house.
Outside the window, two small sparrows nipped at mealworms and blown thistle seeds. On the floor, a tiny mother-of-pearl button shone pale in a slanted ray of sun. Emily picked it up, stroked it with her fingers, and lowered it into her pocket. It must have fallen from Rosa Claire’s petticoat. Something that could be fixed with needle and thread.
Emily was still aimlessly fingering the button, when Jessie came in to say the doctor was on his way to the Kitchens’ place to stitch up a gash across the old man’s leg. He would not return at noon for his dinner.
“Talk like it bad, a accident with the plow,” Jessie said. “Too bad to be jolting him all the way over here in the wagon. You all right, Miss Emily? You looking kind of peaked.”
“Is Rosa Claire with Ginny?”
“Yes’m. Ginny’s dusting the doctor’s office while he gone.”
“I think I will lie down for a spell. I haven’t much appetite, anyway.”
“Yes’m. Maybe you don’t want me ringing that dinner bell, Miss Emily. Your head hurting you?”
“No, ring the bell. I just need to rest.”
“We take care of Rosa Claire, Miss Emily. You just go and rest yourself.”
“Thank you, Jessie.” Emily felt a great surge of gratitude toward these women who helped her now in her inadequac
y. She crawled up onto the bed.
The stillness in which she lay was akin to paralysis. Her mind emptied as did her emotions. She could not apprehend what had hold of her. She longed for something larger than herself, something to envelop her, to anchor her to her life. She had no tether.
She must have slept, and for a good while. It was Rosa Claire’s bright laughter from the garden that woke her. She raised herself on one elbow, brushed back the loose strands of hair against her cheek. Standing, she smoothed her skirt and realized she had never removed her apron. She draped it over the end of the bed. Pulling at the pins in her hair, she sat down at the mirror, watching with disinterested curiosity as her hair fell in wide loops from her temples. She swung her head from side to side, watching the long waves widen. Emily picked up her mother’s monogrammed silver brush and pulled at the tangles. She twisted her hair into a knotty bun, pushed the loose ends into place, and jammed in a last pin.
From the hot shade of the porch, Emily watched Ginny toss beans to Rosa Claire, whose laughter spilled into the air at every bean she missed, which was every one. Ginny looked up at her standing there.
“You all right?”
“Yes, Ginny. I must have been more tired than I knew.”
“Honey, you with child. ’Course you tired.” She tossed a bean to Emily, who instinctively stepped forward to catch it.
Emily came down the steps. “Rosa Claire,” she said. “Here, catch.”
The child toddled forward, scooped up the fallen bean, and threw it straight overhead. It landed on the ground behind her, where her mother scooped it up and began a game of keep-away, swapping the bean between hands behind her back, swaying from one foot to the other. Rosa Claire clapped her hands and threw her head back in laughter. Is there any more beautiful sound, Emily thought. Her children would be her consolation.
“Is Dr. Slate back from the Kitchens?” she said, scooping Rosa Claire into her arms.
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