Reliance, Illinois Read online

  I almost scoffed at this—companionship was not, in my experience, what men desired of Mama—but now he turned those pinprick eyes upon me.

  “Which leaves only one question. Your sister.”

  I held tight the hem of Mama’s skirt. Of all of our lies, he chose to believe this one? Mr. Dryfus peered closer. “What are we to do with you?”

  I won’t do without her. I made a mistake. We’ll go. We’ll go together.

  This is what Mama should have said. With so many of our lies in pieces on the ground, she should have told him this one truth.

  “She can work. She’s a very good worker.” I let go of her skirt. It was another lie. I was easily bored with tedious tasks; she said herself I was ungrateful and undisciplined, with no desire to be otherwise.

  “I would like to see her face,” he said.

  “No,” I said. The boy and the shaking old lady barred the door.

  “Young lady,” said Mr. Dryfus, “you are not in a position to disobey.”

  Mama turned me round. Please, she mouthed. Even as I shook my head, she was peeling the bonnet brim from my face. I let her. I stood there exposed before them—until I unbuttoned my skin and rose up and out of myself to where I might not feel but only see.

  Taken in parts unrelated to one another, I am not unattractive. Both of my eyes are well shaped, though they do not share the same shape, my left being slightly fuller and higher than the right; my left earlobe hangs long. I possess a distinguished overbite, a version of which I’ve seen in Harper’s sketches of the Irish, and I chew my lower lip when nervous, like now.

  But none of these features, which to some extent have softened with time, compelled me to hide behind that atrocious oversize bonnet. I owed this particular modesty to the port-wine-stain birthmark coloring my left side, from forehead to thigh. It was—it is—a lovely shade of red, I think. Lovely for a wine, a rose, a f ine Indian silk . . .

  “I see,” he said, “why you might not mention her.”

  I pulled my bonnet back down, thought nothing, felt nothing.

  “She’ll be no problem to you. She’s a good worker. It would be,” Mama said, gathering herself, “charitable.”

  That word hurt Mama. She considered begging worse than stealing, wouldn’t beg to save her life or mine, and had a deacon’s scorn for anyone who did.

  Mr. Dryfus dismissed the word entirely. “No one gives without expecting something in return.” He snatched his hat from the hat tree. “But we can, we will discuss this later, f ind more suitable accommodations. You are ready?”

  “Ready, sir?”

  “To be married.”

  “Now?”

  “I see no reason to wait.”

  2

  No lace, no church, no preacher. Mama was married in her traveling dress in the courthouse above the town green, by a paunchy little magistrate more intent on his lunch than the proceedings. That night, as Mama and I lay together on a cot in a cramped sloping attic where I was banished until more suitable accommodations could be found, I had already given up on Mr. Dryfus and on Reliance, and could hardly believe Mama did not feel the same.

  “He can’t be what you imagined,” I said, f itting myself into her hollows; her breath came quick and her nerves buzzed straight through me.

  “Didn’t let myself imagine.”

  I didn’t believe her. I had done nothing for the last six weeks but dream about the man who’d written those letters and neither his pinched little mousy face nor his nervous limping footsteps below matched the man I’d constructed—not rich or romantic. Not at all handsome.

  In the attic were a few pieces of furniture draped in winding sheets, a pair of traveling trunks, stacks of newspapers nearly as tall as the ceiling, a vanity mirror with a long river-shaped crack down the center. Mama’s expression, visible in the two halves, revealed nothing.

  “We could go,” I said. “Mama?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “You think he’d be able to stop us?”

  “Not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Wind rattled the dormer window. She combed her f ingers through my hair. “You need a nightcap. Did you see today, the ladies in their dresses?”

  “We could stow away on a steamer.”

  “Stop! Stop now, listen to me.” She turned me round and cold f illed the space between us. Words packed her dark eyes, but she said nothing.

  “What, Mama?”

  “Mind Mr. Dryfus, and his mother.”

  “Mama—”

  “There’s nowhere else to go. Hear? Mr. Dryfus, he’s right. Nothing’s worth desperation. You got no idea. Be grateful you got no idea. No, now look at me! Things are different now.”

  “How different?” Back in Kentucky, before Mr. Dryfus’s reply, before Dot died, the husband featured only nominally into our plans. If he, whoever he might be, did not suit us, well, we’d thieve him and run. Looking around, I didn’t see much worth thieving.

  “I mean to start over here,” Mama said. “I mean to be a lady.” The word lady like a shoe she was trying to f it. “We got to make ourselves necessary. Hear me? Make yourself necessary. Indispensable.”

  She heaved the attic door’s iron ring and, catching her divided reflection in the cracked glass, put one hand to her stomach, forced her shoulders level, smoothed her hair and dress.

  “I got to go to him.”

  “Mama.”

  “Call me Rebecca, Madelyn. You got to remember.”

  I watched, frustrated, sick with an apprehension I couldn’t name, as she climbed down the ladder away from me.

  “Be grateful you got no idea,” she said. Well, I wasn’t grateful. How could I be if I didn’t know what I was being grateful for? I wanted to know, but Mama had always been a silent woman, and the part of her past she’d closed to words had, since Dot died, begun to anger me, and the anger felt, not good exactly, but f illing in a way Mr. Dryfus’s wedding supper of coarse brown bread had not. Outside a dog howled. Insects, silent for an instant, pitched into their next throbbing chorus. Knotty eyes glared at me from boxes and stacked barrels; the slanted rafters became the roof of a great toothless mouth f ixing to swallow me. I scooted from the cot to the dormer window and opened my scrapbook, my one treasure.

  It was nothing special. No cover or binding to speak of, just a cured goatskin shell. Dot had shown me how to sew sheets of foolscap together to make a book; it hurt me to leave my other scrapbooks behind, for I was sure John’s wife must have burned them. John was Dot’s son. For as long as I could remember, he had been sending lithographed letter sheets with pictures of buildings and views of California and had written almost exclusively about foods I had never tasted and could barely imagine: Pineapple. Mango. Banana. Dot called them hungry letters. “No one getting their f ill,” she said, “writes so much about food.”

  She needn’t have worried. It was no thin hungry man but a giant who arrived in May of that year. His wife was Mexican and Chinese and something else besides. I flipped through to the page in my scrapbook that said: Juanita digs her f ingernails into her palm when John looks at Mama. I wasn’t sure what made me write this down or why, that night, I found myself staring at those words.

  Inside my scrapbook, I kept all sorts: Mr. Dryfus’s letters, of course (there were three of them); also a four-leaf clover, a dragonfly’s wing with silver veins webbing the transparent skin, a yellowing piece of cigarette paper, a blade of grass, a torn Confederate note, nine silver f ish scales arranged in a circle. None of the lilacs I’d pressed remained intact. They left behind rust-colored impressions of a stem, a leaf. I’d glued a braided clump of Dot’s hair behind the cover, but this hadn’t preserved Dot either, not her voice, which I was already forgetting, or her spirit, nothing. I knew this, but still that fragmented hodgepodge remained necessary to me without
qualif ication—remained, I suppose, a reflection as true as any I found in a mirror, and the only record I had of the past.

  Mama, who could spend hours hunched over her lace making, teasing patterns from hopeless tangles of thread, spoke little of her people or her past. Dot blamed the war for her silence. She blamed the war for everything else as well, and when I was old enough to consider such things, I remember thinking the whole of human history must be divided into three distinct eras: before the war, during the war, after the war. The war itself was a knot joining the before and after. When you think about it like that, without the war to bind them, the past and the future might never have met at all but remained part of two different ropes, two different stories, two different countries.

  I do know that I was born in the middle of that knot in a wattle-and-daub house a mile outside of Susanville, Kentucky—that’s south-southwest of Somerset, if you’re looking on a map. My father’s name was Landis Wilcox. He was the middle son of Abel Wilcox, on whose land Mama’s family cropped, alongside free Negroes and hired-out slaves. Mama, she thought Landis was going to marry and make a lady of her, but he went away to f ight alongside his brother and daddy a good while before Mama came to f igure it was a baby ailing her. Landis’s mama, Mrs. Abel Wilcox, called her something f ilthy and turned her away, which was bad, but made some sense to me. What didn’t was how Mama’s own family could have turned her out, or how they managed to use God as the reason. She was thirteen years old.

  I don’t know how, by luck or providence, but it was Dot’s house Mama stumbled upon the night I was born. There’d been f ighting. Dot had been crouched for hours behind an upturned table, holding a single-shot blunderbuss, listening to artillery thunder and men and horses screaming. Given the date, the skirmish might well have been part of Zollicoffer’s Fall. But Dot wouldn’t have cared for such details; she’d already lost a brother to one side and a husband to the other and had stopped searching for her son in soldier’s faces. When she heard pounding on her door, she f ired. Instead of a soldier dead on the porch, she found Mama in a rag dress and peacoat, writhing in birth pain. The bullet only grazed her shoulder.

  Dot, she didn’t think either of us would see morning, tried not to care. But f ive hours into the labor, she began calling Mama “baby,” at ten began negotiating with God. Fifteen hours and she’d given up tobacco, sorghum, mulled wine, swearing, lustful dreams, and novels; after twenty she was bargaining with her own life, and it was this exchange that apparently proved acceptable. She liked to complain that her life had been given in service of burdensome blessings, but she never made me feel anything but a blessing.

  •

  When she was well enough, Mama ran away and left me with Dot. Where she’d gone, why she’d gone, what she’d done to survive those years, I didn’t know, though I liked to imagine she was still out looking for my father, Landis. After a certain age, I stopped asking. Doing so brought a pale blankness to Dot's eyes that frightened me from the answer; I hadn’t missed her that I know of. I don’t remember having been aware she was gone, until she returned a skeleton woman, eyes wild with more kinds of hunger than I could name. And so beautiful. Even I, a child of four, who had never considered such a thing as beauty, was struck by those spooked dark eyes, darting and catlike, those lips, red as radishes. Full lips that suggested an invitation Mama did not intend and combated with a frown, which became the shape of her face at rest. Dot peeled me from her leg, and pushed me toward her. “This your Mama,” she said, but for many years, Mama was a name, like Susana or Mary; Dot carried the meaning, and in Dot’s wrinkled, blotchy face I saw myself.

  That is until my eighth year, when I endured a half term of formal education in the Susanville School. Here I learned, in no uncertain terms, that I bore a face distinctly my own. In three months I got into a half dozen f ights with town girls who looked at me funny, and had my f ingers rapped by Mr. Lynd for standing atop my chair during class. Mr. Lynd, a one-armed veteran—himself known to provoke older boys, then wallop them, just to prove he could—made a point never to look at me. Standing on the chair was the only way I could think to get his attention, and it worked. He threw me out.

  For years Dot’s son, John, sent nothing but promises from California. Dot took in sewing. Mama sold her lace and made collars from patterns out of a battered Harper’s Bazaar. A Negro named Isaiah and his family cultivated most of Dot’s twenty acres, but cotton had soured the soil and prices were too low for prof it. We would have survived f ine with the goats and the garden, but we ate well for other reasons. The f irst, and my favorite, was Hiram Cassidy Main.

  We lived only a mile from town, but off the county road; you had to mean to come or, like Mama, stumble blind on the place. Hiram was a traveling agent for the Methodist Book Concern, a polite, taciturn man, hairy all over, with a burned red nose and yellow teeth. In addition to Bibles and Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, Hiram sold dime novels and certain other tracts that guaranteed his customers would be in need of holy forgiveness. Every few weeks, Hiram happened by with a lesson or copybook for me (which is how I taught myself my letters) and a romance novel for Dot, not to mention a dozen eggs or a side of pork or a bushel of new potatoes or a shovel.

  “Why Hiram Cassidy,” Dot would say, “you really shouldn’t have. But what a shame we got no sugar to go with them berries. Rebecca’d make you a pie.” Then she’d send me outside while Mama took Hiram in the back room Dot kept tidy for the purpose. I didn’t question this. Seemed the most natural thing in the world at the time. It was the same for all of the backroom men who made their way to Dot’s house: “Why Hiram, why John, why Wilson, Albert . . . you shouldn’t have, but what a shame we got no flour, salt, cinnamon . . .”

  To Dot’s dismay, Mama did nothing to encourage these men. She thanked them as if they were offering groceries only for smiles, took them in the back room, and came out looking all the more disinterested for their reddened faces.

  “Think beauty lasts?” Dot asked one night after a small, muscled farrier, name of Bindle McDaniel, left only one gristled leg of lamb. Mama was squatting in a pot of herb water in the kitchen, cleaning herself. “No sir,” said Dot. “Then where will we be? Better grab one of those backroom men, show some interest. What’s wrong with Hiram, now?” She slapped the meat upon the cutting board. “Or what? You waiting for love?”

  That wasn’t it. Mama scoffed at the love stories I read aloud with Dot, just as she scoffed at unicorns or fairies or any other made-up things found in books. At the time, we had enough to eat and a place to live; she had no reason to get married.

  Until that spring, when Dot’s son John came back and brought his own wife.

  I remember the warmth in the air carried a honeysuckle sweetness and the moon was sharp and brittle through the window. I was standing before the f ire reading to Dot from The Lamplighter, a story adhering, more or less, to my favorite formula: pretty, pious, unloved orphan is rescued by a kind, downtrodden man, who f inds her a rich benefactor, who transforms her into a lady worthy of adoration, so that she might be loved. (That I was not orphan, pious, or pretty never prevented me from imagining myself as one of these heroines.) “‘No one loved her,’” I cried, “‘and she loved no one; no one treated her kindly; no one tried to make her happy, or cared whether she were so. She was but eight years old, and alone in the world.’”

  At which point, Dot was meant to offer a hearty “Poor, poor dear!”

  Dot’s attentions were not properly directed upon me, but beyond to a husky lout peering through the window. Mama, who’d been in the barn milking goats, came at him from behind with a pitchfork, but he roughed it away, held her by the neck between me and the blunderbuss I’d grabbed from the hearth. Still Dot did nothing but stare as if he were but an overgrown pumpkin, with awe and not a little bit of horror. “Hi, Mama,” he said.

  Neither he nor his wife settled in nicely. In spite of his letters, he was very
much a stranger. Dot, who for so long had spoken of her son in a dreamy hopeless way, didn’t seem at all comfortable speaking with him. She ignored his half-breed wife completely. She would never admit to it, but I think having John back, not as the skinny, hairless boy she remembered but as the overgrown stranger time and war had shaped, made her sadder, reminded her of all she’d lost and distracted her from all she had—that is, Mama and me. I don’t think it was brain fever, after all, but disappointment that killed her.

  I closed my eyes on the thought of Dot and on the tears welling there and tried to imagine my way back to the river. Nine rungs down the attic ladder. Ten steps down the hall. Fourteen down the stairs. Eight out the front door. How many through town? How many to the river? How many would Mama take with me?

  3

  Mr. Dryfus’s mama, Clara, was squat as a winter squash and solid enough to f ill a doorway. Even I, late to growth, stood a hand taller. Her stomach nearly overwhelmed the muslin folds of her dress; she had squeezed into a pair of shapeless leather slippers, and when she shifted one leg to another, floorboards moaned recognition. It was this, coupled with the endless bob of her head and her mothering tone, that disarmed me, though I had little idea what she said even after my ears began to wrap themselves around the few English words I recognized.

  Not that it mattered. When she handed me a knife and pointed me toward the vegetables on the kitchen table, there was little doubt what she wanted. And there was little doubt of her satisfaction when Mama appeared through the kitchen door with the empty chicken slop, set it down and left again with the coal scuttle. Footsteps sounded in the hall. Clara’s palsied face broke into a smile. Indispensable, I thought, bending to my task. Here I am, Mr. Dryfus, indispensable.

  But another, younger fellow, bearded, rough looking as a backroom man with mud on his boots and a dark halo of curly hair, ducked through the doorway. He hugged Clara from behind.