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- Herausgeber: Parthian Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The herons have departed, leaving behind mangrove-tea waters, silt, the faint tang of salt... All that remains are the people, fewer of them every summer, clouds of mosquitoes. Edwardian Florida. The swamplands of Tampa provide a tough but good living for those men hardy enough to brave the weather and the wildness. When illness sweeps the area and the local minister dies, his widow Rose succumbs to madness. His daughter Joy struggles to keep them both alive in what has become a skeleton town, rotting into the swamp and abandoned by all but the most ruthless. The arrival of the Johnson family – cruel, greedy, cunning – signals the end of innocence for Joy. She must learn new ways of survival to keep herself and her mother safe. Rich with visceral imagery, The Hungry and the Lost pits the worlds of myth and tradition against the rational grip of progress and modernity.
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Seitenzahl: 472
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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iii
THE HUNGRY AND THE LOST
Bethany W. Pope
ivvvi
vii
To Matthew: my husband, my love.
And to Xeno: may you grow in love, laughter, strength, and kindness.
CONTENTS
Prologue
2
THE HOUSE
Florida, 1910. The swampland rises uninterrupted, swirling in stinking mist, redolent of ancient bird droppings. The herons have departed, leaving behind mangrove-tea waters, silt, the faint tang of salt. There is the skeleton of a town along what could be called a river, the houses rising on stilts to allow airflow and prevent the floors from rotting in a flood. As the herons are gone, so is the plume-trade. The northern rich will have to decorate their hats with something else. A racoon pelt will bring a man less than a dollar, the panthers are gone, the gators and manatees have made their retreat. All that remains are the people, fewer of them every summer, clouds of mosquitoes, and the odd, water-logged cow.
There is a church in the center, its steepled roof caving, ruined by time, the weather, neglect. There is a cemetery beside it filled with lead-weighted coffins, to keep the bodies from rising before Christ, upthrust from the mud.
No one misses it.
The last parson died near on ten years ago, hacking up blood and chunks of his lungs. His portrait in oils hangs in the manse next door, fungus and river mold creeping in at the corners, obscuring the paints. You can still, just about, tell what he looked like when he was very young. A yellow face rising out from dark wood and black robes, very open around the eyes, though by now he has seen too much.
The manse is not uninhabited.
Two women live there, his wife and his daughter. They crowd together in that place, the walls throbbing blood-veined with their voices, building in strength and timber until the house seems to 4heave with it, breathing as they do, until the house, standing there, stolid, mock-Victorian, hovering on stilts like legs wanting flight, seems to hum with a sort of almost life. The same kind you can find in any hospital, the kind that you see in what remains of a body after the head has met a sharpened hoof. Idiot, struggling, blank eyes staring round, searching in vain for some vague memory of life.
And they are dying, too. Dying with the ruinous town. In their own sullen way. Daughter and mother: Joy Marie, Rose.
Rose is tall, prone to wearing silk dresses in bright, lapis blue, to bring out her eyes, training the green out of them. Now she wears what she has worn for years, fading, rotted out at the armpits, the cumulative effort of humidity and her own rank sweat. Her hair was blond once, bright, the texture of spun silk. It is blond now, but fading, like the dress, not quite white, the years having made it coarser. She stands there; you can see her, at the head of the stairs leading up to second-story darkness. She stands there, vital, erect, the white handkerchief she lowers spotted.
There is light in her eyes. She calls out, down the stairs, the passage to the kitchen, her daughter’s name.
Joy-Marie, Joyce, as her mother will call her, is kneeling in the kitchen peeling potatoes over a pot next to the Sears and Roebuck oven, a leftover from the minister before her father. This is the last food in the house. She shall have to think of something. Later.
Her hair is dark, near-black, wild. There is no reason for her to comb it, though she bundles it into a loose, untidy bun. Her arms are thin and white. She does not tan, even in the harsh sunlight on the river where the trees cannot obscure it, nor does she burn. She peels with passion and intensity, as though angry, gripping each spud hard enough to imprint it with her fingers and cause the veins underneath her skin to bulge. Her eyes are dark, penetrating, and she keeps them focused on her knife.5
Her mother’s voice reaches her, low, deep-water calm, but still the sound would seem to startle her. Her knife slips, the silver, short blade grazing her wrist.
She stands up slowly, holding the injured arm away from the raw elements of their meal, laying the bloodied potato in the bucket. She pauses a moment to bandage her wrist with a swath of rag she plucks from a bin beneath the standing pail that serves for a sink. Rose’s voice calls again, meandering, and the girl does not answer. Her mother knows that she is coming.
Doctored, she makes her way through the long hall, past the library filled with books damp but readable, classics and theological texts clad in leather that is slimy to the touch. She has read them all, every one. She passes the lounge with Hepplewhite tallboys and Chippendale settee and chair-partners, all un-sat in for over a decade; she doubts that by now they could support human weight. And certainly, there are no ghosts to test them, now. She travels past the room she sleeps in. It was not meant for her bedroom. That room is across from her mother’s at the top of the stairs. She sleeps in the death-room, where her father spattered his last, bright breath against the wall. You can still see the spots. The door is open. She closes it as she passes, without knowing why.
Then she is at the root of the stairs, those noisy, wood-creaking slats of mahogany that sound when touched, like axons and dendrites firing thoughts.
This is where they meet most often, mother and daughter. Standing on the middle stair, the meeting of territories, passed most often by food bowl, by night pail, the occasional dress.
Joy is silent, arms dangling, waiting, her bandage hanging like hibiscus bouquet, limp from her wrist.
Rose removes the handkerchief from her lips, it sports a blossom of its own, her blue eyes flashing. She opens her mouth and the stairwell is washed by a new infusion of words.6
There is life here, of a kind, a half-life at least. And, if you are strong enough to follow, you shall feel its raging pulse.
Town
8
EXTINCTION
In the decades that closed the nineteenth century great flocks of enormous, white-plumed birds (so prized by haberdashers and ostentatious decorators of human homes), heron, and egrets that were almost their twins, sent up raucous cries from their collective nests set high up in the close-woven mangrove swamps. These birds gathered in hundreds, their guano spattering the floor beneath the trunks; a strong ammonia-scented mass, white and liquid as whitewash lye. It collected in piles, a foot high underneath the larger collective nests, mingled with the calcium-rich discarded eggshells and the occasional deceased chick.
All of this waste, foul as it is to think about, had a purpose, an important role to play in the life of the wetlands. The ammonia and calcium lent richness to a marshland soil that is otherwise unfit for any growing thing save for mangroves, poison ivy, boab and the saw-tooth palmetto, a vegetable shaped like a small palm that was named for its stiff, cellulite-edged leaves which drew blood from any thin-skinned animal foolish enough to push, unthinking, past its crowded groves.
The birds used their long orange bills, spear-shaped and hard, to pierce the bodies of venomous snakes, swallowing them down in one fluid gulp, their long necks silently undulating as the stilled creatures slithered down, never more to poison or to sting.
These birds inhabited a world painted in blinding shades of blue and green, the water and swamp surging all around them, sending reflected light up to dance among the leaves, and all of this was punctuated by the snowy white of their own plumes. That color shone from the fine-crushed sugar sand dunes, the detritus of a millennia’s work on fossil shells, reducing the 10skeletons of soft-bodied molluscs and the occasional crab to a fine, delicate powder. It shone from the mists that rose in clouds from the secret forest waterways, drawn upward by the sun and dyed by that great open eye the color of gold which has been washed by the blood of sunrise.
And throughout it all, the great birds swooped, feather-splayed and with glistening pinion, soaring or making their slow, Jurassic way by foot through water that rose up to their jointed knees, pursuing toxic meals in the tannin-laden soup.
Then the men arrived. The hunters who brought them down in droves, like their plains-bound ancestors who left buffalo corpses scattered throughout the ravaged grasslands, so many stinking knobs of bone. They came with birdshot and fine-woven nets, to kill, the air so full of their shrieking prey that an unaimed shot could send two birds spiralling down to earth at once.
The men formed camps, then towns, ordering desperate gingham-wearing women from ads placed in adventure magazines with chattel descriptions; twenty-seven, good worker, child-ready hips; thirty-one, even-tempered, good teeth. Women usually, though not always, too plain for wedding, or without sufficient dowries, who had sat too long upon their local shelves and needed, more than anything, free air to breathe away from hurtful gossip and dissent. They were delivered with the other mail-ordered supplies, riding with the farm and hunting equipment, the new nets and the plows, their new husband’s names on slips of paper, pinned like receipts to their shoulders or chests.
Sometimes the marriages were happy.
There was a boom that lasted many years. The men built fine houses, filled with great treasures, oil paintings, and silverware wiped and dried every day to keep them free from slime and bluish creeping mold, the same kind that appears in damp vaults, creeping over the faces of the dead.11
There was a general store, filled with quality things, more variety than a hunter’s bride would usually ever think to want. Finally, they built a fine, steepled church of the protestant persuasion and hired a minister and his lovely wife (oh how the women envied her blond hair that flowed like sea foam along her shoulders) and they made a manse to keep them in, tall, its beams carved mainly from hardwood and not just soft and rot-prone pine. It was a house meant to outlast generations, even in this water-sodden place.
Eventually the couple had a child.
The town experienced nearly three decades of seemingly endless supply meeting with incessant demand, but as in all good displays of economics, the product gave out before the desire. The birds, save for a few token breeding pairs (eventually protected by Roosevelt in 1901, long after the slaughter) were reduced to denuded corpses.
The bodies littered the marshlands until the time came when some desperate boom-and-bust hunter who had spent the last decades moving from scrabbling potato-eating poor, to land-and-servant rich, only to cycle back to poverty again, made his way in cracked and rotted boots through wetlands that were taking their bird-feed one last time. And if they crunched down on the fragile carapace of one more rack of ribs, who would notice? The sound was soft enough to hide behind the wailings of the ever-rushing moon-drawn tide.
The sound of death is often lost.
Death came to them, to the whole town in a manner such as this, and there it lingered. For a while.
HOME
The first room that David decorated when he brought his wife down from the North was the library, an act that reflected the parts of his life that he felt were by far the most important. He would never know what a gift this room would be to his child in later, darker, times. He was a minister with vast, romantic aspirations, seeing symbolism in everything, or placing it there. A walker between worlds was David, fancying the places where the visible and invisible meet and myths may sometimes still come alive and wander, almost breathing, through passageways and the hidden channels where a mortal mind would be afraid to enter.
These are not bad qualities for a person whose job it is to converse with God.
The books on the shelves were mainly Greek; myths, poems and theological texts stacked together in fine, red-leather bindings, all neatly printed, disclosing some variation of the truth. The balance was paid out in stories told in Latin, everything from Aesop to Boethius, a vast selection chronicling philosophy, theology, a loose, mythic history, and even the occasional bawdy Rabelaisian romp.
The Bible, a large and ancient hand-lettered thing in a case of silver gilt, pages opened to The Revelation of St. John, a passage describing the rise of a star-crowned woman who was the mother of dragons, had pride of place on its own neo-gothic stand. It was like one that could conceivably be found in a medieval English church, but which really hailed from the workshop of an ancestor of Chippendale’s.
The stand stood underneath the small stained-glass window he 13had installed, which bore a variation of the image of Persephone as Rosetti conceived her. Her hair, tinted reddish-black, strong, disdainful features, and royal-blue robe glowed with a deep undertone of flame, no matter the light. The fruit that she held, blazing skin and ember heart, was unlike any mortal pomegranate.
The small bite she had taken had reduced her, like Eve, to some lingering half-life among the gray groves and the damned. The small remainder consisted of smaller books, green varicose with cheap binding and pages, all well-thumbed. These were fairy tales and a few choice modern novels that he had read and loved in his early youth and still retained a secret passion for even now. He was a man who knew what childhood was, knew the darkness and the light, and loved it anyway in a way that was both brilliant and unashamed. And people gleaned this from him, quickly, as the knowledge of this well, this deep trove of joy, was visible in his impish eyes.
Needless to say, all of the local children loved him.
They would show up at the doorstep in the hour after suppertime, after cleaning their father’s egret nets and guns, arranging the blood-quilled feathers in their shipping boxes by quality and size. His wife Rose would admit them, smiling over a swelling pregnancy, her dress a bright and radiant azure, trimmed at the hem with lapis silk.
She was one who was as conscious of effect as fashion. A pious woman with the hint of the theatrical wafting from her like perfume. She wore her hair down in a waterfall of naturally platinum Scandinavian curls that hung past her waist, having never met a pair of scissors, and her lips rarely formed themselves into any shape that was not a variation on a smile. This was a trait the plain-tending local women secretly thought a bit scandalous, though they never had any but a kind word for her when they passed her on the street.14
The children would enter, decorous on their first visit, rushing thereafter – past the more classical lounge with its Hepplewhite settees, chairs and piano, whose limbs were always decorously covered by handmade lace leggings, washed once a week to quell mold – before skidding round the corner, fast as they could, into that wonderful, book-lined land.
David would be waiting for them there behind his enormous leather-topped desk, having already hidden great lumps of candy and the occasional small toy in hide-holes placed around the room. The children, both girls and boys, would gather round his desk in rows, waiting, as he removed his pince-nez, polishing them while staring at the children hard down the long length of his nose. They would stand there, solemn, shifting foot to foot. Always unsure if his severity were meant, no matter how many times they’d played it; always slightly, deliciously afraid that it were real.
The silence would reel out.
David staring, the children shifting, Rose looking on inconspicuously from around the tapestry-hung door, her eyes among the embroidered pomegranates and thread-plucked branches. All of them enjoyed it immensely, holding their breath.
Finally, after moments that felt to the children agonizing hours, David replaced the lenses on his face and, as though their reflections gave him a lighter countenance, one more prone to brightening joy, he smiled, waved his hand, sketching out the signal. Go.
The children let out a loud whoop, cacophonous and echoing, that sent the books to shudder on their shelves. The hunt was on.
They tore through the room, pulling out tomes that cost more than their parents could make in a day, wealthy as they were just now, setting them crashing, splay-spined, to the uncarpeted floor. No damage done, thank God, those books were tough. The only 15one they did not touch was, of course, the ancient, stand-bound Bible, left unmolested in its highly-honored place.
Dirty fingers dug through unlocked drawers, scattering paper, pens, upsetting an inkwell that sent tint spreading out on the blotter in dark red tendrils, seeking the treasure, hidden there somewhere especially for them. They went everywhere, finding candies, small toys, even riffling through the minister’s deep pockets. The man and his wife stood with their heads thrown back, rocketing laughter the whole time, until the children had uncovered every last, well-treasured piece.
And before they left, sucking on fruit pastel jubejubes and peppermint sticks, winding up a waddling penguin or fondling a bright, perfect aggie marble in a small and ink-stained hand, they formed back into rows (the only neatness left in this hurricane-addled room) and solemnly shook the preacher’s hand. Bursting into grins again as they left when Rose, radiant with tears that stemmed from pleasure, placed a cheek-bound kiss or ruffled soft hair.
And when they had left, in a flood of laughter, each child holding a gift and each of them content, Rose and her husband stood in the wrecked room and embraced, their fingers finding tender places on each other, their lips taking in the sweetness of their mouths, better than any sugar product ever made. David moved his hand down to her taut, expanding belly to feel the new life that they kindled there, a warm spark that set his Rose alight, until she seemed to burn in air.
They took an hour, after finishing what that touch started, cleaning up the room, setting everything to rights in preparation for the game again tomorrow night.
Soon they would be three and this building would be home.
VISITATION
It is evening now, the brief span of time when sunset paints the sky in bright, hot colors, shades from salmon to crimson in wavering striations, edged a dark and tarnished gold along the bottom and deep, plumy blue-black where the upper limits of the horizon melt into the deepest reaches of interstellar void. There are no clouds tonight and so the stars are showing, one by one, the bright white constellations shining down like holes in space interrupted at their lower extremity by the twisted, full-leafed branches of boab and mangrove interspersed with the occasional small-foliaged oak.
This time, the day’s last phase, is always brief, as though even such atmospheric blooms as this cannot last long in this much heat, wilting away into blackness, complete after only a very few minutes. Things fade fast here, losing whatever beauty they have after lives brutal and brief, but oh, when there is life it is good indeed, flaring up, intensely epigrammatic as an alcohol fire igniting in an airless room.
David is out walking now, in air less boiling than in the heat of day, though never here precisely cool. He is on his way to visit the members of his parish too sick or feeble to come into his office to see him. The sick are mainly women, their illness described by their husbands, depending on the amount of affection remaining in the relationship, if ever there was any, as either ‘a bit punkish’ or ‘she’s malingering again. Could work like a mule if she wanted.’
Though there is a doctor still in town, most of these men would never think to call him for their children or their wives. Sawbones are good for when you get the gangrene infection from 17a hunting cut wet through by the swamp or when you accidentally trap your leg in one of the small boys’ clamp-down raccoon traps, not for muley little woman’s illnesses.
The symptoms range from sunken-eyed exhaustion to thin cheeks and blood-coughing (accompanied by a peculiar smell) that seems to be contracted purely by luck, drinking bad water or breathing foul air. The first group have a high rate of recovery, after a few days’ rest, provided they can achieve some peace when the men are in the room, ordering them up to wash and cook and fetch. The second never seem to linger very long, they snuff out quickly, like flames without fuel, sweating out blood, their skins seeming to glow bright and vivid in their last few hours, as though flaring out in defiance of the coming eternal dark.
They die fast and are buried as soon as possible (even the best embalming cannot add any halt to decay, and after two days the stench of the corpse, even one swollen and drowning with formaldehyde, is unbearably intense). The new brides, ordered from magazines to replace the previous one, now defunct, arrive a few weeks later. They are brought with the other groceries on carts down from Tampa, usually after longer journeys from the North.
It is David’s job to wed them there, directly after their arrival on the cart. The new bride rarely has enough time to wipe the road dust from her heels before the wedding. This speed is necessary so that she may immediately move into her master’s house and begin the work of clearing out the previous occupant’s belongings, caring for the children who are usually still glaze-eyed with grief, and getting a fair start on the maintenance work needed to keep the building afloat after a month of neglect. The chances are good that she will earn her first black eye within the week, her first pregnancy soon after, and her first illness will strike a few months after that.18
It is a very ordered life.
It is a lot of work for the wives. But as they all confide to David on his visits, speaking to him separately and in groups, it is ever so much better than sitting on the side-lines forever; unmarried, dried up, unused. At least as wives they are given respect and not that bitter tincture of pity that they were forced to drink before, when they lived as millstones around the necks of their fathers.
On his first visits, David enters the houses and the sick women, well trained, would try to get up and make him welcome, no matter how sick they were or how difficult it was for them to move. It took three months of rounds and many, many visitations for David to convince them that it was his job to minister to them. And that includes making the tea. Once that distinction had been made, once the ladies accepted it, these meetings became suddenly much more pleasurable for both parties concerned.
In the North his visitations had a decidedly more religious air, a heightened sense of formality with everything done, quite literally, by the book. In this case The Book of Common Prayer. Here this is far less likely. He decided within a week of arriving that the best spiritual aid he can give to his parishioners, the female ones anyway, is a free ear to listen. He has found that if he lets them spend a good hour talking to him, without the fear of interruption or denial, they take it as the best gift he can give them. Even the dying ones agree with that.
And when they are dying he will sit with them in silence, offering up his own quiet prayers for their freedom from pain, before anointing their burning heads with oil that sits there, thumbed into a cross on the heated forehead, simmering until the final breath is drawn and the soul taken up into whatever there is that lies beyond.
Sometimes he can see it go, the soul a bright white light that causes the air to shimmer around the body, as though the walls 19of the known world were bursting, straining to withhold something of greater strength and reality than its own, like a dream figure struggling to lift a real brick.
Luckily there were no deaths tonight, just three ladies broken down under terrible exhaustion, the burden of maintaining society where no human habitation should have been able to form. He sat with them an hour each, making them tea and listening to their constant stream of talk, before leaving with a brief informal prayer. He left the women smiling with temporarily lightened hearts.
These visits also have some benefit for David. They remind him to continue to treat his wife as his equal, lest he get caught up in the hell of hierarchy where there can be respect and order, but absolutely no real love. And now David is on his way home, exhausted but happy. He has done what he can, what he will continue to do for the rest of his life.
The minister is young, a bit past twenty-five, his wife a few years younger. He looks older because of his elongated features, made handsome by kindness, and the extreme thinness of his limbs. An ungenerous person would describe him as storkish or egret-like, resembling in his form the creatures whose corpses keep the town alive and thriving. They have been married for a little over a year and a half; most of that time has been spent here. They moved down six weeks after the wedding, taking trains until Tampa and then hiring coach and carts for the rest of the journey.
This is David’s second church since his ordination at twenty and while he likes it here, he does not plan on staying long. He wants his children to grow up in a place where books are valued and academic intelligence is considered a benefit and not a peculiar form of deformity, to be discouraged by good parents and completely obliterated by great ones.20
No, they will stay here five or six years, eight or ten at the very most, and then they will file a transfer request to the Bishop that will, hopefully, land his family someplace a bit more civilized. Where they can thrive.
Still, he thinks, his gum boots sloshing through the root- and branch-infested slog, disturbing lizards and the occasional scavenging rat. The motion of his walking raises a deep and tannin-rich scent from the watery swirl; it is beautiful here, in a way. If we had remained where we were, there is so much that we would have missed. Sunsets like that one just ended, for example, the joy of good friends.
About a quarter-mile from the manse house he reminds himself that he must continue interviewing for housekeepers (he is not going to allow his wife to become one of those sunken-eyed creatures he visited tonight). He has a feeling that when the baby comes they are going to need all the help they can get.
The manse is in sight now; he has just passed the locked church, its windows dark as dead eyes, passed the yard with its many graves, both sunken and raised. There is his favorite tree for reading, a wide-spread boab surrounded by tombs and growing from what, in this country, passes for a hill-like rise.
And there is his home.
He feels a flutter, a warm spread of joy, for up in the window he can see his young wife.
But oh, he has never in his life seen her like this.
She is standing in the window, her long hair down and golden in the light, gazing at her reflection in the large full-length mirror her mother gave her. That of course is business as usual, it takes an effort for her to keep looking so good. That is something that David files under maintenance and proper care rather than the sin of vanity. But what causes his pulse to race, sets his heart hard to hammering, what causes that feeling of unbelievable joy to rise 21in the secret root of him, is that she is as unclothed and unashamed as Eve before she bit the fruit and took the fall.
He hopes she does not see him looking at her, he senses somehow that this thing that she is doing is something very private, and not meant for any other eyes, even his own. Thinking this, feeling something deeper rising unsummoned from depths he has never known anything about, he retreats to a stand of trees on the other side of the house, to spare a few minutes in prayer and contemplation, and also to give Rose a brief breath of time to finish whatever it is she has been doing.
Something, on reflection, must not have been right. For while her form was undeniably lovely, beautiful beyond anything he has ever witnessed or read about, especially in that glorious light, her face was fierce and the intensity that shone out of it into whatever she could see in the surface of the glass, was terrible and wroth.
But his concern for what she was scrying in the glass was limited at best.
David is a man in love, in both the passionate and romantic senses. But he is also a man who was raised in an extremely rigid culture when it comes to topics of sexuality, inhabiting the kind of realm where a young girl is told never to take a seat just vacated by a fully-clothed young man, lest the chair, warmed by his body, deliver her into the type of excitement that will lead to damnation.
David is sitting there in the mangrove copse, the seat of his trousers becoming moist from the water-drenched moss that covers the branch that he has taken for a chair. He is breathing fast and with great difficulty, experiencing a rush that would be completely alien to an observer from a different time.
He has been married for a year and a half, they are expecting a child, and tonight is the first time that he has ever seen his wife 22completely naked, without even a robe. Usually the things that happen between them take place in the dark or between small gaps in their clothes, unseen, fully covered, denied as fully as possible. As is right and decorous.
It is taking all of David’s strength, all of his great force of will, to allow Rose her privacy. Everything inside of him, after seeing what he has witnessed here, wants to hurl himself forward, through the doors and up those stairs, to burst into their room. And he will do just that eventually, even so. But he will do it on his terms, not giving in randomly to his animal body. He will go after five minutes, when he has collected himself. And when he returns to her he will be civilized, unfrenzied, ready to love her gently without the desire he feels now, to ravish her completely.
He can only hope that in the process of forcing a calm, his shunted passion does not tear him apart, that his new lust does not consume him as completely as a woman feeds upon a grape.
After five minutes the storm has passed. David breathes deeply, catches sight of his wife in the window. She is a streak of blond hair, the blue shimmer of a robe. He smiles and begins, with his heart hammering, the climb up the stairs’ long flight to the bright tower room where his lady waits, swathed in deep silk. Waiting for him.
EXPECTING
The rules of current culture dictate that Rose never be naked, even with her husband, or washing alone in her copper-plated tub (even for that she wears at least a shift which clings but does not reveal). When they come together in the night it is through layers of petticoat and night-dress. This is correct, the vastly accepted good. Victorian rules have had it such that she has been as fully clothed as Eve, post-Eden, since her first cleaning from the womb.
Yet she is naked now, and staring, amazed at her body’s pregnant swelling, as the skin brightens, the infant grows. She wonders, briefly, what she looked like before the baby took root and started growing but her heart is racing far too fast to allow for much analytical thought. She does not know where this sudden need, so like an immolating hunger for her own flesh, sprang from. Only that it’s there, and so she must submit to it, or crave on.
She can see the outline of her baby, the form that distorts her skin, depicted in her mirror. That huge, high oval, standing in a Queen Anne frame, the silver mercury reflecting moonlight that makes her round swelling seem to glow, a convex bowl, turned and cleaned in preparation for the scrying.
There is some other force at work here, more than mere nature would allow.
David is gone tonight, out visiting, giving the communion sacrament to the sick, the suffering, and the damned. He left her here to commune with herself, with moonlight and glass.
What she sees is death.
In the depths of the mirror she falls into a silver-lighted vision. There is a full moon, as pregnant and swollen as her belly glittering through the tattered rags of a storm that has but lately 24passed. She is looking down on a ruined town that seems somehow familiar. As it should.
It is hers.
At her feet a battle rages. Bloodied dark men, howling, and in a raging swirl around them, moving in hurricane patterns, huge dog-like creatures roving. They may be wolves; it is too difficult to tell in this odd light.
There is a tall female figure standing, robed in a bloodied sheath of white, at the crossroads between boab and store. She is all in shades of light and dark, her black hair swirling in the remnants of wind, and her skin is glowing, cracking at the seams, as though she were much larger inside it. Bristling black hairs and the gleam of teeth. Her hands hold a ewer, filigreed white metal, which is somehow horrific, though it is one Rose knows. It came from the church.
Rose would run now, if she could. If the lightning firing all around her did not hold her, if she could tear her eyes away before she has seen what she must. There is a fire glowing, huge and high even in this bright-lit wet, above the robed woman’s shoulder, visible even through the thick branches of the tree, and something somber and familiar tickles at the farthest reaches of her mind.
Something else for Rose to ponder in her heart, and hide.
But she is rushing upwards now, back along that twisted path, to her body which stands there, cradling another, on the other side of the glass.
Before the scene vanishes completely, before the final battlecrash of night, the foul dream deepens. The robed woman looks up from serpentine hair, her face a moon carved in miniature.
She has David’s eyes.
And then Rose is back, in the room which holds her marriage bed; white bleached sheets, a garnet spread, pillows soft as breasts, and the only image in the mirror is herself, weeping.25
Rose says a prayer then, just as she stands, her hands cradling the unborn infant that rests beneath her skin. She is given an answer, though only she could tell if it came from God or from herself.
She decides to forget.
Not entirely, no one has ever been capable of that, but there are caves deep within her mind where terror can be hoarded, until some use for it comes clear. And so she takes the vision of her husband’s transformed eyes and buries it where it might lay seed, or even send a few roots, spreading. Burying it deep where it cannot blossom yet, in its true form.
In that instant, it is possible for her to mistake the rush of her mind’s first cracking for the sensation of relief. She is, after all, essentially fine, though dreaming awake. And a small mental fissure can easily be hidden, for a while.
A sound outside her window shakes her, footsteps cracking against gravel. She shifts a blue curtain and peers beneath the hem, outlining her lapis eye.
It is David, finally, home again.
She is filled, this time, with joy. She spares a second to think, grinning: there is a good name for my daughter, and a name like that can be a prophecy. Our child shall be happy. She sets her will against something she can no longer see, shoves hard. She thinks, I do not care what it will cost me. Our child shall be happy, with David and I.
But she can spare no more time on thinking; her husband will be here soon. Picking up her underthings, her silk cobalt robe. I must look my best.
She is wearing all her garments, though un-corsetted, her long hair streaming, when she hears the creaking movement of the door. She turns to David. Smiles. Meets his rejoicing eyes.
She takes him in.
BIRTHDAY
The manse is a riot of sound, from top to bottom, so loud the walls echo with it. People are running, shouting, there is a long, drawn-out wail. There is the rippling clamor of water boiling in copper pans, the meaty sounds of sheets being torn. Malda Freeman, the new housekeeper, wipes her three-quarter sleeve across a sweaty forehead. Her silver bracelets jangle bright against her skin.
Even down here in the fogged and misty kitchen, the thing going on upstairs sounds more like a battle than a birth.
How could that white girl make so much noise? she wonders, plunging more rags in the frothing water, ready for when the doctor calls. My own mamma had ten in rapid succession, silent as the night and no trouble at all. But not this lady. Already the nurse is back with her other basin, filled up with watery blood.
Malda takes it from her, throws it out the door, not bothering to even try to salvage the pinkish rags that float there. This house is filled with sheets, there will be more. Let the vultures deal with these.
And then Cook is standing, large-boned, beside her and settling her water-roughened hands on Malda’s left arm. ‘The lady. Yeah. She call you.’
When Malda turns to answer she finds herself addressing a wide behind, the cook bent over the stove again.
Well, she thinks, we’ve got to eat.
The nurse is gone, upstairs already. Malda follows wondering why she, of all people has been called. The lady (she refuses to think of her as ‘mistress’) has treated her with vague kindness since she was hired, as though apologizing for a pregnancy which made a necessity out of luxury, but they have never been close.27
How could they be, separated as they are by clothing, class, the tone of their skin?
On the way up the stairs she admires the wallpaper, flowers in jewel tones. She wonders at the lungs that can make that sound, and at the state of the mind behind it. The bedroom door is open, David pacing in front, still in the hall, pipe-smoking furiously, gnawing at the stem like a dog on a bone. The dictates of culture will not stand to admit him lest he see the undoing of parts he has fondled but never laid eyes on, even at night.
‘Are you okay, sir?’ She likes this man; it is difficult not to with his deep brown eyes and careful hands. She would like to comfort him, a small touch on the shoulder, but she does not quite dare.
He does, however, in kindness never thinking. He grasps and squeezes her hand. ‘Thank you, Malda. I’m fine, just worried.’ His smile is boyish, his clerical collar glimmers, white. ‘Go on in to Rose. She needs you more than I.’
Oh how she longs to call this man David. She has only worked here a few months, but her mother said that she was ever fast to love, although for Malda that passion has until now been reserved for children and her female friends. The depths of this desire, its growing, hidden roots, will remain buried inside her, never ever admitted. Instead of making the response she wants to, she nods at him, smiles, then turns to enter the noisy, sweltering room.
The doctor is bent before the altar of Rose’s womb, at that place where flesh is rent, torn and made bloody in order to admit new life. The infant’s head is visible, just barely peeking out from between the tender labia; the crown of its head is covered in a thick, black thatch of hair, the blood beading in the waxy vernix that covers the visible scalp.
The doctor does not notice Malda entering and so she spends an uncomfortable few moments standing in the very center of the room, listening to the wailing and the hurried orders of the nurse. 28Eventually the starched lady sees her and reaches out with stained, white cotton gloves to grip Malda on the arm just below the lace edges of her three-quarter-length sleeve, leading her to the head of the bed and the writhing lady lying there. Malda sees pain-darkened eyes in a sweat-stained face the texture of chicken skin, surrounded by blond hair that falls in a nimbus bunched up behind her, tangled into knots.
The woman, Ms. Rose, looks at Malda from her vacant eyes, as though she were seeing another scene entirely, as though she were not really present in this little room or witnessing the center scene that she has formed. She smells of unwashed sweat, of blood, the unmistakable odor of shit and human skin. Underneath it all, rising up, Malda can detect the sickly-sweet scent of perfume, Lily of the Valley, David’s favorite which Rose had applied to her bosom and hairline this morning, as usual, before the pains had really set their teeth in at the labor’s start.
There is a calm moment, before the next insistent wave of pain, when the two women are joined together, blue eyes to brown. And then the wave comes and, wailing, lifts them up, joining them in deeper, primal ways. Malda cannot help but raise her voice in union with the ululations of the agonized Rose. Welcoming new life in pain and sorrow, and beneath all that, an inexplicable joy.
Already, Malda feels drained.
Before she can take another breath, to satisfy her craving for the oxygen she’s lost, Rose’s hand shoots out and grabs her wrist, closing down with surprising strength on the bangles that decorate her arm, forever ruining them. Later, when the dust has settled and the fresh blood cleared, Malda will find them flattened hard enough to leave their bright floral impressions tattooed in violet upon her skin. They will take months to fade completely. Tomorrow she will have to have the smithy cut off the bracelets 29with his shears. This is a loss that she will mourn bitterly for years, but will never ask David to replace. Although he would.
Right now Rose is gripping down hard enough for Malda to feel the small bones grate, hard enough for the pain to sharpen her senses, heightening them until she feels as though she could name the individual hairs on her lady’s arm. When Rose pulls her close the sensation gets worse. Malda can see the wild panic in her eyes and smell the sour carrion stench of fear in every labored exhalation.
When her voice comes it is ragged, exhausted by long hours of pushing, ‘Malda. Help.’ Rose is still gripping Malda’s left arm in a hold that leaves no option for escape.
Malda knows her cue to action when she hears it, and positions her body directly in front of the lady, straddling her. She swings one leg onto either side of Rose’s curved body so that she is kneeling on the mattress, her rear end hanging suspended over Rose’s pregnancy, hiding both it and the doctor (his cruel forceps scissoring like the arms of a crab) from the frightened mother’s view.
Rose peers at Malda, shocked and grateful, ignoring the exasperated mutterings of the nurse. She is thinking in her exhausted, disconnected way, What does she matter, anyway? That woman isn’t any part of this. Her eyes, already more alert, meet Malda’s and for now the two of them are sisters. Their future rivalries will birth themselves later, on another, less vital day. Rose lets slip her housekeeper’s wrist.
Malda does not notice the pain yet, nor the way the silver manacles have been driven into her skin. Her attention is elsewhere.
She takes Rose’s face between her hands, making and maintaining contact with her eyes, saying ‘Now you listen here, Miss. My momma birthed ten children, one by one, myself 30included, quick as can be without missing a beat. She was a picker-woman,’ a faint smile, remembering, ‘born a slave in Georgia, way up North.’
Rose is focused now, her breathing hitched, but regular. Malda has no plans to stop.
‘When I was born she was outside working, picking cotton, row on row. The war was on, but far from us. It might as well have been on the moon. All I know is by the time I was five we were free. Whatever that means. I do the same thing down here that I always did, but then it was without any money and now I get paid.’
The tale is working, calming her down. It is a good story and it does what the best of them are able to do. It makes the mind grow distant from bodily pain.
‘Now I was the ninth baby, but my momma was younger than you, and you younger than me by a good seven years. But that doesn’t mean anything.’ Her forehead creases, thinking; she forms her words, ‘Like I said, she was picking cotton, bole on bole, filling up those bags, being real careful cause her fingers were sore and she didn’t want no blood on the fiber.’
Malda shifts her weight above the heaving belly, maintaining contact with eyes grown wide and luminous as though seeing the images painted by her words. ‘When she started cramping, my momma squatted down and spread her head shawl over the furrows. I was born inside a minute, without trouble, without her even uttering a sound. Five minutes after that I was cleaned up and bundled in the shawl. She held me like a sling over her shoulder and went back to picking, row on row. If she could do it, so can you.’ This is not the true story. It is the story Rose expects to hear. A little white lie. A lie for whites.
The doctor is saying something now, but neither one of them understand it, or even really hear. Rose is too busy pushing, 31trying to shift this mass within her, this thing that feels like a ten-pound kidney stone, serrated. After a few minutes Malda finds herself pushing too, and the story stops while they wail together, in voices equal parts pain and relief, welcoming the new life who, after waiting just a moment to collect her breath, joins in the wailing too.
The doctor holds the baby, tying off the cord while Malda clambers over her boss and onto the side of the bed. She stands there watching while the doctor hands the child (a girl indeed, and lovely. You can tell by the crack) to the nurse who waits for it with a sterilized wet cloth from the pots that Malda set to boiling a lifetime ago.
The doctor gently closes Rose’s legs, discreetly covering that torn and unrepaired hole with a swathe of white towel that soon blooms with poppies. The nurse, who has been staring intently at the infant’s mobile face, slowly peels off the hanging caul. Malda makes a note of this, as the nurse hands child to mother for that first kiss, and notes too its position a little separate from the other afterbirth. Malda will fetch it later, and bury it in the ground below the stilts, underneath the high threshold of the manse’s kitchen door.
David has entered, admitted at last by the beaming doctor, who says, ‘It’s alive and healthy, though not a son.’ The medical man’s blood-rimmed hand pats the new father’s shoulder, gently. ‘Do not let it worry you. She shall have another.’
But David is already rushing to the bed, not noticing anyone or anything around him but the mother and the girl. He is kissing his wife on her sweat-matted hair, and cupping the child’s head in his palm, looking from one to the other as though his time were short, his fast long, and they the only food that could sustain him.
Finally a voice breaks through. It is the nurse, birth certificate out and ready to be filled in. ‘What are you to call her?’32
Rose looks up, really bright and alert for the first time since Malda entered the room. She does not hesitate. ‘Joy Marie. For pleasure and protection.’
David kisses her again, decorously for the sake of their servant and their guests, and gently squeezes her thin shoulder. The nurse looks at him, seeking approval and permission which he gives with a small nod.
The nurse inscribes the title, her fountain pen scratching illegibly until David hands her over his ivory one, the one with the real silver nib. The name is set down, permanent, made real with the ink and inscription of words.
They are all relaxed, celebratory, even Rose, who is utterly exhausted. Malda feels almost anemically drained, as though she had given something other than a fudged-up story. For everyone except the mother there will be fine beef tonight, Cuban cigars, the best champagne. For the mother there will be imported strawberries, ordered from the North, and soft, silken cream. For the infant, the bared feast of the breast. All will celebrate tonight, in their own ways, and the baptism will be held tomorrow, which is Sunday, in the rapturous, hunter-packed church.
The birthday has begun.
COMPROMISE
Malda brings the laundry down, cradling the basket full of baby linen, amazed at the stink of it, wondering: how can something so small create so much waste? And does the momma clean it up? No. Her hands are too white, too lily delicate to handle such a human chore. That’s why they hired her.
She isn’t resentful, not really, and she knows it. Jealous is what her momma would call it. She can imagine the look that big woman would give her. Momma with the strong arms, wide hips and shoulders a pillar for any child to lean upon, dressed in a floral print faded pink from so many washings and a kerchief on her head that began life as a pair of the Master’s blue jeans, leftover from when they still had a master. It was one of the few things they brought with them into freedom, that and the set of silver bangles Mistress gave her, that Malda inherited and Rose destroyed.
Malda walks, carefully navigating the long stairs, trying not to spill the foul contents of the wicker basket or smudge the expensive flower-patterned wallpaper on her way down. Ordinarily the colors in such things are set and firm, remaining where the printer left them, but there is so much water here that it is difficult to take anything for granted. Take these diapers for instance. This is two days’ worth of girl-baby waste, and already it is mildewing. Lovely. Just another odor for the stew.
Malda has worked here for nearly three months and she is already experiencing a great deal of difficulty, but not in the areas one might expect. She was originally from Georgia, her mother was a picker owned by an old man with many slaves and many acres. Sometimes she moonlighted in the kitchen when the 34Masters were having an especially large party. Her mother had the potential to be an excellent cook, all of the elements were there: taste, a good sense of balance, a passion for fine things and an eye for presentation, but she never received the proper house training when she was young.
The prettier little girls were the ones usually chosen to learn the ladies’-maid manners and culinary arts, and Reeny Josephson (given her master’s surname, which she changed to Freeman after her emancipation) was a thick dark thing with childbearing hips by ten years old, used as a picker from her earliest childhood and made into a breeder from the time of her first blood. But as she got older the slaves around the compound noticed that her cornbread never burned and always remained fluffy and light. So she was brought in to the kitchen whenever she was needed, returning to the fields when the hard work was done.
She wanted better for the daughter she was able to keep and when freedom came, she did her best to provide it. Though she could not arrange a proper reading education, she apprenticed her pretty little girl and set her up to trail after a maid of all work who served in one of Savannah’s nicest houses.
Since Malda was a smart girl, a quick learner with excellent retention, she rapidly improved in manner and skill, and by the time she was twenty she was in high demand among the Georgia elite, used to working for a high salary and able to choose her own employers. But she soon tired of Georgia.
The Jim Crow laws there were harsh and strictly enforced. She had absolutely no reason to suspect that things would be any easier even further south, but they could hardly be worse. From what she’d heard about life in Tampa and the surrounding swamp no one was likely to spit on her just for walking on the sidewalk instead of in the street.
And that was a good part of the problem.35
People here treated her almost like a human being. And it was giving her pretentions.
