Charity (3 page)

“Ma?” She stepped closer, but the old woman did not acknowledge her. “Ma!” Lena, short on patience, took two strides to the side of the rocker and shook her mother-in-law by the shoulder. “Ma! Where are the boys? Where’s Mary and Nyla? I thought they’d be here.”

“They’re at Molvik’s seeing to Pa,” her mother-in-law wheezed. “Seeing to things.”

Molvik was the undertaker. Lena had almost forgotten there was a body to be prepared for burial. She ventured in a more civil voice, “You know they think that Will did it.” Maybe Ma didn’t know that. Maybe they hadn’t told her. Maybe they thought the death of a husband was enough news for the time being.

“Of all the boys,” the old woman wheezed, “I never thought it would be Will.”

“He didn’t do it! But I mean to find out who did, believe you me. Now what do you know about this mess?”

Ma Kaiser turned her small eyes upon Lena. “I don’t know anything,” she mewled, like a fat child confronted with an empty cake plate.

“Well, when did you last see Pa?” Lena resisted the urge to smack her. “What was he doing in the barn? There’s nothing in that barn.”

“I don’t know.” The old woman’s voice slipped into a higher register and she started to rock again. “I don’t keep track of what all that man does.”

Ma Kaiser nor her house ever smelled good, but today the smell of a woman who casually believes all her sons capable of murder and takes for granted the guilt of her favorite was too much. Lena felt herself beginning to gag. She left as fast as she could and, once she had passed the gate, inhaled deeply.

Lena found herself going next door to Julia’s.

Julia’s house was modest in size. A fresh coat of white paint brightened both the outside walls and the length of fence that ran along in front of it. The fence, wrought iron with some scroll-work about the gate, did not go around the house; it kept nothing in and nothing out but made a very pretty picture when viewed straight on. Two peony bushes on either side of the front door were in bud.

Julia met her at the door, a limp handkerchief in one hand, her cat in the other held close to her breast. She wore a gray linen dress, trimmed at the neck and sleeves with thin strips of white lace. She was dressed for company. The cat was gray with white paws and throat. Even in her agitation, Lena was amused at the resemblance between them. As she held the door open, Julia said, “Oh, Lena, he’s gone. Pa’s gone.” Tears rose in her eyes.

“Yes,” was all Lena could say as she stepped into Julia’s kitchen and sat down at her small table. “Julia, they think Will did it.”

“I know. It’s a pity.” Julia, with one hand—her other hand still cradled the cat to her bosom—set a cup in front of Lena. As she did so, Lena saw that the ring on her right hand, an opal in a gold setting that Julia always wore, was wrapped in string on the palm side. Lena commented on it and Julia said, “Oh, yes. These old hands are getting thin, especially when they’re cold. I didn’t want the ring slipping off, you know. It was Mother’s.” Julia poured weak coffee into Lena’s cup.

“Yes, that happened to my mother,” nodded Lena. “She lost her wedding ring in the bread dough. Didn’t know where she’d lost it till Will bit into it in a piece of toast. Nearly broke his tooth!”

Julia smiled at the story, returned the pot to the stove, and sat down. When she moved, her fine white hair held softly in a loose bun at the nape of her neck, waved gently, cloudlike about her head. With that puffball of white fine hair, she reminded Lena sometimes of a dandelion gone to seed.

Lena didn’t know where to put her hands. They went from her lap, to play about her mouth and chin, to touching the table top and back to her lap again. Finally, with one hand and a toss of her head she indicated Gertrude’s house a few yards away. “
She’s
no help. His own mother. Sitting over there like a fat spider. Thinking he might have done it. ‘Of all the boys,’” Lena mimicked Ma Kaiser’s wheezy voice, “’I never thought it would be Will.’ Oof! She makes me tired. How you’ve stood her all these years, I don’t know.” Lena thumped her fingers on the table top, then took a quick sip of coffee.

Julia did not answer or remove her loving gaze from the cat in her lap, who with perfect attention licked the inside of a curled paw. “Is Feather getting clean? Kitty Feather...” she crooned as she stroked his back with her thin, blue-veined hand. “Cats are so clean, aren’t they?”

The kitchen warmed with light cascading through Julia’s white lace curtains. Julia’s house, like Julia herself, always smelled faintly of lavender. For a moment, Lena almost relaxed a little. She blurted out, “Who do you think did it? You know it wasn’t Will, don’t you?”

“Of course, we all know it couldn’t have been Will,” Julia answered. “Not Will.” Julia continued to stroke her cat.

“No. That’s right.” Lena’s hands began their nervous search once more. “Well, who do you think, Julia?”

Julia just shook her head and her eyes filled with tears once more.

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Lena kindly. She felt sorry for Julia. Pa Kaiser had been good to her in his way. She had taken in sewing over the years, but he had helped her out financially from time to time and paid her a little for some bookkeeping while he was still in the well business. Pa had been generous that way.

Julia was dabbing her eyes. “We’ll all miss him, that’s for sure.”

“Yes, that’s for sure,” said Lena. She suddenly saw Pa as he had been the day of her wedding. He was smiling. It was so unusual that she mentioned it to Will at the time. “Your dad seems happy,” she said.

Will grinned and nodded. “Yeah, he thinks I did pretty good marrying you.”

“Well, he’s right. You did,” Lena retorted smugly.

Later, as Pa was leaving the reception, he slipped a few bills into her hand and murmured awkwardly, “Get yourself something nice now.”

It was hard to believe he was gone.

Lena finished the cup of coffee, kissed Julia on the cheek, and left her to the comfort of her cat. As she walked slowly home, she wondered over Julia and Gertrude. No two sisters could be more different. All the qualities that usually got mixed up in people, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, had been separated; all that was heavy and dark had fallen on Gertrude, and all that was delicate and light had gone into Julia. There was something of the fragile aristocrat about Julia, even though she’d grown plump around the middle over the years, and nothing, Lena thought with distaste, but the thick peasant about Gertrude. The resemblance between them was apparent only in the squareness of their faces and the color of their eyes—a rare cloudy shade of hazel. But with the color, the resemblance ended. The expression in Gertrude’s eyes alternated between the dullness of a fish and a bovine fierceness like that of a placid cow roused to defend her calf. In Julia’s eyes there flickered a girlishness that was at times becoming, even charming, and at other times disconcerting, emanating as it did from a face creased with the myriad fine lines of old age. Lena wondered at those times, where had she been, this old lady, while her body aged, not to have matured at the same rate on the inside. But these were fleeting impressions and Lena did not dwell on them except to attribute Julia’s manner to the fact of her spinsterhood and never having children of her own.

Lena shuddered. She was not a spinster, but she was thirty-four and still childless. There was no point to a life without children. Now that she was getting older, she felt it more painfully than ever. Anyway, Lena would never be girlish again. She already felt old as the hills.

Lena entered her own house gratefully. It wasn’t much, this house, but she had taken pains to make it comfortable and pretty, sewing curtains for every window and covers for the old furniture. She kept the wood floors shining the way her mother had taught her: cold water and vinegar. Nothing else. Scrub them with that every week—the wood bleached out pale and glowing. She never had to wax them. She couldn’t afford wax anyway.

Lena lit her stove, put on the coffee pot, then went down to the cellar for a jar of her sweet rhubarb sauce, which, besides the bread and cookies, was all she had left in the house to eat. There was still plenty of coffee and sugar, thank the Lord, but in a few days she did not know what she was going to do. There was no money. Without Will working there would be no money.

She took down a bowl, and as she unscrewed the cap on the jar of sauce, the jar slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor. Half the contents spilled out. She grabbed a rag, sopped it in the bucket of water in the sink, wrung it out and got down on her hands and knees to wipe up the pink, sweet mess. She was on her hands and knees again, on all the floors she had cleaned and scrubbed since she was old enough to tote a bucket of water—first for her mother and grandmother, then for all the people she’d been hired out to for pennies a week and a place to stay—up to her elbows in water, scalding hot or freezing cold, depending on the job to be done and the whim of the lady of the house. Lena was a young woman and her hands were ugly from work. But this, at least, was
her
floor.

She began to cry. This floor was the reason she put up with Will Kaiser—this floor and the lace curtains in the bedroom, the cotton curtains in her kitchen. The wood cabinet that held her dishes and baking things and still supported the neat row of loaves was
her
cabinet, made simply, beautifully and without a nail, by Will’s own hands when he was still more in love with her than with whiskey. This little house, the garden outside, the clotheslines that stretched across the yard—these things were hers, and without Will she would lose them and have to go back to working for other people, living in other people’s houses, caring for other people’s children, having nothing of her own. She couldn’t go back to washing other people’s dirty clothes, cooking their moist cakes and puddings that needed hours of steaming and molding just so, while she, nor anyone she cared a snap about, ever got to eat them.

No, Will was not perfect. But life was infinitely better with him than without him. And no one could take the first ten years of her marriage from her. Unlike some drinking men, he never raised a hand to her. And him sitting in jail was no justice—not for him, who’d done no killing, whose only crime perhaps was in being too drunk to prevent one—and not for her. For, without Will, she could keep nothing she loved and had nothing to look forward to. Without him, there would never be a child. She began sobbing into the rhubarb-soaked rag.

She was sobbing loudly, with abandon, when a shadow fell across the kitchen. She looked up. Framed in the doorway was a tall, slender woman wearing a threadbare black skirt and equally worn white blouse. The high color in her face graced wide-set gray eyes that shone very dark behind her wire-rimmed spectacles.

Lena choked and sobbed harder into the rag she held in her fist. “Oh, Gustie!”

The ladies of the Ruth and Esther Circle met every other Sunday, the members taking turns offering their homes as meeting place. Lena enjoyed the Circle—especially when she could play hostess—except for one Sunday afternoon when the Bible reading was done, the planning completed for next Sunday’s luncheon after the baptismal service for Marvin and Kate Gullickson’s first baby, and the conversation over coffee and sugar cookies turned to gossip about Augusta Roemer. A few clicked their tongues and shook their heads and said it was
such
a shame. Gustie really needed a man to take care of her. And why, for heaven’s sake, didn’t she pay any attention to Nemil Glasrud? Sure, Nemil wasn’t going to win any beauty prizes, but then neither was Augusta, and he was a good worker and had had his eye, however shyly, upon her ever since she came to Charity—now what was it—two or three years ago? And never once had she even given him the time of day. A woman in Gustie’s predicament and not getting any younger after all, they clucked reasonably, could not afford to treat a man like an old shirt.

Lena, who on principle might have agreed, having expressed similar sentiments herself about other women, bristled when such sentiments were tossed about over Gustie. With a glare at her sister-in-law Nyla that said unmistakably
You better not say anything or I will tell a few things I know about you, too,
she said, “And what does Gustie need a man for? So she can have twice as many clothes to wash, and clothes that are twice as dirty to boot? So she has three times the cooking, and somebody she has to pick up after all the time? And wait up for? She’s happy the way she is, and maybe all of you aren’t so blissful in your married nests as you’d have us believe either, and are just jealous of her freedom. It’s none of anybody’s business whether she has a man or not. The idea!” Lena was hell-bent. “And, as for Nemil Glasrud, he’s as homely as a fence and smells like his barn, and I didn’t see any of you...” she cast her fury upon the younger, newly married women in the room, “taking up with him, and you were all given the eye by him at one time or another.”

Lena’s back was up, but not everyone took the warning to quietly finish their coffee and go home. Harriet Kranhold, always needing the final word, tilted her head so that her double chins trebled as they flopped over her collar. Stirring another spoon of sugar into her already syrupy brew, she grunted, “Hmph. She goes off...somebody said she goes to Argus for books, supplies, whatnot, but she’s gone two, three days, sometimes longer. Where can
she
afford to stay in Argus? And on a Sunday? There’s no books or supplies to be bought on a Sunday. She just trots off as she pleases to nobody knows where. It doesn’t look right. Not at all, I don’t think.” After a significant pause, she looked up and continued in a more confidential tone but still audible to all present, “And Axel told me that Harold Schenecker said he saw her a couple of times in her wagon going east. E
ast
, mind you. Argus is
west
.” She paused for effect. “She’d have a long trip going to Argus that way.” A light giggle rippled around the room. Harriet nodded and smiled, stirred and stirred.