Heart of a Dove (3 page)

I huddled away from her, choking back sobs.

“You don’t know better, yet,” she said, leaning close. “And you will learn to satisfy my customers, do you hear me?” To emphasize her words, she caught a handful of my hair and clenched it tightly, bringing her face to within inches of mine. “If you ever act this way again, I will have you whipped. Ask any of the girls if I mean that, and they’ll tell you, Lila.”

She drew back on my hair until I cried out, though I didn’t intend to, afraid it would only unleash more anger. She released me, stood straight, and then perused the bed.

“Well, I know you weren’t lying about being a virgin,” she said, nodding at the linens. “You’ve earned me a fair amount for the evening. Tomorrow you best make these men believe that you want nothing more in the world than their cock in you. I don’t care how you do it, but you do it, Lila, or I’ll put you out on the street and you’ll starve. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said, and then left me alone.

Hours passed. I wrapped my arms around myself as hard as I could, and still the shaking would not cease. I sobbed until there wasn’t a tear left within my body, shame coating me like a wet shawl. An array of sounds met my ears as I lay huddled; there was the piano and laughter and shouting from below, and then, at intervals, the sounds of men being led to the other rooms around mine. I heard sighs and grunts, giggles and moans, bedsprings creaking and headboards thumping, until at last, as dawn began to press its fingers against my windowpane, these too quieted.

When my door eased open I sprang upright from a fitful doze, terror sending blood firing through my body. But it was only Deirdre, washed clean and recognizable again, back in her dressing gown. She slipped soundlessly over the floorboards, her feet bare, and nudged me over, lying down to align her slim, pale front with my spine. I buried my face against my palms, weeping again, though it hurt my throat. She curled her arms around me and pressed her nose into my hair.

She held me tightly for a long time. At last she whispered, “You survived.”

- 3 -

It was my week to hang laundry. My four days, truly, as I could not fairly claim to bleed for an entire week; Ginny checked our bindings to make certain no one lied to her about the length of their time off. It also happened to be July and the week of my sixteenth birthday, and the four days free from servicing customers was gift enough for me. With the basket of clothes pins on my hip, I stepped out into the side lot where Betsy was washing bedding in an enormous iron kettle which hung over a fire pit. She worked with vigor, seemingly tireless; she was one of the few employees at Hossiter’s with whom I felt comfortable enough to converse. Deirdre was another, of course, and I loved her like a sister. She was the one of the only reasons I hadn’t yet given in to the frequent, terrible and desperate urge to drag a knife along my wrist and end my life.

The other women in Ginny’s employ ranged from distantly polite to outright hostile. I had learned many lessons since last autumn. One of which being that women in our business often disliked one another quite overtly, especially if men tended to seek out one’s company over another’s. Buckley Hill notwithstanding, I had earned Ginny as much money as she’d envisioned upon my arrival. Buckley was indeed a regular at Hossiter’s, but he avoided me since our first dreadful encounter, preferring the company of more experienced women. Though by now I could claim a fair amount of experience. It was nothing of which I was proud; Deirdre had been correct in stating that after the first few times, the act would no longer be painful. At least, not physically. Within what was left of my soul, pain flashed and resounded nearly every second, reminding me of what I now was, what I would be, from here on after.

Whore
. It was a word that may as well have been a brand, red and raw upon our foreheads, visible for all the judgmental world to see. Ginny was fond of using it when addressing us, as though we were ever able to forget. Though I would never have imagined becoming acclimated to such a lifestyle, the past months had dulled some of my shock, my fears, and the days and nights were quite routine; in many ways I felt as though I had actually become Lila. When I allowed myself to think of my old name, my old life, the shaking would start again, and I’d play with the paring knife I’d stolen from the kitchen around Christmastide and kept under my mattress, drawing its length lightly over the thin, pale skin on the underside of my forearm, imagining what might happen if I pressed just a hair harder. In my darkest moments I reasoned that heaven was no doubt lost to me as it was; if I took my own life, would hell be much worse than my existence at Ginny’s?

And yet, there were fleeting moments, tiny pockets in time, when I felt a small flash of Lorie, buried deeply within me. It would occur unexpectedly, and last but a heartbeat or two, as though something within me dared yet to live, rather than just survive. When snowflakes fell in whispers from a pearl-colored sky and dusted my face one day in late January, as I’d ventured out to hang the laundry. When the sunset struck across the long, gleaming wooden bar on the main floor and cast a certain slant of light in the first week of April. When I used my mother’s ivory-backed, oval-headed brush, one of the only items I possessed which had belonged to her. I found I could not dwell long upon the memories of home, or I would drown in grief. Nor could I allow myself to conceive of what had happened to Daddy’s ranch, our house, the belongings within; had any of our old hands ventured back after the War and wondered what had become of me? Instead, I imagined my family in some celestial place far from here, together, waiting for me to join them, and that thought brought me a fraction of comfort.

With the money I earned for Ginny, of which I kept only a meager amount, I had been able to purchase additional clothing for myself, able to return my borrowed garments to their original owners. I woke near noon most every day, despite having drifted to sleep at daybreak. I would rise and wander to the kitchen, where the deaf-mute cook, Greta, prepared our food. Greta was aging and communicated with hand motions. Though she never smiled, she had never been unkind to me, a heavyset woman with gray hair wound up beneath a white kerchief. She especially loved baking and seemed to produce something sweet and cream-laden nearly every day. Ginny kept a cow, tended by Johnny, the same man who played piano in the evenings. He was slim and nervous, with fingers that were always drumming along upon something. Once a week he treated himself to a turn with Lisette, whom he obviously favored.

There were seven of us whores working for Ginny; the cow provided ample supplies of both milk and butter, which was lovely for eating but absolutely necessary for cleansing. The butter douche was something I performed by rote now, much like I performed the act of sex with anywhere between fifteen to twenty men a night. Some of the men were regulars at Ginny’s, though most were faceless, nameless blurs in my mind, despite the forced, false intimacy of what I did with them; some of them were former Federal soldiers. I had nearly died with shame the first time I had turned a trick for a former soldier, but I didn’t dare refuse. At the dawn of that next day, I had almost shaken to pieces upon the narrow mattress of my bed, had begged my brothers’ forgiveness, my daddy’s. But there was no absolution.

Among the women I had two friends, Deirdre and Ramie. Deirdre’s friendship meant the most to me and Ramie was simply friendly by nature, with a wide mouth always smiling. Everyone liked her, and at seventeen, she was closer to my age than anyone else. Of all of us, Jola and Eva had been the longest in Ginny’s employ and tended to stick together; Jola was tolerable, as long as one didn’t cross her, and Eva, while lovely, was openly bad-tempered, possessive about getting first picks on customers, and had tormented me in every small way she could, since my first week. That left Lisette and Mary, both of whom, like Deirdre, had lost husbands in the War. Each of us had a room, a bed, food to eat and clothing to wear. A small part of me was able to reason that this counted for quite a bit. I was not plagued with wondering where my next meal would come from, where I would spend the night. Though the pound of flesh it exacted from me was the loss of every dream, every hope I had harbored in my old life.

Betsy nodded to me as I walked past her, letting the daylight bathe my face. I felt such a creature of the night, trapped within the walls of Hossiter’s, that sometimes the sun was almost a shock upon me, but it was still the same sun that had once shown through the slats in the wooden beams of our horse barn back home. As a little girl I had spent many of the happiest hours of my life in and around that barn, smelling the horses, leaning over the top rails of the corral fence and watching Daddy or one of our hands work with an animal. Daddy had been indulgent with me, his only daughter, the baby of his family. He’d taught me to ride along with Dalton and Jesse, had shown me the ways of handling a horse properly.

“You’ll get nothing out of a horse with brute force, darlin’,” he’d tell me. “A good horseman knows better than that, knows how to speak to an animal in other ways. A good horseman learns his animals, responds to them. A horse should respect you, darlin’, not fear you.”

I was thinking of my father, and birthdays from my past, before the War when I was still beloved, part of a family. When Deirdre slipped behind me and tugged my braid I startled, drawn unwillingly from my reverie.

“Lila, what’s got you so jumpy?” she teased. “I heard tell last night that there’s an acting troupe coming in on the afternoon stage.”

“I was daydreaming,” I told her, unmoved by the news. It hardly mattered to us; as though a group of whores would be attending a theater production.

“Dangerous thing, that,” she warned, tightening the belt of her dressing gown and lending me a hand. I’d never yet grown accustomed to wearing a silk robe out of doors, and was currently clad in my only garment suitable outside of a whorehouse, a dark blue muslin that reached the tops of my boots. Then she asked, a note of trepidation in her tone, “Did you hear that Sam Rainey was asking after you?”

I paused in my work, closing my eyes for a moment, gathering strength to reply, “Ramie told me last night. Doesn’t Ginny heed the words about him?”

Deirdre snorted, while the washing cauldron behind us hissed with its burden of steam and Betsy grunted, surely listening to our conversation. I cast an anxious eye over my shoulder, as though Ginny herself may be peering from one of the windows; though she was rarely about before the hour of three. I felt I knew less about her than the first night I’d come to Hossiter’s, though we all speculated. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wouldn’t dream of crossing her; she made the very blood in my veins crackle with shards of fear. Deirdre added, “She knows that he spends his money on whiskey at her bar. She doesn’t care that he may or may not have killed a girl.”

“According to Eva, it’s true,” I said, unable to ignore the twisting in my gut. Sam Rainey was relatively new to St. Louis, though his reputation had preceded him, at least amongst our set. Eva informed us that he was rough with whores at best, and rumors abounded that he’d strangled a girl in a whorehouse somewhere in Arkansas. Though gossip was always abundant, and I was skeptical about most of the talk, there was something about him that made my stomach cringe, my neck prickle in such a way that I knew not to ignore.

I’d cast eyes upon him only a week ago, a lean, spare man with a slight hitch in his walk, a supposed injury from the War. He, like many others who frequented Hossiter’s, continued to wear the Federal-blue trousers of his service uniform. We’d all steered clear of him and thus far he had only chosen to drink and play at the gaming tables. But the night before last, his eyes had followed me, and though I’d been across the room, I’d felt the weight of that gaze. And then he’d asked Ginny about me. I yet had three days before Ginny would notice that I was no longer bleeding. Perhaps he would have moved on before then.

“Lila, it’s early, let’s stay out and see if we can’t spy the stage coming in,” Deirdre begged, like a little girl.

The Grand Hotel, whose name was its grandest feature, was directly across the dusty street from Hossiter’s, and was subsequently where stagecoaches stopped bi-weekly to deposit human cargo. I’d spent many an afternoon spying upon those who stepped from the stagecoaches; I enjoyed one driver most, a rangy man whose voice grated like a saw blade over a nail. The variety of curse words he used would have given Mama’s copy of
Roget’s Thesaurus
a run for its money. From the upstairs hall window, I could peek as the double doors would creak open and disgorge people choosing to visit St. Louis for whatever reason; sometimes I spied children with their parents, holding their fathers’ hands or clinging to a mother’s skirt. Once a young woman had cupped the back of her small son’s head, smoothing his fair hair.

The laundry in my basket was hung; I rested my chin on one shoulder and regarded Deirdre, whose dark eyes shone like a child’s.

“Please, Li, beautiful Lila,” she begged, smoothing a strand of hair from my forehead, and at last I nodded.

The afternoon stage was due at 2:25, and we spent the hour to wait lounging in the kitchen with Greta, who had baked a cream cake frosted with a dusting of the pure-white powdered sugar that Mama had favored for whipping cream. She sliced generous pieces for us and I pretended that it was for my birthday. My sixteenth birthday, which, had I still been in Tennessee, would have occasioned a true celebration; I would have spent glorious hours choosing material and being fitted for a new gown. In my mind it was the shade of an evening sky after a fair day over the hollers of home, a rich, smoky purple.

“Did you ever see a stage show, in your life?” Deirdre asked me, licking frosting from her bottom lip.

I shook my head as I delicately sliced a bite of the cake. “No, but in my lessons for school we did read a fair amount of Shakespeare. I remember
Hamlet
best.”

“A whore who’s read
Hamlet
,” Deirdre mused and her eyes were fond. “I love how you talk, Miss Lila. I wonder if time will take away that southern softness in your words.”

Before residing in Missouri, I’d never realized the cadence of my speech was different; I recalled thinking last autumn that everyone here spoke so brusquely, so quickly.

“Girls, you best save some of that cake for me,” Mary said, coming into the kitchen with eyes yet softened by sleep. She stretched and yawned.

Eva was on Mary’s heels, already made up in her rouging and her lips painted with carmine. Eva was cat-eyed, as Mama would have said, with calculating dark eyes quick to narrow. She was taller than any of us, with legs that she loved to showcase. At her entrance, my stomach soured; my first months had been made immeasurably more miserable because of her. Ramie told me that Eva was purely jealous, that Eva had been the most sought-after whore at Ginny’s until me. Even now Eva’s eyes skimmed over me with a sense of disdain.

“Come along,” Deirdre said, taking my empty plate and placing it in the deep sink with its hand pump.

Eva turned her shoulder away as I passed, as though to inadvertently touch me was too much for her. I felt my upper lip curling in anger and followed Deirdre back outdoors with my heart pounding harder than normal.

“Don’t let her upset you,” Deirdre reminded me, taking my arm into her own as we walked to the far edge of the side yard at Hossiter’s, leaning on our forearms over white-beamed fence that separated it from the boardwalk. A small crowd had indeed assembled at the Grand; surely the word about an acting troupe had generated interest. It wasn’t as though we were forbidden to leave Ginny’s property, though none of us ever did. It was an unspoken rule we all obeyed and never discussed.

“Here it comes!” Deirdre said with excitement in her tone, a gift I cherished. Excitement was something that was dead within me. The closest I came to experiencing it was through proximity to Deirdre.

As we watched, the stage came rattling to a halt in a billow of dust and the clatter of sixteen hooves. The driver I favored was perched high atop, and he bellowed, “Whoa there, you flap-jawed sonsabitchin’ scourges!” and I nearly smiled.