Her Kind, a novel (11 page)

This morning I lingered in that place between sleep and waking where I could recreate my past and greet those who awaited me. I could have sworn that I heard Annie’s voice or perhaps it had been Clara Belle. Their voices so alike.

Zenas was there, too, using his best booming voice to anoint me with two eagles wings and telling me to fly, as an angelic Grandma Laura looks on.

Such an odd dream.

I opened my eyes to the current hour, alone. Oh the comfort of an old friend, my sisters, who might as well be sitting by my bed, waiting till I awoke. Patiently waiting to greet me in this new day.

Take me home.

I whisper this now every morning that I open my eyes to no one but my river.

October is the month where I always felt better.

Pleasant hills, pleasant valley.

The upper river valley with all hues of yellows and reds and greens and oranges warm and comfort me along with this bluest sky blanket that wraps these bluffs like I used to wrap Clara when she was cold or frightened.

It is in this month where I always feel stronger. Year after year an inner sense has forewarned that something better is to come.

Something better for all of us.

Foolish at my age.

I am only to be reminded how foolish under this chill of fall that arrives when the sun departs. The cold will replace these refugees headed south, and when the lock and dams keep the water wide and open, the bald eagles will come to greet me and remain with me in my sleep.

Seems awfully fitting if this is to be my last October.

Grandma Phoebe had said that women were better suited to prepare for death, and birth. She declared this as though she were reflecting on the similarities. Our sensibilities are more fitting to it, she had told me as if she were my sister whispering a great secret.

Men should stay out of the room.

Hattie Jessie had been more beautiful in death than in life. That is what Grandma Phoebe had always told me.

A cherub.

There is a special art to wiping down a body and preparing him or her for burial, she had told Emma this as they prepared Hattie’s little body and she had shared it with me one day on the river porch as she looked far across the water as if the scene were replaying itself as far away as Prophetstown.

It had occurred right here, on our side of the river, and just as destructive as on the other. Maybe it was easier to think of it as removed, detached, or separate from where the rest of us remained living and breathing.

I better understand that now.

The river remains unchanged, but our viewing of it makes all the difference.

Perspective perhaps.

A white muslin sheet from her bed was repurposed as a child’s burial shroud wrapped so neatly around her five-year-old body. The christening dress had already been used for Phoebe Louisa’s burial, and by the time she cut into her wedding dress for Hattie Jessie, Emma had long given up on the daughter who might wear it someday.

Diphtheria brings such ugliness to a child’s body. It’s the survivors who must return it to beauty.

Emma remained so held-down deep within her after that and no one could find it in her to poultice it out. When everyone finally accepted that she needed to keep it within her, even I knew it would never find its way out.

A handmade pine box to hold her baby girl. Wedding satin that had lost its hope and promise was used to line the sides to comfort Hattie with her permanent bedtime and her favorite prayer.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

By the time I arrived, Emma had forever descended into the non-feeling place. The fixed gaze. Ruminating hands that she could not keep still even in church.

I have heard that today’s doctors may offer a bottle of valium for such postpartum hysteria, but in those days there was no such treatment.

Only a forever mourning.

Some sheep just stay lost.

Grandpa Syl told me this one afternoon as he watched me brushing my mother’s hair right in the middle of the dining room. At first, I was embarrassed that he should have seen us like this, but then he walked over and touched Emma’s crown so tenderly.

I held my breath.

For a moment he appeared to be Zenas, the healer. The laying on of hands was only for Ten-Mile Presbyterian, Grandpa Syl had said. He once shouted angrily in the barn to God after Zenas had offered a cure for Emma’s condition. Grandpa Syl always thought he prayed in the barn alone, but we were usually there.

It seems we were always there.

Unnoticed.

The second family.

The good, quiet children who had lived.

Annie died more than 10 years ago now, and my Clara passed just three years after.

I had been alone in Grandpa Syl’s house for almost a decade when Harry and Lillie May decided it was time for them to move in, which to them was the same as taking over.

Harry, who had always been a bit too buttoned up for the village life of Parkhurst had somehow up and decided to move his insurance business to town from the city. His three sons were now grown and gone, so he would take the old house now, he had told me, so matter-of-factly.

Almost as if it were his decision and his alone.

When I am dead, it is yours, I retorted. Equally stoic in my stance.

Such thoughts abounded as I watched Harry assume this new role.

The caretaker.

The last man to govern my days.

We both knew this to be true, but he had once made a cunning plea for me to give in and move to the old folks’ home as so many of my old friends from the Presbytery ladies society had done in their final years.

Yet, there were so few of us left now. Mrs. Davenport had lost her wits and now talked incessantly to her nephew Horace who had died in a terrible automobile accident a few years back.

She would not even remember me if I joined her now, much less having nice chats as we await our passing.

The real fact is that I could not bear living with such a faulty reminder of time and place and the friendship we had. They called her a centenarian in the
Gazette
when they celebrated the century-old birth of a woman who lived instead from her decade-past memories, but as she blew out the one candle that also stood for the other 99, she asked the year and they had paused before they told her.

She turned to her nephew and said, Is that so, Horace?

No such luck, dear brother.

I will lay by this river until my last breath. I shall not be removed. That part, I would not say aloud.

Superior or not, Harry had his own troubles in Davenport and perhaps he sought refuge in Parkhurst the same way that his grandfather had once done after Black Hawk’s war.

Harry had been wrongly accused of running a one-man church after a disruption over the firing of an interim pastor in the twenties, and then there had been that business with the Farm Bureau and the
kkk
in the thirties.

At least Harry had stood on the side of right in both cases. I had been almost proud of him then. So odd that he prefers H.D. now.

Harry had been born for these sorts of negotiations. He had always sought attention, and everyone had obliged him.

The influencer.

Always.

Especially the grandmothers.

Harry had never been motivated by the acquisition of land, property rights, deeds and sections, but of the dollar and all of the advantages he found it would bring.

By this decade he found his most fitting role yet.

The extinguisher.

Farming had never been a vocation for Syl and Moses. Harry could never understand that it had been their destiny.

The glorious fall would arrive each year and make all of the hardship and heartache worthwhile. The lift in Syl’s voice and step in the fall makes me smile even now.

Harvest.

That beautiful, bountiful time of joy.

In fact, I believe I can recall Henry even touching me one fall. Why yes, I remember now that he had once even given me and Annie just the slightest of hugs!

He had taken each of us under his arm and tightened those arms around us.

I remember now how I melted into that embrace.

Melting into a desire for more.

And more and more.

Melting into the moment of relief that it brought.

A relief that just perhaps meant that I was here for more than embroidering pillowcases and scouring the cast iron.

Dare I whisper it now?

Had only I been born a boy!

But, no, it was to have been otherwise.

Harry had been the boy who had lived.

I remember asking to see my Clara Belle before she was placed in her box for eternity.

Highly out of the ordinary, Mr. Runge had said, but then he reneged when he saw the hole in my heart was larger than most sisters and gallantly allowed me into his embalming room.

He never did this for anyone, he gently reminded me.

I have done this work, too, I said as if I were his colleague and not a grieving sister who stifled a gasp as I glimpsed Clara on his table.

Not so easy, I added when I had caught my breath.

John Forest would have appeared so very tiny on this table that held Clara across what suddenly seemed to be a very long room. An ocean perhaps: water so wide I could never reach out to her. But then the image turned to the river and I was reaching; reaching across the rocks in the canal by Smith’s Island, helping teach Clara to skip a flat, smooth rock across the water while Grandpa Syl fished for crappies and blue gill. The summers when he let us take our precious books below the tree and read and read until the August sun was setting, we knew he understood us, and we took our stories to an overnight with Grandma Phoebe in this very house where I write this now.

Clara was home with me in that moment by the river, not supine on Mr. Runge’s table awaiting this closed box, beautiful though it was.

Cover her face with this, I said, handing Mr. Runge the Treat family stole (Lillie would not be getting her hands on this one) and I turned away from this ocean before I, too, drowned before my time.

A river began flooding the room and soon I would not be able to breathe.

She was my daughter that afternoon there in that long room that later turned on itself in my dream over two nights to be a Pelo’s drugstore calendar of the numbered days, numbered pages.

Taught her to walk.

Taught her to read.

Taught her to pray.

Too short.

Yet, we had spent each one over a lifetime together. For surely this must be how a mother felt when a child passes before her.

Never alone till now.

I think it was that day in Mr. Runge’s embalming room that I had finally understood Emma’s distance. She had turned off the spigot to us because she feared her heart would burst, as it already had, and she had known no other way.

Instead, I had chosen another path.

I had left that spigot to run.

In spite of all warnings from my grandmothers, I had let it flow. And I had let no fear come to me that it would ever run out.

Oh, of course I felt the bursting heart, that feeling where death was always knocking, beckoning you to join your child on this table.

Take me now.

Take me instead.

Emma must have prayed it silently that day when John Forest lay wrapped in used muslin on a Connecticut table brought to Iowa on a dream and she could not make a sound.

The dream long gone by then.

I awoke that morning after Clara’s funeral with no dankness.

No shame.

No bereavement.

No fear.

It was as if a lightness had entered me. Clara gave it so freely.

No pretention. Simply elegant love. And now she had left it with me.

A great gift that we could not share together. Yet, she always held her preciousness and no one took it from her. In many ways, her gift was what had healed me.

I always had that Condit strength to soldier through, but somehow then, peering over Clara’s quiet face, saying a last goodbye, memory and lost purpose weakening every limb, I knew then that I wanted it more than anything.

Keep that spigot flowing.