Her Kind, a novel (2 page)

Rose.

For a gnarly, sharp weed some settlers called the wild prairie rose.

Emma.

For all that my mother could not or would not be.

My identity was to be such a combination of appropriate misfortune. A role cast before I had uttered a first word.

On one good day, Emma would tell me she saw the wild rose for its beauty in a terrain she otherwise detested. I do believe this was the closest she ever came to telling me that I was beautiful.

It must have been a flower she truly loved, as she and Grandma Phoebe had surrounded the Condit house with wild rose bushes shortly after Grandpa Syl had passed. Of course, Grandma Laura had chided them for replanting wild roses and not ordering cultivated ones to be shipped from back east.

Through them all, but especially Grandpa Syl, I learned that I was

smart for a girl,

pretty for a Parmlee,

hard worker like a Condit.

When Emma and Henry had married in 1850 on that same day in March that was to become my birthday many birth days later, it meant that she would be reminded of her marriage on the same day each year that Grandma Phoebe presented her glorious angel food in my honor.

My favorite.

I was so sorry about it that I had told her once so when I was 10. She had smiled with her tight, pursed lips, and briefly nodded, but continued peeling the potatoes as if I had not even spoken.

I am certain I saw the nod. That fleeting acknowledgment of understanding.

A rarity for sure.

It’s just her way, Henry would tell us.

Of course your mother loves you.

Eventually, we all learned to make excuses for Emma.

It’s sort of like that when you live in a house that someone died in. You think you might hear the voices of the former residents whispering to you.

Odd little things happen.

Pictures on the wall tilt and you know it wasn’t you who did it when you last swiped them with your feather duster. A door to the sitting room suddenly squeaks ajar, yet no one is there.

Actually, it was my sister Clara who found the box and showed it to me that week. I was not surprised.

That year, Annie, Clara and I had moved into the Condit house in Parkhurst. Grandma Phoebe was gone and she had willed it to Emma, who was also gone by then, too, so Henry said it was all ours. Henry D. or H.D., Harry as we called him, had his own home in Davenport by this time and would never have come back to Parkhurst anyway.

Go live with those river rats.

He would spat at us, and we would smile at our selfish little brother. Lillie May would smile then, too, as if she agreed with us. But truth be told, as Grandma Laura would say, she just always smiled even in tense moments.

Actually, the more tense it became, the more she smiled.

I had watched out of the corner of my eye as I poured coffee for the kindly census worker when he wrote
head of household
under my name on the census card. You can only imagine my smile then.

If only Emma could have seen it. Of course, I made sure that Harry knew it was put into the 1910 record. He had mumbled something about the chronic errors of civil workers.

It’s my job to keep us three sisters together.

Spinsters’ row
they had begun to call our church pew at First Presbyterian. Three unwed sisters and Widow Jones’s regular Sunday morning seats. I was informally charged to ensure that nothing happened to any of us. If only the good Lord could bestow such a power, but I do most certainly serve as spokeswoman.

I do not even feel old, yet the title remained stuck.

At this age, and when marriage was no longer an option, there is no other title left for women like me. I do not blame them.

Yet, my life and my family’s houses were still full of surprises.

As Clara held up the box for both of us to see, I glimpsed the corner of what looked like folded pages beneath the 1904 drugstore calendar with the months still all intact behind tiny staple pins that held them so delicately in place below a New Year’s cherub atop Old Man Time.

The note that covered the delicate, almost sheer, pages did not hide the inkwell blurred writing that melted through to each page. I picked up a black and white photo of a woman about my age standing on what must have been the riverside porch to the Condit house. I could see she was gazing out to the river that still ran in front of the house and I turned the picture over to read 1864.

She had lost only two children by then. The river was certainly still here, so it must have been what she had been looking at.

You did not look at the camera in those days.

Underneath the photo were the missing pages from the Sargent family Bible and a yellowed clipping from
The New York Times.

The Bible pages were worn very thin and would crumble if I didn’t ever so delicately turn to the last page of the Tilley branch of the family tree, which was a page all its own, almost a full tree of its own.

Siblings?

Someone had penciled in charcoal, and then had erased, in the margin next to Agnes (Tylle) and William Tilley’s wedding date.

Erased, but still visible.

The great river has an unexpected symmetry this morning.

It rallies against itself like a current so stuck in its own swirling that it creates pockets of captured movement as if pausing to consider me like a portrait photographer, waiting for me to join in.

Yet, somehow I know you won’t take me with you today.

Sadness comes through me this morning and like the river’s bold current, it washes me clean, taking me to that next beckoning passage.

Fortunately, these moments do not stay with me as they did in the old days. Now, they simply pass on by more like the slightest lap against bank rock and then gone. Or like the carp that tips its nose just above the surface and then a flip and a flap, it’s gone, too.

If you are not looking, you missed it. You missed out.

I am curious now with no pain.

Perhaps I simply slip away beneath the water.

Unnoticed.

Missed out.

Forgotten.

First, I must be clear regarding all of this debris that can become tangled in this passing and caught up along the way like Grandpa Syl’s fishing line.

Cut bait.

He would tell me this with all of his faux sternness, a façade that overlay his kind heart. There was no actual scolding when I did not understand.

Here, let me show you.

The patient teacher I could never have been. An Iowa dirt farmer by choice who came at each day as if it were still his first day crossing the river and soon to be his last. Only too grateful for having set foot on the other side.

If only I could have lived like that.

What a morning.

He would almost shout this out to the dawn rather than Grandma Phoebe. He was the best in me. It is not just now that I can see this.

I am pleased with myself today that no dark woman stands over me this morning, berating like she would in the old days, scolding me when no light could be seen or felt in this tunnel I awoke to last week.

Dying is not an efficient task.

Let’s get on with the living, as Syl would have said, or what’s the use.

Yet, I am finding that the coming to terms is not more difficult than burying your baby brother, or your own mother, or your best sister because here you can detach somehow. Life sometimes lets you do just that, so consider yourself as better off. In your life, the lights will simply go out.

My life has been full as it could get. No room for more.

John Forrest never had the privilege of getting on with it. Better off, they all had said, but they never saw me hold that tiny body in my own childish hands and willing him to eat.

He is happier now that he found the Lord so quickly.

Acceptance was a beautiful gift—its beauty taught to me by grandparents who had lost much more than they had gained by the end.

I had used as much as I could of what I had learned from them. I had always done my best to see to that. One regret that I do not have to suffer from now.

Walk the talk.

I hope they would have been proud of me.

When it is your own soul that must move on to find your way through all of this aloneness, there can be a blessing in the indifference. That is until you awake one night to find your sister-in-law at your bedside with the needle.

I still call it our house, although Harry and Lillie May have long since taken over the rest of it. Now I feel like a visitor when I make the rare trip to the downstairs. I feel better when I think of it as Grandpa’s house. The house that Grandpa Syl died in that afternoon he had pounded the final nail into the doorframe.

Although my keepers have decided that this house is already theirs, even though I am still clearly breathing upstairs, nothing can keep me from this bedroom with a spectacular view of all that I need. At least they have that much sympathy for me and know well that I was once the head of this household back when my sisters were alive and we cared for father here after Emma had passed.

When I am ready, this river will carry me home, the same as it did for her. For all of them.

It comforts me now to think like that.

It’s really all that I have left.

Bachelor and Spinster.

William and Agnes’s official pre-marital statuses were registered in the Henlow parish record when they went to see the vicar for their license to wed.

When your king does as he pleases, thumbs his nose at the pope, and declares himself divine, one can only imagine the impact this must have had upon the small parish of Henlow. To hear of the beheadings at Tower Hill kept the community of Henlow quite secretive over the years as to their own opinions of the crown and the goings on of the current sovereign.

Quietly they lived as they always had, whispering their complaints in a small circle around the sloshed pub table, well out of earshot of the vicar outside St. Mary’s vestibule. Even the notables were somewhat afraid, although it certainly did not slow their egoist boasting over their own parish achievements.

So, there was no specific cause for inquiry when a Tilley married a Tylle.

It happened then and still does in England and here for that matter.

Cousins often married cousins.

The vicar had only wrongly thought that William and Agnes were brother and sister. After all, had he not performed their first communion himself, four years apart?

So it was their mother who accompanied them to register their desire to wed, to set the record straight, to clarify. Since the parish was as willing to accept the tariff for the most ridiculous of matrimonies, she knew it would not take long.

A sovereign would be paid, so no banns would be posted.

You are mistaken.

Mother Margaret had so convincingly feigned the union. Agnes is the daughter of my poor, dear sister, you see, who lost her way with the inquisitors. Tied to the rack she was. Yes, ghastly.

I could not let her baby girl see her pain nor take on such shame, now could I?

I took her in as my own.

Cousins, you see.

Tylle is my family.

Shamed by my sister, yes a witch! So ashamed to say it aloud, I can only whisper the word.

Agnes had never witnessed her mother speak so swiftly or so sure. How dare she be so forward with the vicar?

Cousins! Betrothed since she was seven!

Some in Henlow said the last name was Tilley and some will always claim Tylle. Not uncommon in a day when daughters took their mother’s maiden, sons their father’s. See, it was all within God’s plan. An appropriate marriage for sure, an affinity preserved.

‘Tis our land, not loanland for sure. The lord hath said it in domesday and would say it as sure today!

By the time the crown had set forth the canons to redeem itself from the sins of the former, the Tilley-Tylle union had celebrated its 20th year, birthed four healthy children, only one a son, and a family remained resolved that their venture to see to it that all of their property was protected had been tremendous fortune.

It was family, just and right.

No foolish, hedonist king claiming to be godly or his bastard daughter would take from them what was theirs since the Saxons. They had worked much too hard to see it dowered away.

No person shall marry within the degrees prohibited by the laws of God, and expressed in a table set forth by authority in the year of our Lord God 1563. And all marriages so made and contracted shall be adjudged incestuous and unlawful, and consequently dissolved from the beginning…

Agnes would never come to read the Crown’s canon. Of course, she would never learn to read. In her 59th year, her own son had to read her husband’s will to her. But, oh she had been so proud that day of her vital betroth, as her father had called it.

So adamant he had been.

That day when he had paid so close attention to his daughter. The day she had saved the family as he so loudly proclaimed, beaming at her so violently.

The day he had believed in her enough to teach Agnes Tylle to sign her own name!