Her Kind, a novel (6 page)

Emma always disagreed with Grandma Laura and countered that the truth be told never gave anyone any comfort.

Or strength.

I think it was the spring we moved the lady ferns from the riverfront to just below the sun porch. Secrets were best kept as such, she had added, as if talking with herself as we opened a rich bed to tuck in a tidy row of ferns trimming the front of Grandpa Syl’s house with a false bravado of green.

Fiddleheads sought comfort and shade from and round the limestone wall and any crevice they could find, seeking coolness and comfort, away from the direct sunlight, like my Clara Belle’s ghostly pallor she protected within the walls of our home.

Steeped as strong as the cohosh tea made by Mrs. Parkhurst and forced upon a woman when her child was emerging.

Emma and I harnessed the ferns into a straight row, teaching them to abandon the circle they would have otherwise formed.

Their only rebellion exposed as they found space within the spruce and fir remaining in the lots of our Parkhurst neighbors. Or creeping out of crevices, working their way through stone as thick as river ice.

There was a lesson here.

I would learn truth from the comings and goings of those around me. Real truth was to be earned.

No one was going to tell it to you in so many words, Emma had always said in her hardened way.

Without words.

Henryk Korn, Jr., had been county recorder and as such was responsible for the county voting records. Records mutually exclusive of one another as if the road record could not be tainted with the other resolutions and actions of the Board. But later also came the bridge book and the warrant book which chronicled the bridges constructed and maintained in Scott County, not a small book since crossing the Mississippi by bridge would become a relief to those who spent years crossing by ferry.

Henryk’s penmanship was that of an artist and the minute book benefited from such a perfection of penmanship.

It had been his father, come from Pennsylvania to settle in the Gulf, who had so struggled with the language that he instilled in his son—the desire to perfect his English as a gift and an art intended to redeem the German clan’s struggles against the conniving Irish and Scandinavian settlers who came to English with such ease, such unfair ease compared to the hard and cold word choices that he struggled with even into his days in county administration.

That German edge would never quite diminish, fortunately for him as the German clan was a united group and rested not comfortably and easily in Scott County unless a Korn held office.

Henryk Jr. had been a clean slate.

His father had sought to harden the boy the best that he could. Junior’s endearing, boyish smile and his narrow, pale hands brought a warm tenderness to his mother but had infuriated his father Henryk, Sr., to the point of a terror that his wife could never really understand. For it was she who wanted Junior to learn the piano and to take his charcoal drawings beyond their detailed parlor and express himself amid an ugly land where she had never felt at home.

Yet, his father would not have this as his legacy.

As Henryk’s pen flowed over the pages of the county records with a flourish, he sometimes saw the flashes of the leather straps laid upon the backs of his six-year-old metacarpals, his wrists and on to his shoulders as he sheepishly ducked his father’s slap when his A was not rounded to perfection and his B not aligned with the vowel that followed it, never protesting and always knowing his punishment was deserved for not being perfect.

It was these sorts of scars that never bled through to Henryk’s artistry on the pages of the Board minute book as he transcribed the record that April day, the only acceptable art that he was since ever allowed to practice. I would be forever grateful to Henryk’s beautiful manuscript in the official record that I requested at the service counter.

My mother, my grandmothers had never even climbed these limestone steps of the Scott County Courthouse even though their names were carved for perpetuity in the pioneer marble memorial displayed so prominently on its front lawn.

Unyielding.

Never quite knowing when it was time or right to give way.

Women had taken years to express an opinion in an open church congregation meeting, much less ever think of a day when she could vote for her own representation in a county ruled by the likes of those pious bankers, stubborn farmers and rivalrous river pilots.

My grandmother had egged me on.

I was sure of it. I could not have done this all on my own.

Mr. Korn’s cranky records clerk tried to block him from my view as he sat in the far back of the open office space. As if the spectacles adorned by a gold chain around her neck gave her the perfect lens by which to peer down her narrow, yet flared, nose at me with disgust at my request.

Women can be so evil to other women.

It’s likely one of the reasons this day took so long in coming, I could hear Grandma Laura say this. I coughed and raised my voice a bit too loud, showing them my nerves, as she also would have advised.

I paused as if I had heard her. Felt her calm hand on mine, and took it down an octave.

If you please, Mr. Korn, I would like to register to vote in the next election.

My river is quiet today.

I see a lone, ragged oak branch floating along, creating its silent wake. Drug by a current that it cannot resist. Taken to a destination that it blindly trusts.

No escape now.

Surrender makes it an easier journey.

I know not how Emma carried and covered her way through each day, as I can only imagine how it must have felt to not ever have the outlet, the right to speak out about it as I am here.

At last, now I can be heard.

Silent shame can only be more tortuous than verbalized shame, more tortuous than the unconscious shame of my mother who never dared bring it into her daily awareness for fear that she could not survive it.

It is only now that I see what Emma must have so clearly seen and could not accept what she had become: mother, cow, producer. An atrocious female union of duty and obligation.

It was that outer tier of her face that I remember most.

The sharp, cutting jaw line that sometimes, yes, I felt I wanted to bash her heart against—cutting at the root of a misunderstood pain. She was a lexicon of answers for us, but only offered the hard rock of womanhood that she clearly detested. So, we as her daughters dutifully detested it, too, until we had become powerless to change it. The second sex.

Resist.

In one clean instant, I now glimpse the hatred within myself for becoming like her, my own mother. Wondering whether it ever showed.

Stoic.

False pride.

I had worn it all too well. She had been a single mirage of false strength that could never be touched or relied upon because it was never really all there as we thought it had been.

I had so wanted it to be solid and true.

So I mimicked.

If you were to touch it, it would have crumbled into thousands of particles of a dust so soft and fine that a quick south breeze would send them floating three miles upriver, almost to Princeton, but separated and lost before they arrived.

Dispersed.

Never to be seen again.

So, I learned early on. Just best not to ever touch.

All of her life, Agnes had diligently followed the word of her Lord. 1 Timothy 2:12 her directive.

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

She lived her days quietly under the mandate to follow her husband’s every last wish, even to his dying days where he demanded she care for him as a mother would for a dying son. How odd that she had lived her life with this one man as brother, husband, and now like a son. Her daughters somehow understood, yet her only son remained disgusted as she doted on their father, keeping him alive with her decoctions of milk thistle and dandelion root.

Let the son o’bicchin’ die, he told his sister.

If only he had been taught to respect his mother, common law or not, his sister later remanded her husband that very evening to teach their children to hold respect for their mother, if only in their hearts, so that she may never suffer the fate of Agnes nor their daughters hereafter or after that.

Her husband understood her fear, so did not suffer her for the unlawful temperament. Not this time. Yet, no dower right for her. But he kept that bit to himself.

It should have been little surprise when the pound came upon Widow Tilley’s door that late May spring morning in 1600, less than 10 months since William’s passing, and shackled her to a cart that already led Widow Johnson.

Why?

Conjuratio
n, the vicar declared.

It was not the hammer that had inspired Robert’s idealism, but the king’s own words on the demons around us, within us, within others. It was all Robert had needed to begin his work and to give up his very mother as his first profitable find for himself and for his church.

Damn her for not remarrying; bless her for not remarrying, her son said to himself on her pre-trial day when most of his father’s property finally became his after allocation of his mother’s penance.

The judge had ordered her limbs to be bound and the vicar lowered her face down into the shallow water of the flood pond, the very pond that had saved her crop last solstice. This would be her last memory as she breathed in the darkness.

Robert had been wrong; yet, had she floated, his outcome would be the same.

Proprietor.

Father would have been so proud.

Innocent!

The judge cried, waving his right arm and pointing to the sky behind him as if in celebration. She is now in heaven with her beloved William and has been greeted by her mother, father, and our heavenly Lord who shall collect her soul for eternity.

At now 11 years, and old enough to attend the pre-trial, Robert’s son, John, watched his father’s face as his grandmother was lifted onto the cart still wearing the mud veil. Widow Johnson had already confessed her covenant and willingly shown her mark as final evidence. But as assurance or deterrent, she was brought to the pond to watch, still shackled, and now drug herself to the furthest corner and hugged her knees so as not to touch the still-bound limbs of her dear old friend as the cart lurched forward.

John turned with his innocence to query his father.

Why did she not sit?

But, Robert was not listening.