The House Girl (2 page)

“What? Child, what is it? You look like you seen a spirit.” Lottie believed the restless dead of Bell Creek lived among the willows lining the river where the morning mist hung. Papa Bo, Lottie’s own boy Hap, all Missus’ dead babies, even Mister’s mother and four sisters, their bodies buried back in Louisiana. Lottie saw them there on a summer’s night, or just before the dawn, she said, dancing, laughing, wailing too, among the branches that trailed like a white woman’s hair into the water.

Lottie dropped the flowers she held and moved toward Josephine. Her skirt hems dragged wet in the grass, and her gaze hardened as she saw the mark of Mister’s blow. Taking Josephine’s face in her hands, she turned it and laid one long finger on the tender spot. “Ah girl,” she said. “You’ll be needing chamomile on that. Or something cool.”

“It’s nothing,” Josephine said, though the skin tingled and she felt a rising tenderness. “Lottie, it’s nothing. Just a little thing.” But she did not pull away. The chill of Lottie’s hand, wet with dew, calmed her. Josephine leaned into Lottie’s warm, tough bulk and she was again a child at night at the cabins, after Lottie and the others had finally returned from the fields, and all the day’s sadness would fall from Josephine and into Lottie’s yielding places: the flesh at her waist; the shoulder’s curved hollow; an ample, muscled calf. Then as now, Lottie’s body seemed sturdy and soft enough to contain all Josephine’s hurts.

Lottie let Josephine fall against her and then she turned Josephine’s face back around and took her in with a level gaze. “All right, then. It’s nothing if you say it.”

“It’s nothing.” Josephine shook her head quick, like shaking water from her hair. She squinted at the sky and then turned to Lottie. “I saw Nathan down back,” she said. “He looked to be straining.”

“He been laid up awhile, so he said. On account of his heels. Couldn’t do nothing, couldn’t stand or walk. They cut him too deep, is how he told it.”

Mister had hired Nathan from Mr. Lowden, a neighbor six miles west, just for harvesting time, just to see them through. Nathan had run twice already and twice been caught and brought back to Mr. Lowden, whose tolerance for such goings-on had been sorely tested. Mister had hired him cheap on account of the history and Nathan’s slow pace now that his heels were cut. He was still new to Bell Creek, Josephine had not spoken with him yet; she had not asked him where it was he’d been headed when he ran.

Josephine said, “What’s he like, huh?”

Lottie paused, tilted her head. “He’s fine. Seems fine enough. Got some sense.”

“Mmm. Puts me in mind of Louis. Something in his person, way he stands.” Louis had been sold off three summers past and this was the first time Josephine had spoken of him. It surprised her that her voice did not shake, that no tears came with the sound.
Louis
. The name hung weighty between them, a hope or a tragedy, neither of them knew which. He was gone, gone.

“Louis? I don’t see no Louis in him.” Lottie said this with a frown and a slow shake of her head, as if that decided the matter. “Josephine, what you want with Nathan?”

“Just wanted to say hello.” Josephine looked down and stepped away, her bare soles marking 2-shapes in the mud. She had never lied to Lottie before and she did not like the feeling it gave her, a shifting underfoot, a drop in her belly. Tonight Josephine would ask Nathan to tell her the route north, tonight she would run.
Run
. The word still resonated within her and now took on a new pitch. Would Lottie come with her? Lottie and Winton possessed an unremitting belief in a salvation that would be delivered if they mustered faith true enough, if their path remained righteous. Lottie looked for signs of the redemption, like the two-headed frog Otis found by the river last summer, or the night the sky filled with lights falling and they shone so bright that everyone at the house and down by the cabins woke and stood on the front lawn, even Mister and Missus Lu, all of them together side by side, eyes open to that burning sky. These were all markers along the way, Lottie said, signs that Jesus be coming soon. She was waiting for Him.
You cannot wait another day,
Josephine wanted to say now.
Come with me, Lottie, you and Winton should come. Nathan will tell us the way
.

But here beside the flowers, the air heavy with their scent, the cool of Lottie’s hand still on Josephine’s cheek, the idea of running seemed too raw to bring out into the morning, into the sunlight, with tasks to be done, hours to be got through. The idea floated, not fixed or certain in its specifics, and she knew how easily an intention might go astray, how a path leading away might twist and return you to the place where you first began.

Josephine had tried before to run, one night some years ago. She had been no more than a child then, twelve, maybe thirteen, years old, with no understanding of the dangers or the true northward route or the way the shadows played tricks on the road. The journey back to Bell Creek had been long. This time she would not turn back. This time she would keep on, across the great Ohio River, all the way up to Philadelphia or Boston or New York, the northern cities that lived in Josephine’s mind like Lottie’s ghosts lived in hers.

Josephine said, “I got to be getting on. I’ll come see you tonight, Lottie, at the cabins. We’ll talk then.”

“You come see me,” and Lottie blinked her eyes slow, a softening at the corners of her mouth, the look Josephine knew so well in her, of cautious affection, a caring that Lottie always pulled up short before it went too deep. A muffled, distant kind of love. She’d been this way since Hap passed on, her last son, just twelve years old, proud as a peacock of his fiddling abilities, dead in minutes, with Lottie bent over his body still warm, lips and tongue puffed up, and on his arm a dime-sized redness where the bee had bit.

Josephine continued, down the low slope to the vegetable garden with its tangled rows and a thicket of raspberry and blackberry bushes grown together, fruit mostly for the birds because it reached too high and went too deep for Josephine to collect it all. Josephine thrust her hands into the brambles and pulled blackberries off their white fibrous posts. Last night Missus Lu had asked for berries with her breakfast. The thorns pricked Josephine’s skin but she kept on. Today like any other day. Pick what needs picking, berries with breakfast, greens for Mister’s supper. Do what needs doing. Like any other day.

Josephine gazed west at the small figures in the field, tattered scraps of dark moving against the tobacco green. Jackson alone stood motionless, a cowhide hanging ready at his belt. Even now with so few of them left at Bell Creek, he never flinched when whipping for a row dropped, a slow pace. He’d make a man eat the tobacco worm, Lottie had told her, the thick wriggling body with pincers at its head swallowed straight down. His wife, Calla, was stout and irritable, bought by Papa Bo years back from an itinerant trader. She never spoke of the children she’d left behind or the ones she’d lost at Bell Creek. There was a deep-down meanness in them both. Mister had no backbone for whippings, so Jackson did the work.

A thorn pricked Josephine’s skin deep and she brought the fingertip to her mouth. The first time she ran, fear had seemed a physical presence, tall beside her on the road, and she tried but she could not run out of its shadow. Now the fear seemed different; it crouched and slithered and whispered within the berry bush and the tall grasses all around. It was smaller, trickier, more cunning. The sting of the cowhide. A twisted ankle, a summer storm. Would it thunder tonight, or would the sky be clear? The hounds, the rifles. She thought of Nathan’s crooked walk. They cut the heels with an ax or a long-bladed hunting knife, the legs held fast under the weight of a man or within a vise like the one used for planing the new boards or just tied up with cord, bound as they bound the calves for branding. Two swipes of the blade would hobble both heels, but too deep and the wound would never heal, a leg swelled up and stinking or the foot itself dropped clear off.

A sudden cold descended upon Josephine and it seemed her legs turned dense and heavy, her breath caught deep within her chest. With shaking fingers she took another berry from the bush.

Like any other day. Do what needs doing
.

A sound or a shadow took her away from the berries, and Josephine raised her eyes toward the house. A curtain rippled and she saw Missus Lu’s pale face at the window, staring down to where Josephine stood. Like an apparition, if Josephine hadn’t known better. Hair dark and unsettled as a storm cloud, her eyes just shadows in her head. Missus placed a hand on the glass. Josephine nodded up at her and started back to the house.

A breeze came up and pushed at Josephine’s back as she walked the path.
Run,
it whispered.
Run
.

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

2004

W
EDNESDAY

T
he brief was not finished. Lina Sparrow, first-year litigation associate, took another sip of cold coffee. Her eyes flipped from her computer screen to the digital clock glowing red on the wall: 11:58
P.M
.
Get it to me Wednesday,
Dan had said.
Counting on you to work your usual magic
. Never had Lina been late before, never, and yet here she sat, the last two minutes of Wednesday dangling just out of reach, her office a cave of paper and tented textbooks, the cursor blinking relentlessly on her screen. The brief: 85 pages, 124 perfect citations, the product of 92 frenetic hours billed over five ridiculous days, a document that would go to the judge, be entered into the official court record, be e-mailed to dozens of lawyers, to the client, to the opposing side. But was it
good
?

Lina’s shoes were off—she always wrote barefoot—and as she stretched her toes, she wondered what precisely was her problem. Last year she had graduated at the top of her law school class, and she was now the highest-billing first-year associate at Clifton & Harp LLP, the preferred legal services provider for Fortune 100 companies and individuals of dizzying wealth. Lina had heard of other people’s performance issues—time management, crises of confidence, exhaustion, depression, collapse—but never, in three successful years of law school and nine prolific months at Clifton, had she frozen like this. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and blinked fast. Her office vibrated in the cold fluorescent glare: beige walls, gray carpet, white particleboard shelving units of the kind found in college dorm rooms, office buildings, prisons. On her second day at the firm, Lina had arranged a careful selection of personal items: on her wall, the law degree and one of her father’s smaller paintings; on her desk, the glass snow globe of a pre-9/11 Manhattan skyline and the photo of her parents circa 1982, both with longish hair and secret smiles. Each item represented a unique stamp on the exchangeable, impersonal nature of this space.
I am here,
the snow globe said.
This is mine
.

Lina picked up the snow globe now and shook it. Fake granular flurries settled over the city and she repeated the question again and again: Was the brief good? Was the brief good? Was it? Silently the clock shifted to 11:59. And as the deadline slipped away, Lina felt a rush like skiing, or eating sugar straight, or that icy morning a taxi had careened toward her as she’d waited on the corner of Fifty-first and Fifth and watched helpless, immobile, infused with a wondrous dread as it spun out inches from the curb. An intoxicating, brief adrenaline. 12:00. What was she waiting for? Resolution? Inspiration? The brief said exactly what it had to say: our client wants money and the law says give it to him.

Lina bent her neck hard to the left and heard her spine crack. She slipped her feet back into her high heels. Somewhere down the hall, the night cleaner’s vacuum whined with the insistence of a mosquito. Of course the brief was good. Weren’t her briefs always good? Wasn’t this, the law, what she
did
? And she did it very, very well. Lina typed a signature line and beneath it: Submitted by, Daniel J. Oliphant III, Partner, Clifton & Harp LLP.

The strip lights burned and keyboards purred as Lina hurried the brief down the hall to Dan’s office. Past the heads of the night-shift secretaries floating above the workspace partitions. Past a blinking, malfunctioning copier that sat abandoned, its various doors and flaps left open, awaiting the arrival of some jumpsuited Joe versed in the fixing of mechanical things. Past the coffee station, with its stinky microwave and humming soda machine. Past the row of half-open office doors through which Lina sensed more than saw caffeine-strung associates staring at computer screens or listening on mute to meetings under way in Hong Kong or Houston or Dubai.

At the corner office, Lina stopped.

“Dan?” She rapped a knuckle on the half-cracked door and pushed it open.

Dan sat marooned behind the island of his desk, his face glowing bluely from the computer screen. Floor-to-ceiling windows shimmered behind him, dark as a night sea. He was typing. His eyes shifted from the screen as Lina entered the room but his fingers remained in motion.

Dan was Lina’s “mentor partner,” a designation handed down by the HR department on Lina’s first day at the firm. Lina had heard of him, of course. In the litigation world, Dan was a star. His perfect win record and lack of any obvious social anxiety issues distinguished him from the hordes of aggressively successful litigation partners at Clifton and throughout the city. A photo of two red-haired, pink-cheeked children sat framed in silver on Dan’s desk. Lily and Oliver, Dan had told her. Twins. Lina had never met them, nor the wife (Marion) whose photograph hung behind his desk (tan, wan smile, one-piece).

“Sorry the brief is late,” Lina said, checking her watch: 12:04. “I got a little carried away with the corporate veil discussion. These facts are just so
strong
. But here it is.”

Dan blinked. With both hands he pushed away his prodigious hair: red, springy, tending to vertical. Some partners cultivated symbols of eccentricity like this, flares sent up from the Island of Same. One wore glasses with thick black plastic frames reminiscent of a Cold War Kissinger. Another practiced meditation in his office every afternoon promptly at four o’clock, the
om
s echoing down the hall.