The House on Malcolm Street (11 page)

I grabbed two jars of corned beef like she’d told me, though I really doubted we’d need more than one, even with Josiah likely coming in with a hearty appetite. I didn’t think I’d need very much after already eating pie, and I wasn’t sure my start at work today had been enough yet to earn my keep.

Marigold was cutting the squash when I came back up, and Eliza was enjoying the freedom we’d given her to try to cut an apple on her own.

“Thank you so much,” Marigold told me when I set the jars on the table. “You go right ahead with the apples if you don’t mind while I set these other things on to simmer.”

We’d cut most of the fruit in the kitchen, so I went to the enclosed back porch for another bucket. Marigold hadn’t let me carry any of the apples down to the basement yet. And she’d had me cover the washtub of pears with an old blanket and not carry it in from the yard yet, either. It was all far too heavy for someone as small as me to maneuver on the stairs, she’d insisted. Josiah would have to help.

We cut, cooked, and mashed apples in Marigold’s soup pot. I lifted the boiling-water-bath canner down from a high shelf and carried armloads of empty jars up from the basement to be washed. Aware of the hour, I knew that Josiah was later than Marigold had expected him, and though she didn’t say anything, I could tell the slightest difference in her demeanor. She thought highly of him, that much was clear, and worried when he was late.

We were filling the first of the jars to go into the canner when we heard the train whistle again faintly in the distance. I’d thought it hadn’t taken us long to walk from the depot last night, but much more time went by than I’d expected before we finally heard the front door. Josiah strode in looking far less perky than he had last night. He was a sight, his clothes, face, and hair all a filthy mess. He set Aunt Marigold’s empty egg basket and dishtowels on the table and sunk into the nearest chair.

“What happened?” Marigold asked him.

He seemed reluctant to talk. “Train hit a car. Outside of town.”

Breath caught in my throat, and I had to steady myself suddenly against the side of the sink. An image leaped into my mind of the ashen-faced man who’d arrived at our door last November with the horrible news.
Train accident.
I couldn’t keep my heart from racing.

Marigold set down her canning tongs and limped to Josiah’s side. “Was there anything to be done?”

He shook his head. “We stopped when we could. Wreckage went over the slope by Bud Peterson’s place down into the slough. I went . . . hoping . . .”

He glanced at Eliza and stopped. From the look of him, he’d fought the mud and muck with some determination, searching for any survivor. But the outcome was evidently too grim to speak of in front of a child. Though I couldn’t possibly know whoever the victim or victims had been, still I felt sick to my stomach and utterly broken.

Josiah pulled himself up from the chair and staggered to his feet. “I better go clean up.”

Aunt Marigold, her eyes filled with tears, took him in her arms and held him. He stood, straight and still, his neck quivering just slightly, until he broke from her and walked away.

“Dear Lord,” Marigold said almost under her breath. I couldn’t clearly hear the words that followed, but I could well imagine them to be a prayer for Josiah, for the family of the deceased, or both.

Eliza was staring at me, looking frightened. “Is Mr. Walsh all right?”

“Yes, dear,” I told her somberly. “He will be.”

My heart continued to thunder even as I made an effort at outward calm for my daughter’s sake.
Train wreck.
On only our second night here. It was like the devil’s mockery. And to have to see it happen? Marigold hurried back to her business, but I knew her thoughts were surely centered on her nephew and what he’d been forced to witness. What must be going through his mind? It was just too horrible to think about.

7
Josiah Walsh

It wasn’t easy to push away the image. Bloodied skirt. Crushed body. We’d known immediately that there was no life in the man whose remains had become so entangled with that of his automobile, but I’d held out hope for the woman. To no avail.

Now every step took extra effort, and I ached inside, as though what I’d witnessed had produced some physical injury in me. The encrusted mud seemed to weigh a ton, and though I wanted to be rid of it, I could scarcely coax the movement from my hurting body to cleanse it away. Only gradually did I realize that the heavy pain with each breath, the horrible soreness down my entire left side, was an echo of the days after the accident that had taken Rosemary, when life had seemed nothing but a bitter, monstrous fog.

How quickly it must have ended for the couple in the gray topless coupe at the rail crossing. Perhaps they did not even see the approaching train. Perhaps their last thoughts, their last words, were ones of love and joy. If so, their end might be thought a mercy. At least they’d died together. At least one of them had not been left behind to grieve and struggle with the endless appraisal of what he should have done differently.

Aunt Mari’s washroom was down the hall from the kitchen, with running water and a large tub. But I did not want to wash so near everyone, with their words and their worries. Instead I filled a bucket, which smelled strongly of apples, and carried it up with me to the wash basin beside my bed, where the plumbing did not go.

For the moment I was glad Aunt Mari was too feeble for the stairs, and Leah Breckenridge surely kept herself too aloof to notice my struggle. I did not want them to offer help, nor follow, nor speak to me at all again until I could push away the cloud that had surrounded me.

The woman had been nothing like Rosemary. She was larger. And older. But I could not seem to separate the two in my mind anyway. Rosemary’s pale fingers and strawberry blonde curls filled my eyes even when I closed them. The bulge of new life beneath her dress still pressed at my heart. They were gone. Together and in an instant. But like a lone tree after a cyclone’s devastation, I’d been left behind.

I set down the pail of water at the doorway to my room, ripped the soiled shirt over my head, and threw it against the wall. I heard the
pip
of at least one button hitting the hardwood floor, but I didn’t care. I never wanted to wear that shirt again because it was tainted. I’d dug through the bog in it, I’d held death. And I’d cried.

Why, God? Why did it have to happen? Why does it have to affect me so?

I poured what was left of the tepid water from the pitcher into the wash bowl and buried my hands in it. I didn’t even have to scrub to darken the water, I’d carried so much of the slough home with me. When that water had done all it could, I drained it into the slop pail beneath the washstand and poured fresh water to clean my face and hair.

Little by little, I washed every part of me, leaving my encrusted denim trousers in a heap on the floor. When I was finally ready to dress, I felt too stiff, and almost buried myself in the covers of the bed instead. But if I did not manage to take myself downstairs again, Aunt Mari would send John’s wife up looking for me. She’d be that concerned, I knew without doubt, and I did not want our sudden visitor to be put in such a position. I did not want her inquiring after me at all.

Better if Leah Breckenridge were not here. What good could it possibly serve? But there could be no argument that I was as much a subject of Aunt Mari’s benevolence as anyone. So if I could not stomach the presence of another “wounded spirit,” it might be time for me to move on.

I tried to dress more quickly than I’d managed to wash, hoping Aunt Mari was patient enough to give me the space I needed. But as I started buttoning yet another of the shirts given to me by Mari’s neighbor, I heard the faint sound of footfalls on the steps. Too strong to be my aunt, with her worsening arthritic limp. Too light to be Mr. Abraham, though Mari’d sent him up my way more than once when I’d first arrived here.

In moments came a timid rapping at my door, and when I did not answer promptly, a far more timid voice.

“Mr. Walsh . . . your – your aunt sent me to see if – if you might need anything. Dinner is ready. When you please. She said I could carry it up to you if you wish.”

I almost accepted the offer, but I knew it would send Mari to her knees in prayer for me, and I didn’t want her to worry. “No. I’ll be down.”

Silence from the other side of the door. I’d have thought she was gone, except there’d been no more footsteps.

Finally, her voice ventured once again through the wood of the door. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Somehow I could say no more.

“You could become friends,” Aunt Mari had said when first she’d told me about inviting Leah and her daughter to stay here. “The things you’ve both been through, you could understand each other so well.”

I didn’t want understanding. I didn’t want Mari’s well-meaning attempts to draw me from what she imagined to be some sort of hidden quarter within myself. It was not hard to be friendly, to be a kindly nephew to my generous “aunt,” to joke and banter with the men I worked with and idle acquaintances here and there. But John’s wife? Looking past her frosty demeanor into the pain that must rest inside would be almost like ripping open pages of my own hurt to air in the public view. I couldn’t do it.

Softly, slowly, her footsteps moved from my door and down the oak stairs. I took a deep breath, willing myself to somehow find the appetite Mari would expect. After a long day’s work, I should be ravenous. But my mouth felt like cotton, my stomach like lead. I couldn’t imagine enjoying anything placed before me tonight.

For some reason my mind traveled back to the burnt roast beef Rosemary and I had enjoyed together on our first full day as man and wife. She’d been so excited to prove to me her abilities, only to have almost everything go wrong. But I didn’t care. That roast beef had been the best I’d ever eaten, or could ever imagine eating, because her hands had prepared it and offered it with hope and love shining from her soft green eyes.

No gourmet meal could hold a candle to that.

I left my work boots upstairs and padded down in my stocking feet, hoping to be able to grab a few bites and be done with the obligation without having to say more than a few words at most. I could smell now what I probably should have noticed before. Apples. Fragrant and abundant. Leah Breckenridge must have picked from the tree today. Good for her. At least she wasn’t too stymied by her grief to lift a helping hand.

I don’t know why I didn’t smell the corned beef sooner. Or the pie. Aunt Mari had chosen a couple of my favorites, as if she’d tried to bless me especially. I could take or leave the pattypan squash, but for Mari’s sake I accepted a generous share. She said the prayer, and I wondered if she knew that I didn’t have the strength tonight.

John’s wife and daughter sat and ate in silence, surely feeling as awkward as I in this new arrangement. Only when I noticed the tiny glint of a tear in Leah’s eye did I remember what Mari had told me of John’s death. A train accident. God Almighty.

I’d been too consumed by the cloud over my own thinking to consider what such a subject would call to mind in this woman and her daughter. No wonder they both picked at their food, grave-faced and still. But there was nothing I could do now. The hurt had been driven home without remedy. And Aunt Mari had been right all those months ago when she’d said I’d be able to relate to the pain they were enduring.

“We’ve filled the back porch with fruit,” Aunt Mari said lightly. “With the old washtub full of pears in the backyard to boot. Mostly Leah’s doings. She’s been such a help today. I was going to ask you to carry some of the baskets down to the basement for keeping, but it can wait till morning when you’re rested.”

“I can do it tonight,” I told her, pushing my fork into the corned beef on my plate and careful not to look up.

“I think it might be better for everyone to turn in early,” she protested. “None of that fruit’ll be going anywhere.”

I nodded, and Aunt Mari kept right on talking. “Leah’s discovered the garden. That’s where this squash came from. And she tells me there’s carrots to be found, and the chance of more tomatoes and peppers.”

How could I respond? My only experience with gardens had been brief here with Aunt Mari. And the loving labor at Rosemary’s side as she toiled to create a vegetable patch out of rough sod in the home we’d shared. Now the planted rows made me think of her and filled me with an empty longing. I didn’t ever want to garden again.

“You can’t go on grieving,” Mari had told me once. “At least not to the exclusion of everything else life has to offer. Rosemary would want you to live on and be happy again.”

Perhaps the words were true, but they rang with emptiness for me nonetheless. Rosemary would never have chosen to die in a ditch alongside a narrow street, and to take our unborn child with her. She’d had more hope for the future than that.

I finished my meal and did what Aunt Mari said in returning to my room and retiring early. The clatter of dishes behind me said that Mari and Leah would clean up before doing the same. I was sure I’d been woefully unpleasant company this evening, but there was precious little to be done about that. It would have been worse had I tried to talk. Bad enough to have to face Leah Breckenridge here at all. For her to see me shaken, bowed by the gruesome events of the day, was just a cruel jab at us both.

8
Leah

“Don’t let it worry you,” Marigold told me after Mr. Walsh had finished his meal and retired. “He’s exhausted. And shaken by what’s happened.”

“I know.” Somehow it was hard for me to hold my equilibrium together, as though the very mention of another train wreck had pulled the footing away from me. Eliza was watching me, had been watching all of us through our quiet meal, her eyes wide and wondering, perhaps not completely understanding the reason for our solemnity. Of course she knew that a train wreck was a serious matter, but I’d never told her the manner of her father’s death. I hadn’t wanted her to be plagued by dreams and fears the way I had been for as long as I could remember.