The Immortal American (The Immortal American Series) (20 page)

Mrs. Jones, Bethany, looked crazed and feral. Her hair was free from its braided bindings, and waved long to her mid-thigh. She had torn at her clothes; frayed seams opened to reveal bloody scratched arms. Her lips too were punctured; she had blood on her teeth.

“Baby girl gone, Violet. She gone.” Bethany didn’t so much make a statement but to ask me, Was my sister truly dead? I had no answer to give, no words, no knowledge. I’d be able to tell in my heart, wouldn’t I?

I shook my head, icy wet tears shocking me as they fell from my eyes onto my cheeks, down my neck, collecting in my men’s shirt collar. I couldn’t live without my sister, no matter what may be fact, I couldn’t live without her. She was my heart, the darling of my soul.

“She. Gone.” Bethany wailed.

She reached for my hair and shook it free from its pins. She pulled at my shirt’s sleeves. They tore away. I saw Mr. Jones try to stop her, but I shook my head.

Mathew came through the kitchen door that moment, and it was then, witnessing his anxious face that I knew my sister had died. He rushed to me. I tried to scream, but no noise emerged.

Before Mathew could reach me there was a soft thud in the kitchen and everyone turned to see my mother who I hadn’t even noticed lay crumpled on the floor. Mathew scooped her up in his arms, and my mother, whom I’d always thought was such a tall, strong woman, looked like a tiny, broken bird in Mathew’s large arms.

It was her suffering that broke my own.

“Her chamber, please,” I croaked.

Mathew nodded and strode toward the stairs that lifted up to the bedchambers. I followed, noticing that Bethany trailed me. I turned my head toward her as I stumbled behind Mathew and my mother. Bethany caught my hand, and we walked to my mother’s chamber together.

Mathew laid my mother on the bed, then Mrs. Jones and I covered her in her blankets. Mathew closed the curtains around my mother’s four-post kip, while Mrs. Jones and I remained inside, making sure my mother was comfortable in her attire. Although I knew she would never feel at ease in her own skin ever again. Her daughter, my gorgeous sister, was . . .

Mother didn’t say anything the whole time. Her silent tears never ceased though.

Both Bethany and I held onto my mother’s hands until she slept. We knew she had fallen asleep because her tears stopped. Mrs. Jones and I looked at each other, and left my mother’s bed only to cling onto each other’s hands again.

“We’re going to take care of Miss Hannah, Violet?” Bethany asked while we stood in the slim hallway that opened to my mother’s chamber and to Hannah’s and mine. Who would sleep with me from now on?

Mathew was ascending the stairs while I thought of Bethany’s question. Yes, Concord had an undertaker, but I needed to take care of my sister one last time. I’d left her this morning, because I was a coward who had run from her pain, her fatal sorrow. I’d fled as if her agony was something that would infect me too. I would never forgive myself for not staying with her, not giving her more attention, not letting myself be susceptible to her anguish.

I nodded at Bethany. I would take care of my beloved sister one last time.

By the faded yellow light of a glimmering whale oil lamp Mathew held, I noted he wore thin white lines down his face, stains of dried tears, while he captured my waist in one of his arms.

“Darling, I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

I couldn’t find any appropriate words. Language was becoming impossible again to understand. I walked across the hall with his support and opened my chamber, but fell to one of my knees as I tried to walk through. It was too heavy, the thought that I would have to sleep alone. I would no longer have my sister to share my chamber.

Mathew lifted me from the floor, then had me sit on his lap on the bed. My chin bobbed to my chest with the overwhelming urge to sleep. If I just slept then I might be able to wake up and have all of this been a dream, my sister’s . . . Lord, no . . . death be nothing but a dream. Not reality. This couldn’t be real. My body ached for the embrace of my sister. My arms so tender to the touch that I felt like my skin had turned into thin paper, easily sliced into. Tender, paper-skinned arms that wanted to hold my sister one more time.

Why did she leave me?

Why? I lived for her. Why wasn’t that enough?

The undertaker had my sister. I couldn’t let my sister lie in the undertaker’s house all alone. I needed to be with her. I needed to see her for myself. I needed to dress her and give her a blanket to always keep her warm. I needed . . .

“Bethany,” I rasped, “Hannah and Mother were working on that lavender dress, the one with the white rose buds. Did they finish?”

She shook her head. Jonah stood behind her, holding her around her shoulders.

“We’ll finish it tonight then.”

She nodded. “I’ll go get it.”

The dress was one of Hannah’s most amazing creations; only the silver-gray and black dress she made for me competed with its design. Her lavender dress had ruffles about the sleeves and the panniers which were perfectly feminine. The lavender fabric–lavender was my sister’s favorite color–held a sheen, like silk often does, that glimmered of blues, pinks, and whites which matched the embroidery. The whitish roses were large and a focal piece to the dress. Mrs. Jones and I labored over the dress for a couple hours before it was done. Hannah would have been so proud of me as I actually, finally, stitched in straight and proud lines. Oh, Hannah . . .

What happened to you?

God, you were right, Hannah. He killed you.

Bethany and I walked down to the undertaker’s house, hand in hand again. Mathew had warned Mr. Robinson, the undertaker, that we were coming, and was waiting for us with candles and tears in the doorway of the cellar, the space where my sister lay. He extended the candle holder to me. In one hand I held a basket of dried lavender and mint and a few bundles of the wild flowers I’d picked for her while I had toiled about our farm earlier, but hadn’t the chance to give them to her. Also in the basket was other mixtures for the dead: salt, white clay, and coins for her eyes. I reached for the candle with my free hand.

“Darling, would you like me to help?” Mathew asked.

I shook my head and tried to say thank you for the thought, but I wasn’t sure if words formed out of my mouth any longer. He nodded anyhow and left as Bethany and I walked through the threshold of the cellar’s door and down the steps. The floor was cold dirt; so bitter I felt the freeze through the leather soles of my boots.

We approached where my sister lay on a long table.

Bethany gasped, but I couldn’t look just yet. Not yet. I closed my eyes and fastened the image of her when I woke this morning, of her smiling face. I locked the vision into my memory, and then, with my eyes still closed, I walked to Hannah.

From the few moments of sanity I’d had since I’d heard my sister drowned, I recollected how Mathew—or was it Jonah?–had told me that she had sown rocks into her pretty white dress, the same dress she wore to meet Kimball. When she’d gotten the opportunity to do that, no one knew. After she had restored the dress, she had sewn the fatal weights into her hemlines and pockets, walked down to the river sometime in the afternoon, and took her last swim.

My traitorous mind ripped open a door that envisioned her struggling in the water. Her extra weight with the rocks might not have been needed, since I knew that swimming in a dress with as many petticoats as she liked to wear would not only weigh her down, but strangle any resistance from her legs–if she had fought for her life in those last few seconds. I saw her in one of the deep pockets in the Concord River, descending to the soft bottom with her corn silk hair waving like a water weed.

Did she cry before she walked into the river? Or was she relieved?

As I thought such things all I could feel was the chill. Cold from the earth, cold on my skin, in my skin. Cold in my veins, pumping cold river water through me.

My hands touched her wintry flesh. I realized, since I knew my sister’s body as well as my own, that I was holding onto her forearm. Then I allowed myself to open my eyes. I didn’t gasp; I didn’t breath; I died a little when I looked at her. The river, although granting her death, had been cruel to her. Her face was swollen, and puffed in an unnatural yellowish blue. The river bed and whatever logs or rocks there had been in the body of water had cut her in many places. The cuts themselves were swollen as well–tumescent folds of skin that surrounded deep gashes and pits–deep, black pits. Her hair had all matter of river plants in it. Hannah was a mermaid of the dead.

It took us all night, but we removed almost all traces of my sister’s injuries. In the morning’s dawn, her face didn’t look so swollen after we used the salt to shrink the swelling and the clay to smooth over the gaping wounds. Hannah lay with her beautiful blonde hair, freshly washed in magnolia and lily scented soap, styled expertly. She wore her lavender dress—the aqueous fabric floated around her body, making her look . . . alive. Even with the patches of plaster on her swollen countenance, I wondered if she could take a soggy breath and wake up. But she never did.

In a tale, she would be alive, dancing for some prince. In another life she would have been the princess. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her. No one should be raped, I know, but my sister was pure and sweet and kind and considerate and loved with all her heart, and this world opened its mouth and swallowed her into the depths of darkness, an abyss of sorrow, a hell. All of it made me want to close my hands into tight fists and strike out until my knuckles were broken.

I knew that the reverend was going to meet my mother and me to prepare for my sister’s funeral close to nine in the morning, and Bethany and I had to trudge our way back to the house. People were already out, doing their morning chores or errands, and watched with careful consideration as we made our way north through town–through the town’s Common, the little way past houses and green pastures for sheep, then on the highway, and finally over the North Bridge. A few people had stopped us, and asked when Hannah’s service would be and promised to come over soon with bread, beer, venison stew, or anything else they could make for my sad family.

Jonah met us on the drive and folded his beautiful wife into his arms, while one of his hands smoothed my shoulder. His pat avoided the few blood stains on my shirt. I nodded and walked toward my house that used to be a shining white, but this morning looked mournful gray, and covered in dew as if the house itself was grieving.

“Violet, honey, Mathew is on his way back to Boston to talk again to . . . well, you know.” Jonah’s voice had gotten so soft, that I had to stop and turn toward him to understand what exactly he was saying. He was gently caressing Bethany’s hair from her face when he said, “Your mama hasn’t been out of the house, and I didn’t know if it was proper if I checked on her.”

My mother had been alone in her grief! I tripped in my haste to run to my mother, falling hard on my knees and the heels of my hands. Glancing at my palms, I saw crimson blood instantly ooze. My God, my mother’s child had died, an unnatural death, and I had left her alone.

I raced into my house, where I heard nothing. In my mother’s room, I found her too still in her bed. One hand lay uselessly upon her chest; its last clutch on life released. Still . . .

I heard nothing.

I sat at the kitchen table, still in the silver and black dress Hannah had sewn for me, known its ultimate purpose before I did. I had worn it for days now.

A magistrate from Boston was fuming, and Mathew was being quite adamant about something. I didn’t know what exactly they were talking about. I had forgotten language again. Yet I kept on living. My mother and sister had died, but somehow my heart stubbornly kept beating. I know not why. I had nothing to live for anymore.

Mathew slammed his fist on the table. That I understood, the language of violence. The smash of flesh against wood caused me drowsily to wake from my deaf world.

“She will not lose this farm!”  Mathew yelled.

I was losing my farm? My family’s farm?

“For being a lawyer with some years of training,” said the patronizing magistrate, “you don’t seem to understand the predicament.”

What I did know was that since the Coercive Laws were put into action, our local magistrates no longer existed. Before the Coercive Laws we colonists would usually ask our reverends to dispel our small legal issues. But if the reverend or reverends couldn’t make it right, we would have our own magistrate or the General Courts to take up our issues, but we had none of that now. We had government agents from England at the present, acting for our stead. How could a man born three thousand miles away understand me or know what was best for me? What I pieced together was that his name was Mr. Leslie. Fat, red-faced, British born Mr. Leslie.

He continued in a nasal tone. “Mrs. Buccleuch was not good with her money and owes a considerable sum. Miss Buccleuch has inherited that debt. Now, being that she is a single woman who cannot own a farm, I have to put this farm for sale, which does pain me to do, but I have to set what was wrong into what is right, Mr. Adams. I am also a kind and just lawman; therefore, I can take into consideration how much Miss Buccleuch is in debt and ask the buyer for that much more, to assist in this wretched woman’s state. I couldn’t bear to think of this pretty little thing going to debtors’ prison. So you see, I can be of good help and cheer in this endeavor.” Mr. Leslie smiled at me and let his eyes drop to my open neckline.