The Monsters of Templeton (17 page)

Expect he's lonely. Missus Temple, she refuses to come to Templeton, all rough as it is then. She has a life in Burlington, books and company and music and her father. Tell the truth, expect Missus don't want Templeton at all. So many years Duke tries to get her to come and she says No. No, no, no. She's afraid. But he's lonely and works too much. Remarkable Prettybones the housekeeper can't cook a whit, burns the porridge, burns the ham. I call her Remarkable Uglybones, that witch. I come and start to cook and Duke begins to get fatter again. Looks happier. I feel his eyes on me all day long.

Duke is a good man, I'll grant. Struggles. Don't touch me, not for a long time. And if he don't touch me, I can't run him, works that way. Magic like that. And in the beginning, Duke, he's so busy he don't even have time to touch me, selling land faster than a man could breathe, out all day surveying, riding to Albany, riding to Philadelphia, riding to his family in Burlington. But I run the house good. Cook good food, make a beautiful house. I like things neat-neat, clean as a Sunday morning. Mingo, he builds Temple Manor almost by his lonesome, huge and stone with a yellow roof. But I am the one to make it nice, the whitewash, the curtains, the varnish, though Remarkable takes the credit, that ugly skinny toad. I do the cooking, and even in famine with all the Templeton babies screaming for food, we always have food. I buy our meat from Davey up the hill, and Mingo, he catches fish. I catch fish with Mingo, too, but the one time I go with him in his little boat I seen a huge, bad thing deep in the water, and Mingo puts his hand on my leg and it is all I can do to fight him off and not tip into the water for whatever it is down deep, ready to eat me alive. Never again do I go, never again. Just because we're both dark doesn't mean I'm meant for Mingo I tell him. He leaves me be after that.

Even though I fill her belly, Remarkable is not my friend. She stares at me, suspicious. Brings that little angel Cuff on her side and makes him hate me, too. For some time, Cuff and me was friends, taught me to read a little. Words like water, apple, snake, horse. But Remarkable, she gets her hands on him, changes him. It hurts but I got a mean streak so I call him Little Poof. Your breakfast is ready, Little Poof. Go fetch some water, Little Poof. Turns out I tell the truth, cause a few years later he runs off with a traveling preacher-man and turns out to be a little poof, after all.

The day comes we move into the Manor. My room's off the kitchen, and I know it's coming. Duke is hungry, starving for it. Think may well be me as anyone, certainly won't be Remarkable Uglybones, and anyways I can run him if it's me. I oil my limbs, set the taper ready. There's a knock on the door. I open and see Duke falling over himself, trembling, pale as a mealybug. I bring him in.

Tell the truth, I don't like it. Never have. What I do like is the running. Making men do what I want. That, I like.

I run Duke so gentle he don't see it. Need to do it that way for the menfolk think themselves bigger than anybody and you can't threaten their bigness. I get him to make changes to Templeton, move the market to Second Street, not First, build the courthouse, build the icehouse down by the lake. For years I run him. The town is a big success. Marmaduke gets rich, then richer. Richest.

The day Jedediah Averell come into town on a donkey I see him, sweeping the porch, I see him, I take a long look at him. Not much to look at, all hunched and ugly, but I see the iron in his back, the strength of him and I say, Hetty, that man there's going to be something. And I say, Hetty, you can run that man. Know it first look. Later Averell watches me wherever I go and I feel his eyes on me and I smile. I wait on him, though. Bide my time.

Though I'm careful, go to Aristabulus Mudge every month for herbs, I get with child. Bad news. Remarkable, she sees it immediate. She works on Cuff, and one day he puts my news in a letter Duke dictates for Missus Temple. Duke never reads the letters Cuff writes, account that Cuff is perfect in his writing, so he doesn't know what's in it. Duke signs his name, sends them off. He misses the mention of me, and I don't even think Missus Temple even knows of me before that letter. And she's in Burlington, she's with child, too, with Jacob, and she reads this. Goes a little crazed, sets off that very day with her big son Richard, even though she's eight months gone with a child that kicks her day in, day out. Hops into a carriage and off she goes, like a madwoman. Jostling for weeks over those pitted roads in hired hacks and wagons, sleeping on flea-bitten mattresses, chewing gristle and hardtack. She, a porcelain cup. A wonder she don't break.

I know the Missus's carriage is coming from a mile away, somehow, put on my pretty pink calico, tie my hair back. And she comes into the drive, her little face pale, round in surprise at the big house. First time she's seen it, and I don't know what she's thinking all these years, maybe we live in the trees like the bears. But Duke, he comes running out of the house, joyous, shouting, and Richard, he jumps out to hug him, only fourteen and already so hairy, and Missus Temple, she pries herself out, fat with her baby, but so very tiny. I'm twice near as big as her. She's a little wren. Could break in my fingers like a twig, though I never would do it to her. I pity her, somehow.

And I pity her still, even after she looks at me, eyes burning. Even after she walks around me in one circle, two, three. Even after she says, Marmaduke, I don't want no slave in the house, though she don't say it about Mingo or Cuff, just me. She says, Marmaduke, I don't want no slave in my house. I am a Quaker, she says. Get rid of her. Today, get rid of this ugly wench today. And still I am not angry with her although I am not an ugly wench and she knows it, too.

So that day after my chores I slip up to see Duke in his study. Missus Temple collapsed, sleeps for two days entire, I'll hear. Duke's near to crying. Oh, Hetty, I'm so very sorry, he says. In the dark, with one taper, he looks older than he is.

I sit beside him. I say, Duke, no matter. You go on and give me to that tanner on Front Street, that Jedediah Averell. You'll see. He's a good man, he'll marry me, even if I am black. I say, Oh, and Duke, careful. I say, Duke, take a look at the boy I am to have in a few months. You'll see someone in him you love dear.

Duke, he's both happy and sad, wants to set me up with my very own inn in Albany so that I can have his son. But I say no. No, Duke, Templeton's mine, my own place. I have moved enough in this hard life. I'll be nobody's slave in a week, I'll be a wife. In one week, you'll see. A wife.

Next day I go to Averell with all my things tied in an apron. Knock at the door. He's working in the tannery in the back by the lake, and the terrible strong smell there has made his eyes water. He looks up with his water-eyes, turns red. I say to him, Judge Temple is giving me to you. I'm yours, I say. I say this and smile in his eyes.

In a week, I run him. In two I'm a married woman. The day my son comes, five months too soon for Jedediah, he holds the big boy in his arms. He looks into the pale face, the red hair. He sees the one eyeball gone untied in the boy's head. How it wanders, and maybe Jedediah thinks of his own hunchback and maybe he loves the boy for the eyeball before loving him for who he is. And I see that Jedediah don't care if the boy's not his, or if he does, he don't even think it to himself. Instead, he tries to name him. All night, trying out names. Adam, says he, Aaron. Methuselah, says he. Jesus, says he, laughing. At last, I'm tired out. Midwife Bledsoe, she's cleaned up and gone, Remarkable's come and gone, left gifts, probably poisoned, and I have the baby in my arms. I say, oh Jedediah. What's bigger than big. Bigger than anyone in this little town. President, I say. Emperor. Governor.

My husband looks at me, smiles. Says, Guvnor, that's a good name. We'll name him Guvnor, and that's what he writes in the fat Bible. Guvnor Averell, Born The twentythird Of January, 1790.

Later, when Guvnor grows, I am careful-careful. I tell him my own mother was made with child by her redhead master, though it is not true, though she is an African lady and my father is an African man with two round black cheeks and I remember both in the dust and heat, she in her wrap, he chewing something and smiling at me. I tell Guvnor a redhead skips from grandfather to child always. I tell him he is so smart because I am so smart and he is finer than anyone in this town, than anybody in the world. He is a good boy, he is so laughing and strong, so brave, nobody teases him for his dark skin.

I do not know if he finds anything out, or how, if he does. But I do know that one day, when he is ten, he comes home and he does not look at me anymore. He does not embrace me. His face folds in anger. And that is the day he begins to save his coins, to buy up land. And my own mother's heart is cleft in two, cause that is the day I lose my son. Gone from me, he is that day, gone from me, my boy, for good.

Chapter
12

Cowboy Faces

THE WEEK AFTER the monster left, Templeton slipped into August. We all dreamt of the beast, its long-fingered hands, its delicate neck. We imagined ourselves lodged in its ancient brain, saw the dark water before us as it swam so fast in the cold depths. The leaf-thin shimmy of the moon through all that water. The glacier still slowly melting at the bottom of the lake, glowing phosphorescent blue. Those who loved Templeton felt the monster's loss like a phantom limb, still aching.

No wonder, then, that over our hamlet there had fallen a blue-gray pall, even on the hottest, sunniest days. Even on the days when the tourists were loud and thick on Main Street, we scooped the ice cream, we watered the ferns on the lampposts, we sold the caps and balls and bats in a sort of fuzzy dream state. In the fine old hospital, Vi found the sick less crabby, more misty, dying more quietly than they used to, fighting less against the dark tide of death. Pomeroy Hall--once an orphanage, now an old-person home--stank less of incontinence and smelled more of the air coming up from the lake. In every open window there were old people, sniffing the wind to try to smell the change they sensed in their bones.

That week, we heard nothing about the monster from the authorities. There was a long, puzzled silence. The newspapers with their wild speculations about the beast's origins: "The World's Last Dinosaur" and "Scientist Says: The Missing Link?" and "The Fish from Mars!" began to move on to other matters. There was war in sad and gray parts of the world. There was a virus killing people on cruise ships. There was an adopted woman meeting her birth mother for the first time, pulling her car into the parking lot where the mother stood, weeping, when a semi ran over her and killed her. The ordinary rot of the world. When I read about these things that week, I sometimes found my hands stealing over my still-flat navel, as if covering the eyes of the Lump, keeping it safe. On nights when I couldn't sleep and the ghost ringed my room in a haze, I imagined the Lump as a spinning nucleus, splitting and splitting in red cell-corpuscles, until it resembled nothing more than a halved pomegranate. This put me off fruit for some time.

Every night, I checked the answering machine, hoping to hear the soft round sounds of Primus Dwyer's accent, even if all he said was "hello" and hung up. Every night, I stood listening to the frog pool's rising chorus after the tape beeped off, feeling empty.

I had avoided Ezekiel Felcher twice that week, once in line at the Farmers' Museum cafe, as I was waiting for lunch and he was chatting up a townie I didn't recognize at the register; once as he was towing a van plastered with Phillies paraphernalia, hooting to himself with joy. He, I took it from the bobble-headed toy on the dash, was a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. And I was growing fond of Peter Lieder and the caprine sleeping woman because I spent most of my day in the library looking for--and rejecting--ancestors. Claudia Starkweather's mother and aunt were my next targets, but Ruth and Leah Peck had been sent off to wealthy relatives in New York City when they were ten and eight, respectively. Only Ruth returned, and she returned only when her own daughter Claudia--my great-grandmother--was eighteen and ready to marry. By then, Ruth was already an old widow, devoted to her weeds. Ruth and Leah Peck were the daughters of Guvnor Averell's second daughter, Cinnamon, the products of her fifth and final marriage.

"Just checking," I had said to Vi. "But Ruth and Leah Peck weren't the source of my father, were they?"

"Who and Who Who?" she said.

"I didn't think so," I said.

Ruth and Leah were on the Averell side; their compeer on the Temple side was Henry Franklin Temple, Sarah's father. But he seemed a quiet, sober soul, and though you can never tell about ancestors, I had a strong feeling that he would never have committed adultery. For a few days, however, I did believe in his guilt; I was charged with energy and a feeling I was coming close to the secret when I learned that Henry had set up Finch Hospital in Templeton for his old friend Isadora H. Finch, the first lady-doctor in upstate New York. After much searching, however, I discovered that Isadora lived in a "Boston marriage" with a woman she had met when she was thirteen and a student at Miss Porter's all-girls school. Everyone called the woman she lived with "mannish," and I found a letter addressed by her to Isadora, affectionately calling her "my wife." My suspicions died at that moment.

It was a hot day when I moved to the next generation up, on both sides. Ruth and Leah's mother was Cinnamon Averell Stokes Starkweather Sturgis Graves Peck, Hetty's granddaughter, five times a widow. And Henry's adoptive mother was Charlotte Franklin Temple. She was a spinster who never had children of her own, and had seven sisters, all of whom dispersed elsewhere when they were married, young. Charlotte was the only one left in town, the daughter of Jacob Franklin Temple and a minor literary figure herself; I relished the idea of digging up mud on such an exemplary virgin, finding some secret pregnancy that she hid with her money and influence. She was the one to start Pomeroy Orphanage. The little brown mouse in her watercolor was the first lady of the town from the time her father died and almost into the twentieth century.