The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay (13 page)

“I want to stay here. With you.”

“It won’t be easy. There’s jackass men all over. But I don’t want to be one of them. I’m a good man some of the time. But I’m not a good man all of the time. I know it. I’m weak, and my needs are strong.” He paused, watching as she stood frozen at the foot of the stairs.

“I can’t stay here with you?”

“Oh, no. No, Maddie.”

“It is you that I want to see, why I came down.”

“You’re looking at me.”

“You know now that I am not a girl anymore. And I know . . . I know how to make a man happy. With my body. My hands. I want to make you happy. I have made you so sad.” She stepped toward him as she spoke.

“Don’t get so close, Maddie. I been drinking. And I’m lonely. Don’t ask for nothing you shouldn’t be having.” He looked at her. “I’m an old man next to you, Maddie. You’re more girl than woman. You just got steered wrong.”

“I feel, with you, like a woman.”

“Well, that’s not . . . that’s not like it should be. Hell, you’re more Dalton’s age than the grizzled old ass of me.”

She smiled at him and stepped closer, opening out the blanket that she had wrapped around herself.

“Jesus H. Christ, what are you wearing? That’s Emma’s smell. Maddie, you’re trying to kill me.”

She reached up suddenly and put her arms around him, burying her face against his chest. He bent his head forward and smelled the thick, sweet perfume in her hair. He lifted a handful to his face.

Maddie tried to kiss him. He was so tall above her that she couldn’t reach his mouth. She grabbed at his shirt and pulled him down to her. “Kiss me,” she whispered. “Give me your mouth. I can kiss so good.”

He released her hair. “No. You can’t do this, Maddie.” He covered her mouth with his hand. “This has gone all up for down.” Her tongue was on his fingers.

The door opened. Dalton stood in the doorway. “You goddamned bastard.” Maddie pulled away and wrapped the blanket tight around her. Bill stood, arms to his sides, and stared back at Dalton.

Dalton ran into the room and started pounding Bill’s arms and shoulders with clenched fists. “You filthy bastard! Keep your hands off her! Can’t you let anything alone that’s good? Can’t you let there be something in this goddamned house that doesn’t turn stinking and dirty because you put your filthy hands all over it! You’re no better than that bastard that kicked her!”

Maddie tried to pull him away from Bill. “I want to, you see. I want to be for him what he needs.”

“God in damnation come to drag me down!” Bill roared suddenly as he pushed off Dalton and grabbed Maddie roughly by the shoulders and turned her toward him. “Maddie!” He shook her in rage and frustration. “No, Maddie! No! You are trying to kill me! You come to drag me to hell this minute!”

“Get off her.” Dalton clawed and kicked at his father. “Get your filthy hands off her. You can’t keep away from anything good. Like Mother! You killed her! You killed her with your goddamned stinking seed. You didn’t need any more brats! But you couldn’t stop. You couldn’t leave her alone. You killed her!”

Bill raised his hand and struck Dalton hard across the face. “Shut your goddamned mouth! If you ever, ever, ever say that to me again, your ass will be over that cliff before you get to suck in one more breath.”

The blow sent Dalton staggering. Maddie ran to him. “No, Dalton. No.” He lay sprawled over the table, sobbing, pounding it with his fist.

“Maddie, you leave in the morning. First thing. I’m taking you. And it’ll be too far to come back. It already is.”

“No! Maddie can’t leave!” Avis suddenly wailed down from the top of the stairs.

“She’s leaving, all right!” Bill yelled back up the stairs. “Now, get back to bed, the two of you. You’ll all be leaving soon enough, the lot of you! I can’t be doing this no more. It’s no place for little girls.” He looked at Maddie. “No matter how growed they think they are. I can’t be doing this no more!”

 

Avis cried miserably into her pillow until she finally went to sleep. Idella lay awake in the dark for hours. Maddie was out walking back and forth along the cliff edge. Idella could hear snatches of her singing, the French like a soft moan carried aloft on the wind. The moon was blanketed in clouds tonight, just a smudge of dim light. Idella leaned on the windowsill and stared into the blank dark. The sky had changed so, she thought, everything had changed so, from one night to the next.

When there was the grayest of pale light, like a soft smoke hovering over the beds, Maddie crept into the room. Idella, still awake, turned just enough to watch her without being seen. Maddie looked over at the girls’ bed. Avis’s foot stuck out from the quilt, and Maddie gently pushed it back. Idella closed her eyes as though asleep, then opened them when she heard Maddie open her bottom dresser drawer and start to pile the contents onto the blanket, the one she’d come with. She’s starting to pack, Idella thought. She’s getting ready to go.

She watched quietly as Maddie got down on her knees and pulled out from under the bed a second bundle of what appeared to be clothes. She fingered them carefully without unfolding them and held them up to her face. Then, with some hesitation, she put them into the bottom drawer she had just emptied. Idella could not get a good look at what she was putting into the drawer, but she suddenly had a sick feeling come crawling up out of her stomach, realizing what they must be—Mother’s clothes.

She lay frozen, watching Maddie slowly move about the room, closing the drawer, pulling up the corners of her blanket so that she could bundle the contents. Maddie glanced anxiously toward the bed, and Idella flicked her eyes closed. She opened them again when she felt Maddie moving and watched as Maddie carefully reached behind her pillowcase and removed a small rag doll Idella’d found. But it looked odd. Maddie held the doll to her face, her eyes closed, and brushed it against her cheek. Then Idella saw the difference. She gasped. The doll had hair. A swatch of Mother’s braid was attached to the top of its head. Idella sat up. “Maddie!” she whispered, in shock.

“Oh!” Maddie thrust the doll behind her back.

“That is Mother’s hair!” Idella stared intently at her. “Give me that!”

“No! No! She is all that I have. Please.” Maddie was on her knees in front of Idella, whispering so as not to wake Avis. “This is from my mother. But she had no hair. I wanted her to be beautiful, like your mother.” Maddie was sobbing and reaching toward Idella. Her hand was like a claw flailing in the air.

Seeing how desperate and frightened she was, Idella started to cry. “Oh, Maddie,” she said softly, and for the first time since Maddie’s arrival, Idella reached out to hug her. She could say no more as Maddie engulfed her in an embrace of such force that she couldn’t even raise her head. A deep feeling of sadness rose up in her. It was for Maddie and for herself, too, for all of them. She reached tighter around Maddie and squeezed back with all her might.

When they were able to pull away, Idella whispered, “May I see her?”

Maddie nodded, then slowly offered up the doll. Idella took it cautiously. The room had grown lighter, and she could see that the lock of Mother’s braid was crudely sewn into the top and back of the doll’s soft head. She fingered it tenderly, crying. There was the sad little mouth, the black button nose. “There are no eyes to her,” she whispered. “She can’t see.”

“I lost them,” Maddie whispered. “They fell off.”

Idella gave her back. “Go to sleep, Maddie. You need to sleep now.”

Maddie nodded and crawled into the little bed, clutching her doll. She was soon asleep.

Idella lay watching her for a long, long time, till the light sharpened the edges in the room and it was morning and Dad called to them to get up, by God, he had to get on the road.

 

Maddie made coffee one last time. “Back to the piss pot for me,” Bill said when he poured out the dregs. “Time to go, Maddie. Blackie’s hitched.”

Dalton and the girls lined up to see them off. Maddie climbed up onto the seat next to Bill. Avis was bawling, and Dalton was standing with his hat in his hands.

“Hell, I almost forgot.” Bill reached under the seat of the wagon and took out a wrapped bundle. He handed it to Maddie. “This here is for your birthday.” Maddie sat clutching the package. She could not control the tears any longer, and Avis came up to her, and they started in crying together. “Goddamn it, Maddie,” Bill said. “Open it and put me out of my misery.”

She unwrapped the stiff paper, uncovering the brush and the little bird’s-eye mirror. “Don’t look in it now, ’cause we all look terrible,” Bill said.

“Thank you. It is so beautiful.”

“Idella, she picked it.”

“Thank you, Idella.” Maddie ran her fingers over the soft bristles.

Idella kept feeling that something wasn’t right. Suddenly she knew. “Wait!” she called. “Wait!”

She tore into the house and up the stairs. She got on her knees and pulled out from under the bed her box of special things. Opening it with trembling fingers, she searched till she found what she needed. Without even closing the box, she rushed down the stairs and out into the yard.

“What in the hell got into you?” Dad asked.

Idella rushed up to Maddie and opened out her hand. Two shiny blue buttons, saved from the dress her mother had worn, lay in her palm.

“There, Maddie. So she can see.”

 

Bill came back late that night. He’d gotten Maddie situated at the Smythe farm and told Gramma Becky as much as he knew about her, leaving out some details and stressing what a good worker she was. He could feel Becky’s eyes going on through him, scouring his insides a few times in the telling, and he was relieved there was nothing there for her to see. There sure as hell could’ve been.

A week later, after telegrams had been sent and replied to, he drove Avis and Idella to the train in Bathurst and sent them down to Maine to live with John and Martha on their farm. He looked down at the two little girls huddled against each other in the wagon, not saying a word to him or to each other. He knew they’d be expected to help out a whole lot. They knew it, too. But they’d get proper schooling down in Maine. Martha was Emma’s big sister. She’d see to it. And they’d have something closer to a mother—though Martha was spread pretty thin with them boys and another baby on the way. “Christ Almighty,” he whispered as he watched Avis and Idella waving their little white hands to him from the train window. “They’re in for it. But they’ll be better off, by God. They’ll be better off.”

That night Bill fried up potatoes and doled them out for his and Dalton’s supper. Dalton looked down at the greasy plate and then back at his father. They ate in silence.

“It’s awful quiet around here,” Bill said, finally, pushing his plate away. He got up and poured himself a glass of whiskey. Dalton sat watching him. Bill silently got a second glass, poured a splash into it, and handed it to Dalton. “We’ll be bachelors now, son. You and me. We’ll make do and get by.”

Dalton took the glass and looked down into it. “I thought that’s what we were doing before.” He lifted it and drank a mouthful. Bill poured him one more and joined him at the table. They sat in silence for a long time, drinking whiskey, till Bill spoke.

“Two years ago I had the best wife on earth and goin’ on four children.” He stared into the flickering oil lamp on the table. “Now I’m down to one boy-man, an empty bed, an empty house . . . and a new pair of boots.” He looked down at them. “New boots to wander.”

Dalton had never seen Dad cry but the once at Ma’s grave. This was the second time. He finished his whiskey, cleared his own plate from the table, and let him be.

June 1921

 

Idella sat with her cheek pressed against the window of the train. She stared out at the passing Maine landscape. Farms and fields and small towns would soon give way to relentless trees as the train carried her and Avis back on up to Canada—back home to Dad and the farm.

Avis was fidgeting across from Idella, her braids coming all unraveled from constant nervous plucking. It was no use saying anything. She was miserable enough already.

Aunt Martha had sat them down at the kitchen table when it was still dark and done their hair in braids. “So you’ll look like young ladies,” she’d said, softly pushing from Idella’s forehead the lank wisps that had already straggled out from any attempt at confinement. Then she’d stood looking down at them slumped miserably in their chairs. “You poor, motherless girls,” she’d finally said. Idella had tried to absorb Aunt Martha’s face in the soft light of gray dawn. Aunt Martha’s face was as close to what her own mother’s must have looked like as anyone’s might be.

“Aunt Martha packed us chicken and biscuits,” Idella said. “You hungry yet?” Avis shook her head. “Me neither.”

She looked down at her lap, at her bound red copy of
Robinson Crusoe
that she’d clutched so hard the sweat of her hands had taken on some of the red dye. Seeing this, she wiped them on the seat next to her. She wanted the book on her lap—to feel its weight, the promise of its thick, dense pages. She wasn’t going to read it till she got to Canada. It was for the bad times.

The book was first prize for winning the eighth-grade spelling bee on the last day of school. It had been a surprise to everyone that quiet little Idella had beaten out Arthur Davis—with a word as simple as “banister.” And she wasn’t even a true eighth grader.

Idella had begged to be allowed to finish out the school year before being sent back up to take care of Dad. News of his hunting accident had come down to them just two weeks earlier. He had been shot bad when the men were flushing out a deer they’d cornered, off season. The bullet had gone right through his leg. He had been in the hospital for over a month. The doctors wanted to keep him longer, but Dad kept on yelling so and cursing so and saying he wanted to get on back to the farm so, that they gave in to be rid of him. That’s what the letter from Mrs. Doncaster said. She’d written to Uncle John and Aunt Martha.