The Whip (7 page)

Twenty-One

When people tell time by the sun and the seasons, time becomes irrelevant, foreign to one’s everyday thoughts. If you have children and watch them grow, then you know time…every day you see it moving, right there in front of you. But if you are alone, then time moves in other people’s world, not yours. And all you know or care about time is that your body awakens at the same instant, the hunger in your belly arises at the same moment, and the seasons and life move along, day in and day out, day in and day out, no different from any other. Then it happens one day that you look into the face of an acquaintance, or maybe into the face of a long lost friend, and you see something alarming, shocking, unacceptable. Time has left its decaying fingerprints on that face you used to know. And then you realize that it must be the same for you.

Providence, Rhode Island

1847

Charlotte’s face was now tanned, her arms and shoulders muscular. There was no visible softness about her. Gone was the golden prettiness the other girls had envied, a lifetime ago in the orphanage. Not educated enough to be a teacher, not willing nor winsome enough to be a wife or a saloon girl, she’d scrabbled together over the many years a small independent livelihood. She’d cared for several elderly women and done heavy work in an institution.

Now she was working in the kitchen at Mrs. Bidwell’s Boarding House for Women. It was work. It was a place to live. It was a kind of life. But it was empty. And she was disappearing.

On this dreary fall day, she was just another plainly-dressed, uncomfortable passenger in a rattling stagecoach on her way to Boston…a small valise in her lap, her hands twisting a handkerchief. What was it Jonas used to say? “This one mysterious life you got, what you gonna do with it?” Well, she had survived somehow. And she had turned thirty-five. That’s what she did with it. Got old. That’s what she had done with it.

As she sat watching the clouds change shape through the coach window, the wheezing, chattering man next to her continued talking. His mouth had been wheezing and chattering the whole trip. She hadn’t paid attention to a word he had said, but now he was asking her a question…something about a state law that had been passed in South Carolina. Misinterpreting her blank look for interest, he continued on, “…you know that law that forbids Negroes and white cotton mill workers from looking out the same window.”

Charlotte blanched.

“Are you okay?” he boomed out. “Okay… it’s a new word, don’t you know? Very in vogue. No one knows where it came from, maybe from the Indians. And no one knows what it stands for but anyone who is anyone is using it now.”

Charlotte was about to beg the driver of the coach to stop and let her off as she would rather walk, when the Boston Society for Destitute Children came into view, looking the same as ever—on the verge of decrepitude and in dire need of a coat of paint. The fields surrounding the weathered building were brown and desolate.

And as always whenever she returned, her dark thoughts rose up. The most anguishing of all…the day Beelzebub had died. She’d cried and cried on Jonas’ shoulder, and then, soon after, she packed up her few belongings.

“What will you do out there?” Jonas had said to her. “You’re a woman. You can’t tend horses. They won’t let you. Here you got a job doin’ what you love and what you’re good at.”

“I’ve been at this place since I was a baby Jonas. Don’t know anything else. I don’t want to work here the rest of my life and then die here too. You know how you always say you’ve got to put your arms around life? That’s what I want to do. See what’s out there. I’m scared… but I’ll find a job somehow. I’m so sorry Jonas; I wish you could come with me. I’m going to miss you. But I need to do this. I’ll visit you often. I promise.”

The coach stopped, and Charlotte hopped down, hurrying toward the stables.

Miss Haden looked out her office window with her familiar disapproval. That woman. Here again. To visit Jonas.

A little while later, Charlotte loomed, unannounced, in her office doorway.

“It’s too damn cold out there for a man of his age,” Charlotte said. “He’s shaking. And no one’s been taking care of him. He’s very sick. He’s dying. Why the hell hasn’t a doctor seen him?”

She advanced further into the room and leaned onto the desk, disturbing Miss Haden’s neat piles of paper. It was the same bloody desk, the same bloody office—down to the leather strap hanging from the hook on the wall. Well over fifteen years had passed and how was it possible that nothing had changed except for the gray hair that now threaded through Miss Haden’s head and her wire rimmed spectacles she was now wearing.

Miss Haden stood up in one quick movement. “Remove your hands from my desk. Sit down.”

“I will not sit down until you explain to me why you’ve left an old man out in the stable to die. He has been nothing but faithful to you. You take better care of your livestock. You would call a doctor to attend to a sick horse. Why not Jonas?”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing a doctor can do for him now,” she said.”I need to get back to work.” She looked back down at her account book.

But Charlotte didn’t budge. “How can you know that? How can you be so certain?”

“He’s very old.” Miss Haden looked up again from her book, her pale pink-rimmed eyes peering over her spectacle rims.

“Do you know how old he is?” said Charlotte. “Do you know anything about him?”

“Of course I do. I hired him. He’s old. He’s a darky. A man of low ambition. Do you understand? I’m running the orphanage now. Mr. Meade is no longer here. And I’m busy. You need to leave.”

For a moment Charlotte stared at Miss Haden’s pink rabbit eyes.

“You are a whore bitch. You always were. How could you treat another human being with such disregard? With such disdain. With no respect. Like a piece of garbage. You’ve damaged everyone who has ever been under your care. Me, Lee, and now Jonas. And all the children. Fuck you. Fuck you forever.”

Charlotte turned and walked out the door, leaving Miss Haden standing there frozen over her desk, speechless, the pulsing blue vein in her neck the only sign of life in her body.

In Jonas’ shack behind the stable, he lay resting on his cot. Charlotte sat down on a little box beside him and gently stroked his face.

How can it be that you could love somebody so much and still know so little about them? Jonas knew everything about her. He always seemed to understand things about her before she even knew them herself. But he never spoke of himself or of his feelings. He never spoke of the past. She had once asked him about his mama and papa and if he had ever been married and if he had any children. It was the first time she saw pain in his eyes; just a flash of it, then back to that mysterious little smile he always wore. “Past is past, missy. All that matters is this.” And he took a deep breath. “Remember that Charlotte.”

She held his frail body in her arms and spooned water over his cracked, dry lips. “Try to swallow this. I’m here. I’ll be here. I’m so sorry I left you.”

Jonas’ hand grasped her wrist. She saw in his face that unexpected last strength she had seen before in the eyes of Beelzebub on the night he died as he lay panting his last breath.

Charlotte leaned down and kissed Jonas’ forehead. She heard him whisper, “I seen you grow scared of life.”

He was right. It was true. She knew it was true. She sat there holding him in her arms. She watched him struggle for breath. There was nothing she could do but hold him…help him through this. There was a long moment of silence. And then she felt the spirit leave Jonas with a small rattling sigh. The light in his once twinkling eyes fading away. It was over so fast.

Alone behind the stable, Charlotte dug the grave, venting her anger, her regrets, into the shovel; biting its metal edge into the fall earth. It was almost twilight when she tamped down a simple cross of wood she’d hand carved.
Jonas Parkhurst. Friend. Father. 1847.

On her knees, exhausted, past pain and anger…she rested her chin for a moment on her hand atop the grave marker. She closed her eyes, and from the velvety darkness of her own inner spaces, felt a warm comforting hand on her shoulder pressing down. Startled, she looked up. No, no one was there.

She entered the stable one last time. It was eerie without the living presence of Jonas. His old whip hung on the hooks on the wall where he had always kept it. Charlotte reached up, took it down and placed her hand into the worn grooves of the handle. She raised it high above her head and then snapped it once. The sound reverberated in the silence.

In another moment she was ready. She scanned the stable and walked out, the whip under her arm. She would never return.

Twenty-Two

At the Bidwell Boardinghouse, breakfast was in
progress. A half dozen or so women, ranging in age from their thirties to their fifties, surrounded a long table in the fussily-decorated dining room—a room swaged and bedecked with tatting and lace. Lined up against the wall were legions of diminutive overstuffed chairs, fetchingly bowlegged, useless. At the head of the table sat the owner of the boarding house, Mrs. Alice E. Bidwell, poured to capacity into a lace-trimmed dress.

The women gossiped with each other and pecked at their little plates of food.

“Girls,” squealed a woman, entering the room with bits of paper waving in her hand.

She was coiffed and dressed in a ghastly fashion, a frock the color of dried blood, breast-plated with elaborate bugle-beads and braiding. The woman sat down on the edge of one of the little chairs and fanned herself for a moment with the papers, overcome it would seem, with the news. She regained her composure.

“Girls, I have clippings. From
Godey’s Lady’s Book
,” she announced, “and
The Libertine
.”

An expectant silence descended as the woman started to read:

FAST WOMEN

One of our most promising lady writers, Mrs. R. B. Hicks, editress of the Kaleidoscope, thus deftly describes this new variety of womankind:

“This fast age, with its fast horses and faster men, has brought about that rather fashionable monstrosity, the fast woman. They are a want of the age, these fast women, or the age would never have developed them. Fast young men wanted something to keep up with them, and, presto! We have the fast young woman.

Accordingly we see them with dresses d
é
collet
é
and bare arms, with loud-ringing laugh and questionable wit, with polka and redowa, and a thousand other accomplishments peculiar to themselves, attracting the blasé foplings, whose attention the true woman would instinctively shun. But, though they are so attended, and so applauded, and so exhilarated, there is no young fopling in their train who has not at least brains enough to sneer at them behind their backs. And thus it happens that these fast young women do not marry quite as fast as they dance. In the hymeneal race, we find them lagging behind; and, as their speed is all gotten up expressly for the hymeneal race, it must be exceedingly mortifying to them to find themselves beaten by dozens of quiet, genteel girls who never danced a polka in their lives. It is the old fable of the hare and the tortoise. We would advise them not to be quite so fast.”

The women clucked their agreement.

“Another example ladies, of this wanton shamelessness, is this article I’ve clipped, entitled,
Lives of the Nymphs
.”
She proceeded to read in ecstatic voice:

“We the Libertine newspaper, have pledged to keep a watchful eye on all brothels and their frail inmates. This sad tale is the story of a rich, successful courtesan, Amanda Green—the tall, full-formed daughter of a dressmaker, who was abducted by a man in a coach and plied with Champagne. At the crowing of the cock she was no more a maid. Abandoned by her gentleman abuser, she took up with a German piano tuner—after which there was no recourse but a life of open shame. May those who have not yet sinned, take warning by her example. She is very handsome. She resides at Mrs. Shannon’s, No. 74 West Broadway.”

Some of the women tittered. A few others began coughing behind their cloth napkins.

Charlotte was in the kitchen, pulling a baking sheet laden with golden brown biscuits out of the cast iron oven. The whole kitchen smelled of baking. It was toasty warm and inviting. A quiet peace prevailed. But then the silence was broken by the summoning ring of the dining room bell.

Charlotte sighed; she’d become, over the years, a sigher. In a moment she pushed through the door into the dining room carrying the platter of biscuits. The women were still prattling on about the newspaper clippings. She began to serve each of them.

“You see what happens when you polka,” said a woman smirking.

“Bare arms. What is young womanhood coming to,” said another. “Never catch a proper man that way.”

The majority of the women again clucked their agreement. A few sat buttering their rolls, eyes averted.

Charlotte turned and took the empty serving platter back into the kitchen. She leaned against the frame of the kitchen back door—for she’d become, over the years, also a leaner against doorframes. She let the cool air bathe away the heat inside.

Lee came around the side of the house, moving toward her with a lanky stride and the same smoldering eyes, which at the moment were looking a bit sheepish.

Lee had lived some other places for six months or for a year or for two, and then was pulled by the gravitation of an unfinished fate, back to a shaggy orbit about Charlotte for six months or for a year or for two. Once he’d been gone much longer. When he came back, he mentioned a baby boy and a wife. But with no accompanying details or repeated mention of their existence, Charlotte was not altogether sure he was being truthful with her. She had also heard unsavory rumors that he had been living with another man.

Despite her misgivings about his character and intentions, she always took him back into her life. Not sexually of course. She hadn’t let Lee touch her since that night so many years ago in the stable. She had loved him. She had been drawn to him. But somehow she had never trusted him. Her instincts, with a little help from Jonas of course, told her no good would come of it. But, Lee was the only person who knew her past, and with whom she’d traveled through time. And of course, for better or for worse, she realized he was the closest to family she might ever have in this lifetime.

Referring to his feelings about her, Lee had once explained in a drunken ramble, “there’s a hand ain’t been played yet,” and raised a glass to an uncomprehending bartender in some nameless saloon.

Charlotte watched him approach her now. He stood before her, head down, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“Now what?” she asked.

“One of the horses is walking funny.”

“I can’t keep doing your job for you. I’ve got my own work to do.”

“It’s not for me, Char. For the horse. He’s suffering. And you’re so good at fixing ’em.”

Charlotte glanced back at the pile of dirty dishes awaiting her. She let out a sigh, pushed past Lee and strode out towards the corral. Lee, behind her, smiled to himself.

In the corral, she tried to examine the hoof on the horse. She saw that there was a nail embedded deep within. The appaloosa began to nip at her. Calming him, she realized that she should not try to fix the hoof by herself. She would need to take him to the farrier. She’d probably get in trouble from Mrs. Bidwell for leaving the dirty dishes. But, nothing to be done. The horse needed tending.