Together Apart (12 page)

"And?"

"She didn't make the connection. Narrow thinking, that's what's wrong with the world today. Lumping people together like so many stamped-tin soldiers. That's ridiculous. No two of us are exactly alike, no matter what language we speak, what clothes we wear, where we lay our heads down to sleep at night."

I said "amen" to that.

Mrs. Tinka might not have been a fortuneteller, but she had another knack that drew the town women to the resting room. Mrs. Tinka concocted the best tasting bread. So good tasting that I'd once eaten half a loaf at a sitting. No one but the Tinka women knew what went into that bread—a secret family recipe. The crust was crispy, and the center was soft. Hannah thought there might be a touch of dill, Eliza guessed garlic, and my ma was sure she detected molasses. Mrs. Tinka started out baking five loaves for market days, then ten, then twenty, using both her oven and the one in Eliza's kitchen, and still there were women who went away empty-handed. Eliza finally had to set a limit, one loaf per customer, to keep the women from squabbling about who'd been first in line. Mrs. Tinka used the bread money to pay down the debt owed to Doc Goodman.

Mr. Tinka, like me, dared not set foot off Eliza's property. Sheriff Tulley had been the third person to pester Eliza about the Tinkas. I didn't spy through the transom that day, didn't dare move, so I heard the story secondhand from Eliza, which was more and more the case. Life outside the print shop was becoming like a storybook—a book with many of the pages ripped out. Pages about me!

What Eliza told me of the sheriff's visit was this—allowing that the Tinkas were guests of Eliza's and hadn't yet committed a crime, he'd look the other way until Carlos was well enough to travel, so long as Mr. Tinka stayed put. "I've heard tell that those people will stoop so low as to steal the last penny from a blind man's tin cup," the sheriff had said.

"
Some
of their kind, perhaps," Eliza had replied. "As would some of
our
kind, but not the Tinkas. My late husband held Mr. Tinka in the highest regard, said he was a man of honor, a man to be admired for standing tall in the face of ignorant slurs against his character."

***

I steered clear of Mr. Tinka those first couple of days. I was still hiding out, after all, and he'd caught me wearing a dress. And I wasn't surprised when he came to me, his face as serious as Sunday and only inches away from my own, saying that he'd string me up if I so much as looked crosswise at Rosa. Those were almost the same words Hannah's pa had spat at me the morning after the blizzard. At the rate I was going, I'd be a bachelor the rest of my life.

I told Mr. Tinka that he didn't have a thing to worry about, that I was saving all my sweet talk for another girl. After that he befriended me, and I was mighty grateful. It'd been months since I'd so much as talked to another fellow. Evenings, after the Tinkas had eaten their supper and we'd eaten ours, he'd lend a hand to the finishing work on my boat. While we worked, he taught me a few of his foreign words. The Tinkas were "rom"; Eliza, Hannah, and I were "gajo." "Dae" was mother. "Posta" was sacrifice.

There was another thing Mr. Tinka did that earned my thanks. To, as he put it, "scratch the moving-on itch," he mowed the grass, pruned the shrubs, and chopped the wood. The next time Rusty Farley showed up there was nothing for him to do but sit on the wagon seat the whole two hours his ma was in the resting room. Eliza invited him inside, but Rusty would have none of it. My regard for Rusty raised a notch when I heard that. No self-respecting boy his age, given a choice, would have set foot inside the resting room, broiling sun or not.

Like me, Hannah was-but-wasn't there during those weeks of late July and early August. She did her share of the work—dusted and scrubbed, collected the monies on market days, and set type for the gazette—but she wasn't there in her thoughts. Her thoughts were tied up in the crumpled papers she carried and in the stubby pencil she wore above her ear. Whenever she found herself with a minute to spare, she wrote. And even when she wasn't writing on her paper, she was writing in her head. I'd catch her staring blank-eyed at a wall or drifting away between forkfuls of her supper.

Hannah wouldn't tell me or anyone else for that matter what the play was about, but if one paid attention—and when it came to Hannah I always paid attention—you could figure it out. My first clue came one evening. She'd left her bedroom door ajar, and I just happened to glance in as I passed by. She was standing at the window and had twisted herself up in the long, lacy curtain. The curtain's crocheted pattern was the giveaway; the weave looked like a swirl of snowflakes.

Another evening, it being my turn for kitchen duty, I was up to my elbows in dishwater when I heard Hannah humming a happy tune out in the main hall. I peeked, and there was Hannah, dancing with the dust mop. Not dancing free like she'd danced across the prairie, but swaying enough to stir her skirts. I wished later that I hadn't peeked, because when Hannah caught me grinning at her, she got that startled look of a fox caught in the hen house, stopped her dancing, and went back to hunting dust furries with her mop.

Then there was the night of the storm. I'd been in the stable, working on my boat, when a gust of wind, the smell of rain on its breath, slammed the stable doors shut. When I opened the doors again, lightning forked white-hot against the black sky. I went looking for Hannah, upstairs and down, all the while the thunderclaps rattled the windows like cold chatters teeth. I was checking the parlor for a second time when a lightning flash lit the window to the veranda. There was Hannah. Bracing herself with her hands, she leaned out over the rail. I lost her to darkness, then another flash lit her again. The way she stood there so still, she might have been one of those carved lady figureheads that decorated the prows of the old-time ships I'd seen pictured in one of the Judge's boat-building books.

I joined Hannah then, leaned out over the rail and tried to feel what she felt. Tried to imagine what she was imagining. All I felt was rain splatting against my face. All I imagined was Mr. Richards hollering at me, saying that I didn't have a brain enough to know when to come in out of the rain.

After a bit Hannah turned to me and said, "I have a favor to ask."

"Name it."

"Teach me how to spit."

If I hadn't been holding the rail, I might have fallen overboard. "Girls don't..." I started to say.

"You'd better not let Eliza hear you talk like that."

So I taught Hannah to spit, with the wind first, then into the wind, right there on the veranda, right there in the middle of that thunderstorm.

J
UST BEFORE DAWN ON A RAINY AUGUST MORNING, THE FLICKER
of lamplight shadow-dancing across my papers, I leaned back against my pillow and laid my pencil aside. The play I'd wanted to write, needed to write, was finished. Done.

I slipped out of bed, then padded down the stairs, careful not to disturb the sleepers. I crept past the portrait of Madeline Moore with her wise, watchful eyes. Past the hush of the fern-filled parlor, the Judge's library with its wall of books, into and through Eliza's kitchen and laundry. On reaching the resting room, I built a fire in the potbelly stove then settled into one of the rocking chairs, cradling the play in my lap. Using the fire for light, I reread the first page, with its narrator telling of children setting off for school, ankle-deep in fresh fallen snow, then, like the curtain opening, I fed the page to the fire. The edges curled, caught, burst into flames. I held my hands over the rising heat, warming them.

Into the flames, page by page, like curtains opening and closing, the scenes played out. Page after page until there were no pages left in my lap.

Ash and smoke—the only possible end. I'd written
my
story, not the working girls' story, not the story of the people who would attend the play. No one had been spared the blizzard's fury, be they trapped outside or in. I think be fore I'd finished writing the first page I knew the play would never, could never, be performed, but once I'd begun, buried myself waist-deep in its drifts, there was no turning back.

I told no one that I'd burned the first play, not even Isaac. It wouldn't have done for Isaac to know the whole of it because I'd written everything I remembered. About how close Isaac had held me and how warm he had made me feel. About not wanting to die. And the next morning wishing that I had.

When anyone asked, and Dru asked every day, how the play was coming along, I smiled and said, "Nicely." This was a stretch but not a lie. Minutes after feeding the first play to the fire, I returned to my room, took up a fresh sheet of paper, and began writing the play the working girls would perform. A play that would belong to all.

I finished the second play in little more than a week. The following Wednesday evening, the working girls pulled their chairs into the usual circle, and I handed out the typeset scripts. Then, after briefly summarizing the scenes and cast of characters, I asked for a show of hands of those interested in the two roles that would require more memorization and extra time for practice. Dru, who had been sitting on the very edge of her chair, raised her hand so fast she was soon sitting on the floor.

"Anyone else?" I asked. I looked around the circle for volunteers. As if suddenly distracted by a piece of lint on their skirts or a creepy-crawly on the ceiling, no eyes met mine and no hands shot up, which would have been particularly hard for Imogene and Gertrude, because they were sitting on theirs. Then Clarice bent a wrist and raised a finger.

Dru, still sitting on the floor, arm still raised, looked up to Clarice. "Would you mind terribly if I took the villainous role?"

Clarice's grin said it all.

The remaining roles were decided by drawing slips of paper from one of Elizas many hats, save for one. Rosa, with her parents' permission, had agreed to dance in one of the later scenes. I drew the role of the narrator, which suited me just fine.

We went through the play that first night, sitting in our chairs, each girl reading her assigned lines from the script. There was a lot of giggling—from everyone but Dru. Dru was stone-faced serious and slipped into her character as if into a pair of perfectly fitting though sharply pointed shoes.

Every Wednesday evening after that was given over to rehearsals. Each rehearsal brought changes to the script, until, when I finally got it right, there were as many handwritten lines as there were typeset ones. And each rehearsal brought changes in Dru. It was as if once in character the real Dru disappeared—poof! She'd snap at the other girls when they missed a line or exited left instead of right, and she was especially hard on Clarice, the one girl least likely to complain. It got so bad on one particular evening that I walked up to Dru, pretended to rap on her forehead as if it were a door, and asked, "Dru, are you in there?"

Dru stiffened, but just as quickly relaxed. "I'm sorry, Hannah. I've been awful, haven't I? I just want everything to be perfect, but I promise I'll be good from here on out."

She wasn't as snappish with the other girls after that, though her eyes got a lot of exercise from rolling about.

***

Two weeks before the play was to begin, the handbills had been printed, posted at Fowler's, and sent home with every woman, town or farm, who had visited the resting room or shopped at our market. The costumes, stitched together by some of the regular visitors to the resting room, were nearing readiness.

***

One week before the play was to begin, the stage had been set. The raised floor in the resting room, from which the Judge had once passed down his verdicts, worked perfectly. When the girls weren't on stage, they could slip into the laundry or indoor necessary to change costumes or wait for their next cue without being seen by the audience.

We'd taken down the heavy velvet draperies that hung at the wide windows in Elizas parlor and strung them on a taut rope above the front edge of the stage. Mr. Tinka and Isaac had threaded and looped the rope about a series of pulleys, allowing the curtains to be opened or closed, half to one side and half to the other. Bed sheets, wires threaded through the hems, hung at either side and across the back. At stage left the sheets draped around a paneless window that hung, and sometimes swayed, from wires attached to the ceiling; at stage right, a door was mounted in a footed frame Isaac had ingeniously designed and hammered together.

***

The Sunday afternoon before the play was to begin, I slipped out to the barn where Papa was tending to Hap's injured hoof. I knelt in the straw near him, drew in a deep breath, and then said, "I'd like it if you could come to Eliza's on Wednesday evening, to see our play."

Papa didn't turn to me.

"I wrote the play, Papa, and I'd like for you to be there."

Still nothing.

"The play is about the blizzard. It's about how hard it was on everyone."

Papa stopped salving. His spine stiffened. "It's not right to make light of folks dying."

"The play isn't like that, Papa. I've tried hard to honor those who lost their lives, but it's also about those who sur vived, about life going on. You'll see for yourself if you come."

He reached up and patted Hap's haunch. "Hay will be ready to cut come Wednesday. Likely be in the fields until dark."

I got up off my knees then, brushed away the straw clinging to my skirts, and said, "Guess I'd better be heading back."

I was almost to the barn door when Papa called out, "Tell James I said he should hitch up Hazard and drive you back to town. Sun's setting earlier now, and a girl oughtn't be walking the roads after dark."

It took me a moment to steady myself.

***

Two evenings before the play was to begin, Isaac's mother walked into the resting room. She carried a well-worn leather valise that was nearly the color of the angry bruise on her cheek. I hurried her into the print shop, where Isaac and Eliza were finishing up the play programs. Isaac, on seeing the bruise, became a bull in a cramped corral. He paced back and forth, repeatedly ramming one fisted hand into the palm of the other and saying, "I'll bust his jaw."