It’s because of the chicken thieves, he said.
We are safer in town, he said.
It’s my decision, he said.
But I saw the look on my mother’s face when she read the letter. And I watched her take in the old cookstove, the opened front doorway scattered with discarded boots that none of us had worn since summer began, and the sun streaming in through the dirty windows. I saw the look—and I knew. We were being evicted.
It seemed even three blower dogs and a part-time maid didn’t make enough money to keep twelve skinny citizens in a run-down cabin . . . and we were soon to be thirteen. My mother, after another near-death experience, was pregnant again.
We had until the first of October to leave, but it was decided we would move out before school began. The morning of the move my father was off looking for a job. But we didn’t need his help. With my mother as foreman, Thomas and Joseph taking care of the marble-topped table, and the rest of us toting the clothes and pots and dishes out to the wagon, we packed up every button and stocking belonging to a Higgins in less than five hours.
I was thankful for the gray sky and the muggy rain. It was like a gift to have something to get puckered over. When the rain picked up, Thomas threw an old blanket over the pile and together we tied it down.
“Damn this weather,” he complained.
“I like it,” I said, happy to be disagreeing with Thomas on a day like today. It made things feel more normal.
My mother and Ethel climbed into the wagon with Richard and Arlington. The rest of us would walk. Our new home was above my father’s shop in town. I had no idea how this would work, but I was sure my mother would figure it out . . . as she did everything else.
The babies settled on Ethel’s and Mother’s laps, and Joseph gave a tug on Tam. Thomas and Clio walked up ahead of the wagon. But I wasn’t ready to go.
“I’ll stay behind and help Nan and Mary clean up.”
Nan and Mary had been commissioned to clean the cabin for whomever the new renters were. In the next few hours the only home I’d ever known would be cleaner than I’d ever known it.
“No, you won’t, Margaret Louise,” my mother said. “You’ll say good-bye to your sisters and then catch up.”
I was stunned. An offer to help in the Higgins household was never turned down.
She noticed my surprise and added, “I need you when we get into town.”
I wanted to believe her.
“Margaret Louise!” she shouted. And as usual, I understood her full meaning. Do as I’ve told you to do. Say good-bye and follow us to town. And don’t be longer than necessary.
I watched the wagon for a few moments. Mostly because I was afraid to turn around and see it . . . the emptiness of what once was full.
Too full.
But now I ached for the fullness—hens squawking and dogs barking, flapping laundry and teetering toddlers, the lantern with its broken handle. I didn’t want to see it all missing.
Nan’s and Mary’s muffled voices floated from the house.
I turned around.
The dead grass by the front door looked browner without any buckets or shovels sitting in it. A feather caught my eye as it drifted over the empty henhouse fence. Everything was gone.
I’d spent the last few days packing it up, and all morning hauling it out, so you’d think it shouldn’t be a shock. But it wasn’t over then. It was now.
Nan came out of the house with a pan of dirty water and dumped it outside the front door. “Maggie,” she smiled, clearly startled.
“I wanted to stay behind and help, but Mother said no.”
“Mary and I can do it,” she said, recovering her composure. “And I’m sure Mother will need you when you get . . .” She stopped, not knowing exactly what to call where we were heading.
“Nan!” Mary hollered.
“I’m outside,” Nan responded. Adding, “With Maggie.”
Mary popped to the door. “Hey, Maggie. I thought you were going with Mother?” She looked worried.
“She is,” Nan told her without taking her eyes from mine. “Mother needs her help once they arrive at the shop.”
The empty yard was strange. The quiet was strange. And now Mary and Nan were strange. I needed all this strangeness to stop. I must have looked exactly how I felt because Nan dropped her pan into the grass and hurried over.
“Now, now, Maggie,” she said, wrapping her arms around me. “Everything is fine.”
Fine. Fine was a bunch of gum. It was what we said to each other when nothing was fine. When fine was a long way off.
I sniffed and pushed Nan away. “May I go in and see it?”
“Don’t pile on the agony, Maggie,” Nan said.
“Let her see it,” said Mary. “It’ll give her some peace.”
And because Mary said it, I aimed to make it true. I stepped through the cabin door, and the emptiness of the room crawled into my belly. There was nothing but a broom and some buckets and rags. It didn’t look a thing like ours. Not like the place where Joseph chased John into the edge of the cookstove and busted open a gash in his head the size of a barn door. Or the place where I held tiny little Ethel on my lap for the very first time. Or the place where Henry was alive. Mary and Nan were scrubbing it all away. And for the first time I realized even the stars at night weren’t permanent. Something you’d think my little Henry Higgins would have taught me.
“Say good-bye now, and catch up to the others,” Mary instructed.
“Good-bye,” I said, because she told me to, and then I walked out fast, not wanting Mary to know that seeing it didn’t give me peace.
* * *
I was tuckered out by the time I caught sight of the wagon—still piled high with our life—standing outside of my father’s monument shop. Joseph and Thomas were hauling out the chest that always sat at the foot of my parent’s bed.
“There she is,” Thomas snorted when he spotted me. “You sure are all-fired lazy, Maggie. Making us do all the work out here in this heat while you drag your feet about town.”
I stopped and looked up at him standing in the back of the wagon. It reminded me of another wagon . . . filled with children clamoring for bananas.
“Not going to get all streaked at me?” Thomas asked.
And when I didn’t, he told Joseph to hold on, jumped out of the back of the wagon, and walked over to stand in front of me.
“Are you going to hug me?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to have to,” he replied.
“If you hug me, Thomas Higgins, it means things are much worse than I thought.”
He crossed his arms in front of him and laughed. “You are a bad egg, Maggie Higgins.”
“I’m about soured on holding the other end of this chest,” Joseph growled.
Thomas thumped me on the head and then turned and jumped onto the wagon, getting back to work. It was what my brothers did. Work. Hard. Like my mother. And my sisters.
I pulled my mother’s fire irons from under the blanket and placed them by the door to the shop. And then reached in again and yanked out her kettle and blacking brushes, creating a little pile by the door. Though I was sweating and tired, I kept working.
Ethel bounded down the side steps from the room over my father’s shop, our new home.
“Let’s be a team,” I told her. “I’ll pile things here and you take them up to Mother.”
Ethel loved the idea.
We unpacked like this until it was so dark that I couldn’t tell if the wagon was empty, and needed to search the bottom of it with my hands.
“I’ll take care of Tam and the wagon,” Joseph said. “You go on up.”
There was nothing left to keep me, and so I headed up the stairs.
It looked like sheet-cleaning day, as my mother had hung them up to create walls in the single large room. Thomas dragged things about under my mother’s direction while she breastfed Arlington, sitting at the marble-topped table lit up with candles. Clio played with Richard next to her in his high chair.
“Come see our room,” cried Ethel.
“Wash up for bed, first,” Mother said.
I looked around for someplace to wash.
“Basin’s on the shelf.”
Ethel and I washed our faces and hands, and then wiped up with a clean rag hanging from a nail next to the shelf.
It will be fine. This will be fine. See how she has the rag ready. Everything will be fine.
Ethel took my hand and led me toward a dark corner where our bed was set up . . . without sheets. Mary’s bed did not sit next to it.
“Mother?”
“Yes, Margaret Louise?”
“Where is Mary’s bed?”
“Mary will be sleeping at the Abbotts.”
I swayed in the dark, reaching out for the wooden post of the wall to steady myself.
“And Nan?” I choked.
“Your sisters have taken jobs on the hill.”
Her voice was strong, her tone final. I didn’t ask anything more, but climbed out of my clothes and into my nightclothes and under the blanket next to Ethel.
“Maggie?” Ethel whimpered.
“Everything is fine,” I whispered.