As March wears on, I become my mother’s replacement. I manage the finances, prepare and cook and clean up after the meals, pay the debts, wash the laundry—hill and our own—as well as the hundred other things my mother did, the most tiresome of which is the mending, done late in the evening through strained eyes.
Mend. Patch. Sew. There is a limit to the endurance of trousers.
Ethel is my constant companion, when she isn’t in school. We sweat over the boiling laundry, and freeze while pinning it up, taking it down, pinning it up, taking it down. We stand elbow to elbow at the sink every morning and every evening, as well as a few times in between. We scrub hands and feet and pots and floors. Nan and Mary stop by when they can and do what they can.
Father and I don’t speak much, but between us, we attempt to make my mother comfortable in small ways. Father carries her from room to room to give her new prospects while I turn and plump her mattress. We keep the doors and windows tightly shut to prevent any breath of the raw spring air from reaching her ragged lungs. And I spend my nights reading medical books on consumption borrowed from the Free Library.
The books tell me nothing I don’t already know. Either bleed and purge, or rest and feed. Since she is as white as a summer cloud and weighs about as much, there’s nothing to bleed or purge. Rest she takes care of on her own—all she does is sleep, and cough. Although I do manage to pour a cup of tea and a tin of broth down her every day, her bedpan is the lightest of my sick duties.
Ethel, Clio, and Richard go to school. Joseph, Thomas, and Father go to the factory. Arlington and I stay home with her.
Sometimes I allow him to play at the end of her bed to create an illusion of daytime activity. The constant chatter he keeps up with his toys is awfully sweet. I can see she enjoys listening to him. If I’m going to sit and read, or write a letter to Amelia or Esther, I do it in her room so she feels a part of the living. Because she is living. If barely. Although most days it is obvious this attack is worse than the others, I can’t help but hold out hope she will recover. Amelia does too, and keeps me up to date with everything happening inside our Claverack classrooms. We have decided this will help me when I return, a fantasy both of us have decided to support.
I also receive kind letters from Minerva and Edna. I’m happy not to be forgotten. I read all these letters to my mother when she looks well enough to hear them, leaving out the parts where my friends beg to know if I’m ever coming back. It’s been almost two months since I left Claverack, and when I close my eyes, I have trouble imagining myself there. In contrast, I never conjure up images of my time in New Jersey, except maybe when my little brothers refuse to listen to me.
* * *
“To bed,” I holler.
Everyone is asleep but me, Father, and my two ill-behaved brothers. And I plan to be in bed as soon as I finish emptying the ashpan—my most dreaded duty and the reason I always put it off until the last. I’m easing each of the tiny piles of ash out of the pan and into the bucket as if they were fragile eggs so as not to drop one fine speck of it on my clean kitchen floor when I hear their little feet on the stairs again.
“I’ll not tell you a fifth time,” I warn.
“We’re not tired,” Richard boldly shouts.
Although the two of them must think better of it because I hear receding footsteps followed by giggles.
Father is reading, and I assume from his lack of involvement, hears nothing. He has replaced his old favorite, Mr. Henry George, with a Mr. Eugene Debs, a union leader who’s been very successful in riling up the railway men. Everyone is against Debs . . . the railway owners, the government, the church. Therefore, my father knows he’s to be championed. Out of old habit, he sometimes can’t stop himself from reading the man’s thoughts out loud to no one but Toss, who lies at his feet and is the only one of us left listening.
There is a bang, as if the boys have hit the backboard of the bed against the wall. My father must be choosing to ignore it, because it would be impossible not to hear his two youngest clomping about upstairs like unshod horses. I choose to ignore it as well.
But then there is a tremendous crash, and I fumble my full ladle of ash, sending it up into the air where it spins before clattering to the floor, dusting everything within five feet, including me.
Growling like a dog, I stomp toward the stairs trailing ash.
“Get to bed!”
“No!”
“Richard. Arly. To bed!”
“No!”
“ ‘Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization,’ ” my father quotes from his reading. He is laughing. Laughing. And this is not funny at all.
Exasperated, I fly back into the kitchen, take one look at the ash all over everything, and grab my overcoat.
“I’m going out.”
“No,” he says, without looking up from his page. “It’s late.”
“No?” I ask. “No, as in you won’t allow it? My free-thinking father says no to his daughter opening the door and walking outside? Well, in the spirit of furthering civilization, I’m leaving.”
He looks up from his book. “No, as in no,” he says. “Don’t I always say what I mean?”
“I see how it is,” I snarl. “How it’s always been. You are a man of words, words, words. You may say what you mean, but none of your words mean anything. Because you don’t mean anything.” Without a moment’s hesitation, I swing the door open and walk out, leaving it gaping—knowing I’ve cut him deeply, hoping like hell I’ve cut him deeply.
I’m through the front gate when I hear him slam the door and lock it. The snap of the bolt echoes somewhere deep inside me. I don’t stop, or turn around, but stomp off down the street toward Market because this is the direction my feet are used to and my head is not thinking . . . it’s steaming.
He has betrayed me. All his words, his freedoms . . . I thought he was giving them to me. I thought they were mine. But he wasn’t giving me anything. In fact, he was taking it away, like he took Henry and Emma and this town, and even her.
My anger requires six long blocks to cool from white hot to red. And another three before I can stop gnashing my teeth.
My sisters, my brothers, they’ve always seen him for who he is. But I believed him. Even after Henry, I believed him.
I still believe him.
This last thought blows out the rest of my anger, leaving me empty and cold. I stop and look around. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own head that for a moment, nothing looks familiar. I’ve walked far enough west that I’ve actually left town, wandering out into a very dark world.
“Where am I?”
The question hangs in the air, making me acutely aware of both my aching feet and my aching heart.
I establish my bearings and start toward home, each tap of my boot against hard earth reminding me of the snap of the bolt in the door. Surely, he unlocked it before he went up to bed. Surely, he wouldn’t leave me outside all night . . . in March, no less. The more I consider it, the less I worry. He wouldn’t.
But he would. And he did. The door is locked.
I knock lightly. I know he’s in his chair. Waiting. He will open it and lecture me.
But he doesn’t.
I knock harder, the sound churning up fear from the bottom of my stomach like a whisk stirring up gravy drippings.
Still nothing. Has he gone mad?
I sit down on the steps and hold my head in my hands to stop it from feeling so strange. He has locked me out. Locked me out. For what? For taking a walk? For not listening to him? I’ve spent my entire life listening to him. I’m the only one who ever did. I listened and I repeated and I learned and I worshipped. I worshipped him.
How dare he.
I will the anger back again. But it doesn’t come. And I’m left shivering on the steps.
My choices are limited. The only room I could possibly climb into is my mother’s, but I will not wake her from her sickbed sneaking through her window. The Abbotts are less than two miles. All uphill. Mary’s room is in the servant’s wing off the back of the house. She’ll be awake reading. And if not, she’s a light sleeper.
By the time I reach the Abbotts I’m stiff with cold. The warm night is still a March night. I use a branch I found on the way up the hill to scratch at Mary’s pane.
She looks out, and when she sees me in the yard her eyes go wide.
I meet her round the back door, and follow her silently to her room. She closes the door and helps me out of my coat.
She loans me nightclothes and tucks me into her bed. I pretend to fall asleep before she joins me. I don’t want to explain. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
I lie awake for what feels longer than any of the days I spent inside my New Jersey classroom, listening to the strange clicks, creaks, and squeaks of the Abbott house. It’s been forever since I slept next to Mary’s warm body, but the familiarity of her can’t dispel how out of place I feel.
Where do I want to be right now? Claverack? The old cabin? Across the room from Ethel? The trouble is, I don’t want to be in any of these places, including the one I’m in.
But I will go home. I have to. For her.
* * *
I wake while it’s still dark.
“Maggie?” Mary asks sleepily.
“Go back to sleep.”
She doesn’t listen, just climbs out of her warm bed and we dress together. She hands me a clean towel, and I wash my face with cold water from a basin on her dresser. I don’t bother with my braid.
She lets me out the same door I came in. “I’ll stop by tonight,” she says.
“No,” I tell her. “I’m fine.”
She doesn’t say anything, but I know she’ll be by tonight. I know my sister.
The walk down the hill wakes me up. The door is unlocked. I’m boiling the water for coffee before anyone is even out of bed.
He is the first one awake.
He stands in the kitchen behind me while I work. I know he is there. And he knows I know he is there. Yet we say nothing to each other. The door to the connection we shared has been closed for so long, and now, I have bolted it shut.