“So you’re just up and leaving me?” Tillie McQuire asked with her hands on her hips.
“I could probably send you money in six months to come out there.” He gave her a pained glance over his shoulder. Blocking the light from the window, he appeared engrossed with the view through the dirty glass. “The first part of my new job is undercover work. I wouldn’t have a way to meet with you.”
“Undercover?” What does that mean? Tillie wondered. Sometimes he made little sense.
“I’m going to be a spy,” he said with an edge of impatience.
“Oh. Isn’t that dangerous?”
“All law work’s got its share of danger to it. The secret is not letting them figure out who you are.” He shrugged his shoulders under the galluses crossed behind his back.
“What are you spying on?”
“I really can’t say.”
“You are leaving me …” She fought back the knot in her throat. “And it’s so damn secret you can’t say a thing?”
He turned on his heels and looked at her with a newfound hardness in his silver eyes. They were more like steel than blue. She felt them like daggers stabbing her aching heart. She wet her lips and clutched the chenille robe tighter around her body.
“Tillie, we once promised to be honest with each other. You have your job.” He held out his hands and spread his fingers as if in surrender. “I have mine. You didn’t want to give this up and become my wife.”
She agreed to his statement about marriage with a nod. The deep-rooted sentiment she felt at losing him could not
overcome her fear of being a scrubwoman on her knees. That was being a wife to her. No. She would take her chances on her back in this bed. Housewife. Slave. No. Never. She closed her eyes to the idea of him leaving her and tears ran down her face.
“I’ve offered to find a preacher.”
“You did, b-but I never counted on losing you!”
“I told the major I would take this job.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “What do you expect of me next?”
“It must pay well?”
“Yes. There’s a good salary. We could live well on it.”
“Get out!” she screamed, unable to control her remorse a moment longer. “Go be a spy—I don’t know what …” She pointed to the door and stomped her foot. “Get away from me!”
“Tillie?”
“Don’t Tillie me!” In a rush, she grabbed all his things, handed them to him, then shoved him out the room and slammed the door in his face. She braced her shoulder against it to hold it shut, in case he even tried to reenter it. Tears streamed down her face. There were no sounds beyond the thin door. She pressed her ear to it—hoping he would come back. Beg. Plead with her. Relent his plans to go out there. Nothing. Then her knees buckled and she crumpled to the floor.
The one man in her life who never lied. Who had even offered her respectability and she had rejected it. She’d sent him away and he’d left her life … forever. Why had she told him no?
She knew the answer was in the bitter memories of her mother’s dreary life, and her own growing up. Bitterly she recalled how her mother slaved over wood fires, beat clothes clean with rocks, carried crying babies on her hip, and did without food, dry shelter, and adequate clothes. Did without those things that Tilie’s profession provided. Sure, she and her sisters in this house of sin were an abomination in the eyes of society, but where were those church sisters when all that she had to eat were her own tears?
In the depth of her self-pity she paused and heard her own wails that sounded like a pack of wolves over the ridge. Her body felt far removed from her mind. She knew her soul must be riding on a cloud, the one she rode as a girl to escape the brutal lashes of a peach branch that her father delivered at the slightest notion.
“I’m a going to drive the devil out you, Tillie May,” he would say, then roughly bent her over his knee. Those words stung her as hard as the lashes did on her bare legs. Her mother’s protests were far away and ignored. Afterward, her mother got a severe whipping as well for interfering.
An empty belly and shivering cold was how she recalled her life growing up in Ohio and Kentucky. If her father ever grew a good crop, she couldn’t recall it. They had hail, grasshoppers, tornados, floods. She saw more of their summer-long efforts washed away than she could ever recall harvesting.
Moving, always moving to some better place that was usually a sorrier one than the last. Rats wouldn’t have lived in some of those hovels. A crippled mule to farm with, they never had anything worthwhile in her entire life. Never had a single thing anyone would want to steal. She and her mother worked all day making firewood and having to sell it for pennies to buy food and not having fuel of their own to cook with or for heat.
She found a kerchief in her robe pocket and blew her nose, loud enough to bring her back to reality, and to the fact she was upstairs in Molly Mather’s Cathouse, sitting on the floor. Someone was knocking on her door above her head.
“Yes?” She waited. Hoping, expecting, to hear his deep reply.
“It’s me, Bonny. Are you all right?”
“He’s gone?” Tillie asked.
“Ain’t no one out here but me. Can I come in? You sound upset, Tillie.”
“I’ll be fine, Bonny. But, Bonny?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
“I’s just concerned about you.”
“I know. Thank you,” Tillie said, unable to face anyone over her losses. For certain she couldn’t talk about it to another whore and not cry some more.
She gathered herself up and threw herself across the bed. How could she bury herself in it? Deep enough, be far enough away, she would never think of that hard-bellied cowboy ever again.
A knock on the door awoke her. It was dark outside, she sat on the bed. How long had she slept? Dull minded, she pushed the loose hair from her face.
“Yes?”
“It’s me, Molly. I have a man out here.”
She went to the door and cracked it. In the flickering hall light she could see his bald head. The banker, Arthur Coyle. She wet her lips and cleared her throat.
“Why, Arthur, how nice of you to come by and see me,” she said.
Looking uncomfortable standing at Molly’s side, he forced a smile on his round shiny face. Tillie strode out in grand style, took him by the arm, and led him back into her room with a nod to her boss that she would care for the little man.
“How have you been?” she asked him, closing the door.
“Oh, except for the complaint in my leg, fine.” He stood looking around.
“Well, little Arthur, let Tillie look at that sore leg.” She began to remove his coat.
“Yes, yes,” he said gleefully, allowing her to undress him like a child.
Tillie drew a deep breath up her slender nose. He smelled of talc and barber’s aftershave. After he left her, she knew he would go and take another bath. No doubt so that his dowdy wife could not scent out his transgressions. Poor Arthur. He needed a mother and a mistress, a role that, according to him, his wife avoided like the plague.
“I was so afraid you would be busy,” he said in his littleboy voice.
“No. Never for you,” she cooed, unbuttoning his shirt.
Grateful for the distraction of this customer, she looked with longing over Arthur’s bald head at the starlit windowpane. Wherever you are Luther Haskell, I hope you’re happy.