Hers the Kingdom (2 page)

     I have been, always, a sharer of secrets, a listener. Very early in my life I came to understand that the keeping of secrets was a talent that could be developed, a valuable accomplishment for someone in my position.

     
My position:
I am afflicted with congenital dislocation of the hip, a defect that is seven times more common in females than in males and twice as frequent in children born in winter as in those born in summer. The significance of these associations is obscure, the doctors say. Nonetheless, I am winter's child, the maiden aunt, the sharer of secrets. Do not misunderstand. There are advantages to my position.

     I am Lena Kerr, sister to Willa Kerr Reade.

     And I know most of what happened, though I do not pretend to understand why certain things happened.

     Kit and Porter, perhaps, will want to know, should know. (
Perhaps . . . should . . .
I equivocate, even now. I am not sure what is best, or right.
Best
and
right;
I am not sure what they mean.)

     What I know is this: I am afraid for them not to know.

     Not to know
what?
That those who have loved them best have deceived them? It has always seemed to me that love is not possible without deception. (I have never much cared for the Brownings' brand of love. The Irishman Yeats is more to my liking, as "Crazy Jane Grown Old" says:
Love is like the lion's tooth
.) Still, I have been party to the deception, and it gives me no peace.

     I think I was meant to tell the story. Why else would I have kept the notebooks all these years? Willa would say, I suppose, that I am a born keeper of books, that if I could not write it down I would doubt it had happened. I did keep my notebooks conscientiously, considering each Monday of my life if the past week had offered anything worth recording, only now and then interrupting the schedule for momentous events.

     The notebooks will be invaluable in correcting for the vagaries of memory. It is odd, really, how perfectly I can remember a few hours in the spring of my seventeenth year, the smell of fresh-plowed earth as I walked along a lane on my parents' farm in Illinois. I remember how full I felt, how close to bursting I was with the joy of knowing that I, too, would be going to California. I remember the color of a bird sitting on a fencepost. Why, then,
can I remember nothing of the days that came before, and very little of the trip West? I have also discovered that memory cannot be trusted when it comes to the great events—so often Willa's memories have differed from mine when we compare them from the distance of years. She recounts details that I have long forgotten, if ever I knew them. And I am sure that she thinks I make up my memories.

     I am trying to establish a case for an orderly mind. You will want to come as close to the truth as I can take you. One more point: I have never been without pain. I tell you this only because pain has a practical purpose. It filters the foolishness, especially false romantic notions. (You have only to read Owen's diaries to know what I mean. They are full of gratuitous nonsense, which was not at all Owen's way.) It is not that people who live with pain are any more honest, it is simply that they have not the patience for romantic notions. You should know that.

     Have I explained why I am writing this story? Perhaps not. I will occupy myself with the telling of the tale anyway. And then I will decide, one day soon, one day before Porter leaves again (and he will leave, I know that) if he is to know all that I know.

     He will not be home long, I think. The dateline in this morning's paper read: "With the Finnish Forces near Viipuri." The story said: "Three hundred of an attacking force of nine hundred Russian soldiers were reported to be lying dead, frozen in ten below zero weather in this sector of the Finnish Mannerheim Line."

     Mr. Yeats was right.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned . . .

     But I cannot let my mind turn to that. Not yet.

     For now it is enough that Porter is coming home.

From the Prairie to the Ocean, 1887 - 1892

FROM THE PORCH I could see the buggy make the turn past the church spire at the Four Corners, a full mile away, a long plume of dust marking its passage. Gibralter, my brother, would be holding the reins high and firm, moving the team along at his own pace, steady and regular. He would be talking to the horses, but by now the visitor—the man sitting alongside him in the buggy—would have discovered that while Gibralter might talk to animals, he was not so inclined to converse with humans.

     The visitor would have made a few efforts at conversation, to be sure. He might have remarked on the weather, on the freshness of the spring day, on the sudden new growth, everywhere. Perhaps he admired the team, the matched bays that pulled the buggy. If he knew anything at all about the handling of horses, he would admire Gib's way with the team. And Gib would have answered, "yez," if he answered anything. It would have been a silent trip from the railroad station at Springfield. I hoped the visitor had been able to enjoy those twenty full miles of silence; I hoped he was not the sort made uncomfortable by silence. There was, I felt, a certain peace
in riding in the buggy with Gib at the reins, a steady and lovely rhythm. I squinted to try to get some notion of the man. He was big, I could tell that, because he sat nearly as tall as my brother, who was six and one-half feet tall, like most of the Kerr men.

     Mama said nothing, but she was watching. Now that the buggy was in sight, the rising tensions of the past hours were converting to anger. Her lips had begun to tremble.

     "She promised," my mother said with a tremor in her voice, "your sister promised."

     
Your
sister, she had said; it was an accusation. Willa was not here to meet the visitor, the man from the West who was coming to see her, coming all the way from California by way of Denver, Colorado, and it was my fault that Willa was not here because she was
my sister.

     She could not control Willa, so she would control me in her stead.

     
Please, Willa
, I prayed silently,
please come now while there is time.

     I stood watching that time diminish as the buggy drew near; we were on the long porch that ran the length of the front of the house, and curved to the side. (Grandmother had called it a "verandah" or, sometimes, "the piazza," but Mama insisted on "porch," which I always thought defined the differences between the two women.) My grandfather built his house on the only rise in miles, a big white Victorian frame surrounded, now, by elm and maple and hawthorn trees, looking out over the rich black flatness of the northern Illinois prairie, The Grand Prairie, as it was called.

     We watched as the two riders seemed to float above the hedge of honeysuckle that lined the dirt lane and concealed the buggy, so that it seemed as if the men were rolling along, side by side, supported by air. Soon we would be able to hear the soft, low rumble of wheels on dirt. Waiting for it, straining for the sound, seemed only to emphasize the silence. Mama heaved herself out of the big wicker chair that carried the imprint of her body in its sagging cushions.

     "Burma! Malta! Servia!" she shouted to the Little Boys who had begun to tumble on the grassy patch that stretched down from the porch. Long grass stains were beginning to appear on their blouses. The train was to have arrived at noon. Mama had determined that the earliest Gibralter and the visitor could appear at the farm would be mid-aftemoon. We had been waiting for two hours, all of us except Pa and the Big Boys who were plowing the north section. The three Middle Boys had been put to work in the carriage barn, near at hand. (We called them that—the three Big Boys were seventeen, nineteen and twenty. The Middle Boys were eleven, thirteen and fourteen, and the Little Boys were four, six and eight.) Every one of us, all nine of the boys and me, had been accounted for—everyone but Willa.

     The sounds of the buggy made my stomach tighten. I felt, for the first time, a surge of real anger at my sister. She should have been here. I was surprised at Willa; I felt my face begin to flush.

     Gibralter stopped at the lower gate, climbed out and swung it open. His passenger climbed down too, so that Gib could drive the team through and he could close the gate behind him. Standing in the shadows of the porch, I cupped my hand over my eyes to get a better look. Mama pushed my hand down roughly and I winced, feeling her mood darken.

     She paced heavily across the porch, dressed in serge and bombazine, sweating in the unseasonable warmth of the spring day. The buggy began the last drive up through the avenue of poplars Grandmother had insisted Grandfather plant forty years before, to remind her of a country house in France which she had visited in her youth.

     The trees were in new leaf, a bright green caught by the late afternoon light. It must be, I thought, a lovely sight, even to such a well-traveled man as our visitor, Mr. Owen Reade. In the early days an artist had drawn the farm for one of the state almanacs; the style was primitive, the viewpoint aerial, as if the artist was hanging from a cloud. And yet there was something charming
about the big house, bare against the spread of the lands, the fences marching neatly all about.

     It was the finest farm in that part of the state. Grandfather had settled the land, had cleared it, had built the house for his cultivated Eastern bride, had, even, added a music room on the third floor with a cherry-wood piano.

     I tried to imagine how we would appear to Mr. Reade, the silent Gibralter sent to meet him at the train and then the small, bulky, restless woman marching up and down the porch, followed tentatively by a crippled girl with hands that would not be still.

     
What if he thinks me to be Willa?
The idea paralyzed me. But he would have expected Willa to be there, and I was the only young woman in sight.
No.
The word formed in my brain and bubbled there.
Please, no.
I wanted to hide, to get away. But Mama's hand was hard against my back, pushing.

     "Run and greet him," she commanded.

     
Run
, she had said, and I caught my breath to keep the tears from coming.

     She knew I could not run. I could not even walk properly, but had to sidestep with a difficult, ugly gait, my hips moving up and over in an obscene rolling motion. My movements were grotesque; I could not stand the thought of the stranger looking at me.

     At that moment I hated them all . . . Mama, the visitor, even Willa who was not there. Even Willa.

     And as always, I did as I was told and went hobbling toward them, feeling a flush move down my neck and onto the rise of my chest.

The sound was, at first, unrecognizable . . . we stopped, looked. Then we heard it, a shout. Clearly, a shout. Mama, the visitor, even the Little Boys stopped to peer out to the south pasture. It was Willa, running full out, her long legs stretching, the divided skirt flaring as the wind caught it. She was running as if in a race, as
she sometimes ran with the Middle Boys—to win. She waved her straw hat in the air until she saw that we had noticed her.

     Pulling up short and out of breath some paces in front of the visitor, she raised one hand in front of her face to signal that she could not speak, that she needed to catch her breath. (But laughing, somehow; sensing how ridiculous she must seem, but finding it all so very funny. Willa could do that.) For a few moments she gasped, pulling air into her chest, making odd noises—all the while her eyes saying how humorous the whole thing was. In the diversion she created, I took my first good look at the visitor, at Owen Reade.

     The memory is firm. In the years to come I would be reminded of it every time I saw someone meet Owen for the first time. He was a fine-looking man, beautifully formed. Yet it was not just beauty of form that made people stare at Owen; it was something more, something in his expression, in the way he looked at you, in the way he held his body. More, even: Owen was different. Always that. Owen was different in a way I could never quite grasp. There would be times when I felt I almost understood, but it would always slip away from me.

     "Miss Willa Kerr?" he said with a small smile that could be banished, should the situation suddenly turn serious.

     It didn't. Willa was beginning to laugh. "I have chased you, sir, for better than a mile," she told him, "I saw the buggy and raced you from the Four Corners, and Gib hadn't the courtesy to let me win."

     Gibralter, busy with harnesses, looked up for the first time and a slow, sweet smile spread over his face. Seeing this, Owen looked at Willa as if to say, "And what other miracles can you perform?"

     What he did say was, "I must remember never to challenge you to a footrace."

     The late sun made shadow patterns from the lacy straw of her hat play over Willa's face. "Ah," she answered, "footraces are a favorite pastime on this farm. You cannot avoid them . . . and I've only been bested once."