Angel Sister (5 page)

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At the breakfast table, Kate broke a little piece off her biscuit and played with it a minute before she put it in her mouth. She was never hungry at breakfast time and especially not on mornings like this when her mother and father seemed to be separated from one another by a wall only they could see.

Beside Kate, Tori poured a big puddle of ketchup on her fried egg. Kate averted her eyes and tried not to think about how much it looked like the blood that pooled under the chickens after her mother tied their feet to the clothesline and cut off their heads. Mama said if they wanted fried chicken, they couldn’t afford to be squeamish. It was a fact of life that somebody had to cut the chicken’s head off, pluck the feathers, and clean the innards out of it. Kate didn’t think she was squeamish. She helped pluck and clean frying chickens all the time. Still, watching Tori dip her egg into that pile of ketchup did make Kate’s stomach flip over. So maybe she was squeamish.

But that was the only way Tori would eat her eggs, and Tori needed to eat her eggs. She was too skinny, and the doctor said that was why she caught everything that went around. Kate had always been healthy as a horse, so it didn’t matter whether she ate breakfast or not. She chewed her piece of biscuit ten times before she swallowed it.

On the other side of Kate, Evie was cutting up her bacon to eat it with a fork. She was the only person Kate had ever seen eat bacon with a fork. Evie said that ladies never picked up any piece of meat with their fingers. Not even chicken legs. She’d read a book that said so.

Sometimes Kate thought eating breakfast was going to drive her crazy. She took a sip of water as Tori chattered on about digging worms to go fishing. Kate didn’t want to go fishing. She’d rather pick beans.

But they’d done that yesterday. The beans wouldn’t need picking again until the next day and maybe not then if some rain didn’t come. It had been dry. They’d been carrying water from the well to water some of the tomato plants, but they couldn’t water the whole row of beans. Out west it was so dry they were having dust storms. Kate had read about it in the newspaper last week. It sounded awful. The air thick with dirt. Dirt in your eyes and ears and nose. Dirt flying around when it ought to be on the ground letting people plant stuff in it.

At church Grandfather Reece had been praying for rain even as he warned them about the signs of the time. Kate hated sitting on the pew at Rosey Corner Baptist Church listening to Grandfather Reece shout about how the dust storms and all the wars and rumors of wars from over in Europe were signs right out of the Bible. Punishment for a society gone astray. And all they deserved after the states had repealed Prohibition.

Every week it was the same, and every week Kate wanted to put her hands over her ears and block out his sermon. She didn’t want to think about the end of the world, even if that did mean going to heaven. She just couldn’t get as excited about that idea as Grandfather Reece. He’d raise his hands in the air and get a look of rapture on his face as he talked about the Lord coming back to take them home. He was ready to go and all the rest of them needed to be ready too.

Kate wasn’t all that ready. Oh, she’d walked down the aisle and been baptized. She believed in the Lord, but at the same time Kate liked it here on earth even if it was dusty and dry. She had a lot of living still to do. So she was always glad when her mother let her go to church with Aunt Gertie. The preacher at Rosey Corner Christian Church was young. He and his wife had two little kids, and he didn’t preach about the end of time. At least not every Sunday. He sounded as if he might like to delay going on up to heaven a little longer the same as Kate.

Aunt Gertie told Kate not to fret too much about the end of time. “The Bible says straight out that nobody knows when the Lord is going to come back. And that includes your Granddaddy Reece,” she said one day when they were walking home from church. “This or that preacher has been studying the signs and calling for the end of time ever since I can remember, but the plain truth of it is they don’t know. And that’s the best way, else the good Lord wouldn’t have decided on it. His way’s always best. Even your Granddaddy Reece can’t argue the truth of that.”

Kate didn’t know about that. She wasn’t about to try to argue anything with Grandfather Reece or Grandfather Merritt. Not only would it be disrespectful to disagree with her elders, it would be useless. Her father said tying a piece of cold iron in a bowknot would be easier than changing the mind of either one of her grandfathers. They knew what was true whether it was or not.

She looked over at her father, who was advising Tori that the best worms might be found in the soft ground just outside the barn. Kate shuddered a little. Worms were the last thing she wanted to think about at the breakfast table. She gave up on eating her biscuit and bacon and pushed her plate away from her.

“Don’t waste food, Kate,” her mother said as she picked up her teacup and took a sip. She had already finished off her bowl of oats before Kate’s father got to the table. Oats. Another stomach turner for Kate. Gooey gray glop.

“I’ll save it and eat it later,” Kate said. “I’m not hungry this morning.”

“You’re not hungry any morning,” Evie said as she attempted to fork another piece of bacon. It broke and scooted away from her fork. Undeterred, she slid her fork under the bacon and carefully lifted it. The bacon piece fell off before she got it to her mouth.

“For heaven’s sakes, just pick it up and eat it, Evie,” Kate said.

Evie sent her a mean look. “You eat the way you want to and I’ll eat the way I want to.”

“Girls,” their mother said. “Don’t start. Not today.”

Kate stared down at the table in front of her and muttered, “Sorry.” After a moment she looked up and asked, “Do you have chores for me this morning?”

“I thought you might go with your father. See if his shop needs sweeping out or anything.” Her mother kept her eyes on her teacup.

“But somebody has to go fishing with me,” Tori said. Then she brightened. “Or I could go by myself.”

“Not yet, Victoria,” their mother said. “Maybe next summer.”

“But I’m already ten,” Tori started.

“Don’t look at me, Mama.” Evie finally got the piece of bacon to her mouth on her fork and chewed a moment before going on. “Besides, you promised to help me sew the collar on my new dress today. I want to wear it Friday night when I go out with George.” Her face took on her “dreaming about George” look.

Kate thought any old dress would do for George, who was a goof. A goof with a car, which was nice when he let Kate ride along to Edgeville with them to take in a movie, so she bit her lip and didn’t say anything. Kate loved going to movies, and sometimes George even paid for her ticket as long as she promised not to sit anywhere near him and Evie. Of course George called her Evangeline. Nobody shortened Evie’s name except Kate. After all, Evangeline had been named after the romantic and tragic heroine of a poem. A poem that both Mama and Daddy loved.

Kate wished she knew a few lines of it by heart so she could say them now and try to get her parents to smile at each other. Instead neither of them showed even a whisper of a smile. Mama stared down at her tea while Daddy’s words bored a hole through the wall between them.

“I don’t need a guard, Nadine. Kate can go with Victoria.” He finished off his coffee and stood up.

Mama kept her eyes on her cup. Her fingers were white where she was squeezing the handle so hard. “I didn’t say you did, Victor. I merely thought you might need some help this morning.”

“There’s no doubt of that,” he agreed pleasantly enough, but there was an edge to his voice. Still it was hard to tell if he was angry with himself or Mama or someone who wasn’t even in the kitchen.

Kate didn’t think it was her, so she dared to speak up. “Mama needs some sugar and baking soda, so I’ll walk along with you to the store.”

“I want to go too,” Tori said.

“You have to get those worms before it gets too hot,” Kate said quickly. “They’ll go too deep once the sun starts baking the ground.”

When Tori started to fuss, their mother spoke up. “Kate’s right, Victoria. You can’t go fishing without bait.”

Kate loved having time alone with her father. Sometimes she could get him to tell the best stories. But today as they started up the road toward his blacksmith shop in the middle of Rosey Corner, he wasn’t in a storytelling mood. He pulled his hat brim down low and frowned like the sun was hurting his eyes.

To fill the silence between them, Kate started chattering. “Mama’s making raspberry jam. That’s why she needs sugar. And she said she might have enough raspberries for a pie.”

“The raspberries are ripe?” Daddy sounded surprised. “Well, I guess it is the middle of June. Where has the year gone?”

“A lot of it’s still left.” Kate spun around and walked backward for a moment in front of her father. “I love summer. Don’t you love summer?”

“A smitty gets hot in the summer,” he said, but his frown was gone.

“I guess so.” Kate said as she turned to walk beside her father again. “And I suppose this summer’s not so great for a lot of people.”

“I wasn’t aiming to make you sorry you like summer, Kate. You’re young. You’re supposed to like summer. No school. Time to go fishing.”

“I hate fishing.” Kate made a face.

“I know, but you’re a good big sister. Tell Victoria to bait your hooks too. She doesn’t mind worms.”

“I don’t mind worms. I just don’t like squishing them on hooks.” Kate shuddered. “And then you have to sit there quiet as stone and wait for some fish that’s too little to make a raccoon happy. Then you have to work the hook out of that little bitty fish’s mouth and throw the poor thing back in to grow bigger, but it remembers about the hook and you never catch it again no matter how big it gets. On top of that, it already smells like a fish, which I suppose makes sense since it is a fish and your hands end up stinking like fish. Worst of all, if you do happen to catch something big enough, you have to clean the thing and try to keep from swallowing a bone when you eat it. Now tell me what’s fun about any of that?”

Daddy actually smiled, which is what Kate was trying to make happen. That and to keep him from looking over toward the little square house they were passing where a person could buy a drink. It was closed in the mornings, but Kate had seen men go up to the door at all times of the day and somebody always opened up. Grandfather Reece called it a den of iniquity. Kate had looked up “iniquity” in the dictionary and found verses that talked about it in the Bible, but she still wasn’t sure what went on in the little house. Except she knew it wasn’t good, even if her father was singing when he came home after being there.

“You’re a good daughter too, Kate,” Daddy said. “I didn’t cause you trouble last night, did I?” He reached over and touched her hand as they stopped in front of Grandfather Merritt’s store. Gas fumes floated out to them from the gas pump where a man was filling up his car’s tank.

“No, Daddy. You never cause me trouble.”

“Oh, if only that were true.” His smile was gone again. “But you can tell your mother not to worry today. Tell her I’ll look forward to that raspberry pie tonight.”

“Great, Dad,” she said before she tiptoed up to kiss his cheek. The stubble on his unshaven cheek poked her lips. She stood in front of the store and watched him walk on up the road to his shop. It would take him awhile to get his forge hot enough to shape a horseshoe, so it was just as well no one was outside waiting. And in her heart, a little prayer circled.
Please let that be true about Daddy coming home to supper. Please.

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Tori found worms. When Kate got back with the sugar and baking soda, Tori was waiting on the back porch with a couple of cane poles. She dug around in the can of dirt she was holding and pulled out a plump pink worm to show Kate.

“He’s a wiggler.” Tori looked very pleased as she held up the worm. “We’ll catch a big one with him.”

“Then I guess we’ll be eating fish for supper. I’ll tell Mama to have the skillet ready when we get back.” Kate tousled Tori’s hair with her free hand. “Give me a minute to get a jug for us. It’s already hot. We’ll need water.”

Kate carried the groceries on into the kitchen, where her mother was washing and picking through a pan of raspberries. When Kate told her Daddy promised to be home for raspberry pie at suppertime, Mama managed a little smile as she said, “Then I guess I’d better bake one. Here, take a berry bucket in case you find some vines around the pond. That way you won’t have to fish the whole time.” She handed Kate the small metal pail she’d just emptied into her pan. “And don’t worry if you don’t get back by noon. Evangeline can carry your father’s lunch to him.”

“By noon it’ll be sweltering. It’s already too hot for the fish to bite.” Kate lifted her hair up to give the back of her neck some air.

“You hope.” Mama really smiled now as she laid her hand on Kate’s cheek. She looked her straight in the eyes and said, “Thank you.”

“Sure, Mama. You know I’ll run to the store any time you need something.” Kate knew that wasn’t what her mother was thanking her for, but there was no way the two of them could talk about what had happened last night.

“I know you will.” Her mother dropped her hand away from Kate’s cheek. “I guess you’re going to Graham’s pond.”

“Yeah, it’s closest and Tori says the fish bite better there.”

“If you see him, tell Graham hello for me, and if you run across Fern, you leave her alone.”

“I always leave Fern alone,” Kate said.

“Make sure Victoria does too. That child is too curious sometimes. I don’t think she’s ever met a stranger.”

“There aren’t any strangers in Rosey Corner to meet.”

“What about all the people passing through on the road out front? Gypsies. Hoboes. Men down on their luck. Sometimes it seems like half the country has taken to the roads to try to find work or something to eat.” Mama frowned and shook her head a little. “Thank goodness we still have food on the table.”

“And enough to share.” Kate had carried food out to a man who’d knocked on the door asking for something to eat just two days before. “But Graham’s pond is back in the woods way off the road. Nobody but Rosey Corner folks know about it. No strangers.”

“True enough, but plenty of us Rosey Corner folk have some strange quirks. Fern Lindell for one, and while I don’t think Fern would hurt anybody, I wouldn’t want to test the truth of that with Victoria. So you see that she behaves.”

Kate and Tori cut across the fields to Lindell Woods. By the time they climbed the second fence, sweat was running down both their faces. It felt good to move under the shade of the trees. Graham said this part of the woods was old growth that had never been cleared away for farming. Kate loved looking up at the huge oaks and elms and poplar trees. Sometimes she just stopped right in the middle of the trees and started singing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” to thank the Lord for letting her live so close to something so beautiful, but today Tori was in a hurry to get to the fish.

They left the big trees behind and entered a part of the woods that had once been cleared for farming. Here cedars had sprung up so thick that Kate and Tori had to walk bent over to get through the trees. They went straight for the pond and didn’t go by Graham’s cedar pole cabin to ask if they could fish. He’d already told Tori she could fish there anytime she wanted.

Graham was one of those Rosey Corner people with strange quirks Kate’s mother had been talking about. One of the strangest was the cedar pole one-room cabin where he lived winter and summer, when a big two-story frame house full of furniture stood empty out closer to the road. Graham’s parents had lived there before they died in the influenza epidemic. His father was a doctor, but there wasn’t any way to doctor people who had the influenza. The person either died or didn’t, Graham said. And a lot of the people in Rosey Corner had died. His father was one of the first to succumb because he was out day and night helping people and he brought the sickness home.

Graham didn’t catch it. He didn’t know why. He just didn’t. He’d worn the garlic necklace some hoped would ward off the sickness, but then so had Fern and his mother. His mother died a week after Graham buried his father. Fern burned with the fever for days after that, and Graham thought she would die too. Then the fever left her, but Graham said it carried some vital part of her away with it. Graham always looked sad when he said Fern’s name.

Fern didn’t live in the big house either. At least not the way a normal person lived in a house—sleeping in one of the beds, washing sheets, and cooking meals in the kitchen. She just drifted in and out of the house, eating whatever Graham left on the cabinet for her and sleeping on the floor one night, and the next, bedding down out in the woods in a shelter she made by chopping down cedars and piling them up for walls.

Some people said Graham didn’t live in the house because he was afraid of Fern, but Kate thought it was more that he’d turned the house into a shrine of sorts to his parents. He liked taking Kate and Tori over to the house to show them his mother’s hats. There were shelves of them. Graham would always talk about how beautiful and fashionable his mother had been as he brushed the dust off the hats for the girls to try on.

Kate asked him once why he didn’t give the hats away. Everybody else Kate knew packed up the clothes of any family member who died and sent the box off to the orphans’ or the old folks’ home. But Graham had looked genuinely shocked at the idea of giving away his mother’s hats. “I couldn’t do that. She might need them,” he said.

At the time, Kate had been too afraid to ask him what he meant by that. She already got the heebie-jeebies sometimes when she was in the parlor where Lillie Lindell’s portrait hung. She was sure the woman’s eyes were staring at her no matter where she moved in the room. Kate didn’t like putting on the dead woman’s hats either, but sometimes she did it to keep from hurting Graham’s feelings. She never let the hats sit on her head more than a couple of seconds, as if they might still be carrying some trace of the influenza that had carried their owner away from the living world.

This morning, when Kate and Tori finally pushed through the cedar thickets and trees and came out on the pond bank, the water looked cool and inviting. Kate wasn’t a bit surprised to see Graham and his long-eared hound, Poe, sitting on the east bank of the pond in the shade. As she and Tori walked around the pond toward him, frogs hopped out across the green moss clinging to the edges of the bank and plopped into the water.

Graham wasn’t fishing, but his pole was on the bank beside him. “Done drowned all my worms,” he told them. “We got here before sunrise and caught me and Poe a mess for dinner, so the rest of them out there are yours, Victoria, if you can get them to bite.” Graham looked up at the sky. “The sun’s already getting high in the sky.”

“I know.” Tori made a face as she dug a worm out of her can of dirt and scooted it on her hook. “Kate had to go to the store.” She held the can out toward Kate.

Kate waved it away and set her cane pole down. “You can catch whatever’s left, Tori. I’ll go hunt for raspberries.” She held up her berry bucket. “Mama’s making jam.”

“Yum,” Graham said as he stood up. “I’ll tell you where some good ones are if you promise to bring me a jar. Of course there might be snakes.” Poe raised his head up off his paws and gave his owner a sad-eyed look to see if they really were leaving such a good resting place.

“I’m not afraid of snakes.”

“I wasn’t either till one bit me some time back. My leg swelled up big as a fence post. Probably would’ve died if I hadn’t known some cures. Still goes dead on me from time to time if I don’t drink my adder’s-tongue potion.” Graham stomped his right foot.

Kate never knew whether to believe Graham or not. He had studied medicine. Had planned to be a doctor like his father before the influenza epidemic interrupted his plans. He did come up with special potions from roots. Not to give to other people, but sometimes when somebody in Rosey Corner had a sick animal, they’d come after Graham.

Folks said he should hang out a shingle as an animal doctor, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t even take any money for helping the animals. That way the farmers couldn’t get mad at him if the potions killed their livestock instead of helping them, he said. He did sometimes take a jar of beans or slab of bacon. He had to keep food on the table for Fern and Poe.

Graham wasn’t destitute even though some people thought he was because of the way he lived. Kate’s father said Graham always had cash money to plop down when he bought something at the store. That was more than a lot of the people in Rosey Corner could do right now. The Barclays—Graham’s mother’s family—had money. His grandfather was a state senator, an influential man in Frankfort before he died of grief after Graham’s mother passed on. At least that was what Graham claimed killed him. Kate’s mother said it was a heart attack, that she remembered reading in the newspapers about how Senator Barclay had dropped dead right in the middle of a session of the legislature.

Kate had no idea how old Graham was. Age didn’t seem to matter all that much to him, as if he’d always been old and didn’t worry about it. The skin on his face was stretched so tight over his cheekbones that it showed tiny red blood vessels tracing a pattern across his cheeks. His shirts hung loose off his shoulders the way they might on a scarecrow in somebody’s garden, and Kate had never seen him when his ankles and some leg weren’t showing below his pants. That was because he wore his daddy’s old clothes, and his daddy had been shorter than him.

Every other week or so he shaved whenever he decided he should show up at one of the churches, and he just whacked off his hair with his pocketknife when it got down in his eyes.

“I gave up on having a wife a long time ago,” Kate had overheard him tell her mother once. “No woman I ever met would take on a sister-in-law like Fern. But I pledged to my mother on her deathbed that I’d see to Fern as long as she needed seeing to. I guess Mother must have had a premonition that Fern was going to be damaged by the fever. She laid down sick one woman and got up a whole different one. But that didn’t change her being my sister.”

Now Graham touched Poe on the head and told him he could stay with Tori. The old dog sank happily back down on the pond bank and dropped his head on his paws as he blew a burst of contented air out of the sides of his mouth. “We were out late last night chasing coons,” Graham explained.

“Did you catch any?” Kate asked as she followed him around the pond toward some vines growing at the edge of the woods.

“Naw, not the way you’re talking. Me and Poe, we like to get them up a tree, but then we just exchange pleasantries and all of us go on home. It’s the chase we’re after, not the raccoon.”

“You can sell raccoon skins,” Kate said.

“I couldn’t do that. Me and Poe, we’re way too familiar with our coons to want to skin them.” Graham stopped and pointed toward the raspberry vines. “Looks like the birds haven’t gotten all the ripe ones yet. Or me. I ate some for my breakfast this morning before we started fishing.”

“Now that sounds like a good breakfast.” Kate stepped into the vines to reach for some of the bigger berries.

“Careful. You’ll get all scratched up. Not to mention those snakes.”

“Raspberries are worth it.” Kate pulled off a berry and put it in her mouth. “Nothing better.”

Graham waded into the vines beside her and picked a handful of berries to drop into her bucket. They picked awhile without saying anything. In a tree nearby, a mockingbird was running through his repertoire, and behind them Tori’s hook splashed in the water. Above their heads a red-tailed hawk floated across the opening over the pond and let out a shrill whistle.

“Life is good,” Graham said as he stared up at the hawk.

“But not for everybody,” Kate said.

“Well, no, I guess not everybody can be fishing or picking raspberries on a pond bank, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be happy we are.” Graham dropped another handful of berries into Kate’s bucket.

Kate didn’t say anything for a minute as she stepped deeper into the berry bushes, carefully mashing down some of the vines with her foot. Then she said, “You and Daddy, did you used to go fishing together when you were kids?”

“Your daddy is some years younger than me, but he was always hanging around Aunt Hattie’s boy. Bo was about my age. And we both liked hitting a baseball. Your daddy ran after the balls for us. That Bo, he could smack that ball clear to yonder no matter how I pitched it.” Graham looked up and off across the pond as if he could see the baseball flying still.

“Was Daddy happy then?” Kate asked.

“Nobody can be happy all the time,” Graham said softly before he shook himself a little, as if to get rid of some sad memory. “But he was happy enough when we were playing ball. Course everything was different then before the Great War and the influenza.”

“How?” Kate asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess because we were young and full of the future. Bo, he was going to be a great baseball player, and he was on his way before he went in the army and got killed over there. Me, I was going to cure people. That’s why I didn’t go to the War. I was still in school. If it had lasted longer and the influenza hadn’t come along, I was thinking I’d go overseas as a doctor. Help the wounded soldiers.”

“What about Daddy? What did he want to be?” Kate held her bucket over toward Graham for him to drop in his berries.

Graham didn’t start picking again for a moment as he thought about his answer. “He was younger, like I said. He hadn’t come up with what he planned to do. All he knew for sure before the War came along and yanked him away from Rosey Corner was that he loved your mama. I’ve never seen nobody so much in love when he was just a young sprout. Bo and me thought he’d die of lovesickness before he ever got your mama to notice him.” Graham laughed a little. Then his smile disappeared. “I was in love something like that once upon a time.”