Butterfly's Child (6 page)

That night, when he changed from the scratchy nightshirt to the kimono, he didn't have to sleep on the floor because Mama was next to him. He had a dream about her that he couldn't remember in the morning but it made him happy. When he went out to do chores, he felt Mama still with him, and as he carried in sticks and eased the eggs from beneath the chickens, he told her in his mind what he was doing, and whenever he was by himself, in the pasture with the cows or wading in the creek, he told Mama everything about this place, whispering to her in the language he was supposed to forget.

Life in Plum River
would be easier to bear, Kate thought, if they could attend the First Presbyterian Church in the nearby town of Stockton. Reverend Singleton was an intelligent, compassionate man; she might be able to confide in him. And if she was a regular attender of the services in Stockton, she could more easily make the acquaintance of cultivated people; she wanted to organize a women's reading circle and to entertain interesting couples at dinner parties. The farmers and their wives, while by and large kind, were not intellectually congenial. If her marriage was a trial, she at least deserved a satisfactory spiritual and intellectual life.

Since Kate had been raised Presbyterian, Frank was at first persuaded by her desire to continue worshipping in the denomination familiar to her. But Frank's mother put up formidable resistance. The Pinkertons had been pillars of the Plum River congregation since the church was built, Mrs. Pinkerton declared as she and Kate were preparing brisket for dinner, and it would be unthinkable for them to desert Pastor Pollock and the Plum River parish. Her husband and elder son and Frank's grandparents all lay beneath the cedars in the graveyard, and furthermore, her husband had left a sum in his will that had allowed the church to add its fine new steeple and belfry.

Kate had come to dread the sight of Mrs. Pinkerton in the kitchen each morning. No matter how early Kate managed to rise, Frank's mother was always there before her, cracking eggs in a bowl, rolling out biscuits, frying ham, all of her movements brisk and excluding. She wore loose flour sack dresses over her sagging body, heavy black shoes cut out
to allow her bunions some ease, and thick glasses that magnified her washed-out blue eyes and the creases around them. Mrs. Pinkerton assigned Kate tasks, and no matter how simple—setting the table, making coffee—Kate felt the old woman watching her with a critical eye.

She treats me as if I were a hired servant, Kate complained to Frank. She means no harm, Frank said, she's been running the house for years. When Kate said that was the problem exactly, and wasn't it time for her to move back to Cicero so she could help Frank's sister Anne, now in confinement with her second child, Frank said she only wanted to help until Kate settled in.

Kate felt already steeped in the lessons of drudgery: the long Monday wash days, Tuesday nights with the flatirons beside the hot stove, the endless preparation of meals, scrubbing floors, cleaning lamp chimneys and woodstoves, pumping the separator each morning, tending the vegetable patch.

Kate wrote to her mother, pouring out the details of her grueling routine and, putting aside her pride, begging for money for a servant girl. I cautioned you, her mother wrote back, you're not suited for such a life. Kate should always remember that she was welcome to come home for a long visit. Her mother did not mention the servant.

Frank said they needed to buy a new harrow before the next season, but he would see if he could adjust the budget to hire a young girl; his mother, however, overruled him. Kate needed to learn how to manage the household in all its particulars before she could give directions to a maid.

“I've learned it all,” Kate said, glaring at Frank over the table. “The concepts are quite elementary.”

“I don't suppose you've done any canning.” Mrs. Pinkerton gave her a sharp glance.

Then you would suppose incorrectly, Kate wanted to retort, but instead said in her sweetest voice, “Why, yes, I've done quite a bit of canning.” She'd watched her mother's maid Lavonia put up strawberries; anything she didn't know was available in books.

“I'm glad to hear it,” Mrs. Pinkerton said. “We need one hundred jars of canned goods per person each year. There's a heap of beets down cellar—poor Elmer's last crop. It would be a shame if they went to waste.” They would can them tomorrow, she said.

“Why do you always take her side?” Kate asked Frank as they were getting into bed.

“I don't. But money is short just now. We'll have a servant next year. Corn and wheat ought to be sky-high after this drought—we might have enough profit for two servants. Though what we need most,” he said, putting his arms around her, “is children.”

“I hope they'll be born full-grown,” she said, “and knowing how to can and plow.”

He laughed and pulled her nightgown above her hips.

“Is it just children you want from me?”

“Of course not.” He looked at her, shocked. “I adore you, darling,” he said, gazing at her with that warm, grave expression that had won her.

She kissed him. “Then take my side.”

“I will,” he said, pushing into her as she tightened her arms around him. “I do. I take your side.”

The next morning, after the men were off to the fields, Mrs. Pinkerton and Kate carried sacks of beets up from the cellar and mounded them on the kitchen table. Kate brought bucketfuls of water from the well, poured it into two dishpans, and she and Mrs. Pinkerton stood at the sink scrubbing the beets. Kate's back ached. She wanted coffee and another biscuit.

Mrs. Pinkerton inspected a beet Kate had finished and gave it a further scrubbing, her heavy underarms jiggling. “We can't have grit,” she said.

“No indeed,” Kate said under her breath. “No grit of that variety.” She put the coffeepot back on the stove to heat and pressed her thumbs into her lower back.

“You may sterilize the jars now,” Mrs. Pinkerton said.

“Thank you,” Kate said. Her irony was lost on the old woman, still washing the beets.

Kate set the jars into the large copper bath and went outside for water. When she returned, Benji came into the kitchen. Mrs. Pinkerton gave him a cat's head biscuit and he slipped out again.

“Say thank you,” Kate called.

The door slammed behind him.

“I'm working on his manners.” Kate began pouring water into the bath. “It's very discouraging.”

“He's just like Frank as a child,” Mrs. Pinkerton said.

Kate stared at her. Water splashed onto the stove top, making it hiss. “Boys will be boys,” she managed to say. “All over the world.”

“I suppose so,” Mrs. Pinkerton said. “The boy problem must be widespread.” She looked into the copper tub. “Those jars have to be fully covered.”

Kate returned to the well, hauling up the bucket with such violence that the rope burned her hand. She gazed down into the water—nothing but darkness—and dropped in a clod of dirt.

After the first batch of beets were scrubbed, boiled, and peeled, the women sat at the kitchen table, layers of newspaper over the oilcloth, pans of beets before them. Mrs. Pinkerton began to quarter a beet and indicated with her eyes that Kate should do the same.

Kate slid her knife through a beet—red, slick, and glossy.

Mrs. Pinkerton began to complain about her lumbago, acting up something fierce today. “Could you manage from this point?” she asked.

“Oh, certainly—please do have a rest.” After Mrs. Pinkerton left, Kate pushed the windows open further—a slight breeze, a promise of rain—and sat back down to her task. It was a relief to have the old woman out of the room. Her comment about Benji hadn't meant anything, of course; she would never suspect her precious son of such a thing.

Kate sliced and chopped until her hands were stained purple. A beet slid out from the knife, went skidding across the floor.

She looked at the heap of unwashed beets. Too many for the jars, surely. She piled a good measure of them in a pan and ran to the compost pile at the far end of the garden, where she buried them beneath a layer of leaves and weeds. Elmer's beets. She felt giddy, walking back to the house.

After the jars were filled with the remaining beets, lidded, and rattling in the copper bath, she pulled the rocking chair to the window and began to reread Jane Austen's
Persuasion
. This was the world into which she should have been born: the women poor but genteel, irresistibly witty, eventually marrying wealth. She rested the book in her lap. If she attended church in Stockton, she could become acquainted with Aimee Moore, wife of a prominent lawyer in town. Mrs. Moore was said to be quite intelligent, a graduate of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary; doubtless she'd have read Jane Austen.

She heard Mrs. Pinkerton moving about upstairs and looked at the clock. Almost time for the midday meal; she'd be down soon. Using a heavy cloth, Kate lifted the jars from their bath, poured a bucket of water over them, then set them, as Mrs. Pinkerton had instructed, on the dining
room table to cool. The blood-red beets shone in the light like large, dark jewels.

The next day, the jars were ready to go down to the cellar, but Kate was in no hurry to remove evidence of her housewifery, for which Frank and Mrs. Pinkerton had both praised her. Her back was strained, she told her mother-in-law; she would move the beets in the morning.

That night, as Kate lay beside Frank, drifting toward sleep, she heard an odd pinging noise downstairs, then a loud pop, and another, and a shattering sound. There were more pops, faster, like fireworks.

She sat up. “Frank?” and shook his arm.

Mrs. Pinkerton lumbered past their door and down the stairs. There was a scream.

“Frank,” Kate said, pulling at him. “Get up.” She leapt out of bed and lit a candle.

In the hall she heard another explosion, then the sound of glass raining onto the floor. She flew downstairs.

Mrs. Pinkerton stood at the bottom of the steps, holding a hurricane lamp. Tears were streaming down her face. “Elmer's beets,” she said. “The last of his fruit.”

In the dim light, Kate could see chunks of beets, shards and splinters of glass on the floor, dark liquid spreading beneath them.

“Oh God,” she said, and shouted for Frank.

Another jar detonated, glass pinging against the chandelier, pelting onto the wooden floor. Beets caromed everywhere.

Frank pounded down the steps. “What in hell … ?”

“The beets fermented,” his mother said, her voice quavering. “Your father's beets are ruined, thanks to her.”

“That's not fair,” Kate said. “You were giving instructions.”

“You said you knew how to can. Everyone knows the jar has to be sealed at the proper temperature.”

“Those beets were old—a dead man's beets.” She began to sob; Frank put his arms around her.

“Shh,” he said. “It's all right. No one was hurt.”

“Look at the ceiling,” his mother said. “There's no removing the stain of a beet.”

“I want to go home,” Kate wailed. She thought of her room, the canopy bed, the way the light was in early afternoon.

“You are home,” Frank said, holding her tighter. “Go to bed, Mother. I'll clean up in the morning.”

Frank helped Kate up the stairs and into bed, then lay with his arms around her.

“This place is a madhouse!” Kate cried. “I can't live with her.”

“It would be much harder work for you alone.”

“Hire a servant.”

“As soon as I can.”

She thought of her father, how grieved he would be to see her in this miserable place. She remembered him sitting by her bed when she had the measles, stroking her head, saying a prayer in his soothing baritone.

“I want to go to church in Stockton,” Kate said. “And I want you to go with me.”

“Yes, darling,” he said, kissing her neck. “Whatever you say.”

Beginning the next Sunday, Kate and Frank and Benji attended the First Presbyterian Church on Oak Street in Stockton, and Mrs. Pinkerton, for the time being, went with the Case family to the Plum River services.

The veterinarian
Horatio Keast was at the Pinkerton farm seeing to one of the Percherons when the Case family came to visit. After he finished his work, he washed his hands at the pump and walked to the house. Pinkerton had invited him to stay for dinner.

The adults were on the front porch, talking about the weather and drinking lemonade. The Case girl was there too, wearing a frilly dress, pouting. Beyond the road, the boys were playing baseball in the pasture. Benji was the smallest of the lot—the runt of the litter, Keast thought—but he was fast, running circles around the other boys.

Keast sat down and exchanged pleasantries. The others returned to complaints about the unseasonably hot autumn and the tornado that had ripped through the town of Elizabeth last week. Two cows had been killed, and a little filly.

The Cases were a good solid family who bore a strong resemblance to one another, redheads every one. Case Senior was a carrottop; his wife was fortunate to have auburn hair, though in Keast's opinion she'd look better without those tight braids around her head. Sometimes Isobel had worn a braid, but it was a loose one down her back, to keep her hair from tangling at night. The Case daughter—she was rocking like a house afire, glaring out at the boys playing without her—had the bad luck to inherit the carrottop and freckles. So had all the children, except for one of the sons.

Suddenly Keast saw Benji come streaking across the road. He ran up the steps and threw himself into Pinkerton's arms. “Papa-san,” he said, then let loose a torrent of what must be Japanese.

“Papa,” Mrs. Case said. “That's sweet.”

“Papa-san is a term of respect boys use for older males in Japan,” Kate said. “Normally he calls him Father Pinkerton and myself Mother Pinkerton, to help him feel at home.”