Darkest Hour (8 page)

"Don't you listen in Sunday school? God gives us trials and tribulations to strengthen our resolve," she said through her clenched teeth.

"What's resolve?" I would never hesitate to ask a question about something that I didn't know. My thirst for knowledge and understanding was so great, I would even ask Emily.

"Our determination to fight off the devil and sin," she said. Then she pulled herself up in that haughty manner of hers and added, "But it might be too late for your redemption. You're a Jonah."

She never missed an opportunity to remind me.

"No, I'm not," I insisted, tiredly denying the curse Emily wanted to lay at my feet. She walked on, certain she was right, confident she had some special ear to hear God's words, some special eye to see His works. Who gave her the right to assume such power? I wondered. Was it our minister or was it Papa? Her knowledge of the Bible pleased him, but as we grew older, he didn't appear to have any more time for her than he had for me or Eugenia. The big difference was that Emily didn't seem to mind. No one enjoyed being alone more than she did. She didn't think anyone else was fit company, and for one reason or another especially avoided Eugenia.

Despite the setbacks Eugenia continually experienced in her battle against her horrible malady, she never lost her gentle smile or her sweet nature. Her body remained small, fragile; her skin, guarded and protected from the intruding Virginia sun in winter as well as in summer, never was anything but magnolia-white. When she was nine, she looked like a child no older than four or five. I harbored the hope that as she grew older, her body would grow stronger and the cruel illness that imprisoned her would grow weaker. But instead, she dwindled in little ways, each one breaking my heart.

As the years went by, it was harder and harder for her to walk even through the house. Going up the stairs took her so long that it was a torture to hear her do it; the long seconds ticked by while you waited to hear her foot take that painful next step. She slept more; her arms tired quickly when she sat brushing her own hair, hair that flourished and grew despite everything else, and she would have to wait for me or Louella to finish the brushing for her. The only thing that seemed to annoy her was her eyes tiring when she read. Finally, Mamma took her to get glasses and she had to wear a heavy framed pair with thick lenses that, she said, made her look like a bullfrog. But at least it allowed her to read. She had learned to read almost as quickly as I had.

Mamma had hired Mr. Templeton, a retired school teacher, to tutor Eugenia, but by the time she was ten, his sessions with her had to be cut to a quarter of what they'd once been because Eugenia didn't have the energy for long lessons. I'd rush to her room after school and discover that she had fallen asleep while ciphering or practicing some grammar. The notebook lay on her lap, the pen still clutched between her small fingers. Usually, I took everything away and gently covered her. Later, she would complain.

"Why didn't you simply wake me up, Lillian? I sleep enough as it is. Next time, you shake my shoulder, hear?"

"Yes, Eugenia," I said, but I didn't have the heart to wake her out of her deep sleep, sleep that I wished would somehow mend her.

Later that year, Mamma and Papa acceded to the doctor's wishes and bought Eugenia a wheelchair. As usual, Mamma had tried to ignore what was happening, had tried to deny the reality of Eugenia's degeneration. She would blame Eugenia's increasingly bad days on the horrid weather or something she had eaten or even something she hadn't eaten.

"Eugenia will get better," she would tell me when I would come to her with a new worry. "Everyone gets better, Lillian, honey, especially children."

What world did Mamma live in? I wondered. Did she really believe she could turn a page in our lives and find everything had changed for the better? She was so much more comfortable in the world of make-believe. Whenever her lady friends had run out of juicy gossip, Mamma would immediately begin telling them about the lives and loves of her romance novel characters, speaking about them as if they really existed. Something in real life was always reminding her about someone or something she had read about in one of her books. For the first few moments after Mamma spoke, everyone would scan their memories to recall who it was she was talking about at the moment.

"Julia Summers. I don't remember any Julia Summers," Mrs. Dowling would say, and Mamma would hesitate and then laugh.

"Oh, of course you don't, dear. Julia Summers is the heroine in
Tree of Hearts,
my new novel."

Everyone would laugh and Mamma would go on, eager to continue in the safe, rosy world of her illusions, a world in which little girls like Eugenia always got better and someday rose out of their wheelchairs.

However, once we got Eugenia her wheelchair, I would eagerly encourage her to get into it so that I could wheel her about the house or, whenever Mamma said it was warm enough, outside. Henry would come running and help get Eugenia down the steps, lifting her and the chair in one fell swoop. I'd take her about the plantation to look at a new calf or to see the baby chicks. We'd watch Henry and the others brush down the horses. There was always so much work to do around the plantation, always something interesting for Eugenia to see.

She especially loved early spring. Her eyes were full of smiles when I wheeled her around so she could get full view of the dogwood trees, which were solid masses of white or pink blossoms against a new green background. The fields were filled with yellow daffodils and buttercups. Everything filled Eugenia with wonder and for a little while at least, I was able to help her forget her illness.

Not that she continually complained about it. If she felt bad, all she would do was look at me and say, "I think I'd better go back inside, Lillian. I need to lie down for a while. But stay with me," she would add quickly, "and tell me again about the way Niles Thompson looked at you yesterday and what he said on the way home."

I don't know exactly when it was that I fully realized it, but very early on I understood that my sister Eugenia was living through me and my stories. At our annual barbecues and parties, she saw most of the boys and girls I talked about, but she had so little contact with them, that she depended on me to tell her about life outside of her room. I tried bringing friends home but most were uncomfortable in Eugenia's room, a room full of medical equipment to help her breathe and tables covered with pill bottles. I worried that most who looked at Eugenia arid saw how small she was for her age looked upon her as a freak of sorts, and I knew that Eugenia was smart enough to see the fear and discomfort in their eyes. After a while it seemed easier to just bring home stories.

I'd sit beside Eugenia's bed while she lay still, her eyes closed, a soft smile on her lips, and I would recall everything that had happened at school in the most detailed way I could. She always wanted to know what the other girls were wearing, how they wore their hair, and what sort of things they liked to talk about and do. Besides wanting to know what we had learned that day, she was intrigued about who got in trouble for doing what. Whenever I mentioned Emily's involvement, Eugenia simply nodded and said something like, "She's just trying to please."

"Don't be so forgiving, Eugenia," I protested. "Emily's doing more than trying to please Miss Walker or Papa and Mama. She's pleasing herself. She likes being an ogre."

"How can she like being that?" Eugenia would say.

"You know how she enjoys being bossy and cruel, how she even used to slap my hands in Sunday School."

"The minister makes her do those things, doesn't he?" Eugenia would ask. I knew Mamma had told her some such gibberish so that Eugenia wouldn't have bad thoughts. Mamma probably wanted to believe the things she told Eugenia about Emily. That way she wouldn't have to face the truth either.

"He doesn't tell her to like it," I insisted. "You should see the way her eyes light up. Why she almost looks happy."

"She can't be such a monster, Lillian."

"Oh can't she? Have you forgotten Cotton?" I replied, perhaps more firmly and coldly than I should. I saw how that pained Eugenia and I immediately regretted it. But the spasm of sorrow passed across her face quickly and she smiled again.

"Tell me about Niles now, Lillian. I want to hear about Niles. Please."

"All right," I said, calming myself down. I liked talking about Niles Thompson anyway. With Eugenia, I could reveal my deepest feelings. "He needs a haircut," I said, laughing. "His hair is falling over his eyes and down to his nose. Every time I look at him in class, he's brushing the strands to the sides."

"His hair is very black now," Eugenia said, remembering something I had told her a few days ago. "As black as a crow."

"Yes," I said, smiling. Eugenia popped her eyes open and smiled too.

"Was he staring at you again today? Was he?" she asked excitedly. How her eyes could glow sometimes. If I just looked into her eyes, I could forget she was so sick.

"Every time I looked, he was," I said, almost in a whisper.

"And it made your heart beat faster and faster until you had trouble breathing?" I nodded. "Just like me, only for a better reason," she added. Then she laughed before I could feel bad for her. "What did he say? Tell me again what he said on the way home yesterday."

"He said I have the nicest smile of anyone at the school," I replied, recalling the way Niles had come out with it. We had been walking side by side, a few feet behind Emily and the twins as usual. He kicked a small stone and then he looked up and just blurted it out. He looked down again. For a moment, I didn't know what to say or how to respond. Finally, I muttered, "Thank you."

"That's all I could think of saying," I told Eugenia.

"I should read some of Mamma's romance novels so I'll know how to talk to a boy."

"That's all right. You said the right thing," Eugenia assured me. "That's what I would have said."

"Would you?" I thought about it. "He didn't say anything else until we reached their road. Then he said, 'See you tomorrow, Lillian,' and hurried off. I just know he was embarrassed and wished I had said something more."

"You will," Eugenia assured me. "Next time."

"There won't be a next time. He probably thinks I'm a dumbbell."

"No he doesn't. He can't. You're the smartest girl in school now. You're even smarter than Emily," Eugenia said proudly.

I was. Because of my extra reading, I knew things that students grades ahead of me were supposed to know. I gobbled up our history books, spending hours and hours in Papa's office, perusing his collection of books about ancient Greece and Rome. There were many things Emily wouldn't read, even if Miss Walker suggested it, because Emily thought they were about sinful times and sinful people. Consequently, I knew much more than she did about mythology and ancient times.

And I was faster at multiplying and dividing numbers than Emily was. This only made her more furious. I remember once coming upon her while she was struggling with a column of numbers. I looked over her shoulder and when she put down a total, I told her it wasn't right.

"You forgot to carry the one here," I said, pointing. She spun around.

"How dare you spy on me and my work? You just want to copy it," she accused.

"Oh no, Emily," I said. "I was just trying to help."

"I don't want your help. Don't you dare tell me what's right and what's wrong. Only Miss Walker can do that," she asserted. I shrugged and left her, but when I looked back, I saw she was vigorously erasing the answer she had placed on the paper.

In a very true sense, the three of us grew up in different worlds even though we lived under the same roof and had the same two people as our parents. No matter how much time I spent with Eugenia, and how many things we did together and I did for her, I knew I could never feel the way she felt or appreciate how hard it was for her to be on the inside looking out most of the time. Emily's God did frighten me; she did make me tremble when she threatened me with His anger and vengeance. How unreasonable He was, I thought, and how capable He must be of great and painful acts if He permitted someone as precious and kind as Eugenia to suffer so while Emily strutted about arrogantly.

Emily lived in her private world, too. Unlike Eugenia, Emily wasn't a helpless, unwilling prisoner; Emily chose to lock herself away, not with real walls of plaster and paint and wood but with walls of anger and hate. She cemented every opening closed with some Biblical quote or story. I used to think that even the minister was afraid of her, afraid that she would discover some deep, dark and secret sin he had committed once and tell God.

And then, of course, there was I, the only one perhaps who truly lived at The Meadows, who ran over its fields and threw rocks in its streams, who went out to smell the flowers and inhale the sweet scent of the tobacco crops, who passed time with the laborers and knew everyone who worked on the plantation by their first names. I didn't lock myself willingly in a section of the great house and ignore the rest.

Yes, despite the dark cloud of pain that the truth of my birth held over me and despite having a sister like Emily, for the most part, I enjoyed my adolescence at The Meadows.

The Meadows will never lose its charm, I thought back then. Storms would come and storms would go, but there would always be a warm spring to follow. Of course, I was still very young then. I couldn't even begin to imagine how dark it could get, how cold it could be, how alone I would become almost as soon as my adolescence ended.

When I was twelve, I began to experience changes in my body that led Mamma to say I would be a beautiful young woman, a flower of the South. It was nice to be thought of as pretty, to have people, especially Mamma's lady friends, express their admiration over the softness of my hair, the richness of my complexion and the beauty of my eyes. Suddenly, almost overnight it seemed to me, my clothes began to fit tighter in places and it wasn't because I was putting on too much weight. If anything, my childlike chubbiness in my face had melted away and the straight, boyish lines of my body began to turn and to curve more dramatically. I was always small-framed with a lean torso, although nowhere near as gangly as Emily who shot up so quickly it looked like she had been stretched overnight.

Emily's height brought her a look of maturity, but it was maturity that showed itself only in her face. The rest of her feminine development had either been forgotten or ignored. None of her lines were soft and delicate like mine were, and by age twelve, I was pretty sure I had twice the bosom. I didn't know because I had never seen Emily undressed, not even in her slip.