Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction (8 page)

The early evening hour found him again at our doorstep with hat in hand, here for supper again, invited by Mrs. Murphy. She fussed around him as if he was head of the household and Mrs. Catt made it clear she thought the world of him. I told myself I was outnumbered and did not tell him to go away.

Mr. Phillips noticeably grew under this praise, as a plant would when placed in the sun with moist soil. Their attention and Eunice’s pining gaze further bowed my thoughts of him to a positive way, neglecting the negative view I had carefully fostered of men. Wasn’t it time I moved on with my life? I rationalized. The war of women was over. When men ended a war, they returned to home and hearth. Where was I to go? My title and rank of suffragist was no longer valid or necessary. My home base, the Lighthouse, served only a wayward station; abused women came there in transit to decide what to do and where to go. It was never intended to be a permanent residence for anyone. Not even the homeowner, Thomas, actually lived there (not since his wife, Cady, died anyway) but only checked in periodically.

And I would certainly be too old to return to my parents’ house. I would feel as a failure – worse yet, Papa would view me as a failure. He once told me I wanted only romance, not responsibility. “What is wrong with romance?” I challenged. Mama lowered my raised eyebrows with, “You have to work in the dirt, to get the flowers.” I supposed they were right. I needed to settle, to root; I needed a home and a hearth of my own.

These were my thoughts as Mr. Phillips proposed to me late that starry evening on the front porch, and I said yes.

What is love?

At this point and for the first time in my life, I questioned my intelligence. I knew not where we were, where we were going, and knew little of this man I was to call husband. He knew little of his reluctant bride. I had told no one of our plan to marry, but only made excuses to Mrs. Catt and Eunice during my farewells at the station that I would take a later train to Annan. Mr. Phillips must have wondered why this secrecy but he remained silent, only his searching eyes and deep parenthesis around his down-turned mouth expressing his disappointment.

I didn’t wish to make a big deal out of buying rings and so I had insisted on him slipping my grandmother’s wedding ring on my finger – the same ring I had previously worn on a chain around my neck.

I did not try to analyze but merely recognize that a clandestine and unceremonious marriage at the courthouse was important to me, exciting in the beginning, frightening in the end when I realized the price to pay was that no one knew where I was any more than I did. I was completely on my own.

If someone had asked me for directions, I might have said, “Turn left, and head straight up toward heaven”. Although heaven sounds misleading, for I didn’t think it was heaven at all. Not in the joyful way one would think of heaven, but this plateau on the top of a mountain was “pert-near” as the mountain folk would say, close
enough certainly to wave to those who had passed on to that heavenly shore.

Below us were endless rolls of hills, like giant men with fat bellies, stretched out and snoring clouds of mist.

I looked about me as I climbed down from the truck, wondering where the cabin could be in this wilderness and worried that the truck hood would blow off from all that steam rolling out around the edges. Mr. Phillips fanned the hood with his hat as if shooing a large black fly that wouldn’t go away. Fortunately it didn’t; I would have detested the three-mile hike back down to the main road. I stood and waited impatiently for further directions, seeing no further road.

Finally I could stand no more of the hot sun and the heated truck. “Really, Mr. Phillips, this is a poor sign of hospitality. What are we to do from here – hitch a ride on a passing deer?” Sarcasm yes, but justified; the startled deer was the only living being I’d seen for several miles.

He walked to the back of the truck. “This is where we hoof it.” He pulled out my trunk and headed toward a small path, a dirt line marking the way further up through the trees.

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed my handbag and stepped in behind him, marching in step as I had done many a time down many a street for a cause. I just didn’t know what that cause was this time, however it came to light soon enough.

We walked through last year’s leaves, swishing noisily, grateful I became for the cool shade offered by the birch and maple trees. After a few hundred feet I could hike no more of the uphill climb. My heart knocked loudly on my chest wall and the heat threatened my face. I stopped. There to my left, sticking up behind a small crest was a red-bricked chimney. Curiosity overcame my shortness of breath, shuffling me forward.

On a plateau some feet below where I stood, sat a quaint sort of log cabin. A porch protecting its humble faded-gray front, had been painted in red to match the window shutters. A large well-tended garden stretched out to the right of the cabin, framed in cedar fencing. A clothesline connected the left side of the cabin to a shed
of some sort, too small for a barn, too large for a tool shed. This structure leaned toward the clothesline, as if the weight of the many garments hanging there was more than it could bear. Spread out here and there on the grass laid bleached sheets, towels and rags, appearing as if spring’s thaw hadn’t finished yet. Blotches of white bright light caught my eye from the sun’s reflection on a creek flowing behind the cabin. Rows of lavender bushes lined the aged cedar fencing around the shed and along the side of the cabin, stirring a little homesickness for my mama’s backyard with its long row of lavender along the white picket fence. Here, somehow, around the wild of woods and daisies, the planted purple blooms looked out of place to me, like a prop on the stage of a play.

As Mr. Phillips headed down the slope toward them, children of various ages and sizes, feet bare, dogs nipping at their heels, were running toward Mr. Phillips calling “Daddy, Daddy!” In the center of all this remained one girl in her teen years, standing at the fire pit in the front yard, her sad face gazing over at her daddy, then up to me, then quickly back down to the black pot hitched over the fire.

I saw all this from my elevated vantage point, remaining observant as if I were here only to enquire, and then walk away to write a newspaper story.

Mr. Phillips called me down to meet them all, seven children there were, or at least he called them his “kids”, yet two of the boys looked older than I. The girl at the pot appeared younger but obviously in charge. Petite in her torso, unusually broad shoulders, and her arms were visibly muscular in her short-sleeved calico housedress. She simply nodded when introduced as Mary Sue, and only then pulled her frown from me to a younger brother when he shouted, “She’s the bossiest!”

Mary Sue’s first words were “Daddy, the pig’s tail stopped curling.”

To Mr. Phillips these words meant something significant; to me this was a sign that I was someone Mary Sue didn’t want to reckon with.

He paused in his tickling a toddler and scowled at Mary Sue. “How long?”

“Loooong,” she drawled. “You been gone a long time.” She met his eyes and then quickly diverted her sad light blue ones to the pot. Inside this, laundry soaked and she stirred this with a broomstick. She had my sympathy. Without the aid of today’s machinery and electricity, laundry for seven children would be a burdensome task.

He released his hold on two young ones, picked up a crawling toddler he called “Ruby”, and approached Mary Sue. “Two weeks is not a long time, honey. And I stayed here two nights of it.”

She brought the broomstick out, thick with dripping white garments like boiled noodles and dropped these into another pot of clean water. “I was asleep when you came in at night, I was asleep when you left the next morning.” She said this in a monotone voice, her face void of emotion.

“Well, now, whose fault is that?” Mr. Phillips asked her, his scowl deepening. “Besides, I just wanted to make sure everything was alright. And it was. You and the boys look after things just fine.” He reached over and pulled me over to stand beside him. “And now I’m back for good and with a new mommy for you. That should make you happy, Mary Sue.”

That was my first indication that he hadn’t told his children beforehand about me. I wasn’t the only one who had held this knowledge in the dark, uneasy that exposure would show the cracks and flaws. They were handling it well, as if it were to be expected along with bad weather.

Mary Sue shaved lye soap into the boiling pot of water. She was either concentrating or ignoring, her expression difficult to read. “Hey you two!” she called out as two boys ran by her in chase. “Help me wring these out and then go pour this rinse water on the flower bed. And don’t forget after supper to come out and pour this hot soapy water onto the porch so I can give it a good scrubbing.”

Mr. Phillips sighed. “I’m going to go check on the pig to see why it’s sick, I guess. One of you boys take Bess’s trunk to Daddy’s bedroom. Bess go on in and make yourself at home, I’ll be in directly and Mary Sue can cook us up some green beans and new potatoes fresh from our garden.”

He squeezed my elbow and smiled that bright smile of his until I bared my own teeth. That was the best I could do. I had convinced myself that I was accustomed to large families; my aunt Opal and her eight children, my uncle Jesse with his six boys, a woman would find her way to the Lighthouse with her long line of ducklings trailing behind her ... but this …

The worst of it was, I was afraid to think. Thinking created questions and I was already in way over my head, and questions would only prove that. As a sleepwalker might, I aimed numbly toward the front porch, toward some unknown goal, something inside me hoping I’d wake up.

I did wake up but at the most inopportune moment, for it was just before bedtime.

The four boys had gone up the narrow staircase to their attic beds; the three girls were in the next room, their shared bedroom, whispering and giggling loudly. I was exhausted – ‘dog-tired’ I was told - and completely ill at ease as to what to do. The flurry of events leading up to this moment had (at last!) quieted and I sat with my own thoughts on the edge of Mr. Phillips’ bed.

In my mind’s eye seven children’s heads surfaced from dirty bath water; crying, crawling, needling, runny noses, arguing, pushing, and one talking over another. I saw again Mary Sue’s helpless expression as she attempted to keep these four small rooms and the attic clean.

Supper involved a long process of stoking fire in a horribly old-fashioned stove I hadn’t seen the likes of in years, snapping beans, peeling mounds of potatoes. They had exactly eight chairs crowding around the pine kitchen table and thus a bumpy armchair with exposed stuffing was dragged from the front room into the kitchen where I was forced to sit as ‘New Mommy’, my chin only a few inches above my bowl of beans. I thought this chair befitting to my situation - I was out of place. Washing supper dishes passed to the children, but I had a sinking suspicion this was only because I was new.

The second part of my New Mommy title would bring great expectations tomorrow. They didn’t understand how invalid this was - I could not be a ‘Mommy’, but a parody of one. I couldn’t begin to guess where to begin as I was thrust into the middle of these lives. How could I go forward with them if I didn’t know where they’ve been? Heavy thuds from the upper floor persisted, matching my aching head. If he – if we – were man and wife, he would expect marital relations, but that would bring more children. How would seven others of different blood treat mine? I was twenty-one; suddenly, clearly, too young to begin … such painful nonsense! And it would be painful. I’d heard too many pitiful stories at the Lighthouse from battered women of abusive husbands. I had helped deliver my baby sister, Little Cady, and had seen the seizures of pain and surges of blood, only to witness her death a year later. I would not subject myself to this!

These were my thoughts as Mr. Phillips came into the bedroom from the washbowl on the back porch. His hair hung wet and loose, framing his face, and he smelled of soap. His white shirt now off, he wore only a leather vest and trousers showing off his tanned muscular arms. His bare feet frightened me the most.

I stood up quickly, as if the bed had caught fire. I backed away from his outstretched arms and slow easy grin.

“Come here, honey,” he said in a low, playful tone.

“Don’t touch me!”

He stopped and dropped his arms. “What’s wrong? What happened?” He looked around for some concealed child, but finding none, returned a confused gaze at me. “You’re frightened of me, Bess?”

“No, I-I’m just not ready.”

“I’ll be gentle. I promise.” He took another step toward me.

I squared my shoulders and breathed in deeply for strength. “I simply can’t, Mr. Phillips.”

He folded his arms across his chest and studied me carefully. “You simply can’t – what? Sleep with me tonight? Call me by my first name? Tell me what it is you can’t do.”

“I can’t live here.”

He shook his head and stared down at the pine floor planks. “I may not be rich, Bess, and I know the kids can get a bit rowdy, but deep down they’re good kids and I’m a good man who’d be good to you. I can build on to the cabin if you think it’s too small. Is that it?”