Heart of a Dove (5 page)

Not expecting such a reaction, he stumbled backward and then fell heavily to the wooden floorboards. I remained poised above him with my fingers curled into claws, wishing I was brave enough to leap upon his person and scrape and tear at his face. I would have killed him for my brothers, for my father, for young Rafe Howell, who’d lived the next farm over and upon whom Mama had once cast a speculative eye as a potential future mate for me. For all of them, slain before their lives had begun, ghosts to haunt perhaps nothing more concrete than my memory. But I didn’t move; that was the first mistake.

I underestimated him, feeling the momentary triumph as a sort of euphoria, a drug within my blood. And that was the second mistake.

He lunged before I could blink, clutching my ankles, growling deep in his throat like a maddened dog. Before I could suck enough air to scream, he’d pulled my feet from under me and I was hard on my back, my vision narrowing to a black tunnel. He crawled awkwardly over me and when I saw that he’d pulled a thin-bladed knife, albeit a small one, something my father would have used to clean trout, I twisted and bucked my hips against him, breathing hard. He couldn’t hold me completely still with only one hand and we scrabbled over the bare floor, my head bumping into the peacock dressing screen and knocking it backward with a crash that resounded like a gunshot. Later, I would realize that this was likely what saved me that night.

Groaning deep in his chest, he clenched the blade of the knife between his teeth to free both hands, and at once he was back atop me, shoving me brutally to the floor, before grabbing back the weapon and pressing its cold point to the soft hollow beneath the tip of my chin. Instinct stilled all of my external movement. His breath was coming hard, wheezing against my forehead, his eyes fearsome as he traced the tip of that blade along my throat as though slitting it open, lightly, just skimming my skin. I could hear a whimpering sound, something a tortured animal might make, and knew it was mine. He made the same motion in the opposite direction, seemingly absorbed in the task, drawing the knife across my throat again, pressing just harder on this pass.

I heard running footsteps coming down the hall, though I was angled away and could not see who banged through the door. Sam Rainey moaned then, looking over his shoulder. The second his hold loosened I twisted frantically away, and he turned back to me with the striking of a snake, slashing the blade viciously at me, catching a line along the skin just in front of my left ear; the blood that poured forth was shockingly hot against my neck. And then he was yanked away as I heard a piercing scream, and as though observing from a distance, knew the inhuman sound was mine.

There were
several practicing doctors in St. Louis who would condescend to pay a call to a whorehouse during prime business hours. I was still hidden away in my room, as Ginny refused to allow more of a scene to be created. Betsy had cleaned the cut with a linen dipped in a bowl of vinegar and water, her sympathetic eyes telling me far more than she would dare to speak aloud. Betsy then sat beside me on the mattress and held another cloth to my face; by the time the doctor had climbed the back steps of Ginny’s upper hallway, keeping him from direct public viewing on the main floor, there was little for him to do but pronounce that the wound was shallow and would heal without stitches, though I would scar. He recommended a cleansing with carbolic acid, and then left again, though surely he would charge Ginny for more than five minutes’ time.

Ginny herself swept into my room after he’d left, dressed in saffron this evening, with cut-glass crystals dangling from her earlobes and along the bodice of her gown. She flicked her head dismissively at Betsy, who rose without a word, though she left behind the basin, the linen cloth draped over the edge.

“He’s been jailed, but it won’t stick,” Ginny said, and her voice was uncharacteristically quiet. Her eyebrows drew together over her beak of a nose as she added, “Goddammit, I thought he had learned the last time. He swore to me.” My eyes flashed to hers, though I didn’t dare press for an explanation. She tipped my chin and considered the mark along the edge of my face. She muttered, “Son of a bitch. Are you in pain, Lila? I have laudanum, if so. Do you want it?”

The cut burned, though I would not admit such to her, and refused to accept her offer, having been privy to far too many stories of the horrors of opiate addiction. Ginny was living proof; we had all borne witness to her when she was in need of the drug. I curled my right hand over the damp cloth Betsy had left behind, smelling the strong scent of the vinegar in the water; my hair would reek of it until I was able to wash.

“No. Thank you, though,” I said quietly. I wanted Deirdre, but she was yet working.

“Goddammit,” Ginny muttered again, and her fingers trailed over my neck and just lightly over the swell of my breasts, startling me; she had never touched me thusly. “You’ll scar, but you’re still the most beautiful of my girls. You know that though, don’t you, Lila?”

My mind skipped with panic as I considered my choice of responses; should I agree or disagree with her pronouncement? Which was she expecting?

“Why did he cut you?” she asked me then, her fingers yet upon my skin. I felt beads of sweat, fear and nervous energy condensing upon me like droplets of water along the side of a glass left in the afternoon sun. “What did he say?”

“He…” I gulped and gathered myself, before finishing, “He…he asked where I was from. When I told him he…lost control.”

“Men and their fucking war they can’t leave behind,” she muttered. “And then he cut you? Because you’re southern?”

I saw again the expression in his eyes; no one had ever looked upon me with such unveiled loathing, though I realized it would have been the same for anyone he considered an enemy, even still. I knew, without a doubt, that the girl he’d killed in Arkansas had been of the south. And surely he’d killed others, girls no one would ever remember. I shuddered and Ginny removed her fingertips from the top curve of my breasts.

“He’s crazy,” I said softly.

“He’s not crazy,” she contradicted, her eyes out the window. “He’s damaged. He wasn’t such before the War.”

Again I studied her sharply, but her eyes were distant as she studied the nighttime sky. She looked more human than I had ever observed, though still my bowels tightened at the mere thought of pressing her for information, of daring to upset her.

“Lila!” came Deirdre’s voice then, as she appeared in the partly-open door with her dark eyebrows arched high with dread, pale face still made up for the evening, long hair trailing over one shoulder. She disregarded Ginny’s presence and came to me at once, which she would never dare under other circumstances, curling her arms around my waist and hugging me close before drawing away. She caught my chin in her slender fingers to examine the gash upon the back of my cheek. She gasped, “Oh, Li, I was so scared. He cut you? The bastard cut you?”

Aware of Ginny’s gaze, I said firmly, “I’m just fine. Truly. I’ll be just fine.”

She looked into my eyes and understood. She whispered, “Just so.”

After Deirdre left, Ginny said, “You rest for tonight, Lila.”

Less than a minute later I was alone. My feet carried me to the oval mirror, where I regarded the raw red line that the knife point had opened upon my skin. I traced my fingers over its length, lightly. And wondered just how many other scars I would come to bear from this life.

Sam Rainey
was not held through the night, as Betsy and Ramie informed me over breakfast the next day. The girls were sympathetic in the macabre fashion that is borne of the desire for gossip rather than compassion. All of us were gathered around the table, including Betsy and Greta, though they were standing rather than sitting; I was the unwitting center of everyone’s avid attention. Betsy and Eva were both smoking tobacco rolls, the perfume of these scenting the stuffy kitchen.

“I told her, I told Ginny that bastard was bad news,” Eva pronounced, blowing smoke from the corner of her dark-pink lips.

My eyes flickered to her for an instant, before Lisette added, “Nothing will happen to him, no one cares about a man cutting up a whore. Let alone killing one in her bed.”

“What did he say, Li, why’d he do it?” Mary asked, reaching behind herself to braid her yellow hair as she awaited my response.

“He heard my voice and knew I was from the south,” I said. Deirdre, who had clasped my right hand in her left, gave it a gentle squeeze. Quietly I explained, “He’s crazy, I’ve no doubt. Every word about him is true.”

“So many of them are,” Jola said knowingly. “The way the bastards talk you’d think that Appomattox never happened.”

“For some of them, it didn’t,” Lisette said darkly. “The southerners don’t know they lost, if you want my opinion.” Her dark eyes darted to me, and she added hastily, “No offense intended, Lila. But it is the truth.”

“You’re fortunate he didn’t kill you,” Deirdre said. “I couldn’t sleep for nightmares that he’d done it.”

“I was on the floor when we heard the crash upstairs,” Ramie said. “George jumped the bar and ran up the steps two at a time.”

George was one of the regular bartenders; undoubtedly I owed him my life.

“Not only George, but half the crowd on his bootheels,” added Eva. “It was the most excitement any of them have seen in months.”

Trust her to use a word such as ‘excitement’ to describe what had happened.

“He’ll not be allowed here again,” Betsy said with certainty, and Greta nodded emphatically.

“You’ll have to wear your hair down over it for a time,” Deirdre said, tracing her fingers just above the wound. “But it will heal in time. It won’t be noticeable forever.”

I nodded, as though in agreement. Though it may be true that he’d not be allowed again in Hossiter’s, the same instinct that had warned me of his ill intent before he’d ever touched me lingered within my gut; I knew somehow that I was not yet free of Sam Rainey’s hatred.

- 4 -

“Lorie, you out there?” Deirdre called. “Lord, I’ve been searching everywhere for you.”

“I’m outside,” I called back, at first not registering that she had called me by my real name, rather than Lila.

I was sitting on the upper balcony, the smaller structure that jutted off the side of the building, rather than the wider, grander one in front, where we could perch in the afternoon light and draw attention to Hossiter’s. Just now, both Deirdre and I were bleeding, allowing a rare evening in which we were simultaneously free. I was clad in my blue-flowered silk wrap, my bare feet tucked beneath the edge of a white lacy petticoat. My hair was loose, as I almost never wore it, hanging over my shoulders.

I was watching the crescent moon, just a fingernail paring at it waned towards new, gliding noiselessly to the western horizon through the last of the remaining daylight, while above me in the spread of the eastern sky stars were beginning to pinprick through the darkness. I caught my chin on my bent knees and listened to the distant yipping of the coyotes. It never bothered me, as I never needed to sleep at night. Their barking out on the prairie reminded me that there was another world that existed perhaps not so far from me, thriving and mysterious. I shifted a little, my stomach aching with the cramps that often accompanied my monthly bleeding. My eyes were still on the moon as she joined me.

“Do those goddamn coyotes ever quit?” Deirdre wondered aloud, sitting gracefully.

I responded, “Near to dawn, they will.”

Deirdre regarded me and my flippant response with what I assumed was sarcasm, though when she spoke her voice was sincere. She said softly, “You are so beautiful, Lorie. You don’t belong here.”

My eyes flashed at once to hers, startled by the intensity of her tone and the second use of my real name. I had told her over a year ago, shortly after I’d been cut by Sam Rainey’s knife. Though she was careful never to use it; rarely had she spoken it aloud.

“I’m not bleeding,” she said then, and her dark eyes were luminous with unshed tears as she made this statement. I didn’t understand what she meant, not at first, but she clarified in the next moment. “I lied to Ginny, it’s been so long since she checked my bindings, and she’d be expecting me to bleed about now…”

“Why?” I asked, my voice faint.

“I’m caught,” she whispered, as tears spilled over her cheeks.

Instantly I moved to her, curling my arms around her waist and resting my chin upon her slim shoulder, holding her as she had held me so many times. My heart clanged with alarm and fear, while my mind skipped ahead and calculated what we could do, what could possibly be done.

“Are you certain?” I asked her, drawing back and studying her glistening eyes.

She nodded, lips trembling. “It’s been two months since I bled, and my breasts are sore and heavy. I can scarcely bear for them to be touched. Oh God, what will I do? Ginny will cast me out of here, I’ll die on the streets. I have nothing, no one.”

I tightened my arms about her. I said, keeping my voice firm, “No, you have me. I will help you, we’ll go to Doc Clancy, he’ll help you through this. I have money…”

“I won’t go to him, he’ll butcher me alive,” she whimpered, swiping at her tears with both hands. But they wouldn’t cease spilling. “You know it. I’ll have to drink the tea that Eva talked about once, from that old woman who lives down near the docks. It brings on the pains. I’ll have to kill it, oh God, I’ll have to kill the baby.”

“It would be far worse if it was born,” I told her, brushing her hair from her cheeks with gentle fingers. “You know that. Ginny would consider it her property, a way to make money. She’d sell it, Deirdre, as if it were nothing.”

She shook her head and tried again for a deep breath. Her voice shook as she said,“You’re right, of course. I’ll have Eva send word with her boy, the one who brings her tobacco.”

“No, don’t trust her,” I said with certainty. “Don’t tell anyone else.” I looked hard into her eyes. “You haven’t, have you?”

She shook her head and managed for me a small half-smile.

“Good,” I said. I closed my eyes and considered for a moment.

Deirdre stroked my loose hair with her slim fingers. She whispered again, “You don’t belong here, you don’t. I’ve always known it.”

“Where else would I be?” I asked, still thinking. I finally said with certainty, “I’ll go. I’ll sneak out tomorrow night. I just started bleeding and you’re nearly through. Ginny won’t think to look for me in my room, especially if you keep watch while you’re working.”

“No, I won’t have you risking anything for me,” she said. Though in her tone was a hope that sent an arrow of determination to my heart.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said back. “I would have died here long ago if not for you. You’ve given me more with your friendship than you’ll ever know.”

Deirdre’s eyes flooded at my words, and she collapsed into my arms. I held her fast; at long last she laid her head upon my lap and I stroked her hair, watching the moon as it set into the west.

The next
evening I dressed in my blue muslin, left my face devoid of any cosmetics, laced my boots and pinned my hair into a loose knot on the back of my head. Respectable, very nearly, a word I had not applied to myself in close to two years. In the drawstring purse Deirdre lent me, I had nearly three dollars in coins; if the tea cost more than this I would have to think on my feet. I was planning to sneak down the back staircase once Deirdre let me know that Ginny was otherwise occupied on the main floor, and my heart was crashing with fear and perhaps a hint of exhilaration; though it scarcely seemed possible, I had not set foot off Ginny’s property since my arrival in the October of 1865.

I studied my eyes in the oval mirror as I heard the piano below. Outside, the air was darkening towards night, a blending of grays and pinks decorating the horizon as the sun disappeared. I heard Mary in the hallway, giggling with a customer, and then the door to her room clicked closed; I shared a wall with her, to the right. Not more than a minute later, a soft knock sounded on mine, and I opened it to peek out. Deirdre, her face milk-pale beneath her paint, studied me with her dark eyes appearing twice their usual size, edged with black kohl.

“I’m scared for you,” she whispered.

I was scared too, but I loved her enough to risk this. Besides, I reasoned, Ginny had never told me that we couldn’t leave the property, not in so many words.

“I’ll be back directly,” I assured her.

She tipped and kissed my cheek, before darting to the top of the staircase, observing for a moment. She nodded again and I hurried to the left, away from her and the activity of the main floor, down the back staircase, which led to a small hallway and two closed doors. One of these was Ginny’s room and the other opened upon the alley behind Hossiter’s, where many a man who considered himself too good to appear in the bar to request a whore paid Ginny’s price to sneak in for a trick. I could hardly breathe for nerves as my hand closed around the doorknob, stretching out my senses to listen. Satisfied that no one was near, I slipped out into the dusk of an August evening.

I scurried around the far side of the building in which I had lived since I was fifteen, eyeing it from the odd perspective of the ground, a two-story structure of gray clapboard, with a steeply-pitched black roof. It loomed large against the gloaming sky as I let myself out the back gate in the white fence. I did not allow myself to dwell too deeply upon what I was doing, and hurried over the trampled grass of the alley, planning to merge into the foot traffic on the boardwalk farther south, well away from Hossiter’s. The evening was a fine one, a clear sky fading to black and arching above me, lanterns glowing in the streetlamps, only just lit. I slipped, ghost-like, from between two buildings, keeping my chin discreetly lowered, not making eye contact with anyone, as many were milling about; I could hear laughter and chatter from the direction of the Grand behind me, though I needn’t have worried, as no one paid me particular attention.

I had only five blocks to walk to the docks along the bustling river, and though my mind should have been concentrating upon the task at hand, I found my gaze wandering to the horses tethered at the hitching posts along the boardwalk. Duns and chestnuts, there a dappled gray. They regarded me with little interest, though I curbed the sharp urge to cup a round, velvety nose, rub my palm over a strong, smooth neck. I inhaled the familiar scent of horseflesh and realized I was dallying. The docks were no more than a quarter-mile away, nearly visible from the top window at Ginny’s, and I struck out again, angling east.

It wasn’t unpleasant near the river, I realized immediately. A paddlewheel boat caught my eye first, moored at a dock and backlit by the darkening eastern sky. Its upper deck was brimming with lantern light, cheerful in the dusk, passengers leaning upon the red-painted railing to gaze over the river. Other smaller riverboats were likewise anchored against the constant rush of the river, some being unloaded before my eyes, crewmen rolling barrels along gangplanks, toting wooden crates. There was a busy air that defined the place, men talking, laughing, cursing, shouting, shoving here and there. I paused a moment, getting my bearings, smelling the musky tang of the shore. A young man in shirtsleeves, carrying two chickens by their feet, paused to smile at me and tip his head.

“You looking for something particular, miss?” he asked politely.

I held his gaze for a second, debating whether to trust him. He waited expectantly, a boy perhaps no older than me.

“Yes,” I said at last. “Do you know of a woman who sells medicine…teas and such…near here?”

He blew out a breath and said, “You mean old lady Cross. Why’s a girl as sweet as you looking for her?”

“I’ve a need to speak with her,” I explained without elaborating, and he indicated with one of the chickens the right direction.

“Ask for her at the building yonder, the custom house,” he explained. “She’s always there after dark sets in. Good evening, miss.”

“Thank you,” I told him, hurrying that direction.

The custom house was a two-story structure that, to my nervous eyes, loomed menacingly in the gathering darkness. It was closed for daily business, though a group was gathered on the wide-railed side porch, surrounding a table with a lantern plunked in the middle. Men, mostly, playing at some sort of cards; my eyes roved nervously over the scene and then my shoulders sank with relief as I noticed a woman amongst them, smoking a tobacco pipe, wrapped in a shawl against the evening’s chill. I drew a breath to fortify my nerves and felt my feet carrying me towards them.

They looked my way in surprise, though one, a regular at Ginny’s and a many-times customer of mine named Hiram, observed cheerfully, “Lila! Come to pay a call, doll-face?”

“She’ll charge you, don’t go thinking otherwise,” said one of his companions, raking his eyes over my front. “See if I’m wrong.”

I swallowed away all of the humiliation, closing my eyes for a heartbeat. When I opened them again, the woman was regarding me with frank speculation. I forced myself to look at Hiram as I said, “I’m seeking a woman named Ada Cross.”

He thumbed over his shoulder at the woman and again relief swamped me; I had found her. Now to secret her away from this group to speak privately. Though I should have realized there would be no such fortune. Immediately one of the other men made a scolding noise and asked, “You got yourself in trouble, huh, girl?”

I felt scalding anger rise in my chest. Even if I had been upon this errand for myself, it would have hardly been my fault alone. As though a man wasn’t every bit as much to blame in such matters. I bit back my steaming words and this time implored Ada, who’d not yet spoken. I said, “I’ve a need of…your help.”

The men were laughing now, though Ada blew smoke from the corner of her mouth and then rose with some difficulty, reaching for a cane that had been braced near her seat. She said to me in a low-pitched voice, made hoarse with tobacco, “Don’t mind these fools, girl.”

She was small and slight, stooped a little over the wooden cane. She beckoned and I followed instantly. Once around the far corner, she said, “I can tell it ain’t for you. Who then?”

“A friend,” I said, breathless with concern. “I’ve promised her I would find you. Where we work, a child…could never…”

She nodded at once. “I’ve a tea that brings on the pains. Let it steep for a good half hour before drinking. She’ll be in pain for a good day, perhaps longer. Tell her she may never conceive again.”

I nodded, fearful of these things I would have to tell Deirdre. The woman had a pouch made of ticking that was tied to her skirt with a length of rope. She handed me her cane, then her pipe, which I was reluctant to handle, but did. She rummaged within the pouch, extracting a small burlap bag tied with blue ribbon.

“This is the last I have. I can let you have it for a dollar,” she told me, dangling it before my eyes as though to hypnotize me. I nodded at once, and she reclaimed her pipe and cane, both, letting me take the tea.

“I’ve a dollar,” I told her, rummaging for coins within my own bag, anxious to be away. “Here, and thank you, ma’am.”

She swept my money into her pouch at once, plugging her mouth with the pipe. And without another word she went back to the card game I had interrupted. I clutched the burlap bag and hastened away, though footsteps were suddenly coming behind. It couldn’t have been Ada, as she walked haltingly. My heart beat fearfully, sensing danger, even as a cajoling voice said, “Lila, wait. I have money, if you’ve time.”

I turned and saw one of the men from the table approaching me with a grin, just slightly unsteady. I could smell his whiskey breath and summoned up my courage; I had to tread lightly or he would be not only offended but perhaps violent. I called upon all of my acting skills as I smiled back, with hints of both apparent regret and seduction, and told him, “Ginny would be upset with me if I provided services outside Hossiter’s. I would be punished.”

He reached me and took my arm, drawing me unwittingly near. He murmured, “I won’t ever tell. Hiram speaks well of you, and you are the sweetest little whore I’ve ever seen.” His hand moved to stroke my cheek and I forced myself to remain still.