The House Girl (32 page)

“Mister, what do you want?”

“I’m hungry, Josephine, make me some supper, would you.”

Josephine stepped to the bottom of the stairs, walked carefully around him, and made her way to the kitchen. Mister followed heavily behind her, his breath ragged. From the side cupboard she pulled salted pork, bread, pickled cucumbers, and set to fixing a plate for Mister. She heard his steps wander away again through the house and then reenter the kitchen. Josephine turned and he stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame, his eyes tired and unfocused, the lids half-fallen.

“I am much aggrieved by this news of your Missus.”

Josephine bent her head to the plate, spreading butter on the bread, hopeful that he might eat his supper and retire to bed. There was still time for her to reach the undertaker’s house if she ran, if she kept to the shadows, where the moonlight did not reach.

She placed the finished plate on the kitchen table, but Mister remained in the doorway.

“I am much aggrieved, Josephine, much aggrieved.”

“Mister, I must retire now to check on Missus. May I pass?” She managed to say this with a cool detachment, as though today were just like any other day. But these strangled minutes in the dark kitchen felt like no others that had come before: Mister drinking again, Josephine with the blood sounding loud in her ears, a cold sweat rising on her palms and the tight places of her dress as she stood before him, his thick form blocking the door. There was the smell of bodies in the air, her own and Mister’s, ranker and mixed with whiskey. “Mister, may I pass?” Josephine asked again.

He lunged at her then, a movement fast and fluid, she would not have thought him capable of it. His hands grabbed her shoulders, his breath was heavy and foul. She saw how the hairs of his beard left his face, the root buried in the skin like a pin in a cushion.

“Josephine, I am so sorry. You do not know how sorry I am.” He crushed her to him, and she smelled smoke in his clothes, and mud and horse.

Josephine pushed her palms against Mister’s shoulders but could find no purchase on the floor. Her heels scrabbled against the stone, she felt herself off-balance, her arms powerless against the weight of him. He crushed her back against the wall and the plaster was cool beneath the thin cloth of her dress. There was a slipperiness on her neck, a wetness from his mouth or perhaps his tears.

Josephine said, “Mister, Mister. I hear Missus calling. I hear her calling me.”

Josephine heard nothing, only the jagged sound of Mister’s breath and her own pounding heart, but Mister stopped, straightened his back, relaxed his grip, enough for Josephine to right herself, half-step away. They both remained silent, listening. And then:

“Josephine, Josephine. I need you.” Missus’ voice, like a thread spooling down the stairs, the faintest gossamer twisting in the still air of the kitchen.

Mister turned his head toward the door as though Missus Lu herself stood there and watched him with her eyes tired from sickness, from the years of striving alongside him.

“Go,” said Mister, his voice a whisper, a sudden place of stillness in the struggle between them. And he released her. He collapsed onto the floor. His back heaved, though in sobs or sickness Josephine could not say.

Josephine ran from the kitchen, up the stairs, to Missus’ room. Missus sat upright in bed, her hands kneading the sheets, clasping and unclasping, her knuckles raw, her eyes open wide in the low light of the room, disks of ghostly white staring as Josephine stood in the doorway.

Josephine tried to calm her breath, relax her shoulders, disguise her fear. “Missus, what is it?”

“I dreamt the most horrible dream. I am afraid, Josephine.”

Josephine moved into the room and sat on the bed. She removed Missus’ hands from the bedclothes, placed one atop the other and took them in her own, stroking the tops, smoothing them as if smoothing away the wrinkles from a sheet.

“Do not be afraid,” said Josephine, and she wondered if Mister would come to the room and wait for Missus to return to sleep, wait for Josephine to emerge.

“I have never told you,” Missus said. “And I fear it is my damnation. I know my time is short now, I have no illusions.” Missus’ bones relaxed into the bed as Josephine’s hand stroked, stroked, sliding over the knuckles, down the long slender fingers to their tips. Missus’ head fell back against the pillow, and moonlight from the window struck the planes of her face, hiding the cut in shadow. On the side of Missus’ neck the tumor throbbed, the redness creeping now toward the front.

“What have you never told me, Missus?” Josephine asked, her voice faint, but as Missus Lu’s eyes began to close she asked again, louder this time: “What have you never told me?”

“Oh Josephine, look away. I cannot bear your eyes on me.”

Josephine turned her head toward the window and recalled the kitchen knife she had thrown that morning; she thought how the bone handle must reflect the moon, that surely it could be found in the long grass now, easier perhaps than if she had searched in the day.

“Josephine, there was one baby who lived. One.”

Josephine noticed a trickle of blood, dried to dark, on the windowsill. Missus’ blood that Josephine had not seen to wipe away.

“Yours, Josephine. Your baby lived. You were so young, you did not understand. I was able to ease your pain throughout, Dr. Vickers assisted me. You remember it as a dream, don’t you, Josephine? That is how I wanted it. I did not want you to remember. I wanted you to think it had died. Like all of mine.”

Josephine did not look at Missus. She stopped her stroking and took her hands away and put them in her lap. The air passed through her lungs, thicker with each breath, and the room seemed suddenly adrift, disconnected from the house and earth, tipping, rocking. It seemed to Josephine that she and Missus rode a boat sailing toward some distant, terrible shore. She tried to stand from the bed but her legs felt unsteady; she tried again and, though her legs still trembled, she made her way to the door.

“Was it a girl?” Josephine asked, turning back to face Missus, and she heard her own voice as though it had traveled through a long, deep tunnel.

“A boy,” Missus said. “You had a boy.”

“And where is he?”

“I took him to the Stanmores. What’s one more nigger head, I thought. They have so many.”

Josephine paused in the doorway and looked down at Missus Lu lying there in the bed, blankets pulled up on this hot night, her face flushed, damp with sweat, her eyes dark and not there in her own head. The tumor just visible from where Josephine stood. Josephine remembered again the morning she had returned to Bell Creek and yes, it had been this bed, her mistress’s tall bed, where she had lain down and given birth. The relentless pain, the sound of rain slapping, the crow at the window, Dr. Vickers’s rough hands, her emptiness. A complicated elation flooded Josephine now, knowing that her child had not died, no, her child had breathed and cried and lived, stronger than Missus’ own babies, stronger than the pull of their spirit selves, the cold spirit fingers that must have clutched at his new warm body. But the elation was a selfish one, and this she understood, because where was that boy now? And what did he know of his mother?

The moments of silence widened like the sea between Josephine at the door and Missus Lu in the bed. There was no movement from below or above. Only the sound of the wind came to Josephine, insistent and strong through the willows by the river, rousing the flowers in the beds skirting the house, the latch on the front gate rattling with its force.

“Do you forgive me? Josephine, I ask your forgiveness. You were so young. It was all that could be done.” Missus’ voice trembled.

Josephine said nothing, she made no movement of her head to indicate yes or no. She stepped into the hall and softly closed the door behind her; this was the only act of kindness she could perform. A no, and Missus would not be at peace, she would go to her grave dirty with this sin, burning with it; but a yes would be a lie, and Josephine wanted no more of lies, not for herself or for Missus. In the hall, she listened for Mister but it was Missus’ voice that came to her, higher pitched now and muffled: “Do you forgive me? Josephine, do you forgive me?”

Josephine climbed the back stairs to the attic and crouched, easing into Missus’ boots, fastening the buttons snug tight against her ankles. She took her bundle from the bed and walked down again, careless now with the creaks and stomping. Past the studio door, Missus’ bedroom, down the grand staircase, past the kitchen where Mister’s body lay quiet on the stones, his knees drawn up to his chest, his head turned away.

She made her slow way out the wide front door, down the porch steps, the rockers silent now, still as the dead and gone. There was the moon, just a slice thin as her smallest fingernail, just enough to see by.

As she had imagined, the knife’s bone handle shone white against the dark grass, and she grabbed it and pulled. She stood for a moment in the yard and cleaned the dirt from the blade against her skirts, then pushed the blade into the bundle. She walked down the path, through the front gate, and paused in the dust of the road.

To the south lay the Stanmores’, the great lurking house and the rows of slave cabins and acres of fields. To the north lay the undertaker’s and, beyond that, town, and roads leading farther along, to the wide Ohio River and its verdant, free northern bank. Philadelphia, Louis had said. She would meet Louis there one day, the Broadmoors’ locks would not contain him.

Josephine paused in the dust of the road. Missus’ boots pointed in neither direction. A look behind her: no movement, no sound.

She did not pause for long. It was only later, with Caleb, that she returned to this moment outside the gate and thought of the choice she had made, the way the road toward the Stanmores’ dipped down a little and then rose sharply up and the hill breached in a straight hard line and beyond it she could see nothing.

Josephine did not pause for long because the choice did not seem a difficult one. She would leave him there, yes, she would leave her son behind. The pull that had been within her all her days, every hour at Bell Creek, poised against a newness she did not yet understand. How could she not run? How could she not? A cloud passed over the moon and darkness fell around her, the shadows winked out and she thought with a sudden fierce joy:
All the time in the world, there is all the time in the world. A life is long and it can be good
.

The moon returned and Josephine turned left toward the undertaker’s, keeping close to the long night shadows thrown by the old sycamores that lined this part of the road. She felt no fear. The willows of Bell Creek whispered to her their good-byes.

Lina

Caleb

Josephine

A
t dawn Lina set off from her Richmond hotel, gray clouds rolling overhead. For forty-five minutes she drove through a wet landscape, the sky racing dark above her, past dripping telephone wires and fields painted bright green and yellow. The tires splashed along the rural roads with their ruts and dips, but she was following the rain, not in it, and at last, just before she reached the town of Lynnhurst, the clouds parted and the sun appeared glistening and ripe, hanging low in the sky. The last stretch of the journey took Lina along an old carriageway, paved now but only just, the road rutted with potholes and surging root hills, and she drove slowly. Rows of sycamores towered beside the road and cast flickering shadows across the cracked pavement. Lina squinted her eyes against the sun’s glare. The windshield, the trees, the landscape, all seemed to glitter with suspended drops.

Bell Creek was now the Bell Center for Women and Art, a museum-gallery-school that granted residencies to qualified female artists. The women were given a small bedroom, use of a communal kitchen, studio space in which to work, mentoring from visiting faculty members, and a weekly stipend. The residencies were generously funded by the Stanmore Foundation, Lina had read, and were highly competitive. Since the Bell Center’s inception in 1971, rural Lynnhurst had been transformed into a destination for arts-minded tourists.

Lina saw the sign,
The Bell Center
in curling script, and pulled into the empty visitor parking lot, a soggy stretch of trodden-down gravel and mud. The air smelled of wet earth and far-off manure as Lina made her way along the paved path toward the main house. She looked up and felt herself cocooned by the Blue Ridge Mountains visible in all directions, a series of soft sloping hills tinted gray and hazy with morning mist. They did not feel enclosing but rather protective and somehow feminine, a landscape of many limbs folded, arm over arm, soft curves and rounded tips.

Lina turned a corner in the path and there it was, Bell Creek. The house stood up on a slight slope, surrounded by landscaped plots of exuberantly blooming flowers, the names of which Lina was sure she didn’t know, and the air turned suddenly to their fragrance. The lawn stretched wide and green away from the house and the flower beds, down to a fresh white picket fence with a waist-high gate that fronted the road.