The Sisters (5 page)

Against the train windows, rain clattered like giant handfuls of thrown gravel. Beside her, Wallace sat with his head back, hands shuttering his eyes. Mabel looked across the aisle, out the opposite windows. North, beyond the river, shafts of lightning pierced the black clouds.

When they got to Chicago, Wallace would go out to find a place for them to stay while Mabel waited in the station for Bertie’s train. Bertie was sure to be tired, upset, confused—angry and afraid—and the first days would be hard, harder even than the days after Mama died, but once Bertie was with them, when they could hold her hands and touch her cheek while they explained all, Bertie would understand, and she would forgive them.

The rocking of the train slowed as it approached a station, small, in need of painting—so like Juniper’s. A few seats away, a couple and two children stood up, collecting bags and cardboard cases.

Wallace took his hands from his eyes. “Louisville?”

“No,” Mabel said. “One of the little towns. I don’t know which.” There were three or four such stops—she didn’t remember. She’d been on the train to Louisville only once—a special treat, Butcher had insisted, for her sixteenth birthday. That day he took her first to Stewart’s, made her parade and twist before him in each of the half-dozen dresses the saleswoman had selected before he chose one made all of white lace. After that, they lunched in the tearoom, where the waiters gathered to share their best wishes, setting before her a small cake decorated with fresh rosebuds.

Outside the store, Mabel turned back the way they had come, toward the train station, but Butcher linked her arm in his and led her down Fourth Street, around the corner, blocks and blocks away from the bright stores, onto a street with signless, smoky brick buildings. He knocked at a shabby green door, immediately answered by a whiskered man in his shirtsleeves who pointed to a corner half-covered by a thin curtain and said, “Put her back there. I’m all set up.”

His courtly manner gone now, Butcher shoved the Stewart’s box into Mabel’s arms. “Change into this. Everything.”

She pressed as far back into the corner as she could and set the box on the floor. Beneath the dress lay silk underclothes, white silk stockings, and white slippers embroidered with ivory and silver thread. Glancing from behind the curtain, she saw the men with their backs to her, leaning over a table, talking, so she slipped out of her dress and tossed it over the curtain rod to give her more cover. Shivering against the cold sting of the silk, she stepped into the lace dress.

“Mabel! Hurry it up.”

When she came out from behind the curtain, Butcher snatched her hand and pulled her to him. “Told you she was a beauty,” he said, and kissed her hard, his tongue wedging her lips open, then he lifted her in his arms and carried her into another room where there was a swing placed before a backdrop painted to suggest a summer garden. Butcher set her on the swing and gestured toward the other man, now standing behind a camera. “Do everything just as he tells you.”

Five days ago, seeing the way Butcher had looked at Bertie in her graduation dress, Mabel had gone to Wallace and told him how her stepfather, since the Christmas before she turned fifteen, had come sometimes once, sometimes nearly every night in a week to force her from the bed she shared with her sister and into his. She told how his whispered threats about Bertie had taught her to keep silent, had schooled her in concealment. But she hadn’t told Wallace about the pictures.

They were stereo portraits, a series in the tradition of the Turkish women, twelve views in all, which for years to come Butcher would make her look at while he slid his hands under her nightgown, rough fingers pressing every curve of her body.

There were two copies of the first photograph—one given to Bertie to support the story Mabel was instructed to tell of her splendid birthday visit to the city. In that one, she sat demurely on the swing, her shining hair spread across her shoulders. View by view, her clothes fell away, first the dress, then the chemise, the tap pants, the corselet, the stockings. For the last six, she was entirely naked, ordered to lie on the swing, to arch her back, to spread her legs.

“Ready for the last,” the whiskered man said, then told Mabel to kneel on the seat.

She would get through it, she told herself. She would. Just one more. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, tried to separate herself from her body. The swing creaked.

Butcher, naked, a black mask over his eyes, sat beside her.

“Lean over, girl,” said the man behind the camera.

Butcher wrapped his hand around the back of her neck to push her head down, letting go only when her face was inches from his thighs, her long dark hair pooling in his lap.

She jerked upright at the screaming of the whistle, echoed by the conductor’s final warning of departure: “Tucker’s Creek to Louisville. All aboard!”

Mabel sprang to her feet. “We have to go back!”

Wallace caught her hand. “Mabel, the train’s moving.”

She stumbled across his legs and fell headfirst into the aisle. Righting herself, she crawled a few feet forward. “Stop!” she cried, her face wild.

With the help of another man, Wallace lifted her up and got her back to their seat. All through the car, passengers stared and pointed, murmuring their concern and irritation.

Wallace held her tightly, but still Mabel trembled. “Next stop,” she said. “We have to turn back at the next stop.”

“We can’t.” Wallace rocked her, his voice a singsong. “We can’t.”

“We can wait for Bertie at the station. We’ll all go on the late train.”

“Sweetheart,” Wallace said. “We can’t. You know we can’t.”

“In Louisville, then. We’ll meet her train in Louisville.”

“Mabel…”

“
Please,
Wallace.”

Though he touched his fingers to her lips to urge her to stay quiet, Mabel couldn’t stop the tears. “She mustn’t … She can’t go back to the house. What if she goes back to the house?”

“But you told her not to,” Wallace said. “In your note. Didn’t you?”

Mabel wailed. “It won’t work. It won’t work. Something will go wrong. She’s sure to want some of her things. The stereopticon. We could go back for that—just for that.”

“We’ll find her one in Chicago.”

“You don’t understand!” Mabel struggled to get out of the seat again, but Wallace pulled her to him, holding her head against his chest.

“Mabel, Mabel,” Wallace whispered, stroking her hair. “It’s too late, too late.”

Yes. Too late. There was no going back now.

T
HREE

The Letter

November 1933

Newman, Indiana

BERTIE

N
OT A DROP SPILLED FOR
once. The rusted threads of the cap scraped when Bertie twisted it back onto the lamp. She ought not to use any kerosene this time of day, she knew, but there wasn’t enough light coming through the window and her fingers were too cold to cut the cabbage. Hans would fuss about it, but she’d just have to remind him how he was always telling her they had to save where they could on the light bill. He’d come right back and say kerosene cost money, too, but then he’d go sit at the table and wait for supper and not offer another word about it. She’d keep the lamp going only until she had the fire blazing in the stove.

Her stomach flopped inside her when she thought of the smell that would soon fill the house—like a mildewed wool coat of Mabel’s she’d once found in the old barn, only heated up to spread the stink. If she had the salt to spare, she’d shred a couple of heads and pack a crock for sauerkraut. But no, even if she did have the salt, it took weeks to ferment the cabbage … and then if it spoiled partway through, all that food—wasted. And if the kraut did take, what would they eat in the meantime?

At least Alma was asleep. She’d dropped right off as soon as Bertie had set her in the rocking chair, bundled in one of her daddy’s sweaters. Bertie was glad for it. That child had gotten so she cried every time she saw a head of cabbage, choking on her tears, not able to say just what upset her, but Bertie knew, even if Alma didn’t exactly. It was the way her small belly filled with gas after she ate it. Four-year-old bellies weren’t made to eat cabbage nearly every day—nor grown bellies, either, for that matter, but that’s how it was. Every week for months, when Hans carried in the grocery box—two or three heads of cabbage. And then one day, suddenly, it would be potatoes and they’d feel like Christmas had come, until more months passed with potatoes and potatoes, each week a little softer and more shriveled. After that there might not be any vegetables at all, except the canned tomatoes and the dried beans. The only thing that was sure about what came in the grocery box was that it would never be enough and the last day or two of every week, first she and then Hans would go without so Alma could have a little something.

She gathered up the chopped cabbage and dropped it in the pot then slid her palm across the counter to make sure she didn’t miss any little pieces. Mama used to sprinkle a little caraway in if she had it, or some cracked pepper. That small yellow onion, chopped fine, might be nice on top for a change. Bertie wiped her hands dry and scraped the knife clean on the edge of the pot, ready to peel the onion—she’d save the leavings to drop into a broth—then stopped herself just before she made the cut. Hans would need that onion tomorrow, sliced onto the last of the bread. If she used it tonight for flavor, she’d have to send Hans out to work without a lunch, and that wouldn’t be right.

At least he had work. Most of the other women she knew couldn’t say the same about their men. From one day to the next, Hans never knew what he’d be doing—unloading trucks, digging ditches, clearing brush, laying bricks. When Bill Crother had to shut down the mill, he’d turned off close to a hundred men, keeping just a dozen to make up his work crew—even Hans with his bad leg. Somehow, for the last two years, Mr. Crother had managed to find work for them steady, waiting at the empty mill every morning at six to carry them off to wherever they were needed, sometimes moving them three or four times in a single day. He’d stay right with them, Hans told her, working alongside them, then put in hours longer asking around to find another day’s work. There were plenty of folks needing help who couldn’t pay for it—even in trade—but good as Mr. Crother was, he put his men first and wouldn’t take any charity work. He did his best to hand each of them a few dollars every week, but mostly he paid in groceries because he could stretch the money better that way. Now that winter was coming on, Bertie hoped the coal company would use the crew regular again, since they paid in coal. Each man got a shovelful for every full load sold—on a good day that might be five or six—and at the end of the day, they could divide up the flakes left behind in the truck bed. It didn’t leave them any extra, but most days last winter they’d had some to warm up the house of an evening, enough to take the chill off before they tucked Alma into the bed between them.

Just like she’d promised herself, Bertie snuffed the lamp now that the cabbage was stewing. Nothing to do but let it cook and to wait for Hans to come home to dish it up. She’d grown up thinking of her family as poor, but it had never been like this. They didn’t have much at Christmas, and until her hips and bosom had spread out bigger than Mabel’s, she’d worn her sister’s hand-me-down dresses. They’d learned not to waste food or anything else, and at school, though it did make the teacher mad, they used up every bit of space on their paper and wrote new compositions on the backs of ones that had already been marked. But now she knew what it really meant to be poor. She could think of a hundred things to do—like stitch up the seam in Alma’s blue dress, but how could she? What was she to do, unravel a seam from one of her own to get a length of thread? Her dresses were all so old, any thread she’d get would break in the pulling. She’d clean the windows if she had a few drops of vinegar. Or she would mend the chair seat that had broken through if she had any cane on hand. She’d at least wash her hair so she’d look a little nicer when Hans got home, if she could spare the soap.
If, if, if
—that’s what these years had done to them.

There was a banging at the back door, enough to rattle the window. Bertie glanced at Alma, still asleep in the rocker, and stepped into the hall to look. Alice Conrad. She came at least once a week, asking Bertie for some sugar or extra yeast or a little wedge of bacon—always something Bertie either didn’t have or couldn’t spare—every time making a point about how her husband had lost his job when the mill closed. There were three or four others like Alice who lived nearby, women bitter that Hans had been kept on when their husbands weren’t.

Bertie had overheard them talking one day when she passed them on the corner, on her way down to the riverbank with Alma to watch the barges pass. “Bill Crother’s brother died of the polio, you know,” said one. The others nodded, and it was Alice who said what the rest were thinking. “Just pity, then. Why else keep a cripple when there’s plenty of strong-legged men to do the work?”

Bertie wished now she’d said to them what had come into her head:
Crother’s kept him ’cause he’s the best one down there. Never missed a day of work, and there isn’t anybody can lift more.
But she hadn’t said it. Instead, she’d clamped her lips tight and shoved past them, dragging Alma behind her. If she had said it, they wouldn’t have believed her and would have just turned their noses up and walked away, but maybe then they wouldn’t keep coming over asking for things, trying to make her feel bad. Not that she did. Why should she? But she did hate the sight of every one of them.