Tree By Leaf (3 page)

Lou held the iron awkwardly, and her hands moving the shirt around on the ironing board looked clumsy, because of her fingers. Lou’s fingers had been caught in the looms, more than once, when she worked in the mill in Fall River, and they’d healed up crooked. Lou had clever hands, for sewing and cooking, strong hands for cleaning, even though they looked like she shouldn’t be able to do anything. Lou was full of contradictions like that. She was a girl but she seemed a woman grown. She looked pale and weak, but she was strong. She couldn’t read or write, but whatever she said made sense, and she was quick
to learn. She had a meek and quiet way of behaving, standing as if she hoped nobody would notice she was in a room, as if she’d never dare speak out, but she asked stubborn questions or stubbornly refused to answer. She never complained, even though Clothilde guessed she had plenty to complain about.

Never having had what she’d call a friend, Clothilde wasn’t sure of it, but she suspected that Lou would make a good friend, if she hadn’t been a servant. As far as Clothilde had observed, you made friends from among the girls you went to school with, because of things that were the same for all of you. Clothilde had always been different from the girls in her school in Manfield, and here too. If those girls in Manfield with their starched pinafores could see her now, she thought, getting up to shuck the clams, she could imagine what they’d say She didn’t care anyway. They didn’t know anything, anything, they never did and they always acted like they were so perfect. If Lou had ever been in a school, she wouldn’t have acted like that. Those girls wouldn’t even know how to shuck clams.

Clothilde pulled at the shell of the first clam until it broke apart. She removed the honey-colored body and peeled off the thin black skin that lay along its
side and fitted over its long dark neck. She put the clam into a bowl; the skin she dropped onto the counter. Without having to think about it, she picked up the next. And the girls here, she thought, her fingers working, they wouldn’t believe she knew all about how to shuck clams, and dig potatoes, and scrape a mussel clean with a knife, and—a whole lot of things. If she were God, she’d make people differently, she’d make them all plan to like each other, she’d make them all the same.

Empty shells clattered into the sink. Clothilde’s hands smelled like cooked clams, a warm, nutty smell.

“Is she afraid of him, then?” Lou’s voice asked behind her.

“What?” Clothilde asked. “Who?”

“Him. That man. Your father.”

“Afraid?” Clothilde couldn’t understand what Lou was thinking of.

“I shouldn’t be asting, I shouldn’t be thinking about it,” Lou’s voice said. They were talking with their backs to each other, both of them working at their tasks. “And I wouldn’t, except I’m worried about her.”

“You mean Mother?”

“It’s like she’s sickly. You must’ve noticed it.
Maybe I should put my nose right back on my face, but if I found out I could’ve he’ped her, and I hadn’t ast—because she’s been so good to me.”

Clothilde turned around, confused. The kitchen was a big room, taking up half of the downstairs. The other half was partly the front parlor, and partly the hall where the stairs came down. The kitchen was their main room, with the heat from the range to warm it and the broad table—big enough for a dozen people at one sitting. When the farm had been worked, in Great-Aunt Clothilde’s day, there might be a dozen men sitting down for a meal, when the harvest hay was being gathered, or the blueberries were ripe. Her family used the table for study, for extra counter space when they were putting up beans and peas and tomatoes, for laying out patterns to cut fabric—they used it for everything, and eating too. The parlor they only used in the evenings, when Mother read the Gospels to them. If they’d had callers, the parlor would have been used to receive them in. But the kitchen was where they lived.

Finally, Clothilde thought of something she could say. “She didn’t help you so much.” She didn’t think Lou ought to be talking like this and she knew she oughtn’t to be listening.
But why not?
she asked herself, angry,
Who says?

“My ma needs my wages, so she’s he’ped,” Lou told her, which was surely true. Clothilde had been to where Lou’s family lived, and she had seen the need for even the small wage Mother could pay Lou. “And your mother kep’ me on, yuh, even after she told Pa he couldn’t work for her no longer. He’d been thinking, he’d got a fine place where he’d go Fridays with his hand out and never do nothing because it was only a woman to run it. She sure ripped his ears off, and now—she lets things slip.”

Clothilde put the clam she was holding into the bowl, and gave Lou her full attention. Lou was just waiting, holding the iron. “Mother’s an orphan,” she explained. “She always acted like one until my father went away.”

“To the war,” Lou said.

Clothilde didn’t need any reminding of where Father went. She tried to explain how things were, in Grandfather’s house, in Massachusetts. “Before, at my grandfather’s house, we lived there but nobody wanted us, except we were Father’s.” Lou didn’t understand. “It was because Mother was a nobody. And a Catholic too. And because they eloped to get married. It was—she was—a shame on the family—we are. She isn’t sickly.”

“Then why keep him over to the boathouse?” Lou demanded, unsatisfied. Lou couldn’t have understood, Clothilde realized. She couldn’t know how it had been at Grandfather’s house. Lou couldn’t know how people could act when they were angry at you, and how they could stay angry for years and years, even when they had money to buy everything they could want and always went to church.

“It’s what
he
wants,” she said. “He said.”

Clothilde thought Lou would go back to her ironing then, but she didn’t. There was something more on her mind, something she wanted to ask, or say. Clothilde was afraid of what Lou would ask, but she made herself stand waiting for the question. She knew how to make herself stand quiet, to see what people were going to do, and stay quiet, whatever happened.

“Is he in a bad way, then?” Lou asked. Lou meant, in a bad way like Jeb Twohey, who’d come back home after only three months in France, not wounded but crazy as a bedbug—he’d talk crazy, to people who weren’t even there about things that weren’t happening, until his family kept him to the house. Jeb’s in a bad way, people said, feeling sorry for his family. Whenever he came out they’d act like he wasn’t there, because if you said anything to him, Jeb’s mouth
would wrinkle up and he’d burst into tears, or start yelling, or do something crazy like crawl under a table with his hands over his ears and nobody could get him to come out.

Clothilde shook her head, No.

“Yes,” Clothilde said.

Then she nodded her head, Yes, and said, “I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and said, “No.” She didn’t want to have to think about it.

“Will she be wanting me to move out?” Lou asked. She had her own room in the ell, with a cot and a bureau in it. She’d asked Mother, soon after she’d come to work for them, if she couldn’t please sleep in; she’d said she was clean and quiet and would keep out of the way. Mother had given her permission.

“No, of course not.” Clothilde had never thought of that possibility. Mother wouldn’t do that, would she? Besides, now that Father was back, only he could ask Lou to leave, so Mother couldn’t. “Why should she?”

“Because I wouldn’t like to leave her, not like this, and I don’t want to go back to home, besides. Yuh, that’s a sure thing.” Lou turned back to her ironing.

Clothilde went back to shucking the clams, her
fingers working, her mind working. She wouldn’t want to go back to Grandfather’s house, never mind how big and fancy it was. If she thought she might have to … she’d run away, and hide, and live in the woods. She couldn’t have stood to go back there. She didn’t want to go back to the school there, where the girls ignored her, or said things in corners for her to hear but never the teacher. What did it mean, anyway, what people said about Catholics? She wasn’t one anyway—Mother never went to a Catholic church; she went to the Presbyterian Church with Grandfather and Father and the aunts. On the other hand, Clothilde had to admit the school here wasn’t any better, so it wasn’t just those girls. School here had never been any better and it was worse, since Nate had left. They’d minded his going off to Phillips Academy last fall, although nobody said so to him. Nobody would say so to him, and if they did he’d turn it into a joke. They just said so to her, and the boys who used to be his friends would troop along after her, like a pack of yapping dogs, when she started along home. She hadn’t known how it would be, at school, with Nate gone. They said teasing things to her, waiting for her to start to run away. She’d pretend that she couldn’t hear a word, pretend she was alone, while they said things
about kissing a girl whose brother was going to inherit a factory and be a rich man. They’d come up closer and closer around her. Once, one of them had stopped her and pushed his face into hers—she’d slammed her books into his face, and he was surprised, and
she’d
just laughed. Since then, they’d kept their distance, but they’d gotten meaner. The girls weren’t any better. They thought she was stuck up, and teacher’s pet, and they moved away if she came to sit near them, which she didn’t, any more than she could help. Nate had it easier, because he could fight, he was a boy. Then, when he’d fought out whatever it was, he’d laugh and say let’s go do something, let’s get some frogs, or race to the church and back. They didn’t think Nate was stuck up, and they didn’t mind that he was a teacher’s pet.

Clothilde didn’t think she was stuck up, anyway. She didn’t mind how small the village school was, just fourteen boys and girls in all the grades together. If there had been more of them there would just have been more people not to like what she wore and said, how she talked and the way her school papers looked. If she had a round face and blue eyes, and bright fluffy dresses, like Polly Dethier, Clothilde thought they’d act differently. When boys came up to ask Polly
Dethier if they could carry her books, it wasn’t so they could drop them into any mud puddle, or run away and hide them in the woods. Clothilde had light brown hair her mother braided every morning into French braids, and a square face; her dresses were made-over skirts worn with white blouses; and whenever she saw Polly, envy ate at her heart. She despised Polly Dethier, who did nothing but act happy and smile, to show off her dimple. She wished she looked like Polly so she could like herself better. You could bet your buttons, things would go easy for Polly Dethier.

Clothilde finished the clams. She covered the bowl with a plate, to keep flies out, and scooped the shells and skins into a bucket, to take them down to the beach. Looking out the window, she saw Mother, just standing beside the garden. Mother wore a big hat and white gloves, and she was holding an empty basket. She stood still, studying the garden, with the slim skirt of her white dress moving in the breeze. Where had she gotten those gloves from, where had she had them packed away? And why was she just standing there, when the garden needed weeding? Clothilde watched her mother, the straight back and small waist, the gloved hand resting on top of her hat as if the breeze wanted to take it away when barely any breeze blew.

She knew Lou was right—something was wrong with Mother. But there was nothing she could do. There was never anything she could do. Except wish her father hadn’t come back.

“I used to think,” Lou’s voice called her attention, “if I was an orphan—especially when my pa goes after me.”

But Lou’s father was a bad man—even with the new law prohibiting liquor, Lou’s father managed to go on getting drunk because he had found a job on boats smuggling illegal whiskey down from Canada. Except for the smuggling job, Lou’s father didn’t keep any work he got. He’d moved to Maine when he was through working in the Rhode Island mills; he lived as a coastal for a season, gathering up whatever debris floated down from the lumber camps, and lumber mills, selling it wherever he could. Then he moved into the village, rented a two-room lean-to behind the blacksmiths stable, and hired his sons out to lobstermen and fishermen when they needed an extra hand, taking their wages himself. Lou, he had brought with him, that first day when he came out to ask Mother if she needed a man to work the fields. “She’s strong and she’s obedient,” he’d said. Lou hadn’t said anything. “And she’s honest,” he’d added, as if Mother might be wondering about that.

“I don’t know that being an orphan is so bad,” Lou said.

What did Lou think, if she thought she could feel sorry for Clothilde, and Mother? Clothilde couldn’t stand people feeling sorry for her. She didn’t want anybody’s pity. Especially a servant’s.

She didn’t say a word to Lou, didn’t even show she’d heard the words. She picked up the bucket by its steel handle and went out, through the ell. If there were going to be wars, she thought, going outside onto the grassy yard, then it should be different. If God wanted there to be wars, and men wanted to kill people and conquer other countries—it wasn’t just men who got hurt, either, it was people who had nothing to do with it, women and children, old people, sick people—Edith Cavell, she had been a nurse and they shot her, and they dropped bombs on the city of London where all kinds of people lived, not just soldiers—and there were French farms and towns that got used as battlefields….

If she were God, Clothilde thought, crossing the grass, she wouldn’t have wars. Or, if there had to be wars, then the men would either get killed or not. There wouldn’t be any wounded, there wouldn’t be anybody like Jeb Twohey, it would be everything or it
would be nothing. You’d die or you’d come back fine.

She went down the wooden steps to the beach, holding the railing carefully with one hand. She had read the newspapers the teacher brought to school. She could read through them, she had plenty of time at recesses—she could tell when someone was too stupid to see the truth of what he was describing, or when he was trying to hide the truth—and that showed what he was trying to hide. You couldn’t trust what they said in the newspaper, she’d figured that out. Clothilde read the articles, and looked at the maps, and used her head, and she couldn’t understand why God let anybody have a war.