A Woman so Bold Page 3

  I spat at the corpse of the infant instead.

  I do not recall it, but Granny says I spoke in a low voice, “I won’t kiss a dead imp who stole my mother’s last breath.”

  Granny withdrew from me then recovered herself and reached for me, but I retreated, weeping. I stumbled once on my way out then blundered wildly into one of the visitors milling about the house as I made my way to the door. In my flight, I heard one of the old maids who heard my diatribe crying, “She’s a witch! She has a demon!’

  I did not stop running until I reached the middle of Daddy’s cornfield, where I prostrated myself in the dirt, and wept. At last I lay quiet, listening to the coarse leaves whispering reassuringly above me. My mother’s soul had taken flight, and the thing lying in the parlor was only the shell that had housed her. My sole comfort on earth had vanished, and from then on, I was weighty with the knowledge that I must comfort myself, or remain uncomforted.

  This event did not endear me to the local women who might otherwise have become my surrogate mothers, and my behavior at the funeral the next day sealed my fate. Mama was put to rest in the family plot in the woods behind the house, next to the two babies she had lost between me and Eric. I stood by the graveside, held Lily’s hand, and did not cry. I had wept myself into oblivion the night before and risen without tears that morning, but it was taken as unnatural that I would not weep for my mother. It seemed to signify a lack of the innocence that was so prized in children in those days. However, I still did not weep. It has never been in me to give something to folks just because they expect it.

  Chapter 4

  Second Sight

  A strange thing happened the year after Mama died. Daddy became so consumed with grief, we might have ceased to exist to him. He never thought of our birthdays, or holidays, or going to church. Indeed, he barely thought of feeding us. If not for Lenore and Granny’s help, we might all have been neglected or taken by the state, for Daddy took solace in his whiskey until Colleen came along to distract him. That first Christmas, Aunt Maude caught the train from Monticello to bring us gifts, and if she had not, we would surely have done without.

  One of the effects of being left to my own devices was that I managed to forget the exact date of my birth until the year I turned thirteen. Adults did not make such a fuss over the birthdays of children then as they do now. Granny’s memory failed her on the subject. I knew I had been born in June, that every year Mama had made me a little cake of white flour and sugar and presented me with a trinket like hair ribbons or a rag doll, but my mind seemed to have wiped away which day of the month this fell on as cleanly as I swept the crumbs from the table after dinner.

  Colleen asked about it when she joined our family, but Daddy merely told her it was “sometime in June,” and she settled the matter by making a cake on the first of that month every year. The year I turned thirteen was when I found Mama’s journal. It was my coming of age, opening that window into her inner thoughts, with her solid rhetoric to give me comfort. I ran across it while going through old trunks in the attic, packed away in the same chest that held her wedding gown and the quilts she had sewn in her long ago youth. I flipped through the book for hours, turning the yellowed pages gently until I came upon this entry:

  June 20, 1869

  My pains began last night, and the baby came early this morning, a girl this time. Eric is already so rough and tumble that I was quite relieved not to have another boy, and Solomon is pleased as well, even if he did growl about wanting two sons for my entire lying in.

  She was born with a caul, which Muriel insisted must be kept safely in a jar. I am not one for old superstitions, but I daresay she has a knowing look for being so few hours old, and I wanted to name her Cassandra. Solomon, of course, refused. He said he’d not have his daughter named after a pagan priestess. I let him have his way in this, as in most things, so long as she could have my namesake. We have christened her after his father, Landry, as well. Landra Elizabeth Andrews is her name.

  I had little cause for fear this time. It was a difficult delivery, but nothing like with Eric. Sarah says I was never in any real danger. It gave me hope for bearing children in the future. She’s just a little thing, but she has a strong will and good lungs. I think she is going to take after Solomon’s mother in looks, although he insists she has my dimples.

  The caul I was born with, which my mother had in her safekeeping, disappeared after her death with the rest of my childhood. In my teens, I petulantly blamed my loss (or lack) of second sight on this and on my father’s refusal to name me as my mother had seen fit. In my girlhood, I was visited by many premonitions, the most prominent being the one of my mother’s death, but in adulthood I lost all feeling of knowing, aside from that which came in my deepest dreams, vivid and fraught with colors, in which I dreamt of otherworldly perils or wandered through houses full of winding passages. Daddy told me to hush up, and Granny said I ought to shun the oddity of my birth, that it was more likely God had saved my eternal soul from damnation through its loss.

  I do not pretend to have raised Lily as well as she might have been with Mama alive. In many ways she was even more motherless than I. To be raised from the age of three by an older sister who is a child herself and then by a young stepmother who is ineffectual in nearly every way isn’t much raising at all.

  I never fail to think of Lily’s coming of age without chagrin. It happened early one winter morning when I was about eighteen. Laramie was away for some reason or another, and Daddy had informed me it was my turn at the chopping block. It was a freezing morning. My breath came in clouds, and the ground was covered in hoarfrost. Worse, it was my time of month, so I was feeling sorry for myself as I split kindling with numb fingers and nose, my first-day cramps intensified by the cold.

  Lily came out and hobbled past me to the outhouse, wearing only her slippers and an old quilt over her dressing gown. She was carrying a basin.

  I said, “Are you ill? There’s a chamber pot in your room, and it’s cold out!” I received no reply.

  I split six more pieces of kindling, panting. I was beginning to sweat beneath my clothes, and they clung to my clammy skin, making me shiver.

  As I was arranging the woodpile, an unearthly shriek rent the air. It flushed a covey of mourning doves that had been pecking among the bracken and set me running as fast as I could to the outhouse. I was calling Lily’s name before I reached the door, which I hammered with my fists.

  “What’s the matter?” I cried, “Are you hurt?”

  I received no reply other than the sound of weeping, so I set my foot against the door and began to force it open, which produced a wail of protest.

  “Lily! Why don’t you answer me? Are you hurt?”

  Plaintive, “Yes.”

  I sighed. “How?”

  She murmured something tearfully.

  “Speak up!” I exclaimed, impatient with concern.

  “I’m bleeding,” she repeated.

  “From where?”

  She made no reply to this, and recognition dawned on me like a thunderclap. I leaned against the side of the outhouse, relieved.

  “What’s happening?” she sobbed. “Am I going to die?”

  “You know, Lily! You’ve heard me and Colleen complain about it a million times.”

  There was only silence, so I put my mouth to the crack of the door and said, “You’re fine, you goose. It’s just your monthly courses starting.” I took a kerchief out of my apron. “Open the door a bit.”

  She did so, and I handed her the square of fabric through the crack.

  Just then, Daddy came running toward me across the yard. He had hastily pulled his boots on over his long johns and was carrying his gun. I muffled a snorting laugh into my scarf. Daddy hated to be laughed at.

  “Everything’s all right!” I called to him. “It w
as nothing.”

  “You gotta be joshin’ me,” he stuttered, prancing to keep himself warm. “I never heard a woman scream like that over nothin’. I’d a swore there was a panther waitin’ for her on the john.”

  “It was a spider.”

  He let his breath out in a long white stream.

  “You tell her she dern well better kill the spider next time rather than wake the whole house shriekin’ like a banshee!” he shouted.

  He glared at me for good measure and then headed back toward the house at a capering half-run. The sight was so comical that I longed to laugh, but I waited until he was out of hearing then leaned against the outhouse and giggled until my sides ached.

  Lily’s voice came once more, sounding irritated. “Whatever is there to laugh about?”

  “Only Daddy, running across the lawn in his under-drawers.”

  I thought I heard a small sound of amusement. A few moments later, the outhouse door swung open and Lily stood before me, the quilt draped over her head and shoulders, the basin in both her hands. Soon I had her settled back in bed with a hot water bottle and a cup of ginger tea. I sat on my bed opposite as she drank it.

  “Lily, where did you think all the blood was from when we did the washing?”

  “I don’t know. I wondered, but Colleen said I was too young to know where it came from.”

  “She would say such a thing. And you fourteen! I’m sorry you were so ill-prepared. The first time is a shock even when you know what to expect.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  I resisted the urge to tell her that it took more than something as common as womanly trouble to frighten me. At last I said, “A bit. Happy, mostly, that it meant I was a woman.”

  “What did Colleen say about it?”

  “Oh, not much that I recall. I remember once mine had begun, her cycle changed to go with it. Yours must have joined up with mine too.”

  She wrinkled her brow. “And you out choppin’ wood in the cold! It feels like knives!”

  “You’ll grow accustomed to it.”

  “I’m on mine because you are?”

  I nodded. “I seem to do that to people. Ida used to get so mad. We’d spend a few days together, and hers would join up with mine. Granny used to say a woman who could do that has the powers of a witch.” I laughed. “Granny’s always taken every opportunity to remind me of my capacity for wickedness.”

  “So . . . what do I do now?”

  “The pain will get better in a couple days, and you’ll stop bleeding within the week. You stay in bed today. I’ll bring you some breakfast.”

  “You won’t tell Daddy, will you? Or Emmett? He—he’s supposed to come over tomorrow to do sums with me. He can’t find out!”

  “Why on earth would I tell Emmett? I won’t tell anyone except Colleen. It’s not something women talk about except to each other. Kinda like a secret we all have—special and miserable—but we make it a joke.”

  “Doesn’t seem special.”

  “It’s special because it means your child-bearing years have started.”

  Lily went pale at this, and I worried she was going to be sick. “Oh, don’t look so frightened! It’s not as if you’re going to turn up pregnant.”

  I managed to catch Colleen as we were setting the table and tell her what had happened.

  “Oh goodness, should I bring her a hot water bottle? It’s so cold this morning.”

  “I have done so,” I said. “You might have told her what to expect. She was terrified.”

  Colleen clucked as she poured coffee into Daddy’s cup.

  “Oh, poor thing. Is that what she was screaming for? I didn’t think Lily would take on so about a spider.”

  “What’s that?” Daddy barked.

  Colleen bent over and whispered in his ear.

  “Lorrrddd have mercy,” he drawled. “All I need’s another woman draggin’ around here sayin’ she can’t work on account a somethin’. If it ain’t mornin’ sickness, it’s lovesickness, and if it ain’t that, it’s this.”

  “Honestly, Colleen, you didn’t have to tell him.”

  Colleen was looking at Daddy with a sternness she rarely exhibited. The spoonful of grits she had been about to put on his plate stayed poised in midair.

  “I’ll thank you not to comment on the perils of womanhood with such coldness, Solomon,” she said. “It’s a subject you understand precious little of. And do not say anything to Lily! She’ll be mortified.”

  I expected Daddy to put her in her place with a sharp retort, but he only looked at her in surprise and then began to cut his ham. I stared at them both, stunned, for once, into silence.

  Chapter 5

  Granny Muriel

  In the painting of her that hung above the mantle in our parlor, Muriel Andrews was imposing. Her head was crowned with a mass of red braids, a pearl choker graced her slender neck, and she held herself like a queen. Her features—black brows that slanted upward, sharp cheekbones, and an angular jaw—had an intensity that made their lack of beauty irrelevant. Her small mouth, thin-lipped, was set in a straight line, and there was a challenge in her gray eyes, as if she were daring the painter to capture her inner ferocity. He had been up to the challenge, whoever he was.

  Daddy said I was like her, pleasant in happiness and terrifying in anger, but there was little in me that resembled her, I thought. I liked to laugh, and I had never even seen Granny smile. The painting had been done when she was eighteen, three years after she married Landry Andrews, my grandfather. She was a coalminer’s daughter from Virginia, and he was a merchant from North Carolina. He saw her at a country-dance and began courting her. She bore him one daughter and five sons, all of whom died at Gettysburg except the youngest, my father.

  When he heard the news of his sons’ deaths, my grandfather fell down in an apoplectic fit and never got up again. My mother’s diary mentioned Granny having gone “queer in the head” and not having been right since the loss of her husband, but in all my memories of her, she was as sharp-tongued and sprightly as an elderly woman has any right to be. She was hard long before the war. Life in Appalachia was no kinder to a woman than it was in the swamps and woods of the Deep South.

  When I was twenty, Granny was in her sixties, and she lived in a small cabin at the back of our property. She and my mother had not seen eye to eye on things, and Granny had decided to move out there rather than quarrel with the new mistress of the house. “I must be queen of my own place, however humble it may be, and Elizabeth must be queen of hers,” she’d said, and Daddy had acquiesced.

  Before the war, when our grandfather owned two house servants and ten field hands, there had been slave quarters there. Only one cabin remained, and Daddy had turned it into a comfortable little house for her by putting up a tin roof, sealing the cracks with tar, and planting a vegetable plot out front. I often found it a pleasing sort of irony that Granny lived in quarters that had once housed her husband’s slaves, but she was unharmed by the transition. That was a quality of Granny: she was interminably adaptable so long as she had her way.

  Every few days, Edith, Lily, or I walked the wooded path to the cabin to see if Granny was all right and to take her a plate of food and a basket of necessities. Even though Edith was her favorite, Granny thought even less of Colleen than she had of my mother, and Colleen took advantage of every opportunity to avoid seeing her. The acres of land that had not been cleared for farming were covered with oaks and virgin longleaf pines, and Granny’s cabin nestled among them, reached by way of a footpath cleared through the underbrush. When walking to her house as a little girl, I had often felt like Little Red Riding Hood.

  As we arrived, carrying the laden basket between us, Granny was sitting on her front porch with her ever-present pile of mending before her, humming the opening ba
rs of All to Jesus over and over. Lily and I kissed her wrinkled cheek in turn. She patted us with a gnarled hand.

  “What’s she sent now?” she whispered, nodding at the tin plate in my hands. I peeled back the dishcloth draped over it to keep out bugs.

  “Ham and acre peas, and biscuits with molasses.”

  “Hmph. Don’t like Cawleen’s peas,” she grumbled. “She don’t season ‘em right. Her biscuits is dry.”

  Lily covered a smile with her hand. Gran’s constant complaints about Colleen’s cooking were a private joke between us.

  “I made the biscuits,” I said.

  She brightened. “Oh! Well in that case, I’ll eat ‘em. Lily, how’s that handsome red-headed boy of yours?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Think he’ll ever propose to ya?”

  “Gran, she’s only fifteen!” I exclaimed.

  “I was married at fifteen, and my husband was twenty-nine! I had my first baby at sixteen! Don’t make a difference how old ya are. ‘Tis wisdom and sense that matters.”

  She rose from her chair slowly, groaning, and we followed her indoors. A small round table and a pot-bellied stove in the front of the cabin made up the kitchen. A quilt hung across the back of the cabin separated her little bed from the rest of the room, and a worn armchair sat in front of the hearth. The heart pine floor was strewn with rag rugs. Flour sack curtains trimmed with lace hung in the windows.

  As Gran settled herself at the table with a cup of coffee and the plate Colleen had sent, Lily and I unpacked the basket we had brought for her. It held a loaf of fresh brown bread, a side of pork, half a dozen eggs, four sweet potatoes, a butter crock, and a wedge of cheese.