Diann Ducharme (27 page)

Hunger raged in my belly, as if I hadn’t eaten in days. But I had hardly gotten inside the cottage when Winnie came out of the kitchen with a wooden spoon in her hands. Dread crept into my limbs like a kind of paralysis.

“You want to look in on your mama before supper,” she said, nodding her head up in the direction of her bedroom.

I whispered, “Is she angry with me?”

Winnie looked concerned. “No, she ain’t angry. But she ain’t her own self a-tall. She been asking for you.”

With more relief than annoyance, I wearily climbed the creaking steps to Mama’s room, my day with Ben and my decision to teach fading into the close air the higher I went.

She was in bed, covered up to her thighs with a quilt and staring into the nothingness of the dim, musty bedroom. She hardly looked at me when I walked into the room. Her lacy white nightdress was stained around her chest, and her long hair hung in greasy locks around her propped-up head.

I sat down in a rocking chair. I glanced at the open white Bible on the bedside table, at the gold-rimmed pages reflecting the candlelight. “How are you, Mama?”

She ran her hand over her belly. She said softly, “I could lose this baby.”

“Should I send for a doctor? Perhaps Doc Newman could pay you a visit out here. I’m sure he would, if we called for him.”

She reached her fingers out into the air. “I can touch the specter of death, he lingers so closely. I can smell his rancid breath, his rotting skin.”

She grabbed for the bowl she kept beside her bed and dry-heaved into it. When she was satisfied that nothing was left in her stomach, she sat back and looked at me with wild, strained eyes. “Can you smell him, too? He stinks.”

I shook my head, fighting the increasing urge to scream. “That’s just the smell of the ocean. It’s not death.”

Intricate cobwebs of perspiration stuck to her forehead. “I’m not afraid to die.”

I began to perspire, too. It was so warm up on the second floor; I didn’t know how she could spend her days up there. Maybe the heat was addling her. “Mama, you’re not going to die. Now stop that.”

Her breathy laughter caused the candle beside her to flicker and dance. “When I was younger, I believed that there was a divine purpose for me. I clung to life. I was afraid that I would disappoint God if I died too soon.”

I had never heard Mama talk about her childhood before. Daddy had once told me that her father had been an immigrant stevedore on the bustling wharves of Edenton, and that she had grown up dirt poor on the waters of the Albemarle Sound. But I had never pictured her as a young girl, just like me. Afraid of death, clinging to life.

She spoke in a low, rasping voice, so that I had to draw my chair closer to her bedside. “Did you know that I was reading and writing at the age of three? Speaking words an adult would speak. My parents … they feared for my life. Simple people. They were told by the town’s most respected doctor that I was probably afflicted by a malignant growth in the brain.

“This doctor was intrigued enough to send me to various kinds of medical specialists. All across the East Coast, I traveled. Oh, they all found me highly interesting. But not one could diagnose a problem with my brain, so I was sent home as a curiosity, something to be studied.”

She paused to adjust the pillow behind her head. The sound of the clock’s gears clicked steadily through the small room. I wondered if she was making this story up, in this disconnected madness. Anything seemed possible in there.

I waited on the edge of the rocker for her to speak, perspiration wetting the creases behind my knees.

Finally she continued. “A few of the psychology experts periodically traveled all the way to Edenton to visit me. I was a lonely, quiet little girl, always did as I was told. So I would answer their questions, write their essays. They would scribble madly in their notebooks. They crafted pages and pages of reports to take back to their universities.”

“What did they find?” I asked, my curiosity overpowering the closed-in chaos.

She chortled. “It finally became obvious to them that I possessed the most superior intelligence. It took them a while to figure it out, you know, because I was a girl.” She twisted her fists into her bedcovers. “I was only five years old at the time. I remember feeling blessed, like I was carrying a bright light inside me. But my parents thought me cursed. I think they would have been happier if
I had a tumor in my brain. They could understand maladies of that nature.”

“What happened to you?” I asked softly.

Her eyes closed, and she didn’t answer me for a few moments. Then she went on. “I was forbidden to read and write. I was not to attend school. If your father hadn’t seen me sitting in the seamstress’s shop window, I would still be there today.”

The story of Mama and Daddy’s meeting and courtship was never discussed in our house. I had gleaned from various sources that Daddy was originally supposed to marry Penelope Critchfield, a rich planter’s daughter in neighboring Bertie County. But when Daddy saw Mama, it was love at first sight. Penelope Critchfield was forgotten, at least for a time. But now the husband of Penelope Critchfield, Amos Drumwright, was one of the richest men in the eastern Albemarle, having invested the majority of the family estate in railroads.

Two spots of pink grew on Mama’s white cheeks. “When I saw the Sinclair library, I wept. I had never seen so many books!” she whispered, waving her hand through the air above her head. “The library shimmered—the dust motes twinkled in the beams like stardust. It was a message from God.” She grabbed for my hand and seethed, “You see? He was rewarding me, finally, for my struggles. For my faith in Him. He was answering my prayers.”

“Oh, Mama,” I whispered. Her grip was hurting my hand, but I held on to her.

She giggled a bit. “The low-class stories I’d heard growing up were good for something, as it turned out. I became pregnant with you, and your daddy and I married. The library was mine. Your daddy never cared for those books as I do. He hardly even reads.”

She let go of my hand, finally, and it throbbed, the blood pushing back into the veins again. It seemed that my appearance was necessary to Mama only as a way to gain access to a well-stocked library.
She hadn’t married for love or wealth or power. She had married for education. And she had borne children for it as well.

It wasn’t a completely bad reason for marrying someone, I supposed. Our library was somewhat famous in Edenton. Mama had informed us a few years earlier that there were 1,700 books in it. ’Course, she had accrued many more treasures since that counting.

I asked, “Why are you telling me this? Why now?”

She didn’t answer me. Instead she wailed, “And what good came of all my gifts, in the end? I have not distinguished myself. I have failed God.”

I asked tentatively, “What did you want to do?”

She sighed, a gust of resignation. “Something … else.”

I was annoyed, suddenly. “Your life isn’t terrible. Most women would gladly change places with you.”

She blew her nose into her handkerchief and looked at me as if seeing me for the first time in her life. “Your face, Abigail. You look like a fishmonger, with those freckles and brown skin. What will Hector think?”

Then she began weeping into her nightgown sleeve, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say or do to comfort her. As I watched her, I recalled how Mama zealously guarded the library. We were not allowed in the room unless we had permission from her. Mama often spent entire days in the library, and she didn’t care for intrusions.

From her, I learned to see books as golden treasures, forbidden fruit. When I was small, I remember physically aching to open one, to crack the old covers with the smallest flicks of the wrists and read the carefully chosen words.

Mama—now bitter and worn down by life—had once been as eager to learn. I imagined her as the quiet little stevedore’s daughter with the quick mind, and my heart wept for that child, for her lost potential. As much as she’d grown, she still seemed stunted.

But I admired her courage, and her cunning, her ability to completely disregard what was expected of her. Opportunity had presented itself, and she had taken it, boldly and without apology. It was a powerful lesson for me.

I saw glimpses of myself in my mother, and I was comforted, in a way.

H
ANNAH UNTIED THE SATIN LACES OF MY CORSET AND
I
FOLDED IT AND
placed it in the trunk, now full of unwanted underthings. Throughout the summer the pile of stockings, garters, crinolines, and petticoats had grown bigger and bigger, discarded for their frivolous
uselessness. I pulled on my most common gray dress, with nothing but a thin chemise between that and my skin.

Then I stretched out on my bed, pretending to go to sleep. I waited for Charlie and Martha’s chests to slow into sleep, their breathing keeping time with the measured crash and sweep of waves outside.

My own breath was shallow, in the face of what I was about to do. Thick clouds had endeavored to block the light from the heavens tonight, so the sky was uncommonly obscure. And the air was humid and motionless. Flies buzzed in and out of the windows, checking on me.

After a time, I felt the creaking house ease into its slumber. I climbed carefully through the window and swung my feet softly onto the porch.

I looked at Hannah and Winnie, slumbering peacefully in the hammocks, blankets wrapped loosely around them. Keeping an eye on them, I tiptoed down the sandy porch steps, as quiet as a ghost crab.

But as I made my way toward the hotel, I felt someone grab my upper arm and pull on it. I tried to scream but a hand clamped over my mouth, a hand that smelled of cooking spices and lye.

Her voice whispered, “Oh, Miz Abigail. You going crazy as your mama.”

My heart pounded, but relief spread like butter through my limbs. “Winnie, you scared me to death!”

“You
need
some scarin’! Get back in the house now, and I won’t tell your mama you’re out prowling ’round like a cat in heat.”

I found that it was much easier to be honest in the pitch dark. “I can’t. I’m teaching at a school over on Roanoke Island. A school for the people of the Freedmen’s Colony.”

She didn’t speak for a few seconds, as her grip on my wrist loosened. “Who in their right mind would put you up to that foolishness? I’ll give ’em a hunk of my mind and a foot up their—”

“It was mostly my idea. I decided that I could do it, and I am. I thought you’d understand.”

“How you getting all the way over there? I know you ain’t rowing a boat your own self.”

“Ben is taking me.”

She clamped a hand to her heart. “Oh, Lord, I knew I ain’t heard the last of that boy. Yes, I knew that glint in your eyes. Had it when you was nothing but a baby girl.”

She started wringing her hands. “Your daddy gonna whip you and then me and probably ever last soul in that house for letting you out. And what would Mr. Hector say? More’s the pity, is what he’d say, and move on to the next young gal. They likely waitin’ in a line for him, right this minute. And here you are, acting crazier than a fly stuck in sugar.”

“I don’t care about Hector.”

She sucked in her breath. “You should care about him, is what I’m telling you. Nice doctor man, with a nice family, too. That fishing boy don’t have two pennies to rub together.”

“Out here, money doesn’t mean as much. It’s different.”

“Oh, I know you. You’d miss all your nice things, all your learning books. Come on, come back inside, and I won’t say one word.”

She started pulling on my elbow, but I stood my ground. “You should come with us tonight, Winnie. You’ll learn more than you do by eavesdropping through an open window. Tonight is my first lesson. I met a few of the children already, and the preacher of a church who teaches them during the day. I think you’d like it over there.”

She sighed deeply. “I
must
be gettin’ along in years, to hear you
say such words to me. The baby becomes the teacher, ain’t that how it goes?”

She dropped my arm and looked to the house, which seemed to be watching us conspire. She closed her eyes and muttered to herself for several minutes. Then she said tightly, “All right, then, teacher. Show me this schoolhouse.”

We woke up Hannah to let her know where we were going. She didn’t want us to leave, but I could tell that the notion of being in charge overpowered her objections.

Hand in hand, Winnie and I strode quickly through the silent village of Nags Head. When I saw the shadow of Ben, waiting for me at the soundside pier, I almost cried with relief. He smiled at the two us, but none of us dared speak.