Keeping Secrets (6 page)

Just outside Cypress, natural gas had been discovered, and the fields that sprung up made rich men of many farmers and landholders. It was in the hands of their wives and daughters that Cypress culture rested, with women who had their names written on the rolls of the Daughters of the Confederacy and never let anyone forget it. There never was and never would be anything for the ladies to do other than pour tea and eat lunch, because the two towns together could support nothing more entertaining than a roller rink, a bowling alley and a handful of picture shows. And the ladies were a minority in a society whose members’ necks were as basically and determinedly red as the clay in the hills just the other side of West Cypress. Therefore, when the ladies grew so hungry for enlightenment and shopping that they just couldn’t stand it another minute, they had to drive six hours south to New Orleans (where, if a lady was interested, she could also indulge in some
serious
sinning).

On the other hand, when the ladies of West Cypress grew restless with change burning holes in their pockets, they drove across the bridge to Cypress, being of the opinion that the picture shows and the five and dimes on its main street were just fine.

Why they were called the Twin Cities was a puzzlement to those of the inhabitants who had ever given the question any thought. Even their geography was different, Cypress’s being the richer. For the eastern bank of the Coupitaw, on which Cypress was perched, marked the very western boundary of the Mississippi Delta, with all the rich loam and plantations and wealth that that implied. On the west bank began the piney land, the poorer farmland that might be prettier, with its rolling hills, trees, and shade, but didn’t hold a candle to the loamy bottoms when it came to growing things.

The land around West Cypress did produce a plentitude of trees, and as a result there grew up a paper mill, which, when the wind was wrong, which was most of the time, caused West Cypress to stink.

It was in West Cypress that Rosalie Norris, the woman whom Jake Fine was coming to claim as his wife, resided—which was appropriate, for Rosalie, like the town in which she lived, had felt left out, put down and inferior all of her natural-born life.

She was standing now on the platform of the bus station in Cypress, West Cypress being so much smaller and having so few visitors that the bus didn’t stop there. Rosalie nervously twisted the large luminescent brown beads of her necklace. A woman in a pink dress next to her, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, pushed a photograph of a uniformed young man in front of Rosalie.

“That’s Fred. Isn’t he handsome? I can’t believe he’s finally coming home on furlough.” The woman stopped twitching for a moment and focused on Rosalie. “Do you have a picture of your husband?”

Rosalie smiled vaguely at her. Her husband? A photograph? No, Jake had sent her a picture of the baby Emma, but she’d never seen a photograph of the man she had agreed to marry. He hadn’t sent one along with his letters, and she hadn’t asked. She’d thought it enough to insist that he come to West Cypress rather than her moving to New York. She knew she couldn’t—why, how could anyone—live
there
. She simply couldn’t move, not a woman from a town whose inhabitants referred to anyone from more than fifty miles away as “from off.” Jake had been amenable, saying that her prospects there, with her grocery store, sounded better than his, anyhow. So he hadn’t pushed him for a picture.

She’d sent
him
one, though. She didn’t want to be a complete pig in a poke to this man. She just didn’t think she could stand it if he came all that way with Emma, took one look at her and then carried the baby away.

The tinted photo that she sent him had been taken in her best brown suit with the same brown beads that she was wearing this evening. The long narrow face that looked out of it was pleasant, with a prominent nose, hazel eyes and a pretty smile. She looked exactly her age, which was thirty-six. Her brown hair was dressed in a pompadour. She was tall, as all her family was, tall and lean, with long bones.

Rosalie Norris was never going to win any beauty contests, but then she wasn’t trying to. She knew exactly who and what she was and what she could expect from life. She hoped that wanting Emma wasn’t expecting too much.

“Do you think I’ve lost my mind?” she’d asked her sister Janey the week before.

“You don’t have to marry him if you don’t like him.”

“Then I won’t get the baby.”

Janey nodded. “Well, that’s true. I know that means a lot to you. There are always other babies, though, Ro. And you still could have one of your own.”

Rosalie shook her head. There had been a baby, but Janey didn’t know that. No one knew. That was a while ago—and had almost killed her. She’d paid the price, but then, as she’d always known, nothing in this world comes free.

The past few years had been a bit easier. Sometimes she allowed herself to lock the grocery store’s front door at eight rather than staying on till ten. And on those nights when she went to bed early, she’d begun to dream, not the nightmares she’d had since
that
baby, but of
another
baby, another child. Of course, she would want one that was already here, one that she wouldn’t be responsible for birthing but could raise as her own. Most people seemed to look at it the other way around, as if the birthing were the important part and the raising just incidental, but not Rosalie. She didn’t give a hoot about the sex, and the birthing, or even the man. All
that
was incidental.

She shifted and fidgeted in the still-warm October air outside the bus terminal, pacing back and forth, looking at her watch. She had always been impatient, but if she’d waited this long, she guessed, biting her bottom lip and trying to keep her hands still, she could wait just a little bit longer.

She couldn’t believe that it was only two months ago that she had received the first letter from the man named Jake Fine who was going to be on the bus, the man whose daughter was the blue-eyed blonde baby girl she had already fallen in love with.

In his letters he had laid it out plain and simple. He was looking for a mother for his daughter, for a good home, and that was enough for him. Well, that was enough for her too. She had learned to expect nothing of the world but grief, and any joy that came along was what in the southern part of the state the Cajuns called lagniappe—something extra and unexpected.

She opened her purse and looked again at the photograph of the smiling baby propped up against her daddy’s wrist.

Wasn’t she like a little doll?

Rosalie closed her eyes, and the lady beside her in the pink dress disappeared. The station disappeared. Inside her head a doll danced.

* * *

The Christmas morning of Rosalie’s eleventh year had begun at dawn like every other morning she had ever known.

“You girls get up in here,” her mother, Virgie, stood at the bedroom door and called.

Rosalie rolled over into the still-sleeping body of her sister Lucille, who groaned and then, “Phewy,” Lucille wrinkled her nose in disgust. Nancy, the third and youngest sister in the bed, had wet again, as she did almost every night.

Esther, Janey and Florence were still tangled together like puppies in the other cast-iron double bed in the square unpainted room.

“I’m not telling you girls again,” Virgie said. “Get up now. There’s chores to be done.”

Rosalie fought her way out from between her sisters and slipped her white cotton shift and then her blue cotton dress over her head. The little pink sprigs that had blossomed over the fabric when she’d cut it out six months ago from a flour sack had faded through its many scrubbings in the big iron pot in the side yard. She pulled on a sweater that her older sister Esther had crocheted and then outgrown and passed down to her. She was still cold, as was the fireplace, last night’s carefully banked fire having died hours ago. But she wouldn’t be cold for long, once she took her place in the kitchen at the wood-stove and began her morning chores.

“You better get those biscuits started now,” Virgie said, pushing the flour sack toward her. “Your pa and the boys have already been up an hour. They’re going to be back in here soon.”

Rosalie nodded “Yes’m” and began cutting lard into the flour with two knives. She worked carefully and quickly as Virgie had taught her, handling the mixture as little as possible once she’d added the fresh milk from the pail that her father had already left on the back steps. It hadn’t taken but one slap from the side of her mother’s hand when she was careless and made tough biscuits to teach her the technique. Flour and lard, like everything else on the Norris farm, were too hard-earned to waste.

Rosalie tested the oven of the woodstove with her hand and slipped the first pan of biscuits inside. There would be three before she was finished. Her five brothers and her father would polish off the first two, dabbed with butter her mother had churned and sweet honey gathered from their hives. Afterward the menfolk would wipe their mouths on the backs of their hands, scrape their chairs back from the table and clomp back out the kitchen door to finish their morning work in the barn.

Only then would the girls clear away their debris from the big round table, scrape and wash the dishes in the pot of water that was always at the boil on the back of the black-and-silver stove, dry them and reset the table for their own breakfasts. Only then would Rosalie pull the third pan of biscuits from the oven, and the girls would settle down for a few minutes to eat while their mother, at her place closest to the door, drank a cup of boiled coffee while she nursed the baby.

“They’ve tracked in again,” Virgie nodded at the bare wooden floor.

“Yes’m,” said Janey and Florence. It was the two middle girls’ job to scrub the floor clean with lye which bleached the pine pale as wild spring dogwood blossoms. What it did to their hands was another matter, but country girls couldn’t worry about niceties like soft skin. They couldn’t afford to.

Luxuries of even the most meager kind were unheard of in Virgie and William Norris’s wide-hipped house set on top of a hill well back from the dirt road which led to the hamlet of Sweetwell four miles away. The acres surrounding the farm where William and his family planted cotton every spring were fertile, repaying with bountiful crops the backbreaking, finger- splitting labor of seeding, chopping, hoeing and picking—those years it didn’t rain too much or too little and the boll weevil didn’t come to dinner.

It was pretty country, northwestern Louisiana, green all the way to the nearby border where the piney lands of Texas began. A few miles south was the Cane River, with magnolia-lined plantation lands rolling back from its banks. The three-storied big white houses along the Cane, layered and decorated and sweet like wedding cakes, were so pretty they could break your heart.

But there was nothing but backs to be broken on the thousands of small farms like the Norris place, where the never-ending work spread itself out to fill all the days from sunup to sundown, and the more children there were to do the work, the more mouths there were to feed, and the more store-bought shoes to purchase, the more disappointments to worry about at Christmastime.

Virgie Norris plopped the baby, Will, down for a few moments and pushed her curling dark hair back from her damp forehead. Breakfast done, it was time to start dinner. The carcasses of three chickens lay before her on the countertop, chickens she’d raised from biddies, fed and, just this morning, before the girls got up, wrung the necks of. She’d had Esther scald, pluck and gut them outside the kitchen door. It was cold out, but the smell of the hot wet feathers had upset her stomach ever since Will was born.

She wondered if there was something wrong with her insides. What could she expect, twelve children in fourteen years. The childbearing hardly ever gave her innards time to take care of themselves.

She wished she could do more for her babies, all of them. She’d always wanted their lives to be better, but it looked like they were going to be just the same as hers, her parents’ and their parents’ before them. As long as any of her kin had ever been able to trace their family histories back, telling the long looping and relooping tales while they sat by the fire at night, stories full of great-grand-aunts and second cousins once removed, they had always worked the land, and they had always been poor.

Too poor, she imagined, to ever buy all their children what they’d like to, or even just something, for Christmas.

She glanced up from the chickens she was cutting into frying pieces, a special treat for Christmas dinner, three chickens for the twelve of them not counting the baby, and looked at the tree standing in the corner. The children had decorated it the night before with popcorn, bits of bright ribbon, and the few precious glass ornaments her mother had passed down to her. At the top was a tin star William had brought her from Shreveport so many years ago she could hardly remember, a present when they were courting.

Beneath the tree was one present for each child, wrapped in newspaper: a new pair of work boots, a sweater she’d knitted, a shift with tiny rosebuds she’d embroidered around the scooped neck, all necessities, with one exception. This was the year that Rosalie would get her doll.

The children knew better than to expect much, but each year there would be something special for one of them. At first the treats had been in descending order from the oldest, but then there had been the year that Virginia, her namesake, had taken ill and they’d known that she wasn’t going to make it through the winter. So an older child had been skipped over and Virginia’d gotten the tin-backed mirror that she’d begged for. She’d lain in bed for many an hour, inspecting her pale face and watching herself braid her long red hair. Virgie had thought it a foolish gesture, but the children had all insisted that the mirror be buried with Virginia when she died.