Together Apart (7 page)

I stood close enough to Eliza to see that many of the passages had been marked through with ink and that handwritten notes had been scrawled in the margins.

Drucilla turned to leave then turned back. "Did you mean what you said, that all women are welcome here?"

"Young and old, town and country."

"I overheard my mother telling the Reverend Cobb's wife that you have books here, sitting right out in the open for anyone to read. I was wondering if that might include me?"

"Your mother wouldn't approve, would she?"

"No, ma'am. But I believe I'm of an age where the choice should be mine."

"What age might that be?"

"Seventeen last Wednesday, ma'am"

"You're right. You are old enough to decide things for yourself. You're welcome to read whatever you like."

"Do you have any works of Shelley or Keats?"

"Several volumes of each, but before you get lost in their poetry, I'd like to introduce you to Hannah. She's my partner here in the resting room."

I smiled and stepped forward. Drucilla, who before the day was out would ask me to call her Dru, smiled back. Dru, who would become my bosom friend.

B
Y MID-
J
ULY, THREE LEATHER-BOUND GUEST BOOKS HAD BEEN
scrawled with the names of visitors to the resting room. Most of the women arrived on foot, others by wagon, and a few of the younger and more daring galloped up the drive on horseback. I'd seen just two of these visitors face to face. The others I'd only glimpsed in their comings and goings from behind the curtained window in my room above the stable or heard as a group mumble through the print shop walls.

Ma had visited as often as she dared, though she'd kept her visits short for fear Mr. Richards would find out that she wasn't in whatever place she'd told him she'd be. When she arrived, Ma would always say, "Let me feast my eyes on you," then walk a circle around me like she was making sure I hadn't lost any of my parts or grown any new ones. After she'd done that, she'd start in fussing about how peaked I looked. "Pale as flour paste," she'd say, shaking her head, then unload the gifts she'd smuggled out from under Mr. Richards's nose by tucking them into secret pockets she'd sewn inside her skirts. One day it'd be a half-loaf of her raisin bread, another a few strips of jerked beef. Always, just before leaving, she'd peck a kiss on my cheek like she'd done when I was little boy.

Only once had she done something different. It was as hot as a blacksmith shop in my room that day, so Ma and I whisper-talked down in the stable. We were sitting in the boat, which, according to Eliza, had been a hobby for the Judge—a reminder of boyhood days spent sailing off Cape Cod. A boat Eliza had said was mine for the keeping if I finished her. Ma and I sat there in the near dark, side to side.

"Make believe you are on a ship, Ma, the wind strong in her sails," I said after a longer than usual quiet.

"Where might I be sailing off to?" Ma asked, her voice as lively as a girl's.

"Away from Mr. Richards," I answered.

"Please don't say things like that, Isaac. I'm his wife, and I'm beholden to him."

"You owe him nothing."

"But I do. I should have told you this before: he's the one who paid for your pa's plot in the cemetery. He's the one who paid our boarding bill at the Ackerman Hotel. There we were, without a penny to our name and about to be thrown out on the street with no place to go and no family to ask for help, when he raps on the door to our room and says right out that his wife's just died and his boys need a ma and the undertaker's told him of the fix we're in and will I marry him, all in the same breath. I wanted to slam the door in his face, but I didn't, though before I agreed to marry him I made him promise that he'd let you get your schooling."

A knot had tightened like a fist in my gut. "How much did we owe, Ma?"

"Nearly eighty dollars."

"You've paid him back a hundred times, Ma. Slaving in his kitchen, putting up with his foul mouth."

"Enough," Ma said. "Lets not spoil our time together fretting over that which cant be undone. I want to use the little time I have left to talk about a thing that can be undone. You can't go on like this, son, holed up here like a bat in a cave. It's not natural for a body to live like this, not healthy, and I'm begging you to give Mr. Richards the tools so he'll drop the charges against you and you'll be free to live your life out in the open as God intended."

"I can't do that, Ma. You know I can't."

"All I know is that your health is more important than those tools. Holding on to them isn't worth it, Isaac, and Mr. Richards will never give up looking for you, because he knows the law is on his side. The tools rightly belong to him now. When we married, everything that was mine legally became his."

I didn't answer Ma back, just asked her to wait and then leapt over the side of the boat and hurried into the print shop to fetch a handful of old issues of the
Women's Gazette.

When I got back, I helped Ma down from the boat and gave her the papers. "Read these, Ma. Eliza and others like her all over the country are trying to change things for women, trying to change the laws."

Ma tucked the papers into one of her secret pockets, and she never asked me to return the tools again, though the next time she came to visit, and after she'd taken her scissors to my shaggy hair, she did go sneaking off to talk to Eliza. Don't know exactly what Ma said, but later that evening Eliza offered to telegraph an old friend of the Judge and ask on my behalf if he might have a job for me. Seemed this man owned a fleet of tugs and barges on the Mississippi. I told Eliza that unless she wasn't happy with my work I'd rather stay. What I didn't tell Eliza or Ma or even Hannah was that when and if I did leave I wasn't planning to leave alone.

The other visitor I'd seen face to face was Drucilla, Dru. Her ma being away and a hired girl doing all the housework, Dru came to the resting room every day except for Sunday, which was the only day her banker pa was home to notice if she was there or not.

Dru discovered me not long after her first visit. I was working in the print shop, quietly stuffing gazettes into envelopes and writing the addresses on the outside, when there came a single rap on the door. I undid the latch, then posted myself in such a way as to be out of sight when the door opened. Dru peeked in. When she saw me she grinned like she was about to tag me "it." Without thinking, I grabbed her arm, jerked her inside, and slammed the door closed behind her. It was kind of like reeling in a fish then not knowing what to do with it once it was landed. I just stood there, dumbstruck and gawking.

"You had best close your mouth before a swallow builds a nest," Dru said.

Still I stood there, saying nothing and wishing I were wearing Pa's shoes.

"You're the boy the sheriff is looking for, aren't you? Well, you needn't worry about me. My lips are sealed." Dru raised a hand to her lips and turned a make-believe key.

"Visitors aren't ... aren't allowed back here."

"Oh, I'm no visitor. I'm Drucilla Callahan, though you may call me Dru."

"How did ... did you know the signal?" I fumbled.

"I figured it out by watching Eliza and Hannah. One rap and the door opened, like magic. I love a mystery, and there are none to be found in this town, save for in Elizas novels—and now for you. Tell me everything—how long you've been hiding out here, what dastardly crimes you've committed."

Another single knock at the door. Hannah. When she saw Dru and me standing there, toe to toe, the skin on her forehead puckered.

"I'm sorry, Hannah. I simply couldn't bear to wait another minute to learn who you were keeping hidden away behind the door. But you needn't worry—I'll not tell a soul." Dru then moseyed across the room and started tinkering with the press. "So this is where the blasphemous
Women's Gazette
is printed. Isaac, that's your name, isn't it? Will you show me how it works?"

"Maybe another time," Hannah said just as I'd started across the room. "The young ones are begging for another of your stories, Dru."

"My audience awaits." Dru breezed past and then was gone.

I was about to say that Dru was really something when I caught myself. She
was
really something, but I sure didn't want Hannah to get the wrong idea, so I said, "I ... uh ... do you think we can trust her?"

"I think so, but I'll talk to her, make sure she understands the trouble we'll both be in if you are found out."

And then Hannah was gone, too, and the print shop felt twice, no a hundred times as empty as it'd ever felt before.

***

After the resting room closed for the day, Hannah and I told Dru our story, the same one we'd told Eliza, leaving out the same part, about spending the night together in the haystack. I might have told that part, too, if it'd been just me, but I was afraid the telling would be too hard for Hannah. I'd hoped time would fix things for Hannah, hoped I could fix things for Hannah, but time hadn't and I hadn't. She went about her days, play-acting that everything was fine when she wasn't fine at all.

Hannah was her bluest after her Sunday visits home. I suggested, once, that maybe she shouldn't go, that she should spend her Sunday with me. "I promised Mama, and this is one promise I will keep," she said before turning on her heel and heading out the door.

Sundays were the best days for me. And the worst. The best because, as long as I stayed indoors, I had free run of the house, resting room, and stable. Sometimes I did just that, ran. From stable to attic, up the stairs and down, over and again until I thought my lungs would cave in. Sometimes I'd tunnel under a pile of quilts and play my harmonica. Always I worked on my boat. The boat had become a friend I could tell my troubles to. The boat knew the whole of my and Hannah's story.

And Sundays were the worst of days because there was no Hannah. No Eliza, who visited a different country church every Sunday. No Dru gushing over how like a character in a novel I was or reading me flowery passages from poetry books or pestering me to read the part of Shakespeare's Romeo to her Juliet. No hope of Ma stopping by. No group mumble, company of sorts, drifting out of the resting room. Only me and my silent boat.

Before the blizzard, I hadn't minded being by my lonesome, preferred it if truth be told, but the boy who crawled into the haystack wasn't the same boy who crawled out.

A
CHILD FIRST TAKES A WOBBLY STEP, THEN TODDLES, THEN
walks, then runs. So it was for the resting room. By mid-July, the resting room had found its balance. Wednesdays and Saturdays were "Market Days," days when the town women, market baskets over their arms, came to purchase eggs, butter, preserves, or freshly rendered lard; homespun wool yarn, tatted lace, rag rugs, or bed-sized quilts, to name but a few of the items Eliza and I had arranged for display.

Many of these market goods had been left by visitors as their freewill donation. The other items, especially the more valuable like the quilts and crocheted tablecloths, had been left with us on consignment. Often was the time Eliza had to suggest an asking price because many of the women didn't know the value of their own handiwork. Eliza then added a small percentage to cover our time in tending to the sale in the woman's absence. Always was the price of the items less than that charged by the merchants on Main Street. Always was the quality higher. Always was the smile on the woman's face beaming when she next returned to the resting room and Eliza counted out her earnings.

The number of gazettes we mailed to women all over the country had remained about the same, but the circulation in and around Prairie Hill had grown from nearly nil to well over three hundred per week. This increase was due in large part to the page of social happenings we inserted in the local copies—weddings, births, country church socials, and the like—items that had been reported to us by women visiting the resting room. Paid advertisements had increased from exactly zero to five or six a week—Maggie's Millinery and The Sisters Trimble Dressmaking Shoppe being two of these. The front page, as before, contained articles Eliza had written or articles sent to her by like-minded women in the East. In setting the type, which gave me plenty of time to think about what the words meant, I was beginning to understand why Eliza was so passionate about changing things, especially when it came to articles about the awful working conditions of children, some as young as my sister Megan. Boys in West Virginia coal mines, girls in Massachusetts textile mills. One such headline read, "Lincoln Freed the Slaves—Who Will Free the Children?"

Mama had visited the resting room the Wednesday after it opened, Joey and Megan in tow. "Had to see for myself that this is a safe and wholesome place," she'd whispered. Her stay was brief because she didn't want to keep Papa waiting, though Eliza did manage to send her off with several issues of the gazette. I had no idea that Mama had read them until the day she surprised me with a second visit. She'd come into town not with Papa but with the Zellers. Most surprising, she had left all the children at home. Mama discussed with Eliza the price she should charge for her cross-stitched gingham aprons, then asked if I could spare a few minutes from my work for a private word in my room. Madeline Moore's watchful portrait eyes seemed to follow us as we passed down the main hall and started up the stairs.

Once we were sitting on the edge of my bed, Mama turned to me and said, "I've been reading those gazettes, and what's in them is fine and good, for grown women, city women, but you're little more than a girl, Hannah. Promise me that this is as far away from me as you're planning to go, at least until you're old enough to know your own mind."

"You needn't worry, Mama. I'm perfectly content here at Eliza's."

"You've never been content, Hannah. You've been moving away from me, moving toward some faraway place ever since you began to crawl. And worrying is what mothers do. You'll know what I mean when you have children of your own. Now, I've got to have your promise, Hannah."