A Mother's Promise

by K. D. Alden

  Ruth Ann drew back her left foot and kicked the brick wall next to them. Her eggplant toe hit it full force, and stars exploded behind her eyes. A dry sob, driven only by pure agony, escaped her throat. No tears. Not a one.

  She wanted to run from the place, from Glory’s vulnerability and raw emotion. Because she might catch it, like some awful plague. She wanted to run outside, smash through the stone wall that kept them from the so-called civilized world. She’d run until there were no miles left, run to the edge of the state, the country, the very planet—and jump off.

  But instead she rocked the girl, hugging her close, trying to soothe her. She held her and cared for her as she wished someone would hold and care for her.

  “It’s not fair,” Glory wailed again.

  No. It ain’t fair. It ain’t right. It ain’t Christian. It ain’t even human.

  And I ain’t gonna let it happen.

  “We’re leaving here,” she said to Glory. “Day after tomorrow.”

  “What? But—” The girl lifted her head.

  “I got a plan.” Ruth Ann had nothing of the sort, but the girl didn’t need to know that. She was overwrought already. A mess. That was what indulging in emotion got you. Leaky eyes, sniveling, snot. Puffy face. Ruth Ann had no use for any of it.

  “You do?” Hope dawned on Glory’s face, and it did Ruth Ann good to see it.

  “You bet,” she said, dropping her aching arms from around the girl, with poorly disguised relief. She took two big, delicious steps back from the weird intimacy. “We’re going over the wall, into town, making a quick stop…” She paused. What if Glory wanted to take her own baby, too? That would mess things up but good. Where would two teenaged girls and their infants go? One was hard enough.

  But Glory’s eyes were shining, and Ruth Ann had already opened her big mouth.

  “We’re gonna go get my tiny girl. What happened to your baby?” she asked for the second time.

  The shine dimmed. Glory’s lips trembled, and two fat tears plopped on them. “I don’t know,” she sobbed. And she headed back toward Ruth Ann, arms outstretched, to rekindle the hug.

  Oh, no. No, no, no. That just wasn’t going to happen. Ruth Ann couldn’t bear any more touching, especially not from a stranger. She quite shamefully sidestepped her and grabbed an armful of wet shirts instead. She wasn’t proud of herself, but she did. Their cold, lumpy dampness soothed her tired arms and frayed nerves. “What d’you mean, you don’t know?”

  “N-nobody tells me. Just that she’s s-s-safe…”

  “Well, that’s something, ain’t it? She’s safe.” Ruth Ann seized on that scrap of comfort. “So quit your caterwaulin’,” she said, softening the words with a smile. “You’ll wake up Mother Jenkins and then we’ll be in the suds.”

  Glory shut up immediately. Thank the good Lord.

  “What’s her name, your baby?”

  “Lily.”

  “Very pretty.”

  “At least they let me name her before they took her away,” Glory murmured.

  “Well. Maybe we can find out what happened to her once we’re out.”

  “How are we going to get over the wall?”

  I don’t have the slightest notion. “Never you mind,” Ruth Ann said. “I’ve got it figured out. It’ll be a piece o’ cake. You should go back to bed now,” she added. “You know we need to be ready real early tomorrow, same as always. ”

  Glory shook her head. “No way I’ll sleep.” She gestured at the remaining tower of laundry. “Besides, you look like you can use another pair of hands.”

  Ruth Ann stared at her. She was serious! “Really?” she managed. “You’d help me?”

  “Of course. Move over.” Glory stepped to the wringer and took hold of the crank.

  “Why?”

  “What d’you mean, why?” Glory’s expression was puzzled. “Two pairs of hands are better than one. And you look ready to drop.”

  “I’m fine.” Ruth Ann’s arms and legs felt heavier than lead, but she didn’t particularly like that it showed.

  Glory rolled her eyes and began cranking the wet sheet through the wringer.

  “If Mother J catches you out here, she won’t like it. And the other girls won’t like you either, if they see you with me. You clearly know who my momma is.”

  “I do.” Glory leaned into the rhythm of the wringer, ignoring the loud squeak it made at the three-quarter mark of each full turn. “As far as I can tell, you’re not anything like her. Just a little cranky and standoffish and stubborn.”

  Ruth Ann wondered if she even had the energy to be offended by the words. She tried to muster it, failed and forced herself to the huge kettle again, fishing four shirts out of the boiling water and trying not to splash her aching hands or arms. Meanwhile, this new, unlikely friend, whom she wasn’t quite sure she deserved…well, she turned her head and winked.

  A corner of her own mouth turned up, unwillingly. Glory be. The girl must be hard up for friends if she was willing to hang out with a Riley.

  They finished the washing just after the clock struck three in the morning and banked the fire. Ruth Ann took the heavy basin of starch water to a flower bed and dumped it. Then she poured the rinse water into a vegetable bed. Brought the last of the wet laundry inside to await hanging in the morning.

  Finally, they crept to bed in the female dormitories, where everyone else slept like the dead. Ruth Ann did thank Glory in a whisper. She was too tired to do anything but drop her work dress on the floor, kick it under her little wooden bunk bed and crawl, clad only in her slip, under the covers. She had no energy (or need, after sweating her guts out all day in the laundry) to use the outhouse.

  By that point, she had it figured out: Glory was helping her only because she wanted Ruth Ann to be true to her word and aid in her own escape. She wasn’t some angel sent down by the Lord to relieve her. She had a motive, no matter how nice she seemed.

  Ruth Ann was grateful for her help, but that didn’t mean she should trust in the apparent goodness of Glory’s heart. In her experience, people just weren’t wired that way. They always wanted something from her: work (Mrs. Dade) or information they could use later (the girls who’d pretended to be her friends so that they could cull gossip about her momma) or an audience (the preacher, who loved the sound of his own voice more than Jesus) or power (Mother Jenkins, who felt free to take out her temper on those below her).

  The only person whose motives she truly could not discern was her momma. Ruth Ann’s thoughts turned to her as she lay under the covers. As frightening as Sheila could be, Ruth Ann was fascinated by her. And she still loved her…or loved the mother she’d once been.

  There’d been lullabies, ages ago, as she was rocked to sleep. Kind, chocolate-brown eyes. A soothing hand stroking her hair. The aroma of gingerbread and cinnamon buns from the oven. Warm milk. Momma with her tummy growing large. Feeling a baby kick inside.

  If only she could return to whenever that was. Before the sobbing and cursing and drunken staggering. Before the big sign on the door that Momma said meant they had to leave their cottage. Before the stern old man with the white hair and black robes and gavel had told her she had to be a good girl, then sent her to live with Mr. and Mrs. Dade.

  If only she could go back and stop whatever it was that had changed things…what had it been? She needed to ask Crazy Sheila. Needed to check on her, anyway, before they left this place behind. If only Sheila was stable enough, normal enough, to come with them. Ruth Ann fell asleep trying to formulate a plan. She would not let Doc Price cut into her. Just the idea of it made her skin crawl.

  The cock crowed, as it always did, at five a.m. She fought to stay asleep, mentally snatching the rooster by its wattles, plucking it and stuffing it into a pot. But the lanterns got lit and girls all around her stumbled from their bunks. Greta climbed down from the bed above hers, yawning and rubbing sleep from her eyes.

  Ruth Ann tried to sit up, but every muscle in her body hollered in protest.
She wasn’t sure she could move. Finally, she swung her legs out from under the covers and staggered to her feet.

  “Where’s your nightgown? And what’s the matter?” Greta asked her, with a hint of a smirk. “By the way, you stink something awful.”

  Twenty-one hours of hard labor and she didn’t smell of rosewater? Imagine. Ruth Ann ignored the dig. “I worked in the laundry all night. Mother J made me rewash everything from the lines.”

  “Shouldn’t have left it out in the rain.” Greta tucked her unruly curls under a cap.

  Ruth Ann shivered and reached under the bunk for her dress, aggravating every muscle and tendon. “I feel sick,” she whispered, as she pulled it out and shook it. It wasn’t true, but it was the only way to sneak off and see her mother. And she’d earned a day of rest.

  “Ugh!” Greta recoiled. “Your dress smells worse than you do.”

  Ruth Ann balled it up again and lay down in a fetal position, deliberately not under the covers so her body would tremble in the crisp morning air.

  “Get up, or I’ll tell Mother Jenkins.”

  “I can’t.” Now go, like the Goody Two-shoes snitch you are, and tell on me.

  “You’ll regret it. Besides, someone’s got to go hang up all your wet laundry from last night, and that someone is you. And because of the whole mess, we’ll run behind on the ironing. That’s on you, too.”

  Ruth Ann ignored her until she huffed and left with all the other girls. She had approximately three minutes to stick her finger down her throat before Mother Jenkins flew into the room on her broomstick.

  It was actually only two minutes.

  “Get up at once, you slattern!”

  That word again. Ruth Ann didn’t know what it meant, but it surely wasn’t complimentary.

  “I’m sick,” she moaned. The finger treatment had produced real nausea and she could feel sweat on her brow. She convulsed.

  Mother J didn’t appear to care. “Get up, I said.”

  Ruth Ann did so, clutching her wadded-up work dress to her chest. She took two steps and then vomited into it before collapsing onto her bunk again.

  “Ugh! Wretched girl.” But Mother Jenkins couldn’t argue that she wasn’t ill. “Rinse that off—and yourself, you positively reek!—and I’ll send up someone with a tea tray. Stay in bed. I don’t need this making the rounds among you girls.”

  Ruth Ann trudged with the disgusting dress to the bathroom and took it into the bathtub with her, soaping and rinsing it and the slip along with her body. She hung them to dry over the curtain rail and then got a fresh work dress and slip from the wardrobe in the corner of the bunk room. She put them on, along with fresh undergarments, just as Irene, a girl who worked in the kitchen, brought a tray of tea and toast.

  Clean and dry, with a hot cup of tea, Ruth Ann felt that she could not only escape, but take on the world. She just had to take on her formidable mother first…Nobody would check on her, she was sure, until dinner at noon.

  She went to the door and peered out. The hallway was empty, so she crept from the room, slipped quietly down the stairs and outside into the gray, chilly dawn. A couple minutes’ walk took her to the faded, three-story Colonial house where the “distressed” were housed apart from the feebleminded and fallen—Sheila being, quite possibly, the most distressed of them all.

  Number 213, Sheila’s room on the second floor, was empty. But screams and howls and cussing brought Ruth Ann to the bathroom door, which was open a crack. Wide enough for her to see her mother crouched like an animal, naked, by the wall—hurling abuse at Ruby, the dark-skinned, white-clad attendant who was trying to coax her into the bathtub.

  “Sheila, honey. Won’t it feel good to get clean?” Ruby tried to reason with her. She bent toward her charge and grasped her wrists to pull her to her feet.

  “Leave me ’lone! I’m dirty, an’ I like it that way!” Sheila’s once-blond, silky hair had gone gray and wiry. It hung in her face as she kicked at Ruby, trying to get loose. “Leggo o’ me! Get off!”

  “Come on, now. Water’s nice and warm, but it’ll get cold fast.”

  Ruth Ann wanted to turn away but stood transfixed.

  “Sheila, doll, let’s get in the tub.”

  “Noooooo!” Her mother, unable to gain her freedom, leaned forward to bite her captor.

  “Ow, dang-nabbit! You stop that, you hear?” Ruby, easily six feet in stockings and strong as an ox, lifted her mother bodily even as she twisted and kicked and fought and spit. She swung her 180 degrees and dropped her, none too gently, into the tub.

  That was when Ruth Ann saw it: the long, puckered scar across Sheila’s belly. She felt faint at the sight, bile gathering in her throat. Had Doc Price “fixed” her momma so Sheila couldn’t have any more defective daughters like herself? It sure looked that way.

  The nausea that she’d pretended to have turned real, and she dry-heaved.

  “If you won’t git holt of yourself,” Ruby said to Sheila as she squawked, “I will! Now, we are gonna wash you. Head to toe.” The attendant used one coffee-colored hand to hold Sheila in place and the other to grab a large bar of lye soap. “You want to do it? Or should I?”

  Sheila took the bar of soap from Ruby, who made the mistake of sitting back on her haunches and relaxing her grip. Then Sheila bit into the cake of lye and spit it at her, erupting from the tub as she did so, splashing water everywhere.

  Her freedom didn’t last long, since she slipped on the wet tiles of the bathroom floor and her feet flew out from under her. She clocked her forehead on the sink and went down hard.

  Dear Lord. Ruth Ann pushed the door open and knelt down to check her for injuries. “Momma! Are you okay?!”

  Sheila rolled to face her, her brown eyes glassy, skin pale and waxy. One hand crept to her stomach, fingering the scar. “You. Why are you here?”

  Her mother’s words stung worse than Mother Jenkins’s slap. Even though Ruth Ann knew Sheila was off her rocker, a part of her always hoped for a shred of love or affection from this woman. Sometimes she actually got one. It was surprising, a shock, even, when Sheila produced a tender smile and touched her cheek. It sent her halfway to tears. It mixed her up.

  But today she didn’t have to worry about that.

  “Go away!” said Sheila to Ruth Ann, as an anxiously clucking Ruby risked getting close enough again to check her head.

  “You want a shot or the straitjacket?” Ruby asked Momma. “You want those again? Then behave, child.”

  Sheila slumped into Ruby’s arms as she pulled her upright, stroking her hair. God bless Ruby. She was the only being here who seemed to truly care about the patients. And it was hard, on a good day, to care for Momma. Most workers would just have kept her drugged to the eyeballs, rocking and drooling on herself day after day.

  “Git,” Sheila spat at Ruth Ann. “Git outta here.”

  I’m plannin’ on it. I’m sorry, but I can’t stay.

  Ruth Ann felt no anger toward her, only sadness. Pity.

  “Go away,” her mother repeated. “Go on. I don’t want you to see me like this.”

  Ruth Ann didn’t want to see her like that, either. She hunched her shoulders, mouthed a quick thank you to Ruby, and departed in search of a good story to borrow from the library shelves. An upliftin’ story, one that’d take her right out of her own miserable life and into someone else’s shoes.

  Her tormented toe throbbed, blaring its contempt for this idea. Ruth Ann ignored it, wishing she could switch it out, too. Didn’t seem likely.

  Four

  Ruth Ann darted from one hiding spot to the next as she made her way back toward her dormitory with a contraband title, The Beautiful and Damned, in her dress pocket. Seemed only fair that the beautiful, as well as the homely, be damned. She could get on board with that.

  In the meantime, she called on the good Lord and her own feeble mind to enlighten her as to how to get herself and Glory off the grounds of the Colony. It was a sprawling compound outside of Lynchb
urg, 350 green, rolling farm acres overlooking the James River.

  Visitors never saw the underbelly of the place: dormitories, kitchen, outdoor laundry, chicken coop, workhouses, outhouses and slaughterhouse. The main building, Doc Price’s office and the pastures and barns looked ideal and impressive to the rich people with bleedin’ hearts who paid visits in shiny motorcars and then left, beamin’ with righteous pride on account of they’d written a fat check to help Doc Price keep on workin’ for the greater good.

  Clarence told her how, with his one hand, he scrubbed the undercarriages of their motorcars and shined the chrome headlamps while they chatted with Doc over tea and crumpets. He doffed his cap and bobbed his head when they came out, held the shiny black doors open for ’em and said, “Yes, sir, yes’m, thank you kindly,” when they noted the stump where his left hand should be and told him how very lucky he was to have found a place at the Colony.

  Doc Price’d smile wide, congratulate sir or madam on the magnificence of their hearts and incline his head toward any spots Clarence might have missed with his rag. Then he’d promise to send them a copy of some book on YouGenics, published by his good friend Mr. Laughlin. God only knew what YouGenics was, but Clarence strongly suspected it should be retitled MeGenics. The doc seemed real proud of it; he’d done all kinds of science for it, talked like he’d wrote the darn thing himself.

  Ruth Ann thought about that as she hunted down Clarence, who, go figure, was reraking all the leaves that yesterday’s storm had scattered and then dropped back down like a thousand little gifts for him. This time, he’d had the foresight to scoop them with the rake as he went along into a large wheelbarrow covered with canvas.

  “Pssssst! Clarence!” she called from behind the corner of the main manse. “Psssst!”