What a Woman Must Do

by Faith Sullivan

  “I’m real sorry about Kate,” Donna said from the door.

  Receiving no answer, she crossed to the sofa, sitting down at the opposite end. No one had turned on a lamp, and the east-facing room, with a porch in front of it, was thick with dusk.

  “Was it a heart attack?”

  At length Bess cleared her throat. “I guess.”

  “Did you know she had a bad heart?”

  Bess shook her head slowly.

  “When exactly did she die?”

  “Probably between one and three this morning, Dr. White said.”

  They sat in silence, then Donna asked, “Were you home?”

  Again, Bess shook her head.

  Donna leaned toward Bess to study her face. Bess turned toward her but she was floating, not connecting. Donna edged closer, taking Bess’s hand.

  That was better, Bess thought.

  For half an hour they sat like this, not talking. Harriet came in to flick on a lamp but, seeing the girls together on the sofa, thought better of it and left. Somewhere in the back of the house, voices murmured, a syllable or two drifting now and then through the dining room and into the living room, arriving too diminished to be recognizable. Both the kitchen and yesterday lay miles distant.

  In a low voice Donna asked, “Did you find Kate when you came home?”

  “No.” Bess sighed. “I didn’t look in here. This is where …”

  “What time …?”

  “Nearly four-thirty.”

  Donna stirred but did not let go of Bess’s hand.

  Bess’s voice was nearly inaudible. “Nothing happened,” she said, answering the unasked question. “Nothing is going to happen.”

  When Donna left, the two girls walked to the door hand in hand. Afterward Bess was again without anchor.

  In Kate’s room she sat on the bed, her back against the metal headboard, hugging the pillow to her. She wanted to think about Kate, to caress, like rosary beads, memories of her aunt, but her mind wouldn’t grasp hold of memory.

  Much later, Harriet stood at the bedroom door, silhouetted by the hall light. “May I come in, little girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gracious, it’s warm in here,” she said, switching on the electric fan on the chifforobe.

  Harriet perched on the edge of the rocker. “DeVore was here. He said to tell you how sorry he is. And Arnold and Frieda. I don’t think Frieda’s stopped crying all day. I’d have thought she would be stronger than any of us. I told Reverend Hinks that you were resting.” Harriet eased back into the rocker and folded her hands in her lap.

  “I let Frieda bring the wash in,” she went on. “She folded the towels and washcloths, and sprinkled the ironing. She’s coming over tomorrow to scrub the kitchen floor and iron. She’ll make herself sick if she doesn’t stop. But she has to be doing something. For Kate, I guess.”

  Harriet fell silent. She got up and crossed to the bed, laying her hand on Bess’s hair, reeling the girl in from that place in the ether where she drifted. When she spoke again, Harriet was more hesitant.

  “Arnold and DeVore and I talked while Frieda was taking care of the wash. The men said there were things I should tell you, and of course they were right. First of all, this house is yours, and you don’t have to decide this minute what you want to do with it. When you go to college, we’ll look after it. I’ll be living here till next Valentine’s anyway, and after that Arnold and Frieda will keep an eye on things.”

  College? Bess thought. What college was that?

  “If you decide sometime down the road that you want to sell the house, you will always have a place with me and DeVore or Frieda and Arnold. We all want you to know that.”

  She bent and kissed Bess’s cheek. “Try to sleep.”

  And indeed Bess did fall asleep, waking in the deepest cave of night to shamble along in the dark to the bathroom, half asleep and still wearing the skirt and blouse she had worn to Voss’s Funeral Home. She turned on the bathroom light, putting a hand up to shield her eyes from the glare. When she had used the toilet, she shucked off her clothes and pulled on the nightgown draped over the rim of the tub, where she had left it.

  Rinsing her face and brushing her teeth, she padded back down the dark hall, not bothering with a light, noting as she passed Harriet’s open door the rhythmic drone of Harriet’s oscillating fan.

  From Kate’s room came a low voice, nearly lost in the hum of electric fans. Harriet must have gotten up and come in while Bess was in the bathroom.

  At the door, Bess paused. Only now were her eyes growing accustomed to the darkness. “Harriet?”

  The voice in the far corner grew more distinct:

  “I saw a ship a-sailing,

  upon the silver sea;

  And, oh! it was all laden

  with pretty things for thee!”

  Bess grabbed for the doorjamb and clung to it.

  “There were comfits in the cabin,

  and apples in the hold;

  The sails were all of silk, dear Bess,

  the masts were made of gold.”

  “Celia?” Bess breathed.

  She crept forward. Behind the rocker, outside the watery shaft of streetlight, stood Celia in her mauve cotton dress, pale face gazing down on the baby in Kate’s arms.

  “… all laden with pretty things for thee!”

  Wearing her white muslin gown, Kate laughed and cooed:

  “The Knave of Hearts

  Brought back the tarts,

  And vowed he’d steal no more.”

  “Aunt Kate?” Neither figure glanced up.

  Bess’s fingers pleaded to touch them, but they might melt. Never taking her eyes from them, she climbed into bed and lay listening.

  “… And vowed he’d steal no more.”

  Blinking hard again and again, Bess tried not to sideslip across the boundary of wakefulness. But at twenty minutes to two, by the luminous hands of the Big Ben, she was coaxed across the frontier into seamless sleep.

  Chapter 26

  KATE

  Like the moon, Kate was leached of sharp-edged existence in day-light. Yet soundlessly she tramped the box elder grove, embracing limb and bole.

  From the grove she saw the gray Dodge raise dust a mile down the road. As it turned into the lane, she drifted toward that spot in front of the house where Frieda always parked.

  Waiting for the dust to settle before opening the car door, Frieda observed, “When folks came Sunday for the wake, wasn’t there a lot of ’em standing around outside, though?—men like to do that when it’s warm and then they can smoke and talk—and the yard looked real pretty. That was nice, that you mowed the grass and weeded Kate’s little garden. She would like that.” Climbing out of the car and clamping on her straw hat, she said, “Harriet’s a good girl, but she’s not much in the yard.”

  Surveying the tangled box elder grove, the equally tangled cottonwood grove down by the pond, and the great patch of weeds that was the farmyard, Frieda shoved her lower lip firm against the upper one and set her substantial jaw, her eye stern and defiant.

  Bewildered, Bess opened the passenger door and emerged, tentative and apprehensive.

  “Your Aunt Kate’s farm,” Frieda said.

  “This … is where she and Uncle Martin farmed?” Leaning against the car door, Bess surveyed the farmyard as though for the first time.

  “Yah. This is it.” Frieda rounded the front of the car. “And up here by where Kate had her garden, the old folks are buried, Martin’s mama and papa. I’ll show you,” she called, plowing through the sea of weeds like a staunch frigate.

  Bess started after her, glad she had worn jeans. The weeds were tall and thick and clung with prehensile tenacity.

  “Here’s where Kate had her big garden,” Frieda explained, marching off a great swath of yard. “And over here’s the graves.” She waved Bess to follow.

  Nothing marked the two side-by-side plots but the rocks outlining each. And the rocks would be impossible
to find if you hadn’t memorized the location.

  After several moments’ consideration, Bess said, “They’re my great-great-aunt and -uncle by marriage.”

  “Well, I don’t know, but maybe you’re right. Shirttail relation of some sort.” Snatching the handkerchief from the bosom of her dress, Frieda mopped her forehead and waved the cloth in the air to drive back the gnats. “Relations are important. Kinda like a map of where a person is and where they been, don’tcha think?

  “People should pay respect,” she went on. “This is a disgrace.” She waved her straw hat at the overgrown grave sites. “Kate used to tend ’em years ago when she was able, before the arthritis. After that I told her I’d do ’em, but old Hanlon who owns the place put up a gate with a lock on it at the top of the lane and a NO TRESPASSING sign, and Kate said she didn’t want me out here climbing the fence.”

  Bess had knelt and was pulling the weeds on the graves and tossing them aside.

  “We still drove past every chance,” Frieda told her, “but it hurt Kate not to walk here, to check how things were.”

  “Why didn’t somebody ask Hanlon’s permission?”

  Frieda, too, was on her hands and knees now, pulling weeds. Flinging a great handful down on Bess’s pile, she stared off toward the lane. “Arnold asked. Hanlon said he would be the one liable if someone was to get hurt out here. Just an excuse. He’s one of those people has to have his way.”

  Bess snatched vicious handfuls of weeds, ripping them from their beds and hurling them down.

  “Year or two ago, we was driving past,” Frieda said, “and the lock was gone.”

  Something pinched Bess’s brow. She held a clutch of weeds in front of her face for a moment as if to smell the sunlight and green life escaping from them.

  “You getting a headache?”

  “No.” Furtively Bess wiped her eyes on the back of her forearm, then resumed weeding.

  Ten minutes later Frieda sat back, laughing. “Are we two crazy women?” she asked, mopping her brow again and glancing at the considerable pile of weeds. “Look what we done. The old folks can see out now.”

  “When I come home from St. Cloud next summer, I’ll take care of the weeds,” Bess told her. “And I could plant flowers.”

  “Maybe something perennial that don’t need watering every day. Yarrow and daylilies, maybe.”

  When they had cleared the graves of weeds and neatened the rock borders, Bess wandered up to the house. Cupping her eyes, she peered in several windows at rooms mostly empty. Only the kitchen showed signs of use. Arranged around the old wood-burning cookstove were two cots, army blankets folded neatly at their feet, a table, and two chairs. An open cupboard door hanging loose on its hinges revealed boxes of shotgun shells, glasses, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  Bess lingered for several minutes at the kitchen window before Frieda asked, “You want to see the pond?”

  Kate followed Bess and Frieda, her presence no more intrusive than the zephyr fluttering the cottonwood leaves, revealing their dull undersides and loosening a handful of harbinger leaves, though this was only the twenty-seventh of August.

  After Indian summer she would leave. Or not. She would leave when she’d finally gotten her fill of the place, when she had swallowed it whole like oysters and grown sated. Would such a time come? Such a fullness?

  At the little rise beside the pond, Frieda brushed away mosquitoes and cast a caretaker’s sweeping glance over the scene. A tumult of Canadian geese rose from the pond, crying last-minute exhortations and instructions to one another. Aloft, they slipped and shifted into a vee and headed south, sinuous necks straight and straining as they towed autumn in their wake.

  Trailing her cousin, Bess knelt suddenly, drawn by something lying in the weeds. A silvery disc with a raised letter D in the center.

  Glancing at Frieda’s back, she wiped the charm on her jeans, then slipped it inside her bra to lie against her breast.

  When Kate had watched them drive away, watched them down the road past the Geigers’ farm, she strayed across the yard to the sagging porch, trussed recently and without craft—no commitment, only expediency, use, and a belief in paper: mortgages, liens, deeds.

  Spreading her arms wide and swallowing deep draughts of a landscape worn and patinated, she considered the persuasions of heaven. She might have to forgo them.

  For Irene, Marketa, and the Manion Family

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With gratitude to Lee Boudreaux, my editor at Random House, for her wisdom, skill, and unfailing good humor. Thanks as well to the knowledgeable, dynamic Douglas Stewart, agent and friend at Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  And, finally, a continuing thank-you to my husband, Dan, and our three children—Maggie, Ben, and Kate—all writers themselves. Their patience, support, and example have availed and inspired me.

  ALSO BY FAITH SULLIVAN

  Repent, Lanny Merkel

  Watchdog

  Mrs. Demming and the Mythical Beast

  The Cape Ann

  The Empress of One

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Faith Sullivan was born and raised in southern Minnesota. Married to drama critic Dan Sullivan, she lived twenty-some years in New York and Los Angeles, returning frequently to Minnesota to keep her roots firmly planted in the prairie. Since 1989 she has lived in Minneapolis.