Call Your Daughter Home

by Deb Spera

  Though I know it’s wrong, I can’t help myself. I tell Gertrude the same lie I told my daughter. Her eyes are wild with the knowledge of what is to befall her. She clutches her throat, and when she opens her mouth a black plume of smoke rises from within, and I smell the sulfur of death.

  “Lord,” I pray aloud, “I know I ain’t asked for Your help since my Esther died, but I need You now. Help me with this child.”

  My prayer brings Edna and her sisters through the door. Miss Annie follows behind.

  “Do something,” Alma shouts. “Help her.”

  The black swirls around Gertrude, but it’s Lillian Caison I see reaching wild-eyed through the blackness to me, and I remember my promise. All three of Gertrude’s girls are crying. Mary and Alma grip and shake Miss Annie’s skirts. They press their faces into her side. Miss Annie watches me with new eyes. I look around the room and see the tool I need scattered across the floor. Feathers. I reach and grasp the biggest my fingers can find, and strip it bare leaving a small gathering at the top, like a duster.

  “What is dark must come to light,” Grandmother said.

  “Miss Annie, take the lantern and the girls to the cellar. Edna, you got to help me with your mother.”

  “I’m scared,” Edna cries. “I can’t do it.”

  “I ain’t scared,” Alma says.

  She charges forward, but Miss Annie grabs the girl by the arm and says, “No, I’ll do it.”

  Edna holds Alma and Mary by the hand, and Miss Annie comes to my side.

  “Miss Annie, Mr. Coles will kill me if you get sick.”

  “I won’t get sick, and Mr. Coles doesn’t own me.”

  “Climb on top of her and hold her arms down tight. She’ll thrash. You got to use all your strength. Can you do that with your bad hand?”

  Miss Annie hikes up her skirts, and says “To hell with my hand,” then climbs atop and straddles Gertrude. She plants her knees on Gertrude’s arms and holds both shoulders down. She cries out from the pain of her wound, but she don’t let go.

  “Girls, go to the cellar before the storm starts back up,” I holler. “We got your mama.”

  Edna cries, “No,” but Miss Annie whirls around and says, “Do as you’re told, Edna. Take care of your sisters.”

  Edna listens and moves with her sisters through the house without another word. When they are through the back door, stillness comes over the room like the whole world is holding its breath. I push Gertrude’s head back and shove the feather down her throat, twisting to catch hold of what’s there. It’s thick and strong. Gertrude gags and thrashes but Miss Annie holds her with fierce determination. I feel the thing catch like the tug of a worm on a hook, but the center escapes me.

  What is dark must come to light.

  I push the feather further down her throat, feeling for the root. It catches and takes hold, and I hook the thing by the belly and pull. My grasp weakens, and what I’ve caught breaks apart. If I don’t get the whole of it I’ll lose her. Pushing and twisting and stabbing and pulling, I finally reach the end, but it pulls back and sucks the spine of the feather into the roiling rot, but I don’t let go. With one hand on Gertrude’s forehead, and the other in her mouth, I drag that feather slowly up, working my fingers up the spine ’til I can get my whole hand around the bottom of it. I yank the drudge up her throat.

  “Quick, roll her to the side,” I urge Miss Annie.

  She turns Gertrude over and pounds on her back. Gertrude’s body heaves, and I pull all of what lay inside to the surface. It comes out in a torrent of thick yellow and green pus. The blackness turns to white smoke and disappears in the air. Outside the energy gathers. Windows rattle in their frame. Miss Annie holds Gertrude while I push my fist into her chest and pound three times, shouting, “Breathe,” ’til she takes a sharp inhale and her chest rattles as she feebly fights for every drop of air.

  The backside of the storm hits like the tail end of a bullwhip. A hurricane shutter snaps free of the parlor window, and the wind kicks in so strong hail breaks through the glass like rocks purposely flung. Outside a mighty oak is uprooted from the ground and falls sideway across the front path, taking the tree opposite down with it.

  “We got to move her,” I say.

  “Under the stairs,” Miss Annie replies, and together we pull Gertrude across the floor and through the foyer. Miss Annie unlatches the door beneath the stairwell. Her bandage is bloody. She’s torn open the wound. Together, we give the door a good yank and wrench it open, ducking our heads inside and pulling Gertrude in behind us. We are shapes in the dark, the lines of our bodies blurred. We breathe together inviting Gertrude to join. Her belly rises and falls beneath my hand. She drinks each breath like water from thirst. Opening her eyes she finds the pale of Miss Annie in the dark.

  “Mama,” Gertrude cries thrusting her arms toward Miss Annie, but Miss Annie scoots to the back corner under the stairs.

  “Mama,” Gertrude cries over and over, ’til finally it’s me that answers.

  “I’m here, Gert. I’m right here.”

  IV

  28

  Annie

  My husband comes alone on horseback well past the midnight hour through the field down the stream of light cast by a late rising moon. A fox darts from under the ropelike roots of a fallen magnolia, spooked by the unexpected. Edwin is not unexpected to me. I’ve anticipated his return. He arrives without fanfare—how could there be, in light of what has happened?—but I’m surprised he is alone. He dismounts and leads the horse toward the barn but stops when he sees in full what the storm has wrought. Stooped and slow, he’s become old overnight, finally joining me in the inevitable march to the grave. Yes, we’ve been hit hard, I want to tell him, harder than you know, but I must wait. In due time.

  The view from Buck’s bedroom is changed, now that the wood is gone between the main house and old slave quarters. Save the palmettos, trees have been upped by their roots and blown far from where they originally stood. Now they are laid out against harvested fields and a full moon like some strange dead crop, a gnarl of branches and trunks that suggest once living creatures killed upon some unknown battlefield.

  Buck hated this room. For the entirety of his eleventh year and just past his twelfth, I woke to find my son asleep at the foot of my bed. He was too old to be in his mother’s bed; that’s what his father, my husband, said. “The boy’s got to learn to sleep on his own.”

  At the start of every night, I’d open the door that separated the girls’ room from Buck’s and tell his sisters, “Leave this open so your brother can see, he is afraid of the dark,” but every morning it was shut, each side blaming the other. I was so angry.

  The windows in my son’s room stand fully open despite the break in heat that has come after the storm. Tonight my breath is present in the air, and the breeze is so strong that the curtains I made, blue, marked with white sailboats, because the child loved the sea, swell to the center of the room. I’ve become cold-blooded. It’s here I wander now, night after night, suspended in time, stranded in the doorway of the three children I lost, the three children I failed.

  In the week since the storm passed Retta has come and asked for instruction on what to do with the detritus. Most of the outbuildings are torn asunder, including the slave quarters, ruined by wind or fallen trees. Only the house remains fully standing, though the chimney has fallen in on the attic, wrecking what is stored there. Water has leaked into all the bedrooms, and windows are shattered. Every day I say to Retta the same as I did the day before.

  “Leave it. Don’t touch a thing, even the broken glass on the floor.”

  I know the talk it stirs. I don’t care. This house should be seen for what it is, wreckage incarnate.

  It has been seven days since I last had food. Retta’s worried for my health, but I am not. I’ve never been more clearheaded and wonder if the shift from numbness
to clarity is from a lack of sustenance. If so, I should have starved myself years ago. Edwin cocks his head and points his face in the direction of the window, but doesn’t look up. If he did he would see me standing and watching. I want to see his face but am not surprised when I can’t. My husband is adept at hiding. I drop the curtains and walk to our marriage bed and wait.

  * * *

  I was seventeen when I met Edwin at my debutante ball. The Hall in Charleston was far grander than any of us could have imagined. In the center of town on Meeting Street a set of steps led to majestic Greek columns. Beyond the door marble floors adorned the room that was gilded with gold fixtures and lit by gas lamps and candlelight. We were fifteen debutantes in total that year, all dressed in white with gloves and slippers. We felt like royalty and made the front page of the Charleston Daily News, which deemed our ball the symbol of changing times, a return to a gentler, more refined South. As soon as I came through the door I saw Edwin lined up in his tails against the wall with all the other eligible young men, and he saw me. He was first on my dance card, and throughout the night I felt his eyes on me regardless of whom I was with. I knew where he was in the room, not with my eyes, but with my body. I could feel heat from his every direction. When Edwin came courting, which wasn’t often since he lived so far out of town, he was never proper. He stole kisses when Auntie was out of the room. I attributed his impetuousness to country living. There were many young men who came courting, so many that Auntie didn’t know which I really liked, and I didn’t let on for fear Papa would put a stop to it. By the time Edwin proposed, it was too late. Papa took the first train down to Charleston. We had a terrible row, but it was settled when he saw I wasn’t going to budge. It’s the only time I ever saw him cry. We were invited to Branchville to see the Coles family’s plantation, the largest in the territory, with cotton fields that lined the railroad tracks and open fields as far as the eye could see. Papa begrudgingly consented, but demanded the marriage be held in Charleston. On the train ride back from Branchville, Papa said one thing and no more.

  “Country life is a lonely life. Have lots of children.”

  I married at eighteen and had seven children by the time I reached my thirty-first year. Three are dead and gone, two stillbirths and then what happened with my sweet, sweet boy.

  Edwin comes across the dining room and foyer, feet crunching on glass, and then up the steps in slow heavy rhythm. At the top he stops to catch his breath. That is when my ears tell me my husband is crying, something I’ve never heard or seen him do. He comes heavy-heeled into the room, and is startled to find me sitting on our bed.

  “That’s hardly the way a grown man cries,” I say.

  “What?” he asks and cocks his head as if trying to understand what I said. But he stops crying so I know he heard. That awareness is something.

  “Have you grown deaf?” I ask.

  “I hurried as fast as I could, Annie,” he says, defensively, from the center of the room. “I’m lucky to have made it this quickly.”

  Does he imagine I’m angry he’s been gone so long, the hurt wife fretting over her husband’s long, arduous journey?

  “Where are our sons?” I ask.

  “The wagons couldn’t get through the roads for all the felled trees. They have been kept back to help clear.”

  “Kept back?”

  “They’re in Williston.”

  “You left them?”

  “They’re fine, Mother.”

  He sits opposite me in the chair under the window, takes a deep breath and confesses in one long exhale, “We’ve lost everything, Annie. Tobacco is our ruin.”

  “We were in ruin long before tobacco,” I respond.

  Half his face is bathed in the light of the moon, the other half cast in shadow, two sides of one face.

  “What’s wrong with you, Mother?” he asks. “Are you ill?”

  What a very good question. There must be something seriously wrong with me to have been so blind.

  “Don’t call me that. I’m not your mother.”

  “Annie, listen to what I’m telling you. When we got to Florence, the market was flooded with growers. We camped for two days on a line that stretched through town. Half the growers came up from Wilmington in hopes of getting a better price. We didn’t even get market value, Annie. We didn’t get anywhere near that.”

  “Now what?” I ask.

  “Now we consolidate our assets, leverage what we have. I don’t know. Sell the Sewing Circle? We have to cover what we owe. Between the failed crop and damage to our properties we are behind, Annie, well over a hundred thousand dollars behind, and that’s just this season. I’m not accounting for three years of failed cotton.”

  So that’s his plan. The Circle. Take what’s left.

  “Am I supposed to feel pity for you?”

  He gathers himself into composure, and we sit in silence until his confusion turns to suspicion. I do not look away. He straightens himself and turns his head from me to look around the room. My wedding rings sit on his nightstand. The glint of diamonds and sapphires is difficult to miss.

  “Annie, I’m tired,” he tells me, then rises and takes off his watch. He opens the night table and lays it alongside his other timepieces, then moves his hand sideways and fingers the ring of keys. He’s counting.

  “You won’t find the key you’re looking for. I’ve taken it and placed it in safekeeping.”

  With his back to me he feigns an exasperated sigh and says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I think you do, Edwin. I believe you understand me perfectly.”

  He turns with coiled force struggling to stay controlled. The veins of his neck protrude. “Annie, you’ve had a fright. We’ve all been dealt a terrible hand, but we have to play it. We can discuss our future in the morning.”

  I’ve been dismissed.

  “Spare the euphemisms, Edwin.”

  I stand and face him. “We’ve reached the end, you and I. It wasn’t how I imagined, but we both deserve what’s coming—all of it, you, for your disgusting proclivities, and me, for standing by you instead of our children. The good news is it will finally be over.”

  I leave him standing in the center of his bedroom and shut the door between us. I fall asleep just before dawn. When I awake it’s late. My eyes cannot open fully in the glaring light of day. A crisp chill in the air makes the warmth of the blankets a temptation to stay beneath, but I force myself to sit up and listen to the sounds of my house. Downstairs, glass is being swept. Outside, the yard is filled with men clearing debris. They call instructions to one another across the fields. Already they’ve become a singular moving organism. In just a few hours’ time Edwin has rallied the men in town and given them the tasks they’ve been begging me for the greater part of a week. What’s left of the barn is being steadily disassembled. Good, I’m glad to see it go. Piles of wood are stacked in rows. Bonfires have been set near the house and around the plantation to burn the refuse. The smell of smoke lingers in the nostrils. Edna is in the yard hanging the ticking for the mattresses we use for Camp on the clothesline to dry. The pudding pot sits ready on the outside hearth—hung in preparation for Camp. Edwin has made his decision. Appearances shall be kept.

  A sudden sharp breeze sends a chill down my spine. Autumn is here in force, the last gasp of life before winter turns everything dormant. Across the field my husband walks with purpose away from the slaughterhouse where another fire burns in the distance, sending black smoke into the bare blue sky. He’s rid of the evidence. He stands and surveys the property, then glances at the house and raises his eyes, searching until he finds me watching him through the window. He breaks his gaze and strides away, but not before I’ve seen what he wears about his waist. My husband now carries a pistol.

  29

  Retta

  Dear Odell,

  I nev
er told you how I figured out I loved you. It’s a mighty big thing to decide on love, especially when you are about to give your life to a man. I didn’t have a notion about how to decide such a big thing, so I come up with two questions to ask myself. The first was, if anybody ever tried to hurt Odell how would I feel, and the second was, if somebody did hurt Odell, what would I do? The rage that answered the first question answered the second. I didn’t even have time for my thoughts to think. I knew in my body I’d kill the man who hurt you. I felt I could do that. You gave me strength I didn’t know I had.

  I done what I promised I wouldn’t, Odell. I’ve brought the white woman and her children into our home. Proverbs 28:27, remember, O? “He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse.” There is no greater curse than to turn one’s eyes from the grief stricken, and Gertrude’s afflicted in body and spirit. Her children love her and I believe it’s them that keeps her alive, but she can’t see beyond the darkness. She don’t know that’s just the devil playing his tricks, but I do and he knows it. He’ll put up a fight to hold on to what he’s got, but devil be damned, I got the rage of what I understood when I figured out I loved you.

  Your wife,

  Oretta

  Odell’s grizzled face flashes before me. He’s unshaven but smiling and happy to see me. His face comes right down to mine like he means to give me a kiss, but instead he whispers, “Somebody wants to show you her alphabet.”

  In gladness I wake and in sadness come into another day. It’s just a dream, I tell myself, nothing more. I sit up in my sling to get my bearings and throw my legs to the side where they dangle above the ground where the periwinkle blossom has faded, where my baby girl is buried. If I’d known how well I could sleep outside I might have done it years ago.