Stillwater

by Nicole Helget

  Angel put the purse to her nose. She sniffed it and crinkled her nose. Then she rubbed the smooth side of the purse along her cheek. “I don’t know. If I can, maybe. But probably not.”

  “Please,” he said. “I won’t be mean to you ever again.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Angel’s mother still remained locked in her room. Angel began to imagine that her mother had died in there, behind the big, heavy door. She imagined that now Nanny would come every day or perhaps even move into the Hatterby house and take care of Angel always. Angel wondered what it would be like to always feel healthy, to never have stomachaches, to freely go to school and not have to sneak there only when Mother was ill or pouting, to play unconstrained, to make friends, more friends than one. She wanted lots of friends. Girl ones and boy ones. More friends than only Clement. Would other children like her? Clement did. Would other boys like her? Would she one day have a boyfriend?

  The possibilities excited her. She hopped from her bed and to the door. She opened it softly and slowly and slipped into the hallway. She sought the quietest path. She tiptoed past her mother’s room. She heard voices from within. She stopped. The priest. Father Paul was here again. She heard him chanting. Last rites? She listened and held her breath. The sound of her mother’s real cry, one that was deep and low and rocked her small body, rolled under the door and seemed to pool at Angel’s feet and move in vines up her legs, her belly, her chest, and then clasp her neck. Her mother was alive.

  Angel swallowed and returned to her room.

  In the morning, Nanny slipped Angel to school. Alive with curiosity and owl-eyed at the world outside her home, Angel planned to enjoy this day to its fullest. She had a vague notion that it might be the last one. Like the other children, she leapt to her feet at recess time and skipped outside and ate unfussy food and inhaled pine air and plunged a dipper into the water barrel from which all the other children drank. Her cheeks flushed, and she got a slight sunburn on her nose. She scraped her knee, twisted an ankle, and ran so fast, she got a side ache.

  “Everyone gets them,” Clement told her. “Just lean over and breathe.” He rubbed her back.

  When she stood up straight, she saw an unfamiliar person coming down the walk. He was black, but lighter than any Negro she’d seen before, and he was holding his hands out in front of him, his fingers lifting and falling as though playing a phantom piano. His face was slightly plump. He wore a tan shirt with a black vest over it. His boots were shiny.

  “Who’s that?” Angel asked. She placed her hands over her belly.

  “Where?” said Clement. He followed Angel’s gaze. “Oh, him. That’s the kid who cleans the school. Davis. His mother dresses him like a dandy.”

  “A what?” said Angel. She licked her hand and ran it over the top of her head.

  “He’s a Negro,” Clement said. “But not the enslaved kind.”

  “That’s good,” said Angel. She turned her back to the new boy.

  “I guess so,” said Clement. “He’s all right, but he talks a lot.”

  Angel pushed her shoulders back. “Is he coming over here?” she asked Clement.

  “No,” said Clement. “Why?”

  When Clement and Angel returned to the classroom with the rest of the students, Davis set his mop and pail in the corner and stood behind Clement and Angel’s table.

  Clement turned around. “You can sit here,” he said. Then he explained to Angel, “We’re not supposed to, but we let Davis learn some too.”

  Davis was older than Angel and Clement, and taller and stouter. He sat beside Clement but leaned around him to look at Angel.

  “Hi there, pretty girl,” he said to her.

  Clement put his hand on Angel’s arm. “He talks a bit forward because he’s been raised in a whorehouse,” he said. He elbowed Davis. “Weren’t you?”

  “Can’t deny it, but I don’t mind it,” said Davis. “Always something interesting going on there. How ya been, Clement, and who’s your lady friend?”

  “Knock it off, Davis,” said Clement. “She’s new and not used to your jokes.”

  “I think I been swept off my feet,” said Davis.

  Angel’s cheeks flooded with heat.

  Clement sniffed, as though in laughter, but his forehead and the corners of his mouth lowered.

  All day, Angel and Davis glanced at each other, leaning around Clement to catch looks and smiles.

  At the end of the day, just as Angel determined she’d say something to Davis, ask him a question or compliment him on his shirt, she walked out of the school to the clearing and lifted her head. There Angel’s mother stood. The forest canopy darkened. Bird noises seemed to stop.

  “Angel!” her mother hissed.

  “I—” Angel started.

  “You’re fired,” her mother said, lips barely moving.

  Angel looked over her shoulder to where Nanny stood. Nanny pulled a bonnet over her head and looked at the ground.

  It struck Angel as odd to stand between her tall, sturdy blond nanny and her small, delicate dark mother, round in the belly with a child. In the sunlight, her mother seemed tiny beneath the giant trees but so serious and threatening. Her mother looked from Clement to Angel and frowned. She held out her hand, and Angel tucked her head and walked toward her mother.

  Clement shouted, “You can’t take her away!”

  Davis asked, “Who’s that?”

  Nanny stayed back, and she never again returned to the Hatterbys’ house.

  That night, when her mother brought her the soup, Angel slapped it off the tray and sent it splattering onto the floor.

  “I’m not drinking it,” she told her mother, with words that dropped like stones. “I’m not drinking it ever again.” The bowl broke; pieces of it tottered along the wood floor. The soup splashed the walls and the legs of her bed and the bottom of her mother’s skirt. One of her mother’s cats crept along the wall and ran out of the room.

  Her mother bent to pick up the pieces of the bowl and tossed them onto the tray. Then she stood, put an arm on her lower back, and stretched, popping her belly out far for Angel to see. She extended her arm, clamped her hand into a fist, and pounded herself in the belly. She gasped and then spit, “You are a dirty little abandoned bitch. If it weren’t for me, you’d be a snot in that orphanage.” She hit herself again and again.

  “Stop,” Angel said softly. “Stop it.”

  Her mother hit herself again and again. “You stop it,” she said. “You stop it,” she kept saying. Finally she leaned over and staggered out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  All night, moaning and wailing came from her mother’s chambers. In the morning, a pail full of bloody rags sat outside her mother’s door. After a few days, her mother emerged and her belly was flat again. Angel wondered about the baby, but she never saw one.

  34

  Davis Learns His Place

  WHEN DAVIS CAME HOME from school, he found a stray cat sitting on his bed. It had a fresh-from-the-forest look to it, its fur matted here and there, an eye pasted shut, and an angry cocklebur in its tail. Its other eye, gray-green, looked at him as though it was disgusted by his presence.

  “Ma!” Davis shouted. He was growing tall and had hair under his arms and often felt full of unexplainable rage and strength. “Ma!”

  Down the hall of the Red Swan, a door flew open and footsteps plodded on the hallway carpet. Suddenly, Miss Daisy appeared in the doorway, looking harried and disheveled.

  “What’s the matter?” she wheezed. Her hair was coming out of its bun. Her cheeks were flushed. She looked back toward her room and then at Davis again. “Is everything all right?” She held his face in her hands. “Why are you yelling? Are you hurt?”

  He could smell the sweat and a man’s cologne on her. As a boy, those scents hadn’t bothered him. As he grew and came to understand what they meant, a fury had built in his bones: at her, at the men, at all of it. “There’s a strange cat on my bed.” He po
inted to the feline, spreading like butter in the sunshine streaming through the window.

  “Oh,” said Miss Daisy. “That’s Homer. He kept coming to the door for scraps and mewling to come in. He won’t hurt you.” She walked over to the cat and picked him up. She put him to her nose and smiled at him. The cat struggled and leapt from Miss Daisy’s chest back onto Davis’s bed.

  From her room down the hall came shouting. “What’s going on!” and “I paid a lot of money for this!”

  In her cheerful lilt Miss Daisy shouted back, “Be right there!”

  Davis rolled his eyes. “We already have a dozen cats,” he said. “They’re everywhere. I don’t want any more cats stinking up my room.”

  Miss Daisy clenched her jaw and quivered her lips, which meant she was about to cry.

  Davis sighed. “Ah, God. I don’t mean to upset you, but we’ve already got so many animals around here.” He pointed to the cat hair on his pillow and the carpet. “How are we going to feed this one too?”

  More shouting from down the hall: “Get back here, you piece of filth!”

  Davis stepped into his doorway. “Hey!” he shouted. “Shut your damned trap!”

  Miss Daisy heaved up a big sob, and Davis turned and put his arms around her. He was now half a foot taller than her and still growing. He held on to her and hugged her tight until he was grabbed around the neck and yanked off his feet.

  “Stop it!” Miss Daisy screamed. “Get away from him. He’s just a kid.”

  A small, bald man, wearing only trousers and suspenders, stood over Davis, hauled back his fist, and landed it on the side of Davis’s temple.

  “You think I’m gonna let a little nigger talk to me like that?” he said. He popped Davis again in the same spot.

  Miss Daisy grabbed hold of the man and tried to pull him away. He shook her off and pushed her back. She fell into Davis’s dresser and onto the floor.

  The man reached back and punched Davis three or four more times, knocking him down, before the bartender appeared in the doorway, kicked the man in the stomach, encircled his waist, and threw him to the floor.

  “Dirty nigger in here!” the bald man said. “Filthy whores and dirty niggers.” He got up, went back to Miss Daisy’s room, and appeared again with his boots and shirt and coat. “You just lost yourself a customer,” he said before descending the stairs.

  Miss Daisy, her hair and clothes a mess, cried like a child.

  Davis touched his fingers to his temple and his eye. He looked at his hands and saw blood. “I hate this place,” he said. “I hate it here.”

  Miss Daisy crawled to him and used her hem to wipe the blood from his face. “Shhh,” she said. Tears fell from her face onto his own.

  “I hate it.”

  “You just have to learn to be quiet,” she said, “and hold your tongue.” She pulled his head up onto her lap. “Get me some water,” she called to the bartender. When he did, she dabbed a handkerchief in it and then blotted his face.

  “For how long?” Davis asked.

  She seemed to be thinking. She moved the handkerchief all around his face, carefully and tenderly. Then she welled up again. “Maybe always,” she said. “I hope not, but maybe.”

  He pressed his face deep into her skirts and cried. He could smell the man scent and jerked away, revolted. He stood. “I hate this place.” He grabbed Miss Daisy by the arm and pushed her out the door. “Get out. Leave me alone.” He slammed the door. Then he went to the window, opened it, and took in a good breath of clean air. The cat sat lazing on his bed as though nothing strange had happened. Davis picked it up and threw it out the window.

  He lay back on his bed and thought about all he wanted to do and see. He talked to himself. “I want to see the mountains and get some of that gold in California that everyone’s talking about. I want to have an adventuring kind of life on a horse, with a gun and money. I have to get a horse. I will become a Negro cowboy, or maybe just a cowboy; maybe no one will know me and will think I’m light.” He closed his eyes and saw himself riding into a western sunset on a big, strong horse with its nostrils flaring, chasing down a mountain lion or a black bear. He saw himself raising a rifle and shooting the animal and gutting it and then wearing a coat made from the fur. He imagined himself panning in a river, plucking gold nuggets as big as his hand out of the water and buying a pocket watch and a new saddle. He pictured himself on the new saddle, with Angel riding with him. He’d put his arms around her and hold on to the reins as they rode over the land. Davis put his hand down his trousers and awakened himself. He stroked and stroked, thinking of her reddish blue lips and pale skin. He stroked and stroked as he imagined the noises she would make as the horse carried them away.

  35

  Big Responsibility

  AS THE BURGEONING NATION wrestled over the rights of fugitive slaves, Iowa and Wisconsin became the twenty-ninth and thirtieth states in the Union, which for years left the land west of the St. Croix and north of Iowa, including Stillwater, as part of the United States but no state in particular. The tribes of the region had called the place Minnesota, Land of Sky-Colored Waters, as it was sometimes bluish and sometimes cloudy. Already rumblings were heard about giving that name to the territory. Some men wanted to push for immediate statehood, but the battle would be tense. The thought of another free state sent nervous tremors up and down the necks of the leaders of the Southern states. Too many states wagging their fingers at the slave states was not something the South wanted. To some escaped slaves and abolitionists, a place in limbo, Minnesota Territory, was a good place for people in limbo, and so dozens of fugitive slaves, with the help of riverboat workers, free Negroes, whores, barbers, railroad porters, an earless priest, an overburdened nun, an arthritic squaw, and the bastard son of a fur trapper and a red-haired imp stepped onto the shores of Stillwater.

  Stillwater found itself on a twig’s tip of a branch on a tree with roots deeply planted in the South. Mother St. John’s Home for Orphans and the Infirmed had converted a well-hidden room into a safe haven and resting place for weary travelers from the South. And although the boy Clement couldn’t understand the politics surrounding the events that unfolded there, he understood that his job was important and should remain a secret.

  Mother St. John woke Clement by blowing in his ear. She held a dim lantern to her face. For nine years now he’d lived here among the sick and motherless. He was a good boy and a comfort to Big Waters, who had raised him, doted on him, and reared him to do good and hard and humble work in the world.

  “Wake up now,” Mother St. John said. “I need you to collect our guest.” Clement sighed and sat up. He dressed quietly so as not to wake the others. Mother St. John threw a satchel filled with biscuits and dried beef over his shoulder. “He’ll be hungry, I’m sure,” she said. She opened the door just wide enough for Clement to get through and handed him a bottle of whiskey. “For the conductor.”

  Clement considered asking for the muzzleloader that Mother St. John kept hidden behind her own bedroom door but then thought better of it. Instead he said, “I thought I heard a mountain lion yesterday.”

  Mother St. John said she hadn’t heard of any big cats in the area and told him to say his Hail Marys on the walk to the river. Clement started out, his mind on nothing but that gun until he considered the consequence of not saying his prayers as Mother St. John had directed. He knew that as soon as she had him alone, she’d ask him about his prayers. And it was impossible to lie to Mother. She had told him once that nuns knew everything, a special gift from Jesus. He believed her. So, on the first decade, Clement dedicated each prayer to begging for a rifle. Six Hail Marys into the Joyful Mysteries, Clement froze in his boots. From the sky, two yellow eyes fell like embers from a torch and grew larger and larger. Clement gasped. The eyes became bigger and bigger, moving closer and closer, toward his head. He fell to the ground and asked the Virgin to protect him as an owl dove past. The draft ruffled his hair. He dimly saw a rabbit dashing in and o
ut of the leaves and branches, and then heard the high unnatural scream of the creature rip through the dark as the owl seized it with its talons and lifted it into the sky. The heavy wings flapped strongly. Very soon the woods were quiet again. Clement breathed. If he’d had a gun, he’d have blasted that owl. And maybe the rabbit too. Probably he’d have shot the rabbit first and then the owl. Both of them.

  Clement began walking again. He knew these trees well and the things that lived among them. He knew the hollow tree where the bobcat made its den and kept its kittens. He knew the rock upon which the garter snakes coiled into large mating balls each spring. He daydreamed about Angel, and he grew briefly jealous of Davis and the way he stole her attention. But before he knew it, the rustle of the leaves and the creaking of the branches were muted by the rushing sound of the river, where he knew to wait. He settled near a cluster of birch trees. Birches were his favorite. The way they grew into each other, strengthened each other, one tree’s bark melting into another’s amazed him. He leapt up and grabbed a low branch. He swung back and forth, suspended like an opossum. He counted to a hundred and then dropped down. His palms stung. He spit into them and rubbed his hands together.

  Clement’s mind wandered to guns and hunting. He made pistols of his hands and pretended to shoot and holster. After a while, he sat and leaned against a tree, waiting. He pretended he was a stealthy hunter. He raised his arms as though handling a rifle in pretend-aim at a bear or wildcat. He pressed himself against the tree, imagining he was at war against restless Indians or wandering robbers. He turned his head to one side of the tree trunk and then the other, so that only one eye surveyed the area before him. At the thought of the enemy, Clement dropped to his knees and then lay on his stomach, making himself as small as possible, at one with the earth. If he were a real soldier or sheriff, he knew, no one would see him. He leaned on his elbows and popped off a shot.