Willow Springs

by Jan Watson

  Reuben’s face betrayed no emotion as they approached the end of the narrow street. “Here now. I think this be where young Andy lives.”

  The house sat nearly level with the road. The tiny front yard looked tidy compared to that of its neighbor, which was strewn with all manner of odds and ends, the most curious of which was a wooden rowboat, oars still attached.

  They’re ready for the flood, Copper thought but kept it to herself. She figured she’d already said enough.

  Holding her skirts aloft, she stepped across the drainage ditch and into the yard. Paw-paw yipped and whined to come with her, but she left him in the carriage. The gray, lightweight-wool calling suit she wore with its short, fitted jacket trimmed with crystal-beaded swirls of purple ribbon seemed woefully inappropriate, and she wished she’d worn anything but the jaunty hat of gold and purple feathers. The emperor in his new clothes couldn’t have seemed more out of place.

  Unlike most of the other houses, the door to Andy’s was closed. Flakes of white paint floated to the rough stone stoop when Copper rapped loudly. “Andy,” she called when she got no response, “are you in there?”

  The door opened a crack, revealing a dirty little face framed by tangles of hair the color of rich cream. “What do you want, miss?” the little girl whispered.

  “Hi there. I’m Andy’s friend. Is he home?”

  “He ain’t here.” The door opened wider, and the girl stared up at Copper with round blue eyes. Wash her face and this child would be beautiful. “I wish he’d hurry back. Me and Dodie are hungry.”

  “Could I speak to your mother?” Copper asked.

  The child made no move. “My ma’s asleep.”

  “Well . . . ,” Copper started, unsure what to do. She couldn’t just barge into a house uninvited. Could she?

  A dull thunk . . . thunk . . . thunk emanated from somewhere in the room.

  The girl looked over her shoulder. “That’s the baby. She’s mad ’cause there ain’t no milk.” Her voice sounded resigned and old beyond her years.

  “Should I come in and see about her?” Copper asked.

  “Andy says don’t let nobody in without permission. You wait right here.” The door closed behind her.

  Half a minute passed before it swung back open. “Dodie says come on in,” the girl said.

  The room Copper entered surprised her. Expecting few and humble furnishings, she saw instead a camel-backed sofa of elegant brown brocade and two plush chairs of the same material, one with a brightly colored fringed shawl draped over the arm. In one corner sat a curio cabinet, lavishly dressed dolls covering its mirrored shelves. Just steps beyond the sitting room was the kitchen, where an odd-looking baby banged her head against the back of a wobbly wooden high chair.

  “I’m Marydell,” the girl said, sliding her hand between the chair back and the baby’s head. “And this is my sister, Dodie.”

  In stark contrast to the parlor the kitchen was nearly bare. Strings of brightly colored beads hung from a doorframe separating it from the room beyond. Through the beaded curtain, Copper could faintly make out the form of a woman lying on a bed.

  The toddling-age baby continued her head banging, smashing against Marydell’s hand.

  “I’m six,” Marydell continued without even a grimace of pain. “Can I wear your hat?”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Marydell.” Copper fumbled with her hatpin and handed her hat to Marydell. Leaning down, she unfastened the tray and slid the baby out. “Does Dodie mind if I look in the cupboard?”

  Marydell put her ear to her sister’s mouth. “Dodie says, ‘Help yourself,’ but I already looked and it’s empty as my belly.”

  Copper drew aside a panel of printed cotton that hung from a length of twine strung between two nails. Indeed, the kitchen cupboard was empty. The shelves held only a bottle of clotted milk and a withered potato sporting a long white sprout.

  “Muk,” the baby said and reached toward the bottle.

  “Reckon she could eat it off a spoon?” Marydell asked. “It won’t pour. I already tried.”

  “We need to wake your mother.” Copper peeked between two strands of beads.

  The woman slept with one slender arm thrown across her eyes. Stirring, she propped herself on one elbow. Clouds of hair the color of clover honey spilled around her heart-shaped face. “Marydell,” she whined like a petulant child, “you know I need my sleep. Can’t I ask the least little thing from you?”

  “I’m sorry, Ma.” Marydell laid Copper’s feathered hat on the table before she slipped into the room. “Let me fix the blanket.” The child drew the coverlet across her mother’s chest and patted it into place. The woman’s droopy eyes closed before Marydell finished.

  “Here, lady,” Marydell said, grabbing Copper’s free hand. “Let’s take Dodie outside.”

  The scent of ammonia stung Copper’s nose. “Do you have a clean diaper?” she asked as they stepped out.

  Reuben had turned the carriage around and waited up the road a bit in a shady spot. Copper could see Paw-paw’s head hanging out the window.

  “That Dodie’s always needing something. Come round back with me.” Marydell edged through the narrow space between her house and her neighbors’. “I hung this nappy out this morning. It should be dry by now.”

  Taking Dodie from Copper, she laid the baby on her back on a patch of grass. Deftly she exchanged the wet rag for a dry one. “There now, is that better, baby?” she asked as she hung the used diaper over the same rusty wire from which she had taken the dry one. “When they’re smelly, I have to rinse them out in that bucket. Andy keeps water in it all the time.”

  Copper knelt and took the baby in her arms. Dodie leaned back as far as she could and grinned. A string of drool wet the front of her stained gown. She was a wiry baby, long and thin without a trace of fat. Her perfectly round, slick head sat on her shoulders like the stopper in a bottle, and her ears stuck out like the handles on a jug.

  Copper fought her inclination to rouse the children’s mother. How could she lie abed when her little ones were hungry? Instead she followed Marydell to the front stoop, where they sat to wait for Andy. A fine anger settled in her chest like a smoldering ember. Righteous wrath.

  Before long, Andy came strutting down the street—a resplendent Andy all dressed up. “Hey, girls. Hey, Miz Corbett. I sure didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “I came to see if I could take you to get something special to wear to the ceremony tonight, but I see someone’s beaten me to it.”

  Marydell ran to her brother’s side and stroked the arm of his brown-and-gold glen plaid jacket. He had knickerbockers to match and long black stockings tucked into shiny brown boots. “Andy, you look beautiful,” she said.

  “Yes, Andy, you are quite handsome,” Copper agreed.

  Andy smiled. “I expect I feel right handsome.” He set a box of groceries on the stoop and doffed his new brown- and white-striped billed cap. “Would you believe the mayor took me to the dry-goods store to get me a suit of clothes, and Mr. Massey wouldn’t let him pay? Said it was on the house. Don’t that beat all? Just for helping you get Matilda back.”

  The baby held her arms up, and Andy settled her on his hip. “Glad you’re dry for a change, girl.” Dodie squealed and pulled at his tie. “These here shoes are a mite big, but they’ll do.” He squared his shoulders. “Mr. Massey said a growing boy needs a big shoe.”

  “You deserve every bit of it,” Copper said. “Did the mayor buy these groceries?”

  “No, ma’am,” he replied, his chest puffed out. “I bought these with my earnings.”

  “Muk!” Dodie cried. “Muk.”

  “Yes, girly-girl, milk.” He opened the door but did not invite Copper in. “I’d best fix Dodie a bottle. See you tonight, Miz Corbett.”

  Standing on tiptoe, Copper searched the crowd in vain for Andy’s mother and his two little sisters. “Surely they’ll be here. I can’t believe his mother would miss the award ceremony.” />
  Simon slipped his hand under her elbow. “Did you meet Annalise when you went to her house today?”

  “Is that Andy’s mother’s name? How pretty. No, she was still abed.” It was near dusk, so she furled her parasol as they walked along. “I met his sisters, Marydell and Dodie. That baby tickles my mind. There’s something familiar about her, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Don’t you think babies look pretty much the same?” Simon asked. “Like Humpty Dumpty, all head and no necks?”

  Copper laughed. “Dodie’s not the prettiest little girl I ever saw, but I don’t think she looks like an egg. Marydell’s a different story. She reminds me of a wildflower with all that yellow hair around her little dirty face.” She stopped to face Simon. “I don’t think their mother takes very good care of them.”

  “Annalise is an inattentive mother, but she’s not mean, and they’ve got Andy.” He escorted Copper to a front-row seat in front of the grandstand. “Look, there’re the Johnsons with baby Matilda.”

  The crowd clapped enthusiastically as the mayor escorted Andy to the podium, where Mr. Johnson shook his hand and Mrs. Johnson hugged him tightly.

  As if he spent every day in front of a crowd, Andy started right in. “Alls I can say is I couldn’t have saved baby Matilda here without Miz Corbett’s help, and her praying didn’t hurt none. And I ain’t never going in anybody’s cellar after dark again.”

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Simon said as he and Copper strolled home following the ceremony and the fireworks display. “Did you enjoy the evening?”

  “Oh yes. I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than the fireworks. It was like watching the brightest star burst in the heavens. I wish I could have shared it with Willy and Daniel. They would have been so excited. I should write Mam in the morning and tell her all about it.”

  Their Bible reading that night was about Jesus and a woman nearly stoned.

  “Simon,” Copper said when he had finished reading, “do you ever get angry at your patients?”

  “Anyone in particular you have in mind?” he asked as they knelt for prayer.

  She turned to face him. “Well, Andy’s mother for one. It makes me mad that she was sleeping when her children were hungry. And Birdie, too, for heaven’s sake. You act like it doesn’t bother you that she nearly killed Matilda.”

  “Sweetheart, one thing you have to learn when you practice medicine is not to rush to judgment. It’s easy to think we would do better than people like Annalise, but how do we really know, never having lived their lives?”

  Bowing her head over folded hands, Copper tried to concentrate as her husband led their prayers. His words about judgment stung, though she knew he hadn’t meant them as a rebuke. The anger she’d welcomed toward Andy’s mother that morning churned in her stomach like a lump of soured dough.

  That night Copper dreamed she lived in Bible times. She walked along a winding road, her sandaled feet kicking up little puffs of dust. A clay water jug rested on her shoulder. Shading her eyes against the fine sand stirred up by a quick, hot wind, she saw a crowd gathering on the steps of the Temple. In her haste to see what was happening she twisted her ankle on a rock that lay in her path.

  “It’s the Lord of the Jews,” she heard one man tell another, his voice thick with sarcasm. “He’s talking to that harlot.”

  People milled around, picking up stones; angry words called out for violence. The wind, laden with the feel of an approaching storm, swirled faster until the crowd faded away and left Copper staring into the dark-pooled, beseeching eyes of a woman drawing water from the well.

  Past midnight she woke with a start, her hand aching from the stone she’d clenched so tightly. Slipping from bed, she fell to her knees and asked Jesus to grant her eyes like her husband’s, eyes that could see past people’s ways and into their hearts.

  Glumly, Copper stared at her breakfast plate. For once she didn’t have an appetite. After her late-night prayers, she’d stolen downstairs and out to the porch. Wrapped in a quilt, nestled in the porch swing, she spent long hours wrestling with her conscience. Birdie’s pinched face kept intruding into her thoughts. “I had a baby once. Had a baby once,” Copper could hear her say. What did it mean? What would drive Birdie to steal another woman’s baby?

  “Cat got your tongue?” Simon asked.

  Pushing a bit of biscuit into a puddle of gravy, Copper said, “I’m worried about Mrs. Archesson. I want to go to the hospital to see her.”

  Simon’s face clouded. Somehow she’d known it would. “She’s not really in a hospital,” he said. “The asylum is not a fit place for you to visit.”

  “But . . .”

  He looked over his spectacles at her like Mam used to do, as if to say, “Obey me.”

  “Simon, I won’t feel at peace until I see her. How bad could it be?”

  Sighing, he gave in. “It’s a depressing place, but if you must go, I’ll get Tommy Turner to escort you. He knows his way around.”

  Suddenly hungry, she dug into her food. “Thank you. I feel better already. It can’t be as depressing for me as it is for Birdie.”

  Copper was pleasantly surprised when she and Tommy Turner approached the administration building. The asylum was nothing like the prisonlike structure she had pictured it to be. The complex sat back from the road on manicured lawns, albeit fenced ones, and was remarkable for the profusion of flowers of every kind. Fruit and shade trees bordered curving paths where nurses walked their charges, who looked remarkably alike in shapeless robes washed to the same dull gray.

  Copper drew her skirts aside to allow the passage of an elderly woman who plucked imaginary objects from the air. “Let’s go find Birdie.”

  They entered the three-storied central pavilion through an arched fanlighted doorway. The reception hall was clean and airy. Sunshine streamed through huge many-paned windows on either side, and the polished, dark-marble floor echoed with their footsteps, announcing their presence.

  “We are here to see Mrs. Archesson,” Copper informed the man who sat behind the first desk they saw. “We have permission from her admitting physician, Dr. Corbett.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He chewed on the stub of a lead pencil and barely looked up. “Let me see. . . . She’s a new admit, so she’s in A. I’ll send for Nellie; she can escort you. The gentleman will have to wait here. No men callers but family allowed in that part of the institute.”

  “I’ll wait for you outside,” Tommy said, heading for the door.

  Copper wondered what painful memories of this place were hidden behind his pleasant demeanor.

  A few minutes later Nellie arrived and led Copper down a long, wood-paneled hallway to a heavy door, which she opened with a jangling set of keys, then locked behind them. Bright light gave way to shadow as gas lamps hissed and spit out stingy rays barely illuminating stone steps descending to Women’s Ward A.

  The open, airy feel of the asylum’s grounds seemed a thousand miles away from this dismal stairwell that smelled of lime from the damp, thickly mortared rock walls.

  “This is where the real crazies are kept,” Nellie informed Copper in a clipped accent Copper couldn’t place. “Them as what hurts somebody.”

  The narrow hall opened into a wide corridor, revealing a row of barred floor-to-ceiling doors through which Copper glimpsed what seemed to be the same poor woman over and over again. Each small cell held an iron bedstead tethered to the wall with a heavy chain and not much else, save the hapless creatures living within. The smells of unwashed bodies and stale urine mixed with moans and screams of despair.

  “A moment, please,” Copper said, placing one gloved hand on Nellie’s arm, ashamed of her reaction. What made her think she could be of any help in such a place? She should have listened to her husband.

  “Here, miss,” the nurse said with concern. Her round, pink-cheeked face and robust figure made Copper think Nellie should be milking cows, not living like a mole. “Let’s sit a bit. The kitchen’
s just up ahead. We’ll have a spot of tea before you see your friend.”

  Nellie steered Copper to the kitchen and pulled out a straight-backed chair before she poured dark steeped tea into two gray granite mugs. “I’d sweeten that some.” She handed Copper a lidded bowl. “You’re looking a mite peaked.”

  “Thank you for being so kind,” Copper replied, stirring sugar into her tea. “I’m sorry to cause trouble.”

  “No trouble, miss. I was more than ready to sit a spell.” Nellie took a long, loud sip and looked over the rim of her cup. “Who might you be to the lady who tried to kill that wee baby?”

  “I’m just an acquaintance, really.” With trembling fingers, Copper carefully took a sip of tea, then set her cup on the matching saucer. “I met Mrs. Archesson in Dr. Corbett’s office, and I came to visit with her for a bit, just to see if she’s all right. I don’t mean to stay but a minute.”

  “This is not how we usually does things,” Nellie said, rising. “We don’t get many visitors on Ward A.”

  “Surely they don’t stay here forever,” Copper said.

  “Most will get better—quieter anyway—move upstairs, and have privileges. Some work on the farm. They go home when they can if they have someone to watch over them. Mrs. Archesson’s not so bad. Her brain’s just clouded from all that tonic she drank.”

  “May I visit with her now?” Copper asked, feeling stronger from the sweet tea.

  “Surely, miss, just let me get her hooked up.”

  Copper followed Nellie to the cell door and watched as the young woman clamped a metal shackle around Birdie’s left ankle before tethering it to the foot of the bed.

  “Really,” Copper began, “I don’t think that will be necessary. . . .”

  “That’s the rules, miss, else you can’t visit with her.”

  “I understand. Thank you, Nellie.” Copper entered the room where Mrs. Archesson lay, stiff as a corpse, upon a lumpy mattress.