Willow Springs

by Jan Watson

  “When?” she demanded this morning when the doctor held his stethoscope to Simon’s chest.

  “Now, little mother,” he answered, his kindness shattering her patience as he patted her arm, “we must let nature take its course.”

  They’d put a chair and a little table to hold a Bible and a lamp right outside his door. A steady stream of folks came to keep watch with the family, and most tarried there, searching the Scriptures and praying. Alice practically moved in, and Benton came every evening. Food piled up in the kitchen until Copper couldn’t stand the sight of it. Then Reuben would pack everything up and take it to the poorhouse.

  Copper stayed next to Simon’s bed, knitting little sweaters and hats. She really didn’t mind her vigil. It was pleasant sitting beside her silent husband, and as long as she sat there he was alive. The warm days lingered with gentle breezes through the open window. But she could tell that cold was coming; frost was creeping their way.

  Then a miracle happened. On the morning of the sixth day, as Copper embroidered yet another infant’s gown, Simon woke up. “Sweetheart,” he rasped weakly, “water.”

  He sipped a small amount through the invalid’s straw before his head fell back against the pillow. “What happened?”

  She told him what she knew as his eyes tracked her face, loving her still.

  It seemed for the next day or two that Copper would get to keep Simon. Even Alice took heart and went home to care for Dodie. Dr. Thornsberry was pleased when Simon ate a little broth and some milk toast. Once he even sat up on the side of the bed, his thin legs dangling.

  Copper had just picked up her sewing when Dr. Thornsberry made his final call. “He’s sleeping,” she said when she spied the burly doctor filling the doorframe. “He’s just taking a rest.”

  He made his doctor motions again—lungs, heart, pulse, skin turgor; she knew the drill by heart—before he fixed her with a pitying look. “I’ll be back soon,” he said as he stepped into the hall, where Searcy stood waiting. “Fetch Alice and Benton,” Copper heard him say. “It won’t be long.”

  Ever so carefully, she folded the little gown on which she worked and put it squarely in the middle of the nightstand. Taking a moment, she rearranged flowers on the dresser brought by friends yesterday. Flowers so bright and gay in a yellow vase.

  “I’m so cold,” Simon said from far, far away. “Take down your hair and warm me.”

  Pins and combs fell to the floor as her hair tumbled free. Just one more task before she went to him. There, just at the top of the doorframe, was the key they never used. She took it down and turned the lock. He’d be hers alone for a while.

  Somehow Simon had managed to turn to his side, and he held out his arms to Copper. Gently she lay down. It seemed so long since he’d held her. She could feel his shallow breath as he laid his head on her shoulder. Slowly, so slowly, he traced the mound of their baby, her hand resting on his.

  Quick as a darting minnow came the response.

  “Our daughter moved,” he said.

  “Alec, our son,” she teased, desperate to keep him there. “You’ve picked no name for a girl.”

  He raised himself on one elbow as if his strength were restored. “Lilly. Name her Lilly . . . Gray . . . Gray . . . Everything’s fading . . . but look! Do you see?” His hand lifted and pointed. “Angels in the corner!” His arms slackened around her. He fell back, still against the pillow.

  Copper leaped up, screaming, “Go away! You can’t have him.” She grabbed the yellow vase of flowers she’d just arranged. It shattered against the far corner, followed by the cut-glass vase full of mums.

  Voices shouted, “Open the door.” Fists pounded. “Let us in.”

  “Go away!” she screamed again, throwing one item after another until her dressing table was clear and every little bottle and pot of perfume and elixir was broken. Nothing was left but a pair of scissors from her sewing basket. “Go away,” she cried to the people pounding at the door and to the angels in the corner. “Go away.”

  The doorframe splintered, and strong arms circled her from behind. She kicked and struggled as Dr. Thornsberry wrested the scissors from her hand. A hypodermic flashed and then a needle’s prick. Faces swam in and out of her vision—Searcy’s and Alice’s, Benton’s and Tommy Turner’s, and even Simon’s, growing cold. The crunch of broken glass and horrible screaming bounced off the walls and echoed down long hallways filled with rushing water and many doors. None of which opened for her.

  A thick film held Copper under. She swam in dark green water; the prick of the hypodermic needle became as welcome as a warm drink on a cold day, taking her pain away. Words, muffled as if spoken through yards of cotton batting, came at her, but rarely could she make them out. When she did, she heard, “Contractions . . . labor . . . too soon . . .” She couldn’t concentrate enough to make sense of them.

  Three days after the funeral Copper didn’t get to attend, her tiny daughter was born in a night of blinding pain. Little Lilly Gray, born of sorrow, swaddled and whisked away while her mother swam in the dark green pool.

  “Laura Grace,” Mam said, “what have you done to yourself?”

  Copper fought to sleep. She didn’t want clear words, didn’t want the light that streamed in from open curtains to penetrate her gauzy mind. Where had Mam come from? Was she back on Troublesome Creek? Had this nightmare been just that—an awful dream?

  Discomfort woke her. Her chest hurt. Cramps tightened her belly. A binder wrapped her tightly from just under her shoulder blades to her hips. “Lord, help me,” her parched lips mouthed, though the prayer didn’t make it past her throat. “Bring back my husband. Bring back my baby.”

  A glass straw was held to her lips—was that the same one she’d offered to Simon? She wanted to knock it away, but she couldn’t lift her hands, so she drank. It wouldn’t do to disobey her mother.

  “A bath.” Mam leaned over her and straightened the pillows that lumped behind her head. “That’s what you need. A bath, and then we’ll see what we can do about this hair.”

  Mam and Searcy washed her with quiet efficiency. Soon a clean wrap replaced the soiled one, though if she could have, she’d have ripped it off and thrown it out the window. “It’s worse than a corset,” she squeaked, her voice sounding weak and childlike. The bed linen and even her clean gown smelled of roses, not lavender. For that she was thankful. “Can I get up?”

  “I think so,” Mam said. “Searcy, please bring that chair. It will do her good to be out of bed for a short time.”

  Strong hands lifted her. Her wobbly legs wouldn’t hold her. Where had her strength gone?

  “How about Searcy fetch some of that chicken soup off the stove?”

  “Yes,” Mam replied. “That would go down well. I believe she’s ready to eat more than the little bits of broth she’s had these last few days.”

  Why was everyone talking over her head? Did they think she’d lost her mind as well as her strength? Had she? Copper slumped back against the chair, too weak, too weary to care.

  Mam made a little exclamation of despair. “What shall I do with your hair?”

  A comb caught on Copper’s hair, the pain welcome to her. Pain was the only thing that felt real in this room of grief—the pull of the comb, the tightness across her chest, and the sharp cramp of her belly. Simon was gone, and Mam was here instead, teasing the tangles from her hair. Lord, help me, she prayed again. A litany against despair. Lord, help me.

  Dr. Thornsberry approved of Mam’s ministration when he came to call. He was glad to see Copper up. Glad to see her eating. “A little walk around the room,” he encouraged, he on one side, Mam on the other. “A little walk and then back to bed.”

  Settled against the pillows, Copper caught his hand before he had a chance to leave. “What happened to my husband? Please tell me. Why did Simon die?”

  “Now, my dear,” the good doctor started, patting her hand, “you’ll only upset yourself.”

  “I have to kno
w.” Her voice was a haunting need. “I have to set it right.”

  “Why, what do you mean?” he asked.

  “There must have been something we could have done. Some way to save him.”

  The doctor let go of her hand and scrubbed his face as if weary beyond words. “I thought we had. When he started eating, I felt he’d turned the corner, but it seems he’d lost more blood than we knew, much of it pooled inside him, secretly sapping his strength. I’m so sorry.”

  With those sincere words, the dam was broken. Copper’s wailing could have been heard from the street corner.

  They let her cry for many minutes. Finally, just when she thought she might drown in her own tears, Dr. Thornsberry said, “For heaven’s sake, somebody fetch her baby.”

  Copper’s mind went still. Her baby? Had she heard right? Could it be that her baby was alive?

  Lilly Gray was a tiny bundle and the meanest baby Dr. Thornsberry said he’d ever seen. Copper laughed through tears when he said that, when he explained what he meant. He’d never thought she would live, he told Copper, weeks early and delivered to a mother in shock. But as soon as she was released from the womb, she started kicking and squirming. They could barely keep her swaddled she wiggled so in her pasteboard box in the warming oven. They couldn’t get her to take milk from the wet nurse, so Alice and Searcy and Birdie had set up a command post in the kitchen and fed her around the clock from an eyedropper.

  When Copper held her baby, her binder flooded with milk. “Why did you wrap me in this thing?”

  “I thought it best,” Dr. Thornsberry said, “to dry up the milk.”

  Copper held her daughter, her baby never expected to live. Dark hair as fluffy as dandelions gone to seed, eyes shut tight, little limbs swimming, using up needed energy trying to find her mother.

  “Loose this thing,” she said, not caring who saw. “Let me nurse my baby.”

  Such relief. Copper felt as though an elephant had stepped off her chest. Blessedly, the room was empty except for Mam, who sat at the foot of the bed, her head turned away. And, of course, Lilly Gray, who made no motion to suck. Copper stuck her finger in the baby’s mouth; she made a mewling sound. She’d never get nourishment this way.

  “Help me, Mam. Tickle her feet.”

  Mam leaned over and stroked the baby’s foot. Lilly tried to jerk away, but Mam continued. With her knuckle, Copper pulled down on the baby’s chin, opening the little bird’s mouth. There—just a tiny suck, but it was followed by another then another. “Hand me that cup, please. I’ll just catch this extra.”

  The day was spent in this fashion. Lilly Gray eating in minute bursts of sucks, none lasting long enough; Copper using the eyedropper between, even while the baby slept, then massaging the small throat to make her swallow. Her own pain was forgotten in the wonderment of her daughter—the physical pain, anyway; nothing could assuage her broken heart.

  Over the next few weeks it was a blessing to have her mother here, although secretly Copper wished for her father. But Will was with the boys, who were quarantined with a light case of the measles. Their whole neighborhood was locked up tight. Mam had had to slip out even though she posed no threat of spreading the dread disease.

  They had time those quiet days. Time to make amends for a lifetime of misunderstanding. And time for Copper to get the answers to questions long locked away in Mam’s vault of repression. It was her way of protecting herself, Copper came to understand, and the only way she knew to protect the niece she had raised as her daughter.

  “Times were different then, Laura Grace,” she said one day in answer to Copper’s prodding. “It seemed best to keep family secrets just that. And how was I to know you’d ever find out that people here gossiped that your grandfather Taylor took his own life?”

  Mam’s cheeks colored as if just talking about it brought back the shame she must have felt. “He was a broken man after my mother’s death. He couldn’t adjust to losing her. You can’t imagine what I went through just to get him buried next to my mother.”

  Mam’s hands worried each other, twisting about in her lap. “It’s against the law, you know—against man’s law and God’s. The caretakers of the cemetery had rules against laying suicides to rest with proper folk.” She stood from her perch on the side of Copper’s bed and walked to the window. “It was as if his very body was unclean.”

  Copper tried to bite back her question, but it pushed past the wall Mam had built so many years before, crossed over the barrier Copper had never been brave enough to breach. “Did he? Did Grandfather Taylor kill himself?”

  Mam’s sigh lifted her shoulders, and she let them drop. Her eyes looked a hundred years old. “He tried to go on. He suffered Mother’s death for many years and then . . .”

  Copper laid the baby on the bed and went to her mother. Embracing her from behind, she murmured, “I’m so sorry, Mam. What a terrible time for you.”

  Rarely had Copper felt her mother’s embrace, but now Mam turned to her. “I made so many mistakes in raising you, Laura Grace, kept so much of myself hidden away. For that I’m sorry.”

  “You owe me no apologies,” Copper replied, tears seeping through her closed eyelids, Mam’s long-suffering sorrow mixing with her own.

  “Come home with me,” Mam pleaded before she left. “You don’t have to stay here alone.”

  Copper turned it over in her mind. Being with Mam and Daddy and the boys was tempting. But she wasn’t ready to leave Simon. She hadn’t even visited the grave. She might never go there. He’s not really dead if I never see a grave. Voice was never given to this thought. People would think she was crazy, and maybe she was. But one moment he had been naming their daughter and the next he was pointing to angels. How could that happen? How could life end so quickly in a strong and vital man? Maybe if she had attended his funeral instead of swimming in Dr. Thornsberry’s drug-induced sleep, she would believe. But then she wouldn’t have her daughter. The doctor had bought Lilly needed womb time, and Copper couldn’t fault him for that.

  “Laura Grace?” Mam’s voice pulled her back to the present. “Would you consider it at least? You could have your own place close to us. We’d all like that.”

  “I dream of going home,” she answered wistfully, “home to the mountains. The farm is there. I know I could make a go of it.”

  Mam’s face grew stern. “Your daughter’s needs come first. It would be best if you put Troublesome Creek out of your mind.”

  Copper sighed. “I know you’re right, Mam. But dreaming doesn’t hurt, does it?”

  It was a long, cold winter. Copper never left the house, glad for the excuse of Lilly Gray. How easy it was to turn invitations away. “Lilly Gray is colicky,” she could say, or “I think Lilly Gray may be coming down with a cold.” It was out of the question that she would leave her in the care of Searcy or the young downstairs maid Alice had hired to help with all the added work a baby brings into a home. Most days she never left her room but stayed cocooned in covers and quilts with baby Lilly Gray.

  What a darling girl her baby was. She demanded nothing and was content to lie in her mother’s arms for hours at a time. Alice said she was spoiled, and Copper knew Searcy agreed, for Lilly Gray never cried. There was no need. Funny to see Alice and Searcy in collusion, Copper thought. Finally united in effort to save Copper from herself.

  “Who wants saving?” Copper said to the baby, whose legs had dimpled with fat over the course of the winter, who now had a double chin and eyes as round as saucers. She would talk to her daughter in such a fashion, as though there were answers to be found in the knowing eyes that held her fast. Sometimes she felt as if she could get lost in the depths of those gray eyes. “We can live right here in this room. We don’t ever have to leave, do we? You won’t leave me, will you, Lilly Gray? You won’t ever leave your mama.” Tears started again. Oh, she hated the weeping, the never-ending sorrow that held her in such a hard grip.

  What had happened to her life? It seemed Copper no
longer knew who she was. For one thing, she didn’t recognize herself. The mirror reflected a sickly woman whose bones jutted out like a plucked chicken’s, all elbows and knees.

  She twirled her hair into a bun and secured it to the back of her head. Who cared what it looked like anymore? But Alice was coming by, and she had to make some effort to be presentable. She pinched her cheeks for a little color, then turned away from the mirror. Fatigue filled her with its heavy fog, and she crawled back into bed. She’d rest while she waited for her sister-in-law to come calling.

  She had to admit that she enjoyed Alice’s visits. Her sharp tongue and bossy ways seemed right somehow. Everyone else tiptoed around Copper, keeping distance as if her grief were contagious, but Alice was not afraid.

  Spring was coming. Copper could see the changes outside her bedroom window. Buds were forming on the trees, and a robin had started a nest. Lilly Gray had nodded off to sleep, a thin drool of milk on her chin, when Alice came for her daily call.

  “Where’s Dodie?” Copper asked.

  “I left her at home,” Alice responded. “I’m taking Lilly for a while.”

  “What do you mean?” Copper answered, her nerves jangling.

  “Let me hold my niece.” Alice took Lilly Gray and snuggled her tight. “Good morning, precious. Guess what Auntie Alice has brought for you?”

  “Where are you taking her?” Copper asked as Alice dressed the baby in a sweater.

  “I’ve brought a perambulator, so Lilly Gray and I are taking a stroll,” Alice stated, as if Copper had no say. She put a frilly white bonnet on Lilly and tied the ribbon under her chin. “Is this not the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  Lilly Gray looked over Alice’s shoulder. The bonnet revealed startled eyes and round cheeks, her little mouth puckered like a rosebud.