Rachel didn’t need to be shown where to go in this house that had once been so grand. She had gone back to that room for at least two other babies—the two she could hear now, fighting over some broken toy in the front room.
She walked through the butler’s pantry joining the big kitchen with a hall. The hall led to a room that had been intended for a parlor or a library, with a huge bay window that sagged out into the light gray sky. In spite of all the gray light let in by the high windows, the room was still dark. Lace curtains that had disintegrated into eccentric loops hung over the panes of grimy glass like the ragged legs of insects circumambulating the sky. The wallpaper dangled in long brown strips from the wall. In places even the plaster had given way and the bare lath showed. There were dark stains on the paper, like maps of a rugged coastline showing the variations that the winds and water had traced out in the long assault of the sea upon the land.
The bedstead, its height in keeping with the height of the ceiling, was strewn with broken or twisted curlicues of tarnished brass. Two of the elegant slim posts terminated in black screws that had once held on the proud spired heads. The other two heads were still there—no longer proud, but pitted with greenish dents. A torn dishevelment of quilt lay upon the bed, scarcely more shaped by the figures under it than it would have been by its own foldings if a sleeper had crawled from under it that morning and left it.
Even the two faces in the bed matched the intricate ruin of the rest of the room.
“Hello, Edith. How are you?” Rachel spoke softly so as not to wake the sleeping baby.
“Better, I think. This one came easy. He was so little. I think I’ll get my strength back real soon.”
For Edith to get what she called her strength back would compare to pasting the torn strips of wallpaper back over the laths no longer covered by plaster. She would gain a bit of thickness in the skin stretching across the ribs that rose and sank over the lesions in her lungs.
Rachel tried to be light. “You certainly surprised us all! Why in the world didn’t you tell us?”
“I thought I’d lose him. I hemorrhaged some. He’s an awful thin little thing.” Her voice was tender. She actually seemed happy to have brought another baby into a poverty-stricken world where he would have to be motherless. It was her second child since she had known positively that she had tuberculosis. Rachel simply couldn’t understand it.
“Would you like me to give him a bath when he wakes up?” she asked.
“That would be awfully nice.” Edith could sound apologetic even in a whisper. “I don’t dare to trust him to Irene yet. She’s so clumsy. And he’s getting a little rash.”
“What can I fix you for dinner?”
“Oh, I’m not finicky. Please don’t go to any trouble. Anything at all will be just fine. I think there’s some eggs and some Dutch cheese out there in the pantry. I made a batch just before he came. Irene can show you where things are. Now you just go ahead and help yourself before you worry about me.”
“I brought over some soup,” Rachel said. “There’s enough for us all.”
It would have been unpardonable for her to avoid eating at the Wilkeses. On the other hand, she wondered if she could get the pans and dishes clean enough so she would feel safe. She decided that she would take over the dishwashing herself and set Irene to doing something else that didn’t matter so much.
She tiptoed back out of the room, took off her overall jacket and her sweater, and hung them on a hook in the pantry. Then she said to Irene, “Why don’t you let me finish up these dishes, dear? Maybe you could sweep the floor and get it ready to mop. We must try to get caught up enough today so that you can go back to school tomorrow. My, you certainly are getting to be a big girl. Your mother could never get along without you, could she?”
Irene smiled with ill-founded pride. “I’d rather stay here and take care of Toady than go to school.”
“Oh, but somebody your age must go to school regularly.” Rachel tried to sound as though she believed Irene learned things in school. “You’re a big girl, all right, but you still must go to school.”
“I can’t do schoolwork very good,” Irene said. “I’d rather stay here. Are you going to make me go back?”
“Well, we’ll see how things go,” Rachel told her. Perhaps the burden of the house and children was not so bad, Rachel thought, as the burden of failure the child faced in school every day. But she was so thin she made Lucy seem almost plump. Surely, living in the same house with tuberculosis, she would have it before very long, wouldn’t she?
She tossed Irene’s dishwater as far as she could out into the yard. A flock of assorted fowl—chickens, ducks, and a couple of evil, hissing geese—rushed to the spot, fighting each other for whatever crumbs might have fallen with the water.
She rinsed the dishpan with some boiling water and dumped that outside also. Then she fixed some water as hot as she could stand it and started over on the dishes.
At that moment she was grateful for Irene’s dullness. A brighter child of her age might have understood that this neighbor knew her family’s dishes must be sterilized, but Irene was beyond noticing how differently she was doing things, let alone understanding why.
Rachel went into the pantry and saw what she had noticed before—a nearly full box of Washington apples set high on a shelf to keep the voracious little boys from eating them all in one afternoon. Even the look of the purple tissue wrappings made Rachel covet those apples. She did hope that Otto would invite her to take a few home so she could put them in Lucy’s lunches for a week. Without doubt he had got them on a relief voucher. And he had got them because some Washington farmer could not sell them at all. Some Washington farmer, perhaps, who found bread a very costly thing. How ridiculous it was that when farmers wished to exchange the things they needed from each other, they had to involve themselves with such an awkward and humiliating intermediary as government relief.
When she finally had the dishes clean enough to suit her, she went out and brought in the food so the soup could be warming. Then she scrubbed the table in earnest, with the strong lye soap she had made when they butchered, and told Irene to wash the little boys and feed them. The soup was made from vegetables in her own root cellar and some canned beef. She carried a bowl of it in to Edith and supported her with one arm while she propped her up with pillows. She could feel the bones of Edith’s arms and shoulders right through her nightgown.
“Oh, this smells so good,” Edith said. “It just brings my appetite right back.” She coughed, but not deeply. However, it was the kind of tickling cough that might bring up deeper coughs.
“I’m so glad you like it,” Rachel said.
“What good bread this is! It’s so fresh. I haven’t baked for a week.” She chewed slowly, for she had lost so many teeth.
She’s not quite two years older than I am, Rachel thought. There were only the two of us in the Eureka Class of ’17. There were no boys at all—they had all gone to war. Even Otto had gone to war. And then I went away to school. Now here we are, and she has six children and she is dying. That’s how time goes, that’s how life goes. Perhaps I will even die before she will. Perhaps there will be a snowstorm today and I will die trying to get home, away from this house.
“What kind of flour do you use?” Edith was asking. She might have been complimenting a friend’s sandwiches at a Ladies’ Aid luncheon—just as though she expected to grow old, like anybody else—old and fat, exchanging years of amenities at the Ladies’ Aid.
“Dakota Maid,” Rachel said.
“I’ll just have Otto buy that kind next time.”
After dinner, for which Otto thanked her profusely, Rachel mopped the kitchen, scrubbed the table once more, and stoked up the stove to get the oversized room as warm as possible for the baby’s bath. Why hadn’t they come for her before, she kept asking herself. Apparently they had had no help at all, except for the doctor, and the baby was two days old. Perhaps Otto simply hadn’t been able t
o leave—but he could have sent one of the children. There was no understanding them. Otto was erratic enough, but Edith’s pride so compounded their confusion that one could never tell why they did or did not do something. Perhaps they had not thought the baby was going to live.
As she lifted the fragile mite from the bed, she noticed how swollen Edith’s breasts were. It was astonishing the way a mortally ill mother could respond to the demands of a new baby. It was either wonderful or senseless that such a woman was going to produce milk from her wasted chest.
Rachel hated to take from the baby the strength a water bath and so much handling would require of him, but she felt that she must clean him up. It looked as though he had not been changed more than once or twice since he was born, and his minute sharp hips and blue thighs were already irritated. He couldn’t have weighed over five pounds at birth, and he weighed less than that now. Her own two, by the time she had come back from the hospital with them, had weighed nearly nine pounds, and she could hardly believe the difference between this one and hers. Cathy at two weeks would still turn a little blue too when the temperature changed or when she got a foot out of a bootee, but she had never been the kind of blue this baby was.
Because of his prematurity and his littleness, his genitals seemed abnormally huge and dark and mature. Any boy baby seemed over-large to her, but this one was the worst she had ever seen. His purplish, wrinkled scrotum was bigger than his emaciated thighs. He was physically deficient in every way except one, as though that one part of him had grown first and taken all it needed before it gave anything to the rest of him—as though whatever nourishment the fetus had got for eight months reported straight to that place from the umbilical cord before daring to go anywhere else. Always and always the means of reproduction, she thought, as she made herself clean him. If he lived to grow up at all, he would be as frantic to reproduce himself as his father was. At times she found the human race almost too foolish to tolerate.
Yet she could not help pitying this baby in his helpless unconscious maleness, ruled and burdened with the desires of millions of years, bound to propagate himself whether there was room and food in the world for him or not. It was not his fault he was here—to grow up so miserable, to have a constant cold from the time he was two weeks old, to fight with his brothers over a mashed toy automobile. It was not his fault that he had to be here—to grow up to be so proudly and desperately male and to father, in his absurd pride, more foolish males. For males were foolish—there was no doubt about that. Her father was the only man she had ever known in her life who could admit he was wrong. And now even her father had proved to be too stubborn to go for help in time. She was sure of it; she spent nearly all her waking moments getting herself used to it.
But by the time she had finished bathing the little five-pound Otto and putting some of Cathy’s powder on the three or four square inches of raw skin that covered his bottom, she caught herself feeling a maternal contentment at knowing that she had made a helpless baby more comfortable. She tried to tell herself that this was just the instinct in the female that corresponded to the one in the male—the one that fought and hungered to preserve life, even though the life of any sexual creature could lead only to death. But even while she tried in this way to put her feelings out of her mind, she longed to take the baby home with her, wrapped up in Cathy’s clean blanket and smelling the way a baby ought to smell, of a very faint sweetness that was not the powder but a sweetness of uncorrupted human flesh—a smell of beginning humanity, innocent of the glands that one day made every baby come to smell like a man or a woman.
The little Otto was crying more earnestly than she had thought he would be able to. Everything was there for the survival of the species—not the happiness of the species, for that was totally irrelevant. Only the survival was taken care of—the outsized organs of reproduction, the bellyful of equipment for metabolizing food, and the out-of-proportion voice for demanding it.…
Rachel had planned to get in some Christmas sewing in the coming two weeks, but she saw that she would be spending all her spare time in this kitchen instead. There just wasn’t anyone else to help. All the Wilkes relatives had sold out and gone far away and each of the other near neighbors had some reason why she could not be of much service. Ruth Johnson would be glad to come and help with the house, but she was middle-aged and childless and terrified of handling a new baby. Helen Sundquist, despite her red-faced heartiness, had all she could do to run the house for four grown men between the spells of lightheadedness when she had to sit down for a minute to get her breath and blink her eyes. Both of them would begin baking and sewing when they heard the news, but probably neither of them would be much help otherwise.
Still farther away were her own mother, who was ruled out because of a siege with pneumonia, besides having to manage the farm without Will, and the Greeders, who were afraid of getting anywhere near the disease in the Wilkes house because of Ed’s own lungs, weak ever since one of his bulls had gored him. No, she was the nearest neighbor, and most of the job was up to her. It would be bad enough to give her mother the extra burden of Cathy every day, but her own baby would never come inside this house.
She stayed as long as she could. She rubbed out on the washboard enough clean clothes for the boys to wear the next day and mopped some more floors. She found two fairly clean sheets and changed the bed that Edith would share that night with the baby and Otto and his shameless lust.
Then she got Irene started peeling potatoes and making some kind of supper for them all, put on her sweater and jacket, and went out into the first skimpy flakes of snow that loosened themselves from the descending sky and flew down with the northwest wind. If they should get a big snow now, there would be even less chance of getting anybody else to help. Everybody would be snowed in for a while.…
How could Otto thank her forty times in one day and never offer her one of those apples to put in Lucy’s lunch? All the way home she couldn’t put out of her mind the longing she had to slip one of those delicious, fresh, shiny things in with Lucy’s sandwiches tomorrow for a surprise treat. Rarely did she catch herself committing the sin of covetousness—but today she couldn’t stop herself. Otto should have offered her some of those apples.
She stripped off her apron, dress, shoes, and stockings as soon as she stepped inside her kitchen. The shoes she put back out on the porch and the clothes she dropped into the boiler on the stove.
George had gone to pick up the children as soon as she returned with the car, and he came into the kitchen with them, carrying Cathy because the snow was beginning to be thick on the ground. Her children seemed so vital and sturdy to her that she was nearly overcome by her amazed thankfulness. Cathy still clutched the gnawed spicy remnant of an oatmeal cookie. The cookie was pink with the fuzz from Cathy’s warm red mitten, and Rachel wondered if the new little Otto Wilkes would ever have a pair of mittens with enough fuzz on them to come off and stick to anything else.
After the children were in bed she took a bath to make sure she got rid of as many tuberculosis germs as possible. The draft along the kitchen floor was milder than it had been a few days ago. She thought the weather must be warming up. George came out to the kitchen for a drink while she was in the tub. She hated it when he did that. Males …
In the morning she could feel the heavy predawn whiteness at the window before she got out of bed.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I wish this had held off for a few more days. I hate to send Cathy over to Mom in this mess every day, but I know I ought to be over at the Wilkeses as much as I can this week.”
“Oh, Rachel, you’re never satisfied,” George said. “Be glad we’re finally getting some moisture. What’s a little snow, anyway?”
If he had really wanted to know, Rachel could have told him what a little extra snow at the Wilkeses meant—leaks in the roof, wet footprints over all the floors that she had scrubbed clean for the first time since—well, probably since she had gone to scrub when the
last Wilkes boy was born.
By the time they got to the Wilkes house, the sun was rising somewhere, but it was hard to tell where. The only effect the growing light had was to extend the apparent height from which the snow was falling. Lucy’s father helped her mother out of the sleigh. Her figure blurred and almost faded out by the time it reached the vague outlines of the house. Presently two small blurs emerged from the spot where the first blur had disappeared and grew into the two boys who went to school. They attacked the sleigh at the same moment and climbed up it, racing each other.
“Hey, take it easy there,” her father yelled. “Don’t hang on things that way. Where’s your big sister?”
The boys crouched away in the corner. “She ain’t going today,” said one.
“She sick?” her father asked.
“She’s gonna help.”
Lucy had all she could do to make Cathy stay under the robe with her until they left her off with her grandmother. Then her father let her stand up with the boys.
They held their mittens out flat so the flakes could land in their palms and showed the shapes of the snow to each other. Sometimes an especially big crystal would land intact, cushioned by the mitten, and they could see its perfect outlines. Lucy stuck out her tongue to catch the flakes and the boys copied her, lifting their faces and shutting their eyes against the tiny, soft, cold slaps. They were the teasing hands of the frost fairies—those little soft pats—but it did no good to open your eyes, for the white little things only hid in the falling whiteness. When Lucy lowered her head and opened her eyes again, her lashes were stuck full of snow and she saw that the boys’ eyebrows were thick and white like old men’s.
Lucy wished that her father would put sleigh bells on the horses. She sang songs in school about the way the bells jingled when people went for sleigh rides, but she had never seen any horses or sleighs with bells. Yet in none of the songs about sleighing were bells ever absent. She hated to be missing so much. Once she had asked if they could get some bells. “Pshaw!” her father said. “Where did you get that idea? Why, it would drive a man crazy. Not to mention the horses. They’ve got enough to think about now.”
The Bones of Plenty Page 38
