Mrs. Roberto - Or the Widowy Worries of the Moosepath League
Page 26
It would be a mistake, however, to equate these apelike characteristics with any lack of wit or ingenuity. Leander Spark found the members of the Moosepath League a little mysterious, to be sure, but in his own element he was as quick and sharp as a fox. If Mr. Mullett, some yards ahead and on the other side of the street, stopped to considered a window display or greet an acquaintance in his gloomy manner, Sparky anticipated him; the one man would hesitate and the other would already have paused beside a carriage or have turned about to watch his quarry’s reflection in a shop window. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump did their best to imitate him, and eventually the stares they drew were only vaguely curious.
Mr. Mullett rounded the corner of Union and James Streets, walking in a westerly direction, and Sparky let out a dark chuckle. James Street was itself busy, and much of the activity there was due to the telegraph office. People came and went and newspaper boys and street hawkers occupied their self-claimed turf, advertising the enticements of the news or their wares in competing voices. It was not the first time that Leander Spark had followed someone to this place of business.
“Wait here,” he said, and then, “No, go across the street and admire the shops there so he won’t eye you when he comes out.” Then Sparky stuffed his green cap in a pocket, exchanged a couple of pennies for a paper from one of the nearby vendors, and gestured against the evil eye before stepping inside the telegraph office. He found a corner of the office and looked occupied with some front-page item while watching the reflected images of several customers in the highly polished brass of a wall sconce. The ticking and tapping of the telegraph and the murmur of private conversation underscored the public business of the place.
While Mr. Mullett had his turn with the clerk, Sparky went to the raised counter on the other side of the room and fiddled with a telegram form and a broken pencil.
“What’s this?” the clerk inquired of Mr. Mullett.
“People-in-pen,” said the gloomy fellow.
“Yes, well, dashes or not, I’ll have to charge you for three words there,” said the clerk.
“It’s all one to me,” said the customer indifferently.
“It’s all three to me,” retorted the clerk. “I count thirty-two words, including your people-in-pen. Sixteen cents.”
Mr. Mullett looked as if he thought this was steep, but he might have worn the same expression if the clerk had offered to pay him. Mr. Mullett laid some coins on the counter and left the office.
The tick and click of the telegraph sounded in sporadic bursts as each message, in its turn, was sent up or down the line. Sparky had caught sight of Mr. Mullett’s contribution to this chatter—a single piece of paper, like a dozen others, passed between the clerk and the telegrapher—and just as a man might keep track of the cup that holds the ball in a magician’s game, the collector marked that particular piece of paper as it was processed from one man to the other, till it had been read and sent and placed on a spike with scores of its brethren.
Sparky leaned over the counter and whispered to the telegrapher, “Do you know what the time is?”
“What?” said the man at the telegraph.
“Do you know what the time is?” Sparky showed his gapped teeth in a broad grin to the customer who was then dealing with the clerk. The grin was somehow unsettling, and this customer and several others turned their heads or found something of interest in a newspaper or the charts on the walls. Leander turned back to the telegrapher, who had paused in his duties to nod in the direction of a wall clock behind him. Sparky shrugged, indicating that he was unable to read the time and a little embarrassed to admit it.
The telegrapher managed not to look too put out. He glanced over his shoulder and considered the clock behind him. “It’s twelve minutes before twelve,” he said, turning back, but the brawny man was already shouldering himself out the door.
33. Pants and Trousers
“Now, clear the decks!” declared Mabel Spark. “This isn’t a sideshow.” She waved a hand at the faces peering round the doorframe. Only Annabelle, who stood near to the bed in the corner room, seemed exempt from this dismissal.
Bobby hung for a moment at the threshold, looking uncertain and timid—not of his mother but of circumstance. “Are you sure he’s a girl?” he asked.
“I guess I know the difference,” said Mabel. “Or you had better hope I do. Now go!” Mabel was not a cross person, but recent events had ridden out of rule, and she had sensed even before this latest revelation that a firm hand was required to set things right. She listened to the last of the footsteps disappear down the hall; then she turned back to the room and the small person on the bed.
The child known to them as Mailon sat with her vigorously washed hair glowing in the light from the single window, her shoulders hunched and her eyes downcast. Small bare legs dangled beneath the hem of one of Timothy’s nightshirts—what might pass for a shift—and narrow, scarred feet twisted against one another. There were red welts on the girl’s limbs where she had been bitten by fleas or lice.
But their eyes and minds came back to the girl’s hair; her light brown locks were cut short and uneven so that no amount of soap or grooming could tame the shaggy spikes that remained. Her face appeared (to them) to have taken on a softer appearance—an impression due partly to the removal of dirt and partly to the eradication of their former ignorance. It seemed that if one looked past that boy’s shorn hair, one could imagine a girl of six years.
Thaddeus was as amazed (and disconcerted, to be sure) as he had been when, as a child not much older than Tim, he’d seen a bearded woman at the circus. His understanding of gender did not leave much room for indecision, and the sight of what had been a scrappy little boy transformed into an apprehensive little girl affected him with nearly as much consternation as it had his youngest children.
The former Mailon Ring looked like a prisoner in the dock expecting some terrible sentence, hardly daring to move, to breathe or even look up from the floor.
“Dear,” said Mrs. Spark to the child on the bed with absolutely nothing behind the word but a kind of sad acknowledgment.
The little girl did not look up.
“Dear,” said the woman again, more as address this time than comment. She did not think to sit, or to scooch down, or otherwise put herself at a level with that small, down-turned face. “Do you understand that you’re not a boy? That you are a girl?”
“A little,” came a small voice. It was a moment before they understood what she had said.
Mabel looked to her husband, but Thaddeus was staring at his own feet. Annabelle stepped in, leaning down just a bit and saying, “How long have you been—? I mean, how long have you—?”
The blue eyes looked up, though the girl’s head hardly moved. “As long as I remember.”
“But why?” said Mabel.
“Dad says boys aren’t hard put like girls,” pronounced the waif.
“Well!” breathed the mother.
Thaddeus cleared his throat and raised his head.
“He says,” added the child, “that if something happens to him, I’ll more likely make it if I were a boy.”
Mabel sat down on the bed, only to relieve her shaken frame, but the effect was to make her a shade less daunting to the child.
“Was that a bad thing to do?” asked the little girl.
Mabel patted the bony knee and said “Shush.” She had tears in her eyes.
“I think,” said Annabelle, “when she grows her hair out, and we get some of Betty’s old dresses from the back closet, she’ll be pretty as can be.”
This pronouncement was meant as comfort, but the child’s face revealed a confused aversion. “I’ve never worn a dress,” said the little girl, equally astonished and frightened.
“You can’t dress like a boy any longer,” said Mabel firmly. “Certainly not if you’re going to live here.”
The little girl looked out of breath and ready to cry. “I can’t climb a tree in a dress.”
Thaddeus cleared his throat again, and his wife looked up to invite his opinion, but he had only been reacting to a sudden understanding, and that was of how much a girl, or a woman, gave up by putting on a dress. He’d been rather fond of climbing trees in his youth, and might be climbing them still if his age and girth (and, ostensibly, his dignity) hadn’t stopped him.
“Annabelle never climbed trees,” stated the mother in a quiet tone.
Annabelle looked as if she might have something to say about this but remained silent.
“I won’t be able to play with Tim anymore,” said the girl
“Nonsense.”
“He doesn’t like girls much. He told me so.”
Annabelle let out a noise that was part disgust, part amusement.
“He’ll like them if I tell him to,” said Mabel. “He may not be playing a great deal himself in future if it means I have to worry about him chasing over roofs in the middle of the night.”
The memory of that adventure altered the little girl’s face the slightest particle. “That was some business,” she said.
Mabel had been complaining all morning about “what boys get up to!” but this assertion from the little girl rendered the matter in a separate blush. Suddenly, she was proud of the waif, and this sensation left her almost as confused as Thaddeus. “Good heavens,” said Mabel. Her husband cleared his throat a third time, and she said, “Thaddeus, will you stop grunting and say something?”
“What do we call—” he began before finishing a little weakly with “her?”
“You have something there,” said Mabel. “What do we call you, dear?”
The former Mailon looked down at her feet again. She was receiving more attention than she could ever recall, and she was finding it a mixed blessing.
“Your poor departed mother must have given you a name,” said Mabel. “She didn’t call you Mailon.”
“Melanie,” said the little girl, looking the slightest bit defiant of anyone who might dare laugh.
Mable and Annabelle looked at one another, then at the child before them. “Why, that’s beautiful!” said Annabelle.
Melanie reacted to this particular praise about as happily as Timothy would have. “Do I have to wear a dress?” she asked as if she had been condemned.
“You had better get used to it, Melanie Ring,” said Mabel Spark. “Particularly if you’re to live—”
“Not yet,” came Thaddeus’s high-pitched voice.
“What?” said Mabel, the snappishness in her voice rising more from surprise than anger.
“Not yet,” said Thaddeus, his hands behind his back. He had been thinking, among many other things, that he might have treated Mailon Ring more gently if he’d known her as Melanie Ring, and it disturbed him. He’d never been unkind to the child, it was true, but he had seen the little boy as simply another peripheral character in the life of the tavern—a character who would probably vanish as quickly as he had appeared, with no explanation given, and none asked. A little girl he might have looked after more closely, which distinction was the other side of the coin but also part and parcel with her own father causing her to disguise herself in the first place. “It will do her good—and us, too, I think—if we get used to the idea a bit at a time.”
Melanie looked as if a great weight had been lifted from her. Annabelle winked at the little girl.
“I don’t know, Thad,” said Mabel. She was a woman of proper upbringing, and the idea of knowingly allowing a girl to dress in boy’s clothes seemed highly inappropriate.
“Not yet,” was all he said, and the subject was closed for the time being. “Chief!” called Thaddeus. “Tim!” The father had not heard his youngest child’s footsteps among those leaving some moments before.
Guiltily, Tim poked his head in from the hall.
“Come in, now, and say hello to your friend,” said Thaddeus, sounding more sure of the situation than he felt.
Tim cautiously stepped into the room. His parents had wondered if he had ever suspected (or perhaps even known) about his friend’s secret, but they could see now that he had not.
“Are you a girl?” he asked. He might have been asking an apparition if it were a ghost.
“I guess so,” said Melanie quietly.
“Oh,” said Tim, then to his father, “Can she still climb trees while she’s dressed like a boy?”
Thaddeus almost chuckled, though he did his best to look solemn.
Mable decided to ignore the question—in fact, to derail it, so to speak. “Those trousers fit, I see,” she said.
Thaddeus considered Mr. Thump’s pants.
“My sewing hasn’t suffered,” said his wife with audible pride.
Thaddeus peered down at his own backside. “Can’t see it from here.”
34. Something Past the Hour
The wagon bumped and joggled over the fields behind the Ferns’ roan mare, riding the green ridges and near to plummeting into the little dales where streams ran among the poplar and the willow. Behind the wagon ran the children, and behind the children strolled Madeline Fern and Sundry Moss. Mister Walton rode alongside Mr. and Mrs. Fern and in front of Hercules, whose celebratory picnic this was. The pig sat up, when he could keep his balance, and grunted at the children who ran and shouted behind. Aunt Beatrice had seemed pleased to be left off at the neighbor’s.
May is famous in the State of Maine for blackflies and impatience, as spring enlivens the least of creatures to pester beast and human alike, and summer often stands just out of reach but tantalizes a body with a sweet breath now and then and a modicum of buds to dot the waking fields. May of 1897 was more summerlike than some, and since the wind had seen fit to come around to the west and display enough life to keep the bugs clinging to shelter, the Ferns deemed it a propitious day to venture an outing.
From certain heights they had glimpses of the Abagadasset River and, further on, the broader reaches of the Kennebec and the crest of Swan Island. With the wind at their back, the climbing sun in their faces, and a happy pig among them, the world seemed unhindered and simple to grasp.
Sundry had the ability to entertain a crowd or a single person by way of the stories he told, and he had Madeline laughing about his cousin, who, at the age of thirty-eight, was nearly shot for a woodchuck in the act of sneaking with a May basket through the garden of a querulous spinster, and then Madeline was gasping at his rendition of his father’s near legendary (at least in Edgecomb, Maine) battle of fisticuffs with half the Blamey clan of Mount Hunger. In short, he had risen above his earlier fit of cloddishness and thoroughly charmed the young woman.
By the time they caught up with the front of the party, the linen was spread upon a knoll above the river, the children had gone with Mister Walton to the water’s edge, and Hercules had trundled down the board ramp that Mr. Fern laid out for him. The pig quickly found the shade of a crabapple tree, where the winy remnants of last fall’s decaying fruit encouraged him to root the ground and toss dirt over his shoulders.
A sweet, almost doleful, note sounded the clear air. Mr. Fern stood upon the flat height above the water with a flute to his lips and piped a gentle melody as the sun glanced from the instrument. He had his eyes closed—his features sad with the beauty of the song he produced—and his wife, too, listened from beneath a lowered gaze. After a time, a single voice rose up to meet the graceful notes.
“‘Oh, wherefore did God in His power so wise,
Occasion a pasture like Bonniekell Rise,
And impart such a blessing with His gracious hand,
As Bonniekell Brook to water the land?
What were His thoughts, and what was His notion,
That took me to Bonniekell, far “cross the ocean?
What was His reason? Why did His grace
Shine like the sun on this sinner’s face?
Oh, wherefore did God, in His wisdom so great,
Render me power to raise an estate,
To harrow the earth and raise up my bread,
And fashion a cottage to shelter my bed?
What were His thoughts, and what was His notion,
That took me to Bonniekell, far “cross the ocean?
What was His reason? Why did His grace
Shine like the sun on this sinner’s face?
Oh, wherefore did God, from His throne up above,
Raise up the maid who accepted my love,
Who waits by the door, and sees with her eyes,
The flourishing glory of Bonniekell Rise?’”
The flute and Madeline’s voice carried over the knoll and even as far as the water’s edge; the children slowed in their tracks and looked up the slope of the shore to see their sister singing with the clouded sky behind her. Mister Walton looked up as well, but then gazed down at his feet as if this were something too intimate for any but the nearest family.
If such compunctions visited Sundry, other sensations transcended them; he watched Madeline, herself like a figure in song, as she mingled her voice with the flute’s music in the most natural and candid manner. She, at least, had no compunctions about being watched—she hardly understood that she was—and the very act of singing seemed as true to her as it would a lark or a robin, or a bluebird perhaps, as she was dressed in blue and her hat was wide with frills of white and blue.
The ensuing silence was only broken by the wind in the grass and the sound of Hercules grunting his satisfaction. Mr. Fern’s long face beamed, and his wife reached up to take his hand. Madeline flashed a brilliant smile at Sundry, who was not prepared for such a blow.
Earlier in the day, Mister Walton had sidestepped Mr. Fern’s questions regarding pigs, intending all along to find the proper moment to confess his ignorance and to apologize for anything he might have done or said to cause such a misconception. The Ferns, however, had interpreted his gentle evasions as professional reticence; or perhaps (they wondered) his history with pigs was wrapped in some untold tragedy. Nothing if not polite, they decided to talk about anything but pigs, and Mister Walton’s opportunity of making a gracious confession seemed to grow ever more remote. They all took turns visiting with Hercules, however, and the great pig lay in the shade and ate very well from the plate that Mrs. Fern made up for him.