Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

  Vanessa read the document again to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood. “Is this okay with you?” she asked her sisters. “Or should we just pack up and leave?”

  “We’ve come all this way…,” Georgiana said, her voice trailing off.

  Ellie shrugged. “It better be a damned good story. And come morning, I’m out of here even if I have to walk.”

  With Willy watching, they each picked up a pen and signed their name.

  Willy was all thumbs as she signed each document and affixed the seal, almost dropping the device used for making it when she got to the agreement Vanessa had signed. Once Willy was finished, she handed the agreements to Hattie and headed for the elevator, and the green-shaded lamps magically disappeared from view. Once again the only light in the room was provided by the night sky outside the expanse of glass.

  So many stars. More than Vanessa had ever before seen. Scattered about like fairy dust. And the moon was in its slightly deformed, more-than-half, less-than-full configuration that Vanessa now knew was its “gibbous phase,” a factoid that she had picked up from Lily, who had actually liked her science class last year and claimed to have found the unit on astronomy “fascinating.” But maybe that was because the teacher was a young, attractive male, whom both Lily and Beth agreed was “drop-dead gorgeous.”

  Vanessa looked at the glowing dial of her watch. The time difference between Colorado and France was seven hours, and her daughters would still be in bed. They awakened to crowing roosters and church bells in the morning and always had their petit déjeuner sur la terrasse. Every conversation with them was peppered with more and more French. She wished she were there with them, even if her mother was sleeping with a Frenchman under the same roof. She missed her daughters. Missed her mother. Missed her dear departed father.

  She was glad that her father never knew his mother. What a disappointment she would have been.

  Twenty-One

  MYRNA felt the gaze of the three women who genetically were her granddaughters but for whom she had no feeling whatsoever. Of course, it was no surprise that the baby she’d had in prison probably grew up to have children of his own. She’d always had a codicil in her will that excluded any progeny who were not mentioned by name. But that was just a precaution. She never really expected to meet these hypothetical grandchildren.

  Myrna thought she had erased Hattie decades ago, long before she began her rise to prominence. When the John Coulter County Courthouse burned down, the record of Hattie’s birth and the court records of her trial were destroyed. Doing away with newspaper articles that detailed her crime, trial, and the trial’s outcome had been easier to accomplish: all it took was a visit to the newspaper morgue of the John Coulter County News with a pair of scissors in her purse. And all it took to purge the state archives of her prison records was to slip them in a briefcase and walk out the door.

  But she had forgotten about the yearbooks.

  And she had forgotten about the stupid questionnaire she had filled out the first day of her incarceration. Not an official record. Just a piece of trivia. Who would think that such an insignificant artifact would survive all these years? Maybe other incriminating information was stashed away in other files. Maybe no one could ever completely escape his or her past.

  The three sisters were watching her expectantly. Myrna realized that the middle sister—Ellie—looked a bit like her favorite granddaughter but immediately pushed the thought aside.

  Their meddling into her life was beyond annoying. It threatened all her hopes and dreams for the future.

  So why was she willing to share with them the story of how she came to bear the child that had become their father? It certainly wasn’t because she thought they had a right to know. But she might as well give them what they came for before she dealt out their punishment.

  So strange that they should come looking for her at this particular time. For more than six decades she had lived in the present and for the future, but over the last few months thoughts of the time when she was still Hattie had been much with her. In fact, the past had been so much with her of late that it was as though she had been mentally preparing for her part in this evening’s proceedings.

  She would begin with her memories of her parents and her little brother, Patrick.

  Patrick. Myrna closed her eyes and searched her mind for an image of him. A little red-haired, blue-eyed boy with a clubfoot riding on his father’s shoulders. Those were hard times for her family. But even though Patrick was crippled and her parents had to work hard from dawn to dusk, those had been the sweetest years of her life. And so she began telling them about the shanty house and the poverty and the love. And how that period of her life ended with her father leaving for Alaska and her brother’s death.

  “I had just finished the eighth grade when my father returned from Alaska, already a broken man, his health compromised and his grief over losing Patrick profound,” she told her listeners. Then she described her father’s illness and how the only thing between them and starvation was charity and the eggs her mother sold. She described her papa’s suffering in excruciating detail and explained the role she had played in his death.

  “You really ended your own father’s life?” Vanessa, the oldest of the sisters, asked, incredulous. She glanced at her sisters, who obviously shared her shock.

  “One does not lie about something like that,” Myrna snapped. “Wouldn’t you have done the same thing if your terminally ill father was suffering mightily and had asked it of you?”

  Vanessa drew in her breath. “I…I don’t know,” she stammered.

  “Were you with your father when he died?” Myrna asked.

  Vanessa shook her head.

  “Well then, how would you feel if your mother or one of your sisters had committed a mercy killing?”

  Vanessa felt her cheeks grow warm with frustration or anger, but before she could respond, Ellie said, “I was with him. Daddy was in a coma at the time of his death. And if he hadn’t been, there would have been drugs to alleviate pain, so there would have been no need to do something like that.”

  “I suppose,” Myrna said. “And you are city girls. You’ve never put a suffering animal out of its misery. Never wrung a chicken’s neck. Never seen a screaming pig hanging by its hind feet from the rafters and bleeding to death out of a slit in its throat so its flesh will be edible. Never prepared a human body for burial.”

  “Why are you even bringing up such things?” Vanessa demanded. “I am deeply sorry that your father suffered so much, and I realize it took a tremendous amount of courage for you to do what you did. But what happened that night is between you and your conscience. I was expressing surprise, not condemnation.”

  “Maybe we should continue this in the morning,” Georgiana piped in with a worried frown on her face.

  Hattie shook her head. “I have other plans for tomorrow. If you want to hear the rest of the story, you will hear it tonight or not at all.”

  “Willy said that you wanted us to spend the rest of our vacation here with you,” Vanessa pointed out. “Obviously she was mistaken.”

  “I never should have involved her,” Hattie said. “I wasn’t thinking straight when I asked her to track you down. Apparently the poor dear got all caught up in the idea that three granddaughters I didn’t know existed had come looking for me. Probably she thought I would want to get to know you and for you to meet my family, but she now realizes that is not the case.”

  Hattie paused. “So do you want to hear the rest, or not?”

  Vanessa glanced at her sisters.

  Ellie and Georgiana both responded with a nod. They’d come all this way to hear Hattie’s story. If tonight was to be their only opportunity, then they wanted to let her finish.

  “Very well,” the woman they knew as Hattie said. “But first I need to take a break.”

  Myrna used the restroom then went out on the deck for a few minutes to breathe in some of the crisp night air and calm the anger s
eething within her at how those three women had disrupted her life and peace of mind.

  The stupid little newspaper story about their search for a woman named Hattie would appear in other newspapers. It was just the sort of mindless human-interest story with which newspapers like to pad their pages and could eventually be in dozens of newspapers. Maybe hundreds. The story and the yearbook picture. With these three being from New York City, she wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up in the New York Times.

  Why, just as decades of dreaming and meticulous planning were falling into place, was this happening to her?

  She would see to it that any yearbooks from her years at Coal Town High School were removed from the school library, but that was like closing the barn door after the horse had already departed. Of course, there would be numerous copies from those years stashed away in attics or on closet shelves. How many students from that time were still alive? she wondered. The majority were probably dead, but not all. There would be others who, like her, were still active, still with all their mental faculties. Probably just a glance at that picture in a newspaper would not ring a bell, but if they read the article and discovered that the girl in the picture had gone to Coal Town High School, they would take a second look and then pull a yearbook down from the shelf or from a box in the attic. But even if they recognized the girl from back then, there was no way they could connect the girl named Hattie Worth to Myrna Cunningham.

  Myrna touched her face, wondering how much had she’d changed? Would people in her present life see a resemblance between her and the girl in that old yearbook picture?

  That was highly unlikely, she decided. Not after all these years.

  The only people who could connect Hattie Worth to the woman she was now were the three women sitting here in this room.

  And Willy. Her dear Willy.

  Damn those three women! Damn them to hell.

  Twenty-Two

  MYRNA would have loved to have a glass of wine to calm herself, but she needed to keep her head clear and poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher on the credenza. Wine would come later when Willy served their late-evening repast.

  And after the business of the evening had ended, she would never have to deal with these women again.

  She downed the glass of water, then returned to her place at the head of the conference table and allowed her mind to return to Hattie and the drab little shack of a house just outside Coal Town.

  “I helped my mother wash my father’s dead body,” she said.

  All that was left of her papa was skin and bones. Her mother had covered his private parts with a towel, and Hattie looked away when she washed him down there. They dressed him in his best clothes, and Hattie sat with him while poor Mama walked back to town to get the undertaker. By then the snow had buried the road and was drifting against the house. Hattie waited all through the day wondering if her mother was lost in the snow and had maybe frozen to death. Then she would be both fatherless and motherless. An orphan like she read about in books.

  So quiet it was without Papa’s breathing. Just the sound of the house creaking under the weight of the snow on the roof.

  To push back the quiet and pass the time, Hattie picked up her book and kept on reading to her dead father, stopping every so often to put some coal in the potbellied stove. When she finished Robinson Crusoe, she read from the Bible, understanding little and questioning such passages as “But if any provide not for his own and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” Her papa had done his best. What sort of God would judge him badly?

  It was evening before Mama and the undertaker arrived in the hearse.

  The funeral was two days later. It was bitterly cold, but the snow had stopped, and the sun was shining. Along with neighbors and church people, many of the men Papa had worked with in the mine attended, even though they would have their pay docked for the hours they were away from work.

  Like Patrick, Papa was buried in a wooden casket. Hattie wondered how Mama had paid for even that. Perhaps the undertaker was letting her pay for it a little bit at a time.

  The preacher droned on, but the hymns sounded especially beautiful in the crisp, cold, snow-covered stillness. The hymns made her papa’s funeral beautiful. Hattie wasn’t sure there was any such place as heaven, but if there was, her father should be there. With Patrick.

  Hattie began to realize the very next day just how much her father’s passing would change her life. Each of her teachers called her to their desk and told her in a soft voice how sorry they were for her loss. When she walked back to her desk, her classmates averted their eyes.

  Hattie had never had a best friend, but she had always been accepted by the other miners’ daughters and congregated with them in the halls between classes. But after her father died, when she walked down the hall even the daughters of miners acted as though they didn’t see her. Hattie now represented their worst nightmare. The miner’s life had killed her father, and Mr. Sedgwick had not done right by him and his family. Hattie and her mother were facing even harder times than they had just endured.

  The landlord had told Mama that he wouldn’t put a dying man out in the cold, but after Papa was gone he expected them to pay up or leave. After the funeral, when the landlord came on the first of the month to collect the rent, Mama would hand Hattie a blanket and send her to the shed.

  Mama began taking in ironing, with the ironing board becoming a permanent fixture in their tiny front room. The old Ford still needed a battery so Mama still put her eggs in the wheelbarrow and pushed it into town every Saturday morning, but at least the worst of winter seemed to be over.

  That spring she and Mama planted their garden as always, and Hattie did most the tending. Then one night a man who wasn’t the landlord came knocking at the door, a man Hattie didn’t know. Mama stepped out on the porch to talk to him, closing the door behind her. Shortly, she came back in the house and told Hattie to go to the shed. As Hattie was going out the back door, she heard Mama opening the front door to let the man in.

  Other men began to come. Sometimes, while Hattie was alone out in the shed, she would revive an old fantasy. Her little brother, Patrick, was still alive. The doctor in Billings thought he was such a pretty little boy with his red curls and blue eyes and rosy cheeks, and he and his wife had never been able to have children so he told Mama that Patrick had died and took him home to be raised as his own. The wooden casket that Mama buried had contained a bag of sand. Hattie imagined the day that she would be strolling along a street in a place that wasn’t Coal Town and she would see this handsome boy and know at once that he was her little brother. They would come fetch Mama and the three of them would live together someplace nice with no winter and no coal mines.

  When winter rolled around again, Hattie refused to go to the shed when men came and went to her room instead. Her “room” was a lean-to that Papa had built on the house after Patrick was born. It was furnished with a narrow bed and a table and chair. Her clothes hung from hooks on the wall, and her other possessions were kept under the bed. The only light came from a lamp plugged into the same extension cord they used for the iron. Instead of a door, there was a curtain made from an old blanket. In the evening, whenever there was a knock on the door, Hattie went to her little room. Sometimes she peaked around the blanket to see who it was that night. Sometimes she didn’t want to know. Because of those men, they had a roof over their heads, a car that ran, and money for food and coal. When men didn’t come, she and her mother ate eggs and whatever their garden had provided, and Hattie would pick up the coal along the railroad tracks to fuel the potbellied stove and the cookstove. They managed. But there was no money for clothes and shoes. By then Hattie was a beanpole of a girl and taller than her mother. Mama would let down the hem and take in the waist of her own well-worn skirts and dresses so that Hattie would have something to wear to school.

  Hattie hated going to school in her made-over cloth
es and shoes that hurt her feet. She hated Coal Town, hated the mining company that had caused her father’s death, hated the man who owned that company, hated the men who came in the night and kept her and her mother from starving, hated the schoolmates who snubbed her, hated the people who looked the other way when she and her mother walked down the street, hated the preacher who told Mama she was a fallen woman and that she and her daughter could no longer attend his church. Except for a few of the teachers who loaned her books and encouraged her, Hattie hated the entire population of Coal Town, Montana.

  Her goal was to leave as soon as she graduated from high school and never come back, not even to see her mother. Maybe Mama had done the best she could, but what she had done made Hattie not love her anymore. Hattie had lost her little brother and her father, and she no longer respected her mother.

  Hattie started thinking about West Virginia, a state that she knew nothing about except that the aunt she’d never met lived there. Papa had asked Mama to let his sister in Pikesville, West Virginia, know when he died and tell her that he always remembered her kindly and was sorry things had been the way they were. Pikesville was not a pretty name, and maybe it wasn’t any nicer than Coal Town, but it would be a place to start over. When Mama never got around to writing to Vera about Papa’s passing, Hattie decided to do it herself. And not just because Papa had requested that Vera be informed. Hattie figured since Vera had inherited a farm that should by all rights have been bequeathed, at least in part, to Hattie’s father, Vera couldn’t very well turn away his only living child. And since Vera was a spinster lady with no children of her own, she would have to bequeath the farm to Hattie, who was her closest living relative.