The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Well, I, um . . . I’ve always been irregular . . .”

  A lie: her cycles have been clockwork ever since she got her first period at twelve. For a decade, until September, that time of the month has come precisely at that time of the month.

  “No morning sickness, then? Fainting spells, cramping . . .”

  “Not really. I didn’t realize I might be expecting till my stomach . . . popped.”

  Another lie.

  All those steamy late summer nights, lying awake on her side of the empty double bed, worrying—sensing—that a fragile new life had taken hold inside her.

  By September’s end, her period had been MIA. She’d spent autumn mornings vomiting into the toilet, afternoons too drowsy to leave the couch, sleepless nights in denial.

  Weren’t pregnant women supposed to gain weight? Melody had dropped a dress size.

  Didn’t pregnant women have strange cravings and ferocious appetites? Melody felt queasy at the slightest whiff of frying food and couldn’t find anything remotely appealing on the Thanksgiving table.

  Pregnant women couldn’t wait to share the news with their families, their friends . . . their husbands. Melody’s brain had tiptoed around the truth even when her appetite came raging back and her waistbands became tourniquets. Yet she didn’t dare see Doc Krebbs, the obstetrician who’d delivered Melody and her younger sister into the world.

  Last year around this time, just before her wedding, her mother had enrolled her as a patient in his practice, and—in typical Honeybee Abernathy fashion—informed Melody after the fact.

  “It’s time you saw a woman’s physician, poppet,” she’d drawled, folding linen napkins for her bridge club luncheon. “Doc Krebbs will answer any questions you might have about y’all’s wedding night.”

  Melody’s face had burned, a blushing bride.

  It’s burning now, too, but . . .

  “Almost done with the pelvic exam, Mrs. Hunter. Take some deep breaths . . . In . . . out . . . Yes, that’s it.”

  Breathe . . . In . . . Out . . . In . . .

  “Ouch!”

  “I am surely sorry about this,” he says. “Just try to relax.”

  She’d chosen him from the yellow pages because his name is Stevens, like Elizabeth Montgomery’s character Samantha on Bewitched. People are always telling Melody she looks like her.

  If only she could work a magic spell that would make this pregnancy disappear. But there is no magic in real life. Only the underground network she’d heard about back in high school, when a group of girls were gossiping about a classmate’s rumored pregnancy.

  “There’s a place up near Macon where a girl can go to get it taken care of,” her friend Charlene had whispered. “You just show up at this church, and they whisk you away and take care of it.”

  “Take care of it? You mean . . .”

  “Shh!”

  Melody had asked Charlene the specifics out of curiosity and not necessity. She would never find herself in that situation. She was a good girl, preserving her virginity for her wedding night.

  And so she had. A good girl, a good wife . . .

  She stares at a poster taped to the wall—an advertisement for clomiphene, a new fertility drug. It shows a happy woman encircled from behind in the arms of a happy man. Her head is leaning against his chest, his chin on her shoulder. They’re wearing dreamy smiles and wedding rings.

  Melody and Travis were married last February. His draft notice was waiting when they returned from their honeymoon. After two months of basic training and two more of advanced infantry training, he was allowed a short leave to visit her and then transported to Vietnam. And then . . .

  “Ouch!”

  “I do apologize, Mrs. Hunter. But the more tense you are, the more uncomfortable it is.”

  “I’m not tense.”

  “Then you’re the first pregnant newlywed woman I’ve ever met who is not.” Another chuckle, back there beyond the draped cloth over her bent knees, from a man who suspects nothing more than new mom nerves.

  “Exactly when . . . I mean, am I due in April?”

  “’Bout mid-May. Hold still if you can.”

  “Sorry. I’m trying.”

  Mid-May. God help her.

  “Your husband is in the army, Mrs. Hunter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you had word from him recently? Since . . . ?”

  “No, I haven’t heard from him . . . since.”

  Two days ago, the Viet Cong had launched a violent offensive to coincide with the Tet lunar new year.

  “I’m sure he’s just fine,” Dr. Stevens says as though he knows, and Melody nods as though she agrees.

  “When he does get in touch, you’ll have big news to share with him, won’t you?”

  “Yes. I surely will.”

  At last the doctor rolls back and stands, methodically plucking his splayed fingertips to remove one glove, and then the other. He looks like the Kentucky Fried Chicken guy—elderly, with a goatee, horn-rimmed glasses, and a black string tie beneath his white coat.

  “No man ever forgets the day he finds out he’s going to become a daddy. Got the news from my wife back in ’28, right before the Okeechobee Hurricane made landfall. I don’t know which one hit harder.” A smile curves his lips, but his eyes pity her, a pregnant young wife whose husband might never return.

  He makes an appointment to see her next month and hands her a bottle of prenatal vitamins. “All righty, then. You can go ahead and get dressed. Oh, and, Mrs. Hunter?” He turns back in the doorway. “I’ll keep your husband in my prayers.”

  “Thank you.”

  Travis’s well-being should be Melody’s only concern right now. She should be at home watching the news, or in church praying.

  Six months along . . .

  Six months.

  The baby had been conceived in late August, early September.

  Travis had deployed in July.

  The Bronx, New York

  Her birth certificate says Linda Lucille Miller.

  She was named after her mother, plain old Linda Miller, and her mother’s favorite comedienne, Lucille Ball. It’s hard to imagine that a woman who’d never smiled or shown interest in television, or anything really, would have had a favorite comedienne. It’s even harder to imagine that she herself has anything in common with plain old Linda Miller, but her biology teacher says that a person’s parents leave a genetic imprint in every cell. She doesn’t like to think about that, or about her mother, who always called her Linda Lou.

  Everyone else calls her Linda, except her father. To him, she’s “Gypsy,” the name he’d privately bestowed when she’d come into this world. The name he says everyone else will know when they leave it—en masse, according to his prophecy, and anytime now.

  Gypsy Colt Matthews would have been her legal name if he’d had any say in the matter, but he hadn’t been around the night she’d been born.

  “Hospitals aren’t my scene,” he’d told her with a shrug.

  Her mother hadn’t been his scene, either. And though he’s mentioned the family and friends—followers—he’d once had, now there is only his daughter.

  “You and me, we’re the chosen ones, Gypsy, baby. No one else matters. They’ll be gone, just like that, when Judgment Day comes,” he says, snapping his fingers. “And it’s coming, man. Anytime now. We have to be ready.”

  When she isn’t in the mood for Bible study or reading newspapers in search of signs that the apocalypse is imminent, she claims to be bogged down in homework.

  Most of the time, he buys that excuse, especially now that she’s in high school. But for her, academics have always been a breeze.

  The other day, her biology teacher, Mr. Dixon, asked her if she’d started thinking about college yet.

  “Oh, I can’t afford that.”

  “Keep up your studies, and the finest universities in this country will be offering you scholarships.”

  “Do you really think so?�
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  “Of course. But you’ll have to work hard.”

  A scholarship . . . college . . . a ticket out of this declining neighborhood and vermin-infested apartment, with windows too warped to open and a bathtub in the kitchen.

  Sitting in front of the television news on this Friday evening, she works algebra problems as Walter Cronkite gravely reports the ongoing Tet Offensive in Vietnam and Eddie Adams’s graphic photograph yesterday capturing a Viet Cong prisoner’s execution. Then he announces the birth of Elvis Presley’s daughter.

  The war is bad enough, but now her girlhood idol, the world’s greatest sex symbol, has become a dad?

  Yeah, the world’s coming to an end, all right.

  She turns off the TV and goes to the icebox to scrounge up some supper. Oran had left a note this morning saying he’s working late tonight.

  So smart, putting it in writing rather than mentioning it in person before she’d gone off to school. She might have read something into his voice, or seen a glimmer in his eyes.

  She can always tell when he’s lying, though it usually isn’t to her. Often he prefaces a lie with the phrase, “Very truly I tell you,” lifted from the gospel according to John, one of his favorite books in the Bible. Fascinated by scholarly theories about John’s identity, Oran occasionally claims to have written the book himself, along with Revelation. Gypsy has seen him convince rapt crowds of it, dispatching the naysayers with his breathless, brilliant dissertation.

  Yes, he’s smart, Oran.

  But Gypsy is smarter.

  Back in Travis’s poppy-red Camaro, Melody puts the top down despite the cool day. She’s suffocating. She needs air.

  This is going to happen. There’s no way out. Not anymore.

  Melody’s old friend Charlene still lives in town. After going through school together, they’d been bridesmaids in each other’s weddings, and had looked forward to sharing married life as couples. But as Travis prepared to deploy, Charlene’s husband, Gary, was burning his draft card and marching on Washington.

  “He’s the devil. You stay away from him,” Travis had told Melody. “Stay away from both of them.”

  “She’s my friend.”

  “You heard the scripture at their wedding, same as at ours. ‘And the two become one flesh.’ He’s the devil, and she’s his wife. That makes her the devil, too. You got that?”

  “But—”

  “You vowed to love, honor, and obey me, Melody. I’m ordering you to stay away from those people. You got that?”

  I don’t take orders from anyone!

  It’s what she should have said. Instead, she’d cried, and he’d softened.

  “Baby, I’m going to war to fight for this country. I’m a patriot, putting my life on the line for your freedom. How do you think I feel when I see these long-haired whining hippies who don’t respect me? Can you blame me for wanting to keep you away from them? I’m trying to protect you.”

  “I know you are, Travis, and I love you for it. I promise I’ll stay away from Charlene.”

  It’s far from the only promise she’s broken since Travis had left.

  Around Thanksgiving, Melody had called Charlene to ask her about the underground network that helped pregnant young women. But the moment she picked up the phone, Charlene announced that she and Gary were expecting their first child. Melody stammered a congratulations and hung up.

  On a grim December day she’d finally found her way, on her own, to the so-called way station: a small white clapboard church in a backwater Georgia town up near Macon.

  Otis Redding’s hometown. The musician had been killed in a plane crash days earlier. Melody had wept as if she’d known him personally. She hadn’t, but . . .

  “I have kin up Macon way. They introduced me to their old pal Otis . . .”

  That voice, rich as pecan pie, had still oozed into her mind even then. Even now.

  She closes her eyes and sees dolphin fins dancing in pink light arced across a glittering blue sea. She remembers leaning against a strong chest, encircled in the arms of a man who wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  “That’s the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen,” she’d murmured, and he’d told her that in his world, they refer to dawn as dayclean.

  She’d loved that. Dayclean: a fresh start, with yesterday left behind.

  Ah, it really had been a summer of love, hadn’t it? If not in the beginning, then certainly when it had drawn to a close. Love, and many other things—not all splendored, as the song goes.

  Here on the southern Atlantic coast, summer gives way to hurricane season.

  Melody starts the engine.

  The radio disk jockey is in mid-announcement: Priscilla Presley delivered a baby girl yesterday.

  “That’s right, all y’all. Elvis is a daddy. Let’s celebrate that with his latest hit.”

  Melody turns off the radio amid the opening notes of “Just Call Me Lonesome.”

  The doctor’s words echo in the silence.

  “No man ever forgets the day he finds out he’s going to become a daddy.”

  There are no hurricanes in the forecast today. The winter sky is a brilliant blue as she heads northeast toward Barrow Island off the coast of Georgia to deliver the news in person.

  Brooklyn

  “Matthews! You’re still here?”

  Oran looks up from his stack of files. The clinic’s obstetrician, Harold Brooks, has exchanged his white lab coat for a tweed overcoat.

  “Not for long,” he says. “I have to finish this paperwork.”

  “Take care getting home. It’s sleeting out there.” Brooks puts on his hat, black galoshes squeaking as he heads for the door. “Be sure to lock up. There was an armed robbery the other night at the pharmacy around the corner—a masked man with a gun. Sign of the times.”

  End times, Oran wants to say, and then elaborate—oh, how passionately he can elaborate on that topic. But this isn’t the right time or place. Or person. This man will never be one of the chosen few.

  “Have a good night, Doctor.”

  “You, too. See you tomorrow.” Brooks disappears into the blustery February evening.

  The receptionist, Carla, is long gone, as are the nurses. Ordinarily, Oran, too, would have left after the day’s final patient departed. For what they’re paying him, the paperwork can wait.

  He’d been anxious, sitting there at his desk in the reception area, waiting for the doctor to split. If she’d shown up while he was here . . .

  She hadn’t. But she’s coming soon.

  He locks the door and goes to the darkened patient examination room with a window facing the subway entrance. He watches Brooks pause to light a cigarette, shielding the flame from the precipitation.

  Get moving, man! Go!

  Slush appears to be freezing on the steps to the elevated subway platform. The doctor ascends with great care and disappears from view above.

  Oran watches the stairway until the next Manhattan-bound train rumbles away with Brooks on board. Carla had confided that the doctor—married with five children at home in Oyster Bay—is having an affair with one of the nurses. Not the stacked blonde one, she’d added, as though that were the shame of it all. No, he’s sleeping with the quiet, middle-aged brunette who lives alone in the Village.

  Carla, a stacked blonde herself, enjoys office gossip. That’s served Oran well. He’s turned on the charm with her, too, volunteering to cover the phones during her extra-long lunch breaks—a key part of his plan.

  Oran grabs Dr. Brooks’s white lab coat hanging on a hook behind the door. It smells of cigarettes and Brut aftershave. He slips into it. The sleeves are a little short. The other girls hadn’t seemed to notice. Such a trivial detail in such a monumental moment in their young lives.

  He drapes the stethoscope around his neck. Spotting the doctor’s thick reading glasses on his desk, Oran tries them on and checks the mirror. A blurry man with a brown crew cut gazes back at him, blue eyes masked behind the thick horn-
rims.

  Square and stodgy. Nice. He practices Dr. Brooks’s commanding stride and mutters to himself, getting into character.

  With the first girl, he’d accidentally dropped a “far out” into the conversation. It might have given her pause, though only for a moment, and then he reeled her back in.

  Oran has a way with women. With people. Always has.

  “That’s my handsome, charming boy. He knows how to wrap everyone around his little finger,” his mother, Pamela, used to say.

  He isn’t just good-looking, quick-witted, and charismatic. He’s smart. Genius IQ, just like his Gypsy. Like his mother, Pamela, too, his grandmother claimed, but that was hard to believe. Pamela had been spectacularly stupid, throwing away opportunities just as she’d thrown away her parents, and her son.

  He opens a file cabinet’s bottom drawer and reaches way into the back, retrieving a new patient chart hidden inside a long-dead elderly patient’s folder. Pushing the glasses down his nose, he skims the details she’d provided over the phone when she called looking for an appointment while Carla was out to lunch.

  She’d given her name, address, and date of birth. When he’d asked which school she attends, she’d asked, “Why do you want to know?”

  “Routine question.”

  “That seems awfully personal.”

  “This is a medical office, ma’am. We hold your information in strictest confidence.”

  He’d smiled when she named one of the borough’s Catholic high schools, clinching her place in his plan.

  She’d faltered again when he’d gone on to more intimate questions about her menstrual cycles, regularity, and date of her last period, but complied just as the others had. Catholic schoolgirls are trained to comply with authority. They’re also aware that contraception and premarital sex go against the teachings of the church, but shame doesn’t keep them from breaking the rules. God forgives their sins, just as Oran does.

  Hearing a knock, he takes off the glasses. He needs to be able to see her. See into her soul to confirm that she’s worthy.

  They’re lining up nicely, his girls. She’ll be the third. If all goes as planned, he’ll need just one more.