After the Rain

by Jane Lorenzini

  Merle smiled. “Mrs. Metzger is about due in for coffee beans. I’ll ask her if he’s available.”

  They walked toward the front gate so Abigail could begin preparations for the midday meal. Belle looked next door for Boone’s boat and spotted it bucking on the river’s choppy waves.

  •••

  That afternoon, for the first time in eleven years, Duggan’s storage room returned to its original purpose—housing jars of pickled peppers, bolts of butcher paper, and puncheons filled with molasses and kerosene. They’d cleared out Belle’s belongings, and now the wide bench on Belle’s trike was jam-packed with plants, clothes, fabric scraps, candles, sewing sundries, stacked books, and a shaving mirror. She sat in the middle of the seat with a conch shell in her lap and pedaled slowly. Merle walked alongside, clutching a howling basket with Coquina trapped inside.

  At Baker’s, they unloaded everything onto the floor of the cottage. The sky began to hint at an angry outburst. A low growl of thunder confirmed the warning.

  “You’d better head back home before the rain, Merle.” Belle stood with her hands on her hips.

  Merle reached into both pants pockets and pulled out something from each one. “I want you to have these.” He nodded toward the small table. “Put this skinning knife in that secret drawer.”

  He then held out the other object.

  Belle’s arms dropped to her sides. “Don’t do that. Keep it with you.”

  On the dresser, he set down a brush with an ivory handle. “Clara would want it with you, honey. At least for a while. Until you feel settled.”

  She nodded. “That’s very dear of you.” She tried to say thank you, but her throat locked up. A happy goodbye was Belle’s hope, but her immense gratitude for Merle wouldn’t allow it.

  Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She covered her face with both hands and cried into them. Merle moved forward, wrapping his arms around her, absorbing the sobs.

  “We’re just under separate roofs now, honey. Nothing else will change.” Palm fronds swished in the swelling wind that gusted through the stuck window. “You’re where you should be.”

  Sniffling and trying to regain control of her speech, Belle whispered, “I . . . I know.”

  They embraced until she stopped crying. The room had grown dim, the thunder louder and closer.

  “You best go now, Merle.” She was grateful for a reason to hurry him off.

  Merle offered a gentle nod and left the cottage. Large drops of rain pelted the ground. He walked briskly along River Street toward the store. Daggers of lightning took violent stabs at the horizon, so he broke into a run. Within minutes, he scurried into Duggan’s and left the door sign turned to “Closed.”

  •••

  Heavy rain pounded the roof and dripped into a bucket on the floor. Merle walked past a kerosene lamp and lit a candle instead. With a heavy sigh, he sat down on a stool behind the counter and poured a glass of Cuban rum. As he toweled off his wet face, thunder rattled the glassware on shelves throughout the store. With a raised glass, he made a toast: “To you, Belley.” She was gone from Duggan’s, likely for good, and he’d had a hand in it. But now she could spread her wings and let a fresh breeze lift her off the ground. She deserved a chance to glide for a while, to let the view from on high inspire her to thrive, like the fruited groves and billowed sails below.

  He tossed back the liquor and thought about his beloved Clara. He pictured her hands, strong enough to yank a life into the world and yet so tender when it came to exploring him. Her memory brought him comfort but anguish, too. He chose more often than not to avoid reliving their time together. But tonight, he needed to be near her. In his mind, he sat beside her and stroked her soft auburn hair as she sewed. Each stitch brought her closer to completing the long white dress she’d wear on their wedding day. He whispered in her ear, “You’re going to be so beautiful,” as she worked. He rocked the cradle beside him. “And now we have our sweet little girl who made it into this world because of you.” He tried to stay focused on that loving moment, but one staggering image always prevailed: Clara wearing the dress in a casket.

  A jagged bolt crackled across the sky, illuminating the store with a white flash.

  “I’m so sorry, Clara,” he said softly. Tears filled his eyes. “I didn’t think I could raise her without you.” He folded his hands in prayer. “Please forgive me.”

  Merle hung his large, heavy head. He could never forgive himself for what happened to Belle after the Carsons agreed to take her.

  Chapter 6

  My throne, Belle thought. She leaned her head back against the rocking chair’s wide wooden slats. Never before had she experienced such a surplus of contentment. She’d eaten a hearty lunch at Baker’s and was now surveying the tidied cottage from her soothing perch. A soft breeze visited through the open window and nudged a striped curtain. The previous five days had passed like a parade of colorful boats, each one more enchanting than the last.

  Moving into the space had taken scant time—hours instead of days—which wasn’t her preference. She’d wanted to indulge her desire to clean and organize and personalize her space that she had garnered. But there simply wasn’t enough square footage or piles of belongings to drag out the process.

  The dresser easily housed her minimal clothing. She’d filled one of the drawers with books and outdated gardening periodicals from Baileys’ Nursery. On top, she set the conch shell, a keepsake Merle had received in trade for an alligator skull from a customer passing through from Boot Key. Next to the large pink shell, she placed a vase filled with a vibrant mix of flowers from Abigail’s garden. There was room, too, for Merle’s old shaving stand topped with a mirror. Coquina napped on the bed’s linen coverlet, which Belle had beaten vigorously outside along with the goose-down pillow. A candle stuck with wax to a pie pan sat on the bedside table, along with a pressed-tin match safe. The scene was astounding to Belle, unimaginable in its stark contrast to her bleak childhood with the Carsons, where a floor blanket served as her bed and privacy was limited. Where nothing but distress was hers alone.

  For as many years as she lived with Betsy and Nelson Carson, Belle could think of little that she’d learned from either of them. Nelson was often away from home, working or off hunting with Julius. He was never curt or unkind but often swept her aside. “Go help your mother,” he’d say. Julius claimed a good bit of Nelson’s attention, helping with chores and errands. But Nelson was blind to his son’s misdeeds, of which Belle endured the worst. Julius would torment her and demand silence. He claimed that dragonflies—he called them dragon needles—would sew her mouth shut if she told on him. But she never would. How could she possibly say out loud what was happening to her? And surely his word would outweigh hers.

  Most of her time was spent with Betsy, who instead of teaching Belle something just told her to do it. “Go collect eggs,” she’d say and thrust an empty basket at her. The hens pecked Belle’s hands until she discovered that reaching well above their heads and gently lifting them off the nest solved the problem. At mealtime, Betsy would scold Belle if she burned greens or anything cooking in a pot, never explaining that the stove developed hot spots related to where the wood was placed in the firebox. She’d eventually figured that out, and most everything else, on her own. The Carsons fed and housed her, but raising her was clearly not their concern.

  Thankfully now, there she sat, happily nestled inside the Baker cottage. Belle rose from the rocking chair and walked to the dresser. She picked up Clara’s brush and watched herself in the mirror run its bristles through her long hair. Her reflection revealed a prominent forehead, almond-shaped eyes, and full lips. The square jawline was anchored by a pointy chin, which mismatched the button nose. If Belle looked anything like her natural mother, Clara would have known.

  In their first year of living together at Duggan’s, Merle told Belle he would cook s
omething special when her birthday rolled around. She thanked him but said she didn’t know when she was born, that the Carsons recorded only their son’s birth date in the family Bible. Merle explained that he knew she would turn fifteen in March because he was once engaged to Miss Clara Burns, the midwife who delivered her. Belle was eager for details.

  He’d described how Clara sailed from Fort Myers to Sanibel Island to assist her mother, a young, unmarried woman named Eva who was working for a castor bean farmer on the barrier island. Merle explained that, sadly, her mother died during delivery, but that Clara told him she was very brave and did all she could to bring her daughter into the world.

  “Your mother gave everything she had . . . her last breath . . . to mother you” was the way he’d worded it.

  Merle said Clara endured a stormy sail back to Fort Myers with baby Belle swaddled and held tightly in her arms. She was named after the resilient schooner Maybelle that safely transported them back home. Merle said he didn’t have any additional details, only that an arrangement was made between the Carsons and the town pastor to adopt her. When Belle asked Merle if he married Clara, he said no, that she’d died from a rattlesnake bite just a week after returning to Fort Myers. The conversation had revealed a common bond in each of their losses: Clara.

  Thank you, Belle thought, and squeezed the handle of the special brush. Clara once held it in her hand, perhaps the same hand that held Eva’s as she gave birth to Belle.

  •••

  In 1862, Eva Logan lived in a dusty southwest Florida town bustling with an endless stream of frisky cattlemen. The noisy cattle pens in the deepwater port town of Punta Rassa were busier than the bordellos, but not by much. Both were teeming with sweaty, agitated animals waiting for their turn: the cows to board a southbound schooner to Havana, the cow hunters to mount a prostitute. Tall, short, beefy, thin—the men all smelled of Cuban rum, swamp, and urgency. For weeks, they’d cracked their leather whips and slept in austere cow camps, herding the thousands of scrawny cattle that wandered the dense scrub woodlands. They slept under the stars and dreamed of a woman’s voice whispering, “I’ve been waiting for you,” in their sunburned ears.

  The parlor girls were certainly waiting for the men’s gold doubloons, Eva included. The gritty deeds disgusted her, but shiny money on the dresser paid her way. Had her parents known what she’d resorted to, they would have been devastated. But they couldn’t know.

  Just weeks after the Logan family had moved to Punta Rassa, a raging house fire killed Eva’s mother and father. While she was in town, shopping for provisions, the house attached to her father’s blacksmith shop became fully engulfed in flames. She’d returned to a horrifying sight—her smoldering house and people sitting on buckets following a failed water brigade. Neighbors speculated on a variety of calamities that may have sparked the blaze, but all that mattered to Eva was that she was eighteen and alone. The people who offered her a place to stay were generous, but they were all strangers. She chose instead to stay at the Sandy Spur, where her mother had worked as a maid. The sympathetic owner agreed to let her clean the hotel in trade for room and board. Soon, though, the rules changed. Men showed up in the rooms she was tidying, expecting to kiss and touch her. When she told the owner, he said, “You’re a pretty girl. Pretty makes good money.” Still numb from grief and shock, Eva wandered into her new role at the Spur. She let the men take from her so she could take care of herself.

  Months passed, and business at the hotel was brisk and unruly. After a year of working on her back, Eva stopped menstruating. She wasn’t surprised. Cattlemen couldn’t be bothered with the act of withdrawing, and post-coital douching was unreliable. She kept the news private and continued working, vomiting strategically and waiting for her body to betray her with visible proof. Some of the other “pretty girls” told of herbal potions that stopped their pregnancies; others met with a midwife who flushed out “the inconvenience” with an injection of water. Eva was certain she didn’t want a child, but she could never abort one. Surely, she could find someone who’d want the baby.

  When she was told to leave the hotel—that she was underperforming in bed and overshowing a bit in the belly—nineteen-year-old Eva boarded a mail boat heading southwest to nearby Sanibel Island. The destination had been on her mind ever since she’d met a man, weeks earlier, in front of the Punta Rassa telegraph office.

  He’d walked out of the office and flopped down next to her on a bench. Immediately he began talking to her about a telegram he’d just received.

  “A man in Louisiana wants my beans,” he said, poking at the paper in his hand. “My castor beans.”

  Eva smiled at him. “Congratulations.”

  He chuckled and offered his hand. “Where are my manners? I’m Arthur Cooper.”

  She took his callused hand. The man seemed pleasant, with no hint of perversion or deceit. If she’d gained one useful skill at the Spur, it was identifying degenerates.

  “Hello, Mr. Cooper. I’m Eva.”

  He insisted she call him Arthur and began to explain the deal he’d made with the manager of a cottonseed mill interested in extracting oil from his castor beans. Using his hand, he described a bean plant, shrub-like with long-stemmed leaves that spread out like fingers. He said he grew the plants on Sanibel Island, where he lived.

  “It must be wonderfully quiet on the island,” Eva said. “It’s so . . . smothering here.”

  Arthur smiled. “There’s just plants, my workers, and me out there.” He held up the telegram. “But now I’m going to need a lot more help.”

  It was that brief interaction that prompted Eva to board the mail boat Spitfire the very next day. She left Punta Rassa behind, en route to Sanibel.

  When she found him on the sparsely settled island, Arthur looked both puzzled and pleased.

  “Eva?”

  He’d remembered her name, and she got right to the point, explaining her “situation” and inquiring about work in trade for food and shelter.

  “And you should know, in time, I’ll need your help finding a family to take my baby.” She shrugged. “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”

  Arthur wiped his brow and stabbed the point of a shovel into the ground.

  “I welcome the help. You can stay in that small palmetto shack.” He nodded toward a structure set apart from a group of larger shacks. “We can discuss the other thing later.”

  Arthur kept her busy, fed, and safe through the months that followed. She toiled beside a handful of other farmhands setting seeds, watering, harvesting—whatever was necessary. She worked hard, infinitely grateful to escape the bustle and hustle of Punta Rassa. The move allowed her to lay in bed every night, alone, listening to the soothing waves of the Gulf.

  When Eva appeared quite far along in her pregnancy, Arthur insisted she stop work in the fields. Instead, she helped with bookwork inside the house, a sparse wooden structure with three rooms. One afternoon, as Eva worked a pencil with one hand and rubbed her protruding stomach with the other, Arthur sat down at the desk across from her.

  “Eva. The baby. Tell me your plans . . . what you want.”

  Her eyes instantly welled up with tears. She’d been crying most nights during the past month, terrified of how much she’d fallen in love with the bastard baby, a workplace accident. The powerful bond had crept up on her. Or perhaps she’d labeled thoughts about cuddling and protecting her baby daydreams, a way to pass the time as she worked. But the day she sobbed at the sight of a robin’s egg smashed on the ground was the day she had to be honest with herself. She wanted to be a mother.

  “I can’t do it,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks and onto the calculations in the account book.

  Arthur folded his hands on the desk. “Can’t keep the baby, or can’t give the baby away?”

  “I want to keep my baby, Arthur.” She sniffled and sighed with her eyes closed. “
I’ll figure it all out.”

  Before he could answer, Eva’s body tensed. “Ohhh . . .” She grabbed the sides of her stomach and dropped her chin to her chest. “Arthur, what’s happening?”

  “Let’s get you to the bedroom,” Arthur said, and helped her shuffle to the bed. “Everything’s going to be fine, Eva.”

  When the Spitfire arrived at the island that day, Arthur explained what was needed. Two hours later, the boat returned with help for Eva on board.

  •••

  When midwife Clara Burns entered the house, Arthur answered her questions quietly and led her to the bedroom where Eva was moaning, her hair drenched in sweat.

  “I’ll need hot water and towels.” She nodded at Arthur and shut the door behind her.

  “Eva, I’m Clara. We’re going to help each other, all right? Tell me what you can about the pain.” Clara pulled off the bedcovers. Blood stained the sheet under Eva’s bottom.

  “My back.” Eva’s voice was weak. “It’s broken.” She rolled her wet head back and forth on the pillow, her eyes shut. Tears ran down her cheeks, mixing with beads of sweat.

  Please let me live, Eva thought.

  Clara quickly searched for clues outside and inside of Eva’s body. A female farmhand knocked on the door and opened it upon Clara’s reply, “Come in.” She placed a bucket of hot water and a mound of towels near the bed and left. Over the next two hours, Eva’s moans became screams of agony. Bloody cloths lay in a pile on the floor. The baby’s head and shoulders had appeared, but Eva had stopped pushing, exhausted.

  “Take a deep breath, dear.” Clara held a cloth doused with ether near Eva’s mouth and gently wiped back strands of hair stuck to her forehead.

  Eva breathed in the sweet-smelling air and begged again.

  Please, God, let me live. Let me take care of my baby.