The Surrogate

by Judith Henry Wall

  “Not really. I experience something new every time we go out.” Which was true, Jamie thought. Only yesterday, she had watched an armadillo ambling down the middle of the road as though it didn’t have a care in the world and not minding at all that Jamie, her hand firmly on Ralph’s collar, was following along behind it.

  She had learned to listen to the ever-changing music of the prairie-the sounds made by animals and insects, the whisper of the prairie grasses waving in the wind. And she admired the ever-changing palette of color as the sun traversed the sky and slid behind an occasional cloud.

  The daily walks also had led to a deeper awareness of her own body-a different sort of awareness than when she was on the track team. Running was all about pacing and required intense concentration. With walking she was able to relax and enjoy the feel of her muscles working in concert as she strode along. Sometimes she would take a deep breath just to feel her lungs fill and expand and to relish the health and youth and strength of her own body. The muscles in her legs were almost as firm as they had been when she was running track and working out almost daily. She sometimes wondered if walking had become an obsession with her. Or was it simply a coping mechanism that helped her deal with isolation and loneliness? And with fear? She was sailing in uncharted waters. The changes in her body went further than the muscles in her legs and the capacity of her lungs. She could no longer button her jeans, and there was a firmness to her belly that had nothing to do with the underlying muscle structure.

  “Actually I have a specific destination today,” she told Lester. “I asked Freda about any points of interest I might visit on my walks, and she told me about an abandoned farmhouse a few miles north of here. Do you know where it is?” she asked.

  Lester said that he did and would be out front in fifteen minutes.

  Ralph’s tail started wagging when Jamie got her hiking boots out of the closet. “So you think you’re going to go with me?” she teased.

  She and Ralph made their way down the main staircase and headed for the front door. Lester hadn’t arrived yet, so she and Ralph sat on the front steps. Freda’s pickup truck with its camper-shell clinic was parked under the portico, a seemingly daily occurrence. Jamie assumed that the nurse came to visit Ann Montgomery. In spite of the difference in their ages, the two women seemed to be close friends. Probably it was their devotion to Amanda Hartmann that brought them together.

  A visit with a friend would be nice, Jamie thought. Or a letter from one. Without knowing her current address, Jamie realized that her friends and sister would not be writing to her, but she wondered why she hadn’t heard from Lenora. Other than her correspondence course, the only mail she had received were her monthly bank statements, which were being mailed to the ranch by the anonymous “third party” and opened by Miss Montgomery before passing them along to Jamie. Such measures seemed ridiculously extreme to Jamie, but then, as Lenora had pointed out more than once, privacy was a major issue with the Hartmanns.

  When Jamie saw Lester’s truck approaching, she stood. He pulled up beside her and rolled down the window. Jamie could hear Vince Gill singing “A Little More Love” on the truck radio.

  Lester turned down the radio. “I have to be back by noon, so you’re going to have to ride at least part of the way.”

  “I’ll walk first-for an hour,” Jamie said, glancing at her watch then heading down the drive. Lester turned up the radio. When Vince finished his song, Reba began pondering “Is There Life Out There?”

  Jamie jogged a bit to get ahead of the radio. She liked Reba but didn’t want the distraction.

  She slowed as she approached the main gate, waiting for Lester to activate the opener. As soon as the gate swung open, she and Ralph headed north.

  She walked down the middle of the empty roadway. Ralph ran excitedly from side to side, sniffing clumps of prairie grass and frantically digging up gopher runs. She wondered what he would do if he actually caught a gopher.

  At the end of an hour, Lester honked at her, and she and Ralph rode the rest of the way. “There it is,” he said, pointing toward a mailbox hanging crookedly on a fence post. The name on the box was “McGraf.” At the end of an overgrown lane she could see a listing barn, a windmill with a missing blade, and a stone chimney jutting out of a rooftop.

  “I want to take a look,” she told Lester as she reached for the door handle.

  “No way. I’d lose my job if you fell down an old well or through a rotten floor.”

  Jamie started to protest but decided she didn’t want to get Lester in trouble. Disappointed, she stared at the desolate scene. “Why did the McGrafs leave?” she asked.

  “Actually there are several deserted farmhouses on the ranch,” Lester explained. “Word has it that Mr. Hartmann paid the back taxes on the farms and had the occupants evicted. The McGrafs didn’t get very far, though. They loaded up their truck and drove off right before a blizzard hit. No one knew they were missing, so no one went looking for them. It was a week or so later when some hunters spotted the truck out in the middle of a field. Mr. McGraf and the missus and three kids were all packed into the cab of the truck. Apparently they lost their way in all that snow and ice and froze to death.”

  “How horrible!” Jamie said. A family had tried to make a living here and failed. But they shouldn’t have had to pay with their lives.

  “Yeah,” Lester agreed. “Every few years something like that happens. Sometimes a farmer gets lost on his way back from his own barn. Weather gets that bad sometimes.”

  She imagined the family members taking what they could fit in the back of an aging truck and leaving the rest to be scavenged by drifters over the years. Had Gus Hartmann given them a deadline, threatening to send the sheriff to evict them, or had they simply not realized a blizzard was on the way?

  “So this property is part of Hartmann Ranch now?” Jamie asked.

  Lester nodded. “I guess it’s all right for me to tell you since it’s public record. All the Hartmann land used to be on the east side of the road, but now they own several thousand acres along the west side.”

  “Why do they need so much land?” Jamie asked, taking in fields that had once been cleared but were now covered with prairie grass and scrubby mesquite trees. Obviously, Gus Hartmann had no pressing use for the land when he made the McGraf family leave.

  Lester shrugged. “My dad says that owning a lot of land makes rich folks feel safe or something like that. Kind of like owning an island, I guess. Instead of being surrounded by water, or by walls like the movie stars in Hollywood, some rich people surround themselves with a sea of land. Except what’s the point if they never visit their safe place. Gus Hartmann hasn’t been to the ranch since I started working here. And Miss Amanda has only been here once since she married the greenhorn.”

  Jamie took a last look at the deserted homestead as Lester turned the truck around and sighed.

  “You feeling okay?” he asked.

  “Just a little melancholy. Those poor people. By now Mr. and Mrs. McGraf should have had grandkids running around the yard.”

  “Yeah. Or maybe the Lord was ready to call them home,” Lester said. “Maybe they’re living in a whole lot better place than they had back there and not having to work so damned hard to put food on the table and shirts on their backs.”

  “So we shouldn’t grieve when people die?” Jamie asked. “Or question the circumstances when their deaths seem so unnecessary?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Lester said. “I leave stuff like that to Miss Amanda.”

  They rode in silence for a time. Then Jamie asked, “Would you really lose your job if I got hurt?”

  “Yep. And this is a damned good job. Better than any job I’d have working in Alma, that’s for sure. I’ve got health insurance, a retirement plan, and two weeks’ paid leave a year. And I live in one of the bunkhouses for nothing. Miss Amanda takes good care of her people.”

  “I saw Amanda the other night on television,” Jamie said. “She
was amazing.”

  “Yeah, whenever one of her revivals is televised, all the Hartmann City folks gather at the church to watch on the big screen. Everyone who works on the ranch thinks the world of Miss Amanda.”

  “What about Gus Hartmann?” Jamie asked as she stroked her dog. “What do people think of him?”

  “Everyone respects him, but he doesn’t know everyone’s name like Miss Amanda. When I was a little kid, he used to come to the football games in Alma with Amanda’s son. Mr. Hartmann is a short little guy. Real short. Sonny Hartmann went to a private school back East, but when he was at the ranch, he’d drive into town and hang out some. You’d think a rich kid like that would be a snob, but he wasn’t. Sometimes he even played pickup basketball at the school yard. Shame about what happened to him. Everyone in town was real tore up over it. But you know what? I’m not supposed to talk about the Hartmanns. It’s a habit, I guess. Folks who live here on the ranch are more interested in the Hartmanns than they are in movie stars or football heroes or the president in Washington, D.C., but we all signed a paper promising not to talk about the Hartmann family to outsiders.”

  “A confidentiality agreement?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Lester said. “But since you’re living here now, I guess that kind of makes you one of us.”

  “Not really,” Jamie said. “I’m just passing through. I won’t ask you any more questions about the Hartmanns. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “You know, we’ve all been mighty curious about you,” Lester admitted. “At first we thought you were going to work for Montgomery-a secretary or bookkeeper, maybe-but it seems like you don’t do much of anything except walk.”

  “So, why do people think I’m here?” Jamie asked.

  “Well,” Lester said, staring at the road, “Freda says that Miss Amanda invited you to come to the ranch to get away from a mean boyfriend and then you turned up pregnant so she’s letting you stay here till the baby is born. But Miss Amanda is still afraid that the boyfriend might come looking for you, so she doesn’t want you wandering off by yourself.”

  “That’s pretty close,” Jamie said.

  “You’re just lucky to have someone like Amanda Hartmann to help you get your life back on track,” Lester said.

  “That’s true,” Jamie said.

  Back in her sitting room, Jamie removed the decorative items from the two rooms, leaving only her books and photographs and the potted plants from her grandmother’s house. She even took down her great-grandmother’s mirror and put it in the closet alongside her grandmother’s sewing stand. She could no longer think of these two rooms as home. Not even a temporary one.

  Chapter Thirteen

  JAMIE AWOKE IN the night to the sound of singing.

  A thin, quavery female voice was singing a strange song about a woman longing for her “sweet little Alice blue gown.”

  Jamie rolled over and looked toward the chair in the corner.

  It was empty.

  The singing was coming from the sitting room. Light was pouring through the open door. Jamie rose and padded across the bedroom.

  The old woman was sitting next to Ralph on the sofa, her hand stroking his back. His tail thumped when he saw Jamie.

  Their visitor was wearing a lacy black nightgown that hung loosely over her bony shoulders and chest. Her feet were bare. Red lipstick covered her mouth and much of her chin. A well-worn red leather pocketbook rested on her lap. When she finished her song, she applauded, the loose skin on her underarms waving back and forth.

  Jamie applauded, too.

  The woman looked at Jamie, apparently noticing her for the first time. She acknowledged Jamie’s applause with a shy smile then let forth a delighted cackle. Jamie remembered that laugh. The first time she’d heard it, she thought she was dreaming. Now she was wide awake, and the woman was obviously quite real.

  “I’m Jamie,” she said as she sat across from the woman. “What is your name?”

  “I told you last time I was here,” the old woman said. “I’m Mary Millicent, and this is my house.”

  “Do you live here all the time?” Jamie asked.

  The woman nodded. “Up in the tower. My children are going to burn in hell for keeping me a prisoner in that room with the witch as my jailer.”

  “You’re not in that room now,” Jamie pointed out.

  “The witch thinks she is so smart, but she’s forgotten that this is my house, and I have a magic key that opens all the doors.” No sooner had she said these words than she gasped and put her hands over her mouth.

  Jamie jumped up and rushed to the old woman’s side. “What’s the matter?” she asked, kneeling in front of her.

  Mary Millicent took her hands from her mouth. “You won’t tell them, will you?” she asked in a whisper, her gaze darting from side to side.

  “About your key? No, I won’t tell,” Jamie whispered back.

  “And promise you won’t tell the witch that I was here.”

  Jamie nodded.

  “Cross your heart and hope to die.”

  Jamie solemnly crossed her heart. Then Mary Millicent looked around as though to make sure no one else was in the room. “The witch doesn’t know I can walk,” she whispered. “The nurse, too.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  Mary Millicent shook her head. “If the witch knew I could walk, she would lock me up or chain me to the bed.”

  Jamie sat on the sofa. Ralph gave her a quizzical look, as though asking if he should abandon his position on the other side of Mary Millicent and come sit beside her. With a gesture of her hand, Jamie told him he was fine where he was.

  “I added on the wing because we needed more room for all our important visitors,” Mary Millicent said, sitting up straighter and lifting her chin. “We had presidents and senators and ambassadors and even a sultan come here. Sometimes they brought their wives, and sometimes they didn’t. They liked to dress up like cowboys and ride horses and hunt deer and quail, then sit around smoking Cuban cigars and drinking Tennessee whiskey.”

  “Tell me about the tower,” Jamie said. “Did you build it to make the house look like a castle?”

  “Nope. I built it so I could have a private place. Sometimes I would invite one of the gentlemen visitors to meet me up there. Now the only excitement I have is watching people out the windows. That and making the witch mad,” she added with a chuckle. “I watch you from up there. You and the pooch walk all the time with that boy following you in the truck.”

  “Why do they keep you up there?” Jamie asked, not sure if she believed the woman.

  “Because I’m a secret,” Mary Millicent said. “They don’t want a crazy old woman going around saying things she shouldn’t say and embarrassing Amanda. She’s on television now just like I used to be. Everyone would notice me when I walked into a restaurant or through an airport. People would come up to me and tell me they’d seen me preach on television, and they wanted me to bless them and to touch my hand. You want to touch my hand?”

  “Sure,” Jamie said, taking one of Mary Millicent’s clawlike hands in her own. Her nails were carefully trimmed, as were her toenails. Her hair was combed. She had smelled before, but not now. Obviously someone was trying to look after her needs.

  “Do you like me?” Mary Millicent asked, tilting her head to one side.

  Jamie started to say that she didn’t know her very well, but the look on the old woman’s face was so beseeching, like a small child in search of a friend. “Of course, I like you,” she said.

  Mary Millicent put her head on Jamie’s shoulder, and Jamie put her arms around her. Her skin felt like parchment. Jamie could see down the front of the lacy nightgown. Mary Millicent’s bony chest was flat with no flesh at all. Just baggy skin and two shriveled-up nipples.

  Mary Millicent became so still that Jamie wondered if she was falling asleep. “Maybe you should go back to your room now?” she asked. “You don’t want the witch to find you here.”

/>   “Will you sing with me first?”

  “What would you like to sing?”

  Mary Millicent began rocking back in forth in Jamie’s arms singing a familiar hymn. Jamie closed her eyes. She remembered standing next to her grandmother in church singing the very same hymn. In their simple little frame church.

  “What a friend we have in Jesus,” Jamie sang along with her elderly visitor, “all our sins and grief to bear/ What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.”

  At the end of the hymn, Mary Millicent kissed Jamie on the mouth, then, clutching her red purse and with Jamie’s help, she shakily rose to a standing position.

  Jamie watched the barefoot, frail figure in a lacy black nightgown slowly make her away across the room.

  “Good night,” Jamie called after her.

  Without turning around, the woman waved a hand, then opened the door just an inch or two and peeked out into the hallway. Apparently assured that the hall was empty, she left, closing the door behind her.

  “Seems we have a friend,” she told her dog. “How about you and me going back to bed?”

  Before turning off the light, she opened the door and looked up and down the hall. There was no one in sight.

  She locked the door, an act she distinctly remembered performing when she and Ralph came in from their evening foray into the backyard. It was a defiant act she performed nightly with Miss Montgomery in mind. Even though she realized the housekeeper had a passkey, Jamie wanted her to know that uninvited visitors were not welcome.

  Mary Millicent also had a passkey, it seemed.

  She assumed that Mary Millicent’s “witch” was Ann Montgomery. The designation made Jamie smile.

  The next morning when she set out on her walk, Jamie wanted to turn and wave to Mary Millicent. She didn’t, of course. Someone might see her. When she reached the road, however, she looked toward the house-at the tower with its many narrow windows. Was Mary Millicent watching her?

  After her walk, Jamie took Ralph to the apartment then headed back downstairs to the library. After her conversation with Mary Millicent, she wanted to study the pictures on the wall.