Darkness at Morning Star

by Joyce C. Ware

  DARKNESS AT MORNING STAR

  Joyce C. Ware

  Chapter One

  Would I have responded to Belle’s letter differently if her loving words had given me any reason to suspect what might follow? I’ve often wondered about that. My dear friend Malcolm Wilcox had often prodded me, in that gentle way of his, to reach for the sunlight. Had he mentioned the shadows my reaching arms might cast? I can’t recall now that he did, but it doesn’t really matter; life was quick enough to reveal them to me.

  The morning the letter arrived I was being fitted for my wedding dress. It was a hand-me-down from Mother Rogg as all my dresses had been. Plenty of wear left in ‘em, she used to say, and there was; but for my wedding I had hoped...

  “Stand straight, Serena,” she commanded. The words emerged from around the pins she held between her lips as a faintly comical “Stan state, Seena,” but there was no mistaking the testiness of her tone. “A body’d think I was fitting you for a shroud. I’ll never get this ruffle on right if you keep slumping like that.”

  As if I cared. The ruffle, a cheap bit of yellowed trim scissored from a neighbor’s cast-off parlor curtains, would serve only to extend a skirt of unseemly shortness to a length that would seem merely skimpy. Nevertheless, in response to her impatient nudge, I obediently resumed my slow revolution on the low wooden stool that wobbled uncertainly on the braided rug whose wool strips, cut from worn-beyond-repair clothing, had crisscrossed through my hands on many a dark winter evening. Waste not, want not, Serena.

  Do I sound ungrateful? I shouldn’t and I’m not. Wilma and Howard Rogg were not my real parents, and although I addressed them as Mother and Father, they didn’t pretend to be anything other than what they were: caretakers of an orphan child. They were dutiful guardians, exacting employers, and although rarely kind, never cruel. In short, we had a contract, the Roggs and I, and love had no place in it.

  Mother Rogg shoved the last pin home with a heartfelt “There!”

  She lumbered to her feet, her breathing labored, and pressed a fisted hand to her back as she moved two steps back to look up at me critically. Plump fingers darted out to pluck at the amply cut, fussily trimmed bodice in which my modestly rounded bosom was lost. I curved in my shoulders protectively.

  She sighed. “There you go slumping again. It’s a good thing Ernest values a good character above good looks. I swear you look more like a ghost every day.”

  It was true. I would not be a glowing bride. The silver-blond hair I was secretly proud of was not enough to compensate for my pallor and the increasing prominence of my collar bones, but then Ernest Rogg was not the kind of man to kindle a glow in a girl’s cheeks.

  Father Rogg was a pharmacist. He owned his own shop and served the medical needs of the population, both human and animal, for many miles around. He was modestly prosperous—which is to say he had no debts to speak of—and his reliable, conscientious and devout nephew, Ernest, was both his assistant and hopeful heir-to-be. I have no doubt the parents of the other girls my age thought I’d landed on my feet a lot smarter than I deserved. I was equally sure their daughters harbored nary a pang of envy.

  “A couple of inches taken in on each side should about do it,” Mother Rogg mused, “but you’ll have to come down off the stool. I can’t reach way up to you from here, you know.”

  I jumped down, overturning the stool in the process. Ever since attaining my present height of five feet, six inches, I had been made to feel as if I had somehow done so deliberately, in order to discomfit the diminutive Roggs. I complained of it once to Malcolm Wilcox when, after completing the daily tidying of his house, I stayed on, as I often did, for tea. Without comment, except for the smile in his faded blue eyes and a twitch of his white moustache, he lent me his copy of Gulliver’s Travels and suggested I read the section about Lilliput. As he intended, the misadventures, at once comic and frustrating, of a human of normal size among a population of very little people persuaded me to take my own plight less seriously. Oh, how I missed that dear, wise man!

  “Did you hear me, Serena? You can get yourself out of my dress now, but be careful!”

  The warning was unnecessary. What with the pins and all, it was like trying to make my way out of a blackberry thicket. When I said as much to Mother Rogg, she agreed that it was, and, with a rare smile, began to help, but a loud knock on the front door cut her efforts short.

  “My stars and body! Who on earth ... ?” She pulled her apron over her head and tidied disarrayed hair with quick little, darting plucks of her fingertips. “Serena! Close the parlor door behind me so you can’t be seen... it could be Ernest, you know.”

  Heaven forbid that Ernest should see his intended in her pinned-up frumpy wedding dress before their nuptial day! I stood, huddled, in the airless gloom, my mood as dark as the parlor’s uninviting horsehair-stuffed suite. Pristine as the day it was bought, I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing the drab gun-metal-colored mohair with which it was upholstered. I preferred to think it was either the only fabric available, or the only kind the Roggs could afford at the time. I never asked, for fear of learning otherwise.

  I stared at the motes of dust dancing in the narrow shafts of sunlight beaming through the parlor’s stained, pin-holed shades, pairing and parting in a glittering gavotte animated by errant wafts of air. Lord knows my origins were as humble as that drifting dust; was it so wrong to wish for a brief flashing dance of my own?

  Self-pity ill becomes you, I told myself sternly. Ernest will be a good provider; you will have security, and one day you will have children to love and to love you in return. I knew, deep down inside, that romance couldn’t hold a candle to that kind of enduring love, but oh, what a lovely flame it must make!

  I sighed deeply, and the pins marking the tucks to be taken in the bodice of the wedding dress pricked me into renewing my efforts to extricate myself before Mother Rogg returned. When she did, she seemed oddly distracted, and I turned away, hoping to ease the dress off before she took frowning notice of my lack of progress.

  “It was Abner Quarles, Serena. He brought a letter.”

  I turned, unsurprised by the wonderment in her voice. Everyone the Roggs knew lived right here in Jericho, New York. The mail Mr. Quarles usually brought were bills to do with the pharmacy, delivered monthly from Albany and New York City, with religious periodicals arriving twice a month for Mother Rogg and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper every week for Father Rogg, because, he claimed, of his professional need to keep abreast of the burgeoning trade in patent remedies it advertised. But letters? Never.

  “It’s for you,” she added bemusedly, turning the envelope end over end as if to discover a different, less surprising addressee.

  For me? The only person I knew who had ever left town for longer than it took to shed a tear at a wedding or a funeral was Malcolm Wilcox, and he was dead. I looked at Mother Rogg expectantly as she continued to revolve the long oblong in her hands.

  “It’s from that orphanage. What business could they have with you after all these years?”

  What business indeed, I thought resentfully. I thrust out my hand, causing the pins in my bodice to prick the tender-skinned swell of my breasts as if to chastise me for my impatience. “Mother Rogg?”

  She surrendered the envelope reluctantly, the transfer fanning the illuminated dust into a frenzy. I inserted the tip of my pinky into the corner of the flap.

  “The dress first, missy!”

  I swallowed hard, stifling the protest that clamored in my head, and stood, wordlessly obedient, as Mother Rogg slowly peeled the dress from my arms and body and just as slowly folded it, all the while darting glances at the letter now in my hands. Pretending unawareness of her curio
sity, I heaped the musty fabric into her arms and waited until she had left the parlor before allowing my impatient finger entry into the mysterious missive.

  Folded inside the outer envelope was another, creased and stained, which had already been opened. It bore a Kansas postmark and was addressed to the agency that had arranged for my placing-out.” A note was pinned to it. To whom it may concern, it began in an awkwardly formed yet strangely familiar hand. Nine years ago, while wards of your institution, I and my twin sister, Serena Garraty....

  The words blurred before my eyes. Belle. The letter was from Belle. My hands trembled as I eagerly unfolded the pages. The note, which had probably originally been folded around them, fluttered to the floor. The letter was dated March 6th, my—our— twenty-first birthday, a month and a half ago.

  Dearest Reenie, I surely hope, if this letter reaches you, it finds you in good health. I have never forgotten the sadness of the day we parted at the Randall’s Island Orphanage in New York. Hardly before I knew what was happening, I was aboard the westbound train the Children’s Aid Society had assigned us. Before the week was out I found myself standing on a station platform in Kansas, where I was the first chosen from a whole lot of others....

  I smiled. Even as a child. Belle had been vain. It must have meant a lot to her to be the first chosen.

  I was taken by Mr. Ross Cooper to the Morning Star Ranch to be a companion for his ailing wife, Charlotte. She and Mr. Cooper have now passed on; but Morning Star is still my home, and I want you to come and share this wonderful place with me. I didn’t write before, because if you were adopted—I never was, but the Coopers always treated me like one of their own—I don’t reckon you had much of a say about your destiny before you reached your majority....

  Adopted or not, I hadn’t had much of a say either before or after my twenty-first birthday about my destiny, if that was what marriage to Ernest Rogg constituted. Destiny. Something foreordained by the stars. What was that Turkish word Malcolm Wilcox fancied? Kismet, that was it. Could Ernest be my—be anyone’s—kismet? If it weren’t so sad, I might have laughed.

  Please say you’ll come, my own dearest twin, if only for a visit. We have so much to catch up on and share. I don’t even know if your poor leg ever healed properly! Whatever you decide, telegraph me at the address below. That way I’ll at least know if you are still alive.

  It was signed, “Your lonely, ever-loving sister, Belle.”

  At the bottom, after the address, a few additional lines were scrawled: Remember that song of Mama’s about the pretty little horses? Bazz says you can have a little spotted Indian horse of your very own to ride across the prairie!

  The postscript, clearly a dashed-off afterthought, touched me deeply. Imagine Belle remembering the lullaby Mama used to sing! And who, I wondered, promising me a pony of my own, was Bazz? I traced my finger under the address: Morning Star Ranch, Ellsworth, Kansas. Kansas. It might as well be the moon. I would never know who Bazz was; never see Belle again ... unless....

  I hastily slipped back into my cambric wrapper, determined to test the waters with Mother Rogg before my resolve wavered. I found her in the kitchen, preparing potatoes for the midday meal. Her head was bent, and I marveled as always at the pin-wheeled precision of the tightly braided salt-and-pepper plaits that encircled it. Malcolm Wilcox, who did not admire her hidebound ways, wondered if a match set to the end of it would send her off into a sparking cartwheel like the fireworks on the Fourth of July. “Everyone is entitled to a little excitement, don’t you think, Serena?” The memory of his irreverence made me smile.

  Mother Rogg turned. Her face was carefully expressionless; but she couldn’t quell the glitter of curiosity in her lashless dark eyes, and I could have sworn that just before she spoke, her little button nose twitched with it. “I guess your letter brought good news. I haven’t seen you smile like that in a month of Sundays.”

  “It’s from my sister,” I said. “My twin sister, Sybelle. I haven’t seen her in ... let’s see it we were eleven when she left, it must be nine years, going on ten.” Ten years. Why, that’s almost half my life, I realized with a pang. “She’s living out in Kansas on a ranch called Morning Star and she wants me to visit, and please, mayn’t I?”

  The words rushed out like a torrent through a downspout. Mother Rogg’s mouth turned in on itself; her doughy cheeks puffed with indignation.

  “My stars! Have you taken leave of your senses? Your wedding in two months’ time and all there is to do? And where you think the money would be coming from—”

  “There’s the money I earned cleaning at Mr. Wilcox’s—”

  “More lollygagging than cleaning if you ask me! Besides, that’s your dowry. Promised to Ernest. Better spent on furnishings to last you a lifetime than a visit to Kansas that’d be over before you could take a deep breath. No, put it out of your mind, Serena. Now you know where your sister’s at, you can write to her,” she continued in a bright, brisk tone. “Why, you can have a regular correspondence, exchange photographs and the like.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied dully, knowing it wasn’t the same at all. Belle and I had been apart so long, I felt I hardly knew her anymore. After she had joined me in the orphanage where my father had placed me two years earlier, we failed to develop that close bond, born of intuitively shared joys and apprehensions, experienced by other identical twins I had known.

  I could not recall if we had enjoyed that special affinity before our separation—my memory of those hungry, fearful, helpless years is mercifully blurred—but I knew that neither words penned on paper nor likenesses captured by a camera could invoke it if we had. No, I had to see her, to smile into blue eyes set aslant like mine, touch those similarly blue-veined, white-skinned arms and stroke the mirror-image silver hair, which, last time seen, had been confined in a single, long braid. I recalled its brushy tip bouncing at her waist as she walked away from my infirmary bed and, as I tearfully thought at the time, out of my life forever. As I reread Belle’s letter, tears again filled my eyes. Oh, Belle! There must be a way! I can’t give up… not yet, anyway….

  Just then, I heard through the open window Father Rogg’s heavy, uneven steps on the front porch. Injured by a runaway carriage many years before, his twisted left leg increasingly protested the burden of his bulky body. By noon more often than not, his mood was testy and his temper short. It would do me no good to present my case to this judge.

  “Mother Rogg, is Ernest’s dinner ready to take to him yet?”

  She looked at me in surprise. Such eager willingness was uncharacteristic of me. For the last year, it had been Father Rogg’s custom to stay at home after the midday meal rather than return to the pharmacy, which left Ernest in sole charge until closing time. To compensate for the added duties and responsibility thrust upon him, it had been agreed between them that I would deliver a proper dinner to him every working day, which I dutifully did, whatever the weather or temperature. It was an agreement I hotly resented, for as Malcolm Wilcox had shrewdly observed when I expressed my indignation to him, the added responsibility served to strengthen Ernest’s position, the covered dishes I brought him merely icing on an already provided cake.

  I hastily packed a basket with the towel-wrapped dishes and, avoiding Father Rogg’s frowning entrance into the kitchen by a hair, made my escape down the back steps and out the rear gate to Maple Street. The unfurling new leaves of the well-grown trees that gave the street its name twinkled greenly in the late-April sunlight. The Mossbachers’ front walk, two doors down from the corner of Main Street, was edged with daffodils coaxed into early bloom by the unseasonably warm weather of the past week. I paused to admire their cheery golden trumpets, wondering as I did so if there were daffodils at the Morning Star Ranch in Kansas.

  Kansas. My mind fair boggled at the thought of that wild vastness. Could a person like me feel at home on those high, wild, windswept plains so unlike the verdant farmland ringing this quiet, pretty town? Did Belle?

>   “Home,” Malcolm Wilcox used to say, “is as much a state of mind as a place,” which was why, perhaps, I had felt more at home in his house—where we spent more time talking and reading together than I did cleaning—than anyplace else I had ever been.

  “Where you off to with that basket, Little Red Riding Hood?”

  I looked up, startled, to see Mrs. Mossbacher sweeping her front walk clear of fallen maple wings. Tall, gaunt and knobby-boned as an aged horse, with a long, wide-nostriled nose to match, her ready smile swept all such unkind comparisons away.

  I returned her smile. “It’s Ernest’s dinner, Mrs. Mossbacher. To make up for the extra hours he’s been working, you know.”

  She looked at me consideringly. “Do you think there’s a chance of that weedy intended of yours fattening up some before your wedding day? I swear, it’ll be like embracing a bag of antlers, Serena.”

  “He’s a good Christian man, Mrs. Mossbacher,” I protested weakly.

  She gave a loud, eloquent sniff. “Fussing about how good everyone else ought to be doesn’t add up to Christian goodness in my book. But I admit that when it comes to reckoning up vice and virtue most people in this town have doubts about my arithmetic.”

  “Maybe so,” I conceded, “but as for me, I think the sum of your parts is something to be reckoned with.”

  “Hah!” she snorted. “I guess I’ll take that as a compliment, Serena.”

  “That’s how it was meant, ma’am.” I ducked my head in a goodbye nod. “I’d better be going along now. Ernest’ll be fretting for his dinner.”

  Mrs. Mossbacher’s comment to that was conveyed wordlessly by the vigorous resumption of her sweeping. The rhythmic pump of her meaty forearms sent the maple wings swirling over my head, and as I rounded the corner onto Main Street I could still hear the brisk skritch-skratch of her broom on the herring-boned brick.

  The Rogg Pharmacy was well situated, flanked as it was by Harold Cannon’s hardware store on one side and Abe Seligmann’s dry goods on the other. A farmer could hitch up after milking, come into town to pick up barbed wire, bag balm and sewing notions for the missus, and be home before noon.