Duet for Three Hands

by Tess Thompson

  Her silent shouts to her husband overshadowed all.

  Please sit up, darling. Declare it all a terrible mistake.

  And in answer, I’m feeling right as rain, Lyds. What’s for supper? I could eat a small horse.

  Please, climb out between the boards and those awful eternal pillows and tease me about Sunday dinner being late because I practiced too long on the piano and forgot to stoke that blasted old wood stove you refuse to replace.

  Better to save than spend, Lyds.

  William was frugal; no need for modern appliances, he often said. Regardless of the electric stoves most of her friends took for granted, he felt obliged to wait another year or two before purchasing one. Better to save than spend, he said at least once a week to his daughters. Spoken like a banker, of course, who had seen the near financial collapse of 1927 and predicted that something worse was soon to come.

  William had been frugal. Past tense.

  Finally the last horrid step in the ritual of burial commenced. The men of Sam’s barbershop, acting as pallbearers instead of playing checkers and smoking cigars as they normally would on a Saturday afternoon, took him out the front door like the coffin was an ordinary piece of furniture. The flowers were tossed aside, in various locations, their usefulness done. Later, she recalled nothing of the burial, but there was dirt under her fingernails and mud on the midsection of her skirt. She could not fathom how that had come to be.

  When they returned home, her daughters each holding onto an arm because she could not walk alone, the sickly sweet smell of the flowers greeted them. Lydia gagged. Emma, her oldest at fourteen, guided her into a chair. Birdie brought a glass of water. At fourteen and twelve they were little ladies, taught in the southern style despite their northerner mother.

  The women from church had cleaned up, but they’d left the flowers, perhaps thinking they would be a comfort. They were not. She hated them, every petal, every stem. They covered her beloved piano, the formal sofa her daughters weren’t allowed to sit on, the side table where letters often waited for the post. Had the flowers multiplied while they were away watching William being lowered into the ground?

  She sent Birdie and Emma to wash up and put their nightgowns on. “I’ll be there shortly to tuck you in.”

  They didn’t argue, knowing when to leave and when to stay, a quality they’d inherited from their father.

  The silent conversation with William continued. It was softer now, without the other voices to interfere. I need to play you one more hymn, William. Your favorite hymn. But this time he did not answer. Already she was losing him. She collapsed onto the piano bench. But even here, the flowers mocked her. They occupied every inch of the keyboard’s closed cover.

  She twisted on the bench; her gaze swept the room. Angry energy coursed through her until she was hot and damp. She rose to her feet. The flowers must be removed so she could breathe again. They could not, would not, stop her from playing one last hymn for her William. Every last flower was destined for the compost, if it took her all night. She stomped to the sewing basket and pulled out her scissors. They must be cut to bits, their perky buds slaughtered. They must suffer.

  She turned and stumbled on the corner of the braided rug, the scissors like a sword in her hand. Wait. Where to start? The scissors dangled now from her index finger. William would know where to begin, but he wasn’t here. She closed her eyes, gripping the scissors. Please no, she begged the pain. Please don’t come until I get through this day and into bed. The pain heeded no pleas. It came in cruel waves, as if someone stabbed her with the benign sewing scissors, but worse because the wound was inside and could not be healed with ointment or pills.

  William waving to her from the driveway. Chicken potpie in the oven smelling like love, like life. That grin he always had when he first spotted her, even after fifteen years together.

  She’d come to greet him from the porch like most days, anxious to tell him of her morning, of the way the sparrows had seemed to sing harmony with her piano. First the wave, the grin, and then he collapsed onto the red dirt, inches from the green lawn, clutching his left arm. His last breath was of the red dust instead of the cool grass. Even that small comfort was denied her.

  Not even two days had passed since that last moment. And now? The house smelled of death.

  The flowers must suffer.

  The doctor assured her that William hadn’t suffered. “Heart failure. It was instantaneous. Didn’t feel a thing. That should be a comfort to you.” It, she wanted to tell him nastily and with emphasis, was not a comfort to her; she knew it wasn’t true. His last thoughts would have been of her and their daughters. He clung to life, to them, even in those final seconds.

  Now, the clock chimed eight. Four days ago William had read them a chapter from The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle. William thought the children should read all the Newbery Medal winners.

  Emma’s voice from the bedroom startled Lydia from her thoughts. “Mother, are you coming?”

  “Yes, right now.” Wake up, she ordered herself. Take care of your girls.

  They stared up at her, snuggled together in the double bed they shared. Lydia forced a placid smile. No need to scare them with her plans to murder the flowers. She tucked a cool white sheet around their shoulders. Dark smudges under their eyes betrayed grief.

  The house creaked, settling in for the night, as if shrinking back to size after holding half the town in its modest rooms. Birdie, still childlike, spoke with a sleepy voice. “Mother, stay with us until we fall asleep.”

  “Yes. Close your eyes now.”

  But Birdie’s blue eyes remained wide open, steadfast in the study of her mother’s face. “Do you think Daddy can see us from heaven, Mother?”

  She felt scratchy, salty tears behind her eyes. “I do.”

  Emma moved closer to Birdie in the bed.

  “Are we poor now, Mother?” Birdie asked.

  Lydia brushed blonde hair from Birdie’s freckled forehead. “Your Daddy took care to make sure we aren’t. His daddy’s daddy owned this house and property, so we’ll always have a place to live. He had some money put aside for us in case anything ever happened to him.” Just last week, he’d suggested he teach her to drive, though most women in Atmore, Alabama, did not. She’d agreed, pleased that he would think her capable. Thinking about how carefully he’d planned for them, it seemed to Lydia as if he knew he might die young. There was money and a small life insurance policy, too, that he’d mentioned to her a year ago. She hadn’t listened carefully, believing they had many years left together. No one expected a healthy man to die of natural causes at age forty-five. Was there something in him that suspected he wasn’t long for this earth?

  The worried look disappeared from Birdie’s eyes. “So we won’t have to move out of our house?”

  “No, of course not. What made you think that?”

  “One of her friends told her that when your daddy dies you have to move to the poor side of town.” Emma pulled her arms from under the sheet, clasping her hands together. “But Daddy took care of things, didn’t he?”

  “He did. All he ever cared about was taking care of us. Since the moment I met him, he started looking after me.”

  “You looked after him, too, Mother,” said Birdie. “He told us so.”

  Lydia’s eyes brimmed with tears. She brushed them aside. “I’ve been a very lucky woman. Now go to sleep. This has been a long, terrible day.”

  The girls nodded. Emma reached under the sheet and took Birdie’s hand. Their entwined fingers made a bump in the sheet in the shape of a heart. They closed their eyes, and Lydia watched until their grief-pinched faces turned peaceful in sleep.

  Now, the flowers. She tiptoed out of the bedroom to the parlor and slipped her feet into her husband’s work boots for the first time. Only a size too big. Enormous feet and hands for a woman, she thought with disgust. How a man as handsome as William had ever overlooked her feet she had no idea. They were flat and wide, like a duck’s
.

  In the last of the evening light, she pushed the wheelbarrow close to the porch, filled it with flowers, then took the lot of them out to her compost heap near the chicken coop. As she walked, her feet moved up and down in the boots, rubbing against her toes and heels. William’s voice in her head: You’ll get a blister, Lyds. Do you have to do this now?

  She averted her gaze from the spot where he’d fallen. Once she reached the compost, she stopped, clutching both handles of the wheelbarrow. The flowers lay atop one another, their blooms bowed in repose, like dancers taking a final bow. They were benign. Of course they were. How had she thought otherwise? They were nothing but innocent flowers that she’d lovingly cared for. What was the matter with her?

  She let go of the wheelbarrow and slumped against the side of the chicken coop; all the venom evaporated, replaced by awful pain. The last of the sun peeked through the pines at the edge of her property, making long, slanted shadows. How William had loved those trees. When they first met he’d regaled her with stories of running through the forest, playing cops and robbers and war and other little boy games. He’d spent most of his life looking at the trees sway in the Alabama breezes.

  The old barn cat, Piggy, appeared, purring and pressing against Lydia’s legs. “Oh, Piggy, I hate this.” She knelt and then sat on the hard ground. Piggy climbed onto her lap, resting his rather large head (Birdie said he had the face of a pig, thus the name) on Lydia’s knee. Lydia caressed him absently. Piggy purred louder. Something scurried, probably a lizard or mouse, and Piggy jumped as if possessed by the devil and ran toward the sound. Sighing, Lydia rose to her feet and brushed the back of her skirt with her hands.

  She left the flowers and the wheelbarrow and William’s trees, walking across the yard in his boots until she was inside and seated at the piano. She could play How Great Thou Art from memory. Her fingers knew it and so many other hymns, just like her legs knew walking. She didn’t sing along like she did when she played at church, but as she played the last refrain, William’s rich baritone seemed to fill the room.

  Afterward, she whispered the Twenty-Third Psalm and walked over to the shelf where her special things were displayed: a silver vase given to her by her mother when Lydia graduated high school, framed baby pictures of the girls, her mother’s formal tea set, and the Tyler family Bible. She turned to the Bible’s front page, where William’s mother had written:

  William Benjamin Tyler. Born December 10, 1882.

  Using her best pen, she filled in the date of his death: June 10, 1928. She sat in the parlor as night swallowed the last of the light, gripping the Bible between cold hands, unable to think of a prayer to ask of God. She could think only, why, why, why? Then, William’s voice:

  Sweetheart, go to bed.

  She left his boots by the front door. In their bedroom, she slipped into her cotton nightgown and took the pins from her hair, letting it fall around her shoulders, shivering despite the summer heat. The feel of her hair about her shoulders always made her feel young, like the upstate New York farm girl she once was. She’d come to Atmore fifteen years ago to marry William, bringing with her nothing but the clothes in her suitcase and leaving behind the promise of a career as a concert pianist. She was eighteen when she married the thirty-year-old William Tyler. Who she was before she was his wife was a dim memory, like the faded photograph of her at sixteen, put away now in a neglected drawer.

  In the mirror, she examined her reflection, wondering if the last several days had changed her. No, it was the same face as the one William kissed only days ago. She touched her cheek, thinking of that last kiss, wishing she’d held his touch for a moment longer, had kissed him properly like when they’d first been married. If only she’d known to say a final goodbye instead of taking for granted his promise to return for lunch.

  She undid her dark blonde hair from the braid she always wore and began to brush it. One hundred strokes will keep it shiny, her mother always advised. Thick, it reached the middle of her back and was crimped from being in the braid so that it appeared to have movement, like a wheat field swaying in the wind. It was her eyes, her mother once said, that made her pretty. Framed by thick lashes, they were a light blue that looked like a hazy sky one day and the blue of a tropical sea the next. Her mother had said to her the day before she left for university, “Your eyes are remarkable, Lydia, and make you a great beauty. Use your beauty for good, as it’s a great responsibility.” A great beauty? This was not true to anyone but her mother. Lydia suspected that women never saw themselves as they truly were, no matter how they stared at their own reflections. And their mothers? They surely did not see their daughters as they truly were, for love distorted their view. At the time, she’d dismissed both her mother’s compliment and her advice, knowing her face was long, her lips thin, and there were the freckles—they covered almost every inch of her almost pointy nose. Simply awful. There was the problem of her height, as well. She was tall, way too tall for a woman.

  Tall women could not be beautiful, Lydia thought, so she put aside her mother’s words and became accomplished and educated instead, not worried over her appearance until the day she met William.

  She was in Atmore during a break from college with a friend from school who was born and raised in Atmore. The second evening of her visit they’d gone to a dance at the Grange. There he was, looking at her from across the room, with a slight smile on his face. His name was William, she learned later, and he worked at the bank. But at that moment she knew only that he was tall (taller than she) and handsome in a no-doubt-he-was-of-English-descent kind of way, blond and fair-skinned, with dark blue eyes. He raised his hand in greeting. She quickly looked away but not before she saw him grin wildly at her. A blush started from her toes and ended at the top of her head.

  Later, waiting on the porch for her friend, she heard the door creak, and when she looked up he was there again. She watched as his breath caught and he smiled at her once more. He thinks I’m lovely, she thought. How wonderful it was. The way he looked at her, really looked at her, as if she were truly beautiful, made it true. For even with her height and unusually large hands, he’d thought her a great beauty, just as her mother had. During their years together, he’d been a man of a thousand compliments, with a rebuttal to every self-criticism she might utter. Now she would be no one to any man. She would no longer have the privilege of feeling beautiful in the particular way that love brings. William, who will help me decide which hat to wear?

  She moved to the bed, bone weary. The room consisted of a simple wooden bed frame, a quilt in a pattern of red stars over the bed, and, in the corner, a rocking chair where she’d nursed both her babies. Perching on the side of the bed, she imagined slipping under the cool sheets but somehow could not move. It was the prospect of sleeping alone in their marital bed—impossible. Her fingers traced the outline of a star on the quilt, and she pulled his pillow onto her lap. Had she been a good wife? Please, God, let it be so.

  She wept silently into his pillow. After the tears stopped, she made the bed up again, her strong hands halting their work only long enough to breathe in the scent of her husband from his pillow. Tobacco and shaving cream. At the window, she peered into the backyard. Fireflies had come to the dark, sparks of undaunted light. They never ceased to delight her. Often William captured them in a jar for the children, tiny gifts that were really only a loan, for they were let out into the world before bedtime. None of them could keep anything beautiful trapped for long.

  William’s voice came to her again. Sleep with the children. Nodding, as if he were in the room, and holding the pillow close to her chest, she crossed the hallway to her daughters’ room. Pushing Birdie gently into the middle of the bed, she climbed in, placing William’s pillow under her cheek.

  Birdie shifted in her sleep, making the purring noise of a kitten. Lydia snuggled closer. She stayed in the same position for most of the night, the yearned-for yet elusive sleep thwarted by the hollow, fearful pain in her chest th
at felt like a vise. Outside the windows, the crickets chirped a rhythm that after a time began to sound like: I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.

  Finally, just before dawn, the crickets ceased, and the emerging day fell silent. She might have uttered a response to fill the quiet, but nothing came, not even the sound of William’s voice.

  Chapter 3

  Jeselle

  * * *

  On a cloyingly hot day in early September, Mr. Bellmont demanded roast beef for his supper. So after breakfast, Mama left for the market, wearing her yellow straw hat and the brown, cotton dress with the bell sleeves that cupped her muscular shoulders. “Jes, wash up the dishes while I’m gone.” Almost six feet tall and lean, Mama pushed open the screen door using her backside; it slammed against the side of the house and then came to a close with a bang. Mama powered across the yard, scattering the brown, decaying magnolia blossoms with the force of her rapid gait, and then disappeared around the side of the house.

  To the hum of the ceiling fan that swirled warm air around the kitchen and offered little relief, Jeselle scrubbed away the morning’s grits stuck to the bottom of a pan, perspiration soaking the collar of her thin cotton dress, where her hair hung in two braids. She was small for thirteen, willowy, with a delicate bone structure. Jeselle looked like her father’s mother, according to Mama, with the same heart-shaped face and dimples on either side of her full mouth. Unfortunately, Jeselle would never be able to judge for herself if this were true or not. Her father and his parents were all dead, buried in the colored cemetery on the other side of town. Jeselle was only weeks old when he died coming home from work, killed by white men for the dollar he’d made that day washing dishes. Mama had come to the rich part of town looking for work and through divine providence, there was no other way to explain it, claimed Mama, she’d found Mrs. Bellmont.

  While she worked, Jeselle watched Whitmore in the garden, sketching a fallen, forgotten peach, shriveled brown and punctured with holes from a bird’s voracious feast. The other peaches, harvested in June, were in jars, canned by Mama and lined in neat rows in the cool basement. He sat on the grass under the shade of the peach tree with his sketch pad propped on his knees. His eyes moved from the peach to the paper and back again, while his left hand sketched, holding the pencil in a way both assured and relaxed. With his other hand, he occasionally swiped at flies and bees hovering near his head.