“We can’t begin to understand your pain,” Hattie directed at the missionary before turning back to Grace. “But that said, you have to fight. For the sake of Violet, if not your own.”
“There’s a time to grieve, but there’s also a time when grief becomes an imposition.” Adelaide smiled and took a breath. “I was a little girl when my father taught me that,” her left cheek twitched faintly, “after my mother passed.” She pressed her palm against that side of her face. “We admire people who overcome tragedy. We’re not comfortable with those who wallow in it.”
“Adelaide!” Hattie said. “I certainly hope you’re not putting your own comfort above my sister’s.”
Grief made his way toward Grace. “What an insufferable—”
“On the contrary,” Grace said. “Adelaide is simply expressing what everyone else is too afraid to say.” She turned toward the missionary. “They all walk on eggs around me because I lost a child. But not you. Never you.”
Adelaide accepted Grace’s words as validation and settled in her seat, a large goose smoothing her feathers. Hattie sat still, her mouth in a thin line.
“Look at her,” Grief said of the missionary. “Nothing but a fat pig, feeding off your pain. The gall.” He leaned against the arm of the couch and ran his fingers through Grace’s locks. “She can’t see past her own stomach. How could she understand your heartache?” He lifted a handful of Grace’s hair to his nose and inhaled. “They don’t deserve to share your misery.”
In that moment, Grace decided to push her pain down inside, where she alone could touch it, where no one else could taint it with their dirty fingers. She’d get out of bed every morning, dress herself, feed Violet, do all that the world and God required of her. It wouldn’t be easy, but she’d find a way. Grace leaned forward and glanced at Violet in the kitchen.
“A handsome enough girl,” said Grief, “though without Daisy’s shine.”
“She’s mine,” Grace shot at him. “I have to love her.”
“Of course you love her,” Hattie said. “No one ever thought otherwise.” She and Adelaide exchanged nervous glances.
Had she said those words aloud? Grace willed herself to do better. She began with the smile, pushing both ends of her lips up, away from the pain she hid inside. She stood and asked, “How can I help with dinner?”
“That’s a fine start,” Hattie said, and hugged her. “Let’s get that bird on the table.”
* * *
Grace continued to smile throughout the meal, the clean-up, and the pleasant parlor conversation. She wore her new expression like a corset, cinched at the middle, pinching the heart and lungs. Those who thought grief had a beginning and an end were particularly grateful for her effort. Her smile, or at least the semblance of it, eased their discomfort.
Only Violet found her mother’s countenance unnerving. She was reminded of a snake before it strikes.
* * *
Owen stood at the edge of the yard, catching glimpses of Grace and Violet as they passed by the open back door. He closed his eyes and breathed in the turkey and all that it promised. A couple slices of gravy-soaked bread, a mound of apple dressing, a chunk of plum pudding. His family around him. For a moment he thought to go inside, but knew the stink of whiskey would upset them and spoil the day.
* * *
When they finally returned from Aunt Hattie’s, Violet found Stanley sitting on the porch waiting for her.
“I’ve missed you!” she said.
“It’s awfully late for company,” Adelaide said, and Stanley stood to leave.
“It’s too cold out here.” Grace eyed the missionary and held her new smile in place. “Follow us around to the kitchen. You can visit inside.”
Once the women settled into their bedrooms, Violet shoveled more coal into the stove, opened the drafts, and stoked the flame. She grabbed Stanley by the hand, intending to lead him over to the fire, but he yelped so loudly, she let go.
He opened his palms, faceup. Infection oozed from angry wounds sliced across his fingers. “Ain’t nothing. All the breaker boys get cut. Can’t help it when you’re picking slate.”
Violet led him by the elbow over to the sink. “I hate your father. What was he thinking, sending you into that mine?”
Stanley yanked his arm away. “Don’t go dragging Pa’s name through the mud.”
The seriousness in his voice surprised her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I . . . I didn’t know.”
“I’m sorry too.” He offered his elbow and a shy smile.
Violet hopped up on a stool and pumped enough water to fill a basin halfway, then poured in half as much kerosene. “Now, soak them,” she said, giving him the stool so he could reach.
“Are you trying to kill me?” he gasped at the first sting.
“Do you want to lose your fingers to infection?”
“That’s what Tommy Davies asked when he saw me. Piss on your hands is what he said. All the breaker boys do. And hand up to God, it helps.” Stanley raised his right hand, but Violet dunked it back into the kerosene bath. “For crimony’s sake!” He winced in pain.
“That’s disgusting!” Violet turned up her nose as she pulled out a bowl from the cupboard.
“Tommy’s a mule boy, now,” Stanley continued. “Said maybe I could help him tend the animals sometime.”
Violet eyed Stanley to make sure he hadn’t moved, before trying her hand at a poultice of bread and lard. She rubbed the ingredients between her palms as if making a piecrust, then put the doughy lump aside in the bowl. After half an hour of soaking, Stanley gingerly patted his hands dry. Violet rubbed the paste of bread and lard across his cuts, then wrapped his hands in bandages as best she could. “Mother says this is good for infection.”
“Let’s hope it works fast. I have to go back to work tomorrow.”
* * *
The next morning, Stanley carefully unwrapped the bandages and scraped off the bread and lard clumps sticking to his fingers. He looked at his hands, glistening with animal fat, and noticed the infection had calmed some. He placed both poultices into a drawer for later use and headed off to the mine.
Long before Stanley ever worked in the breaker, he used to stand at the square, look down across the Lackawanna River, and picture the Sherman Colliery as a kingdom, as evil as any in Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. It spanned a hefty tract of land between Market and Green Ridge streets, and blackened everything it touched—grass, flowers, trees on both sides of the river, and the river itself. The men took the worst of it, some coated in coal dust, others caked in it. Pitch-dark structures housed blacksmiths and carpenters, powder and steam, ogres and trolls. The breaker, a one-hundred-foot giant made up of windows and stairs and odd-angled stories, sat hungrily in the center waiting to feed, its metal teeth able to chew tons of coal at a sitting.
* * *
Stanley looked at his hands, then fell into line with the other boys entering the building. He sat at the third chute, a position assigned to him on his first day, and straddled the boards. The two boys above him picked through the coal, tossing away the largest, most obvious pieces of slate and bone. As the coal passed through Stanley’s station, he had to sort more carefully, which was nearly impossible since the coal dust blocked the natural light. He didn’t complain, though. The boy at the bottom had it the worst. He was closer to the foreman and his whip.
At mealtime, Tommy found Stanley finishing the last of his cold cabbage. After a week of ten-hour days at the chute, Stanley’s back had started to bend like the crook of a pear tree.
“You need to stand up when you can. If not, you’ll get stuck that way.” Tommy nodded in the direction of several boys who stood upright, yet their backs were rounded like old men. “Come on. The walk will do you good.”
Stanley followed Tommy toward a barn about twenty feet to the right of the mine’s entrance. Inside, countless bales of hay rested against one another, and one lone mule stood in the last stall.
“Who’s
that?” Stanley asked, nodding toward the white beast.
“Most cantankerous mule a fellow will ever meet. Refuses to work and that’s the end of it. Mr. Sherman paid two hundred dollars for her six months ago, and she’s never seen the inside of the mine.” Tommy grabbed hold of the plaited whip around his neck, moved toward the stall, and threw a handful of old carrots in her direction. The mule peeled back her lips to expose her teeth and snorted. “Won’t let herself be harnessed. Won’t let herself be led down.” She kicked up her front legs, as if punctuating Tommy’s words with her own exclamation points, then turned sideways and ignored him.
Stanley edged up to the gate of the stall and extended his hand for her to sniff. The faint smell of bread and lard still clung in the folds of his palms.
“She’ll bite you as quick as look at you,” Tommy warned before turning toward several harnesses hanging from nails on the wall. He fingered each, looking for one not too new or too worn. New leather chafed the necks of the mules causing them to buck. Old leather split easily, causing the car to break away from the animal.
“That’s a good girl,” Stanley cooed as the mule rubbed her nose across his hand.
“Well, I’ll be. How’d you do that?”
“You can’t come at her head-on.” Stanley gently stroked her snowy neck. “She startles.”
“How could you tell?”
“She’s been beat.” Stanley paused to stare at the beast, and she stared back. “It’s in the eyes.” He started petting her again. “You want something to eat?” he asked her, bending slowly to retrieve one of the carrots. The mule ate from his hand.
“Think you can get her into the mine? Boss’ll make you a nipper for sure. Get you out of that breaker.”
Stanley looked at the cuts on his fingers, swollen and oozing again after half a day’s work. “Opening doors sounds a hell of a lot better than picking through slate. Give me a week,” Stanley said as he strolled out of the barn whistling.
* * *
Every day at mealtime, Stanley entered the barn and approached the mule. “Well hello there, Sophie.” He named her for a mutt he sometimes played with in the neighborhood. “And how are you today?” He started to pet the side of her head, and introduced the harness by inches. First the smell of it, then the feel of it as he rubbed it along her snout. On the seventh day, Stanley and Sophie sauntered out of the barn and toward the mine’s entrance.
“Don’t spook her now,” Stanley said as he handed the reins to Tommy.
The following day, Stanley was promoted to nipper.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GRACE SAT ON THE EDGE OF HER BED, waiting for Adelaide to complete her bedtime ritual of Bible reading and prayer in the room across the hall. If the previous weeks were any indication, she would be asleep ten minutes after what Grace considered to be an overly enthusiastic “Amen.” She clutched a handbill that read,
ROSALEE SPEADS TO THE DEAD
At Poli’s Theatre
Performances held in the evening, 7:00 and 10:00
December 6, 1913, in the year of our Lord
The words were centered in a hand-drawn frame of what appeared to be souls in various stages of flight. One picture in particular had caught Grace’s attention and compelled her to slip the fly sheet into her pocket when she’d seen it on the counter earlier that day at the company store. In the upper right-hand corner, a small outline of a girl seemed to look off at something beyond her. A sketched bow bloomed from the top of her head. Daisy. Grace knew the child to be her own as soon as she laid eyes on her, and understood what she had to do, in spite of the church’s teachings on the subject. She would go that night and speak to her daughter. Grace looked at the drawing again, closed her eyes, and imagined a child, not lost to her forever, but rather sleeping peacefully in the room across the hall. At that very moment, Adelaide’s snoring began, shaking Grace out of her reverie.
She put on a broadcloth coat, attempted to button it at the belly, found it had thickened more than she thought reasonable, considering her ongoing dyspepsia, and left it open from the waist down. She pocketed the baptism photograph of Daisy and the almost two dollars in coins from her dresser, a donation from the women’s Sunday school class after they’d heard about Owen’s sudden departure. What would the ladies say if they knew how Grace intended to spend their money? But she couldn’t think about that. Daisy was waiting for her in a theatre downtown.
A minute or two after Grace stepped out the kitchen door, Violet threw off her covers and got up from the couch fully dressed. She’d taken to sleeping that way since her father had left. Someone had to keep an eye on her mother. That’s what the neighbor women kept saying, and she knew the duty fell to her. She laced up her boots, put on her coat, and slipped through the front door, into the icy December night. Out on the porch, she looked left and right before noticing her mother’s footsteps in a fresh dusting of snow. Violet followed the trail toward North Main Avenue.
The electric lights that made Scranton’s downtown famous hadn’t yet reached the streets of Providence. Gas-fueled flames flickered overhead, lighting the path of stray snowflakes as they floated easily down to the hard-packed dirt road. Once Violet made the turn onto North Main Avenue from Spring Street, she saw her mother about thirty feet ahead. Grace moved at a good clip and Violet struggled to keep up.
About ten minutes later, when Grace had made the left onto Green Ridge Street, Violet lost sight of her completely. She continued, uncertain and uneasy about her mother’s intentions, but determined to follow her nonetheless. Just as Violet rounded the corner onto Green Ridge, she plowed straight into a figure in the shadows. As Violet turned to run, a hand reached out and grabbed her by the back of the coat.
“You’re not to tell anyone about this. Is that understood?” her mother said.
Violet responded with a vigorous nod.
“Not Adelaide, not Stanley, not Aunt Hattie, not Father. Understand?”
Violet wondered about her father, whose name hadn’t been uttered in the house for some months. She felt sure her mother had forgotten him. Violet remembered hearing the fight that night and tiptoeing out to the kitchen just as the door slammed shut. Her mother had sat stone-eyed at the table, muttering something about God forsaking her. Violet had thought to comfort her, but without turning around, Grace yelled, “Go back to bed!” And then, as if someone else were in the room, she said, “God forgive me. I can’t look at her now.”
With this new mention of her father, Violet dared to hope.
“Do you understand?” her mother repeated, reminding Violet of the question at hand.
A second quick nod.
Grace took Violet by the coat sleeve and continued toward town.
* * *
Wonder temporarily supplanted Violet’s anxiety as they approached Wyoming Avenue at night. Electrified bulbs announced Poli’s All-Star Vaudeville on the theatre’s roof and illuminated the plate-glass windows below. An enormous awning curled over doors made of what Violet determined to be pure gold. Once inside the lobby, her mother stepped toward a booth and pushed four dimes across the counter.
“Second door on your right.” A white-gloved woman handed two tickets to Grace. “An usher will be there to seat you.”
Violet noticed her mother walk away without a word. “Thank you, kindly,” she said before scurrying to catch up. Several more white-gloved women sold candy and lemonade under a sign reading, Refreshments. The smell of popcorn rose from a red and white pushcart, alerting Violet to a hunger she hadn’t noticed before, but she knew better than to ask for a treat.
Violet paused as they entered the theatre through the door to the orchestra section. She instantly recognized the balconies, the velvet curtains, and even the same burgundy-jacketed man, from the day she and Stanley had sneaked in.
“Tickets, please.”
An easeled sign advertised the evening’s entertainment, a spiritualist named Rosalee who Specializes in Automatic Writing. Violet didn’t know t
he meaning of the words, but the same urge to flee that had possessed her when she’d been there with Stanley gripped her again.
“Let’s go home, Mother. I’ll make you some milk. You like warm milk.”
Her mother looked ahead, her eyes searching the crowd.
As the usher led them to their third-row seats, Violet scanned the audience, hoping for a familiar face. She found all sorts of people settled in the anchored rows, all strangers. There were women, powdered and perfumed, draped in silk and topped with feathers, accompanied by gentlemen in dark-colored suits of serge or mohair. They seemed comfortable in such lavish surroundings. There were people like Mother in attendance as well, men and women, whose faces seemed as worn as the coats on their backs.
Grace continued to quietly peer ahead as she settled into her seat.
“Is Father coming?” Violet knew this to be an unlikely possibility, but voiced it just the same. Speaking about her father soothed her somehow.
The question was met with more silence. Violet decided to change her approach. She tugged at her mother’s sleeve. “Look,” she said, pointing to the plaster cherubs standing watch over the box seats. “So beautiful.”
Her mother pulled her arm away abruptly, then seemed to reconsider. “They’re lovely,” she said, turning her lips into the palatable expression others had grown to appreciate. She held the smile and aimed it at Violet, who recoiled. Grace faced forward again, slipped her hand into her coat pocket, and removed Daisy’s baptism picture. She traced the edges of the sun-kissed face, occasionally allowing her finger to tickle Daisy’s nose, as if to tease her out of the frame.
Several minutes later, a big-stomached man with a milky right eye sat down next to Grace. “Could never hide her light under a bushel,” he said, looking at the photograph, seeming to admire the bow-topped girl staring beyond the camera. “Looks ready to jump first chance she gets.”
Grace kept her eyes on the picture, lifted her finger, and waited. Daisy remained fixed in the scene.
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