The Stills

by Jess Montgomery

  “He can’t rally out of diabetes,” says the doctor. “It’s not something he brought on himself. He’d have likely fallen into this condition, or wasted away, even if he hadn’t drunk Marvena’s hooch.”

  Ire rises in Lily—for God’s sake, the boy is dying. Lily swallows her rage. “I can take him over to Chillicothe. It’s not that far, and he could be back in a few days, and wouldn’t Dora rather see him healthy, one last time—”

  Leroy’s expression is overcome by a gossamer of hope but quickly resettles into even deeper hardness than before. “No. He shouldn’t have done what he did.”

  He is, Lily realizes, putting all his pain and anger and bitterness at the dire fate that’s been heaped on his beloved, at what he must surely see as the Good Lord’s rejection of his prayers and acts of faith, onto his children. The only sweetness he has left is for his wife. Lily shudders. When she passes, will softness or love return to him in any measure at all to dole onto his children?

  “Please.”

  Behind him, Dora appears, panting from the effort to climb the stairs. She already looks a specter, fading from time and place and memory.

  Leroy wraps his arms around her. “You should be resting. I thought you were on the couch downstairs—I’d never have left your side.”

  “But soon I’m gonna have to leave yours,” she says. Leroy gasps, and Lily can no longer bear to look at this couple, clinging to each other. “And I need to know you will take care of all of our children, not be too harsh when they fail or fall or get hurt.”

  For the next few moments the only sound in the room is Zebediah’s ragged breathing.

  * * *

  Less than ten minutes later, the doctor and Lily have Zebediah in the back seat of her Model T. The doctor is in the back with him, settling a quilt over him, while Lily and Ruth are spreading coarse-ground cornmeal around the tires. Lily had already cranked up the automobile and the engine runs with jittery reluctance in the cold. Now the snow is settling and sticking to the road. Thank God that Ruth—smart girl—had thought to grab not just quilts for her brother, but cornmeal to give the automobile tires traction.

  “Will you be all right to get Daisy and the wagon back up on your own, Ruth?” Lily doesn’t like thinking of the possibility of Daisy misstepping in the dark and the wagon overturning, Ruth being injured or worse. “I can come up with you, hike back down—”

  “Ma’am. Course I can.”

  Lily nods. “Just don’t be afraid to give Daisy a flick, like I did. And maybe give her a lump of sugar, if she behaves on the trek.”

  “Yes’m,” Ruth says. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she reaches in her coat pocket, holds her hand out to Lily. “Thank you for all you done—whatever happens. You didn’t hafta.” Lily was just doing her job. But to deny whatever Ruth is offering would be an insult. Lily holds her hand out. Something sharp presses into her palm.

  She turns her hand upright, stares at the item.

  “When Zeb got home, he wasn’t making much sense,” Ruth says. “He just said this came from a fella he found up by Mrs. Sacovech’s still, that the fella was hurt. Then his speech got so slushy and jumbled, I couldn’t make sense of what came next.”

  Lily must hurry Zebediah to the hospital, an hour away in good weather. But the item, glinting in her hand in the last of the dimming daylight, rivets her to the spot.

  It is a pin in the shape of a bright blue shield, edged as well as lettered in gold:

  Bureau of Prohibition Agent

  US Treasury Department

  CHAPTER 8

  FIONA

  Thursday, November 24, 1927

  4:10 p.m.

  Fiona stands as still as possible as George pulls her head back by her hair, his other hand knuckling into her lower back, pressing her body to his. She wants to avert her gaze from his hard glare, but she can’t move. She wills her eyes to simply convey softness. Submissiveness. Not pleading, certainly not angry. Tipping her look toward either might trigger George to rip out her hair. Or snap her neck.

  They are in her old bedroom, door slammed shut. He’s never been this brutal before. Now she can’t hold back tears of pain from seeping to the corners of her eyes. In the blurry periphery of her vision, she sees the angry flare of his nostrils, discerns from the slight lift of his cheeks that his lips bear a disgusted snarl. If she could see the whole of his face, from a safe distance, she has no doubt it would be like gazing upon a snare.

  Then George blinks, and for a second she sees a sliver of something else. Fear. Hurt.

  Hurt?

  Yes. Hurt. George had trusted her—or at least assumed that she was glib enough not to question his actions behind his back. He must have heard something between her and Elias that set him off, but what? How long had he been standing outside the door?

  Fiona forces her breath to even and slow. Forces herself to think.

  The solid oak door had been shut. She and Elias had been talking at a near whisper, Elias because he was scared and in pain, Fiona because she wished to appear soothing while digging for truths she could eventually forge into a weapon to use against George.

  Perhaps it is not anything he heard in particular, but simply that Elias and Fiona had been talking, and at length. George does not like anything he cannot control, and he had not been in control of the conversation. Once, at the Cincinnati mansion, she and Klara had been conferring before a dinner party when George walked into the dining room, making them both jump with his snapped question: What are you two yammering on about? Perplexed, she’d replied, The number of place settings for tonight’s dinner. He’d looked relieved.

  Now the scant twin slivers of hurt and fear in his eyes, just behind the cruel anger, embolden her. George Vogel is vulnerable after all. And she can use that.

  “Oh, George,” Fiona sighs.

  He jerks her hair, but she does not yelp. Keeps her eyes soft and embracing on his.

  “What were you talking about?” George asks.

  “You,” Fiona says as evenly as possible. Then, though doing so painfully rips several strands of hair from her scalp, she forces herself forward, just enough so her lips brush his.

  George lets go of her. She staggers back. He shoves her, so that she lands on the edge of the bed. Her head and neck are throbbing and she longs to rub them. More than that, she wishes she could strike George. But she sits still, staring up at him evenly. As if they are equals.

  “What?” George looks at his hands, seems surprised to see strands of her hair.

  He slaps his hands together. She forces herself not to stare at her hair falling to the rug.

  “Elias told me everything.” Fiona waits for shock to fully cover George’s face. She savors the sense of satisfaction over spawning such a reaction, more intimate in some ways than their lovemaking. Before the sense can make her recklessly giddy, she adds in a soft voice, “About the plans for the property here. That it’s not going to be a warehouse. That you’re going to have your trucks of legal alcohol hijacked, collect the insurance, and then bring the alcohol here for reconstituting and reselling.” She musters an admiring smile. “George, it’s brilliant!”

  George stares at her. “Why in the hell would he tell you that?”

  “Because he thinks it’s brilliant, too.” So far—the truth. Or at least part of it. Now to keep her voice even for a lie. She leans forward conspiratorially. “He told me that Aunt Nell has told him that she would only ever sell this farm to me. No matter the consequences.”

  George plops down on the rocker. His girth sends the rocker shooting back. But it doesn’t tip over. Even a wooden rocker seems to know not to make a fool of George Vogel. “Oh yeah? And when would she have told him that?”

  She must answer carefully.

  At last, she allows herself to look away from George, to give herself a moment to think without his gaze bearing down on her.

  Her eyes trail to the armchair across from George, to a pillow in an embroidered cover. It’s the fir
st cross-stitch Fiona had ever done, a scene of a young woman walking beside a pond, in a pink dress, with a matching pink parasol, blithely unaware of the swan gazing at her from the water’s edge. Fiona had so wanted that embroidery kit from the notions and fabric store in Kinship years ago, but Aunt Nell had said it was too advanced for a first-time project. Yet it had shown up weeks later under the Christmas tree, a gift from Uncle Henry.

  She moves to the chair, picks up the pillow as she sits down. Now Fiona’s hands shake a little as she holds the pillow in her lap. Who had been right? Both of them. She’d only finished half of the pillow, disappointed by how her lumpy stitches botched the charm of the image. Aunt Nell—never one to let anything go to waste—had finished the pillow with smooth, perfect stitches.

  The pillow’s half-lumpy, half-smooth scene of a genteel yet exotic place—one with parasols and swans—seemed to taunt Fiona for the rest of her time with Uncle Henry and Aunt Nell: she hadn’t seen the project through, not by herself.

  But this time, she was determined. She would see her plan through.

  She looks up at George, replies matter-of-factly, “When you were here with him to visit Aunt Nell and Uncle Henry three weeks ago.”

  George stops rocking. He leans forward, elbows to knees, clasps his hands. Steady, steady. Fiona keeps her eyes unwaveringly on his.

  “We were together the whole visit,” George says.

  Fiona swallows. He’s not going to deny or try to explain away that they’d visited, and yet he’d told her that this was his first time on the farm.

  She forces another smile, takes a risk, hedges her bet that he won’t recall every detail of the visit against her observation of how much happens on any given day with George, what’s more over the course of three weeks. “Were you? There was never a time that Aunt Nell and Elias walked the grounds together, while you and Uncle Henry talked business, man-to-man?”

  Doubt flashes across George’s face, but he says, “Well, of course there would have been—though your uncle was a tough one. Didn’t want to sell, even when I told him how much it would mean to you to have this place.” George gestures around the room. Well, of course he wouldn’t have revealed his real purpose for wanting the farm. “Told him how sentimental you are.” George gives a cold smile, showing only the tips of his upper teeth. Sentimental.

  But she says softly, “That is right, darling.” It takes all her resolve not to scoff. She’s … well, she wonders—her head is pounding so hard that it’s hard to think—What is the opposite of sentimental? There’s nothing she wants to reflect back on. She only wants to look forward, to a future in which she is in control of her and her children’s fates.

  Not George. Or anyone else. Just her.

  “Elias should have told me—not you,” George says. Ah, good. His wrath is now turning from her to Elias. “And why would your aunt have told him?”

  “Elias says she told him that she knows I always wanted to have more children.”

  True, but Martin had been content with one son. Said they could offer more to one child than to many.

  “But she also told him that I had such trouble in my early years.” Not true; she’d never had a miscarriage. Fiona looks down as if the notion of her having had relations with her first husband is shameful. Her face reddens, as if she is blushing modestly.

  But the heat rises from a panicky thought: What if she’s been wrong in assuming that George would be pleased with news of a child?

  After all, she’d been surprised that Martin had been content with one child.

  She’d been telling herself that this baby would give her leverage—but what if George feels pinned down by the news? What if, oh God, what if he insists she have it aborted?

  He’d know people who could make that happen—with or without her consent.

  Maybe she should hide the news. Run away. But what of Leon? How would she get to him? How would she and her children live, without George’s support yet on the run from him? He’d never accept the shame of a woman abandoning him.

  No, if she wants to eventually get the power to control her own life, she must trust her instinct about George’s ego. Take this gamble.

  Wouldn’t Martin be proud?

  The bitterness of the thought strikes her, makes her inhale sharply at last.

  A sound, she hopes, that George might also misinterpret, perhaps as hopeful excitement.

  Fiona tilts her head up just so, looks up at George through her long lashes. “But I’m not having trouble now.”

  Fiona holds her breath as she watches George, who has frozen and is staring at her.

  Slowly, a smile tugs up George’s lips. The widest smile she’d ever seen him give.

  “Do you mean—are you telling me—”

  Oh, thank God.

  Fiona smiles, too—out of relief, but let George see it as joy. “Yes, George, yes! We’re having a baby. And that’s what brought all this up with Elias, you see. While I was tending to him, he said he’d noticed that I looked paler than usual. A bit off my food at dinner. And being a doctor, he wondered, and well, I told him…”—Fiona pauses, thinks of her uncle Henry, of Leon away in Philadelphia, and the tears rise naturally—“well, because I have been sickly.” That much is true, though of course she hasn’t told Elias any such thing. “And that’s why he told me about the plans, because he thought that would mean so much for us—for our child, George!”

  George rushes over, pulls her from the chair—but gently—to the bed, sits down next to her, puts an arm around her.

  “Oh, this is good news.” He’s beaming, as if just moments before he hadn’t been pulling her head back so hard by her hair that she thought her neck would snap.

  Fiona makes herself melt into his embrace. She looks down at the embroidered pillow, on the floor at their feet. She still hasn’t figured out how to stop the planned attack of alcohol poisoning at the Kinship Inn. Maybe she could figure a way, once Abe and Luther return.

  She has at least a day for that—the speakeasy won’t be running tonight.

  But she has only a little bit of time to tell Elias about her pregnancy, to make sure he’ll back up her story.

  Fiona sighs. Already, she’s constructing a plan far more complex than the embroidery pattern of her youth. This is going to be hard—

  “Oh, my little spitfire,” George says, fairly cooing, apparently certain that Fiona’s sigh was proffered from contentment. “Our baby!”

  Or maybe it’s not going to be that hard at all.

  CHAPTER 9

  LILY

  Friday, November 25, 1927

  12:32 a.m.

  At last, Lily’s house emerges in her headlights. She exhales—blessed relief at the sight. Since leaving Dr. Goshen off at his home in Kinship forty-five minutes before—the drive thrice longer than usual in this weather—she’s had to stop and get out twice and use a spare blanket to wipe ice off her windshield. Even so, she’d soon had trouble distinguishing the edges of the road, inching along slower than if she’d been driving Daisy.

  And yet also a slight sting of disappointment at the darkness of her house—no coal-oil lamps shimmering behind the panes of her parlor window. Course, it’s silly to expect Mama to wait up into the wee hours—doesn’t she already do enough for Lily?

  Lily parks her automobile near the road, knowing it will be hard to drive up the lane from the house if it snows all night. Her fingers won’t fully extend when she releases the chilly steering wheel, so hard had she gripped it on the long drive.

  She treks around to the back entry—less likely to disturb Mama and the children than coming in the front door near the foot of the stairs. Despite the cold, Lily hesitates at the back porch as she had just the afternoon before, when she’d come in with sage for the turkey. Thanksgiving dinner seems more like a lifetime than just a few hours ago.

  Lily alerts to a creaking sound. Her hound or the animals in the barn? But no, the animals are surely all settled for the night, and their sounds
from inside the barn wouldn’t carry so far. A night critter, then, movements muted by the cold and insulating snow?

  The sound comes again. Steps, inside the house. Lily lets herself into the mudroom. Surely it’s Mama, never having gone to sleep after all. She slips into the kitchen and sees in the entry to the dining room the shadow of a figure, rimmed by a light burning after all. Lily draws her revolver.

  The figure stills, sensing movement.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Benjamin, his voice tentative and somber.

  Her face flames, not just for pulling her gun so quickly. His voice feels like a warm caress, reaching to her across the kitchen. Yesterday afternoon he must have parked alongside the house where she had not walked tonight, and of course she wouldn’t have seen his automobile still here in the dark.

  “I was in the parlor and I just heard your automobile, and you walking around the house. I thought to come back here, to start up some hot water for tea—”

  “For tea?”

  “May I light a few lamps?”

  “I reckon,” Lily says brusquely. Then she considers. “I never saw a light from the parlor window when I walked up to the house. What were you doing in the parlor in the dark, anyway?”

  Silence for a long, drawn moment.

  “Thinking,” he says finally.

  She swallows back the urge to ask, About what? She retreats to the mudroom, divests coat, boots, and hat. When she reenters the kitchen, it’s now alight with several coal-oil lamps.

  Lily stows her tote bag on top of the pie safe. Her fingers brush the red glass bowl, where she keeps her sheriff’s badge. Earlier, she’d left in such a hurry that she’d not thought to put it on. She thinks of the other badge—the revenuer’s badge, from the Bureau of Prohibition, now carefully wrapped up in a handkerchief, in her tote bag.

  She turns to see Benjamin at the stove. As the kettle starts to sing, Lily realizes that the kettle has been long filled with water, her cup prepared, her return anticipated. That he has been awaiting her.