The House Girl

by Tara Conklin

  Josephine stepped to the bottom of the stairs, walked carefully around him, and made her way to the kitchen. Mister followed heavily behind her, his breath ragged. From the side cupboard she pulled salted pork, bread, pickled cucumbers, and set to fixing a plate for Mister. She heard his steps wander away again through the house and then reenter the kitchen. Josephine turned and he stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame, his eyes tired and unfocused, the lids half-fallen.

  “I am much aggrieved by this news of your Missus.”

  Josephine bent her head to the plate, spreading butter on the bread, hopeful that he might eat his supper and retire to bed. There was still time for her to reach the undertaker’s house if she ran, if she kept to the shadows, where the moonlight did not reach.

  She placed the finished plate on the kitchen table, but Mister remained in the doorway.

  “I am much aggrieved, Josephine, much aggrieved.”

  “Mister, I must retire now to check on Missus. May I pass?” She managed to say this with a cool detachment, as though today were just like any other day. But these strangled minutes in the dark kitchen felt like no others that had come before: Mister drinking again, Josephine with the blood sounding loud in her ears, a cold sweat rising on her palms and the tight places of her dress as she stood before him, his thick form blocking the door. There was the smell of bodies in the air, her own and Mister’s, ranker and mixed with whiskey. “Mister, may I pass?” Josephine asked again.

  He lunged at her then, a movement fast and fluid, she would not have thought him capable of it. His hands grabbed her shoulders, his breath was heavy and foul. She saw how the hairs of his beard left his face, the root buried in the skin like a pin in a cushion.

  “Josephine, I am so sorry. You do not know how sorry I am.” He crushed her to him, and she smelled smoke in his clothes, and mud and horse.

  Josephine pushed her palms against Mister’s shoulders but could find no purchase on the floor. Her heels scrabbled against the stone, she felt herself off-balance, her arms powerless against the weight of him. He crushed her back against the wall and the plaster was cool beneath the thin cloth of her dress. There was a slipperiness on her neck, a wetness from his mouth or perhaps his tears.

  Josephine said, “Mister, Mister. I hear Missus calling. I hear her calling me.”

  Josephine heard nothing, only the jagged sound of Mister’s breath and her own pounding heart, but Mister stopped, straightened his back, relaxed his grip, enough for Josephine to right herself, half-step away. They both remained silent, listening. And then:

  “Josephine, Josephine. I need you.” Missus’ voice, like a thread spooling down the stairs, the faintest gossamer twisting in the still air of the kitchen.

  Mister turned his head toward the door as though Missus Lu herself stood there and watched him with her eyes tired from sickness, from the years of striving alongside him.

  “Go,” said Mister, his voice a whisper, a sudden place of stillness in the struggle between them. And he released her. He collapsed onto the floor. His back heaved, though in sobs or sickness Josephine could not say.

  Josephine ran from the kitchen, up the stairs, to Missus’ room. Missus sat upright in bed, her hands kneading the sheets, clasping and unclasping, her knuckles raw, her eyes open wide in the low light of the room, disks of ghostly white staring as Josephine stood in the doorway.

  Josephine tried to calm her breath, relax her shoulders, disguise her fear. “Missus, what is it?”

  “I dreamt the most horrible dream. I am afraid, Josephine.”

  Josephine moved into the room and sat on the bed. She removed Missus’ hands from the bedclothes, placed one atop the other and took them in her own, stroking the tops, smoothing them as if smoothing away the wrinkles from a sheet.

  “Do not be afraid,” said Josephine, and she wondered if Mister would come to the room and wait for Missus to return to sleep, wait for Josephine to emerge.

  “I have never told you,” Missus said. “And I fear it is my damnation. I know my time is short now, I have no illusions.” Missus’ bones relaxed into the bed as Josephine’s hand stroked, stroked, sliding over the knuckles, down the long slender fingers to their tips. Missus’ head fell back against the pillow, and moonlight from the window struck the planes of her face, hiding the cut in shadow. On the side of Missus’ neck the tumor throbbed, the redness creeping now toward the front.

  “What have you never told me, Missus?” Josephine asked, her voice faint, but as Missus Lu’s eyes began to close she asked again, louder this time: “What have you never told me?”

  “Oh Josephine, look away. I cannot bear your eyes on me.”

  Josephine turned her head toward the window and recalled the kitchen knife she had thrown that morning; she thought how the bone handle must reflect the moon, that surely it could be found in the long grass now, easier perhaps than if she had searched in the day.

  “Josephine, there was one baby who lived. One.”

  Josephine noticed a trickle of blood, dried to dark, on the windowsill. Missus’ blood that Josephine had not seen to wipe away.

  “Yours, Josephine. Your baby lived. You were so young, you did not understand. I was able to ease your pain throughout, Dr. Vickers assisted me. You remember it as a dream, don’t you, Josephine? That is how I wanted it. I did not want you to remember. I wanted you to think it had died. Like all of mine.”

  Josephine did not look at Missus. She stopped her stroking and took her hands away and put them in her lap. The air passed through her lungs, thicker with each breath, and the room seemed suddenly adrift, disconnected from the house and earth, tipping, rocking. It seemed to Josephine that she and Missus rode a boat sailing toward some distant, terrible shore. She tried to stand from the bed but her legs felt unsteady; she tried again and, though her legs still trembled, she made her way to the door.

  “Was it a girl?” Josephine asked, turning back to face Missus, and she heard her own voice as though it had traveled through a long, deep tunnel.

  “A boy,” Missus said. “You had a boy.”

  “And where is he?”

  “I took him to the Stanmores. What’s one more nigger head, I thought. They have so many.”

  Josephine paused in the doorway and looked down at Missus Lu lying there in the bed, blankets pulled up on this hot night, her face flushed, damp with sweat, her eyes dark and not there in her own head. The tumor just visible from where Josephine stood. Josephine remembered again the morning she had returned to Bell Creek and yes, it had been this bed, her mistress’s tall bed, where she had lain down and given birth. The relentless pain, the sound of rain slapping, the crow at the window, Dr. Vickers’s rough hands, her emptiness. A complicated elation flooded Josephine now, knowing that her child had not died, no, her child had breathed and cried and lived, stronger than Missus’ own babies, stronger than the pull of their spirit selves, the cold spirit fingers that must have clutched at his new warm body. But the elation was a selfish one, and this she understood, because where was that boy now? And what did he know of his mother?

  The moments of silence widened like the sea between Josephine at the door and Missus Lu in the bed. There was no movement from below or above. Only the sound of the wind came to Josephine, insistent and strong through the willows by the river, rousing the flowers in the beds skirting the house, the latch on the front gate rattling with its force.

  “Do you forgive me? Josephine, I ask your forgiveness. You were so young. It was all that could be done.” Missus’ voice trembled.

  Josephine said nothing, she made no movement of her head to indicate yes or no. She stepped into the hall and softly closed the door behind her; this was the only act of kindness she could perform. A no, and Missus would not be at peace, she would go to her grave dirty with this sin, burning with it; but a yes would be a lie, and Josephine wanted no more of lies, not for herself or for Missus. In the hall, she listened for Mister but it was Missus’ voice that came to her, high
er pitched now and muffled: “Do you forgive me? Josephine, do you forgive me?”

  Josephine climbed the back stairs to the attic and crouched, easing into Missus’ boots, fastening the buttons snug tight against her ankles. She took her bundle from the bed and walked down again, careless now with the creaks and stomping. Past the studio door, Missus’ bedroom, down the grand staircase, past the kitchen where Mister’s body lay quiet on the stones, his knees drawn up to his chest, his head turned away.

  She made her slow way out the wide front door, down the porch steps, the rockers silent now, still as the dead and gone. There was the moon, just a slice thin as her smallest fingernail, just enough to see by.

  As she had imagined, the knife’s bone handle shone white against the dark grass, and she grabbed it and pulled. She stood for a moment in the yard and cleaned the dirt from the blade against her skirts, then pushed the blade into the bundle. She walked down the path, through the front gate, and paused in the dust of the road.

  To the south lay the Stanmores’, the great lurking house and the rows of slave cabins and acres of fields. To the north lay the undertaker’s and, beyond that, town, and roads leading farther along, to the wide Ohio River and its verdant, free northern bank. Philadelphia, Louis had said. She would meet Louis there one day, the Broadmoors’ locks would not contain him.

  Josephine paused in the dust of the road. Missus’ boots pointed in neither direction. A look behind her: no movement, no sound.

  She did not pause for long. It was only later, with Caleb, that she returned to this moment outside the gate and thought of the choice she had made, the way the road toward the Stanmores’ dipped down a little and then rose sharply up and the hill breached in a straight hard line and beyond it she could see nothing.

  Josephine did not pause for long because the choice did not seem a difficult one. She would leave him there, yes, she would leave her son behind. The pull that had been within her all her days, every hour at Bell Creek, poised against a newness she did not yet understand. How could she not run? How could she not? A cloud passed over the moon and darkness fell around her, the shadows winked out and she thought with a sudden fierce joy: All the time in the world, there is all the time in the world. A life is long and it can be good.

  The moon returned and Josephine turned left toward the undertaker’s, keeping close to the long night shadows thrown by the old sycamores that lined this part of the road. She felt no fear. The willows of Bell Creek whispered to her their good-byes.

  PART THREE

  Lina

  Caleb

  Josephine

  Lina

  WEDNESDAY

  At dawn Lina set off from her Richmond hotel, gray clouds rolling overhead. For forty-five minutes she drove through a wet landscape, the sky racing dark above her, past dripping telephone wires and fields painted bright green and yellow. The tires splashed along the rural roads with their ruts and dips, but she was following the rain, not in it, and at last, just before she reached the town of Lynnhurst, the clouds parted and the sun appeared glistening and ripe, hanging low in the sky. The last stretch of the journey took Lina along an old carriageway, paved now but only just, the road rutted with potholes and surging root hills, and she drove slowly. Rows of sycamores towered beside the road and cast flickering shadows across the cracked pavement. Lina squinted her eyes against the sun’s glare. The windshield, the trees, the landscape, all seemed to glitter with suspended drops.

  Bell Creek was now the Bell Center for Women and Art, a museum-gallery-school that granted residencies to qualified female artists. The women were given a small bedroom, use of a communal kitchen, studio space in which to work, mentoring from visiting faculty members, and a weekly stipend. The residencies were generously funded by the Stanmore Foundation, Lina had read, and were highly competitive. Since the Bell Center’s inception in 1971, rural Lynnhurst had been transformed into a destination for arts-minded tourists.

  Lina saw the sign, The Bell Center in curling script, and pulled into the empty visitor parking lot, a soggy stretch of trodden-down gravel and mud. The air smelled of wet earth and far-off manure as Lina made her way along the paved path toward the main house. She looked up and felt herself cocooned by the Blue Ridge Mountains visible in all directions, a series of soft sloping hills tinted gray and hazy with morning mist. They did not feel enclosing but rather protective and somehow feminine, a landscape of many limbs folded, arm over arm, soft curves and rounded tips.

  Lina turned a corner in the path and there it was, Bell Creek. The house stood up on a slight slope, surrounded by landscaped plots of exuberantly blooming flowers, the names of which Lina was sure she didn’t know, and the air turned suddenly to their fragrance. The lawn stretched wide and green away from the house and the flower beds, down to a fresh white picket fence with a waist-high gate that fronted the road.

  Lina felt for a moment displaced. The still heat of the morning, the sweat beginning already to dampen the nape of her neck, under her arms, and the familiarity of this house, the gray-scale photo she had studied so many times now suddenly made full-color real.

  It was 8:20 A.M.; the museum opened at 9:00. There seemed to be no one else around, only the twitter of birds, a crow’s call, the occasional drone of a passing car. Sticking to the gravel paths, Lina circled west toward the rear of the house. The backyard was carefully clipped and verdant green with a plotted vegetable garden, a pretty little old-fashioned well painted a bright white, and some artfully arranged old farming implements—a rusty plow, a red tractor with weeds sprouting up through the engine box. Lina heard the dull rush of water flowing but she could not see the river. The back lawn stretched fifty feet or so until dense vegetation and a row of trees—some willows and others, older and taller—blocked the view.

  A twisting gravel path led to the tumbled remains of various outbuildings, and Lina followed it, stopping to read the plastic plaques, warped and buckled by weather, that identified each site. Here stood the old curing barn, destroyed by fire in 1851. The meat house, used for smoking and storing dried meats. The dairy, where milk, cheese, and butter were made and stored. These iron pots were used to launder clothes.

  Completing her circle around the house, Lina again found herself standing before the porch. She now noticed the two wooden rockers placed there, angled together, and she wondered if these were the same chairs—had Lu Anne and Josephine posed here, so long ago, for the photographer?

  And Lina realized then that nowhere did she see evidence of the cabins that must have housed the slaves of Bell Creek, or any signs at all referencing the others who had once lived here side by side with Lu Anne and Robert Bell, plowing the fields, reaping the harvest, grinding the wheat, cleaning the clothes, picking the blooms. The Bell Center documented these tasks now only in the passive voice: Clothing was laundered. Cheese was made. Meat was smoked.

  Just then a youngish woman wearing a red dress exited the house and propped open the front door.

  “Morning,” Lina called to her. “I’m looking for the Bell family archives.”

  The woman looked at her watch. “Nora should just be opening the doors now,” she said and directed Lina away from the main house, along another path that led east toward the parking lot.

  “It’s a five-minute walk,” the woman said. “I’m sure our archivist, Nora Lewis, will be able to help you. Nora knows everything there is to know about the Bells.”

  Lina followed the path the woman had indicated back toward the parking lot and then up a steep hill. At its crest, she stopped and saw below her a one-story, largely windowless rectangular building. It had the look of a modern prison or hastily constructed temporary classroom at a community college, though the paint was the same bucolic shade of white as the main house. The building seemed to float atop the lawn, no person visible inside or out, but the front door was propped open and Lina thought she could see a light inside. THE BELL CENTER HISTORICAL ARCHIVES, a sign read.

  Lina made her way
down the hill and entered cautiously. An electronic bell pinged.

  “Hello?” she called.

  An expanse of dark, dirt-concealing carpet stretched before her. A few chairs, a full bookshelf, and a round table stacked neatly with art books and paper pamphlets were to Lina’s left; PUBLIC REFERENCE AREA read a sign on the wall. In front of Lina stood a long chest-high counter constructed of an old, honey-colored wood that seemed lifted from another building completely. From behind this artifact now popped a woman, her eyes a pale blue, her gray-blond hair fastened in a long braid that fell over one shoulder like a pet python.

  “Why, good morning!” she said with significant cheer. She was stout, but not fat, with an ample bosom and an armful of bracelets that chimed faintly as she moved. The woman’s voice lilted with an accent Lina had not heard before—it was not TV southern, more soft roll, less twang.

  “Good morning,” Lina said. “Nora Lewis?”

  “Guilty as charged.” A loose, sleeveless maroon top flowed from her shoulders and gold-colored disks hung from her ears. Nora Lewis was the closest thing to a hippie that Lina had seen since entering the state of Virginia.

  “My name is Carolina Sparrow. I was hoping you could help me. I’m a lawyer involved in a class action lawsuit,” Lina began, wincing at the practiced formality of her own voice. “I’m looking for information about Josephine Bell, specifically if she had any children. I’m working under a tight deadline and was hoping I might consult some of your documents.”

  “Oh dear, are you with the Stanmore Foundation? They’ve already come by for all the relevant materials.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m with a law firm in New York City, Clifton & Harp.”

  Lina fished out a business card from her purse and held out the creamy tab of heavyweight card embossed in royal blue to Nora Lewis, who glanced at it with disinterest.

  “And have you tried the Historical Society, in Richmond?” Nora said without taking the card. “They have just reams of information about Charlotte County. You might find something there about Josephine Bell.”