Roxanna Slade Part 12

But he had her attention which had never been that easy for him to get. So he told her my news. (in those days married people didn't think about a baby as "ours." We were just being honest, both of us knowing that Palmer's part in starting a child had been no more than a matter of minutes. Mine would take a lot longer.) Miss Olivia turned to me, no trace of a smile. "You lied to me, didn't you?"

It nearly floored me. I flushed blood-red but I had the guts to say "No ma'm. You asked me long before I knew."

Her splendid eyes didn't blink for a minute but held onto mine. Then her head shook slowly side to side, and her eyes welled full

of tears that wouldn't flow. She rang the little bell for Coy to clear the dishes. Then she stood up gravely, whispered "Good night" and was gone like a ghost or a terrible bird that might still lurk in a room's dark corner and seize your face in powerful claws when you least expected.

For the rest of that dark night with all Palmer said --in trying to explain how sad she'd been, how much she'd lost--I lay on my side facing the wall and wished my womb would spasm once hard and cleanse itself and me both, light and free again in my father's house.

Palmer had to leave for work before daylight. I stayed in bed and prayed just to vanish, just to shrink up inward till--by evening when he'd climb our steps --there'd be our stale sheets and my folded clothes but no trace or recollection of me. I hate to tell it, but it may help someone if anybody reads this. I even reached my right hand down and entered myself as far as I could with my strong nails in the hopes of damage. I didn't even bleed. And by the time I'd tortured myself back down into some kind of sunrise rest, there came a light knock at the only door. I had no choice but to answer since Palmer had never yet managed to mend our lock.

I was halfway composed and ready to stand when the door opened wide, and Miss Olivia walked in with a tray.

Before I could think of who I was and whose place I was in, I said straight at her "No, no ma'm. You take that back." It was not morning sickness. I was still shocked and bitter about last night and what she'd said.

But she held her ground. The place was hers undoubtedly. She set the tray on the one small table. There was a pot of coffee and a covered plate of something. She poured a cup of coffee, creamed and sweetened it and set it by the chair at the head of the table. When she faced me she was still not smiling. But she said "Anna, I beg your pardon. I can try to explain. May I sit down in peace?"

What was I going to do but agree? I put on the black kimono Muddie gave me on my last birthday and walked to the table. The room was warmer than I'd realized. Palmer had opened the curtains when he left, and the sun was already powerful. I sat by the coffee. And when Miss

Olivia stayed upright, I said "Rest your feet."

She thanked me, took the other chair, uncovered the plate of eggs and sausage and set it before me.

Half mad as I was, I didn't refuse it.

She had the good sense not to try to touch me but kept her hands together in her lap. When I'd taken the first mouthful of coffee, she said "I want you to know I was not myself at supper last night. I was maybe more stunned than I've ever been since Lark drowned at least."

In my final few months at home, I'd sunk into telling Leela and even my mother exactly what I felt about something they'd said or done. As the words would come from me, I could literally hear them like a stranger's voice. It never sounded mad or cruel, not to me, just new and impressive. And at first that scared me. Was some demon in me, or was this who I was meant to be as I grew on up? Still not knowing, it spoke in me now straight at Miss Olivia. "I was as stunned as you, maybe more."

"You accept my apology?"

I told her I did.

She said "I don't know how much Palmer has told you, but I lost three children long before Larkin."

I told her I'd seen their graves at Lark's and Major's funerals--little statues of lambs turned to face each other with the names and dates, brief stretches of life but long enough to seem like people torn from you by G.o.d.

Miss Olivia's eyes were wide and dry, but she said "I know you've suffered real losses. Your own child though, no more than an infant--"

I told her I had no doubt at all that nothing on Earth could equal that.

She nodded hard. "Four of them now. None left but Palm." I nodded as well. It felt as if I were watching a teacher in grade school standing at the blackboard proving a problem in plane geometry. I could see how perfectly right Miss Olivia was. But she raised no feeling in me, not this bright morning. Even in my deepest troughs of the blues, I'd cared more than this. I thought if I forged some half normal gesture, it would trigger my sympathy. Her left hand was laid down near me on the table. I

moved to cover it.

She drew it back from me but slowly, not as if I'd burned her. After she'd studied my face a long time, she finally said "You know I've got no grandchildren yet? These next months will be very hard on me."

A laugh flew up in my throat but I stopped it. Whose child is this? Who's making it right this instant inside herself? Try saying Roxanna and you'll have the answer. But all I said was "I hope I can ease things for you some way. I may need to leave here, Palmer and I that is--"

Those words struck her across the eyes like a rawhide thong. Then she calmed herself. "That truly might kill me."

Again my laugh rose and half escaped. But my face stayed calm as I said "Miss Olivia, I'll do everything in my small power to see that you survive this, grinning."

By then she seemed on the verge of leaving with no clear winner in the struggle we were staging. She got upright to her feet very slowly, turned toward the door and said "Monkeys grin--monkeys and skulls."

I said "Miss Olivia, I just meant smiling. I hope all of us are smiling by the time this child gets here."

That brought her back. She retraced her steps and sat again and told me straight as if she felt no reluctance at all. That's kept me wondering all these years if she'd planned to tell me her final story, her big trump card, or if I shook it out of her somehow. In any case she told it so plainly that her worst enemy couldn't have doubted the truth of one word. She said "What you don't know--what Palm doesn't know--what n.o.body on this place knows but Coy is the fact about me."

She paused and reached toward a spot on the table, a small dried stain from some old meal at my usual place. First she tested it with a fingernail. Then she took that finger back to her lips, wet it and set out to scrub the stain. When she quit it was gone. And it almost seemed she'd changed her mind. She looked to the door and seemed to think of leaving.

But I likewise touched where the stain had been and said "My housekeeping skills are slender."

That settled her somehow. She sat back a little

and said "They'll grow." Then she took my face with her eyes as surely as if she'd reached through the four-foot distance between us and clamped me to her. "I'll do this fast. You need to know but it hurts me to tell you. I was born two years before the war ended--1863--and in my girlhood east of here in Weldon, there were very few young men left alive. One of the last results of the war that n.o.body mentions was a million old maids, no boys to marry. I got on up to being seventeen, eighteen. And still no young man had showed any interest in me and my famous eyes (famous in my house at our dinner table). It pained me a good deal, the prospect of lonesome barren years and an old age of begging a dark back room from some luckier cousin with a life of their own.

"So when I was eighteen, an older man took an interest in me--a lawyer who hadn't served in the war. His heart was weak, so weak he fell over dead one evening at my parents' supper table. But not before he got me pregnant. I lived on at home barely stepping outdoors for the whole long ordeal. For those long months I faced my father and my helpless mother by the moment and saw their heartbreak not to mention despisal from my younger sisters--and then I had a still-born boy on the loveliest day of a beautiful spring. I survived someway. I lasted through nearly twelve more years of agony fit to grind strong bones to dust.

"Everybody in Weldon knew my story.

By then I'd become the trusty but luckless woman you hired to sit with dying relations or crazy old men. I was recommended to Major Slade when his first wife was dying slowly of a dreadful cancer deep in her vitals. I'd never laid eyes on any of the Slades. But I packed my satchel and came here to live and tend that woman through weeks of howling, justified howling. There was nothing we could do but pour morphine into her like water till she finally died. Through even the worst of it when her entrails putrefied so badly you could hardly stand near her, the major never laid a hand on me to ask for any kind of consolation.

"But when we had buried the few pounds of bone that were left of his wife, I had to ask him when I'd be free. Major held his place, his usual chair out on the front porch; and he said "Miss Larkin, you'll never draw one free breath again if I have my way." Then he smiled and here I've been ever since. I was thirty-one

years old, and here I sit--not one free breath in all these years."

She plainly thought she was finished at that point. I'd believed every word. But since she meant me to be moved and changed by what I heard, I needed to know at least two more facts. Mean as it sounded at last I said "You mentioned two more dead children once. I've seen their graves."

Miss Olivia's eyes acknowledged my hardness. They clamped nearly shut. Then she said "Three years after marrying Major, I bore him dead twins--two little girls. He'd never had a girl. When we buried them Major asked if I didn't want him to fetch my "other baby" from Weldon. I'd never been sure he'd known that story. So I thanked him and said that would be a real kindness. He had my first child dug up and brought here, and he paid for the stone with no trace of complaint. Then two years later Palmer was born. That seemed like an end to my curse. Or so I thought till the day Lark drowned."

I could see that her whole face, still turned on me, was only meant to be telling the truth I'd need to know to live on here. I wouldn't bear that. Even with all the pity I felt in the wake of her news, I said "Miss Olivia, I didn't kill Larkin."

I'd never said it to a soul till now.

She waited to hear all I meant by that. Then she finally rose to her feet again and left me in silence.

I ate every sc.r.a.p of Coy's good cold eggs.

Predicting a baby's arrival in those days was more of an art than a definite science. Dr. Rogers and I had pretty much concluded that I'd be due in the Christmas season. Since I'd long since promised that Palmer and I would spend Christmas in my home, I made early plans with Muddie to go there at least a week before Christmas and wait for the child. I and Leela and our two brothers had been born in that house--so had Father before us--and the nearest real hospital was twenty miles west. In any case back then many well-off white women seldom chose to bear children in a hospital. The chance of deadly infection was greater in a hospital than at the hands of a country doctor and a Negro midwife. So home delivery was a normal expectation, so

normal that even Miss Olivia couldn't seriously object.

What she did though, right through summer and fall, was to go on wringing her hands in worry about my condition and the oncoming labor. I never got used to it--the idea of this woman, strong as a buffalo, scared by a process as normal as tree bark. What was she scared of? She'd seen plenty deaths, anybody could die, it was no hard skill. All the same in the summer months when I could see that she was entirely sincere in her worry and was not just trying to upset me, I didn't let her get me down.

Blistering hot as that season was right into October, I invented slews of jobs for myself --writing letters to every soul I knew in the outside world to keep up my spirits, mending everything broken I could find, reading Miss Olivia's diary (which she said I could read, "just not the past two years' worth, starring you") and taking walks in the cool of the evening when Palmer got home. Exercise then was mostly looked on as fatal to a pregnant woman, but neither Palmer nor I believed that. We'd watched enough black women toil in the field till hours or minutes before they delivered, and they seldom died from it.

Then when I was about to scream from the tense air around me, a rescue arrived. It turned out Coy had a simple-minded child who lived down the road with a blacksmith husband and could sew very beautifully entirely by hand. Her name was Castille, like the soap. And for whatever reason she had no children which was probably a blessing. All you had to do was buy Castille a pattern, cut the cloth for her; and she could put it together overnight. Coy said she'd literally sit up whole nights working by oil light. Most mornings also Castille would come to the Office. Then she and I would work together till mid-afternoon pausing only to eat. We made maternity dresses for me, shirts for Palmer, long skirts and shirtwaists for Miss Olivia and baby clothes sufficient for a set of quintuplets.

Maybe because she was barren herself, Castille had peculiar ideas of what children did inside the womb. And day after day she took great pains to see I understood all her hopes and fears. She thought for instance that it was good to read aloud to unborn babies--the Bible of course but also

other future information that might prove useful. Though she couldn't read a word herself, she brought me her husband's old remedy book, an almanac with the phases of the moon and a startling pamphlet which claimed (with pictures) that Abraham Lincoln hadn't died of his wounds but was still alive somewhere in Tennessee planning to start the war back up and finish the job of freeing black folk.

So while Castille bent low over her sewing, I'd read aloud to her and me, plus the growing baby and any birds that flew past the window. There were times, I think, when we both expected Mr. Lincoln to knock and step in on us tall as any old pine and terribly scarred but kindly as ever.

I at the very least learned a good deal in our working hours, especially the old-time remedies for everything from strokes to floating kidneys. Castille seemed to enjoy the listening. As to my child and the course of its growth in the deep dark within me, only time would tell. But any honest and harmless relief from Miss Olivia's air of doom was as welcome to me as bathing my swollen ankles in the creek that ran between the Slade place and Castille's. I'd walk her home some days.

And on my dusty way back, I'd wade some distance up the snaky old creek watching for any sight of a copperhead or cottonmouth moccasin. Whenever one appeared I'd halt and warn it of my condition. They always showed me dignified respect. I think well of snakes.

Unfortunately for me by early November, Castille and I had made all the clothes any child could need. And I'd fairly well scoured the Office and the main house for manageable tasks that could use my plain skills. That, with the weather closing down, was when Miss Olivia's concern really bore down on me. Not that she told me anything I hadn't already learned from watching the live world of women and babies. But by the time I got too big to move with any ease, my mind began to dwell on the dark side.

Those were also the days when perfectly sober friends and kin could sit and tell you to be very careful about what you watched, heard or dreamed. Any undue powerful impression could mark the child. See a snake and the child might arrive with a scaly hide, that sort of folly.

But as days shortened drastically and the cold nights settled, I had mischievous empty hours to think of such foolishness and worse. Even today I seldom meet a young pregnant woman who doesn't have nightmares or secret worries about delivering a damaged child. But back when I started, public inst.i.tutions for the deformed and unfortunate were scarce. So the average person came inffcontact with many more tragically damaged children than now.

All the more reason then to wind up in bad hours, sometimes whole nights long, when I pictured myself giving Palmer a monstrously misshapen son or daughter. There were dreams he'd wake me from all but nightly--me sobbing in my sleep--that were so real and awful, I kept them dark secrets.

Still I made it on down to December with no bodily problems worse than swollen legs and a sorely burdened back. Miss Olivia kept asking me the date of my departure for home. I'd long since told her December 18th but she'd forget it. I'd patiently tell her "one week before Christmas," and she'd ask again the next day. So I was looking forward to the 18th like my personal salvation. Then late on the morning of the 16th well after Palmer had left for the woods, I was in the kitchen with Miss Olivia and Coy. And Miss Olivia said "I still can't believe you and Palmer are going to shut me and Coy out of this coming business."

I tried to control my voice. But I said "Miss Olivia, listen. It's my mother or you in this coming event. I believe it's customary for a woman to go home to her own mother at such a time."

Coy plainly said "That's right."

Miss Olivia said "This is Palmer's home. The child is Palm's, isn't it?"

I had no idea then what bombs were really like. But I'd heard of them. Anarchists were something people talked about even in the country, and again World War I was barely behind us. I recall standing there in the face of that question and saying to myself In an instant now you'll fly into pieces and kill this woman.

Coy had turned to watch me, and I tried hanging onto her eyes in the hope of steadying myself or laughing anyhow. But all Coy did was give her long repeated groan.

So I ran.

I'd never fled from anyone till then. I was no bull terrier, but I generally tried to hold my ground if I knew it was mine. Yet that day I surrendered on the spot without a peep. Even now I'm not sure why Miss Olivia managed to break me with six normal words. By the time I'd slammed the Office door shut and fallen on the bed, I thought she might be saying that somehow my child was Larkin's. Had she lost her mind? Lark had been underground for more than two years.

But hadn't Fern told me how in a dream Lark informed him I was pregnant? That was crazy too, though not with Miss Olivia's cold meanness. By then I was dreading she'd turn up any minute to beg my pardon or pursue her purpose, which was what? Was she killing me by seconds and inches? Was she driving some wedge between Palmer and me, to get him back?

I lay there dry-eyed but sick at heart, wondering over and over again how I was meant to wade through a whole life if life was like this. No answers arrived, Miss Olivia didn't show up, in a few more minutes I'd stumbled onto sleep. And I didn't wake till awhile after noon. When I did I was lying on my right side, and I knew straight off that something was new. My hand went out and felt the quilt.

It was sopping wet. At first I couldn't look. I thought it was blood, still warm. But no, it was water. My "waters had broke" as old women said. My next thought--honest to Christ, my next clear thought--was Kill yourself right now. Don't have your baby in this hateful place. It seemed as sane as anything else I'd lived through lately.

My bag had been packed for several days. In case of emergency Palmer could drive us home at once, and I'd be safe in a kind place. But Palmer was gone now well past reach till sundown at least, and with no telephone there was still no way to call for help. I sat up on the bed to try to clear my mind. There had to be a way to get out of here and bring my baby to life in a calm house that wouldn't just blight his eyes from the start (i'd been hoping for a boy). Before I could rise to my feet and get balanced though, the door opened quietly--no previous knock--and Coy was with me.

From my first day at the Slade place, I'd never been sure if old Coy liked me, resented me or scarcely noted my presence. She kept her mysteries as closely as a rock beneath your foot that silently plans to outlast you by trillions of years. Coy took three steps on into the Office leaving the door half open behind her.

I was scared to stay, but I halfway sat up. Coy's filmy eyes looked up and down me as if I might or might not be a person.

I was never sure what she could see. So when she didn't speak, I said "I think my waters just broke."

Coy nodded. "Did."

"What does this mean?" I said. I'd raised my voice knowing Coy was deaf.

But now she damped both her hands on the air. "Talk quiet," she said. "I ain't deef yet." But she stayed on silent.

So I said "Am I all right?" I was whispering.

"If you asking me," Coy said, "I say you all right."

"I'm supposed to be at my mother's, aren't I?"

"You been saying so, yes. Course women has babies in the ditch if they want to, has em drunk or sober."

I can't imagine where the thought came from, but I was so desperate I said "Have you come to take me?" Coy wouldn't so much as climb into a car. She'd only travel on her own two feet, not even on trains except to my wedding.

She thought about it though. Finally she shook her bald head again. "You ain't going nowhere till Palmer get back."