The House Girl Read online

  The room held a collection of furniture and ornaments that brother Henry had purchased or paid others to make, the finest workmanship, the latest fashions of fifteen years past. Nothing had been removed or replaced since Henry passed on and Papa Bo took his inheritance. Two small tables of dark-brown walnut waxed and polished to a high shine stood at either end of the sofa, two straight-backed chairs with slender legs placed to either side, framing a place for sitting and conversation in front of the wide brick fireplace. On the mantel rested a series of ceramic figurines, scenes of a bucolic nature: a deer and her fawn, a small flock of white sheep, a black-faced slave tending a brown-spotted cow, as well as a small bowl of clear blue glass, a bubble suspended at the centermost bottom point like a giant frozen tear. Every week Josephine would hold these ornaments in her hands and wipe clean the wooden mantel beneath them. She would rub a cloth over their brittle painted faces, the deer’s snout so realistically drawn, the cow’s hooves black as the man’s face, the blue glass thinning to such a fine edge that once Josephine cut her thumb and it felt as if she had drawn it against a blade.

  Missus Lu sat with back straight and shoulders squared, her hands folded palm to palm in her lap. Josephine had known no other mistress but had seen the daughters of Mr. Stanmore as they rode by on their sable mares, and Missus Lu’s posture recalled for Josephine now their riding stance. They shared the same confidence in bearing, bred from privilege and a certainty in their place in the world. Hardship with Mister had not bled it out of Missus.

  “Josephine, fetch the good doctor some lemonade, or perhaps sweet tea, Dr. Vickers?” said Missus Lu.

  “No, nothing for me, thank you, Lu Anne,” said the doctor. He paused and then added gently, “May I ask how your symptoms have been?”

  “Doctor, I’ve been right as rain, not a care in the world.” Missus Lu smiled broadly, but her eyes were unfocused and a twitch lifted the right corner of her upper lip as she spoke.

  “Yes. But come, let me examine you. If I may.”

  Missus Lu hesitated, her mouth twisting again with the tic. “And is it absolutely necessary?”

  “I’m afraid so, my dear.”

  “If you must …” she said and gazed away from the doctor, out the parlor window bright with sun. “But Doctor, I’m afraid that Robert is not able to see you today. You are to speak your conclusions to Josephine. I am terribly forgetful, you see.” Missus spoke these words slowly, with a childish purpose, as though afraid of the scolding she might get if she did not say them right.

  “Oh, that is a pity. He cannot spare a moment?” Dr. Vickers spoke with irritation and glanced at Josephine, a sideways lifting of a lid, and that gesture provoked another memory: of the doctor’s fleeting attention, an impatience and disguised aggravation at the untidy way of things. His thick fingers, rough and careless. “Not even a moment?” he asked again.

  “No. Robert gives his apologies.” Missus Lu stood and gave a small shake of her head. “He is very busy.”

  The doctor pushed himself up from the settee. He did not look again at Josephine.

  DR. VICKERS WAITED IN THE hall as Josephine helped Missus Lu remove her dress and place it across the screen painted with flowers that shielded a corner of the room. Missus’ high narrow bed sat against the east wall, a wash table and jug beside it. There was no rug and the windows were hung with heavy dark curtains that gathered dust and small flying insects in their folds. Missus’ clothes were kept in a paneled wardrobe of cherrywood that had gone dark over the years. Though situated at the back of the house, this had been the room Missus Lu insisted on calling her own because the bank of west-facing windows afforded a view of the setting sun, an event Missus preferred to consider while reclining upon the bed, her head propped by pillows.

  “Ready,” said Missus Lu, and Josephine fetched the doctor from the hall. Missus stood in her petticoats and chemise, no corset, her skin pink and rough-looking, and submitted without protest to the doctor’s prodding and taps. The markers of Missus’ illness were plain: her sunken chest, the rough rasp of her cough, the spray of pink spots across her back. Dr. Vickers turned Missus’ body and placed his fingers around the nape of her neck, examining the red lump.

  A shiver ran through Josephine. She looked away, her breath suddenly turning fast and hard, her heart thundering. Memories rushed through her with the speed and force of a locomotive, she could not stop their forward thrust. That first time, she had waited too long to run, all those long months of not understanding, not wanting to understand, hiding her changing shape behind heavy skirts, her long apron. She had returned to Bell Creek as the pains came, her belly hanging low and heavy, a twisting inside; Josephine had known her time was soon, she would not make it far on foot.

  She had lain atop a high bed—Missus’ bed?—with Missus Lu beside her and the doctor there, his bald head, his impatience. And the pain finally had ended, and in its place there was silence. She heard no baby’s cry, nothing of that breathless high wail she remembered from Calla’s newborns. Only silence, heavy and full, and she listened to the sound of nothing and the beating rain. It seemed the natural course, her baby born dead, as all babies were born at Bell Creek, perhaps the air not ripe enough to sustain new life, or perhaps the spirit others would not tolerate one wet and screaming and so they took it for their own.

  Afterward, the doctor left her, and Missus Lu stayed for a time and stroked Josephine’s hair and held her hand and then she too left the room, the door closing with a sharp drop of the latch. Josephine was alone and she had wept until her body seemed dry and hard as a stone in the sun.

  Mr. Jefferson’s chest of drawers had opened and Josephine struggled to close it again. She pushed her fingernails into her palms and focused on their bite until the knuckles felt they would crack or the skin split apart. She directed her gaze out the window, the sky a whitewashed blue, the treetops still on this windless day. The view here was a pleasing one, looking out over the green tobacco fields, and beyond those the gold shimmer of the wheat backing into the far distance and, against the gold, a sturdy line of dark evergreen. Above the trees two hills rose gently, the slopes meeting in a dark convergence that gave the land the look of a woman lying back, her legs crossed, and the perspective as if Josephine stood at the woman’s toes. She thought of her mother’s spare grave, the small rounded mound, and now imagined her mother as monumental, her body carved from the mountaintops and valley, her hair the clouds, her skin the smoothness of a young green leaf. How to paint such a scene, of a woman’s body curved within the hills?

  Josephine released her clenched fists. She watched a sparrow alight on an apple branch, flit away beyond the window frame, then back again, to a different branch, and away, and back. Over and over, the sparrow’s underwing flashed white, its head pointed like an arrow. Josephine heard the distant low thrum of the field hands singing at their work. Tonight I will run. Tonight. Silently she spoke the words again and again and again.

  Dr. Vickers finished the exam and bade Missus Lu get dressed. Josephine moved from the window to help her and the doctor paused for a moment, sunlight now piercing the room. He stepped closer to Josephine and narrowed his eyes, appraising her or perhaps merely in response to the glare. “I will wait in the hall,” he said.

  Missus Lu was docile and calm after Dr. Vickers’s exam, her gaze never straying from the window as Josephine removed the old petticoats and dressed her again in clean garments. She lifted her arms, turned her body as Josephine directed. Was a fit coming? Josephine worried, with the heat of the morning, the doctor’s visit. “After, we’ll sit in the shade, down by the river,” Josephine whispered to Missus Lu. “I’ll read to you.”

  Josephine left Missus Lu sitting on the bed. “I’ll be just a moment,” she said and closed the door behind her. She turned to face the doctor, who waited just paces from the door, his cane tapping impatiently against the floor.

  “Your mistress’s condition is very grave,” he said. “Is she resting? Does she e
at well?”

  “Yes—yes,” Josephine stammered. “Her appetite is good. Rest, yes, she sleeps moderately well. Though the fits sometimes disturb her.”

  “I will need to bleed her, and I have not brought my mercury. I did not believe the tumor would be this advanced.” He was speaking to himself now, his eyes distant, gazing toward the window at the end of the hall, over Josephine’s shoulder. He shifted back to Josephine: “You must keep her calm, but keep her spirits lifted. She has a melancholy nature and a fragile composition. The combination is not good for a life of hardship on a farm such as this, and it is imperative that you keep her mind focused on happy thoughts, frivolous things.” The doctor’s eyes scanned the hall, the bare floorboards, the mended curtains at the far window, the patches of stained plaster mottling the walls. “It is a rough road your mistress has chosen,” he said.

  In deep Mississippi, Missus Lu’s family farmed cotton on a sea of rich land, where Missus and her five sisters and one brother had been raised. She spoke of it often to Josephine, the dresses she once wore, the dancing and music at the parties her family would host, a bracelet she’d been given on her sixteenth birthday, a slender ribbon of gold she wore every Friday evening for supper with her parents. “I left it behind, Josephine, when I married him,” Missus had said, before her illness. She had spoken in a factual tone, the reporting of events long gone. “He cut a fine figure then. He talked so sweet and shy, and his eyes were indigo blue.”

  The doctor took a step and leaned in closer to Josephine. She smelled the mustiness of unwash and a strong medicinal bitterness.

  “I know you, girl,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

  He tilted his torso forward just slightly, and she saw a darkening on the inside of his collar, a glimpse of the gray-yellow skin of his neck and a scabrous redness edging up from his chest. His smell turned rank in the closeness of the hall.

  “No, Doctor,” Josephine said, backing away. She wanted nothing more to do with this man. She wanted him gone from Bell Creek, with his cane and his inquisitive hands.

  “Don’t you? I think that you do.”

  Josephine shook her head no but she saw the way he looked at her, the certainty in his eyes and a curiosity, cold and clinical.

  “Yes, well, it is to be expected,” he said. “You were very weak, and so young. I administered a sedative.” He tilted his head back and his stance shifted, his chest pushed forward. “The whole affair, it was a pity. A disgrace.” Dr. Vickers spat out the word. “Your mistress has shown you such kindness, more than any other would, I can assure you of that. You’d be sold away, gone, or at the very least in the fields, out of her house. I don’t know why she does what she does. She has always been headstrong.”

  Josephine lowered her gaze, careful not to meet his eyes or make any motion that might prolong this encounter. The doctor’s white knuckles curved along the handle of his cane.

  A faint rustle of movement came from inside Missus’ room, a creak of floorboard, the hush of petticoats moving behind the closed door. Distracted by the sound, Josephine turned her head and Dr. Vickers stepped away down the hall.

  When the doctor spoke again, his voice was efficient and direct. “Your mistress, I believe she is dying. It seems there is a tumor; that is the source of the protrusion at the back of the neck. The question is really one of time. It is difficult to know how long it will be in these cases. The illness has persisted for so long already, and her mind is not strong. But she may very well surprise us all, find an inner reserve.” He lowered his chin.

  “Tell Mr. Bell all that I have told you. I will call again in two days’ time. If anything should change in her behavior, Mr. Bell must send for me at once. Do you understand?”

  “Of course, yes. I understand.”

  Dr. Vickers’s eyes were heavy-lidded, unblinking. “I will see myself out. Stay with your Missus.” He turned to make his way down the creaking stairs, the tip of his cane held high, never once hitting a step.

  JOSEPHINE REMAINED IN THE HALL long after Dr. Vickers had gone, waiting for Missus Lu to summon her. Missus Lu, dying. The doctor’s words settled into Josephine, taking possession of her heart, and she felt her resolve falter. After she was gone, who would care for Missus Lu? Who would hold her down when she shook, comb her hair, fetch what she needed, see that she ate? Mister would never do such things. He had no money for another house girl. Lottie, Therese, Calla, none of them knew all that Josephine knew of the house, of Missus and her ways.

  Josephine watched the sun on the floorboards, the shadows cast by the clouds moving like water across the wood, and she thought of an earlier time, when she was a girl but not a child. Her bare feet slapping on the stones of the kitchen floor as Missus sang a tune in the parlor. Books taken from the library and ferreted up to her room, and the night hours full of the marvels they contained. There had been a lightness then. Before the bee sting that killed young Hap, before Missus’ fits, before Louis got sold away. Louis brought Josephine flowers once, just before he left. A handful of the goldenrod Lottie would pull as weeds, left at the back door; Josephine had known who they were for and who had left them. He was quick on his feet, long and lithe, a handsome curl to his upper lip when he smiled, which he did freely, with an eagerness to please her.

  He talked of running. It was Louis who first made it seem to her like a thing that could be done. When she visited with Lottie and Winton late in the evenings, with the musty smell of wet woodsmoke from the fire and the spray of red sparks when Winton poked a log, Louis whispered to Josephine of how, one day, he would run. Philadelphia, he said. Boston. New York. And he had spoken the names of northern cities as if they were sweet drops rolling in his mouth. Come with me? he asked and he had thrown back his head and laughed as though it were a plan they could make, to go for a picnic, to run for their lives.

  The last time Josephine saw him, he lifted his brows, inquiring as to how she had been keeping. Josephine in the house, Louis in the fields and the cabins; only yards separated them, but rarely did they pass each other to speak. They had never touched. It was late morning, Josephine sent out to fetch Mister, and Louis had stepped away from his row when Jackson’s back was turned. Watch me go, he had whispered to her. Soon. Philadelphia. I’ll call outside your window. A dove, they don’t call at night. You’ll know it’s me.

  I’ll know it’s you, Josephine had said. This was before Mister and his drinking, before Josephine’s breasts grew so tender, before her belly began to swell, and she had imagined the streets of Philadelphia, she and Louis side by side amid the crowds, just another boy and girl making their way along the road.

  A few days later, Louis was sold off. Sometimes at night she’d listen for the dove’s call, but it never came. Doves don’t call at night, she knew as much.

  Not long after Louis got sold, Hap died, and it seemed all the light of the world was snuffed out for a while, those two strong boys gone in an instant, and the women and old men left weeping. Josephine mourned in her own way. She did not kneel down with Lottie, she did not visit the place where Hap was buried. Lottie asked her: Why do you reject His light? Why do you scorn Him? Lottie’s religion was grounded in Papa Bo’s sermons and the tragedies she herself had suffered. A man she once loved taken from her in a way that Josephine had never learned, Lottie never told of its particulars; Lottie’s mother and the three little sisters, scattered somewhere in the cotton states, so Lottie supposed; other children, Lottie never spoke their names, born before she came to Bell Creek, Josephine could only guess at their number; and then Lottie’s last, her beloved Hap, a spot the size of a dime. It was only the Lord who would not leave her.

  Josephine had pondered Lottie’s faith. She had stood beside Lottie and Winton in the old meat house as Papa Bo preached and moaned, shook, and sometimes fell to the ground. Time and again Josephine had tried to feel their fervor but she had looked upon them and felt nothing. Missus too believed. Josephine had seen her lips move without sound as her finger trac
ed along a gilt-edged page. But Josephine was not transformed; she had never felt an ecstasy or heard a call. Her body was hers alone, not belonging to Mister or Missus Lu or to the Lord above. And it was only with this true belief that she could tolerate the putting of one foot before the other, the drawing of another breath and another and another.

  Standing in the hall, the sun lengthening across the floorboards, Josephine saw her mother’s body stretched across the hills, and Lottie on her knees at Hap’s grave, and the sheen of Louis’s skin by firelight; she heard the doctor’s words: It was a pity. A disgrace, and that terrible breathless silence. The things you can control and the things you cannot. And Josephine knew she could not wait, no, she would not stay for the dying Missus Lu. Run.

  Lina

  FRIDAY

  Eleven thirty P.M. and Lina was working at home. Conversation fragments, laughter, and hoots filtered into her room from the sidewalk below, but for Lina the weekend seemed as distant as the moon. She sat in bed, a pillow on her lap, a book on the pillow, and read. As promised, Dan had shifted all of her client work to other attorneys. During the course of the meeting with Dresser, Lina’s desk had been cleared of all papers relating to her old cases and a pile of books and binders had replaced them: information on class action lawsuits, histories of U.S. slavery, economic treatises, financial models of farm worker wages and earned income, and case precedent—reparations for Holocaust survivors, for Japanese Americans, for East Germans post-reunification; decisions from the International Court of Justice, the Nuremberg Tribunals, the British Foreign Compensation Act.

  To begin her research, Lina had lugged home a briefcase full of transcripts from interviews conducted in the 1930s to record the memories of the last surviving American slaves. The nature of the harm, Dan had said. One individual’s experience to represent the experience of the many. Lina was hoping some potential leads might emerge from the interviews. Using census data, public historical records, and the biographical information contained in the transcripts, it would be easy enough to track the descendants of an interviewee. And Garrison had offered to put her in touch with some friends who had already traced their antebellum family roots. He’d stopped by her office after the meeting with Dresser, standing in the doorway, a pen behind one ear. “They’ll be happy to talk to you. Just use my name,” he’d said, and winked.