The Sisters (16 page)

The woman, her gray hair flecked with ash and pulling from her bun, now stood red-faced in front of Mabel, yanking at the camera strap.

Mabel lowered the camera but kept a firm grip on it, protecting the lens with her cupped hand.

The woman released the strap and took a step back. She stared at Mabel hard, studying her face, as if trying to imagine it in another time.

Daisy said, “Sorry, ma’am. We don’t mean any harm.”

The woman ignored her, cocked her head, and narrowed her eyes at Mabel. “I know you.”

Mabel looked away, then down at the camera as she fumbled in her pocket for the lens cap. Her hands were trembling. She tried to think what to do, but it was as if her mind had struck a wall. She knew this woman. Mrs. Kendall. Her old boss.

Mabel pretended to search her other pocket for her press identification. “Must have left it in the car, or pulled it out with something,” she muttered. “So sorry.” She shook out her hair so that it fell across one eye and now glanced quickly between Mrs. Kendall and the rubble around them. “My name’s Bertelle. I’m a photographer for the
Indianapolis Star.
”

“Indianapolis.”

“That’s right.” Mabel offered her hand, hoping the woman would look at that rather than at her face. It didn’t work.

“Bertelle,” said Mrs. Kendall. “Bertelle. What were you before that? Before you were married?”

“I’ve never married,” said Mabel. She didn’t know how she’d explain if Mrs. Kendall demanded to know who Daisy was.

“What’s your first name?”

A sudden wind kicked up the ash, forcing them all to cover their eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry,” Mabel said when the wind settled to a breeze, “I see we’re bothering you. What was this part of town before the fire?”

A look of doubt flashed through Mrs. Kendall’s eyes, and she answered the way she might have answered a true stranger. “Businesses and such,” she said. “That was my store over there.” She pointed, and Mabel looked toward the pile that had once been Kendall’s Dry Goods, hoping her eyes suggested curiosity and sympathy.

“Any idea how far the fire line goes?”
The crisis has passed
, Mabel thought. She was all journalist now, and Mrs. Kendall apparently had decided she’d been mistaken.

“Down by the river, about two miles out,” Mrs. Kendall said, pointing the way Mabel knew so well. “Didn’t get to the cemetery.”

“Sorry again to have troubled you,” Mabel said, turning and motioning for Daisy to follow. “Good luck to you.”

Behind her, Mrs. Kendall snorted at the ill-placed goodwill, but at least they’d gotten away from her.

Mabel walked quickly up the street, moving faster as she approached the corner. Behind her, Daisy called, “Slow down. Mama! Mama, stop!” Mabel didn’t stop until she’d reached the car. While stowing her camera in its bag, she felt Daisy pulling on her arm.

“Look at me, Mama.”

Mabel turned toward her daughter but couldn’t look at her. She leaned against the car, swept her hair out of her eyes, and stared at the fire-tortured cross propped against what was left of the church.

“That woman knew you,” Daisy said. “And I think you knew her, too.”

Mabel nodded.

Daisy’s voice strained between annoyance and compassion. “What are we doing here, Mama? You could have asked that woman if she knew anything about Bertie. Isn’t that what you want? To know something?”

Mabel lifted her eyes to her daughter’s pleading face and turned away. She felt Daisy’s warmth beside her, felt the girl’s slender arm slipping around her waist, drawing her close. Daisy was the taller one now, even without high heels.

“Tell me, Mama-bel. What do you want?”

Mabel pressed her head against Daisy’s, then eased out of the embrace. “I don’t know,” she said. “Really, I don’t.” She couldn’t bear Daisy’s look of exasperation and quickly raised a hand against whatever question she might ask next. “I want to drive some more. Down to the river.”

Year after year, so many years ago, sometimes braving the cold water as early as Easter, Mabel and every other kid who lived close enough to the Laurel River to make it on foot or on bicycle had splashed and swum and floated in the cove. Everyone except Bertie, who was afraid of the water. Mabel had coaxed every way she could think of, trying to get Bertie to tell her why she was afraid, but her little sister would twist away from her and run high onto the bank, crying, “I just am. Leave me alone!”

Wallace was nearly always there, clowning but careful. Even after all this time, Mabel could tick off five or six names of younger children Wallace had taught to swim. Once in a while some kid’s older brother or sister would try to show them a frog kick or how to swim just under the surface, but they always came back to Wallace and his legendary patience. Mabel herself had seen him at work—arms held steady under a little boy’s back, singing out words of encouragement for as long as it took for the boy to feel he could manage a backstroke. He, too, had tried to persuade seven-year-old Bertie, eight-year-old Bertie, nine-year-old Bertie to let him teach her, but Bertie always refused. He’d stay for a time on the bank with her, skipping rocks downstream from the swimmers, so she wouldn’t feel left out.

When Mabel steered the car around the final bend, she saw that Mrs. Kendall had been right. The fire had rolled right up to the river and died. On the fire side of the bank, everything was burned down to the water, and bits of trees bobbed in the current, but on the other bank, it was still spring. Looking west of the swimmer’s cove, squinting in the sunlight, Mabel could see where the jagged far edge of the fire had been, just this side of the bridge, not a hundred yards from the cemetery.

Without a word, she got out of the car and started on her way there. Daisy followed a few steps behind.

It was a well-kept cemetery. While she looked around to get her bearings, Mabel wondered idly who did the mowing and trimming—the Freemasons, perhaps. Then, as if she had been here only last week to refresh the flowers on her mother’s grave, she walked straight to the familiar plots. There was her father:
Albert Fisher,
1889–1918
. Beside him, because on her deathbed she’d demanded it and because Mabel had fought for it, calling on the doctor as witness to final wishes, was her mother:
Imogene Fischer Butcher, 1890–1922.
Though Jim Butcher had protested, there was another stone, shaped like a tiny pillow, next to Mama’s, etched with the words:

CHARLES

STILLBORN SON

1922

For the whole time Mama was pregnant, Butcher had bragged to everyone that he was going to name the boy James, after himself, but when Dr. Moseley came in and told Butcher the baby was dead and that his wife would likely die within the hour, Butcher made him write
Charles
on the certificate, saying, “Not going to waste my name on a dead son.”

“That’s my father,” Mabel said when Daisy stopped beside her. “And Mama and the baby.”

“I saw some pretty wildflowers down by the river,” Daisy said. “I’ll go pick some and bring them back for you.”

Mabel waited beside her parents’ graves until she saw Daisy dip out of sight; then she moved up and down the rows restlessly. There were names she recognized, people from church, a near neighbor and his wife. There was Naomi Linder, who had been three or four years ahead of her in school.

No sign of Bertie, even accounting for a married name. No Albertas at all that she could see, except the one for Alberta Gunther, one of the oldest graves in the cemetery, a small weather-pocked stone marked
1842.
The idea that someone with her own name lay in the ground had troubled young Bertie, and she wouldn’t answer to Alberta after that, not for anything—not until Butcher gave her no choice.

Mabel found him at the northern edge, where the town had traditionally buried the ones unclaimed by family. The marker was a slate, sunk now into the ground and barely visible:
James Butcher, d. 1927
.

Under her feet he lay.

In a pine box, most likely, rotted by the damp ground.

Under her feet.

She stomped once. Twice.

And then her feet were pounding the ground. Pounding so hard she felt the strike through her whole body. Pounding as if her rage could drive the bastard deeper into Hell. Pounding. Pounding. Pounding. For her mother. For Bertie. For herself.

For all that he had cost them and for the price she would pay and pay and pay.

Mabel stopped, her strength spent. But for her wheezing breaths, there was no sound. The birds had flown. The unscathed leaves hung silently in the unmoving air. Waiting.

She scrubbed at her eyes with her palms, furious at the tears. The sun was lower now, and moving in its glare, she saw Daisy back at Mama’s grave, arms full of flowers. She started toward her daughter, wandering aimlessly through the stones, seeing but not registering the names carved in them. There was a granite bench she didn’t remember. She dropped onto it, exhausted, grateful. She could rest here a moment, under the linden tree that stretched its limbs overhead. From the bench, she could see Daisy, nearer now but still further than Mabel could yet carry herself, looking every inch a devoted granddaughter, brushing dirt from the headstones with her fingertips, taking great care arranging the flowers.

Watching her daughter, Mabel stroked her fingers along the front edge of the bench. Something was carved there. A vine of roses? She leaned forward to get a better look, and when she did, she saw the back of the bench chiseled with three-inch-high letters:
HANSFORD.

All around her lay Hansfords. The elders who had passed when she was a child. A four-year-old daughter, Wallace’s sister, from scarlet fever. His father, Gregory. His mother Margaret, just three years ago.

And there, between them, was his stone:

BELOVED SON

WALLACE ARTHUR HANSFORD

LOST IN THE LAUREL RIVER

1909–1927

Mabel stood up, but her legs gave way, as if they were nothing but pillars of sand. She was on her knees, arms clutching her ribs, near to shattering from the howl that rose from her, that unfurled like a rope to pull Daisy to her.

Then Daisy was beside her, holding her tightly, rocking her, cooing, “Mama, oh, Mama.”

She felt her daughter’s arms, heard her daughter’s voice, but their comfort was as the comfort of a cave, a protective hollow for one’s lonely terror.

She should have followed him. Should have followed him. All those years ago, hard as she had tried not to, she had known that Wallace would go nowhere but back to Juniper. She should have followed him. Should have faced with him whatever had to be faced.

Mabel stared past the stones, past the new grass and the wildflowers Daisy had let tumble. She stared past Daisy, past the present, into the past, and saw what she had never seen.

A frigid December day. Early-morning sleet. Wallace standing in his sodden coat at Union Station, scanning the passengers coming off the Louisville train, straining for a glimpse of Bertie. It was too much, not finding her, not finding her as he had not found her so many times before.

He pushed his hand in his pocket, counted the fare, and stepped onto the next train south. He heard nothing, would let himself hear nothing, until the conductor called “Louisville.” There, silently, he stepped onto another train, slid into a dirty corner, and leaned his head against the window to wait for Juniper.

He would have made it before Mabel finished work that day, would have stepped off the train, turned away from the town, passing the small farmhouses glowing with supper lights. He would have walked through the winter mud until he came to the river, just to the place where the current was fastest. He would have stood there until dusk became darkness, tossing stones he couldn’t see. Then, from the memory the body holds in itself, he would have climbed to the highest point on the bank and looked out over the river, trying to see into the darkness, calling Bertie’s name. And then he would have taken one last step. Into the air. Into the black water.

N
INE

The Burger Chef

Summer and Fall 1956

Newman, Indiana

RAINEY

June

N
O ONE WAS GOING TO
stop her; she’d made up her mind about that. Rainey fastened the waistband on her skirt—a leafy-green check, just right, she thought, with her sleeveless white blouse. She couldn’t risk stepping out in the hall to the full-length mirror, so she tilted the one on her dresser as far as it would go and climbed on her desk chair to try to see how her flats looked with the skirt. High heels would have been better, but it was at least a two-mile walk to State Street, so these would have to do. The green scallop along the sock cuffs was a nice touch. Hopping down from the chair, she admired the way the skirt ballooned around her, and for a moment Rainey wished she were daring enough to wear it without the petticoat, like Sally sometimes did.