Authors: Donna Mabry
It was several days before I felt well enough to go
downstairs. Mom Foley took care of the baby, bringing
him to me only when he cried to be fed. He was always
clean and seemed to be well cared for. When Lulu
came home, she visited me and then went to see her
baby brother.
Clara came over twice a day to look after me. She
became my lifeline, bringing me my meals, listening
to me, praying with me and seeing to my needs.
George came and went as he always did. His life didn’t
change one bit.
One day, about a week after the baby came, I
woke feeling stronger. I got out of bed and dressed.
The effort tired me, so I sat and rested for a while. I
could hear my family chattering downstairs in the
kitchen. I made my way down, hanging on to the
bannister and sitting down to rest for a few minutes
every few steps.
When I finally reached the kitchen, Mom Foley
was holding the baby and rocking it. Lulu was eating
her corn meal mush, and George was eating his blackeyed gravy. Lulu jumped up and hugged me. “Look,
Mommy’s here.”
Worn out by the trip down, I plopped in the chair.
Lulu patted me on the back. “Do you want a bowl of
mush?’
I smiled at her. “That would be nice.”
Lulu got a bowl, spooned it out, and put it in
front of me. Between bites I said, “I guess we ought to
name the baby.”
George’s mother looked down at her grandson
with love. “His name is William, after my father.”
I was shocked and a little angry. It had never
occurred to me that I wouldn’t get to name my own
baby. “I thought your father would have had an Indian
name, him being pure-blooded and on the council and
all that.”
Mom Foley glared at me, and answered
hatefully. “Many of my people took English names
years ago.”
I looked at George, who ducked his head and
kept on eating. Lulu chimed in. “We’ve been calling
him William all along, Mommy. Can’t he keep it?”
I sighed. “It’ll do. We’ll call him William.” I
looked at George, who still had his head down.
“William James Foley.”
George looked up in surprise, but I returned his
stare, and he dropped his head without objecting and
went back to his greasy breakfast.
I really surprised myself with my speaking up
like that. After I had time to think it over, I hoped that
calling my baby James would help me to come to love
him the way I did Lulu. I realized it wasn’t natural, the
way I felt. It wasn’t that I hated him, or even felt bad
about him. I didn’t feel anything at all about him. He
was only another person in the house. I went back
upstairs, and when I had taken my Bible out of the
bottom drawer of the bureau, I wrote the name on the
line under Lulu’s.
I fed William and held him every day, but it was
as if I were doing it from a distance. Each time Mom
Foley came to take him back, I felt relieved that he was
out of sight. It bothered me that I wasn’t growing to
love my own baby, but I didn’t know what to do to
make it happen. I prayed about it every night for
several months and then just gave up. I thought if I did
my duty to the child, maybe in time I would love him,
but deep inside myself, I knew it would never be the
way I loved Lulu.
A year later, William was toddling around the house.
George had taken to calling him Willie and Lulu called
him Bud. Since the name Bud appealed to me, that’s
what I used, too. George’s mother still called him
William.
His doting grandmother had been urging him to
give up nursing and drink milk from a cup. She gave
him a cup at every meal, and although I would have
rather nursed him for another year or so to help keep
from getting in a family way for a while I didn’t say
anything to her. I didn’t see why my mother-in-law
kept giving William the cup and almost gloating when
he would accept it, until one morning in October.
It was still my habit to do my own laundry on a
Tuesday, and I’d changed the bedding and gathered up
my wash in a basket to take outside. George hadn’t
gotten around to running a water line inside the house
yet, and I still had to do the wash on the back porch. I
held the large basket against one hip with my right
hand and the bannister in my left as I started down the
stairs.
I heard quick footsteps behind me and then I was
hit hard in the middle of my back with such force that
I went rolling head-over-heels down the stairs,
bouncing off the landing, and then crashing to the floor
by the front door. The breath was knocked completely
out of me, and I lay there on my back wondering if
anything was broken. I opened my eyes and there was
Mom Foley at the top of the stairs, grinning down at
me.
The old woman went back to her room and came
out carrying William. She walked down the stairs,
stepping over the laundry that had scattered, and went
right past me. By then, I was able to sit up. I seemed
to be all right and grabbed at the skirt of the old woman
as she swept past. “Why did you do that?”
Mom Foley gave an evil smirk. “I was hoping
you’d break your neck, and I’d be rid of you.”
I let go of her skirt, and she went to the kitchen,
smiling and humming a song to her grandson. I sat still
for a while and then bent first one leg and then the
other. I tried out parts of my body until I was satisfied
my bones were all right and then got up and gathered
my laundry from the steps. I picked up the basket and
went to the kitchen. George’s mother was holding
William on one hip while she stirred a pot on the stove.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I slammed the basket
down on the table. “I’ve never been anything but nice
to you. Why in the world would you want to hurt me?”
The old woman didn’t turn around, just kept
stirring. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“If you don’t want to hurt me, why would you
push me down the stairs like that?”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Mom Foley said,
finally turning to look directly at me. “I said, I wanted
to be rid of you.”
I know my face went white and tried to catch my
breath. I lived right in the house with someone who
wanted me dead, and I believed she would keep trying
until she killed me or someone stopped her.
My heart pounded so loud I could hear it. I ran
out of the house and over to Clara’s. I beat on the back
door. Clara opened it, and her eyes grew wide when
she saw the look on my face.
I grabbed Clara’s hand. “She tried to kill me,
Clara, and I don’t think she’s going to stop trying until
she does it. She told me right out that she wants me
gone.”
Clara pulled me into the kitchen and sat me
down at the table. “Oh, Maude, what are you going to
do?”
“I don’t know what I can do. Tell George? He
won’t do anything.”
“Maybe you should tell Doug Graham. As
deputy, he can arrest her.”
I shook my head. “Then what? It’d be my word
against hers.”
Clara stood and stomped her foot, her fists
clenched as tight as her teeth. “You’ll just have to take
the children and leave him.”
I looked up at her. “Where would I go? I can’t
make enough money sewing and doing laundry to take
care of myself and raise two children.”
“Oh, God, Oh, God, this isn’t right,” Clara
moaned. “What are you going to do? You can’t just
wait around to see what else she tries. She might feed
you poison, or God knows what else.”
“I don’t know, Clara. Let’s try to think up every
possible way she might do it, and maybe I can just be
careful not to give her the chance.”
So, we two, kind-natured, Christian women sat
at the table and discussed ways to kill someone and
make it look like natural causes, then listed ways to
keep from being a victim. When we were sure we’d
thought of every possibility, we both knelt by the table
and took turns asking God to keep an angel on guard
over me and to change the old woman’s heart.
Satisfied that we’d done all we could, I hugged
Clara. “I don’t know how I could live in that house if
you weren’t here,” I said to my friend, and then I went
back to the house, sick with being afraid.
I stayed in my room and sewed until George
came home. When I finally went downstairs, my
family was sitting around the table, looking for all the
world like a normal family. No one would have
thought that one of them wanted to be a murderer.
Mom Foley was dipping the stew out of the pot
and putting the plates on the table. She sat my plate
down last. I gave the old woman a challenging look
and picked up the plate and exchanged it with
George’s. He gave me a puzzled look, then caught the
expression that went between me and his mother. He
ate without saying anything about it, and I acted as if
nothing had happened.
When he came to bed that night, he turned out
the lamp, put his back to me, and yawned as if he were
sleepy. I lay in a shaft of moonlight, “Aren’t you going
to ask me about it?”
George sighed. “Ask about what?”
“Your mother pushed me down the stairs this
morning and told me right out she’s going to kill me.”
George finally said, “What can I do about it,
Maude? She’s my mother, and she’s an old woman.
You can’t expect me to put her in jail. You’ll just have
to be careful around her.”
“That’s pretty much what I thought you’d say.”
After that, I was as careful as I could be, looking
around me before I went down the stairs, eating only
the same food that George ate, being as careful as I
could. I knew that, if it happened, it would be
something that looked like an accident or something
natural, like bad mushrooms. The old woman didn’t
want to go to jail. She just wanted George and the
house and the children to herself, and she would do
anything she could think of to get rid of me.
There was talk everywhere of the war in Europe, but I
didn’t pay much attention to it. Once in a while, I
would get my hands on a real newspaper, not just our
little hometown one, and read it from front to back. I
would have liked to have a newspaper every day, but
the big one was printed in St. Louis and cost too much
money.
I didn’t see what the war had to do with me. I
was fighting my own war right in my home.
Sometimes I would catch George’s mother looking at
me in that way she had, and it would give me a chill. I
could tell she was trying to think of a way to get rid of
me without getting caught.
In April of 1917, America got in on the fighting.
President Wilson, who’d been saying all along that
America was staying out of it, finally declared war on
Germany. He started up the draft, and we sent 10,000
men a day to go fight over there.
Almost every one of the young men from the
town joined the army without waiting to be drafted and
went off to what they were sure would be a great
adventure. They were saying it was the war to make
the world safe for Democracy, or the war to end all
wars. I didn’t know what to think about that. I knew
that the Bible said there would always be war and
rumors of war.
A few of the young men never came home at all.
Some were buried in cemeteries across the ocean,
some at a place called Flander’s Field, and some at
Arlington in Virginia, where I read they were laying a
lot of our boys to rest. Some died in the forests of
France, and they never did find them. Some came
home without arms or legs, or blind from the mustard
gas. The war finally ended on November 11, 1918, and
the rest of those who could, came home. One of them,
Johnny Parker, came home with the Spanish Influenza.
I read later that it swept around the world twice
in two years, killing between ten and twenty million
people, changing as it went. Many people died within
hours of coming down with the symptoms. With so
many doctors away at war, those on the home front
made do with nurses, or medical students. Some had
no one to help them. It didn’t matter much. There was
no treatment except prayer. If a person got the flu, he
either lived or died.
As the sheriff, George closed public places, and
everyone stayed home as much as possible. When it
came to the Parker house, Johnny Parker died, his
mother lived, and his father lived. One of the marks of
the terrible disease was that it was more likely to take
the young and strong than the old or infirm. No one
group was spared.
Toward the end of the outbreak in Kennett, there
were no coffins left in the town. No one who knew
how to make them was well enough to do the work.
They wrapped the flu victims wrapped in canvas or
bedding and buried them as fast as they could. With a
shortage of workers, family members who were able,
dug the graves in the cemetery themselves, and put up
wooden markers that would have to do until they could
get a proper stone.
Influenza ran through the town, killing one out
of four. The preacher at the Holiness church visited as
many sick as he could and then caught the flu himself
and died. There had once been three doctors in town.
One was away to the hospitals for the soldiers, one was
still working twenty hours a day, and one died from the
flu.
George was the first in my house to get sick. I
kept cold compresses on his head to ease the fever and
washed him all over several times a day with cool
cloths. In a week he was over the worst of it, but still
weak and bedridden.
At three years old, Bud had outgrown his cradle,
but still slept on a mattress on the floor in his
grandmother’s room. She was the next one to get sick,
and he was sick right along with her. I tended both of
them as I had George, stroking them with the cool
cloths and changing the soiled bed linens. Mom Foley
was so weak she could barely move, but as I cleaned
the vomit and the runny stool from her body and
washed her, she looked hard at me, her eyes shining
with hatred. It was pitiful, and I pretended not to
notice. I talked to her as I worked, “I’m praying for
you, Mom Foley, praying that you’ll accept the gift of
Jesus’s salvation for your soul. I don’t think Wakondah
would hold it against you. I think Wakondah is just a
different name for God.”