Olivia, Mourning (41 page)

“How is Avis?” Olivia asked later when they sat down to eat.

“He’s Avis.” Mrs. Place shrugged. “Like I told you, him and Lady Mabel have been living in your father’s house since they got married a few months back.”

“You call her that, too?” Olivia raised her eyebrows. “I thought I made up that name for her.”

“Everyone in four counties calls her that. They still have Mrs. Hardaway keeping the house for them cause Mabel’s always busy in the store. Like I’m sure you can guess, she gets after Avis pretty good. And you’d really hate the way she hovers over your Tobias. He takes something out of a box and puts it on a shelf, she comes along right behind him and moves it over an inch. It’d be funny, if it didn’t make you want to strangle her.”

“How is Tobey, other than having to put up with her?”

“Appears to be just fine. She doesn’t seem to rile him. No matter what she says or how often she repeats it, he just nods his head and shuffles away. But like I told you, he took himself a room over at Mrs. Monroe’s, so at least he’s got his evenings to himself. Does take all his meals with them, though.”

“That’s no surprise. If there’s one thing I’ll give Mabel, it’s being a great cook. Is he still keeping company with Emma O’Keefe?”

“Far’s I know. I see them walking down toward the river every once in a while. Must be where they go to do their canoodling.”

Olivia felt a pang of loneliness. It would be so nice to see him and that wobbly smile of his. But what could she tell him? Nothing. Not about Mourning and not about the Stubblefields. She remembered what Mrs. Place had said about weak people with good intentions. That was Tobey.

“You never talk about your family.” Olivia changed the subject.

“Don’t have much of one. Father ran off when I was a little thing. He could come begging at my door, I wouldn’t know who he was. I got two older sisters, but it’s been a good, oh, I’d say ten years since I seen either a them. I do got a cousin I’m in touch with, Susan, comes to visit me once a year or so.”

“That must be nice for you. But what about your mother?”

Jettie studied her plate for a moment, then looked up, smiling and shaking her head. “She warn’t much of a mother. Was my sisters what raised me.”

“Why? Was she sick?”

“Yes. Bad case of bottle-itis. Maybe she was nice when she was sober, but I couldn’t say. I don’t know how, but she did manage to hold a job, cooking at one of the hotels.”

“Where did you live?”

“Up in Erie. Had a little shack on the water. I’ll tell you one thing, owner of that hotel found her real entertaining. Said the customers loved her. He woulda let her tend bar, if he warn’t afraid of her drinking him stick dry. See, she had a friendly streak. Loved to talk with anyone what would listen. Her opinions about life on this planet kept everyone laughing. And once she got started drinking, she’d set into philosophizing and using a lot of them sayings, only she’d get them all mixed up. ‘Well, you can’t teach a sleeping dog to lie,’ she’d say. Or, ‘You can beat a dead horse, but you can’t make it drink.’ My favorite was, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the victor.’”

Olivia grinned and asked, “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”

“Since she fell off a boat and drowned. Day after my fifteenth birthday.”

“Oh.”

They finished that meal in silence.

Olivia spent the next day in the company of Pocahontas.

“That must be some story,” Jettie said that evening, when Olivia barely looked up from the pamphlet to say a word.

“The play’s okay. But trying to decide what you think about the comments Mrs. Steadman wrote in the margins is what’s interesting. She says all kinds of stuff about what really happened to Pocahontas. Want to hear?”

“Sure. Everyone always said you’d grow up to be a teacher and here’s me having a private lesson.”

“So the Pilgrims were going to starve their first winter until Pocahontas showed up with a raft of food, right? Miss Evans taught us that she did that in secret, against the wishes of her father, the Chief. But Mrs. Steadman says that wasn’t true. Her father was the one who sent her, only he didn’t want anyone to know that. He couldn’t figure out what to make of the Pilgrims any more than the Pilgrims knew what to make of the Indians. So he sent just enough food to keep them alive, and he sent it with his daughter, so she could spy on them.”

“Smart Chief.”

“But Mrs. Steadman says that when the Pilgrims kidnapped Pocahontas, it wasn’t like Miss Evans taught us, so they could get the Chief to do what they wanted. She says back then a lot of white folks held to a notion about converting the Indians to Christianity and marrying them. They thought that was the way to have peace between them. America would be colonized by whites and Indians all mixed up together.”

“Like to see that happen ’round here,” Jettie said. “First the Protestants gotta kidnap a slew of Catholics and marry them. See if
they
can get along together, ’fore they start hobnobbing with the Mohicans.”

“Pocahontas was supposed to be the first example, so they got her married to one of the men who kidnapped her. He took her back to Europe to show her off, show folks back there how the Americans were Christianizing the wild Red Man and spreading the word of God. But a few years later poor Pocahontas got murdered and then some whites massacred a whole lot of Indians and after that the idea of marrying them and making peace that way sort of petered out.”

“Yes, well, I can see where slaughtering the families of the brides and grooms could put a damper on wedding plans.”

“But look at what it means. It means that back then there were a lot of white folks who didn’t think a man and a woman couldn’t be together unless their skin was the same color. They thought children who had one white parent and one Indian parent were going to be the new Americans, not mongrels. And those people were the Pilgrims. The people who started our country. Who came here because they believed in freedom.”

Jettie looked up from her needlework and studied Olivia over her spectacles. “Old Mrs. Steadman sure got your dander up.”

“A bunch of stupid, selfish men ruined everything. Taking all the land from the Indians and then kidnapping African people and making them slaves. Out in Detroit I was always hearing about the things white people learned from the Indians, about medicines and hunting and trapping and farming. We’d have a much better country if congress had passed a Greedy White Men Removal Act instead of an Indian Removal Act.”

Jettie shook her head and smiled. “Probably so. I think I’m about ready to turn in.”

Olivia idly picked up one of the newspapers Jettie had brought home and her eyes opened wide. Congress had passed the law Jeremy had told her about, the General Pre-Emption Law. Squatters could purchase 160 acres of land, at a dollar twenty-five an acre, and not pay for it until later. Mourning could have had his own place right now, if she hadn’t meddled in his life.

The following evening Jettie set her needlework aside and made a show of studying the calendar.

“It’s September 5
th
. Far as I recall, you’ve been here forty-six days. And you must a spent at least three days on the boat and what … two days in Michigan after they let you go? And the week that they …” She raised her eyes to look at Olivia. “I’d say that, all together, it’s time you saw a midwife.”

Olivia sat quietly, hands folded in her lap.

“I ain’t saying you got to think it’s for sure. It could be from the shock of all what happened out there,” Jettie said. “Women can stop bleeding for a lot longer and for a lot less reason than what you been through. But if you are carrying a child, a midwife or doctor ought to be able to tell by now. And you need to know early on, case you want to do something about it.”

Olivia nodded in numb agreement.

“It might have to be a doctor,” Jettie said. “I don’t know no midwives ’round here what don’t know every soul and devil in Five Rocks. Ain’t one a them I’d trust not to flap her jaws about Old Man Killion’s girl.”

So a few days later Jettie hung a “Closed” sign on the door of the bakery and rented a buggy. Olivia cowered inside her cloak and they drove two and a half hours to Weaverton. There Jettie inquired in the general store and was referred to Doctor Murdock, who saw patients at an office in his home. Jettie had given Olivia a ring to put on her finger, telling her to turn it around, so the stone wouldn’t show. She told Olivia to call herself Mrs. Springer.

The door was opened by an older man with sloping shoulders, a round pot belly, and thin wisps of hair. Wearing a sour expression, Doctor Murdock silently led them back to his office and told Olivia to get up on the table behind a screen. He examined her quickly, while Olivia all but bit through her bottom lip.

“You can get down now,” he said and went to the basin to wash his hands, before seating himself behind his desk.

Olivia rearranged herself and came around the screen to seat herself on the rickety chair next to Jettie’s.

“Well, congratulations, Mrs. Springer. You are definitely going to have a baby. I’d guess the happy occasion will be in another seven and a half, eight months.”

Jettie reached over and squeezed Olivia’s hand, which remained limp in her lap.

From the way the doctor was looking at her and the distaste with which he had pronounced “Mrs. Springer” Olivia was sure he knew she was a girl who’d gotten herself in trouble. He recited vague advice about getting enough rest and not moving heavy furniture and seemed relieved when the two women quickly rose to leave. Neither of them spoke as they climbed into the buggy. Jettie drove out of town and then pulled to the side of the road. Olivia stared silently ahead.

“You best do your crying and cursing,” Jettie said. “Get it out of you now.”

“I just want to go home,” Olivia said. “I mean to your house. I just want to go home.”

“Straight back to prison? No, that ain’t what we’re gonna do. Not on a day like today. Buggy’s paid for till evening. You’ll have enough days shut up in that house. We’re gonna have us a nice drive and find some sinfully expensive place to stop for lunch. Let someone wait on us for a change. Then we’ll take us a long walk in the sunshine. Do you good.”

“I don’t feel like it, Jettie.”

“I know you don’t. That’s why you’re gonna do it.” Jettie turned and took both of Olivia’s hands in hers. “Look, once you get over feeling sorry for yourself – which I know you got every right to be doing – you got to figure out how to go on living. I think a nice walk in the sun would be a good start. That’s how I do my best thinking. Way out here you don’t even have to wear that damned shroud.”

Olivia started crying and Jettie put her arms around her. “There, there. At least now you know.”

“What am I going to do, Jettie?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Want? There’s nothing for me to want to do.” Olivia sat up straight and blew her nose into the handkerchief Jettie handed her.

“In this life there’s always a price to pay for whatever you do. You got to lay out all your choices and pick the one that looks the least bad to you.”

“That’s what my father always used to say.”

“You can have the baby in one of them places and give it away.” Jettie raised one hand and started bending back its fingers with the other. “You can –”

“Not now. Please.” Olivia had no patience for this conversation. Without knowing that Mourning might be the father, Jettie had no advice to give.

“If I were younger, I’d ask you to let me raise it. But then I’m not younger.” Jettie sounded sad.

Olivia raised her eyes, realizing that to someone like Jettie this predicament might not seem so awful.

“Would you really have had a baby? All by yourself?”

“Well, anyone would prefer having a husband. Even a useless one would at least keep you respectable. Certainly is easier on a child. But of course I would have wanted a baby. Why wouldn’t I? Imagine how different my life would be, if I had a child to care for. Might even be some grandbabies by now.”

“But the way people would talk about you …”

“What they gonna say what’s worse than what they already do? That’s the thing about respectability – you can only lose it once. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Long as you don’t kill no one, ain’t much more they can do to you. Anyway, I coulda gone off somewhere. Out to Michigan. Claimed to be a grieving widow. Who would have known the difference?”

She handed Olivia another clean handkerchief, seeming to have an endless supply of them in her pocket. Jetty gazed out at the fields surrounding them and then looked back at Olivia.

“I tell you, Olivia, if you decide to have that baby and give it away, I just might ask you to give it to me. You might think it wouldn’t be fair to the baby, me being old and alone and in my social situation, but I’ve got money put away. I’d hire someone to help in the bakery, so I could take proper care of it. And when I’m gone, well, there’s the business. That child would never want for anything, that’s one thing I can promise you.”

Olivia burst into sobs. At that moment she was incapable of caring what would be good or bad for the baby. She felt like shouting, “What about me? None of those choices are any good for
me
.”