The Reservoir (15 page)

“I asked her if she didn’t think Henry Gooch or Wiley Wormley might be a better prospect than me. But she didn’t think that was funny, even though I didn’t really mean it as a joke.”

“Tommie, I got a letter from her last week. Everything is fine between you two as far as she knows. I don’t like your being deceitful, it makes me nervous.”

“Deceitful? You’re still writing to your cousin Cary Madison, aren’t you? And half a dozen other boys?”

“Not half a dozen, Tommie. I get lonely out here. If somebody writes me a letter, I’ll write them back. I’m not engaged, so why shouldn’t I write letters to as many friends as I want to?” She ducked her head and folded her arms.

“I don’t mind if you do,” he said. Now that her passion was stirred he wanted her more than ever and he tried to take her hand. She pulled away.

“You can be very cruel, Tommie.”

“What’s cruel about wanting you?”

“You know as well as I do that somebody could see us now. But go on if you want to, you won’t ruin my reputation around here. I’ll just say you were taking advantage of me and everybody will be on my side.”

In the morning she kissed him before he left and told him she was sorry for being so cross with him. “I’ll be sweeter next time,” she said. “And things will be different then, won’t they?” She looked at him with as much concern and hope as she could muster. He nodded, and she said, “If you don’t speak to Nola, I don’t think I want to see you anymore, Tommie. You can stay here, but I won’t be any more than a cousin to you.”

It was several more weeks before he was able to return, and when he did he told her he still hadn’t broken with Nola, on account of her mother’s illness. What he didn’t say was that he could not bring himself to turn his back on a future with the heiress to Upper Oaks estate. He promised Nola that as soon as he was able—probably within a year—he would buy a house in Little Plymouth.

And then came an evening in July when it was so hot that Uncle John suggested Tommie take his cousin down to the creek to cool off. George was in Manquin on errands. It was as though their going off alone was sanctioned by the head of the house—perhaps he even wanted to throw them together, Tommie thought. “He doesn’t suspect we were sweethearts,” Lillie said, when they were dipping their feet. “But he knows I’ve been low for a while, and company cheers me.”

Tommie put his arm around her. “I’ve missed you, and I still love you,” he said. “I think Nola and I will get married next year. I just couldn’t break off with her. I don’t love her the way I love you, though. I don’t think I ever will.”

Lillie leaned her head against his arm and held back a sob. “It’s all right, Tommie. I didn’t think you’d choose me.” She swirled a toe out to where a water strider dimpled the skin of the creek. “Were you lying to me all along?”

Tommie thought a moment, trying to get at the truth. “No,” he said, “and if I was, God will punish me.”

“That’s just like a lawyer, not giving a simple yes or no.” She said it in a pert way, but she turned from him.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “Lillie? My little Lillie, can’t we be friends?”

She shook her head, but she let him hold her while tears slid down her cheeks and when he kissed them she didn’t try to pull away. She kissed him back a little. And then they were just looking at each other. He had a vague feeling that she was different in some way, more restless and anxious. Yet she had a certain way of looking at him—her lips tucking into a slight smile, dimpling her right cheek, a smile that said she knew things about him—that melted him entirely, and she was doing it now, giving him that secret look that was only for him, sitting there with her bare ankles crossed in the water, her skirts above her prim pressed-together knees, a long braid down her back. And then he was pawing at her blouse, and, though it had been some time, they knew just how to move for each other. So without either of them thinking the outing would go like this—but not exactly thinking that it wouldn’t—they were making love again, this time to the trickling music of the little creek that ran to a larger stream and so to the Mattaponi.

She later told herself that she was mistaken, that periods were sometimes missed—though she had never missed one herself. Why now, she wondered, when he was not coming back? (For he no longer stopped with them on his visits to King William.) She wrote to a schoolmate for advice for a “poor friend” who had missed her monthly; the rest of the letter was deceitfully cheerful. She felt sick, restless, moody, and, above all, lonely. George and Daddy John worried about her, but she said she was fine, just a little melancholy sometimes. Her grandfather asked her if missing her cousin Tommie was the reason and she swore it was not, that she didn’t care a thing for him. Was it some other boy then? No, she said, she just felt she was getting old and that she wanted to be moving on with her life. George nodded sadly, as though he wanted to ask her something but was afraid.

Lillie’s friend finally wrote back, full of news of her family and friends, church picnics, and a trip to Baltimore and out to the seashore. She had no advice, except that Lillie’s friend was probably in trouble and would just have to accept the consequences. Marriage was the only somewhat acceptable way out of such a difficulty, unless she had money for a lying-in house. There were such places in Richmond for wealthy girls who got in trouble, etc., etc. But Lillie knew all this.

She wrote to Tommie twice, but he didn’t answer. In a third letter, she told him, “I simply have to see you to tell you something
very
important Tommie and it concerns you so you must come here as soon as you can and hurry because I am so lonely but that is not the reason I need to see you.” He wrote that business would bring him there in ten days and he would “make it a point to stop and visit with you and George and Uncle John, because it has been too long.”

In the meantime, she wrote to Mrs. Mary Dickinson in Bath County in the mountains, inquiring about teaching positions. Daddy John and James Dickinson had fought side by side when the Forty-first and Thirteenth Virginia Infantries combined at Second Manassas and Fredericksburg, and had promised to be friends for life. He had gone back to Bath and started a family, and he owned a two-hundred-acre farm on the Cowpasture River. Mrs. Dickinson wrote back to say that her grandchildren and several neighbor children were enough to make up a little school, and she would be happy to provide Lillie room and board and a little extra.

Until she could speak with Tommie, she was uncertain what she should do. Surely he would calm her fears. When he finally did come, George was out in the cornfield, and her grandfather was napping. She and Tommie sat out on the back steps with a pitcher of iced tea, talking quietly. “I’ve missed you, Tommie.”

“I’ve missed you too, cousin,” he said. “I’ve been working so hard I don’t have time for my own family, it seems like. Nola sends you her love.”

Lillie tightened her lips. “Tommie, I have something to tell you, so I might as well. I think I’m pregnant.”

Tommie raised his eyelids as though shocked, though he really was not. For several days now, since receiving her letter, he knew that was a possibility. He had been able to put it out of his mind, except at night. He set his glass down. “And the father?”

“Tommie, there’s been no one but you.”

He nodded, biting his lower lip and trying to think. His nighttime fears had resulted in no plans or imagined outcomes of any sort, only vague notions of being trapped, and then praying. Indulging in these dark fantasies meant they couldn’t possibly come true; besides, God had big plans for him, for why else would he be the only one in his family to go to college and become a lawyer? He suddenly felt uncomfortably hot—he loosened his cravat and ran his handkerchief over his brow.

“Tommie, what are we going to do?”

He let the ramifications of that tiny word sink in. Before, the only “we” had been a phantasmic ecstasy hidden from the light of day, and now it was oozing up from the ground where it had somehow been carelessly broadcast. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“No, I can’t go to any doctor I know, and I won’t see anybody by myself.”

His mind was racing like a bayed fox, dodging for an opening. And then just as suddenly as the news had broken over him, he felt a calmness spreading like creek water through his veins. Sitting here on the steps with Lillian, her same lovely, if somewhat more careworn, face, the songs of birds around them, the crazed pitcher of tea, his uncle snoring inside, the chickens moving in the coop down the yard, his own watch quietly ticking in his pocket—everything in its place and reassuring of the orderliness of life—surely his world could not have slipped from its moorings. He remembered Randall Croxton telling him about a kind of pill you could take, and a malpractitioner who sometimes performed abortions because he was in debt, though it was against the law and dangerous and carried an air of squalor and degradation. “Don’t worry,” he said.

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know, I need to talk to some people. There’s some pills I might can get that will fix it, make it go away.”

“And you’ll bring them to me?”

“Or send them.”

“I found a job teaching in Bath. I was going out there in October, but maybe I should stay here now.”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, not wanting to sound too eager. “No, I think it would be good for you to go. You should go on out there, and you might find there was nothing to worry about after all.” The right thing to do, a voice told him, was to offer to marry her. But another, more practical voice told him there was no harm in waiting. There were girls who tried to trick boys into marrying them—probably Lillie wouldn’t, but still, what was the harm in waiting to see if she really was pregnant? “You’re not sure, then?” he said.

“No, but something’s different. I can tell. It’s like something’s shifted, not just inside me, but everywhere.” She touched his hand. “Tommie I’m sorry I’ve been so blue in my letters, but you see now, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” he said. She sat beside him, knees on elbows, chin propped on her joined hands, and she glanced sidelong at him, her tea-brown eyes seeking solace. The pleats of her blouse stretched open, her narrow shoulders sloped, and he wanted to take her upstairs in his arms right then.

“You care about me, don’t you, Tommie?”

He nodded.

“Then you won’t leave me alone, will you?”

“No, but I need time to think what to do.” He glanced at her suddenly. “How did this happen now?”

“I don’t know, Tommie. It’s not my fault, it’s the Lord’s will. I dreamed I was having a baby all by myself out in the woods somewhere and there was blood all over. I woke up sweating and so scared I almost called out.”

Tommie patted her arm but had a distant look in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’ll get through this all right.” He stood and put his hat on.

“You’re not staying to supper?”

“I wasn’t planning to, no. Aunt Jane’s expecting me home tonight.”

“But you’ll come back before I go off up to Bath?”

“Yes,” he said, “I’ll be back in two weeks, next court day.”

“Try to come next week.”

He nodded.

“And Tommie you must write to me. I get so worried when you don’t write. I go out of my mind. Please don’t let me suffer so.” She gave him a pleading look and grasped his hand. “You’ll come to Bath to visit if I ask you to, won’t you?” He nodded again, biting his lower lip. “I’m a little bit scared, Tommie, but I think now it’s all going to work out just fine.” He watched her silently mouth the last few words, something she had not done in years.

Against his protests, she packed some leftover biscuits and stew beef and sliced tomatoes into a paper sack, along with a jam tart. They hugged each other and she wanted to keep holding him, but she heard her grandfather stirring in his bedroom so she told Tommie good-bye.

“Be brave,” he said, meaning it as much for himself as her. And then he was gone. She stood on the front stoop dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and watching his buggy jostle down the pine-bordered lane, then turn out onto the road. She waved her handkerchief, but he wasn’t looking. She kept watching until he had completely disappeared between the fields of tobacco and tall corn.

Two weeks later a letter came from Tommie explaining that he would probably not be able to come, but that he would try to visit her in Bath County. Neither of them mentioned the problem in their letters. Yet she wished he could have said something more reassuring than “I wish you the very best” and “I’ll be thinking of you and praying for you.” He signed it “Love, your cousin Tommie.” She felt like tearing it up, but she saved it in her trunk, along with scores of other letters and, tucked under the lining of the trunk’s bottom, a dirty poem from
Wisdom for Girls
, sent by a schoolmate, who secretly copied it from her brother’s book. Lillie would sometimes read it for a titillating thrill, though lately she’d forgotten it.

A month after her missed period she spent several tense days hoping and praying, but when no blood came she began packing for the trip to the mountains. Uncle George bought her a new warm black overcoat, trimmed at the neck and cuffs with fox fur. “It’s from me and your granddaddy both,” he said, handing it to her. He stood with his head down, one hand gripping the other wrist. Then he cleared his throat. “Miss Lillie,” he said. He had such a grave look that Lillie touched his arm and asked what was the matter. “We’ll get along all right here. But we’ll miss you. You don’t have to go away up yonder. I talked it over with Daddy, and we want to give you another dollar a week.” He stood looking at his mud-scuffed work shoes.

She hugged him, and he just stood there. “Uncle George, you’ve both been very good to me, better than I deserve. I’ll be back Christmas, I promise. I just need a change for a while.”

“I expect that mountain air will be good for you,” he said, repeating a formula he’d said many times the past few weeks. “You’ve been poorly, and that air might be just the cure.”

The last few days she busied herself baking, doing the laundry, packing, polishing her shoes, giving the house a good cleaning, and helping her grandfather hire a suitable cook and laundress. A short letter arrived from Tommie: