The Secrets She Carried (7 page)

When he leaves I’m alone and nothing is familiar, not even the sounds coming through the screen—croaks and chirps and leaves rustling. I miss the noisy night sounds of the Quarter, men shooting dice in the alley behind the house, jazz oozing like steam from the door of the speakeasy, the pitiful wail of a saxophone on some empty corner.

I miss home. And I miss Mama.

I’m not mad anymore, just sad, and a little afraid too, I guess. But as I arrange my underwear in unfamiliar drawers, I know Mama would be pleased. I want so badly to write her, to tell her everything—that I’m safe, that I’m scared, that I want to come home. But she made me promise not to write, never to write. No looking back, ever. It’s what Mama wants for me, even if I don’t want it for myself. That
night, as I curl into my strange bed with its crisp good sheets, I let myself cry for the first time since leaving Mama at the station.

The next morning I come awake like I’ve been walking in a dream, but the pillow under my head is all wrong, and the light is spilling into the room from the wrong direction. I close my eyes tight and count to ten. When I open them again I see the yellow flowers on the wallpaper and know I’m long gone from home.

My first week is hard.

After a day or two I begin to find my way, but it’s a fair trial. More than once I blunder into the wrong room. Our little shotgun house in the Quarter had four doors, including the one that took you from inside to outside. I can’t say how many doors are in the Big House, or how many windows, or how many porches. I expect that’s why they call it the Big House—and because it sounds grand and very Old South.

It takes weeks to grasp the difference between the gallery and the foyer and the mudroom, between the sun porch and the guest porch and the reading porch, between the front parlor and the sitting parlor—and between the bedroom of Mr. Gavin and the bedroom of Mrs. Gavin, easier than the others at least, since they are situated at opposite ends of the house.

The advertisement from the
Times-Picayune
was for a lady’s companion, but it doesn’t take long to see I’m to be much more than that to Susanne Gavin. For my bed and board and my paltry pay I am owned body and soul, sunup to sundown and well after—hairdressing, sewing, reading aloud, pouring tea, picking out clothes, picking up clothes, dosing medicines, even handling her correspondence when she sees I have a good hand.

Susanne is something fearful, a willful child and a wicked queen all at once. She takes a kind of medicine from a brown bottle with a small dropper. Her tincture, she calls it. She takes it twice a day, ten drops in her tea in the morning, then in the afternoon another ten in
some bootleg she keeps under her bed but still drinks from a teacup. One day early on I ask what it’s for. She looks at me sharp and tells me it’s to calm her nerves. I itch to say I don’t believe it’s working, but I know better, and count out the drops like she tells me.

We go into town now and then, Susanne all gussied up in her hat and white gloves, me in tow with her packages. To anyone who asks, I am her
girl
. And I am that especially to those who do
not
ask, women too busy worrying how to make a chicken stretch a full week to bother with the goings-on at Peak. For the colored women, though, she spares no breath at all, giving them a good, wide berth, as if their darkness might rub off on her milk white skin. Clear as glass she is to me, parading me and her belly under the noses of her lady friends, as if she’s the first woman in the world to ever have a baby.

Yet, I see what no one else seems to, or are perhaps too polite to remark—that this baby isn’t agreeing. There’s no motherly glow about her, no bloom of new life in her cheeks, only a dull pallor that hangs about her, as if her light burns too low. And the more her belly burdens her, the more she presses me for pickled okra and lemon ice and back rubs, and with calls to her room in the middle of the night to brush her hair when she can’t sleep. When none of these work she takes another dose of her tincture. She sleeps then and wakes up mean as anything.

She slaps me sometimes, after the tincture, calls me lazy and cracks my knuckles with her big silver hairbrush. I should care, should be hurt or angry. But I hold no fondness for her, and so I let the words glance off. Lots of girls would have left when they found out what the woman was all about. Maybe I should have too. But by then there was Henry.

T
hree weeks pass before I lay an eye on Susanne’s husband.

For a while I wonder if he might not be a figment of her imagination, someone she dreamed up after taking too much of her tincture. But the baby growing in her belly is real enough, and so I guess he must be too. I can’t blame him for staying gone. Susanne is either shut up in her room with a cloth over her eyes or squalling like a wet cat about something. The only time the man’s even in the house is to sleep, which he does way down the hall from Susanne, which makes me wonder how that baby even got in her belly.

Then one day I’m with Susanne up in her room, pinning her hair, when I hear something rattling up the drive. I sneak a peek between the curtains. She likes them closed in the afternoons, says it keeps out the heat. I think it keeps out the air, but I keep quiet. They’re her curtains.

“Someone’s coming up the drive,” I say when I spot a rusty-looking truck spraying gravel out behind.

Susanne shakes her head, loosening one of the curls I just pinned up. “That will be Henry,” she sighs. “Master of Peak Plantation.”

I pin the curl back, but I can’t keep my eyes from wandering to
that little slit between the curtains. The truck is parked now, with one door open, and I see a man climbing down from the seat. He’s tall and rangy, wearing overalls and a plaid shirt with the sleeves pushed up. Him, I think? He’s the big important man Susanne’s been going on about? Climbing out of that old wreck with his knees all filthy, and a mashed-up hat on his head? I don’t believe it. Then I think, Susanne would never lie about something like that.

As soon as I finish Susanne’s hair, I slip down the back stairs and through the kitchen, hoping to get a closer look. I catch sight of him again from the back porch, heading into the barn with a couple colored men dressed just like him. After a while I give up on him coming out and go back inside, where Lottie’s busy stirring something on the stove.

Lottie’s proper name is Charlotte, although Susanne refuses to call her anything but Cook and expects me to do the same. I don’t, though, when we’re alone. She looks near Mama’s age, looks tired like Mama too. She’s big-boned and solid country, with a head of rusty hair and a voice tough as gristle. Susanne brags that she’s the best cook in Gavin. I don’t know if that’s true, or even if it’s saying anything at all. Not many folks can afford a cook these days. And the food here is different from what I’m used to back home. The corn bread and sweet potato pie are fine enough, but there isn’t much flavor to the rest of it. It’s all chicken and pork chops—fried, fried, fried. At least there’s always plenty of it. These days, that’s saying something.

Lottie’s still wary of me, not sure how tight I am with the Missus, afraid I might make trouble for her. Today she pours me a glass of tea and sets a saucer down in front of me with two squares of corn bread. It’s good, still warm from the oven. I wash down the first bite and think about asking if she’s ever thought of throwing in some hot peppers, like Mama does. I don’t, though. I don’t think she’d like it.

Her back is to me; she’s stirring something in a big bubbling pot.
I catch a whiff of ham hock as she drops the lid back on. “You plan on staying?” she asks, still holding her big wooden spoon.

I blink at her like she just asked to borrow a hundred dollars. I’ve got a job, a roof over my head. Where else would I go? Then I think of Chicago, where I’m eventually meant to end up, and of Mama’s people waiting for me there. But Chicago feels a million miles away.

Lottie doesn’t notice that I never answer. “Ain’t really any of my business,” she says in that gruff voice of hers. “And maybe I ought not to tell you, but there’s been a whole passel of girls through here—girls just like you. They all leave after a while. Some don’t stay a week. What about you? You gonna stick it out?”

“Have to,” I say, swallowing hard. “Nowhere else to go.”

“No kin to take you in?”

I shake my head, not sure if I feel bad because of the lie or because it feels true when I say it.

“Well,” says Lottie, shaking some more salt into whatever it is she’s cooking. “It ain’t really my place to say—ain’t really my business at all—and you probably don’t need me to tell you, but Ms. Susanne’s a handful. And she’ll be getting worse if things don’t go well with that belly of hers.”

Lottie’s eyes narrow down when she says that last part, and I can see just how badly she’s itching to
make
it her business. I forget about my corn bread and lean forward in my chair. She drops down next to me at the long table, her face all screwed up with her secret.

“This one’s number four,” she says, squinting one eye at me. “All the rest are dead.”

“Three…dead?” I breathe the last word out. Back home, folks would say that was some bad voodoo.

Lottie sucks at her teeth a minute, shakes her head. “Never born is more like it—lost every one.”

“Oh,” I say, closing my eyes at the thought of it.

“Yes, ma’am. Never had a live one yet, and it’s eating her up.”
Lottie grunts as she hauls her stout frame out of the chair and moves back to the stove. She peeks under the pot lid, turns down the flame. “She was always an uppity thing, but nothing like she is now. I truly don’t know how Mr. Henry stands it.”

“For better or worse,” I say, like I know something about it. “Love is supposed to be for better or worse.”

Lottie gives a little snort. “No love between them two—different as pigs and chickens, and a lot less friendly. But then, what they do ain’t none of my business.”

I shoot a look at the door, then drop my voice. “He never goes to her room,” I say with my cheeks all hot. “At night, I mean. Come to think on it, I never see them together at all.”

Another snort, louder this time. “Not likely to, either. Except maybe at dinnertime. Even then they don’t talk, just chew and try not to look at each other. Poor Mr. Henry…” Her voice trails off. She sucks on her teeth some more.

I press my lips together, but the words come out anyway. “As far as I can tell there’s nothing poor about Mr. Henry, with all his land and his fine white house. And any man who’d marry a woman like Susanne has to be cut from the same cloth.” I sound like Mama when I say it, prickly and hard, but I made up my mind about Henry Gavin long before I saw him climbing out of that rickety truck.

Lottie lays down her spoon. “It ain’t like that,” she says with her lips turned down, and for a minute I think she’s going to cry. “He’s a good man who made a bad mistake. He wasn’t thinking about love when he married her, just about land, and this place. Now that’s all he’s got.”

“You mean Peak?”

“A quarter of this land used to belong to her daddy—came to Henry when he died. He knew that woman wasn’t no prize—not pretty, not sweet, and not exactly fresh at almost thirty, so he sweetened the deal to get her off his hands. Henry didn’t care anything
about a wife. He only took her ’cause he wanted that land and ’cause she’d been chasing him all over town for years. I guess he got tired of running.”

I’m thinking of Mama now, and the man who was my daddy. He lived and died for his passions, Mama used to say—all of them except her. I’m also thinking that a man who could make a deal like that—a wedding ring for a few acres of dirt—might be exactly the kind of man Susanne deserved.

Lottie must see into my head. All of a sudden her eyes go soft. “He’s a good man, Adele, got a good, big heart. His daddy died while he was in school, so he had to quit. Shame, too—he was smart, all the time reading something. But it was just him to look after his mama, and all this place too, while his friends were off at school or chasing girls. This place is all he knows. That dirt out there, that’s where he lives, not this house. And those tobacco stalks are his children.”

“The babies…he didn’t want them?”

“Oh, he wanted that first one,” Lottie says, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. “Wanted the second one too, I reckon. Every man wants a boy. But after the second time with Ms. Susanne…well…I think he kind of quit hoping. She keeps trying, though, God help us all. Bound and determined to start some kind of dynasty, finally prove to folks she was good enough to marry a Gavin.”

I finish my tea and corn bread, watching Lottie about her business, pulling a plate of pork chops from the ice box, mixing flour and salt and pepper in a bag while a blob of Crisco melts in a black iron skillet, and I think, she’s so used to this kitchen she could probably fix supper blindfolded.

“How long have you been here, Lottie?”

“Ten years, I guess it is now. Came to cook for Mr. Henry just after his mama died. They were already married then, but Missus doesn’t know the first thing about cooking.”