Page 1 of Fragile Wicked Things
PARTONE
Jane
One
When I was ten years of age, my mother passed away.
That summer day began with a sweltering heat but ended with a chill as the Kansas wind swept in. The living room curtains flapped, caught in a violent dance with the swirling air, each trying to overpower the other until Mrs. Reed slammed the window shut. The tattered panels fell, undisturbed by the storm brewing outside. She ran her hands along her arms, shivered, then shut the rest of the windows throughout, each time looking up to the sky at passing clouds obscuring the afternoon sun. I wished she would go away.
Reverend Reed and his wife had descended on our home, the latter taking over the household, intrusively marching from one room to the next, correcting things that were wrong. She had me move the glasses nearer the sink and organize the cutlery drawer, but she nearly fainted when she spotted the rat poison tucked in a corner of the pantry near the food and insisted it be kept out back in the shed. I wanted to implode. Meal times were unbearable. The Reverend and Mrs. Reed spoke of many things, inconsequential matters to do with weather, church members, gardening, everything except the one thing pertinent to me—at the end of the hall, behind a closed door, my mother lay dying.
My mother, once a robust and strong woman, withered away in the months leading up to her death, stricken with battle scars against a determined cancer. For the most part, the Reeds kept her away from me in a dark bedroom down the hall from where she used to sleep with Father. Reverend Reed assured me that his wife held her hand when she died, but this was of no consequence to me. It should have been my hand that held hers as life departed from her.
In the weeks leading up to her death, I kept busy cooking, washing, cleaning, and scrubbing the floors of my mother's sickness to the side of her bed. The vomit would be wiped away using ripped bed sheets and strained into a pot of water, now lukewarm after having sat for an hour. Mrs. Reed would carry hot water in a heavy pail and pour its contents onto the floor. Pieces of vomit fell into the cracks between the floorboards and dropped into the dirt under the house for the ants to devour.
Father was nowhere to be found, but if I had known then to venture out into the town's place of drink, I would have found him slouched over at the bar, a drink held firmly in his unclean hands. When I was younger, he used to hold my hand. His hands were rough, scored sharply by the tools he used for carpentry. At times he would not notice that they bled, but my mother always thought of such things and cleaned out his wounds before wrapping a bandage around them. But that was before when my father knew how to be a father; a time before my mother's illness with cancer and before my father's illness with the drink. It is a memory from my brief, happy childhood.
I was born in 1942, eleven months before my father returned from the war a broken man, part of one leg amputated due to gangrene. My mother told me he thought his open wound minor, and he refused treatment until other serious cases were looked at. By the time he dealt with his leg, the damage had been done, and doctors operated on him against his ferocious protests. His screams, once vivid in my mind, are now distant, nearly forgotten. I seem to have a memory of this, although it isn't possible, and the only explanation I can offer is that I must have been connected to my father before I met him.
I thought of such things as I scrubbed the floor clean, fetched water, and peeled potatoes before dropping them in boiling water. These are the things my mother used to do. I would watch her, learn from her, and help as best I could so that I would one day become a woman and care for my husband and children the way she did hers. Mother's hands were rough from her chores, her smile soft, her laughter gentle, and her words quiet. She knew when to speak and when to remain silent, not only around my father, but Mrs. Reed, too, who would gossip incessantly about other parishioners. Some nights, as I lay in bed, I would hear Mrs. Reed's voice drone on. Behind the closed door, it sounded different from her usual high-pitched pithiness. The Reverend's voice sounded like a musical instrument, compelling parishioners to take notice and comment on his inspiring sermons.
Mrs. Reed had me send for the doctor, whose home was ten streets from ours in a nicer part of town. The telephone company had disconnected our phone some months before, and, although my mother used to ask the neighbors to make calls, on this particular day, they were not home. I ran across the street and down block after block, passing children my age playing with their dolls as a couple of boys played cops and robbers.
I bolted up the steps of the front walkway to the doctor's house, tripped and scraped my knee against the concrete. As I raced up the wooden steps of the front porch, Doctor Lloyd came through the screen door, medical bag in hand, having already seen me rush onto his property. He told me to follow him to his car. Moments after I slipped in, he reversed it from his driveway.
When we arrived back, my mother had already died.
The Reverend prepared a few words for my mother's soul. Mrs. Reed called on me to come and join them in the room where my mother lay. A deep red damask tablecloth, a wedding present from an aunt I never met, now covered the only mirror in the room. Superstition ruled Mrs. Reed. As a minister's wife, she easily explained how her superstitions could co-exist with her Christian beliefs.
"The mirror confuses the soul of the recently departed and can become trapped in its reflection, a device set up by the Devil himself. He is known to use trickery to prevent the soul from its rightful reward in heaven, and one must outwit the Devil at his own game."
She held my hand as we closed our eyes and bowed our heads, listening to Reverend Reed's musical voice, but this time, his voice carried the sound of a baritone oboe. Opening one eye, I saw my mother lay there motionless, seemingly at peace, unlike the battered woman I had seen over the previous two weeks. I wished to pull away the red bedspread that laid over her and keep only the white bedsheet and pillows so that she appeared to be on a cloud.
Mrs. Reed's hands were soft as she held me against her bosom. She wiped away a tear.
"What will become of you?" she said before sending me back to my room.
Later, Reverend and Mrs. Reed walked Doctor Lloyd to the front door where I overheard them speaking about my father, now a widower. They suggested sending Mr. Smythe, who lived down the street, to recover my father from the local bar, but I knew that Mr. Smythe would need help bringing the drunkard home. The conversation turned to the funeral and when they stepped out the door, I couldn't hear what transpired after. Alone in the house with my mother, I wanted nothing more than to hold her hand.
I peered out my bedroom door and tiptoed towards my mother's bed, but there was no need to tiptoe, as I could not wake her from her peaceful death. The room remained dark; a small candle lit on the night table near her. The light cast a hue on my mother's face, giving her the appearance of a blush on her cheeks.
The wind rattled against the windowpane, the blinds drawn down. "A storm is coming. I can feel it in my bones," my mother would have said if she could still hear the wind outside.
The room grew cold now that the fire in the kitchen's hearth had gone out. Situated on the other side of one of the bedroom walls, it provided warmth in this small square room.
My mother lay with her lips slightly ajar, her skin still warm. At first, I poked her, but when nothing happened, I touched her arm and felt her warmth. She was still my mother, still with me, still in me.
Leaning closer to her, I wanted to feel her breath on my cheek, for her eyes to open, her lips to smile, to hear her voice again, as if she only played at a pretend death. I ran my fingers along her arm, closer to her hand, but the damask fell from the mirror before I could wrap my tiny hand inside hers. As I looked up, I swear to this day I saw her reflection, a hollow version of her: face white, half-recognizable and half-ghost. A cold wind rushed up to me, suffocating me. Near me, her body twitched. She had come back from the dead!
I screamed.
Then, the darkness overcame me, and I dropped to the floor.
* * *
When I cameto my senses, I found Mrs. Reed hovering over me, the Reverend beside her. In her hands, she held smelling salts that irritated my nose. My head rested on a pillow, but I remained on the floor near my mother's bed.
"You gave us such a fright," the Reverend said. "Mrs. Reed always carries smelling salt on her person during times like these."
