Compromise with Sin Page 20

  Her voice became barely audible. “He has this crazy notion you and I . . . he thinks you’re Marie’s father.”

  Yonder shifted his gaze. When he faced her, Louise saw a look of estrangement in his eyes reminiscent of the time he told her about getting beaten for courting a white woman.

  He thrust the bag at her. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go finish my breakfast.”

  Late morning, after several hours of keeping watch, Louise could not force her eyes to stay open against the sun’s merciless rays. She stood and turned away from the sun, and as her eyes began to feel better, she realized her mouth was parched. But water would have to wait. She dared not leave the post she had set up on the uncomfortable iron settee next to Morrissey’s folly. She checked her watch again. The truck must have broken down along the way. Frank and Marie should have arrived long ago.

  After leaving Yonder in the dining room, Louise had gone to her apartment and picked up the dress she was embroidering for Marie, hoping that busy hands would steady her nerves as she waited. But she’d worked in fits and starts, her concentration broken by thoughts that tumbled over one another. Sorrow for the words that must have wounded Yonder. Anger towards Frank and Bernard. Self-loathing for having been the cause of so much pain. And longing to hold Marie safe in her arms again. Nothing good can come of this. Louise recalled the sense of foreboding she’d had on the eve of Frank and Marie’s departure for the Chautauqua tour.

  Now that her eyes were rested, Louise sat down and picked up the dress again. A light breeze twisted the silk ribbons draped across the arm of the settee.

  As she untangled and cut a length of red ribbon, she rehearsed what she had decided to tell Frank. Assuming that sobriety and daylight had brought him to his senses, she would remind him that her maternal grandmother was part Sioux, with hair straight as a stick just like Marie’s, a plausible lie since no family photographs or documents existed to disprove it. And point out that Marie had the fair complexion of a Morrissey. Even Frank’s cousin had remarked about it once on a visit to Riverbend.

  If Frank refused to believe her, then what? She would have no choice. Holding the ribbon, her hands dropped to her lap. To save Yonder she would have to tell Frank about Doc.

  The hours passed with hunger pangs that came and went, relentless thirst, and lips becoming dry and cracked. The sun had moved, putting Louise in the shadow of the Inn. She jumped at the sound of a vehicle downshifting for the steep climb up High Street. She stood halfway, then sat back down. Not the sound of Frank’s truck.

  When the automobile came into view, she recognized it and wondered what brought the sheriff. Perhaps news about Lars.

  The car entered the drive, turned around, and parked facing the street, but it was several minutes before the sheriff opened the door, stood, tossed his hat onto the seat, and strode toward her. In that time, Louise worked her tongue and mouth which had become so dry she couldn’t have spoken with slurring.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Morrissey.” Sheriff Andy Maguire squinted against the sun. He started to crack his knuckles but stopped himself and hooked his thumbs in his belt.

  “You caught Lars!”

  “No, ma’am.” He blinked a few times and shifted his gaze from Louise to the dress she was working on.

  She wondered why the sheriff did not get to his point. The law did not come calling for no reason. An uneasy feeling from childhood returned, the occasions she’d watched Pa get arrested. She held up the dress. “For Marie. She likes embroidered things. She can touch them and make out the designs. It’s for her Chautauqua appearance in Riverbend.”

  “It’s right pretty, ma’am.” The sheriff’s voice broke. “I’m afraid. . . I got a call from the sheriff over in Lancaster County. Mr. Morrissey and your little girl . . . there’s been an accident.”

  “Are they hurt?” The way he looked down at the ground and cracked his knuckles alarmed Louise. They must have been badly injured.

  “Ma’am, I don’t know how to tell you.” His voice broke. “They was killed.”

  Marie’s dress fell to the ground. Louise gripped the settee. Nonsensical images careened in her mind . . . a hotel fire, Lars wielding a knife, her father brandishing a stick. The world went dark. If she reached out, her fingers would graze walls closing in. Then an instant of clarity. “No. It can’t be. Frank and Marie are on their way home. They’ll be here any time.”

  “No, ma’am. They died when their truck went into a creek.”

  “No, not my husband and daughter. You’re mistaken. Someone else.”

  “Mr. Morrissey had identification.”

  “I expect them home any time.”

  “Yes, ma’am, they was on their way, driving on West Stagecoach Road near Sprague when they run off Olive Branch bridge.”

  Louise stared at the needle in her hand trailing red ribbon and wondered what it was for. Oh, yes, Marie’s dress. She shook her head. “What makes you so sure it was them?” The guttural anger in her voice surprised her, a detached voice that seemed to come from someone hovering next to her. “My husband is a good driver.”

  “If it’s any comfort, ma’am, they died instantly. They wasn’t in any pain.”

  Louise was trembling, and her words came out in a shriek. “How can you know they didn’t suffer?”

  “Their necks was broken, ma’am. Lancaster County sheriff said they died instantly.” He picked up Marie’s dress and placed it in her hands. “I’m right sorry, ma’am.”

  22

  July 1905

  The bodies of Frank and Marie had been taken to the Lancaster County morgue in Lincoln. Louise would have to arrange for them to be transported to the undertaking parlor in Riverbend, then brought home for the funeral service.

  Woozy from the laudanum she had taken to calm her nerves, Louise sat in the back parlor where she felt murmurs around her, J.D.’s voice dominating a conversation that included Yonder and Dovie. She gazed at her hand that stroked the arm of her chair. Stroked it over and over.

  Snatches of phrases registered, but mostly Louise drifted somewhere beyond meaning. Dovie had insisted she drink the opiate, reminding her that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written her best poetry under its influence. Louise wondered how. She could not grasp a thought long enough to string words into a simple sentence.

  Other voices, muffled. Yonder got up and closed the pocket doors that divided the back parlor and dining room.

  Louise watched Dovie approach and felt her hand on her arm.

  Dovie said, “Who do we need to notify out of town?”

  “I don’t know, Frank’s cousin and . . .”

  “Where is your address book? We’ll go through the names and make a list.”

  Louise shrugged and swept her arm in a wide gesture. “I have to see them . . . the bodies. Now.”

  “Of course.” Dovie looked toward her husband. “J.D.?”

  Yonder spoke up. “I’ll drive you there.”

  For most of the two-hour drive to Lincoln, Yonder and Louise retreated into silence. Louise’s eyes took in the sun-washed scenes of people going about their everyday lives—some children playing kick-the-can, older boys and girls detasseling corn, a farm wife weeding her vegetable garden. She strained to remember what an ordinary day was like.

  Each time the automobile neared a bridge, Louise held her breath and fought off images of Frank and Marie being crushed or flung into the creek.

  The laudanum was wearing off. Regaining control of her faculties was good, but she longed for the narcotic fog, a shroud against the awful reality she held at a distance.

  “Alive.” She blurted the word without knowing why.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. I cannot comprehend that they’re . . .” She could not bring herself to say the word.

  Louise had become all too familiar with death, helping Ma wash and dress the bodies of her baby brothers. She took pains to lay them out as though they were just sleeping. Pa would head for the sta
bles to make coffins but end up going on a bender for days, and Ma would send Louise to the saloon to fetch him, a pointless errand as there was no prying him away from his card game and bottle. Meanwhile the little ones’ mouths and eyes would contort in ghoulish ways. And the stench would make Louise gag.

  After little Malachi died, Louise searched for just the right stone, one smooth enough to inscribe with a piece of coal.

  Malachi Jacob Caldwell

  B. 1869 D. 1871

  God’s Little Messenger

  Joshua died not long after he’d learned to walk, a time when the ground was still frozen. His coffin, nailed shut to keep coyotes from the body, sat outside next to the house. It was April before he was laid to rest in the side yard. Weeks later his baby brother was interred next to him. Louise marked their graves as well.

  Joshua David Caldwell

  D. 3-21-1875

  Aged 1 Yr. 28 Ds.

  God’s Little Jewel

  Baby Boy Caldwell

  D. 5-12-1875

  Aged 3 Ms. 17 Ds.

  God Had No Right To Take Him

  After the third baby died, Louise decided she hated God. Had Pa been able to read, he would have boxed her ears for the words she put on that stone.

  “This must be the morgue,” Yonder said as he parked the automobile.

  Louise opened the jar of Vicks VapoRub that Dovie had insisted she bring. She smeared the gel inside her nostrils and winced at its sting, then handed the jar to Yonder. The pungent menthol odor brought back memories of Marie squirming to get away as soon as she smelled it. Now Louise knew she could never again use it as a cold remedy.

  She stepped from the automobile. Yonder’s firm hand on her arm brought back the old anxiety that Frank would misinterpret his intentions, and with that thought the drunken telephone call played again in her head, rousing the guilt that always lay beneath the surface.

  Inside, a frumpy matron grudgingly set aside her knitting. “The bodies was just delivered. Haven’t got them cleaned up yet.”

  Louise and Yonder followed her through a dim corridor to a formaldehyde-smelling, gray room with concrete walls and floor. Sunlight poured through open windows, its shafts like spotlights on an insect drama abuzz with the frantic wings of maybe a hundred flies stuck on flypaper strips hanging from the ceiling.

  Louise took a chair across from Yonder at a metal table. She stared at the double doors behind him until a group of flies alighted on the table and busied themselves in a huddle. Louise pressed her palms on the table’s cool surface, a contrast to the heat and humidity that sapped her strength and sent rivulets of perspiration trickling between her breasts.

  She jumped when the double doors swung open with a loud bang. The end of a sheet-covered gurney appeared. Its wheels squeaked. Pushing the gurney was an attendant wearing a grimy white jacket. A wheel jammed, and he gave it a kick. The figure under the sheet shifted, almost imperceptibly.

  “He’s alive,” Louise cried out. “You’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  She lunged for the gurney, but Yonder caught her and pulled her back.

  She stared as the attendant removed the sheet. The gray, bloated body scarcely resembled Frank. The forehead was bashed, the nose lay to one side, and shards of glass protruded from several of many cuts.

  Louise turned away. The smell overpowered the Vicks and made her retch, body-racking dry heaves. Soon she was looking into a metal wastebasket that Yonder held while she vomited. She sat down and wiped her forehead with her handkerchief.

  “These effects was on the body, ma’am.” The attendant’s words diverted her attention from the body to a tray that held Frank’s silver money clip, pocket watch, four rifle shells, and other items.

  When the attendant lifted the sheet from Marie, Louise steeled herself. She looked at a bloated face covered with gashes. Gently, so as not to cause any more pain than necessary, she plucked one of a half dozen shards of glass from Marie’s face.

  The attendant took it from her hand. “They went through the windshield, ma’am.”

  The candy-striped nightgown, stained with mud and blood, had a gaping tear at the shoulder. Louise brought the torn edges together and attempted to make them stay in place. But as soon as she withdrew her hands the tear gaped again.

  Moving the matted hair, she bent to kiss Marie’s forehead, but it was crushed. She dropped to her knees, saw the table leg looming large, and felt hands jerking her backward away from the leg. It was Yonder, his eyes filled with alarm at her near miss. He knelt beside her and held her quaking body as she sobbed into his shoulder.

  She heard him say they should leave. But leaving her daughter was unconscionable, her daughter who was supposed to come home triumphant. It was my fault. I should never have wished Marie wouldn’t outgrow her nightgown.

  Before they could leave the morgue, Louise signed papers at the front desk while the matronly woman sat knitting what appeared to be a baby’s sweater. The woman pointed a knitting needle in the direction of two suitcases along with a small box, which turned out to hold items retrieved from Frank’s truck.

  Yonder took the box and suitcases out to the car. When he returned he asked the woman, “Are there more boxes?”

  Without looking up from her knitting, she said, “Nope.”

  “There should have been a rifle,” Yonder said. “Mr. Morrissey carried it for protection when he traveled.”

  “Nope.”

  “You see, Yonder?” Louise said. “The rifle wasn’t in the truck. Frank didn’t mean what he said.”

  Another hour or so of daylight remained, and Louise insisted that Yonder drive her to the bridge where the accident occurred. The site was only about fifteen miles from Lincoln, but it was slow going on the narrow road. The recent heavy rains had turned the road to muck, and deep ruts grabbed the tires, jerking the automobile from side to side.

  “I don’t reckon we’ll ever know why Frank would take this God-forsaken road when he could have taken the two-lane macadam all the way,” he said.

  Louise shook her head. What was it after all these years that caused her husband to suspect that she and Yonder were lovers? What would he have done to Yonder? And her? In this moment she saw with clarity the terrible events her infidelity had set in motion. Marie’s blindness, now her death and Frank’s. She hoped Marie, the little innocent, had died still believing Frank was her father. She looked at Yonder, another innocent ensnared in her deceitful web.

  “Olive Branch bridge.” He slowed the car and stopped on the side of the road.

  Neither moved nor spoke. Louise closed her eyes and held her breath so as not to break the stillness and its momentary sanctuary.

  The bridge railing was intact. Deep tire tracks that ended at the creek bank’s edge indicated where the truck had been dragged from the creek.

  Standing next to the tire tracks, Yonder ran his hand over the end of the steel railing. “Black paint. That’s where the truck grazed it. He missed the bridge altogether.”

  Louise wanted to feel that the place was hallowed, that she could reach out and embrace the spirits of her loved ones. But it was just a bridge. “Did they─”

  “Their necks were broken. Both would have died instantly.”

  Louise shielded her eyes against the glare of the setting sun and scanned the creek. A piece of cloth had snagged on a stick and bobbed, almost lifelike, with the flowing water. She studied it, trying to make out whether it was a fragment of Marie’s nightgown. She looked away. “Frank was a good driver. Sober or drunk. I’ve seen him when he could hardly stand up, but he could still drive.”

  Yonder nodded. “Most likely Frank didn’t even see the bridge. The mud could have caused him to lose control. It’s bad enough now, think what it must have been like in the dark, probably with a blinding rain.” He nudged Louise toward the automobile. “We’ve seen all that we need to.”

  As they turned to go, Louise could not resist one final backward glance. When she did, something caught her eye,
something that whoever recovered the bodies from the rain-swollen creek had overlooked. Yonder turned as well. Hoping to discover that her mind was playing tricks, Louise stepped closer to the creek to study the long object that caused the flowing water to break and ripple over and around it. But there was no mistaking what was visible now, what Yonder had undoubtedly seen as well: the edge of a rifle barrel.

  23

  July 1905

  As Louise’s trembling hands chain-stitched a blue edge along the collar of Marie’s dress, thoughts of the collar gracing her daughter’s broken neck set her weeping. Her mind would not let go of that night, the drunken telephone call, the crash that sent them through the windshield, the rifle in the water. Louise reached for the laudanum bottle, unscrewed the cap, and winced as she swallowed the bitter opiate.

  Relief. Her breathing slowed, and she lost herself in each languid, deliberate stitch. In, out. In, out. No hurry. She had until September. Marie would not need the dress until her Chautauqua appearance in Riverbend. Marie, beloved by all, The Chautauqua Darling, would hold the adoring audience in the palm of her hand.

  Frank would have wanted a service in the parlor. He may have chafed at being tied to the Inn, but it was sentiment more than inertia that held him to his lifelong home. Louise heard herself harping at him─if only she could take back the words. She had called their apartment a mausoleum.

  Curly Ambrose arrived early to take formal photographs of Louise with the coffins, both of which were closed. Later he would photograph scenes at the hearse and graveside.

  Mourners filled the Morrissey parlor and dining room. For the first time in the history of the Durfee Chautauqua Bureau, substitute performers were found and some acts cancelled, thus enabling those close to Frank and Marie to pay their respects. Mr. and Mrs. Ryder attended, as did Miss Keller, Mrs. Macy, Bernard, Giovanna and several crew members.