Redeeming Love (5 page)

But deep inside of her, something told her she was. If her father cared, would he have wanted her dead? If Mama cared, would she have sent her away?

God’s truth. What was God’s truth?

They left the next morning. Sarah never once glimpsed the sea.

When they arrived home, Mama pretended everything was fine, but Sarah knew something was terribly wrong. There were boxes out, and Mama was packing her things.

“We’re going to visit your grandmother and grandfather,” Mama said brightly, but her eyes looked dull and dead. “They’ve never seen you.” She 31

Redeem.000 7/25/07 4:38 PM Page 32

R

E

D

E

E

M

I

N

G

L

O

V

E

told Cleo she was sorry to dismiss her, and Cleo said that was fine. She had decided to marry Bob, the butcher, after all. Mama said she hoped Cleo would be very happy, and Cleo went away.

Sarah awakened in the middle of the night. Mama wasn’t in the bed, but Sarah could hear her. She followed the sound of her mother’s stricken voice and went into the parlor. The window was open, and she went to look out.

What was Mama doing outside in the middle of the night?

Moonlight flowed over the flower garden and Sarah saw her mother kneeling in her thin white nightgown. She was ripping all the flowers out.

Handful after handful, she yanked the plants up and flung them in all directions, weeping and talking to herself as she did. She picked up a knife and came to her feet. She went down again on her knees beside her beloved rose bushes. One after another, she cut the roots. Every last one of them.

Then she bent forward and sobbed, rocking herself back and forth, back and forth, the knife still in her hand.

Sarah sank down onto the floor inside and hid in the darkness of the parlor, her hands covering her head.

They rode in a coach all the next day and slept that night in an inn. Mama said little, and Sarah held her doll pressed tightly against her chest. There was one bed in the room, and Sarah slept contentedly in her mother’s arms.

When she awakened in the morning, Mama was sitting at the window and running the rosary beads through her fingers as she prayed. Sarah listened, not understanding, as her mother repeated the same phrases over and over.

“Forgive me, Jesus. I did it to myself. Mea culpa, mea culpa…”

They rode another day in another coach and came to a town. Mama was tense and pale. She brushed Sarah off and straightened her hat. She took Sarah’s hand, and they walked a long, long time until they reached a tree-lined street.

Mama came to a white fence and stopped at the gate. “Lord, please, please, let them forgive me,” she whispered. “Oh, please, God.”

Sarah looked at the house before her. It was not much bigger than the cottage, but it had a nice porch and pots of flowers on the window sills. Lace 32

Redeem.000 7/25/07 4:38 PM Page 33

F

R

A

N

C

I

N

E

R

I

V

E

R

S

curtains hung in all the windows. She liked it very much.

When they reached the door, Mama took a deep breath and knocked. A woman came to answer. She was small and gray and wore a flowered gingham dress covered by a white apron. She stared and stared at Mama and her blue eyes filled with tears. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.
Oh…”

“I’ve come home, Mother,” Mama said. “Please. Let me come home.”

“It’s not that easy. You know it’s not that easy.”

“I’ve nowhere else to go.”

The lady looked at Sarah. “I don’t have to ask if this is your child,” she said with a sad smile. “She’s very beautiful.”

“Please, Mama.”

The lady opened the door and let them in. She showed them into a small room with lots of books. “Wait here and I’ll speak with your father,” she said and went away. Mama paced, wringing her hands. She paused once and closed her eyes, her lips moving. The lady came back, her face white and lined, her cheeks wet. “No,” she said. One word. That was all. No.

Mama took a step toward the door, and the lady stopped her. “He’ll only say things that will hurt you more.”

“Hurt? How could I be hurt more, Mama?”

“Mae, please, don’t…”

“I’ll beg. I’ll get down on my knees. I’ll tell him he was right. He
was
right.”

“It won’t do any good. He said as far as he’s concerned his daughter is dead.”

Mae swept past her. “I’m not dead!” The lady gestured for Sarah to stay in the room. She hastened after Mama, closing the door as she left. Sarah waited, hearing distant voices.

Mama came back after a while. Her face was white, but she wasn’t crying anymore. “Come on, darling,” she said in a dull tone. “We’re leaving.”

“Mae,” the lady said. “Oh, Mae…” She pressed something into her hand.

“It’s all I have.”

Mama didn’t say anything. A man’s voice came from another room, an angry, demanding voice. “I have to go,” the lady said. Mama nodded and turned away.

When they reached the end of the tree-lined street, Mae opened her 33

Redeem.000 7/25/07 4:38 PM Page 34

R

E

D

E

E

M

I

N

G

L

O

V

E

hand and looked at the money her mother had placed in it. She gave a soft broken laugh. After a moment, she took Sarah’s hand and walked on, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Mama sold her ruby ring and pearls. She and Sarah lived in an inn until the money gave out. Mama sold her music box, and for a while they lived quite comfortably in an inexpensive boardinghouse. Finally, she asked Sarah to give back the crystal swan, and with the money they got for it, they lived a long time in a rundown hotel before Mama found and settled them for good in a shack near the docks of New York.

Sarah finally saw the sea. There was garbage floating in it. But still she liked it very much.

Sometimes she would go down and sit on the wharf. She liked the salt smell and the ships coming in loaded with cargo. She liked the sounds of the water lapping at the pillars beneath her and the seagulls overhead.

There were rough men at the docks and sailors who came from around the world. Some came to visit, and Mama would ask Sarah to wait outside until they left. They never stayed very long. Sometimes they pinched her cheek and said they would come back when she got a little bigger. Some said she was prettier than Mama, but Sarah knew that wasn’t true.

She didn’t like them. Mama laughed when they came and acted as though she were happy to see them. But when they went away, she cried and drank whiskey until she fell asleep in the rumpled bed by the window.

At seven years old, Sarah wondered if Cleo hadn’t been partly right about God’s truth.

Then Uncle Rab came to live with them, and things got better. Not as many men came to visit, though they still did when Uncle Rab didn’t have any coins to jingle in his pockets. He was big and dull, and Mama treated him with affection. They slept together in the bed by the window, and Sarah had the cot on the floor.

“He’s not too bright,” Mama said to her, “but he has a kind heart and he tries to provide for us. Times are hard, darling, and sometimes he can’t. He needs Mama’s help.”

34

Redeem.000 7/25/07 4:38 PM Page 35

F

R

A

N

C

I

N

E

R

I

V

E

R

S

Sometimes he just wanted to sit outside the door and get drunk and sing songs about women.

When it rained, he would go to the inn down the road to be with his friends. Mama would drink and sleep. To pass the time, Sarah found tin cans and washed them until they shone like silver. She set them beneath the roof leaks. Then she would sit in the quiet shack with the rain beating down and listen to the music the drops made plinking into the tins.

Cleo had been right about crying, too. Crying did no good. Mama cried and cried until Sarah wanted to cover her ears and never hear her again. All Mama’s crying never changed anything.

When the other children mocked Sarah and called her mother names, she looked at them and said nothing. What they said was true; you couldn’t argue with it. When she felt the tears coming up, building like a great hard pressure inside her, hot, so hot she thought they would burn, she swallowed them down deeper and deeper until they became a hard little stone in her chest. She learned to look back at her tormentors and smile with cold arrogance and disdain. She learned to pretend nothing they said could touch her. And sometimes she convinced herself nothing did.

The winter Sarah was eight, Mama became ill. She didn’t want a doctor.

She said all she needed was rest. But she kept getting worse, her breathing more labored. “Take care of my little girl, Rab,” Mama said. She smiled the way she had long ago.

She died in the morning, the first sunlight of spring on her face and her rosary beads in her dead-white hands. Rab wept violently, but Sarah had no tears. The heaviness inside her seemed almost too great to bear. When Rab went out for a while, she lay down beside Mama and put her arms around her.

Mama was so cold and stiff. Sarah wanted to warm her. Sarah’s eyes felt gritty and hot. She closed them and whispered over and over, “Wake up, Mama. Wake up. Please, wake up.” When she didn’t, Sarah couldn’t stop the tears. “I want to go with you. Take me, too. God, please, I want to go with my mama.” She wept until exhaustion overtook her and only awakened when Rab lifted her away from the bed. Men were with him.

Sarah saw they meant to handle Mama and she screamed at them to 35

Redeem.000 7/25/07 4:38 PM Page 36

R

E

D

E

E

M

I

N

G

L

O

V

E

leave her alone. Rab held her tight, almost smothering her in his foul-smelling shirt, while the others began wrapping Mama in a sheet. Sarah went silent when she saw what they had done. Rab let her go, and she sat down hard on the floor and didn’t move.

The men talked as though she weren’t there. Maybe she wasn’t anymore.

Maybe she was different, the way Mama once said.

“I bet Mae was real pretty once,” one said as he began sewing the shroud closed over Mama’s face.

“She’s better off dead,” Rab said, crying again. “At least now she’s not unhappy. She’s free.”

Free,
Sarah thought.
Free of me. If I hadn’t been born, Mama would live in a
nice cottage in the country with flowers all around. Mama would be happy. Mama
would be alive.

“Wait a minute,” said one, and pried the rosary from Mama’s fingers and dropped it in Sarah’s lap. “I bet she woulda wanted you to have that, honey.”

He finished the stitching while Sarah ran the beads through her cold fingers and stared at nothing.

They all went away, Mama with them. Sarah sat alone for a long time wondering if Rab would keep his promise to take care of her. When night came and he didn’t come back, Sarah went down to the docks and flung the rosary into a garbage scow. “What good are you?” she cried out to the heavens.

No answer came.

She remembered Mama’s going to the big church and talking to the man in black. He talked a long time, and Mama had listened, her head bowed, tears running down her cheeks. Mama never went back, but sometimes she would still sift the beads through her slender fingers while the rain spat on the window.

“What good are you?!” Sarah screamed again. “Tell me!” A sailor looked at her oddly as he passed by.

Rab didn’t come back for two days and when he did, he was so drunk he didn’t remember who she was. She sat cross-legged with her back to the fire, looking at him. He was maudlin, sloppy tears running down his bearded cheeks. Every time he raised the half-empty bottle by its neck, she watched 36

Redeem.000 7/25/07 4:38 PM Page 37

F

R

A

N

C

I

N

E

R

I

V

E

R

S

his Adam’s apple bob. After a while, he fell over and snored, the rest of the whiskey running through the cracks in the floor. Sarah put the blanket over him and sat beside him. “It’s all right, Rab. I’ll take care of you now.” She couldn’t do it the way Mama did, but she would find some way.

Rain drummed against the window. She put out her tin cans and blocked her mind to everything but the sound of the drops plinking into them, making music in the cold, dull room.

She was glad, she told herself, really glad. No one would come knocking at the door. No one would bother them anymore.

Rab was guilt-ridden in the morning. He cried again. “I gotta keep my promise to Mae, else she won’t rest in peace.” He held his head in his hands and peered at her with bloodshot, sad eyes. “What am I going to do with you, kid? I need a drink. Bad.” He looked in the cupboards and found nothing but a can of beans. He opened them and ate half, leaving the rest for her.

“I’m going out awhile and think things through. Gotta talk to a few friends.

Maybe they can help.”

Sarah lay on the bed and pressed Mama’s pillow against her face, comforting herself with the lingering scent of her mother. She waited for Rab to come back. As the hours passed, the trembling started deep inside her.

It was cold; snow was falling. She lit the fire and ate the beans. Shivering, she dragged a blanket from the bed and wrapped herself in it. She sat as close to the grate as she could.

The sun was going down, and the silence was like death. Everything slowed inside her and she thought if she closed her eyes and relaxed, she could stop breathing and die. She tried to concentrate on that, but she heard a man’s voice, talking and excited. It was Rab.

“You’ll be pleased. I swear. She’s a good kid. Looks like Mae. Pretty. Real pretty. And smart.”

She was relieved when he opened the door. He wasn’t drunk, just lightly in his cups, his eyes bright and merry. He was smiling for the first time in weeks. “Everything’s going to be fine now, kid,” he said and brought another man into the shack with him.