The House Girl (6 page)

“Your Mister, he’s drinking spirits again, isn’t he?” Missus lifted her hand from the picture and turned toward Josephine. Her large dark eyes were wide and unfocused, and a flush lay across her fine nose and pale freckled cheeks. Josephine feared a fit was coming. “Isn’t he?” Missus repeated.

Josephine paused. It took a moment for Missus Lu’s question to truly register, for Josephine to quit watching her for a sudden jerk, eyes rolled up, and to consider the words. Mister drinking again? Josephine said, “I don’t know, Missus, truly I don’t.”

“Papa Bo, he told me that Mister was not strong. The passing of his mother and sisters in Louisiana when he was a child, it hit him hard, Papa said. He said to me that I was the strong one, that I had to be strong for us both. That’s what I have tried to do.” Missus turned back to the canvas.

“Yes, Missus.”

“God looks down and pities him. He pities us both.” Missus pressed her lips together. “What does he do when he’s gone in town two, three days? Do you know, Josephine?”

“I do not, Missus. I do not know.”

“I can’t help him now. And Papa Bo is gone. I fear for him. I fear for us all.” Missus Lu’s hand was trembling, Josephine saw the charcoal dance above the surface of the canvas. “I forgave him. Before,” Missus said. “I never told him, but he knows. I forgave him what he did. A man cannot be held accountable for his conduct while drinking. Do you understand, Josephine?”

“Here, Missus, let me help you.” And Josephine stepped forward to take the charcoal before it marked the drawing.

“Do you, Josephine? Do you understand?” Missus waved Josephine’s hand away.

“Yes, Missus. Of course.”

Josephine looked out the window to the road where one of Mr. Stanmore’s boys was driving past. She could hear the driver calling to the horses,
Move on,
and the crack of a whip.

Mister, drinking again. The collar of Josephine’s dress pressed too close, as though a hand tightened there.

There were days that had passed dark and quick, barely fastened now to her memory, hanging loose as the slate that sat crooked on the roof. After Papa Bo’s passing, and another of Missus’ miscarriages, the last, as it happened. And Mister never in the fields, always in the house. His heavy, slow footsteps outside her door. At night, the floorboards creaked and she would know it was him.

At night, with Mister there in her room, Josephine would look to the square bit of window that sat up high on the downward slope of the roof. Sometimes the moon shone full through it and sometimes it was the darkest gray of clouds and Josephine would try to mark its perimeters, where that square of sky began and the frame of the window left off. Who was she to tell? There was no one to tell, no use in the telling.

After those days passed on, that time ended and another began, and she gave it no more thought. Mister stopped his drinking and the narrow steps to Josephine’s attic room were crossed only by herself. She gave it no more thought than she did a bee that stung her hard and then fell down dead to the earth, its stinger still embedded in her arm. She rubbed the wound and continued on her way.

Josephine’s eyes went to the canvas, to Missus’ picture. “Missus,” Josephine said, “the second baby, its left cheek is flatter than the first.” She pointed to the flaw.

Missus Lu turned back to the drawing. “Oh Josephine, come do this,” she cried and threw the charcoal to the ground where it broke in two. Josephine retrieved the pieces and took the longer in her fingers. Her shoulders fell, her breath evened. With a steady hand she hollowed out the shadowing on the second child, then moved to correct another awkward angle on a third.

Missus watched for a moment and then her lips turned down, her face went slack. “I cannot abide this room another second,” she said and walked out into the hall.

With a tipped head, Josephine focused on the picture Missus had begun. For Josephine there existed no greater joy than this. The faint pepper smell of the homemade paper, the gritty charcoal dust misting the space around her fingers, her fingers moving faster than her mind could determine where to draw this line, that shadow, the picture emerging from her in a rush as though no distance existed between the paper and her mind’s eye, they inhabited the same interior space, the same intimate world that belonged to her and her alone.

Missus kept a set of books on the study of art that sat on a tall shelf in the studio. One of these was called
Artistic Technique and the Mastery of Painting
and in it Josephine had seen a portrait of Mr. Thomas Jefferson. He stood in his presidential office, his posture straight, his face solemn, and in the back was a tall chest, the wood burnished and gleaming in the soft oil light of the painting. The chest contained many drawers small and large, each fronted with a curved brass handle shaped like an elegant letter U with tendril ends. Josephine had studied this painting and found in it something of use, not for evidence of technique or artistic rendering but for the chest itself, a tall keeper of secrets. It was inside these drawers that Josephine put the feelings she could not have, the rage that would drown her or the disappointment that would crush her. Over the years she had learned to fold down rising emotion just as she would fold the clean bedsheets, the sheet growing smaller and tighter with each pass until all that remained of that wide wrinkled expanse of cotton was a hard closed-in square.

Each wrapped tight, packed away, corners folded over, a small firm bundle.

Inside those drawers: the smell of liquor strong on Mister’s hot breath, the creak of the floorboards outside her door, the creak in his bones as he settled above her. All packed away, and Josephine closed that drawer with a shake of her head, a blink of her eye, a heartbeat slow and steady within her chest. She bent her body into the sketch of the children, bringing her face close enough to kiss its rough surface, and she began to draw another child, much larger than the others, its head almost double the size. With care she formed the child’s lips, its sleeping eyes, round chin, and perfect scrolled ears.

Did Missus’ dead babies sleep here in this studio, the room once intended for their use? Josephine did not believe in the spirit signs that Lottie looked for. But still, there was a magic in here, not entirely benign, not entirely wicked. A sharpness in the air, maybe from the turpentine Missus used to clean her brushes, or the acidic tang of the indigo powder. The light too radiated rich and clear, even after the sun had passed the windows and waned against the other side of the house. Even when the night’s darkness came up through the hills and the valley with a soft graying and muting, the room still seemed aglow.

It was here that Missus had taught Josephine to read. Books brought up from the library, Cooper, Dumas, Dickens, Poe, the names written in gold, the covers cracked, pages spotted dark with mold but still Josephine touched them only with her hands clean, with reverence, savored every word written there, each one a small victory. Letters formed carefully, again and again, the paper burned in the grate afterward, but a few secret pages carried under Josephine’s skirts, up the stairs to her attic room. “Don’t breathe a word to your Mister,” Missus would whisper. “We’d both be in a world of trouble.”

Josephine stopped her work on the canvas.
This will be my last,
she thought.
The last picture made here in this room,
and she felt a bottomless sinking, a different kind of fear, not the fear of discovery, of the hounds, of capture and punishment, but of the deep unknown, the world beyond the latched front gate about which she knew nothing. For a moment it stretched forward in her mind as colors and light, chaos and noise. If Nathan told her the route, if she found her way north, where would she stop? What would hold her there?

Josephine’s mother lay buried under a tall, sickly ash that grew in the slave cemetery, beyond the far wheat fields, to the east of the Bell family plot. Josephine had no memories of her mother though she had searched her mind, hoping for some image or smell, a song perhaps. Lottie said her name was Rebecca, carrying Josephine at her breast when Papa Bo bought them both at auction, and dead from a fever that would not stop in the months after her arrival at Bell Creek. A bad bargain, Papa Bo had raged. Josephine was six when Lottie first showed her the grave, just a rounding of earth, no marker, only the yellow ash leaves scattered about. Sometimes Josephine would go there, sit on the mound, listen for her mother’s voice in the wind, but not once had she ever heard a thing.

Josephine left the charcoal on the easel and moved to the corner and her stack of pictures. Perhaps she might bring something with her when she ran. Could she carry a canvas rolled tight, a folded paper tucked within her bundle? Was it foolish to think she might keep them dry and safe? Each of these pictures had created in her an expectation, a hope for the day. Will Missus go to the studio? Will her mood be charitable or mean? Will there be an ocher made up, a new pencil to use? The completion of each picture, of Josephine saying to herself—
here, this is finished, I have done my best
—seemed a small passing, and she would mourn in a way. A lightness would be gone from her step, the pure tedium, the unrelenting weariness would return. Until she began another. And another. There were so many pictures to make, and the time was always short, the days when Missus allowed her to paint never enough to finish all the scenes that appeared before her.

Josephine paused at one canvas and picked it from the pile, a painting of Lottie over which she had labored for many days. Lottie stood before the cabin she shared with Winton, flowers in her hands. Behind her, Josephine had painted the sea, using as her model a picture she had seen in a heavy book she took from the library,
The Geography of the Sea,
by a Frenchman with a long and frothy name. Josephine had never seen the sea, and this book contained glorious plates of swirling blues and grays, complicated graphs that measured precisely the shape and volume of a wave, maps and text that spoke of the sea as a watch, its cogs and levers and wheels seeming mysterious to the casual viewer but operating to certain concrete principles that students and sailors alike might master. But still, the Frenchman wrote, unlike a watch, there existed always an element of wild, the great unpredictable passions of the sea that might rise up to foil the learned predictions. This was what Josephine hoped for Lottie, and why she placed a sea there in the most unlikely of places, behind a slave cabin in the landlocked county of Charlotte, Virginia. There, an ocean raged and in it the seeds of disorder.

“Josephine! Josephine! Where are you?” Missus Lu’s voice came loud and insistent from the bedroom. “Josephine!”

No, the picture of Lottie was too large, too heavy to carry, but then another caught her eye, a drawing of Lottie and Winton together. And then one of Louis: gone these years now from Bell Creek but still in Josephine’s thoughts, always there. And one too of a younger Missus Lu sitting on the porch, a sketch made before her illness, when Josephine was just a girl, giddy from learning her letters and the feel of the paint on her brush. Working quickly, she rolled the papers tight as she dared and slipped the roll up the sleeve of her dress, but it fell ungainly against her wrist. She pulled them out and placed them again on the top of her pile. Later she would return and spirit them away, fold them into her bundle or fasten them to the inside of her skirts. Later.

“Josephine!”

“Coming, Missus. I am coming.”

Pale and watchful, Missus sat on her tall bed as Josephine entered the room. Missus’ nightdress was streaked with charcoal dust from the studio, her feet were bare and dark with dirt. Silently Josephine wiped Missus’ feet, hands, and face with a cloth wet from the jug, lifted her slender arms to wipe away the sour pungency beneath, and helped Missus to dress, easing first the petticoats then the dress over her slim hips, the tight arms, the bodice, and fastening the long back row of hook and eye. With both hands, Missus Lu lifted her hair away from the last fastenings, and Josephine inhaled sharply. A red lump rose from the back of Missus’ neck, just below the hairline, the skin stretched tight into a rounded point like someone inside was trying to elbow out. The tip was small, the size of a currant, but the lump widened at the base, spreading out and underneath the skin.

Josephine shifted her eyes away to finish the hooks and then began to fix Missus’ hair as she liked it, up at the sides, low in back. Her hands trembled. When had such a thing appeared?

“Hurry up, Josephine. Dr. Vickers’ll be here soon and me not even dressed.”

“Yes, Missus.” Josephine sped the comb through Missus’ hair, careful not to pull too sharp or to touch the lump.

“Dr. Vickers, he knew my daddy well,” Missus Lu said in a conversational tone, tilting her head for Josephine’s comb, seeming oblivious to the mark of sickness growing on her, and it was this ignorance that brought up a pressure within Josephine’s chest. At that moment the vast spider’s web of emotion she felt for Missus Lu was reduced to a single, simple strand of pity. “Why, I’ve known Dr. Vickers since I was just a tiny thing. Robert does despise him.”

Josephine did not respond but kept on with Missus’ hair, the strands heavy and slick with unwash. The last few weeks, Missus had refused to bathe, despite the heat. Water frightened her, she said. She believed it to be alive.

“Robert won’t even come in to see Dr. Vickers. Too busy with the picking, so he claims. But you’ll stay with me, won’t you?” Missus turned full around to face Josephine, pulling out the half-finished updo, and grasped Josephine’s wrists in her small, tight fists. “Stay with me.”

Josephine nodded. “Of course, Missus. I’ll stay with you.” She placed a hand on Missus’ shoulder and gently squeezed the thin muscle. “Don’t you worry.”

Missus Lu turned back, relieved, and Josephine finished with the hair, her eyes straying again and again to the knob at her neck. Mister was wrong. This was no passing spell. Missus would grow worse before she grew better, if she ever did—Josephine had seen prettier wounds than this lead to quick, ugly deaths. The pity twisted and burrowed in Josephine’s stomach, and she pulled down at the hair to cover Missus’ nape and wondered what marvels Dr. Vickers might summon to effect a cure for such an affliction.