the entire back length, was empty: we had retreated back into the wing on the east side, which had once been the original frontier homestead.
We cannot run that house without all the slaves
. John had insisted that we send most of our slaves off to friends in Alabama before the Federals could requisition them and everything else they could get their hands on.
The house is much too big for Mariah to keep up,
John had said. I had known this to be only partly true. The rest of the truth, I knew, was that my husband wanted me to quit living among our dead children, if only for a while. This did not stop me from drifting through their rooms and listening for them.
I remembered the voices of my children and the sound of my own voice teaching them their lessons and reading them Bible stories, the sound of the piano, the sound of the tall case clock ticking in the hallway.
Nothing disappears
. I imagined that the sounds and smells of the children existed somewhere, borne away by the wind. That was a comforting thought. They also existed in my mind, as memories, but of late I had come to distrust those.
I could never leave those memories behind. They buzzed at me like gnats.
There was the central passage that ran the full length from front door to back, dividing the downstairs. There was the stairway that led to a similar hall upstairs. Heavy poplar doors led to two rooms on either side of both hallways. On the first floor the best parlor lay to the left of the entrance, my husband’s office to the right. At the back of the house a door opened into the family parlor, where the portraits of our family had once hung. Across the hallway there was the dining room, the table now covered in linen. Upstairs, the only place I spent much time anymore, the doors to my children’s bedrooms remained shut. Above the foyer there was an odd little room with no discernible purpose—an architectural accident, unintended space—and it was there that I spent my days sitting in a small haircloth rocker.
I was a medical puzzle. Like every other lady I’d known in Franklin, I’d been given my bottle of laudanum when the grief had overcome me, but unlike the other women, I had sunk deeper into my despair and—yes, I knew this—my eccentricity. This was not the usual outcome, according to Dr. Cliffe. In the little bottle the ladies of my former circle found the strength to sleep without dreaming as they sent their husbands off to war, or their children. They could move about and pretend to run their households, but in truth they spent their days moving through a sludgy torpor, never completely sure when a conversation had begun or when it should end.
But I had, in fact, never taken the laudanum. Every day I poured a little from the bottle into an empty perfume bottle which I kept hidden in a compartment of my dresser. Every month or so John dutifully went to get my next bottle, and every day I poured a little into my perfume bottle.
I won’t prescribe more than this, because any more would kill her if accidentally taken all at once,
Dr. Cliffe told John when he thought I hadn’t heard him.
In the years since I watched John Randal die when he was just three months old, the first of my children to leave me, I had collected the dozens and dozens of deadly doses, graduating to larger and larger perfume bottles as the months passed by. His eyes were so big, and he was so little, and when he looked up at me, his brows permanently wrinkled by pain and pleading, I saw the possibility of true innocence and the monstrous crime being committed against that very idea, against me,
against my son.
Sometimes the pain would ease, and he would smile, but only tears came when I tried to smile back and show him that I loved him, that he was the most wonderful thing. After a time he quit smiling. He was defenseless in this world, and so I loved him all the more and hated the world. Every day when I awoke I went to the wardrobe and pulled the bottle out. I’d
We cannot run that house without all the slaves
. John had insisted that we send most of our slaves off to friends in Alabama before the Federals could requisition them and everything else they could get their hands on.
The house is much too big for Mariah to keep up,
John had said. I had known this to be only partly true. The rest of the truth, I knew, was that my husband wanted me to quit living among our dead children, if only for a while. This did not stop me from drifting through their rooms and listening for them.
I remembered the voices of my children and the sound of my own voice teaching them their lessons and reading them Bible stories, the sound of the piano, the sound of the tall case clock ticking in the hallway.
Nothing disappears
. I imagined that the sounds and smells of the children existed somewhere, borne away by the wind. That was a comforting thought. They also existed in my mind, as memories, but of late I had come to distrust those.
I could never leave those memories behind. They buzzed at me like gnats.
There was the central passage that ran the full length from front door to back, dividing the downstairs. There was the stairway that led to a similar hall upstairs. Heavy poplar doors led to two rooms on either side of both hallways. On the first floor the best parlor lay to the left of the entrance, my husband’s office to the right. At the back of the house a door opened into the family parlor, where the portraits of our family had once hung. Across the hallway there was the dining room, the table now covered in linen. Upstairs, the only place I spent much time anymore, the doors to my children’s bedrooms remained shut. Above the foyer there was an odd little room with no discernible purpose—an architectural accident, unintended space—and it was there that I spent my days sitting in a small haircloth rocker.
I was a medical puzzle. Like every other lady I’d known in Franklin, I’d been given my bottle of laudanum when the grief had overcome me, but unlike the other women, I had sunk deeper into my despair and—yes, I knew this—my eccentricity. This was not the usual outcome, according to Dr. Cliffe. In the little bottle the ladies of my former circle found the strength to sleep without dreaming as they sent their husbands off to war, or their children. They could move about and pretend to run their households, but in truth they spent their days moving through a sludgy torpor, never completely sure when a conversation had begun or when it should end.
But I had, in fact, never taken the laudanum. Every day I poured a little from the bottle into an empty perfume bottle which I kept hidden in a compartment of my dresser. Every month or so John dutifully went to get my next bottle, and every day I poured a little into my perfume bottle.
I won’t prescribe more than this, because any more would kill her if accidentally taken all at once,
Dr. Cliffe told John when he thought I hadn’t heard him.
In the years since I watched John Randal die when he was just three months old, the first of my children to leave me, I had collected the dozens and dozens of deadly doses, graduating to larger and larger perfume bottles as the months passed by. His eyes were so big, and he was so little, and when he looked up at me, his brows permanently wrinkled by pain and pleading, I saw the possibility of true innocence and the monstrous crime being committed against that very idea, against me,
against my son.
Sometimes the pain would ease, and he would smile, but only tears came when I tried to smile back and show him that I loved him, that he was the most wonderful thing. After a time he quit smiling. He was defenseless in this world, and so I loved him all the more and hated the world. Every day when I awoke I went to the wardrobe and pulled the bottle out. I’d
Similar Books
