Lonnie said, “It has been squashed under the bed for a year,” as she dove back under. She came up with a worn-out larger shoe. It had a hole in the toe.
By the time the candles were put out that night, I had learned much about these people and none of it endeared them to me. The old woman made me wipe out pots and I vomited with each one, worse than seasickness. I was to sleep in a tiny alcove under the eaves, furnished with a fetid mat and a bearskin. I pulled the mat against the chimney and made myself a tent of the skin. I pilfered a rug I found rolled in a corner behind a chest, adding that to my little tent-house. Master and Mistress and Birgitta slept downstairs.
The Haskens’ three daughters ranged in age from twenty-one to fourteen. All of them snored. Lonnie was given to fits where she stuttered and stammered and sometimes fell down, spitting and foaming. Birgitta warned me to keep her from falling in the fireplace and away from all candles and lamps. When she was not taken with fits, she played at braiding and unbraiding Christine’s hair while Christine sat knitting. I longed to have my ma work the painful knots from my hair and I would have asked Lonnie to do mine had this been any other place. Lonnie’s given name was Livonah, but she could not pronounce it. Lonnie found ways at odd times to pop out of a corner or from under a bed and call out, “Scary Mary!” It kept me so uneasy that I wanted to scratch her face. She slept with Rachael and clutched a doll made of wood and dressed in miniature clothing.
Rachael was the eldest, cross-eyed as a baby bird, and made me most uneasy. She had a way of asking, “That, there! That one, I told you, Mary,” without pointing a finger or naming a thing, expecting me to guess which eye she had aimed at something she wanted brought to her. I could not tell what she wanted and I hated the way it made me feel stupid, as if I had left my senses behind on the voyage. I thought of her as a prating, narrow-backed, long-nosed, cross-eyed fool.
Christine was the middle girl, nineteen, plain as her mother and more dull than Birgitta, as if her mind had a hollow place in it which wanted filling. She did nothing throughout a day other than sit and knit stockings. The stockings seemed nice and there were more than enough to go around, so I smiled and remarked to her that they looked ever so nicely made, and that I should enjoy having a pair of the extra stockings to keep my feet warm, as she had a stack of nine or ten pairs in her basket. Christine flew from her chair, squalling, “Mary tried to steal our stockings!” which caused Birgitta to lay me a whipping across the back.
The next day I sneaked up to Christine and hissed into her ear, “You pathetic, defective creature. I would not touch your worm-infested, pox-ridden, goat-shit-filled stockings if I held the devil’s pitchfork in my hand.”
That got me a whipping by Master himself with a leather strap he tethered next to the fireplace and once a week used to strop his razor. Once he had laid five great whacks across my back and legs, he said to me, “You are not an equal in this house; you are a servant. You will never address this household with insult or familiarity. You will never say the name of the father of all evil aloud within these walls. It is my duty and right to train you until you understand your place. It is also within my right to take you to the deep woods and leave you for the wolves. Is this understood by you?”
I nodded that it was, though I could not speak, for the effort of weeping inside myself had left me mute. That night after hauling wood, water, and slops all day, I was sent to my corner in the upper floor without supper. I did not wake until Lonnie poked me with a broom handle the next morning.
They kept goats in a room of the house. The stench was as wretched as the hold of the Saracen pirate ship. I suppose one might say that that goat room was in its content and purpose a barn, but they had created it by simply building a wall at one end of the house itself. The whole place smelled dismally sharp. Everything I touched and cleaned, even the food I ate, tasted of the tang of goat dung.