Sister, I will tell it straight out. Pa is dead. That hurricane I herd was so bad down Texas way come on all the way up hear acrost the plains and acrost the farm. Trees was flung clean out the ground, and one fell down on Pa. He’s dead. Half the roof flew off, but me and Clancy got it fixt.
Ma won’t talk no more. Don’t eat. Won’t drink neither. She can’t get out the bed, just hold her face ’gainst the wall. She don’t cry none. I keep thinking every breath she takes gone be the last one. We got Pa buried by that field he liked and fixt a place beside for Ma. It’s ready for her. It ain’t no use you come home now, but I thought you ought to know ’bout your folks.
Signed your brother Gifford
Alice dropped the letter and laid her head on the table, one hand under her cheek, the other hanging empty beside her. She felt its emptiness and raised it to her breast. Her father dead. Her strong, unwavering father dead, just like that. Right there in his own field in a storm. She had loved him and loathed him. Loved him for being good and steady, for carving a wooden doll for her; loathed him for how he had made her loathe herself for being female, for not being a son who could plough and help to bale the hay. But he had loved her in spite of himself. That much she knew. She also knew what it meant when people stopped eating and drinking. She had seen it when going with her mother to help a neighbor. Once that happened, it didn’t take long. She envisioned her mother, frail and lying on the bed alone, face to the wall.
Gifford was right. No doubt her mother had already taken her last breath, likely days ago, while this letter was making its erratic way to find her. This was her mother, the mother who had loved her as a girl, dressed that wooden doll her father carved. In her uneven breath, the tears that fell, untouched, Alice felt the weight of her own motherhood, of her infant son, Jonathan, his soft breath against her, the sensation of fullness in her breasts, the feeling of milk letting down, the heartbeat of life, what her mother had once felt for her.
I must live, she thought. She carried me in her body, as I carried him in mine. She taught me to sew, and I made the gown in which to lay him in his coffin. I hold his memory. I alone. I must live.
*
Alice sat beside the window, working on an extensive alteration for the White Way, taking in a waist for a young woman who had recently been quite ill. Who was this girl, she wondered. Had she sat with her mother, their hands touching now and then, an occasional smile of approval at a beautiful line of stitches? Alice sat back, her hands idle now, remembering her life with her mother back on the prairie. She recollected how unfailing the precision of her mother’s stitches had been. Alice suddenly felt herself as the treasure she must have been to her mother . . . her mother, who had urged her to another life. Diminished as she had felt by the men in her family, Alice knew regardless that they had loved her. But she had been less than a boy would have been in their eyes—only a useful accessory to help with the cooking and laundry. Her mother had known the limitations of her choices for marriage out there. She had envisioned a different life for Alice, had encouraged her to come here to the city, with a gifted needle in her hand, to find a life of her own and a far wider range of possibilities for love.
Alice squinted at her stitches, pulling her long-threaded needle toward the light. The skirt was a fancy thing of Venetian broadcloth, fabricated in eight gores, with a small bustle, so that the alterations had to sit precisely to align with its support. A skirt that she could never hope to wear but that she took pleasure in perfecting for another. As she slipped the needle back into the next stitch, Alice felt it prick her in the dark beneath the fabric. She left the needle there, sucked at her finger, dropped her hand limp against the rustling fabric. Alice touched her finger to the needle again, then stopped and, almost unthinking, let the garment slide to the floor. She retrieved it and laid it across the bed, attentive not to loosen her carefully placed pins. The time had come to do something more about Howard’s disappearance, however fruitless. Doing nothing had resulted in nothing. She rose, took up her plain wool shawl against the welcome chill, locked the door behind her, and dropped the key into her pocket. The uncertainty of waiting was dragging her down. She had to go back to the station house. Clearly, no one was coming to her.
Once there, Alice was relieved to see Sergeant Ames exiting one of the far office doors in the long hallway. He walked briskly to her.
“You have news?” he asked.
“No. No, sir. I came to find if you might have discovered anything. Anything at all.”
He took her elbow and guided her back toward the entrance. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Butterworth. We’ve had no leads whatsoever. And might I suggest that the absence of leads is possibly good news? I know the time is becoming extended now. Mr. Butterworth has been absent for quite a while, but we have no leads to indicate injury or death.” He continued to guide her toward the entrance door. “I assure you, Mrs. Butterworth, there is no need to tax yourself by coming all this way to inquire. We will most assuredly notify you should we discover anything at all.”
Since Ames now had the door open wide for her, there was little for her to do but go out. Yet she hesitated on the step. For what, she did not know. From inside the station, she heard the voice of another officer calling out, almost as if to ensure she would hear what he said. “That Butterworth woman back? What kind of name is that, anyway? You’d think by now she’d have figured out for herself that he’s left her.”
Alice raised her eyes to the closed door. The tears were there before the thought that she had been abandoned could clarify itself in her head. All feeling drained from her body, as if her blood had ceased to flow. Dead? Yes. Injured somewhere, not remembering? Yes. Deliberately walked away? No. A plan to disappear, to leave her in this limbo, abandoned? No. But there it was. The shock of it filled her numbed body, like the prickling of blood returning to a foot that had fallen asleep. Had she let herself be asleep in this marriage? Asleep in her life? Alice closed her eyes and tilted her head to the open sky. The air on her face was suddenly chill. She lifted her skirt and stepped, without falling, into the insidious mud of the Chicago streets.
The way back blurred before her eyes. She kept them down, seeing only a haze of dull colors—black Balmorals, chestnut Chelseas, men’s boots, women’s boots—sidestepping puddles, balancing on the wooden boards that led her to nowhere. The way back. Not to her home. She had no home. Even if he were dead and it were not his fault, she had no home. With him gone, no matter the cause—accident, murder, an unexpected heart attack, deliberate abandonment—she had no home. She slugged her way back through a kaleidoscoping blur of boots to the empty flat. Home did not exist.
CHAPTER 9