The cousins are silent with each other—Asia suspicious, Edwin shy; the Mitchell children huddle together, inert and unsettled. Mother brings her chair to the doorstep to work in the sunlight. She’s collected the rags of their costumes to see which ones can be repaired and returned. She’s already mending.
When Uncle Mitchell finally wakes they all join him at the table, where Ann Hall serves them bowls of bread and milk, eggs and cheese, potatoes and baked apples. Aunty Rogers, on Ann’s appeal, has sent over a Dutch oven of corn pone, which Ann tells Rosalie and June quietly not to eat until they know their guests are sated. Rosalie doesn’t begrudge it, though she loves corn pone. But she’s never gone hungry the way the Mitchells have.
Uncle Mitchell thanks them all with a forced elegance. “We’ve had as warm a welcome as we might have thought only a happy dream on those long, desperate nights of long, desperate travel.” He tucks in.
After some serious eating, Uncle Mitchell continues. “But as to the future, I’m sure you see that it won’t do. We can’t all squash together like this. We’ll need our own rooms and beds.
“We thought you lived grander,” he explains.
He helps himself to more of the corn pone, douses it with butter and sorghum. “But all this can wait until your lord and master’s return. No hurry. We’ve surely known worse.”
Rosalie has been watching the cuffs of June’s Sunday shirt, dipping into the breakfast eggs as George eats them, staining them yellow along the edge. That stain will never completely come out, though it will no doubt fall to Rosalie to try.
So Uncle Mitchell’s words take a moment to register. She turns a shocked face to Mother. She hears the little tchh Ann makes when expressing disapproval. The Mitchells are here to stay.
As they have no money, Father will now have to support them all. “Until I find my feet,” Uncle Mitchell offers, but that day will be long in coming. Since Mary Ann’s and Elizabeth’s deaths, money has been tight. Father still draws enormous crowds, but he sometimes forgets or refuses to appear or does half a play and then loses interest. Then the manager has to be fully recompensed for the ticket sales and the space. Or else he spends his earnings on drink, or spurious business ventures, or sudden charities before Mother can get her hands on it.
New sources of income are necessary. Mother will have to take produce into the city and sell from a stall. It offends June that she is forced to do this, but Rosalie suspects she won’t mind regularly leaving the farm for a day and a night.
Aunt Mitchell, who managed to walk the thirty miles from Baltimore toting her daughter, is suddenly an invalid. She takes to her bed and treats her sister-in-law as a servant. If Father had stayed in England while his star rose, she and her husband would be people of consequence. She blames Mother that this didn’t happen. “Your mother owes me,” she tells Rosalie, “the life I might have had if she hadn’t seduced my brother away from us,” and when Rosalie says nothing in response, “Stand up straight! Speak up! I suppose you think this lisping and stooping is delightfully girlish, but believe me, you’re not the girl to carry it off.”
The whole neighborhood watches and wonders. Why does Mother put up with this? It’s a mystery. “Mr. Mitchell,” Ann Hall tells Aunty Rogers, who tells everyone else, “does not one lick of work. He won’t even bend down to put a log on the fire.”
Mr. Mitchell is quickly known and despised as an ill-tempered drunk. The neighborhood children, black and white, are used to roaming the farm, even into the cabin, where Mother or Ann can be counted on to give them something to eat. Now there is no food to spare and Uncle Mitchell shouts at them, telling them to get off the very property where they have lived longer than he.
Rosalie’s cousins also seem to feel that their previous hardships entitle them to the easy life now. “Cousin Rosalie,” George says. “Fetch me some milk.” The milk bucket is kept cool in a small brick cave that the spring runs through. Rosalie has to put on her boots and bonnet to go and get it, and then take it back. His tone is imperious though he’s two years younger. In fact, he’s just the age Henry Byron should have been. Rosalie resents this unearned and inexplicable survival more than she can say.
“Cousin Rosalie,” says Robert, who is younger still. “Go and tell your servant to make me an egg with a soft yolk.”
One day as Rosalie is getting Asia ready for her nap, Uncle Mitchell arrives with a rabbit that he throws onto the dining room table. Its neck has been broken. “It just up and died,” Uncle Mitchell says. “Fell at my feet. Hand of God. I thought it disrespectful to let it just go to waste. Tell your woman to stew it with some onions and potatoes.”
Rosalie sees the great absence in the rabbit’s eye. Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!
“You can have the tail,” Uncle Mitchell tells Asia, who has never been offered anything she didn’t immediately desperately want.
Mother says no to the tail and then Rosalie has to remove Asia, screaming, from the house until she can be calm again. But she says yes to the stew. She even eats it. Everyone but Rosalie has some. Is Rosalie the only one who remembers how Father said that falling away from his beliefs and eating meat was what killed Mary Ann and Elizabeth? The cabin smells of cooked flesh for days.
* * *
—
In the evenings, while there’s still light, Mother sits, more pregnant than ever, on a chair dragged outside so she can be under the cherry tree. The wind tosses white petals onto her dark hair, her shoulders, the hillock where her lap once was. She’s busily altering Rosalie’s day dress and June’s Sunday shirt to fit one Mitchell child or another. Mother has always made Father’s costumes. She’s good at this work. Rosalie watches her favorite dress disappear and reappear no longer hers. She herself has been put to the task of hemming cloth into diapers, the dullest sort of sewing imaginable.