While I was in the valley struggling with the strange matters of love, a tragedy came to my mountain. Prudence meets me at the door with news. She never meets me at the door. But today, a sick joy glints in her eyes as she rushes to spill news about a girl who has been missing the past few days.
“She’s a sinner, trampy and cheap, Brother.” She wrinkles her nose. “Surely the Lord had a hand in her dismal fate. She’s probably dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“You don’t know any such thing, Prudence! The Lord doesn’t relish a lost soul gone astray. Please don’t spread falsehoods whose truths you know nothing about. You should pray for this poor girl’s safe return.”
Prudence looks at me with such raw hatred that it sucks my breath away. Then she walks to her room, softly closes the door, and locks it. I’m sobered from my convention high, and in that moment, all ties with potential love and happiness I felt in the valley evaporate, and I’m left standing in my sister’s poisonous air. I always forget how acrimonious Prudence is until I’m gone and return. I pray for her most fervently.
? ? ?
It’s Sunday afternoon, two days since I’m back where I belong, even more ill-placed than before. I endured Henry’s inappropriate jokes about love during the days we were together. I stumbled through this morning’s lackluster church service. I now know this: love is no laughing matter.
Today Prudence sits by a window and mends socks. I catch sight of her out of my peripheral view and see her stop and watch me stare out the window.
“You sick?” Her voice holds no sympathy.
I don’t know why I don’t answer her. It miffs my sister to no end when I don’t answer.
“Brother, you hear me? Got cotton in your ears?”
I square my shoulders. This is a new low for me, a rebellion suited for a two-year-old. I stand, pull on my coat and wool scarf, and head to the workshop. I even slam the door behind me for spite, though I will pay for my insolence. I’m guessing Prudence won’t fix supper tonight but stay in her room and fume. Or she’ll let the woodstove fire die out on purpose, and somehow I don’t care—and I’m shocked! I’ve cared about consequences every moment of every day since I was born. Now I don’t.
I haven’t been to see Kate since I returned. I’ve had sitting by the door the penny candy, three used readers, two new magazines holding articles about Loretta Lynn, canned tuna, jars of peaches, and the dog food she ordered. To trudge them to her cabin and leave them at her door is beyond me. If she’s there she’ll be polite and offer me tea and ask about the convention. I’ll have to confess I went to only three one-hour lectures and didn’t listen to any of them, and no, I can’t remember the topics so we can’t talk about them. Then she’ll ask if I’m sick, and surely she’ll understand when she sees me that I’m not myself. In truth, to explain it all is too much to take in today.
I sit out in my cold workshop among the sawdust and worn sandpaper and unfinished stack of block toys I need to tend to. The frigid wind comes through the opened door that I don’t close. My nose runs, and my fingers and toes grow numb. My chest aches like I’ve got pneumonia. I must be getting very sick. I deserve to get a fever and even more body aches than I already have.
If this is what love feels like, why would anyone seek it out and want to hold on to it? It hurts so much I can’t breathe right. Food is tasteless. Sleep has been elusive these recent weeks. To move my arms and legs simultaneously is a weighty chore. When I hear a voice sounding like Kate’s call my name, I cringe. Oh Lord, now I’ve done it. I’m hallucinating.
Then the woman who absconded with my thoughts, and who lives behind my eyelids, sticks her head around the edge of the open doorway to my workshop. Her face is flushed healthy, and around her neck she wears a green tartan scarf the color of her eyes. I close mine for a moment because I think she’s a mirage.
When I open them, she’s still there! The dog stands beside her and whips his tail, and fresh joy floods through my veins like rain in the desert. Kate has her walking stick. She sought me out. She found where I live!
“Well, hello, stranger,” she says. “Welcome home.”
Prudence Perkins
Hell is being born into a family of preachers named Eli.
A person can’t have a thought to herself without some rule taking the starch out of it. From the time I could walk, the path was marked and only a fool would wander. And I won’t a fool. I settled for scraps if I wanted something cause Brother got the choice. Being the boy and all. Being another Eli.
Daddy and him sat round the woodstove and talked like equals bout the heavenly plan for salvation and their divine part in it. I was stuck to the ground with thoughts nobody wanted—a girl nailed in a sorry place.
Like today. I wait for that new teacher in the schoolhouse instead of visiting at Fleeta’s house with Alice Dickens and Laura June Mayhew, eating molasses cake Fleeta promised to bake. I’m in a bad mood missing cake and gossip cause Brother had to preach a funeral and I’m stuck here, and she’s late so I wait.
I was six to Eli’s eighteen when Daddy got cancer and Brother left home for preacher schooling. I emptied slop buckets and hauled wood, baked biscuits and tended garden. Lye soap cracked the skin open on my fingers when I helped Mama do laundry in yard pots. Everything I did was coated with the Lord’s slippery words. I almost drowned in verse. I learned to breathe underwater was what I did, being the daughter of a Eli.
After two years gone, Brother come home a preacher, third generation. Daddy waited till he did and died, and Brother cried cause he was scared. Mama got old fast after that. When she passed on the eve of my thirteenth birthday, only one last Eli needed tending to, and that fell to me. From the outside I stayed pretty much the same after Mama passed. Plain, modest, quiet Prudence.
Then something changed.
Eve’s curse come a year later, and blood ran down my skinny legs and stained the very ground I stood on. I kept more thoughts to myself. Course, Brother don’t study me like Mama used to. He don’t know what ragtime done to the insides of a lone girl without a mama to guide her. Ragtime cramped, and twisted flesh made nothing fit right over tender skin.
God must have hated womankind something terrible to punish her month after month, and leave the mark of blood as her shame.
Jumbled in all the new strange, I had private thoughts bout the boy, thoughts that sprung outta the air when I turned sixteen. Thomas James Slater was his name. Folks called him TJ. Nobody called him Thomas cept me, and that was inside my head and never out loud. He come to church regular. I watched his hair sweep cross his high forehead and curl at the nape of his neck. I wanted so bad to touch one of them curls, pull it open, and watch it spring back and grab holt of my finger.