The trip was Father’s idea, a way to remove Mother from the scene of so much loss but also another chance for him to dazzle the British audiences. It was his third such try, and still they refused to love him, comparing him unfavorably to Edmund Kean, no matter how he bellowed and declaimed. Edmund Kean! Who at the very start of Father’s career had tricked him into a contract to keep him in bit parts. Whose followers came to Father’s shows only to riot in the pit, fight and shout, throw orange peels onto the stage, and create such cacophony that no one could hear the play. Edmund Kean, dead and gone and still his relentless nemesis.
Once again, Father was found wanting in both physical strength and understanding of character. Kean, the reviews said, had understood Richard III as a man of consummate address, energy, and wit. Father had played him with nothing but bluster.
Father wrote home that “。 . . entre nous, theatricals in England are gone to sleep—with all their puffing of full houses.” He complained of the London Tricksters.
Those months in London provided the only schooling that Rosalie would ever have. She made no particular friends, too quiet and awkward for that, but her teachers were fond of her. She surprised her family by doing rather well. Father went so far as to write Grandfather and say so.
Before the trip all the children had been inoculated against smallpox. Still Edwin and Asia suffered light cases. Hagar had to be hospitalized, but she also survived. But Henry’s inoculation didn’t take. He died and his death was more terrible than either Mary Ann’s or Elizabeth’s.
Henry Byron had been the best loved of all the children. He was a quick, thoughtful, charming child. Their shining boy. For Rosalie, he was her rock, her constant companion, their tight bond forged during the terrible time of the cholera.
He’d climbed trees, rode hell-bent on horseback, knew and loved everything about the farm, everyone who lived on or near it. The summer before his death, June, Rosalie, and Henry had spent the time after their chores in a long game of Camelot, a game made into a play in which they all performed. June was Arthur and Merlin, Rosalie was Guinevere and Elaine, Henry was Lancelot and Galahad. The narrative, all Henry’s, was short on romance, but long on jousts. They played this game under trees so thick with leaves that Rosalie could remove her bonnet and crown herself with flowers, and no reddened cheeks or freckled nose would give her away at bedtime. They stole capes and wooden swords from Father’s chests, went smashing about among the branches and roots.
“？‘Hie thee home to me,’？” she would say to Arthur openly or secretly to Lancelot, and she went so deep into believing, it was hard to come back and be Rosalie again. Sometimes she wondered if she could have been onstage like Father had she only looked like Mother. It still seemed possible then that she might come into her beauty. If she did, she’d run away and join a troupe and be someone else every day of her life. They’d played this game in what Henry called the green light of the forest, and it kept them out of the sad, sorry house where children died.
One day Lancelot had been sent off into the trees on a quest. Five minutes later he’d reappeared. “Rosalie! June!” he’d called. “Come see!” Between the path and the forest was an open space that led all the way to the swamp and every inch of it was covered in wild lilies. It was Henry’s idea that they pick some for Mother, an extravagance of lilies, as many as they could carry, to overwhelm her with the sheer mass of beauty.
“How lovely!” Mother had said and immediately taken them in armloads, more than she could carry in a single trip, to the graveyard.
Henry’s own grave remained in England. There was no way to bring him home.
* * *
—
Grief has destroyed Rosalie’s parents right before her eyes. No wonder Edwin was born so anxious. No wonder Asia was born so angry. It seems to Rosalie that God has reached down and scooped out the middle of her family as casually as if He were eating a watermelon.
iii
If all these deaths made June stolid, and Edwin anxious, and Asia angry, then what of Rosalie?
Rosalie has become cautious. Since Henry’s death, she hasn’t spoken above a whisper. She’s the only child who suffered neither cholera nor smallpox, but one’s luck will always run out eventually. Henry Byron’s did.
She still goes to the Mount Zion church with Mother, but now it’s a part she’s playing, the pious daughter. This is not her first falling-out with God. One Sunday morning, when she was eight, she overheard two women talking about her. Such a shame about Rosalie, one had said, her voice low and sympathetic. Rosalie didn’t understand at first. What about her was such a shame?
But then the other woman—And her mother so beautiful!
No girl knows she’s ugly until someone tells her so and every ugly girl remembers the someone who first told her. Rosalie had gone home and looked in the mirror, hoping the women were mistaken. She couldn’t really assess her own face and this kept hope alive until the years brought further confirmation. Still, it hurt and it seemed to Rosalie that God shouldn’t have allowed her to learn this in His very own church. He shouldn’t have made her look so much like someone she was not. Or, what if she looked exactly like who she was? What if it turned out she wasn’t beautiful on the inside either?
Later, she’d come to see that these feelings arose from her own sin of vanity. She didn’t exactly forgive God, but she did shoulder her share of the blame.
This time is worse. This time she’d prayed for Henry to recover and God had responded by sending the swarm of red sores that covered and swelled his eyelids, ringed the inside of his mouth and nose, made his death an agony. Rosalie wanted no further dealings with Him. She didn’t even care that Henry was in heaven now. There was no excusing such a death.
So her carefulness is a secular matter, intended more for her mother than herself. One more lost child, Rosalie thinks, will do Mother in. Rosalie will not be that one more child.
And yet, she can’t help but wonder just exactly how much grief her death would cause; she sometimes spends those moments before sleep trying to imagine it. Would Father dig her up? Would Mother wake the stars with her weeping? There is an odd pleasure in these fantasies. Rosalie returns to her coffin again and again in dreams.
Ironically, it irritates Mother considerably, her silly whispering, her refusal to go out and about in the world.
* * *
—
Rosalie is kneeling on the dirt floor in front of the kitchen fireplace, trying to unbutton her little sister’s dress so Asia can nap in her underclothes. The room is too warm and smells of burnt eggs because Asia threw her custard into the fire when Mother said she had to eat it all. The biscuit dough is resting in its bowl on the scarred kitchen table until Rosalie has time to roll it out and there is wet laundry waiting to be hung.
Rosalie hears the frantic barking of the dogs and feels the lash of anxiety this causes her. The mail has arrived too early. Half an hour later and June could have gotten it on his way in to supper.
Asia picks up her shoe and hits Rosalie with it, once in the arm and once in the face. It surprises Rosalie more than it hurts her. Mother comes to stand over them. She’s too pregnant to kneel down herself; she would never get up again. “Go get the mail,” she tells Rosalie, “and leave the naughty girl behind,” which makes the naughty girl scream.