It’s so wonderful, how he swooped in to save them all. He has every right to congratulate himself, although, Edwin-like, he’s just as prone to self-flagellation for not understanding sooner how dire the situation was. Why, he asks, didn’t anyone tell him? Mother too selfless, of course, but Asia or John or Rosalie herself surely could have written. So he’s already feeling guilty when there is no cause. Rosalie fears that he will seize fresh guilt from what she wants to say.
Which is this: Rosalie is worried about John. Edwin hardly knows him. He doesn’t understand how abnormally sensitive John is where his own shortcomings are concerned. And Edwin’s miraculous rescue wouldn’t have been necessary if John hadn’t failed so miserably on the farm. This doesn’t mean John’s not as relieved and grateful as the rest. He hated the farm. He’s well rid of it. Everyone knows that he did what he could. No one blames him for the year of trial and tribulation. No one except for John himself.
So Rosalie would like to ask Edwin to consult with John as if they are equals. To try not to provide such a vivid contrast to John’s failures. At the very least, Edwin could stop talking about the way poor Mother has been supporting them all, educating, clothing, feeding them on the paltry hundred or so dollars left in Father’s estate, as if John had been nothing but another mouth at the table, another millstone around Mother’s neck. Another albatross, just like his sisters.
* * *
—
Rosalie and Asia are working together in the parlor. Outside, a chilly winter morning. Inside, the bright sunlight is streaming between and through the lace curtains, dappling the floor.
Outside, the mulberry trees are dripping free of their glittering ice casings. Inside, it’s just turning warm enough to let the morning fire die. One charred log rests on a mound of glowing ash. Soon enough, when the sun shifts and the chill returns, Rosalie will coax that log into flame. For now, the sunshine suffices.
Asia is standing on a chair, in her work clothes, gingham skirt, burlap apron. She’s pulling books off the higher shelves and handing them down to Rosalie to be dusted. Asia’s talking to the books as she does this. “Hello, Homer, you old blind fool. Hello, Byron, you mad, bad man. Come! Let us clean your dirty faces.”
The stack of Mother’s Godey’s Lady’s Books can only be handed down a few at a time, so heavy are they with advice, fashion, and receipts for the modern woman. “Hello, little Oliver,” Asia says and hands Rosalie her own beloved Oliver Twist.
Rosalie blows the dust from the top of the pages. It dances through the sunlight and up Rosalie’s nose. She sneezes three times. “Bless you,” Asia says. “Bless you. And bless you again.”
If Asia weren’t there, working away, Rosalie would take a break now. Her crooked back is aching. She would sink onto the settee, put her feet up like a girl, open Oliver Twist, and read it again from the beginning.
She does this instead. She closes her eyes, asks for advice from Mr. Dickens concerning her talk with Edwin. She chooses a random page, and points. The sentences on which her finger has landed are these:
I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys and beef-faced boys.
Rosalie can, in fact, make this relevant to her current predicament. What she cannot do is make it helpful.
* * *
—
Mother is calling Asia to the kitchen. Asia hops down, graceful as a doe, and disappears. The fire whispers one last time. There’s a bright square on the flocked wallpaper where a picture once hung. Rosalie tries to remember which picture it was. Why was it removed? She feels slightly insulted at this implied criticism of Booth taste. Now she remembers it—a young girl feeding chickens. Horses watching with high interest from the pasture behind her. Maybe it wasn’t the sort of vista that pulls you inside. Maybe it didn’t have the colors and romance of the painting of Niagara Falls that Asia loves so much that she insisted on taking it to the farm and then insisted on bringing it back. Still, Girl with Chickens is a perfectly inoffensive picture. Rosalie will find it, wherever it is, and put it back where it belongs. It will be there to remind her that she’s not, in her heart, the city sort.
Because all this time, she’s also been thinking of Asia standing on the chair. When she was young, she, too, used to hoist up her skirts and climb. Not the furniture, that was never allowed, but trees all over the farm, the apple trees in the orchard, and most especially the cherry tree at the corner of the cabin. From there, holding on to one branch, feet on another, she’d look down on Mother and Ann hanging the laundry, Mary Ann and Elizabeth chasing each other around their legs. Henry and Nelson, down by the spring, poking sticks into anthills. June off in the distance, leading the cows to the dairy. She could see them all, but, and this was the best part, none of them saw her. None of them ever thought to look up into her secret, leafy, birdy world.
For whatever reason, her agoraphobia completely disappeared when Father died. These last years on the farm had made her long for the time before the deaths, for a girlhood in which she now felt she’d been practically a dryad, singing to the bees and the frogs and the water. Smoke rising from the cabins, the smell of pine and rain and musk. The rising trill of blackbirds, the rounded call of doves and owls. The forest in springtime. The forest in new snow. Meadows in the stars. Stars in the meadows.
All those pleasures were still there when they returned, but denied her by the endless chores that fell to adult women and the limits of her own body. She’d wasted the last of her girlhood, shut up in the dim room of the cabin, afraid of voices she should have welcomed.
The ghosts were gone now, gone silent, the doorway between worlds shut fast no matter how she bangs upon it. She should have known that she’d miss them, her dear dead brother and sisters, the sticky web of their love. She’s lonely without them. She’s ordinary without them. They knew her at her best. The same cannot be said of Edwin, Asia, John, and Joe, who, she sometimes feels, have always been so focused on each other, they hardly know her at all.
Sometimes when she watches Asia and John interrupting each other to tell a story or laughing at a joke she doesn’t even understand, the way she misses Henry is a roaring in her ears, a bitterness rising in her throat. For just a moment she can see him again, beckoning her forward through the green light into a carpet of lilies. Hie thee home to me, she thinks, desperate with love for the ghost who never spoke, but who might, even now, be trying to find his way across the ocean. He’ll look for her at the farm. He won’t know to come here.
Rosalie climbs onto the chair. She’s a little drunk, truth be told. She’s found that a small glass of gin in the morning helps the ache in her back and if she stops with just the one, no one’s the wiser. Not even Mother, with all her years of honed observation.
Already Mother’s making noises about Edwin’s drinking. “I can’t blame him,” she’s said to Asia and also to Rosalie when she sees that the level in the gin bottle is down. “It’s in his blood. It’s the family curse.”
It hasn’t occurred to Mother that Rosalie is in the same family.
She’s drunk just enough now to feel exhilarated rather than frightened when the chair creaks beneath her. Just enough to give her the sense that if she did fall, she would float down like a leaf on a stream.