“Bitsy, is Byrd Bowlin courting you proper? I don’t want you getting in trouble. Sometimes this happens when people are grieving. They feel alone and seek comfort. They can forget themselves.”
“Miss Patience, how can you say that?”
When she reverts to “Miss Patience,” I know she’s mad.
“Byrd loves me and we’ve kissed, but it hasn’t gone further. The Reverend Miller’s wife gave me the same sort of talk . . . What kind of a person do you think I am? What kind of man would Bowlin be if he expected that?”
“Well, you know, all those young girls, like Twyla and Harriet and her sister Sojourner, aren’t just tramps. Love has a way of undoing buttons. I just don’t want you getting in trouble.” I think of my own thunderstorm night. After the loss of my first baby, I was never able to get pregnant again, but being sterile has an advantage. No worries about getting knocked up. Not that (with the exception of Hester) there’s been any chance since Ruben died.
“I wish everyone would just leave me alone!” Bitsy jerks up to get another bucket of beans, then bangs down in her chair in a huff. “After the quilting bee we’re going to his parents’ for dinner, and then he’ll bring me home in his father’s truck.”
I’m tempted to say something like “Don’t come in late,” but I let it go. I’ve said my piece. Instead, I croon with a grin, “By the light of the silvery moon” and throw Mrs. Maddock’s invitation across the table at her. By the light—of the silvery moon—to my honey I’ll croon . . .
Tuesday morning we cut hay from the back pasture with the rusty scythe I found in the barn and sharpened with a file until the blade was razor thin. I swing the wooden-handled implement like a peasant woman in a painting, and Bitsy rakes the long sweet grass into piles and then drags it in an old blanket to a fenced-in area behind the barn. The stack is as high as our heads, but we’ll need a lot more with a horse, cow, and calf to feed.
At noon we quit and, behind the springhouse, strip down to our waists and scream as we pour buckets of cold water over each other. Then Bitsy puts on her second-best dress and rides her bicycle to Hazel Patch, and I put on my second-best dress and wander down the dusty road to Sarah Maddock’s for tea.
I knock on the three-paneled oak door with a leaded glass window. I hadn’t noticed the ornate pattern before because the screen was across it, but the glass is edged with a delicate border of flowers and leaves. No one answers, so I knock again. There are lace curtains hanging, and I can’t see inside. I hope Mrs. Maddock didn’t forget about me.
“Hello!” I yell. “Anyone home?”
“Come in,” a woman answers from deep in the house.
I turn the knob.
“Patience?”
The call seems to come from way in the back, so I pass through the living room and enter the empty kitchen. On the way, I admire the cast-iron Phoenix woodstove with the ornate silver-plated top, the carved oak fold-down desk, and the floor lamp with the fringed blue silk shade, but there’s no time to linger.
“Here.”
“Mrs. Maddock?”
“On the back porch.”
I’m expecting something like my own back porch, a small room where we keep buckets, our washtub, old rubber boots, winter coats, things that need fixing, and wet dogs, but I’m surprised to find a screened-in room that runs the length of the house with high-backed white wicker furniture and ferns in hanging baskets.
A round pedestal table is set with white cups and plates bordered with tiny pink flowers and cutlery that looks like real silver. There’s also a silver tea set and a vase of deep purple asters. Mrs. Maddock rolls herself over in her wheelchair and takes my rough red hands in both of her thin, cool ivory ones.
“Call me Sarah Rose, honey. I’m so glad you came. Is Bitsy here too?” The table, I notice, is set for three.
“No, I’m sorry. I probably should have come down to tell you. She has a quilting bee at the church and then dinner with her beau. She’s courting.” I say this with a smile and a slight shrug.
“Those were the days!” When Mrs. Maddock laughs, it’s like silver bells tinkling. I sit down in the closest chair. I’m not used to the ritual of formal tea and am unsure what comes next. Is this high tea, like I’ve read about, the kind they have in England, almost a meal—or low tea? Looks like high tea to me, but what would I know? My women friends in Pittsburgh drank black coffee in mugs around a kitchen table where we talked world politics.
The wheelchair-bound woman pours me a cup and hands me a tiny embossed silver pitcher. “Cream?” Then she lifts a glass cover off a rose-glass plate and reveals white sugar cookies with white frosting. In another bowl are canned peaches.
“This is quite a spread. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. I feel I should have worn white gloves and a bonnet.”
“I’ll be honest too. I haven’t had anyone to tea for fifteen years. Not since I got infantile paralysis. I was twenty-four.”
I glance at her legs and then at her face. If she was twenty-four fifteen years ago, she’s close to my age now.
Sarah Rose
“Polio?”
“It was 1916, and I was pregnant and so happy and at first we didn’t know what it was. I just had a fever, a bad headache, and stiffness of the back and neck. I thought I had some kind of flu, but I soon lost the strength in both legs and couldn’t even get to the commode. That’s when we called in the doctor and they took me to the hospital.”
“The polio epidemic was awful, wasn’t it?” I respond, not knowing what else to say. “I heard seven thousand people died in 1916 in the U.S. alone. You were lucky you made it.”
“I guess.” She runs her hands down her withered thighs. “Four times that many people were left paralyzed. At the time, I wanted to die.”
“I’ve felt that way too.”
She looks at me with interest. “When was that? When you felt you wanted to die?” she asks gently.
That’s why I don’t socialize. There are so many things I don’t want to divulge; it’s like trying to dance with your legs tied together. Sarah Rose is still waiting. I’ll tell just a little . . .
“I was pregnant and engaged to be married when I was sixteen and my fiancé, my lover, was killed in a train wreck. Seven days later I hemorrhaged and lost our baby. I almost died too. That’s when . . .” I take a big breath. “. . . That’s when I wished I would die.”