Maude Page 13

  “What about your Wakondah?”

  “He’s not my Wakondah. He’s my mother’s Wakondah. I believe in God and I believe that Jesus was His Son and all of that. I just don’t go to church. I never saw the need for it. That doesn’t make me a heathen.”

  “How can you be saved and not go to church?”

  “Saved--who said I was saved?”

  “You just said you believe in Jesus.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean it like you mean it.”

  I would have to think that one over. It somehow comforted me that at least he admitted he believed in Jesus in some way or another. I would pray twice as much that God would save him.

  I turned my back and he lay down. Over my shoulder I asked, “Will you promise me that we’ll put up the paper next Saturday?”

  He sighed again. “If someone doesn’t rob the bank.”

  When two more Saturdays passed and George found excuses to stay in town all day, I gave up hope of his helping me. Clara and I walked into town and talked to the storeowner about the right way to hang paper. He chuckled to himself and wrote down directions for me. As I left the store, he shook his head and said, “That George.”

  On Tuesday, following the storekeeper’s directions, Clara and I managed to get one wall of the bedroom papered. It took us all afternoon, but I was very happy about it, and thought it came out wonderful. I waited for George to tell me how nice it looked. If he noticed it at all, he didn’t say. He went to bed without a word.

  On Wednesday, Clara and I did the second wall, getting better at the work and picking up speed as we gained experience. We did the third and fourth walls on Thursday and were finished. The difference in the room was amazing. It had gone from drab and dull to bright, pretty and cheerful. George either didn’t notice or pretended not to notice.

  I set up my little round quilting frame by one of the windows in the bedroom and spent my afternoons working on the new bedding. With Mom Foley still doing most of the housework, I was happy to have something to fill my spare time. George’s mother and I had worked out a truce concerning that. She made him his bacon-grease/bread/coffee breakfast every morning, and she allowed me to help her with supper. She had a large garden planted in the back yard, surrounded by chicken wire to keep the poultry out. I made and fenced my own garden on the other side, planting the things I enjoyed that weren’t grown in the other plot. I took cuttings from Clara’s roses and lilacs and other shrubs and coaxed them into rooting. I planted them in the front yard and hoped they would make the front of the house pretty for the next summer.

  I bought bulbs in town that would grow the next spring and planted crocus, tulips and hyacinth in rows down the walk from the front step to the road. I left the downstairs cleaning to Mom Foley and cleaned my room and Lulu’s room and did our laundry. It still wasn’t enough work to fill my day. Sewing the bedding and curtains gave me a great sense of satisfaction, and I almost dreaded the time when they would be finished.

  When it came time for Lulu to start back to school, George’s mother brooded like an old hen. For some reason that I didn’t understand, she and my girl had really taken to one another. They worked together in the garden while the old woman told stories about her people, about the Holy men, the councils that had included her grandfather and her father, the Big Hill Osage and the Sky people. Lulu loved hearing them.

  On the day that school started, Lulu and Maggie went off hand in hand, swinging their lunch pails. They joined a few other girls walking by on their way to the schoolhouse. They were all really looking forward to classes. To celebrate the occasion, I’d made two new dresses for Lulu and stood on the porch to see the girls off. George’s mother watched from the side yard as they disappeared down the road. I almost felt sorry for her.

  In the afternoon, I saw her walk down to the road several times and peer into the distance until the girls returned. When she finally caught sight of them coming home, she went back to her cleaning without saying a word.

  Chapter 18

  I asked George several times to fix up the outhouse. He always agreed to do the work, but he never got around to it. I borrowed Maggie’s little wagon again and walked into town to buy a bucket of paint, a paint brush, some thinner, and a bag of lime. The storekeeper loaded it into the wagon because the bag was too heavy for me to lift, so when I got started, I used a bucket to scoop the lime out of the bag and dump it into the hole a scoop at a time. I wouldn’t allow Clara to help me on a project that was clearly not woman’s work. I started by dumping the lime into the pit. It took a while to get the work done. That took care of the stink.

  I found a hammer in the barn. Whatever nails were beginning to pop out of their place, I pounded back in, straightening and fastening down some of the boards that had come loose at the bottom and gone crooked. I used a scrub brush to clean the walls inside and out, and once they were dry, I painted both sides in white. The difference was really satisfying.

  Again, George made no comment, except to ask how much it cost. When I told him, he began whistling his non-tune and rubbing his chin, but he didn’t object.

  It was the same when it came to painting and papering the living room. He promised he would do it the first chance he got, but after waiting several weeks, I ran out of patience and did it myself. Again, I didn’t ask Clara to help. That would mean her being in the house with Mom Foley all day, and I didn’t want to put her through that. It was a lot harder to work alone, but since there was boarding on the bottom half of the walls, the paper strips weren’t so long that I couldn’t handle them.

  I’d planned to get George to run a water pipe and set up a pump in the kitchen like Helen’s house, but after asking him over and over, I just gave up completely on that idea. I would ask him, and he would say that he’d think about it, but he made no move to start the job. The longer he put it off, the more resentful I got. After a while I suggested he hire someone to do the work.

  “Hire someone? To work here in my own house? I can’t spend money for that.”

  “You don’t want to do it, and I can’t do plumbing. How else are we going to get it done?”

  “My mother’s been getting water out of the well without a pump for forty years. It’s right at the end of the back porch. If a well and a bucket are good enough for her, it’s good enough for you.”

  His mother stood listening and smiled to herself. I threw up my hands in surrender. I hadn’t brought enough money of my own to the marriage to pay for anything myself. I would have to make do with the well and the bucket, at least for the time being, but I began to think that maybe I could do something else to have more of my own money.

  I told Clara I would like to do some sewing for other people, and she put out the word. In a few days, I had work. I knew George would find out and wondered what he would say. I was afraid he either wouldn’t like his wife working for other women, or that he might take the money from me, which as my husband, he had the legal right to do.

  When we got into bed a few nights later, he asked me, “Doug Graham said that Sarah told him you were doing some sewing for some of your friends at the church. Is that right?”

  “Yes, it is George. Do you mind?”

  “Sure, it’ll help pay for all these improvements you’re making around here.”

  I kept my money in a little bag with a drawstring top in the back of the drawer with my underwear. George never mentioned it. It didn’t amount to a lot, but it gave me a good feeling to have it.

  It was the second week in November. I’d overslept and jumped out of bed, thinking that Lulu would be late to school. I dressed in a hurry, but when I went to Lulu’s room, the bed was made and Lulu was gone. Downstairs, I could hear her chattering away. She must be eating breakfast with George and his mother.

  I was glad Lulu was up, no matter who had wakened her. I walked into the kitchen. George was sopping up the black-eyed gravy with a thick slab of bread. He lifted the bread out of the dish and the grease made a string as it slid back down
into the bowl. I leaned over and threw up all over the kitchen floor.

  I straightened up and leaned back against the doorframe, so weak I could hardly stand. George looked at me wide-eyed. “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

  His mother actually cackled. “It’s about time,” she said.

  Lulu’s eyes grew wide. “What’s the matter, Mommy? Are you sick with the flu or something?”

  I stood there, my eyes squinched shut, my throat squeezed so tight I could hardly get a breath, and my mouth filling with water that I couldn’t seem to swallow. It was a familiar feeling, and I realized what it was right away.

  “I’m all right, baby, just a little sick to my stomach, is all.”

  George’s mother laughed. George and Lulu looked at her in surprise, and she said, “Your mother’s going to have a baby, Lulu.”

  I was angry at the old woman for saying it so blunt. I wouldn’t have put it out like that. I’d have waited until my stomach grew, and then would have set Lulu down for a mother-daughter talk and broke the news gently. Mom Foley had no such refinement in her.

  Lulu’s eyes opened even wider and her jaw dropped open. “A baby? When are you going to have a baby?”

  Again, I didn’t get to answer first, Mom Foley butted right in. “I’d say about May or June.”

  I did a little math in my head and nodded in agreement. I hoped the news wouldn’t upset Lulu, but I needn’t have worried. Lulu jumped up from her seat and grabbed me in a bear-hug. “Have a little girl, Mommy, so I can have a little sister.”

  Mom Foley got up and walked up to me. She put her own face just a few inches from mine and gazed into my eyes. Then she stuck out her hand and placed it with her fingers spread apart on my stomach, never flinching in her stare, “She’s going to have a boy, Lulu, and we’re going to see to it that it’s a big, healthy one, aren’t we?”

  My throat began relaxing so I was able to swallow the water that had filled my mouth and I stood straight. “I’m sorry. I’ll clean up this mess.”

  With her hand still pressed against my stomach, the old woman smiled and said, “You go upstairs and lay down. I’ll clean it up.”

  George, Lulu, and I were all speechless. I thought that maybe the world would stop turning, but I was still shaky and glad of the opportunity to rest. I went back upstairs and dozed for another hour. I heard the front door slam behind Lulu as she left for school. I thought maybe George would come upstairs to talk to me before he left, but I heard his horse trotting around the house as he rode for town.

  A stubbornness took hold of me. I waited for George to talk about the baby, but he didn’t mention it, and I wasn’t about to bring up the subject with him. I didn’t know if he was happy or not. I was sick every morning for the next three weeks, but had learned when to expect it and always made it to one basin or another before it came over me.

  I was almost down to the kitchen one morning when I heard George’s mother say to him, “You leave her alone at night, George. You’re made just like your father and she doesn’t need that going on with her carrying a baby.”

  George didn’t answer. I hoped he would listen to his mother. He hadn’t reached for me since that morning I’d thrown up in the kitchen. I wouldn’t mind a seven or eight month rest from the painful relations. As much as I longed for him to kiss me or even hold my hand in some sort of tenderness, I hadn’t missed his nighttime attentions at all in the last few weeks.

  What I did miss, what I pined for, was affection. James had held my hand when we walked together, stopped to kiss my neck when he passed behind my chair, sometimes just wrapped his arms around me and gently held me next to him. I would relax my body against his and feel that I understood the true bond of marriage. George never touched me for anything but the relations. Not anything. It seemed to me that he went out of his way to keep from touching me.

  I put on a lot of weight and couldn’t do much without getting tired. I gave up work on any restorations to the house, fearing that lifting things and dragging the wagon back from town filled with supplies might be too much for me. I knew it was useless to ask George to do anything to help. I went to church every Sunday until my stomach was too big and might be an embarrassment.

  I’d bedded my garden for spring before the winter set in, and I looked forward to working it after the last frost. Lulu would have to help me. I talked to her about it, and she was excited about it.

  Everything seemed to make Lulu happy those days. She loved her teacher, loved her new friends, loved the idea of helping with the garden and especially loved the idea of the baby. She and I sat sewing a layette for him and little coverlets for the cradle in the few daylight hours left after she got home from school. I remembered how I loved sewing with my mother, and now, I loved sewing with Lulu.

  Lulu and I both shared our relief when winter passed and the days began growing longer so we could have more light to work.

  I’d given up asking George to do anything at all around the house, but realized that if I worked it right, there was a way to get things done. At the kitchen table one morning in April I said to Lulu, “I’ll have to ask George to get your cradle down from the attic so we can clean it up.”

  Lulu was happy at the prospect, but she’d also figured out that George wouldn’t ever get around to doing the small chore. “I’ll get it down after school, Mommy,” she said. “We can get it cleaned up and ready. It’ll be fun.”

  George walked in just then. His mother fastened her glare on him. “Get upstairs to the attic and bring down that cradle, George.”

  “I’ll get it later, Ma, I’m running a little late right now.”

  She strode over to him and stuck her face up to his, “Get it right now,” she hissed. He jerked his head back away from her. His eyes grew wide. “All right, Ma, I’ll get it.”

  He went out of the room. Lulu looked down at the table in shock. She’d never seen the grandmother like that. I smiled to myself. There’s more than one way to skin a cat around here.

  George’s mother didn’t miss my reaction, and for the first time, she smiled at me. “You just don’t know how to handle a man,” she said, then went back to her work.

  George was back in the kitchen in a few minutes, cobwebs hanging from his head. It was all I could do to keep from laughing at him. He started to put the cradle in the corner.

  His mother glowered at him, “Put it out on the porch so we can clean it up,” she barked. He did as he was told, then went straight out to the barn to get his horse and leave for town.

  Chapter 19

  June second, a Wednesday, in 1915, just before dawn, the first pain woke me. It wasn’t an easy pain, like the first ones I had when Lulu was coming, but sharp and strong. I gritted my teeth until it passed and then poked George in the back with my elbow. It took considerable pokes to wake him, but he finally sat up. “What is it?” he asked, as if it had never come to him that it was time for his son to be born.

  I took a deep breath. “It’s time, the baby’s coming. Go fetch the doctor.”

  He rubbed his chin. “Doctor? Why would I get the doctor? Is there something wrong?”

  “George, I told you, the baby’s coming.”

  “My mother’s here. She’ll take care of it.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She can do it. There’s no need to pay a doctor for something when my mother can do it just as well as he can.”

  I could see that there was no use talking to him. Maybe his mother could do it. A lot of women had babies with a midwife instead of a doctor. “All right, let her sleep until the pains are closer.”

  George lay down and went back to sleep right off. I shook his shoulder. “I need for you to get my things. I need the pads to keep the bed clean and the linens and such for the birthing.” He answered me with a snore.

  I was fed up with his sloth. I thought about hitting him with the flower vase that I kept on my bedside table, but instead got up and gathered what I needed myself. I got the bed re
ady for the birth and lay back down. Another wave of pain hit me about a half-hour after the first. I rode it out, and after a minute it eased up. When the next one came, it was a little sooner and a little harder than the first two. The sun was coming up, and the rooster crowed. George was sound asleep. I prodded him again with my elbow.

  He finally woke enough to look at me. “What?” he asked.

  “Go tell your mother it’s time, George.” Just as he stood to pull on the trousers he’d dropped in the floor the night before, his mother opened the door and came in. She was carrying a bundle of rolled up cloths in one hand. She laid them on the bed and gave an order to her son. “Get out. See to it that Lulu eats and goes to school. We don’t need her here in the house while this baby is being born. It might scare her. Just say her mother is too tired to get up, and I’m sitting with her in case she needs anything.”

  George pulled on his shirt and shrugged into the vest with the badge that he wore to work. I knew that he would do what his mother told him, and for once, I agreed with the old woman. Lulu didn’t need to see the birth and didn’t need to sit in another room worrying while it happened.

  The pains came off and on all morning, coming harder and closer together as I expected. I was getting more and more tired. I wondered if I would have any strength at all when it came time for the baby to be born.

  Mom Foley did her work around the house, looking in on me from time to time. Around noon she came in carrying a bucket of water. The pains were close together and awful by then, but I tried to hold on, telling myself it would be over soon.

  Mom Foley unrolled the bundle of cloths she had brought in earlier. Inside it were two knives, one I recognized as being from the kitchen, and one I hadn’t seen before. It had a short, thin blade. She laid the strange one on the table and stuck the kitchen knife under the mattress. She said, “This is to cut the pain.”

  There was also a cloth bag that smelled of herbs and a small roll of new string.