My stomach felt like it was falling faster than the rest of me but I barely had time to notice it before I was spilling out the open laundry chute door on the first floor. My face met the floor and the rest of me was right behind, on top of it. The impact was briefly stunning, as if I had run into a wall, before the blood started to spurt from my nose. My glasses fell off my face as I curled like a possum.
Cleonie and Perdita arrived from different directions.
“Hit jez jump,” Cleonie told Perdita. “Whump!”
My eyes were blurry but I could still see the disbelief on Perdita’s face.
“An natchell,” she muttered. And then said clearly, “You be’s an natchell,” to me.
“Azz,” she told Cleonie, who rushed away
When Cleonie clamped a dish towel packed with ice on my face, I realized that Perdita had, in fact, said, “Ice.”
Miz Verlow came down the backstairs and took in the situation with a quick glance. Seizing my hand and pulling me to my feet, she plucked my glasses from the floor with her free hand. She nudged me toward the stairs.
“That was very noisy,” she told me as she followed me upstairs. “If anyone had been trying to sleep, the poor soul would thought the roof had blown off.”
“Yes’m,” I agreed, from behind the muffle of ice pack and swelling face.
“Thoughtless of you,” Miz Verlow continued. “I would have expected it from a boy.”
“I wisht I was a boy,” I mumbled.
“Well, you’re not and a good thing too. I cannot abide boys. Let’s get this straight, Calliope Dakin.” Miz Verlow spoke without any apparent anger. “You are not going to become the house hellion. You will not behave as if you are a satanic familiar or some motherless child or any of the other roles that you may have adopted in the past. In this house, you are going to become the Calliope Dakin you will be for the rest of your born days, and that Calliope Dakin”—she paused on the second-floor landing and closed the laundry chute door—“that Calliope Dakin is going to know how to behave.”
I snuffled. “I should have waited until there was laundry at the bottom of the chute.”
She looked down at me. “Exactly.” Then she gave me my glasses. The plastic frame was broken across the nose. The glass parts were all smeary.
“Miz Verlow, what’s ‘an natchell’?”
“‘An natchell’?”
“Perdita called me ‘an natchell.’”
Miz Verlow smiled thinly. “A natural. Some poor soul who is feebleminded.”
I was severely let down. I had been hoping that an natchell meant pirate or daredevil, or something wild and brave.
We arrived at Mama’s bedroom door. Miz Verlow knocked lightly with her knuckles.
On opening the door, Mama’s unnaturally sweet smile vanished at the sight of me, to be replaced with a look of triumph.
“I take it,” she said to Miz Verlow, “that Calley has succeeded in changing your mind on the subject of corporal punishment.”
“Not really.” Miz Verlow pushed me toward Mama. “I fear that I overestimated the ability of a child of her age to go without maternal supervision.”
With that swift turn of the knife, Miz Verlow left me to Mama’s mercies.
Mama closed the door after her.
“Well,” said Mama, “it certainly is remarkable how the childless always know everything there is to know about child rearing.”
She looked around. “Where’s your suitcase? Get yourself some clean clothes and go sit in the tub, Calley, so you don’t bleed on anything but that towel and your clothes. When you’ve stopped, take a bath.”
I crouched over my suitcase, cast into a shadowy corner of the room. I had two clean pairs of underpants and a clean pair of overalls cushioning the books from Junior’s shelf, and a bunch of Betsy Cane McCall’s clothes—more of hers than mine.
Mama looked down over my shoulder for a few seconds and then smacked me on the back of the head.
“That’s what you packed?” She slapped my face. “Do I look like a department store to you?” She snapped her fingers. “I can just replace your clothes like that? Clothes cost money, Calley, a lot of money and we are dirt poor now. Dirt. Poor.”
I pulled at the lobe of my left ear and stared at her defiantly.
“We,” I said. “Are. Not. Dirt. Poor.”
She slapped me again. “I should buy you a red jacket and a fez and let you pass for an organ grinder’s monkey. At least you might come home with a few pennies in your hat. Get out of my sight.”
Twenty-seven
WHILE I bathed, I contemplated Miz Verlow’s terms and Mama’s reactions, which had been almost more interesting than the terms.
You reside here at my pleasure.
You will obey my rules.
Your room and board I will take in barter from those goods that came with you. Or you can choose to work, but only here on this island and with my consent or approval.
You will attempt no communications with anyone without my foreknowledge and consent.
You will make no contracts nor incur any debt without my foreknowledge and consent.
You will not leave the island without intent to return, nor travel more than fifty miles away without my foreknowledge and consent.
You will not abandon the child here. Understand that she is all that stands between you and a fate worse than the one that befell your late husband.
The child will go to school.
The reach of your enemies is long and their enmity persistent. If you cannot agree to this, you will imperil your life and freedom.
There is no negotiation of these terms.
The choice is entirely your own.
Mama had begun disdainful, she had sniffed and snorted, but at the end, she had been trembling with anger and fear.
Nothing that I could imagine was more appealing to me than staying where we were. Since I had feared all along that Mama would abandon me, it was no shock to find out that Miz Verlow suspected it of Mama as well. The talk of peril and enemies and enmity was uniquely satisfying. Not only did it confirm my own sense of precariousness, it did so in the guise of a fairy-tale stricture: Break a rule as simple as speaking to a stranger, and be punished with a hundred years of naptime. The relief to me of having Mama firmly tethered to me, and to this place, was immense. The nature of the perils, of the enemies and their grudges, did not need to be elaborated. My daddy was in bloody pieces. Somebody, something, had done us a terrible turn. It was only wise to reckon they might not be done with us. A seven-year-old does not normally or naturally think very far beyond the moment, but raw fear forced it on me.
Having bathed and washed my hair, I swished the two pieces of my glasses through the soapy water. I dried them and put them, with Betsy Cane McCall, in the pocket of my clean overalls.
Miz Verlow caught me on the backstairs landing again, putting my bloodied towels and clothing in the laundry chute.
“Child, I’ve seen bramble bushes with birds caught in them that were still neater than your hair,” she said. “Get your mama to comb it and tie it up for you.”
Mama’s door was closed and locked. I had tried it already. My face hurt. My head hurt. I realized that the throbbing in my head was what Mama meant by a headache. I could not think what to do next.