Bone House_ A Novel - Betsy Tobin [18]
“This was your mother’s?” I ask.
He shakes his head slowly no. “It was his.”
“The doctor’s?” I ask, confused.
“No. The crooked one.”
He speaks of my master, with his crooked spine. “He came here often?” I ask.
The boy nods.
“More than the others?”
He shrugs. “It is possible,” he adds.
“Did she . . . favor him?”
He frowns then. “Why would she?” he says in an accusing tone.
“I do not know,” I say to placate him. “I only wish to know a little more.” His face relaxes a little.
“Was she . . . afraid of him?” I ask cautiously.
He gives me another dark look, as if this suggestion is even more offensive. “No,” he says. “She feared no one,” he adds, more than a hint of pride creeping into his voice.
I nod, smile a little at his loyalty.
“She was strong,” he continues. “Stronger than all of them.”
“Of course she was,” I say, and know it to be true. We sit in silence for a moment, and my mind reaches back to a time as a child when I came upon her in the forest. She was bathing in the river a short distance from the village when I spotted her through the undergrowth. At once I was entranced by the sight of her naked flesh. Her back was turned to me and I saw that her shoulders were broad and muscled and smooth as ivory. I watched as she scooped water over her head with a small wooden bowl, tilting her head right back, her hair stretching nearly to her waist in a glistening ribbon of wetness. She closed her eyes to the flow but kept her mouth open wide, allowing the river to course right through her. Over and over she doused herself and I stood rooted to the spot, unable to tear my eyes from the sight of her, even more unwilling to reveal my presence lest she stop. I did not breathe or stir until she had dried herself and gone, and only then did I emerge from the thicket, like a fawn at dusk, to kneel beside the river’s edge and dip my fingers into the icy waters that had caressed her only moments before.
Long Boy has lost interest in our little talk, and I am left with only the spit and crackle of the fire. He keeps his silence in the corner, curling like a leaf toward the wall, while I ponder his answers. Although I had not been aware that my master frequented this place, the news does not surprise me, for he is a man like any other, even if his spine is bent. Despite his mother’s wishes, he has never sought a wife, though there was talk in the village many years ago of a match. With youth and wealth, he might have found a woman who would tolerate his deformity, but having lost the former this now seems exceedingly unlikely. And too, there is the matter of his character, which can only be described as eccentric, though perhaps this is unfair, for his deformity has resulted in his isolation from society.
At any rate, who would choose him as the father of her children? To marry such a man would entail considerable risks on the woman’s part. She would live in perpetual fear of monstrous births, for it is known that those who are disfigured are many times more likely to produce deformities among their offspring. Perhaps this is what Dora feared: a monstrous fetus inside her, and the risk that it might kill her in childbirth.
I dwell upon this notion for a time. If she had good cause to believe the child was his and was malformed, she would be right to fear a dangerous labor. Pregnancy is a calamitous journey at the best of times, and many women perish from the birth of normal, healthy babies, let alone monstrous ones. Even my mother lives in fear of such cases, for on the rare occasions when she has delivered a malformed child, the labor has been both prolonged and exceedingly torturous for the mother. She is forever advising those under her care to take precautions against such births, believing fervently that they can be prevented by a woman’s conduct. According to my mother, if a woman harbors perverse thoughts when she lies with a man, or indeed dwells too long upon