Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [34]
One cold February day when Eli brought me home from school, the doctor’s carriage stood parked by our front gate. Fear gripped my stomach in its fist and wouldn’t let go. “Is Mother sick again?” I asked Eli.
“Better ask Tessie. She know.”
“Is it time for Mother’s baby?”
“Shush! Ain’t fitting to talk of such things.”
As soon as I came through the door, Tessie was waiting for me. “Where’s Mother? Can I see her?”
“Now, you best stay down here, child, ’til the baby come.”
I thought I could hear my mother moaning now and then as I waited nervously in the parlor. Tessie finally took me outside to the kitchen to distract me. Esther had all sorts of pots and kettles going in the fire, as usual, and the fragrant room quickly swallowed some of my fear in its steamy warmth. I sat down at the table across from Eli and watched the cold sleet wash down the windowpane outside.
“What’s it like to have a baby?” I asked.
Esther rolled her eyes. “Ain’t no picnic, I tell you that.”
“What makes Mother cry out so?”
Eli leaped up from his chair and fled the kitchen.
“Hush, now,” Tessie warned.
“Why won’t anyone tell me?” I asked.
“Because it ain’t fitting to talk about such things,” Tessie scolded. “You find out when the time come. And I ain’t gonna say no more about it, so quit asking.”
When I heard Daddy’s carriage arrive, I ran back through the cold sleet to the house. He immediately went upstairs to talk to the doctor, then came down again and asked Gilbert to pour him a drink. I went into the library to see him, but Daddy never did sit down in his chair. He paced nervously across the room to the window, looked out at the doctor’s carriage, covered with slush, then paced back to his desk, over and over again. I grew tired just watching him.
“Is Mother all right?” I finally asked.
“The doctor says so.”
I was afraid to ask about the baby.
Neither of us ate much of the supper Esther had made, but I saw Ruby carry up a huge tray of food for the doctor. The baby still hadn’t come when it was time for me to go to bed. I slept poorly, listening to Mother’s moans in the night.
The next morning, Tessie came to sit beside me on the bed, gently stroking my hair. “You mama had a little boy baby last night,” she said softly. “But he all blue, just like the others. He in heaven now, with the angels.”
“What about Mother?”
“She okay.”
“Is she . . . is she going to die?”
“No, the doctor say she ain’t gonna die. But I think she want to.”
The doctor was wrong. Before nightfall, my mother was dead.
Mother’s older sister, Martha, came down from Philadelphia by train for the funeral. Aunt Anne and Uncle William drove into town from Hilltop. Jonathan, who now attended the College of William and Mary, arrived by paddle steamer from Williamsburg. He wrapped his arm around my waist to hold me up as I stood beside Mother’s open grave in Hollywood Cemetery. The gaping hole in the ground, the bare tree branches, the black mourners’ clothes all looked stark against the frozen white ground. I had just turned sixteen, and my first grown-up dress, with long sleeves and proper hoops, was a black mourning gown.
That night after everyone else had gone to sleep, I slipped from my bed and went down the hall to my mother’s room. Ruby sat all alone on the edge of Mother’s neatly made bed, a single candle on the dressing table casting an eerie light. Ruby looked up as I entered, and I saw that she’d been crying.
“Ruby . . .” My voice sounded loud in the quiet night. “Ruby, there’s something I need to know.”
“You as pretty as she always was,” Ruby murmured as I stepped closer. I cleared the knot of fear from my throat.
“The doctor said my mother was fine after the baby was born . . . but Mother died.”
Ruby said nothing. I didn’t want to ask the question out loud, but she wasn’t going to make this easy for me.
“How . . . how did my mother die?”
Ruby shook her head as if she wanted both me and my question to go away. I knelt on the floor in front of her, face to face, taking her hands in mine.
“I came here to see Mother the day the baby was