Seven Sisters - Earlene Fowler [111]
“How?” I asked, hoping to get her started talking.
She gestured over at the table next to me. “See that picture?”
I picked up the round, copper frame and looked at the black-and-white photograph of a young boy sitting in the lap of an older woman who bore a striking resemblance to Mrs. Knoll. The boy appeared to be about two years old, and I recognized the facial features of a Down’s syndrome child.
“That’s my boy and my mother,” she said. “He wasn’t normal. Guess you can tell that. He had the best care, though. His whole life he did. Even when he got the cancer in his bowels. Had the best care. Private nurses. Big pretty headstone when the angels finally took him home. All because I kept quiet.” She reached down and stroked Heidi’s huge head, causing the dog to sigh deeply. “But now, I reckon there’s no reason anymore. I’m old. I’ve been wanting to tell someone. You look like a nice young lady. Do you have any children?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. You’ll do anything for your kids. Leastwise, most folks would. Oh, you make your mistakes, all right. Maybe you’re too easy or too hard. But most folks do their best. They try. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“There’s those, though, that just defy everything God ever intended. You want to believe they have a soul, but you can’t imagine, can’t imagine on this earth, why they do what they do. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded and didn’t answer.
Then she told me a story that would darken a piece of my heart until the day I died.
14
“THOSE BROWNS NEEDED me, no doubt about it,” Mrs. Knoll said. “Good nannies weren’t any easier to find then than they are now, and the Browns really needed a good nanny, what with those three little girls under eleven and then the two sets of twins. Rose Brown had her hands full, and she wasn’t raised to do nothing much but sit around and look pretty.”
“When did you first come to work for them?” I asked.
“Right before the first set of twins was born. Oh, my, Mrs. Brown was big as a steamer trunk. By the time I came, those little girls of hers had been running wild for months. Took me a good long time, let me tell you, to get them civilized again. Especially that little Capitola. She was wild as a fox and liked it that way. Took me a week to comb all the knots out of her hair.”
She shifted in her chair and wiped a bit of spittle that had pooled in the deep wrinkles around her mouth. I waited, trying to keep every part of my body still, though I was jittery with nerves.
“She was a handful, that little Cappy,” the old woman reminisced. “The others, too, though not as much. That house was beautiful. It felt like a castle to me. I grew up around San Miguel in a little two-bedroom shotgun shack out in the middle of nowhere. Father worked for a farmer out that away. Mother was sick from the time I was real little. I started keeping house for Father when I was five years old. Could make a perfect angel food cake when I was seven, and that was on a woodstove.”
“Incredible,” I murmured. Then I asked, “How old were you when you went to work for the Browns?”
“It was in 1925,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I was thirty-eight. Father said it was the best thing, what with Johnnie’s condition and all. The Browns paid real good, and Johnnie’s daddy took off right after he was born. Never saw him again. I sent money to my parents and visited when I could. The money helped a lot, Father said.”
“Johnnie is your son?”
She nodded and pointed again at the picture on the dusty end table. “I visited him every chance I could get. He did okay out on the farm as long as Mother was alive. He didn’t take much care, mostly just feed him and dress him, sit him on a blanket under a tree. I’d been with the Browns for about a year when Mother died. By that time, I’d already seen what I’d seen and I wanted to leave, but the judge offered to triple my pay, and with Father being all stoved up and not able to farm anymore, I was