The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [201]
"Oh! I’ve made you cry!" said Helen. She took my hand. "I’ve said all the wrong things! I haven’t talked about heaven at all, and heaven is our comfort! My mama could talk about heaven in the nicest way, as if it were a big lighted house and our whole life here was just a night journey, and at the end of it, after all the muddy roads and the rain and the cold wind and the hunger unto starvation, well, to see those lighted windows up ahead, and all the other travelers arriving at the door, and to hear the Host call out! She could make you welcome death—at least your own. I tried to welcome hers, I really did, but I was only a girl then, that was eight years ago now, it was hard. But she said, ’Ellie, love, I feel that I am entering the mansion, and I am expected there, don’t grieve,’ and so I didn’t, so much, for her, but I surely did for myself. But there must be a special room in the mansion for those littlest souls—"
And then she, too, began to weep, putting her hands over her face and sobbing.
It astonished me that I had lost every single thing, including, at the moment, my very name and history. Right beside me, practically right in the room with me, was the other life that I had not managed to live, a common mode of existence, the natural extension of my first twenty-one years, the very easiest thing to go on with, it must be said. And yet I had gotten onto a different track entirely, and I had followed it to this room, among these strangers. She hadn’t said the wrong things, because nothing she might have said could have lessened my astonishment. I sat up and took a sip of the tea, and I was reminded how, when I got to Kansas City and woke up that first morning in the Humphry House, I had been so afraid, and it was a bite of something in my mouth that had gotten me over my fear. I took another sip. The tea was warm and bitter. I wondered what it would enable me to go on to. After drinking it, I took up the napkin and dried my tears.
"Oh, my goodness!" Helen sat up and took a deep breath. "Well, I am sorry for you, Louisa, and you may stay here as long as you care to, and you don’t have to tell me a thing about yourself, though of course I am dying of curiosity. This toast is told! Shall I have Delia make some more?"
"Who is Delia?"
"You haven’t met her. She’s the cook. I don’t know what she was doing when you came yesterday. More than likely, she was down in the cellar, looking things over. She’s a terrible one for hoarding, you know. She’s always making more jam and more jam and telling Ike to plant more potatoes and turnips and such. She’s scared to death we’ll starve someday. Why, this winter—when it was so cold?—we were fairly bursting, she made us eat so much at every meal. She kept saying, ’You thin out, you gon’ die, missy!’ And she will never thin out herself! She doesn’t say any of that to Lorna, though. No one tells Lorna what to do except Papa. When I was a girl, she had a husband come, you know, they had a ceremony and everything, even though Papa said no good would come of it, and he didn’t hold with servants getting married. Her husband was Jake Taler, whose owner made rope in Independence, and Jake got around some. I saw him myself, two or three times, but Jake didn’t tell her what to do, either. She told him what to do! I must say I am a bit afraid of Lorna myself."
"What happened to him?" I was much interested in the fates of husbands.
"Oh, I don’t know. I was only a girl. It was before Mama died, even.