The Ripper's Wife(118)
I kissed the earth his cold lips lay beneath six feet deep, wishing with all my heart that I could feel their warmth again and his arms around me. I caressed the earth, imagining his hair beneath my hand and the diamond horseshoe sparkling in the close darkness of his coffin, a little glittering U to catch and hold my love, the way it had once held our luck.
“I still love you,” I whispered fervently, “and here I renew my promise—I’ve come back and I forgive everything!” I kissed him again and my tears watered the earth over him. “The past is dead, but not my love for you! May you rest in peace and God forgive you for what you have done, as I have.”
The past is dead, I said again to myself as I stood up with a clear conscience, to let it sleep in peace, restful or uneasy, and went home to America.
39
After a few more years of wandering, I finally found a home and a haven in Gaylordsville, Connecticut. I had recently read a novel someone had left behind in a bus station, Show Boat by Edna Ferber, and the gambler, the reckless wooer, Gaylord Ravenal, reminded me of Jim, and maybe I saw a little something of myself in Magnolia, the woman who loved her husband through thick and thin. I could just see Jim’s smile lighting up his eyes and the diamond horseshoe twinkling in his tie again. I took it as a good omen, that I had finally found the place where I belonged.
I met a pair of ladies on the train, a Mrs. Clara Dutton and a Miss Amy Lyon, who were respectively the matron and nurse of a boys’ school. Seeing that I had nothing, they offered to share their hamper of sandwiches and slices of lemon jelly cake with me. They were kind to me, and for the first time in many long years I told them something of my story, making it clear as the finest crystal that I didn’t want notoriety, I longed only for peace.
“You poor soul, it has been a long and wearying journey for you; hasn’t it?” Mrs. Dutton said. Then she shared a lengthy look with Miss Lyon, who smiled and nodded. “But I think it’s over now,” she clasped my hand.
They told me about a spot of land near the school that nobody wanted because it was too near a railroad track. “When the trains go by they would make any walls near there shake, and I’m sure they’d shake the thoughts out of anybody’s head too,” Mrs. Dutton said. But the land could be had very cheaply if I didn’t mind the noise and a little discomfort. It turned out I had just enough money saved to buy it and build a little shack to call my home. There wasn’t enough money for electricity or running water, but I had always preferred the kind, gentle glow of candles and lamps and there was a stream just a few steps outside my back door and the trees and blackberry brambles around it provided me enough privacy to bathe. I was no longer a pert-breasted blond beauty, so I couldn’t imagine anybody braving those brambles to spy a glimpse of my nakedness.
To welcome me to my new home, Mrs. Dutton brought me a blanket she had crocheted in orange, pink, and white stripes, in remembrance of how that first conversation had begun when I admired the orange and pink taffy-colored clouds outside the window. Her sister-in-law, Mrs. Roberson, the wife of the school chaplain, sent me a loaf of the fresh-baked banana bread she was famous for. And Miss Lyon gave me several packets of vegetable and flower seeds. Some of the boys from the school—how sweet of them, since they hadn’t even set eyes on me—painted me a little placard that said “Home, Sweet Home” in bright pink letters, with the sun smiling down on my little house and flowers springing up all around it, and Mrs. Dutton said that some of them had even volunteered to come hoe and weed the earth for me.
The “friendless lady” wasn’t friendless anymore. For the rest of my life, I would bear the name I had been born to—Florence Chandler. They respected my wishes and kept my secret. No one ever asked me a single question about my former life or my guilt or innocence; they let those tired old ghosts rest.
I can’t say there were no more dark moments to mar my newfound happiness—no one can say that—but, on the whole, I was content. Sometimes the demons would rear their ugly heads and pull me back into the sticky, sluggish black tar pool of depression, but I fought them back down into the pit of Hell as best I could and just got on with the business of living. From time to time, especially as I got older, the diary would beckon to me from the dark corner where it lay hidden, demanding that its story must be told now that there was no one who needed protecting anymore. But, following the philosophy of out of sight, out of mind, I just piled more of the magazines, old newspapers, and discarded books I endlessly collected on top of it, trying to stifle its evil whispers.
Mrs. Dutton, Mrs. Roberson, and Miss Lyon found me little jobs to do around the school, nothing too taxing, as I was getting on in years, but simple, pleasant things like helping in the library, decorating the chapel, and assisting Miss Lyon in the dispensary, helping to minister to and soothe her little patients who were trying so hard to be brave little men in the face of scrapes, burns, and the occasional dislocated shoulder or broken limb. It was just enough to make me feel that I had actually earned my nickels and dimes and the hot lunches I was provided.
Some of my benefactors still remembered me, and tiny bequests came in the mail from time to time, though these trickled off during the years of the Great Depression, when times were lean for almost everyone and many millionaires were feeling the hard pinch of poverty. Some even, I’m told, ended up selling apples on street corners or jumped out of windows when faced with the prospect of living without their fortunes.