The River Widow(40)
“Where were you today, Mama?” Daisy asked as she held her doll in her lap and scooted closer to Adah.
“I went to see one of my customers.”
Daisy rubbed her eyes, which looked tired and sad. It was almost bedtime. “I don’t like it when you’re gone. I wanna go, too.”
Adah hugged the girl. “I know, honey. Maybe someday.”
“When you’re gone, all I do is wait for you to come back.”
Adah had to fight tears now climbing from her heart into her eyes. She couldn’t remember one instance of Mabel sitting down to play with her granddaughter or even letting Daisy watch her in the kitchen. Instead Mabel usually shooed Daisy away, saying, “Go play.” The girl would spend time around Adah while she did laundry, terrifying Adah that she would get too close to the boiling clothes or the strong lye soap. Often Adah had to shoo her away, too, having to ignore her wide-eyed pleading and curiosity about everything, her frequent questions.
Lately Daisy’s favorite word had been why . She wanted to know why the sun went away at night, why Miss Socks had white feet, why her grandparents made her eat things she didn’t like, and why they wouldn’t let her play on the parlor furniture.
During meals, she was required to sit and eat without speaking except to say her prayers and thank God and Mabel for the food. She had few toys, and so when Adah had found an old broken wagon beside the road one day, she’d taken it home in hopes of repairing it and painting it, but as of yet, she’d not had the time.
Once she’d asked Jesse if he would help her, but he had responded, “Hell no. I cain’t believe you carted that trash back to this house.”
She and Daisy were alone. No one knew what they were going through, as if they were marooned on an island. Linked by an invisible bond that no one else might understand. But as years passed with the Branches, would their bond break? Would pain and helplessness drive them apart? Would Daisy end up believing that no one cared or wanted to help her? What was Adah waiting for? Some benevolent spirit to swoop down and save them? She had to keep the peace, get help, get some more money or a home away from the farm, and she had to get custody of Daisy.
Now Daisy began to whimper.
“What is it?” Adah asked.
Daisy wiped her perfect button nose, now reddening, with the hem of her play dress. “My bottom hurts.”
“What?”
“I got a spanking today.”
A sudden rage snapped to life inside Adah. “Why? Let me see.” Adah helped Daisy stand, then lifted her dress and bore witness to red swollen swaths across the girl’s upper thighs.
Daisy said, “I was bringing in the eggs from the coop, and I dropped them. All but one of them broke.”
“Who did this?”
“Grandma.”
Adah’s first urge was to march into the house and demand an explanation from Mabel. Spanking was one thing, and most people believed in it, but to leave marks amounted to a beating. Surely everyone in this family had been raised with regular beatings, and it had made them into the cruel people they were today. Adah couldn’t allow it for Daisy. If hatred alone could kill, then Adah’s would still Mabel’s callous old heart with her thoughts. Blistering, seething words gathered in her mind and begged to be spoken. But then again, what could she do? Any confrontation could result in her being kicked out of the house, and where would that leave Daisy? Alone with the monsters. As Jack had said, she had to be careful she didn’t string up her own noose. If she did, she’d never get her share of the farm or anything else.
“It was an accident,” Daisy whispered, her sweet little voice breaking through Adah’s fog of fury.
Adah worked hard to catch her breath. “I know, honey. I know.”
That night Daisy fell asleep while Adah stared out the window, and the bald moon rose and lit the land with silver light that made even the shadows of branches and leaves stand out in sharp relief. There was no wind that night, and the bare fields looked how she imagined the moon would—stark and serene, calm and quiet. Shadows were absolutely black in that brightness, and now Adah knew that the ghost of a woman beaten to death walked this land along with the shadows. Her daughter abused now, too. Probably Betsy would haunt this place forever.
Beyond the moon, there were millions of twinkling stars in the sky. Adah sighed and closed her eyes. What had happened between Daisy and her was as insignificant as one tiny star in the vastness of all space, but it was, like each one of those shining lights, beautiful and special. A gift had fallen into her lap in the form of Daisy, and she had to be ever so careful what she did with it. She was the girl’s only hope.
When the house was silent, Adah reached under the bed for the wooden box of letters she’d found in the attic. She had never read the letters from Doris McNeil. But now . . . even though she was invading a dead woman’s privacy and could be opening a Pandora’s box, it was time.
The letters were housed in ocher-colored envelopes and written in black ink, with the latest on top. Each was folded in half, and Adah handled the pages as if they were some kind of holy parchment. If she stood by the window, the moonlight was bright enough for her to read by, and what she found there did not exactly provide credibility for Jack Darby’s theory, but it certainly didn’t disprove it, either.
In the last letter Betsy Branch had received from its author, who did indeed turn out to be her mother, Doris had written, Dearest daughter, if you need a rest, please come. Other letters referred to injuries due to vague accidents that her daughter was healing from. But the rest was about family happenings, church, friends, special occasions. There was nothing here that Adah could take to the police. And according to Lester, Betsy’s mother had died soon after her daughter did, so there was no way to glean any further information from her. Daisy had her father’s family and no other living relatives.