Bloody Season (16 page)

With young womanhood came stays, which squeezed an early tendency toward matronliness into the hourglass beloved of a healthy young nation with an overfondness for Rubens’s cherubic nudes. A fascination with prints and colors asserted itself as soon as Michael Horony’s memory was respectfully put down in camphor and cedar. This coaxed a bloom not only from her cheeks but from her mother’s as well, for the little income strained out of mulish earth by a widowed mother, a half-grown son, a distracted daughter, and three small children was not to be squandered on bright scarves and calico that cost as much as three bolt-ends of stout gingham. Her father’s razor strap was employed almost as frequently during these years as it had been when he lived.

By then Mary Katherine had divined the meaning, if not precisely the import, of the looks she drew from men. Davenport was a major stop for steamers plying the Mississippi River, and although while in town her mother made certain that neither of them passed near the levee, Mary Katherine flushed at the appreciative expressions that came into the otherwise poker faces of silk-hatted gamblers and the rubber, professionally cheerful faces of derbied drummers when she passed them farther inland and felt her mother’s gloved hand tighten around hers and hasten her on past. She detected pomade and whiskey on their persons, smells associated with her father; and her veins ran warm.

One month before her seventeenth birthday Mary Katherine dressed for town; and if Katharina Horony thought her daughter’s cape too much for the balmy early-autumn climate, she made no mention of it. If she had, Mary Katherine had a cough handy by way of explanation, although not severe enough to banish her indoors, as that would have made it all for nothing. For under the cape she wore her best dress over another one more serviceable, two petticoats, and three pairs of drawers, enough clothing to fill the small portmanteau she had elected to leave behind for want of a way to smuggle it into town.

Her chance came in the mercantile while her mother was comparing cloves of garlic under the patient eye of the proprietor behind the counter. Wandering toward a stack of ladies’ hats in the corner next to the dress material, Mary Katherine pretended interest in the dyed ostrich plumes, then when the merchant turned away to weigh the cloves, opened the door carefully so as not to disturb the bell looped to the handle and left the store. From there she ran the three blocks to the levee as fast as two legs bound in five layers of linen would let her. There the USS Oleander was loading. For an anxious half-hour while she knew her mother was looking for her she stood among the passengers waiting to board, then eased onto the bottom deck while the man taking tickets was arguing with a fat woman who insisted that her son, nearly six feet tall with a blue shadow on his chin, was under twelve and so eligible to ride half-fare.

The bottom deck was an adventure in odors. For a girl reared near a port, there was nothing novel about the smells of baled jute and molasses in barrels and freshly sawn lumber; but when they came together with various fine scents emanating from parasoled women on the arms of men in striped vests and planters’ hats, with water slapping the hollow hull and the boat actually shifting beneath her own tread when she crossed the deck, they assumed an enchantment befitting the oils of China. The aroma was not to be matched and had only to be encountered again to return an aging fancy-woman to a youth in which nothing was beyond reach. She was, however, dismayed to learn that even on this fine whitewashed craft with its great painted paddles floating gently astern, the stench of fish overlay everything, from the barrels of salted salmon resting in the hold. It reminded her unpleasantly of the voyage across the ocean and of her brother Julius quietly dying in his rope hammock.

But the past was no fit opponent for the present. The throated steam whistle, often heard in town but never before from directly overhead, with its vibration buzzing beneath the soles of her feet, opened the future.

A deckhand closed it. After observing her for some minutes wandering unescorted between the decks, he asked to see her ticket, and when she took too long searching for it in her tiny reticule he escorted her to the bridge. The pilot was a red-bearded man in his forties with a long brown face under a beetle-black derby, a joint of charred bulldog pipe nailed into the center of his face, and a tan leather coat with distressed elbows worn over a pinstripe shirt without a collar. He, too, had a fishy smell, like everything else aboard except the passengers. Standing at the wheel he heard the deckhand’s report, interrupting him once to reach up and tug the whistle, then dismissed him.

“What’s your name, lass?”

He had a thick, burring speech from which she had to sort the words before she answered.

“Kate.”

“What’s your surname, Kate, lass?”

The glassed-in cabin was strong with him. “Fish.”

“Fish?”

“Fisher. I’m Kate Fisher.”

He rotated the wheel slightly. His pipe gurgled. “Well, Kate Fisher, lass, what are we to do with ye?”

“I’ll work for my passage.”

“I have all the hands I require.”

“You won’t take me back.” It wasn’t a question.

“I would were that my inclination, but I’ve a ruddy schedule to make.” His softening of the “sch” put her in mind of the English sailors among the crew during the Atlantic crossing. But he wasn’t English. “I would put ye ashore in Saint Looey did I not ken ye’d be raped and your white throat slit five minutes after we put off. The war took its toll of gentlemen, ye see.”

“I am twenty-one and can care for myself.”

“Ye’re eighteen or younger, or I’m no judge.” He gave the whistle two short blasts and corrected course around a float full of fishermen. “Are ye Catholic, Kate Fisher?”

She wondered if Roman Catholics had a smell of their own, and if it was as evident to him as his was to her. “Yes.”

“I’ve a place for ye, then. Now get below and tell that ruddy barbarian Isherwood he’s to keep his sweaty paws off ye until we land. In a nice way, mind. He killed a woman in Hannibal and he has terrible bad nightmares aboot it.”

She never found out if he was joshing about the deck-hand. When the boat docked in St. Louis the pilot took her inland to a great stone building behind an evil-looking cathedral as large as downtown Davenport and then he passed out of her life forever. She never learned his name, but in later years, when whiskey and memory overtook her, she would smirk at his bluff innocence and despise him.

The Mother Superior of the convent was a fat Frenchwoman of indeterminate age with a nose twice the size of hers with an angry red boil on the side of it and a moustache. She gave Kate—for from then on Mary Katherine was never known by any other name—to a very tall, very thin woman in a nun’s habit, who took her to another room where she was made to strip and climb into a wooden tub full of cold water and grasp her ankles while Sister scrubbed her back with brown soap and a coarse cloth until it stung. A bucket of icy water was dumped over her head and she toweled off shivering with thin terry and put on clean drawers—not her comfortable linen ones but a pair made of gray shoddy that chafed her thighs—and a plain white cotton shift. Sitting on a wormwood bench she pulled on coarse black knee-length stockings secured with plain garters and laced on a pair of man’s scuffed brown brogans that extended two inches past her toes and felt corrugated inside.

When Sister advanced on her with steel shears she tried to run, but the thin woman was faster and much stronger and sat her on the bench with an arm wrench that made her cry out. She was still recovering from it when her wet black hair was gathered in a wiry fist and cut off at the nape of her neck with three crunching snips. No minors were allowed in the convent, and when that night she was locked in a ward with a dozen other shorn girls who spoke among themselves in whispers and stared at her without addressing her, she lay on her narrow cot crying, convinced she looked a horror. A few days later, however, when she was allowed to pass under Sister’s escort through the courtyard into the cathedral, she admired the boyishly ethereal face framed in a scarf looking back at her from the surface of the holy water. Although she genuflected and hurried to a pew before Sister could box her ears for the sin of Vanity, on her knees she determined never to let her hair grow back out.

Big Nose Kate was born in the convent. The other girls called her that from the time they learned her name, and tailored jokes to her that were previously reserved for Mother Superior’s fearsome fistulated snout. The first time a girl used the name to her face, Kate knocked her down and straddled her and clawed at her eyes until Sister separated and whipped them both across their bare buttocks until they bled. Nevertheless it quickly became popular, and even the nuns came to use it to distinguish her from the other two Kates in their charge.

So Big Nose Kate came out of that time, but more than just the name. On occasions later when the clergy got in the way of her vocation she would claim that the only difference between God’s house and a whorehouse was the pointed roof, and those who heard would think she was merely trying to shock them, but what she never spoke of was the Private Instruction in Sister’s cell. There among the hymnals and Latin dictionaries and votive candles she discovered that the reason nuns never squirmed like the girls under the scratching of their shoddy drawers was that they never wore them. The diet in the convent was mostly salmon from the riverboats, and Sister tasted of it, so that despite the irony of her adopted surname Kate never ate fish the rest of her life. After hours the girls practiced what they had learned from Sister with one another in their cots. Although Kate often took part, she gained far more knowledge than release from these sessions. For her the convent would be a lesson in the universal craving for physical fulfillment that she would carry to the grave.

There were only two ways to get out of the convent.

Escape was not one. The first week Kate was there, a sixteen-year-old girl whose baby had been remanded to an orphanage downriver slipped out of the cathedral while Sister was in holy rapture and was gone two days and one night. She attempted to sneak aboard a riverboat, was found out, and scrambled down the levee a hop ahead of the out-of-shape deckhand who pursued her and lost his footing and her trail at the bottom. On the second day a city policeman caught her picking through a trash barrel behind a restaurant, recognized the dirty convent shift she was wearing, and delivered her to Sister, who attended her lovingly during her long recovery from Sister’s whipping. Other attempts were made while Kate was in residence, but none came even that close to success, although the punishment was the same. The St. Louis city fathers were staunchly Catholic and the police were always willing to aid in recapturing runaways.

Coming of age was the first of the sanctioned roads to freedom. Upon reaching twenty-one, the petitioner had the choice of entering the novitiate or leaving by the front door. A surprising number opted for the former, and Kate could always identify these among the novices, who spelled the nuns in the classroom and kept order in the dormitory, by their broken wills. She herself had no intention of letting that happen to her, or of spending the next four years begging carbolic off the nuns for her abraded thighs and tasting salmon in Sister’s cell. The second key to liberty—of a sort—was marriage.

One of the convent’s unadvertised purposes was to serve as a kind of animal shelter for pioneers looking for wives. Several times a week, men stuffed into high boots and new suits of clothes tramped through the classroom and dormitory to look at the girls and talk with some of them. Mother Superior said they were settlers inspecting the spiritual arrangements before putting down stakes in the area, but no one was taken in by it and Mother Superior herself made no great effort to be convincing. Kate talked with a few of the men, but was offended by the blunt way they studied her build under her shift and by the sour earthen smell of them, and they in turn lost interest when their questions about her people went unanswered. Their wills, moreover, were as strong as hers if not stronger, something she had had quite enough of from her mother and from Sister. If they were shopping, she was too. When Sister noted her attitude and rebuked her during Private Instruction for the sin of Pride, Kate feigned ignorance; and rather than allow herself to be backed into admitting the true purpose of the visitations, the thin woman merely clenched her long jaw and raised her habit.

Once a month the girls’ teeth were inspected by a dentist named Silas Melvin. Melvin was a fussy little man with a pink face and rimless spectacles and black hair receding into a half-moon four inches above his eyebrows, although he was still in his twenties. He affected a laughable fastidiousness of dress in view of his shabby coat and turned collars that convinced the other girls, who called him Aunt Silas, that their sex held no interest for him. Kate was less sure and settled the point one day by borrowing a shift from a girl several sizes smaller and arching her back so that her nipples stood out against the taut cotton while he was leaning over to look inside her mouth, causing him to drop his little mirror and crack the glass.

She liked his clean smell. He admired her “Greek profile” and said she had fine teeth. Mostly she liked the fact that he was plainly afraid of Sister and avoided her as much as he could without offending. A man who could be intimidated represented freedom. Kate encouraged his attentions, and soon he was making his visits twice a month, blaming an outbreak of pyorrhea in the city. No one credited it. By then it was commonly accepted that Aunt Silas was smitten with Big Nose Kate.

Mother Superior blessed the match. Professional men were a sturdy influence on rebellious young women. Moreover, despite the fact that his stubborn Protestantism precluded their marrying inside the Church, Mother Superior was serene in its teachings and believed it would encompass them both in time; which made it a victory of Faith. So it was that six months after Kate came to the convent, she was wed by the pastor of the Presbyterian church.