Karen Memory (5 page)

It’s plain farm food, sure, but I’m a plain farm girl. I like it better than the poached eggs and hollandaise and asparagus and whatnot we serve to the tricks at a 500 percent markup. They come in special for the food, and Connie’s in charge of the maids as serves in the dining room and changes our sheets. Those girls don’t live in the house, and a lot of ’em is younger than Madame would employ in a horizontal position anyhow.

The johns like to think they’re getting treated fancy by the fancy women. I just like to eat. And if a little extra bit of molasses sort of smudged over onto the salmon, there wasn’t much finer eating from here to China, in my mind.

Connie left me alone to chew in peace and went back to chopping onions for supper. She kept her nails short and clean white. Her hands were medium sized, too, and clever-quick as anything. Tendons played across the backs like the strings inside a grand piano. Like the spine of her knife as it rose and fell.

She’s got a gadget that’s supposed to do a lot of those things for you, but she don’t hardly need it. You’ve never seen an onion diced so fine.

I was just clutching my coffee mug and watching her, blinking like a satiated cat, when Miss Lizzie stomped in wearing her street boots and a scowl. Her face was all pinched up around her spectacles like she meant to hold them in place by frowning, and her shoulders rode up to her ears. I could hear the piano wire tendons in her clockwork hand clicking as she made a fist with it—and Miss Lizzie ain’t the sort to show her emotions that way. She’s enough of a lady to make Miss Bethel proud.

I was on my feet in a second, the warmth and comfort of that coffee mug forgotten. My mouth opened, but Miss Lizzie stopped the words coming out with a look. Not a mean look. Just a Miss Lizzie look. One that didn’t brook no messing about. “They’re fine, Karen,” she said, like she could read my thoughts.

I wouldn’t put it past her.

I sat back down, slowly. Connie slid my empty plate away. “Pie, Karen honey?”

I shook my head as she handed Miss Lizzie a mug of coffee all her own. I took mine with cream and sugar; Miss Lizzie drank hers black as a cowpuncher and I bet she would of boiled it over eggshells if it wouldn’t of made Connie blanch.

I did sort of want pie, but I didn’t
need
it, if you know what I mean, and I wanted to hear whatever Miss Lizzie was working herself up to venting. Seamstresses get to have a good sense of when people want to talk, and if something’s eating them, and even just what sort of people they are. And that hunch in Miss Lizzie’s shoulders said that whatever was eating
her
was about the size and temperament of a grizzly bear.

She hooked a chair out with one boot—abrupt, but she always is—and thumped into it. She blew across the coffee, pushing lazy coils of steam into a streamer, and slurped the hot edge of the mug. “Picketers,” she said.

“I heard them,” I answered. I picked my coffee up, too, because talking goes easier if the other person sees you doing what they’re doing. “The Women’s Christian Anti-Prostitution and Soiled Dove Rescue League?”

“God no,” she said. “It’s the Democrats. On the street right over our heads, more’s the pity. Just where anybody who wanted to pay us a friendly afternoon visit would have to walk through, and be spotted and recognized.”

“We’re closed anyway,” Connie said, putting a sandwich on a plate in front of her. Ham, pickles, and sea beans, it looked like. On one of Connie’s hard rolls.

I filched a sea bean. It crunched between my teeth, briny and grassy and good.

Miss Lizzie fixed me with a look, but she didn’t mean nothing by it. She took a bite of her sandwich, chewed, drank coffee, and said, “We won’t be closed all night. The glazier just got here. And guess what mayoral candidate those Democrats are supporting?”

Connie shook her head. “Not Dyer Stone, I take it?”

I hid a smile behind my hand, because we wasn’t supposed to know about Mayor Stone’s occasional visits. Anyway, he was a Republican—the party of Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes.

“Peter Bantle,” Miss Lizzie spat, and crunched into her sandwich vindictively.

Chapter Four

Since we was closed and since it weren’t raining, after I just about licked my plate Connie took advantage of my gratitude to send me to the market. I wanted to check on Priya—and Merry Lee, sure, but really mostly Priya, and I wasn’t sure if I liked myself more or less for being honest enough to admit it—but Miss Lizzie got that line between her eyebrows and told me that neither girl was to be disturbed before midnight at the earliest. When I, of course, would probably be hard at work stargazing. Or ceiling gazing, since you can’t see much in the way of stars through plaster, or Rapid City’s constant fog and clouds.

So Connie claimed I needed a distraction and put a pile of net bags in my hand and sent me off to the market with Miss Francina to shop for supper. Even though it was sunny—albeit already getting on toward evening, this late in the year—I hooked an umbrella on to my arm. I was wise to the ways of Rapid City. We had accounts with some of the merchants, but Miss Bethel—who kept the books—signed me out a fistful of paper dollars. I’d heard some in the old Confederacy wouldn’t touch the hundred-dollar notes with their portraits of Abraham Lincoln, but given gold rush prices all up and down the waterfront I was happy to fold up a couple and shove them in my button pocket. She also handed me a pile of pennies and trimes and cartwheels, for making change with.

Miss Francina and I walked along beside the cart, to stretch our legs and because it was more pleasant than jouncing. The road was fair enough dry—I skipped over a few stinking puddles—and all around on the horizon the mountains were out in every direction, looming up out of blue distance like genies standing in their smoke.

The Bayview Market is two lies in just one name—Rapid City has a Sound, not a Bay, though what the dictionary difference is I couldn’t be the one to tell you, and you can’t see the water from it anyhow on account of the shipworks dry docks—but it is just about hard enough by to smell the sea, and it’s about my favorite place on earth, barring my own private bedroom. It’s a long redwood building the size of those dry docks, up on stilts and with the doors guarded by wooden stairways on account of maybe flooding, what with where it sits. Redwood stands up to a soaking, anyway, and it was built long before the street-raising plan went into effect. Now it’s just eight feet up from the road instead of thirty, even if the road isn’t quite finished yet.

You used to be able to row to it when it flooded. Now there’s talk of putting in stone steps, the better for folk to fall down ’em and split their heads when the granite slicks up in winter. Still, it’s full one end to the other with market stalls. There’s hothouse flowers in January, and oranges from China and alligator pears from Mexico, and the freshest seafood you ever tasted in your life. Scallops as big as your hand, that you cut and eat like a filet steak. Oysters by the gross and by the dozen, plain briny honest fare for whores and tradesmen alike. Agate-red salmon and agate-green lobsters that turn a whole different, brighter red when you boil them. Saffron, cinnamon, nutmeg, peppercorns. Sea salt in great soft, sticky flakes. Cheese from as far away as Vermont and France. Blackberry wine and good brown local ale. Fresh-baked bread, coffee beans like green pearls, tea that’s come from as far away as Priya did. Anything you have ever eaten or wanted to eat, basically, and a slew of other things besides—baskets, cloth, Singer sewing machines right out of the Sears catalog. Even made-up clothes for the prospectors heading north who didn’t bring nobody to sew a thing for them. Really sew, I mean, though I suppose most wives know a bit about the other kind of sewing, too.

I could spend a week walking the sawdust-strewn planks of that place, nibbling samples of sardines and candied salmon. So it’s a good thing Connie sent me with a list, because otherwise I might wind up bewildered and wandering the aisles until I wasted away to a haint. (There is more than a few stories that the Bayview is haunted. Mostly I think they’re jokes. Mostly.)

Miss Francina and me bought three kinds of bread—which I stuffed into a net bag—and two kinds of cake. She took charge of those. We also split a small apple pie as a snack. Most of the other fruit was only good as preserves by now, though you could buy some ready canned in glass jars as pie filling, but the end of the apple harvest was still coming in and the pie tasted like paradise with ginger sugar sprinkled on top. So I guess I got my pie anyway, and you know it turned out I did need it after all. We got ten pounds of onions, half-white and half-yellow, and arranged with a butcher to deliver fifty pounds of fresh beef and venison, and similar provisioning from a fishmonger. The potatoes would be delivered, too. The greengrocer had some of those Chinese oranges with the real soft skins, and I filled up a bag with ’em and another bag with Brussels sprouts. They’re just fancy cabbage, but the johns will pay extra for ’em and I like cabbage well enough.

The eggs and the milk came to the house on delivery, so we didn’t have to worry about those.

By the time I’d sent Miss Francina back to our hired cart for the third time to drop off packages, I was feeling quite pleased with myself. Miss Francina is nothing but good qualities, but none of those good qualities is the patience to cook well or do the kind of picking over potatoes for green spots it takes to handle the marketing. I’m good at it—it’s no fussier in detail than grooming horses—and I was feeling pretty smug about my good work and Connie’s trust as I shouldered a net bag of onions with one hand and picked over mushrooms in a bin with the other. I think I was even humming to myself—some fashionable tune that Pollywog, who was opera struck, had been playing on the parlor baby grand while the Professor wasn’t looking.

I’d never take so little care now. But the hand on my wrist caught me by complete surprise. Of course, I flatter myself that my enemies—and now I know I got enemies, which weren’t a word I would of used in those days—wouldn’t do anything so careless now, neither. They’ll have learned a little respect.

But as I said, I wasn’t expecting nobody to grab me just then. I guess I was young yet and not too smart. I just stared at that hand on my wrist in shock. It was big, scarred across the back, curls of coarse tawny hair sprouting between the knuckles. Exactly the sort of hand you might expect to grab you unexpectedly, except for the woman’s dainty gold ring on one pinky.

I followed the broad bones of the wrist up to the elbow and the rolled-up calico sleeve. Home-sewn, it looked like. Somebody cared enough about this fellow to hem his clothes with care.

As for me, I didn’t care much for him at all. He was squeezing my arm something fearful.

My eyes snapped up to his face. He wasn’t as tall as his hand predicted, but he was even broader. He had bad teeth and good skin, dark blond hair greased into ringlets, a red silk kerchief inside his collar tied in a fancy knot. I didn’t know for sure he worked for Peter Bantle, but let’s say I could guess.

“You’re one of that Damnable woman’s tarts,” he said. He had a pleasant light voice. I thought Pollywog would of called it a tenor. He sounded more surprised than mean. “Well, you’d better come along with old Bill now.”

Nobody nearby seemed to notice he was grabbing me. Or if they noticed they didn’t care, even though I wasn’t tarted up just then. I was wearing my plain blue muslin country dress and a carriage coat for marketing, and no paint. Amazing what people can fail to see when it’s a man doing it to a woman, even a respectable-looking woman.

I hit him across the kisser with ten pounds of onions and he let go of my arm.

The net bag held, to my surprise. A couple of his teeth were less sturdy, as I surmised from the way he staggered back, clutching at his mouth, and then worked his jaw, doubled over, spat red—my stomach lurched—and grimaced. Around us, people withdrew in a circle—some watching, some walking hastily away. Behind me, the greengrocer pulled the boxes of mushrooms out of harm’s way.

Bill blinked tears from his eyes, then fastened his gaze on me. “Bitch,” he snarled—why they never think of anything cleverer I’ll never know. When he lifted his hand up again, this time there was a fighting knife glittering in it.

But by then, I had the umbrella in my right hand, the wrist still red and burning from knocking his clenched hand loose. A knife’s sharper, but an umbrella has reach, and mine has a pretty good steel ferrule to the tip. He was a lunge-and-slash fighter and he had the weight and reach on me, but Bruce Memery taught me to brawl when he taught me to shoot—and to ride—and when Bill stepped to his right to dodge my umbrella’s swat and swiped at me again I surprised him by not jumping back but instead spanking him across the hand with the onions again. It worked—his hand went up—and I jabbed him in the breadbasket with the umbrella. I might of gigged him like a frog except the ferrule struck on one of his canvas braces and so it just made him
oof
like a mule when you deflate her for saddling. More’s the pity.

He went skidding backward, buying me a couple of seconds, but the Spanish notch on the back of the Bowie snagged in the net and the onion bag ripped. Onions bounced everywhere.

I heard myself panting, watching the onions roll. A quick glance left and right didn’t show me anything else I could use to foul the knife, and the umbrella wouldn’t stand up to more than one or two cuts. There was no sign of Miss Francina, and even if she heard the cries going up and came at a run she’d hit the press of people going the other way. It would take her too long to get to me. With the knife out, the crowd was pulling back farther, and still nobody stepped in to help me. I could try to jump the greengrocer’s stand, but a bustle and petticoats weren’t designed for acrobatics.

Bill looked at the torn bag in my hand and smiled, showing the teeth I’d busted. A little spit-thinned blood dripped down his chin. At least he shaved; I think I would of puked for sure if it were trickling through stubble.

I wasn’t stronger, and quicker only helped me so far. I supposed I just couldn’t get lucky enough for Bill to trip on the onions and break his fool neck. If I was going to live through this—or get out of it without getting dragged to Peter Bantle’s house, and from there God knows what might happen—I’d have to be smarter.