Thing With Feathers (9781616634704) (6 page)

Mavis watched her own biscuit in earnest as she buttered it, deliberately ignoring the scuffle between her sons. Wyatt passed the potatoes around again, glad that things were back to normal.

Chapter 11

April 1928

Cloverdale, Oregon

S
he slipped quietly from between rough blankets and tiptoed into the water closet. As soon as the door was closed and latched, she lifted her nightie and looked anxiously between her legs. She was immediately assaulted by the familiar musty smell of her father. She grabbed a cloth and dampened it in the basin, rubbing coarse soap softened with lavender oil into the washcloth before using it to make her body clean again.

Will it ever be clean again?
she wondered.

All the soap and lavender oil in the county wouldn’t make you clean, Blair. He’s made you filthy. He’s a pig, and so are you for letting him do those filthy things to you!

But I don’t let him!
Blair pleaded with her sanity.
He…rapes…me!

She withdrew her hand from under her cotton night dress. Much to her dismay, the white cloth was still white.
How many days have I repeated this routine?
She was unsure, but enough days that Blair knew she should have had blood by now, enough days that panic sprouted. Yesterday at the schoolhouse, Priscilla Mason had told her that “grandma was visiting,” when Blair had asked why she grabbed her stomach so. That was Priscilla’s way of saying she was having her menses. Blair remembered that she was usually over her time before Priscilla’s began. Miss Joseph had told the girls that cessation of menses indicated pregnancy. She’d promised them that the day menstruation ceased would surely be the happiest day of their married lives, for it meant the bringing of a new life into the world.

I’ll bet Miss Joseph doesn’t know it’s going to happen to you, Blair! I bet Miss Joseph wouldn’t think it so happy a day if she knew it was because you’d bedded your father!

Blair threw her hands to her ears as if that could stop the voice from within. It was a terrible and obtrusive voice, and it grew louder with the passing of each new day. Blair leaned over the wash basin and vomited.

The coffee pot lid rattled in the pot as Blair tried in vain to stop her shaking. She poured her father’s cup and splashed just a few drops of the boiling brew over his poised hand. Blair screamed when her father jumped up. She ran to the sink for a towel.

“Damnation, child! What has gotten in to you?”

Blair started to say something, but no words would come out. She stood at the sink, facing him, her eyes wide and her mouth frozen, and then she just began to cry. As her father looked on in confusion, her crying grew louder and bordered on hysteria. The preacher walked over and very casually slapped her hard across the cheek. Blair’s legs grew weak at what she suspected would follow next, and she fell to the floor in a bawling heap. Preacher Bowman just stood over her, wondering what it was all about.

“I think…Father…I’m pregnant.”

He reached down and turned her face up to his. He stared at her for many seconds. “By Gosh, Blair! I believe you might be!”

It was Blair’s turn to be confused. She thought she would surely receive a beating for allowing such a thing to happen. But her father did not appear angry at all. He looked as though he were actually happy. He was smiling at her. He picked her up gently in his arms and rested her in his most comfortable chair. Then he fetched some milk and apples for her and urged her to eat.

“You must stay healthy, Blair. You have a child to consider now.”

He is actually doting on me,
Blair marveled.

“A son! I know it will be a boy!” He started slicing the apple into pieces for her. He could not seem to stand still.

“But, Father…” Blair was appalled. “I can’t have…what will people think of us? I can’t stay here. I thought perhaps you would send me to Aunt Mary in Indiana or take me to one of those city doctors. I’ve…I’ve heard they can…rid a woman—”

“Never!” The preacher turned red as a rooster’s comb. “This was God’s plan all along, Blair. Can you not see that? You are such a foolish girl. Drink your milk!” And with that, the preacher stormed out the back door, letting it slam behind him.

Blair always hung the wash down by the river. A few feet back from the water’s edge, there were two fairly straight Alder trees, ten feet apart, from which she had strung line to hold the wash. As she bent over the wringer, she placed her left hand over her middle and rested it there, feeling only the slightest swelling to her firm abdomen. But it wasn’t her belly that told Blair she was pregnant. Rather, it was something else her hand felt. No. That wasn’t right. It was something her heart felt through her hand. There was no doubt in her mind at all.

When Sean came out of the trees into the clearing, that was how he found Blair. She had one hand over her stomach, the other on the handle of the wringer, and her eyes focused on some distant horizon. She did not hear him softly call her name as he approached, so as not to startle her that time; and when he came up beside her and carefully put his hand on her shoulder, she whipped her head around, startling them both.

“Boy, I’m sorry, Blair. You were really concentrating on something, I guess. I gave a holler this time. I swear I was not trying to sneak up on you. Is everything all right?” He truly looked concerned for her.

“I’m fine,” she said shortly and went back to turning the handle as though he were not there.

“Can I help you with that? I mean, I know a thing about doing wash. I help my ma all the time. I don’t think anything so strenuous should be called women’s work, do you?”

“Huh?” She was far off again.

“Blair, let me do that for ya. Are you sure you’re okay?” Sean carefully pushed her aside and started in.

She did not answer right away. She walked a few feet closer to the water and sat down on a large stump.

Talk to him, you idiot,
the inner voice told her.
In case you have not thought this through yet, he is freedom. Blair, he is our way out.

“Huh?” she asked aloud.

“Did you say something, Blair?”

She turned around to look at him, really seeing him for the first time. He was awful handsome and was always so nice to her. She wondered why. She knew she wasn’t very pretty, and she knew that people in town thought her odd. The Marshall family had money, stature, and good looks.

Why is Sean here?

Ugh! Just quiet and let me talk to him, girl. You would ruin everything if I let you
.

Chapter 12

“Y
ou’re awful nice to me, Sean. I wish I could do something nice for you too. Maybe I could give you a tour of the church graveyard. It’s kind of interesting reading all those old headstones. Did you know we have Civil War veterans buried there?” Blair’s inner-self asked him.

“I did. My grandpa on my ma’s side was with Sherman’s army in the March to the Sea. He wasn’t with us long after the trip here by wagon. He’s buried there. But a tour sounds fine,” Sean said. “Say, maybe we could do it this evening, just before the sun goes down. See, I was hoping to try something different with my camera. I’ve been reading some about different photography methods. I was thinking of trying to leave the shutter open once it got a little dark and writing something in the air with a lantern just to see if it catches it on the film. Would you like to take me on that tour and then help me with the experiment? I’ll put your name in lights!” He grinned.

He watched as Blair transformed before his very eyes. She tucked her chin coquettishly and looked up at him through her lashes. Boy, but Sean thought she looked even prettier when she did that. “Yes, I would, Sean.”

He finished the last blouse in the basket and hung it up with wooden pins. He slapped his hands against his trousers and turned to face her. She was writing “Sean” in the dirt with a twig, he noticed. He smiled to himself.
She likes me.
That must be the reason she’s come out of her shell,
Sean thought, though it worried him a bit how that girl could run so hot and then so cold. It was like talking to two different people. “May I come by for you then around five o’clock?”

Blair had removed her boots and stockings. Then she hiked her dress up well past her petticoat and stepped into the cool water. She turned and gave him another fetching look over her shoulder. “I’ll just wait for ya by the fence, Sean.”

“Okay!” He removed his folded pork pie from his back pocket and placed it back on his head.

“Well, see ya then, Blair!”

She waggled playful fingers at him.

He turned and hurried back the way he had come but perhaps with just a bit more spring to his step.

Chapter 13

P
reacher Bowman visited his church in order to thank the good Lord for the son He would soon bestow upon him. But after a few minutes of basking in the knowledge that his son would be forthcoming, the demons who frequently tortured him started in. The demons asked what the congregation would think about the preacher’s unwed daughter having a baby. The demons said that the congregation would run him out of town when it was learned that he had fathered his child’s child.

“They don’t understand this bidding I do for Him,” the preacher yelled at hiding devils. Sweat began pouring from his scalp and forehead.

Ordinary folks would fail to grasp the holy design. They had not the intelligence or the insightfulness to recognize that he was just a disciple devoted to God’s destiny for him. Bowman prayed for answers, and in due time one came to him, but it surely came not from God. Bowman began making plans of his own.

They called him the music man. Bowman’s trip to Dolph to find him took several hours because the town of Dolph kept getting moved around, until these days it was several miles farther up the Little Nestucca River. Dolph had a nice hotel and a stagecoach drop but not much else. And by the 1920s, there were no stagecoaches running from Portland or Salem. The roads that connected the Oregon Coast with the state capitol and other citified destinations were primarily the rough logging and fire access roads of dirt that traversed the Big Nestucca and Little Nestucca Rivers many times. Most visitors who drove their shiny new Chevy AA’s and Ford Model-T’s as far as Dolph, were only too happy to park their treasured vehicles in the Dolph garage and taxi out to the coast.

Old Man Bell, who ran the Dolph station, had purchased a couple of used creamery trucks from local farms to use as shuttles to the coast, mostly for visitors heading to the Tjaden Bath Houses and Wellness Spa. The undercarriages of the creamery trucks sat higher, which made them better at navigating potholes, fallen rocks, trees, and other road hazards without snapping an axle or punching a hole in their oil pans. Bell had customized the cargo beds to accommodate seat benches along the sides. Canopies were installed to protect passengers from rain, and curtained sides unfurled to act as barriers to all the dust those hard rubber tires kicked up.

Buckboards and horsing were still the primary means of travel for most folks who lived in the area. The Marshall family owned a Tin Lizzy, one of the last off the assembly line. They’d also had its back seat removed and a cargo bed placed in its stead.

The Marshall’s.
Bowman grunted at the thought of them.
And that boy of theirs!
He scowled. He knew he would have to do something about Sean Marshall buzzing around his Blair at some point. But at that moment he had much more pressing business to attend to.

Bowman had heard things about the man who taught note singing, recently arrived in Dolph. Mostly, the things Bowman had heard were not at all flattering. The man was reportedly a beggar, a womanizer, and an oddjobber—and none too trustworthy. He was making his way from village to village, teaching folks to sing by note, hosting “shape note singing meetings” in local churches. The preacher did not favor them and had told his congregation that he would not have such meetings in his church. Even though the songs were mostly hymns, psalms and anthems, Bowman indicted the classes as being particularly popular with the young folks, because they used the get-togethers to mingle with members of the opposite sex.