Mary in Darkness - 2

On Saturday morning, when the air was still cool and damp with dew, I slipped out of bed, past sleeping sisters, through the middle of the house to the kitchen.  The air felt like hope, fresh and light.   Morning birds were not yet calling, and our cats were still in small heaps, piled onto each other for warmth.

I tiptoed lightly and slowly around the kitchen, waking up in time to my breaths and heartbeats.  My thoughts gradually cleared.  Mary, huddled last night, afraid to go home.  I was safe, and she was not.  I felt I was rich, and I knew she was not.  Her home had screams and terror, and I did not know what sounded like.

I was nine and Mary was ten.  Grownups had found her and talked about her and kept their voices down low.  I knew Johnny, her brother, might be at his house and might want to run away, too.  I'd always seen him moving disjointedly, awkward, mute and strange in the classroom.  He might want to cry.  But, I'd never heard him cry nor heard Mary cry or even sniffle.

I went to our laundry room and looked around for ideas, things, salvation to give.  If we found a stray cat or small bird, we gave it a box with a rag to be safe inside.  Maybe Mary was just like the cats we had found, even though I knew she was an older girl than I.  She was alone and had no friends.  She needed things and warmth, I thought.

I found our collection of our old, clean towels in a stack, took two and looked around for something else to put with them.  Candles.  We had old leftover candles.  I took a fat low candle, a red one.  I found odds and ends, rolled them all in the towels like a saddle roll. I'd seen cowboys in TV westerns crossing the great plains with their cattle. All they needed was a tin cup and a roll of supplies.  I found a plastic cup and stole it from the kitchen.  I found the matches and stole them, too.

With the bundle under my arm, I set out for the post office, walking up a small hill on our street, around a bend up into the village and then along the main street two blocks to the post office.  My mind was racing with ideas about fear and pain, angry parents, rage, but they were vague and brief.  Mary was so deer-like to me, so defenseless, so quiet.  What had happened, I repeated, what was it like in her house?  I tried to conjure huge pain that would make me run and hide, but I always got to a point of blankness and anxiety.  Mary's fear was a doorway to a world beyond the village where I was living, a doorway to an obscure and odd world.

At the post office, I stood looking at its glass and aluminum door.  I tested it.  It was open. The lobby where the brass-doored boxes lined the three walls was passive, silent, official.  No Mary.  I had been imagining her left alone there by the grownups because she had brought herself there.  Where else would they make her go?  I got the sudden shock that she might have been brought back home and hurt some more.  It sickened me.  I was seeing Mary as a hurt cat, the only other helpless thing I'd ever known.  Silent skinny Mary needed help and I wanted to give it to her, keep her from the dark anger of her house.

I trotted back home with my bundle and set it down under my bed, shoved out of sight.  I heard my mother, awake now, in the kitchen.

"Such a shame," she said.

"What's a shame? I was alert for clues, some way to know what had happened.

"Beaten children.  No one should live like that."  She stirred her coffee and began a pot of oatmeal at the stove.

"Where is she?" I stood at her side and peered over the edge of the pot, watched the salt tossed into the water and the blue flames touching the bottom of the pot.  She smelled like lavender.

"They took her in to town, to a different parish.  You might not see her for a while."  Her hand was  holding the wooden spoon and stirring the warming water in a figure eight.  "You mustn't think badly of her.  She's been through a lot and she needs to heal."

"Badly?"  I watched the oats pour down in an arc from the cardboard Quaker box.  "Is she going to need towels?"  The oats were slowly sinking into the water.  "You know, stuff?"

"I suppose she will.  The family's destitute.  Something very bad has happened, and she couldn't help it.  It's her daddy.  He's a mean drunk, a filthy mean drunk who beats his wife and children.  He ought to go to jail for that, and now maybe he will.  Mary was very brave, but she's afraid and hungry, and she needs understanding and kindness.  Go wash your hands and get your sisters.  Breakfast is ready."

"What's destitute?"

"It's when you have nothing at all.  You against the world in a way.  Go on.  Oatmeal's ready," my mother said and bent down to kiss my head and then smoothed my hair.

"What if we get destitute?"  I was thinking about the bundle under my bed.

"We won't.  We have each other and we're good people.  Her daddy is not a good person, and he could have killed her.  Everyone's very worried about her.  It's very complicated.  I'm going to eat this oatmeal by myself unless you kids come in here and help me."  She sat down at the table and looked at me, raising her eyebrows.  "Hungry?"



"That's what destitute means, not having anything.  You said it twice, so that's redundant.  She's being taken care of.  She's not destitute anymore, but she was.  You cannot give her your oatmeal.  We will help her some other way.  You going hungry will not help her."

My mother was beautiful to me, but I was not getting anywhere, and we were both hungry now.  My sisters trailed into the kitchen, like hungry cats themselves, sleep in their eyes, hair in rumpled tangles.

(to be continued)