Karen Memory

Chapter Three

I never made it back up to Priya that night. Connie and Miss Bethel was both up — the whole house was up by now — but I didn’t see Miss Bethel and Connie took one look at me and poured a cup of sweet chocolate laced with whiskey down my throat and sent me up to bed, promising to feed Priya only if I went willing. Though I suppose it won’t surprise you none that when I finally made it to my room I weren’t in no condition to sleep.

What might surprise you is my room, though, if all you’ve seen is the downstairs or the company bedrooms of a parlor house like Madam Damnable’s. My room’s maybe no bigger than a dockside crib — I can touch both walls with my hands outstretched, and one’s just chimney brick with a coat of whitewash. But there’s a little white table with a lamp on top, and a shelf between the legs for my books and my little wooden horse. My room is all whitewash except the ivory moldings, and it’s all mine.

It’d be a monk’s cell except there’s a rag rug on the floor that I braided and sewed from scraps of our party dresses, so it’s every bright color you can fathom all wound around one another. The bed’s a straw-tick cot I can just about turn over in, soft and clean and hay sweet, and nobody sleeps on those sheets but me. We work downstairs, in the fancy chambers. My room’s a dormer, and it’s warm from the heat rising from the kitchen, and best of all, it’s got a little glazed window I can see over the rooftops from, to the Sound. I can’t see the street, because of the roofline blocking my view, but that’s all to the good the way I figure.

It was light, which ain’t so unusual for me going to bed, but my window faces near to west as makes no difference and anyway, the rain was coming down through a thick gray pall like a dirty fleece. I drew the shades and the curtains and pulled on my nightshirt, but when I laid myself down I couldn’t sleep a wink. I just stared up at that dormer ceiling and picked at my cuticles with my thumb, which is a terrible bad habit.

I could feel every stem of rye in my usually cozy straw tick as if they was laid across my skin like flogging stripes. You’d think I’d never hemmed nor ironed the sheets, nor pulled them tight, there was that many wrinkles gouging me every time I rolled over.

Eventually, I pulled myself over the side slat — which was a mite more challenging than it should of been — and fetched my diary from its hiding place under a half-loose floorboard. The diary’s a little book I sewed the pages of myself, and stitched a pretty calico cover for. I got a pencil off my table and I balanced the little book on my knee to write. I should of given it cover boards, for sure, but I’m still working out how to bind those. I think I might need the big sewing machine, and maybe some kind of special needle.

Writing settles me, like, and I figured if I could get the night down I might be able to get it out of my head for a few hours and get some rest. My eyes burned and my joints ached, I was that tired, and maybe a little dizzy from the whiskey.

But I couldn’t write so good, or get anything laid in a proper straight furrow. Instead, I picked out words and sentences on the paper all wrong and in any sort of order and only realized how little sense or progress I was making when I tasted the splintery, resiny ponderosa pine of the pencil. I’d chewed through the yellow paint. That kind of pine somewhat smells like cinnamon, but it turns out it don’t taste like cinnamon at all.

Anyway, I must of slept eventually because I woke with a page of my diary crumpled and damp under my cheek and my pencil on the floor by the bed. My room had gone stuffy. The rain was over, and when the sun came out it just about turned the whole city into a sweat lodge, even in winter. I knowed from the way the light hit my window that I’d missed breakfast, which Connie dishes up around one.

Miss Bethel and Miss Francina had let me sleep right through it, too, which only happens if you’re sick.

I’m not sure the sleep had left me feeling any the better. My nightshirt was stuck down with sweat despite the chill by the window. I felt tacky and bloated and sore like my courses was coming on, though it wasn’t time for that yet. I smoothed out my diary best I could and pressed the book out open under the ticking to draw some wet out of it, but I couldn’t get the wrinkle out of the page. Then I washed my face in tepid water from the basin and found pencil lead all over the rag when I was done. I combed and corralled my hair and found a clean chemise. All part of the routine.

When I finished it, I finally let myself think about the night before, about Effie and Crispin and Merry Lee. And Peter Bantle.

And Priya.

I started to shake all over again and had to sit back down.

By the time I made it into petticoats and a country dress — I wasn’t fighting my way into stays and a bustle alone — and groped my way down them narrow stairs, it was late enough that I figured I’d best avoid the parlor, me without makeup nor a company dress and all. There might be men out there any time after breakfast — luncheon I suppose it was, for some. I came down all prepared to sneak through the hall back to the kitchen and annoy Connie for whatever the news might be.

But the double doors from the hall into the parlor stood open, and the outside doors was shut. The grandfather clock by the library door said 2:20, so I hadn’t really slept all that long. The rugs Merry Lee’d bled on were missing, replaced for now by some slightly worn ones that usually lived in the hall upstairs. Signor was tea-cozied in the armchair by the fire, though — the blue-and-lemon settee that I think he knows makes his eyes look brighter — and he blinked at me in recognition.

Crispin crouched down between his knees with a whisk and a pan chasing crumbs of ruby glass — you’d think they’d of all fallen outside from the gun blast, but maybe that only happens in detective stories. Street noise drifted down. Some of it sounded like chanting, and I wondered if we was being picketed by those placard-waving hypocrites of the Women’s Christian Anti-Prostitution and Soiled Dove Rescue League again — though it seemed like I was mostly hearing male voices. Crispin hadn’t gotten around to boarding the broken bits over yet, though his hammer hung in a belt loop and some boards lay across the outstretched arms of the unoccupied sewing machine to his left. It was a great brass armature, gears and pistons, every flat surface ornamented with curlicued gold-chased plates and carved plaques of ivory and shell cameo. A cast-iron door on the fabric coffer in its chest read: SINGER SEWING MACHINE COMPANY.

If you’re going to pay fifty dollars tax per week per head on something you won’t much use, Madame Damnable figures it might as well be pretty.

The sun was high enough and at the right angle to trickle in dusty rays through the broke-open fan transom. In its better shine, even down here at the bottom of the well, you could see where Effie’s shotgun pellets had chewed up the fancy woodwork over the door. The light picked out rusty tones in the curls around Crispin’s pate — and a sprinkle of tight-coiled gray — before bouncing up across the room to sparkle on Miss Bethel’s crystal, on the looking glasses in the back bar, and off the gold threads in the striped silk bodice Miss Bethel wore under her starched white apron, too.

She stood behind her bar, fitting the pieces of her shotgun back together after cleaning and oiling. I felt a lick of shame — Effie or me should of seen to it last night — but I reckoned it was too late now. I stopped in the doorway beside the short leg of the bar, though, and waited for her to notice me.

Miss Bethel had curly dark red hair and a spray of freckles across her turned-up nose, and though she was born in the United States, she looked as Irish as the potato famine. To my knowing, nobody ever got out of her what she was doing out here in the territories, but she was one of the ones who went to church every Sunday. She had a soft-seeming sweet round face given the lie by her chin and her disposition. Though she weren’t big nor broad, she wore enough skirts to make up for it, in a silk striped between emerald moiré and white with emerald figures. A long fall of cream lace dripped from her cuff at each elbow. The gleaming back bar — pride of Madame Damnable’s and in fact the whole waterfront district of Rapid City — dwarfed her, but that don’t signify. It would of still dwarfed her if she were Miss Francina’s size: a great carved cliff of mahogany inlaid in borders with jet and ivory, it was figured with wiry satyrs, centaurs with two broad chests apiece, plump cupids, and embonpoint nymphs with their great spirals of carved hair like carousel ponies’ manes. They was all nude, and I’d seen men take upward of seven minutes just to order a double brandy at that bar, so taken were they with those voluptuous carved bellies and thighs.

Miss Bethel finished oiling the rails of the bolt and slid it into place with a greasy click. She frowned over her work, nodding. When she set the shotgun down and noticed me, the frown stayed. It weren’t no welcoming expression. But she tipped her head to the rack of the bottles against the spotless looking glass set in the carvings behind her and said, “Do you want a bit of sherry, Karen dear?”

“I’d better have a bit of breakfast first,” I said. I didn’t feel hungry, but food would likely be wise. Eat when you can, my father used to say. You never know when can will turn to can’t. “I should of cleaned the gun. I’m sorry.”

Crispin glanced over his shoulder and nodded at me. I nodded back. Signor ignored us all like a sultan.

“Fear not,” she said, and bent her knees to drop it once more across its hooks under the bar. “You’d other things on your mind. Both of the colored girls are fine, by the way — Merry Lee hasn’t woken, but Lizzie says she’s sleeping naturally and hasn’t taken a fever. The other girl won’t leave her side. Connie brought her up a cot and more food.”

Miss Bethel can call Miss Lizzie just Lizzie. I’d never dare.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m glad you wasn’t angry about the gun.”

“Weren’t angry, dear,” she said, and handed me the glass of sherry anyway. “Connie set you aside some breakfast, I think. You’d better go see.”

* * *

In the kitchen, I found that Connie hadn’t just set me aside some breakfast — she’d laid plans to make me some special. I set the sherry glass down on the table to wait until after I got some food in my head, and in the meantime I sipped the big mug of coffee she gave me. We save the pretty coffee cups that don’t hold but a mouthful for the customers. She also gave me an even bigger mug of buttermilk kept cool in the cistern, since we was too close to the Sound to have a well. As soon as I tasted that buttermilk, I realized that “didn’t feel hungry” was a lie: my stomach growled like a pit dog, and Connie shot me a sharp sideways grin from over her smoking black fry pan.

Connie was medium everything: medium size, medium color, medium featured, medium aged, medium bosomed … with a temper that never much varied up or down. But she had enough energy for three women. She bustled around for ten minutes and dished me up bread soaked in eggs and fried in dripping with molasses and butter on top. The salmon weren’t running anymore, but there was a big piece of smoked Chinook with it, sweet and flaky and splashed with dill and cider vinegar.

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.