“Mama,” Mary Ann said, crying harder than ever. “Mama.”
Rosalie understood, or else she imagined, that Mary Ann was crying because there were no more good-night kisses. She rolled Mary Ann towards her and kissed her on the forehead, exactly as Mother used to do, though wetter. Then she got up, moving quickly through the cold room to kiss Henry, too, because apparently this job now fell to her.
She remembers another time, when she was sent outside with Henry and June to play quietly in the winter air and not be underfoot. She’d laid her red mitten on the trunk of the large sycamore, only to have it stick to the iced bark, vivid as a wound there. Her hand slipped out, leaving her staring at her pale, naked fingers. There’d been five of them: June, herself, Henry Byron, Mary Ann, and Frederick, but now there were four. They were no longer a full hand.
She missed Frederick, who was a lovely baby with dimpled elbows and two sharp teeth. When he crawled about the cabin, his little bottom swung merrily from side to side. Rosalie would hear him in the mornings, babbling quietly to himself. He never woke up crying as Edwin and Asia now often did.
But the way Rosalie missed him was not the way Mother and Father missed him. She was shocked that he could disappear like that, right into the ground. She was more unsettled by the information his absence contained than by the absence itself. If it could happen to Frederick, what was to stop it from happening to her?
A large family graveyard was built around his grave, railed in with wire and planted with althea and jasmine. Even a five-year-old could see that plenty of room had been left for all the rest of them.
Three years later, Elizabeth was born, bringing the number of children back to five. But Elizabeth was never as hearty as Frederick, and it worried Rosalie. Her nose was always running and often scabbed under the nostrils. Rosalie decided not to become too attached.
This turned out to be wise. One dreadful February both Mary Ann and Elizabeth died. Father was off in Richmond performing Hamlet. He told them later that a prankster had taken out the skull usually used for Yorick and substituted a child’s skull instead. As soon as his fingers touched the tiny head, Father said, he was nearly felled by a premonition of doom.
Two days later, a messenger arrived at the stage, covered with dust and stammering in his haste. He told Father that Mary Ann was dead of the cholera and that the baby Elizabeth and eleven-year-old June had it, too. Father had run immediately from the theater, still in his costume and stage paint, packing nothing.
Meanwhile, Rosalie watched the household collapse into madness. She was now nine years old. June was ill and Elizabeth deathly ill. Mary Ann was dead and Mother deranged, defiant, suicidal. This was not the quiet defeat that accompanied Frederick’s death. This grief was a war against the world.
Aunty Rogers came every day to help Ann and Hagar with the nursing and consoling, but Mother couldn’t be consoled. “Let me die,” Rosalie heard her saying, every day, every hour. “Just go away and let me die.” Rosalie prayed for Father to come. Mother wouldn’t die if Father told her not to.
But Father’s arrival improved nothing. Rosalie ran outside to meet him when he came galloping in on his black-and-white pony, still dressed in his tights and cape, thwacking Peacock’s sides with the flat of Hamlet’s sword. He dismounted, handed the reins to Joe Hall, the farm manager, pushed Rosalie aside without a look, and demanded to see Mary Ann, a week dead now and buried. “Show me,” he said. “Show me,” he shouted.
It was a bright, sunny, cloudless day. Mother appeared at the door, summoned from Elizabeth’s bed by the sound of his voice. She stepped onto the grass. She was still in her nightdress, her hair gone wild. He was caked with make-up and dust, as if his face was melting away. Horrid half-replicas of her mother and father. Rosalie was frightened of them both.
And yet, she was also hopeful. Father would fix things. It was why he’d come racing back. She took Henry’s hand, his fingers wet since they’d recently been in his mouth, and they followed Joe Hall, Father, and Mother along the path to the graveyard. Already Father was shouting that he could restore Mary Ann to life and this was a level of fixing things Rosalie hadn’t known was possible. Her heart lifted. “Bring me a shovel,” Father told Joe.
Joe didn’t move.
But the shovel was right there, leaning against the railing. Three steps and Father had it in his hands. “She wouldn’t have died if not for me,” Father said to Joe.
“God’s will,” Joe said. “Nobody’s fault.”
“God’s punishment,” said Father. “I’ve fallen from my beliefs, been careless in my habits. And God noticed.”
The ground was loose over Mary Ann’s coffin, easy to move. He dug and Mother sobbed, begging him to stop; he was breaking her broken heart, she said. And while all this was happening, Ann Hall suddenly arrived to take Rosalie and Henry away. “We don’t need to watch this,” Ann said, even though Rosalie desperately wanted to. Why couldn’t she be there at the moment Mary Ann opened her eyes?
She sat with Henry on the grass in front of the cabin, leaning against Ann’s legs, until Father came stumbling up the path with Mary Ann’s coffin in his arms. Mother floated behind him in her cloud of insanity.
Ann told Rosalie and little Henry to go upstairs. They ascended slowly until Ann was no longer watching and then they sat together on one of the upper steps. It was smooth and cold and sloped a little in the middle where people put their feet. “It’s all right,” Rosalie told Henry. “Father is fixing it.”
They could hear Father talking to Mary Ann, but they couldn’t hear what he was saying. They couldn’t hear Mary Ann answering. And then there was a roar as Father’s grief consumed the heavens and Rosalie knew Father had failed. She knew then that she’d always known he would, even though only a few minutes before, Father failing at anything had seemed impossible.
The dead child was the only child that mattered. Father refused to leave the coffin, even to go see June or Elizabeth. He refused to have Mary Ann reinterred. Late that night, when no one was watching, he slipped from the cabin with the coffin and the child, hiding her somewhere in the considerable acreage of the farm.
Joe was sent for and he searched through the dark for many fruitless hours until the dogs finally led him right. Neighbors came, their lanterns swinging over the lane in the black night—Mr. Rogers and Mr. Shook and Mr. Mason. They gave Father drink and then forced him into the bedroom, where he shouted and called them names. They kept him confined while Joe returned Mary Ann to the earth. Ann wasn’t there to shield Rosalie. Rosalie saw it all.
* * *