Chapter Five Frankie
FIVE FRANKIE
Out walking again?” Aunt Margaret asked when I came into the kitchen and took my apron from the hook by the stove. “Even in this weather?”
I nodded, avoiding her gaze. “It clears my head.” I went to the sink, washed my hands, scrubbing under my short nails. I could feel my aunt’s eyes boring into my back. I knew she didn’t quite believe me, but I was not sure what she suspected. What the bones might have told her.
“Walking alone?” Aunt Margaret asked as I turned finally to face her. “Or did someone join you?”
My body stiffened but I forced a smile. “Alone,” I said, for it wasn’t a lie. I had walked to the Ayers place and back alone.
She studied me and smiled in a knowing way, and I felt my face and ears grow hot.
“You know,” she pushed, “if you were… walking… with someone and wanted to tell me, it would remain between us. Our secret.” I kept my eyes trained ahead, focused on retying my apron, though suddenly my hands were clumsy and fumbled the strings.
I knew my aunt had secrets of her own. There were the bones she kept hidden in the kitchen and read each morning.
There was the charm full of herbs she wore tucked under her dress—made for her by Charlotte, whom Margaret had been seeing secretly for over a year now.
And then there was my aunt’s midnight roaming.
I wasn’t the only one who suffered from insomnia in our house.
Aunt Margaret said walking in the moonlight relaxed her, stopped her mind from spinning.
But, like the bones and the charms, she knew her husband would not approve.
“Don’t tell your uncle,” Aunt Margaret said on the nights I’d gone out to smoke on the porch and caught her sneaking into or out of the house. I’d promised.
“I saw a coyote over by Pigeon Pond,” I told her now, wanting to change the subject. “Beautiful creature, but unusual to see one out in the middle of the day like that, don’t you think?”
Aunt Margaret nodded. “An omen.” She twisted the cameo ring on the middle finger of her right hand, focused on some unknown thing. Aunt Margaret fidgeted with it when she was nervous or deep in thought.
“Or perhaps it was just hungry and on its way to the Duttons’ coop to steal an egg or a slow hen.” I was not in the mood to talk of omens. Today I needed the comfort of logic and reason.
“Perhaps,” Aunt Margaret said, looking out the window.
“Well, you haven’t missed much here,” she sighed, rubbing her belly.
She was five months pregnant. Margaret had previously suffered three miscarriages, yet she believed this baby was here to stay—the bones told her so.
She had also confessed to me that it was the midwife’s herbal remedies and charms that had strengthened her womb, and that this child she carried inside her was there thanks to the old woman.
Margaret was sure it was a girl, and said that when she was born, she would insist on naming her Charlotte in tribute.
“I’ve got the stew for supper on and am just making a pie now,” Aunt Margaret said. “Your uncle’s been locked away in his study. He didn’t want his dinner or even tea and cake. He’s crouched over his medical books. He’s got a dozen of them pulled from the shelves.”
My stomach turned at the memory of this morning
“He says the horses at the St. James place had rabies,” Margaret said. “But—” She paused for a long moment.
“But what?” I asked as I moved next to her, sprinkling flour on the counter. Margaret handed me a ball of dough.
“Do you think it was rabies?” she asked as I began to roll out the crust. I usually loved this: knowing that Margaret valued my opinion, asking what I thought of things and listening intently when I answered. But today was different—today my aunt’s questioning gaze made me uneasy.
I thought of the horses lying in ruined heaps.
Then I thought of Pearl, begging to run away.
We could leave tonight.
I bit my lip, pressed hard on the rolling pin.
“Not so thin,” Aunt Margaret said mildly.
I nodded, eased up on the crust.
I had been taught to cook and was put to work in the kitchen often, as was expected of me growing up.
I have picked up the basics, but I find the work dull and my mind wanders.
However, I know that when the baby comes, it will be up to me to cook each meal until Margaret is on her feet again, so I’m keen to improve my skills and learn all of her recipes.
It is a talent of mine, I think, to be able to walk between two worlds.
I can easily enter the world of men, smoking and drinking at the pub, listening as they share news and swap tales; I can just as easily slip into a kitchen, don an apron, and peel potatoes, make pie.
I have learned to blend into these environs so well that it is as if I’m hardly there at all.
I am a ghost—listening, sipping at brandy, chopping carrots.
“If it is rabies, it’s presenting very differently than what I’ve seen before,” I said at last, knowing better than to challenge my uncle’s diagnosis. He was the doctor.
I have been living with my aunt and uncle since they moved to town five years ago.
I am an only child. My father abandoned my mother and me when I was a baby, and I have no memory of him.
My mother died when I was four. I was shuffled from house to house after that, relatives and kind townsfolk taking me in, no one sure quite what to do with me—this little girl who wanted to play with only boys, who hated school because she was bored, but who read everything she could get her hands on.
They tried. One family after another did their best to shape me into a proper girl.
They gave me dolls, sat me down with baskets of sewing, taught me to cook.
But I was always happiest when my chores were complete and I could run wild in the woods with whatever pack of boys happened to be around.
And as I grew and began to have inklings of my romantic feelings for other girls, I knew well enough that it was best to never say them out loud, even when the boys I roamed with began to speak of which girls they fancied and what they dreamed of doing with them.
I never felt ashamed of my feelings, only afraid of what might happen should they be found out.
And I must confess, there was a certain thrill, a certain power in walking through the world with such a secret locked away at the very center of my being.
When Thomas and Margaret came to town, it seemed all of Boone’s Ferry breathed a sigh of relief—here was a childless couple, relatives, who had the means of raising this girl no one seemed to want.
Most recently, I had been living with Margaret’s brother, David, his wife, Mercy, and their three boys.
The house was small and crowded and I had slept on a cot in the kitchen.
Their oldest boy, Chauncey, called me an it, neither a he nor a she, whenever there were no parents or teachers to stop him; he teased me mercilessly.
Worse still, he was cruel to creatures. I had seen him pull the wings off butterflies.
He once caught a baby duckling and put it in a canning jar with the lid on, watching as it suffocated.
He kept the duckling in the jar hidden in his room to torment me—showed me its desiccated corpse.
Margaret is my mother’s first cousin. They’d spent their early childhood together in Boone’s Ferry, but Margaret had been sent to live with another aunt in Boston after her mother died young. Our family, I’ve often thought, has had more than its share of dead mothers.
It was in Boston that Aunt Margaret met and married Thomas, a successful young doctor working at Boston City Hospital.
But Margaret was homesick, and spun wonderful tales of the bucolic life in Boone’s Ferry, where she’d assured Thomas that they desperately needed a doctor—a real doctor, not just a midwife with her folk remedies.
It wasn’t long before they left Boston behind.
I am lucky to be not only welcome in their home, but genuinely loved and nurtured.
Yes, my aunt still calls me Frances now and then, and will occasionally suggest that I might try to grow my hair out, or wear some slightly more feminine attire, but she is gentle about it, never cruel.
My uncle doesn’t treat me like a girl or a lady, but like a son.
Uncle Thomas passes down all his clothing to me, even things that are nearly new that he claims don’t fit him right and would look better on me, shares all his knowledge and the books from his massive library, drinks brandy and smokes a pipe with me each evening as we rehash the day.
There has never been any talk, no suggestion even, of me marrying and moving out as all the other girls my age are expected to do.
My uncle has told me, on several occasions, that he relies on me, and that I am more than welcome to stay with them as long as I like.
“One day, if you continue to work with me, study with me, I believe you’ll be a finer physician than I am.
You won’t have the title, of course, but what’s a piece of paper compared with knowledge and ability? ”
I begin each day by tidying the examination room, then I write out the scheduled rounds in Thomas’s diary, and gather the tools and medicines we might need into the worn leather medical bag.
If I wake too early, which I often do—I, like Margaret, am a fitful sleeper—I pass the time reading medical texts, studying.
Then at seven, I make my way into the kitchen to help Aunt Margaret with breakfast. I believe in earning my keep.
“I’ll tell you, Frances,” Margaret said now, lowering her voice, twisting the cameo ring again.
“Your uncle seems… uneasy. He wouldn’t say much about what he’d seen at the St. James farm this morning—only that the horses were sick and very quickly died.
For each word he spoke, I could see there were a thousand he was holding back.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite like this.
Not even last fall when the flu was at its worst. I remember how exhausted, how haunted you both looked then.
Even now, when you talk about it, you still get that look in your eyes. ”
The influenza outbreak hung like a terrible specter over the town. We were only just now starting to believe we were truly over it. Every time a person sneezed or came down with a fever, there was that fear that it might be starting all over again. But our last case had been at the end of December.
“Seeing Thomas today… it just felt different. He looked deeply troubled, but also…” My aunt trailed off.
“Frightened,” I finished.
Aunt Margaret didn’t answer, just nodded, placed her pie crust into the pan, then ran her flour-covered fingers over her belly once more and kept them there, as if to protect the child inside.