Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Feeling hurt and bewildered by what my mother had said, I lay in the trundle bed and listened to my brothers’ sonorant breathing and to the low, whispered voices of my mother and aunt in the next room. This being the first Friday of the month, Daddy was off at his lodge meeting, where he would be until nearly midnight, so Mama and Aunt Kitty had a long time to talk.

I thought of going out into the hallway and putting my head up to the door to hear what they were saying, but I was too afraid that I’d be found out. Still, I knew that what was being discussed must have to do with the reason that Kitty had come to us bereft of some of her customary cheerfulness and good nature. There was a seriousness to their voices even if I couldn’t discern the words.

The next day, a rainy Saturday, my brothers, Willie and Enos, played with their new model train set while I read The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel , a book Mama would never have allowed me to read had she been home that afternoon. (She contended that it was “beyond the comprehension of my young years.”) But Mama was out with Aunt Kitty, and Daddy, not being much of a supervisor in her absence, spent most of the time out in his workshop building a birdhouse. (Not that he would have raised objections to my reading the book anyway, since he probably thought that the Scarlet Pimpernel was some sort of bird and not the daring rescuer of threatened aristocrats during the French Revolution!)

I didn’t see my mother or my aunt when they returned very late that afternoon. While I had been in the kitchen making peanut butter sandwiches for my brothers and me (Daddy had totally forgotten that growing children required three meals a day), Mama took Kitty directly up to my room. When Mama came down much later, she told us that Kitty wasn’t feeling well and that we were to be very quiet, and that under no circumstances whatsoever were we to go upstairs and disturb her. This last warning was directed especially at me.

Aunt Kitty didn’t come down for supper, but Mama made her some broth and took it up. I didn’t understand how someone could take so terribly ill so quickly, for she had looked perfectly well on her arrival the day before.

Later that night, after my brothers had gone to sleep, I heard quarreling in my parents’ room. Determined to know what was going on — for my mother and father seldom exchanged unkind words with one another, even behind closed doors — I crept out to the hallway and put myself beside their door.

“I really wish you’d talked to me about this,” my father was saying.

“And if I’d talked to you, you would have stopped her. And it wasn’t your place to do so,” my mother replied.

“I don’t see how you could possibly have allowed Kitty to take such a gamble.”

“ I took that gamble. Twice . And both times I pulled through.”

“Both times you nearly died , Cora. The man is a dangerous menace. He should be thrown in jail.”

“And where does a girl like Kitty go, then?”

“She shouldn’t have gotten herself in that way in the first place.”

“The insensitivity of that remark silences me.”

I returned to my trundle bed but couldn’t sleep. I finally got up and went downstairs to see our cat, Mittens, who always welcomed my wee-hour visits with her in her favorite sleeping chair on the porch. As I was walking past my room, I could hear the sound of soft, muffled crying coming from behind the shut door. I wanted so badly to go in and comfort Aunt Kitty, but I remembered what my mother had said.

Downstairs, I petted Mittens and listened to her grateful purrs for perhaps fifteen minutes, and then I crept back upstairs. I stood outside the door to my bedroom. It was quiet now. I felt that I should open the door to make sure that Aunt Kitty was all right. I didn’t see how merely taking a look into the room could disturb my aunt, so I turned the knob and slowly pushed the door open. It gave only the slightest squeak from its dry hinges. Aunt Kitty was lying doubled up in the bed. She was awake.

Perhaps the light from the hall sconce, which now creased the darkness of the room, signaled my presence. She turned immediately and looked up at me, her face half obscured in shadow.

“Hello, Maggie Girl,” she said in a hushed, tired voice. “I’ve seen so little of you since I got here.”

“I’m sorry that you aren’t feeling well, Aunt Kitty.”

“Now don’t you worry. I’ll be back to my old self in no time at all.” Aunt Kitty tipped her head in the direction of the oscillating fan that had been set upon my vanity table. “It’s a hot summer night, yet I’m very cold,” she said.

“Do you want me to turn it off?”

“No, sweet angel, I want you to climb into bed, as you always do, and I want you to put your arm around me to warm me up.”

I couldn’t believe that my Aunt Kitty wanted me with her. I was overjoyed to be needed in such a way. I climbed into bed and pulled the covers tightly around us, placing myself next to her. She purred — not unlike my little cat, Mittens. “You are so good to me,” she said groggily, and in no time at all she was fast asleep. I stayed awake for a while longer attending to my job of keeping my favorite aunt warm and safe and helping her to heal from whatever terrible illness had suddenly befallen her.

When I woke in the morning, Aunt Kitty was still lying next to me, but her body was cold. And the bed felt very wet and my skin felt sticky. Perhaps it is perspiration, I thought, for it had been a very warm night for me. But there was a smell there that I couldn’t identify — an acrid, metallic smell.

I blinked. Harsh morning light invaded my room through half-opened curtains. I looked down in the brightness of this light to discover the true reason for the dampness all around me. The sheets were stained dark red. Dirty, scarlet red. I drew back. I said my aunt’s name, and receiving no response, I touched her, then shook her shoulder. She didn’t move.

I screamed.

I screamed as I had never screamed in all of my moments of childhood terror, most of those moments being silly and largely self-inflicted.

And I couldn’t stop shaking.

Mama rushed in and swept me up from the bed. As she held me tightly in her arms, she kept saying, “Oh my darling little girl, my poor, poor little girl!” Mama kept me from looking as the doctor came and formally pronounced Aunt Kitty dead. I was sent, along with my brothers, to a neighbor’s house while police officers interviewed my mother and father in our own home.

Someone had broken the law. Someone had done this to my aunt and it would be several years before either Mama or Daddy would impart the details to me, before my questions received answers. By that time I had already figured most of it out.

What I didn’t know yet was that there was a man in Harrodsburg who was married, who could not leave his wife, but neither could he stop seeing Kitty. And giving her things. One thing that he gave her she couldn’t keep. And such a thing — and I cannot easily bring myself to call that which was growing inside my aunt a thing —could not be allowed to be . Aunt Kitty would have lost her job if she had chosen to carry the baby to term. Once word of it got out, no one would have hired her to do that which she so loved to do: teach.

What I also didn’t know was that it was Mama who had talked Aunt Kitty into going to the man — the man who had spared Mama not once but twice from giving birth to a child that she didn’t want. He had not been so lucky with Aunt Kitty. The autopsy revealed that she had died from a rupture in her uterus.

My mother blamed society for putting herself and her sister between the hammer and the anvil. My father blamed my mother for sending Aunt Kitty to such a dangerous man — one who did what he did without medical training, with callous disregard for the health and well-being of the women who came to him, and only for the money.