Feather Crowns Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of my father,

  Wilburn Arnett Mason

  (1916–1990)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I: Birth: February 26, 1900

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  II: Desire: 1890–1899

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  III: The Babies: Spring 1900

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  IV: Dark-Fire: Summer 1900

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  V: The Journey: Fall 1900

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  VI: Royalty: Fall 1937

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  VII: Birthday: 1963

  Chapter 1

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  Birth

  February 26, 1900

  1

  CHRISTIANNA WHEELER, BIG AS A WASHTUB AND CONFINED TO BED all winter with the heaviness of her unusual pregnancy, heard the midnight train whistling up from Memphis. James was out there somewhere. He would have to halt the horse and wait in the darkness for the hazy lights of the passenger cars to jerk past, before he could fly across the track and up the road toward town. He was riding his Uncle Wad’s saddle horse, Dark-Fire.

  The train roared closer, until it was just beyond the bare tobacco patch. Its deafening clatter slammed along the track like a deadly twister. Christie felt her belly clench. She counted to eight. The pain released. The noise of the train faded. Then the whistle sounded again as the train slowed down near town, a mile away The contractions were close together now. The creature inside her was arriving faster than she had expected. The first pain had been light, and it awakened her only slightly. She was so tired. She dreamed along, thinking it might be no more than the stir and rumble she had felt for months—or perhaps indigestion from the supper James’s Aunt Alma had brought her.

  “You have to eat,” Alma had told her. “That baby’ll starve, though by the looks of you I reckon he could last a right smart while. You’ve got fat to spare.”

  “I can’t eat butter beans,” Christie said. “They’re too big.”

  Alma hooted. “The beans is too big? You keep on with them crazy idies and we’ll have to carry you off to the asylum.”

  “Good,” said Christie, making a witch face.

  In late December, when the doctor advised Christie to stay in bed, they talked about moving her back up to Alma’s house, where the women could take care of her more easily, but Christie wouldn’t go. She had had enough of that place—too many people under one roof. She said she didn’t want her children to be in their way. And she didn’t want to be waited on like James’s Uncle Boone, who wheezed and didn’t work. He believed he had TB.

  She tried to turn, expecting the pain to come back, but her stomach felt calmer now. Dr. Foote probably wouldn’t want to come out this late, she thought, when the clock began to strike midnight.

  Alma burst through the back door a few moments later. She hurried through the kitchen into the front room where Christie lay.

  “Lands, here I am again.” Alma wore enormous shapeless shoes and a big bonnet with a tiny gray-leaf figure that resembled mold seen up close. A woman in a blue bonnet followed her into the room. “Hattie Hurt’s here,” Alma said. She grunted—her laugh. “It’s just like James to run off after the doctor when Hattie was right near. Why, Hattie can dress that baby.”

  “Babies like to meddle with our sleep right off,” said Hattie cheerily. “They don’t want to come in the middle of the morning like civilized company.” She dropped her leather satchel on a chair and hurled off her coat all in one motion. Then she unbuckled the satchel. “Where’s Mrs. Willy?” she asked. “She always beats me to a birthing.”

  “She went to Maple Grove to see her daughter and grandchillern and didn’t say when she’d be back,” Alma said.

  “Mrs. Willy told me to take calomel when the pains commenced, but I didn’t,” Christie said.

  “You’ll feel better when you get this baby out, Christie,” said Hattie soothingly.

  “It’s not a baby.”

  “She’s talking foolishness again,” said Alma.

  Christie tried to sit up. She was in her front room, or Sunday room. The bed, directly across from the fireplace, was sheltered from the front door by the closed-in stairway to her right. To her left was the kitchen. The door was swung back all the way against the kitchen wall so that the two rooms joined into one. Christie leaned over to the bedside table for a rag, and Alma ran over to help her. Alma was rarely this attentive. Christie didn’t want to depend on her, but she was helpless. She had been helpless for weeks, and the condition had made her angry and addled. The children seemed scared of her lately.

  “Alma, reach me a drop of water. My lips is parched.”

  “You done flooded the bed,” Alma mumbled. She brought Christie a cup of water and a wet rag, then turned to the kitchen stove to tend the fire. “This water’s going to take awhile to boil,” Alma said.

  “We’ve got time,” said Hattie, busy with her jars and tools. Her apron was freshly starched. It gleamed white as new teeth.

  Christie’s belly was tight. It needed to loosen up. She tried to knead it, to make it pliable. She thought it might explode. She ran her hands around the expanse—the globe of the world, James had joked. She hadn’t needed a doctor for her other babies. It seemed that each time she had a baby her belly stretched and could accommodate a larger one. The second boy had been a pound heavier than the first, and then Nannie was so big she caused a sore that didn’t heal for weeks. But what Christie had in her now was more than twice as large as any of the others. She had a thing inside her that couldn’t be a baby—it was too wild and violent.

  Hattie Hurt had visited several times during the winter, even though they hadn’t been able to give her anything more than a ham and some green beans Christie had put up in jars. Dr. Foote was sure to charge more money than they could pay, but James said he’d sell a hog.

  “Let me take a look at what’s going on down there,” said Hattie. “Can you get them drawers off?”

  Christie’s stomach was quiet now. She loosened her clothes and pushed down her step-i
ns, one of three enormous pairs she had sewed this winter. James had joked about those too, but she thought he was trying to hide his concern.

  Hattie Hurt had strong hands and a gentle, reassuring voice. Her voice reminded Christie of her grade-school teacher, Mrs. Wilkins. Christie still remembered the teacher leading a recitation of short a’s: march, parch, starch, harsh, marsh, charm, snarl, spark. She remembered how Mrs. Wilkins moved her jaws in a chewing motion to stress the sound.

  Hattie poked around, feeling Christie’s abdomen. She examined the place between Christie’s legs. “You’re pooching out some,” she said. “Now just lay back and wait real easy. We don’t want to force it too soon.”

  While Alma worked at the stove, the children still slept. Christie could see Clint and Jewell in the loft, above the kitchen, on a feather bed. She heard them stirring. Nannie was sleeping on a pallet in the corner between the fireplace and the kitchen wall. This winter, because of her pregnancy, Christie and James had shut off their north bedroom and slept close to the brick fireplace in the front room. Ordinarily, the children weren’t supposed to enter the front room except on Sundays, but this winter they had all moved in. The front room contained Christie’s best furniture, the almost-new cabbage-rose carpet, and her good Utopian dishes in an oak china-safe. James had made their furniture when they started out together in Dundee. When they moved to Hopewell, they stored it in Christie’s parents’ stable in Dundee until their own house was ready. When the furniture finally arrived, it had some mouse stains, but Christie had never seen anything so lovely. She sanded it down and oiled it. Now her weight had broken two of the slats in the bed, and the corn-shuck mattress beneath the feather bed sagged through the hole in the slats. It almost reached the floor, until James put a hassock under the bed for support.

  “Is it time for breakfast?” Nannie asked. She was standing beside the bed, twisting the hem of her muslin nightdress across her face.

  Christie pulled the dress away and patted her child. “No, hon. Go back to sleep.”

  “I want to get in with you. Where’s Papper?”

  “He’s outside.” She started to make room for Nannie in the bed, but her belly contracted then and she cried out involuntarily.

  “You hurt me,” said Nannie. “You hurt my fingers.”

  Christie released her. Alma came over from the stove and steered her back across the soft carpet to her pallet. “Go look for your dreams, child,” she said. “They’ll get away from you.” Turning back to the kitchen, she said to Christie, “I told Mandy to get on down here and carry the chillern up yonder to the house, but where is she?” Alma cupped her ear to listen. “The moon’s shining big as a Sunday communion plate, so I don’t know what she’d be scared of.”

  “Hoboes from the train,” said Christie. “And devils behind bushes.”

  “She ain’t got the sense God give a tomcat.”

  Amanda was Alma’s sister-in-law, married to Alma’s brother, Wad Wheeler. Alma bossed everybody in the household, but she bossed Amanda the most. She believed Amanda thought herself too good for ordinary work.

  “I wonder if Mrs. Willy’s back yet,” said Christie.

  “Oh, I don’t think she knows a woman’s behind from a jackass, to tell you the truth,” Alma said, scowling till Christie imagined Alma’s loose-jawed face drooping all the way down to her apron.

  Christie couldn’t help laughing, although it jiggled her stomach uncomfortably. During the winter, she had grown so fat she had to enter the narrow door of the springhouse sideways. Her ankles swelled and her feet ached. She made clumsy padded house-shoes out of double thicknesses of burlap, folded and stitched on top and gathered around and tied with twine at the ankles. She shuffled through the house, skirting the ashy hearth. For several weeks, she thought she must have miscalculated her time. She kept thinking the baby was due any moment. But the storm inside her kept up, at an ever more frantic pace. And now her time had come, the full time since the heat of last June when she and James had lain in the steamy night without cover, their bodies slippery as foaming horses, while the children slept out on the porch. She recalled that the midnight train had gone by then, too, and that she had imagined they were on the train, riding the locomotive, charging wildly into the night.

  Christie screamed and grabbed Hattie’s arm. A sharp pain charged through her like the train. Hattie held Christie’s hand throughout the agony, while the thing inside tore loose a little more.

  Alma said, “The water’s about to boil and Mandy ain’t here. I’ve a good mind to go up there and give her what-for.”

  The hurting passed. Christie sank into her feather bolster and pulled the cover up to her neck. Hattie wiped Christie’s face.

  “Bring me that likeness of my mama, please, Hattie,” said Christie.

  Hattie handed her the silver-framed photograph from the mantel. In the small portrait, Mama had a large smile, as though she had been caught by surprise.

  “She looks right young,” said Hattie.

  “Yes, but she’d look old if I was to see her again. It’s been two years since I was home.” Christie touched the bleached-out image, wishing it would come to life under her fingertip. “I never oughter left Dundee,” she said.

  “You need your mama,” said Hattie soothingly. “A woman always needs her mama at a time like this. But we’ll do the best we can, Christie.”

  On the very day Christie and James married, her Aunt Sophie told her, “It’s nine months from the marriage bed to the deathbed.” At the time, Christie had dismissed the words as the careless remark of an old maid—Aunt Sophie had been to a female seminary and was thoughtlessly outspoken—but lately Christie had dwelt on the thought. She hadn’t mentioned it to James, not wanting to worry him. But she was afraid she would die. No woman could pass a child this big. The commotion inside her felt like a churn dasher, churning up crickets and grasshoppers. Christie had thought she might be carrying twins, but the doctor hadn’t encouraged that idea. Christie never felt sorry for herself, but this pregnancy had been different—hard and spiteful, as if something foreign had entered her body and set up a business of a violent and noisy nature. Almost from the beginning, it seemed she could feel the thing growing oddly inside her. At first, the sensation was only a twinge, like a June bug caught on a screen door. Then it grew into a wiggly worm, then a fluttering bird. Sometimes it was just kittens, then it would be like snakes. It kept changing, until the commotion inside her was almost constant, and terrifying. One day a clerk at the grocery where they traded showed her some jumping beans from Mexico. The beans were somehow electrified, jerking as though taken by fits. She had something like that in her. She imagined there were devils in her, warring over her soul. And even at calm, peaceful moments, she knew something was not right. The baby drained her strength, and now she could barely eat. Even though her breasts had grown huge and firm, she was afraid her milk wouldn’t make.

  “I know you want your mama,” said Hattie. “Believe me, I know how it is.”

  Hattie worked busily, clipping Christie’s hairs and washing her with a clear, sweet-smelling liquid. She laid out the contents of her bag on the small bedside table—shiny scissors, a slender knife, cotton wool, tubing, twine, soap, a device for expelling milk, bandages, small cotton cloths, blue bottles of liniment and alcohol and calomel, a variety of ointments in tiny round tins. As she worked, Hattie repeated a story Christie had heard before, how her husband had had his teeth pulled one day and the next day was kicked in the face by a mule. He said he regretted having paid the dentist to do what the mule would have done for free.

  Steps sounded on the back porch, and Alma’s brother Wad entered the kitchen. He never knocked on a door. Behind him was his wife, Amanda, Christie’s only real friend on the place. Amanda was pretty, with soft gray eyes and a warm smile. Even though it was the middle of the night, she had put on a clean dress and had pinned her hair up under her fascinator just as though she were going someplace important.

 
“Well, fine time you picked,” yelled Wad across the kitchen to Christie.

  “Don’t let Wad in here,” Alma said to Amanda. “And shut that door. You’re letting the cold night air in.”

  Amanda pushed her husband out and closed the door. Christie could hear him out on the back porch stomping his boots in the cold. He was many years older than Amanda—his second wife.

  Amanda crossed the kitchen to Christie’s bedside. She said, “Wad sent Joseph to get Mrs. Willy. That’s how come we didn’t get here so quick.”

  Joseph, one of Wad’s grown sons by his first marriage, lived down the road a short piece.

  “I thought Mrs. Willy was gone to Maple Grove,” Alma said.

  “Joseph said he saw her driving her buggy uptown yesterday evening peddling eggs,” said Amanda, pausing over Nannie, who had gone back to sleep on her pallet. “I’ll gather up the younguns and take ’em up to our house to get them out of the way. Come on, precious.”

  Clint and Jewell were awake now, their puzzled faces peering down from the loft. Clint, the older boy, had been suspicious for some time about his mother’s condition, but Christie didn’t want James to tell him where babies came from yet. Clint was still too young, and he should see it in cows and horses first.

  “Where are we going?” said Jewell, scrambling sleepily down the stairway.

  Christie heard Amanda cooing to the children, saying that their papa had gone to get a surprise for them. “It’s like Christmas and we have to go away and close our eyes for the rest of the night so in the morning we can see the surprise—if we’re real good.” Amanda always took time to talk to the children. She turned even everyday events into stories. She had a way with all the children on the place, maybe because she seemed like such a child herself, although she was three years older than Christie and had two daughters.

  Amanda was hurriedly wrapping the children in their coats.

  “Get your caps, boys,” she said. “Tie your shoes, Clint.”

  “It’s a baby,” said Clint.

  “Papper’s gone to get a baby,” said Jewell. He reached out and pulled Nannie’s nightdress, and she jerked it away from him. “You’re a baby,” he said. “Nannie’s a baby.”