Leta arrived back to the house before her husband Curtis’s
oldest daughter finished the ironing. Together they hurriedly made the beds.
Leta was feeling anxious that she would still be there before Curtis returned
to the house for supper. Her next order of business was to send the girl and
the two little ones to the garden to carrots, turnips, peas and strawberries
for supper. This would leave Leta alone in the house when her daughter Vivian
arrived to retrieve her.
The little ones loved to play in the garden, so this task was
easily accepted. Once the children were out of sight, she retrieved her three
suitcases from the bedroom and set them on the front porch. Then she waited,
craving a Scotch to calm her nerves. But she would have a drink soon enough, if
and only if Vivian rescued her in time.
Providence sided with her this time, and Vivian arrived
shortly thereafter, pulling the car into the dirt driveway.
“Mother?” she said questioningly. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you once we get out of here,” Leta said. “But
first, help me put these bags in the car and let’s go.”
Vivian recognized Leta’s urgency and desperation, and quickly
assisted her mother. Five minutes later they were on the road.
Once free of the burden she had mistakenly taken upon herself,
Leta could barely keep from bursting into tears. As Vivian drove, she stared
out the window and the greening fields of the countryside, reviewing the
several months of foolishness that she had just experienced—from the day she
met Curtis, who only partially presented himself, to accepting his marriage
proposal, to marrying him and moving to his disaster of a chicken farm, to
learning that he had 12 children at home, and finally realizing he was a brute of
a husband who desired a servant rather than a wife. He had misled and lied to
her. He attacked everything about her—elegance, womanliness, good humor, even
her attractiveness—to remake her into someone she was not, an overworked,
servile farmer’s wife.
This was not what she wanted and definitely not what he
promised. The silent tears rolled down her cheeks, and she dabbed at them with
her handkerchief.
But she had already cried enough. She had awakened before their
usual early hour after a brief and fitful night, then sat in the filthy living
room with its broken furniture and fireplace smell for nearly two hours and
cried. Those were tears of frustration and desperation. But then she acted, and
now she felt relief.
Forty minutes later, they safely arrived at Vivian’s house, just
as her grandson Don arrived home from school. Leta had never been so happy to
see anyone in her life and held the boy so tightly that he had to pull himself
away. While she watched, Vivian sent him to his bedroom to change his clothes
and prepared a light snack.
Leta simply watched her daughter busy herself in the kitchen.
It wasn’t a large kitchen, but a very comfortable one, with two outside walls.
Two of the walls held the cupboards and a large sink under a window. On the
other inside wall, there was room for an electric stove and refrigerator. A
small dining table pressed against the other outside wall and gave just enough
room to maneuver on three sides of it. A large overhead electric light gave the
room a warm glow in the evenings and mornings, but in the middle of the
afternoon, sunlight streamed into the sparkling windows. Leta had spent many
mornings, afternoons and evenings in this kitchen, and as Vivian worked, she
felt safe and secure, for the first time in over a week.
Then evening came, Vivian picked up her husband Ed, they had
supper together, and then the two women were left alone with their coffee.
Vivian sat across the table from her mother and asked, “How
did this happen?”
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