Butterfly's Child by Angela Davis-Gardner Read Free Book Online Page B

Mrs. Pinkerton and Kate carried sacks of beets up from the cellar and mounded them on the kitchen table. Kate brought bucketfuls of water from the well, poured it into two dishpans, and she and Mrs. Pinkerton stood at the sink scrubbing the beets. Kate’s back ached. She wanted coffee and another biscuit.
    Mrs. Pinkerton inspected a beet Kate had finished and gave it a further scrubbing, her heavy underarms jiggling. “We can’t have grit,” she said.
    â€œNo indeed,” Kate said under her breath. “No grit of that variety.” She put the coffeepot back on the stove to heat and pressed her thumbs into her lower back.
    â€œYou may sterilize the jars now,” Mrs. Pinkerton said.
    â€œThank you,” Kate said. Her irony was lost on the old woman, still washing the beets.
    Kate set the jars into the large copper bath and went outside for water. When she returned, Benji came into the kitchen. Mrs. Pinkerton gave him a cat’s head biscuit and he slipped out again.
    â€œSay thank you,” Kate called.
    The door slammed behind him.
    â€œI’m working on his manners.” Kate began pouring water into the bath. “It’s very discouraging.”
    â€œHe’s just like Frank as a child,” Mrs. Pinkerton said.
    Kate stared at her. Water splashed onto the stove top, making it hiss. “Boys will be boys,” she managed to say. “All over the world.”
    â€œI suppose so,” Mrs. Pinkerton said. “The boy problem must be widespread.” She looked into the copper tub. “Those jars have to be fully covered.”
    Kate returned to the well, hauling up the bucket with such violence that the rope burned her hand. She gazed down into the water—nothing but darkness—and dropped in a clod of dirt.
    After the first batch of beets were scrubbed, boiled, and peeled, the women sat at the kitchen table, layers of newspaper over the oilcloth, pans of beets before them. Mrs. Pinkerton began to quarter a beet and indicated with her eyes that Kate should do the same.
    Kate slid her knife through a beet—red, slick, and glossy.
    Mrs. Pinkerton began to complain about her lumbago, acting up something fierce today. “Could you manage from this point?” she asked.
    â€œOh, certainly—please do have a rest.” After Mrs. Pinkerton left, Kate pushed the windows open further—a slight breeze, a promise of rain—and sat back down to her task. It was a relief to have the old woman out of the room. Her comment about Benji hadn’t meant anything, of course; she would never suspect her precious son of such a thing.
    Kate sliced and chopped until her hands were stained purple. A beet slid out from the knife, went skidding across the floor.
    She looked at the heap of unwashed beets. Too many for the jars, surely. She piled a good measure of them in a pan and ran to the compost pile at the far end of the garden, where she buried them beneath a layer of leaves and weeds. Elmer’s beets. She felt giddy, walking back to the house.
    After the jars were filled with the remaining beets, lidded, and rattling in the copper bath, she pulled the rocking chair to the window and began to reread Jane Austen’s
Persuasion
. This was the world into which she should have been born: the women poor but genteel, irresistibly witty, eventually marrying wealth. She rested the book in her lap. If she attended church in Stockton, she could become acquainted with Aimee Moore, wife of a prominent lawyer in town. Mrs. Moore was said to be quite intelligent, a graduate of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary; doubtless she’d have read Jane Austen.
    She heard Mrs. Pinkerton moving about upstairs and looked at the clock. Almost time for the midday meal; she’d be down soon. Using a heavy cloth, Kate lifted the jars from their bath, poured a bucket of water over them, then set them, as Mrs. Pinkerton had instructed, on the diningroom table to cool. The