The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 604
The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 604
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 64: Colors of the Past 39
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Susan stood over the new crib where Kathy lay in a sleep as unaware of the strange knowledge she had brought as of her light, wakeful eyes. Susan had spent the day alone. She’d walked to town along the snow-scraped streets and had passed the time in picking out the things she would need for Kathy’s room and in thinking of the unexpected fate which had momentarily rescued her father from the ignorance of the past, only to imprison him there again like a cruel joke. Her hopes had been raised and then dashed by this revelation just as her old hopes for a child had been dashed by the truths that had arrived with her.
As she turned away from the crib, her eyes fell onto the picture at the side of the bed. From across the room she could see only that the two figures there had not moved. They had not switched places in the frame or turned their backs to the camera or disappeared altogether, but she could not see the expressions on those two faces except through an imagination that could make them into anything at all. The man, her father, seemed to be laughing at her and her mother to be crying or perhaps it was the man who had begun to weep over the daughter he had lost. Perhaps he had died because he could not have faced this moment and perhaps her mother had chosen to die along with him, knowing that she would never be able to keep what she knew to herself. Perhaps there were other secrets that had died along with them and that no child could ever suggest.
The snow lay against the window where the cold north wind had left it. Susan looked out through the hard crystals into a black, overcast night. The wind moaned low and she thought that she could see the treetops waving violently, dark silhouettes against an even darker sky. No lights were visible.
A knock at the door turned her around. Katie came in with a tray.
“Here’s your tea, Miss,” Katie said. “Can I get you anything else?”
“No, Katie, thank you. I’m just going to drink this and then go straight to bed.”
Katie set the tray down and began to turn back the sheets. Susan sat down in a chair by the crib and felt too tired to stand up again. Her feet ached and her arms felt as though they could not raise the cup to her lips. She could feel her eyelids falling shut.
“My but don’t you look just like your mama.”
The voice seemed to originate within Susan’s head and yet she knew that it belonged to someone else. She was intimately familiar with it but there was no face to go along with it. She hoped that it would speak to her again.
Susan opened her eyes. Her hand lay on the tray and her fingers touched the warm cup. Katie was standing at the crib.
“What did you say, Katie?” she said and struggled to awaken herself. “I must have dozed off for a minute.”
“I was just thinkin’ what a beautiful child she is, Miss. I was just thinkin’ back to when you was a little girl.”
The gentle expression on Katie’s face as she looked at the baby was more familiar to Susan than the two faces in the photograph. “Why did you never have any children of your own, Katie?” Susan asked and wondered that she had never asked before. “You would be a wonderful mother, much better than I’ll ever be. It doesn’t seem right.”
“Oh, now don’t go saying such things, Miss Susan,” Katie replied without looking away from the baby. “I always knew that you was going to be a fine mother some day and don’t you say no more about it. I’ve knowed you had a good heart in you ever since you was as little as this.”
“Well, I haven’t gotten off to much of a start.”
“Well, everything take time. You just got to have patience, that’s all.” Katie looked across at Susan with a mischievous grin that Susan had never seen before. “And besides,” she said, “any woman had the kind of surprise you had deserve a little time to get used to it.” She chucked, almost to herself, and looked back down at the baby.
Susan smiled. For the first time since the baby was born, she felt like laughing.
“There was a woman lived across the hall from us when I was a little girl,” Katie said. “She was from Tennessee and looked more or less the way them people looked, you know, kind of a high yella they used to call her. She married a brownskin man and don’t you know all three of their children as white as you is almost. Nobody thought nothin’ of it. Could of been black, brown, yella or white and didn’t make no difference far as them folks was concerned.”
Katie leaned into the crib and kissed the baby.
“One of the girls did pass,” she said with a laugh as she stood up. “Married a white man and he never knowed nothin’ about it. Thought she was from England same as he was.”
Susan smiled and thought of her own reaction to Kathy. She could feel that Katie was right, that nothing should alter a mother’s love for her child, but she couldn’t say it. She could only wish that she herself had felt that way.
“I named her for you,” she said and hoped that Katie could hear more in her voice than she was able to say.
“You what?” Katie replied with a smile as big as her heart.
“I named her after you.”
“Now, why on earth would you go and do somethin’ like that?”
“We had decided to name the baby after either my mother or my father. That was George’s idea. But when I got home from the hospital, I realized that I already had a name, a girl’s name anyway.”
Katie pulled open a drawer and began to arrange the baby’s clothing.
“I had always called my baby Kathy. I used to imagine that I had a little girl and I always called her Kathy. I think it was because of you, Katie.”
Katie stood with her back to Susan and said nothing.
“So I’m going to call her Katherine Clara Heins because you have been like a mother to me, Katie. You’re the only real mother I’ve ever had. I guess we’re going to have another girl to carry on the Heins name.”
Susan stood up and went to Katie’s side. The fatigue was gone. When she kissed the older woman’s face, her cheek was moistened by Katie’s tears.
“Now I know I was right,” Susan whispered.
The baby shouted a syllable as if calling to them. Susan and Katie turned back to the crib.
“Just look at the color in this child’s face,” Katie said and wiped her eyes with her apron. “She going to blush red but cry brown and laugh everything in between. You going to have your hands full when it come time for the men to start chasing this one around. She won’t know which way to turn.”
“I hope you’ll be around to help us, Katie.”
“Don’t worry about me. I ain’t goin’ nowhere. I saw you grow up and I guess I’ll see her, too.”
The thought reminded Susan of the past, of the man who had captured her mother’s heart and the woman who would have become her child’s grandmother.
“But why didn’t you marry, Katie?” Susan asked and tried to imagine a different man standing beside her mother on the church steps. “You would have made some man a wonderful wife. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have. I can see that you must have had boy troubles of your own when you were a girl.” Susan felt a sense of exhilaration as she said this to Katie. She had never thought of Katie in this way before.
“Oh, I been too busy for that, Miss. I never had time to think about those kind of things. When you keep busy, you don’t have time to worry about nothin’.”
“Come on, Katie. What about when you were younger? I don’t believe you never thought about getting married and having a family of your own.”
“Well, maybe I did at one time or another but that would have been such a long time ago that I can’t hardly even remember it now. I’ve had more than most in my day and never wanted for nothin’, thanks to your uncle and your mother and grandmother. And you. I been lucky enough.”
“How old were you when you started to work for my grandmother?”
“Nineteen and that was in the year nineteen, too, just after the big war stopped. I’ll never forget that day.”
“The day you started to work for my grandmother?” Susan sat down again and sipped her tea.
Katie nodded as she spoke. “I had been to work in one of your granddaddy’s mills during the war. They used to call it men’s work but in them days they took anybody had two strong arms and legs. My aunt was already workin’ down there and she took me in one day and that was when I started to work. My mama was sick and we needed the money.”
“My grandparents lived in Chicago at that time, didn’t they?”
“No, Miss, they had done moved up here to the other house over on Hinman. They moved up here just after your mama was born and I come along a little bit later.”
“How did that happen?”
“Well, like I said, I had worked down there in the mill for two or three years when one day your grandmama come along just about the time I was goin’ home. I had just walked outside and it was a bright, cool day that day, when that big old car stopped up right beside me and there was your grandmama lookin’ out the window. At first I didn’t know what she was lookin’ at but after a while I knowed she was lookin’ at me.”
“What was she doin’?”
“Well, she asked me did I work there and I said, yes, ma’am, and then she asked me was my name Katie Gray, and I said, yes, ma’am again and started to thinkin’ that I must had done somethin’ mighty wrong for a lady like that to be talkin’ to me that way.”
“Did you know who she was?”
“No and I didn’t know how she knowed who I was. She asked me right then and there did I want to come work for her. She said she was lookin’ for someone to help her around the house and that her husband was so-and-so and that somebody at the mill had told her about me. She said she knowed she could trust me ‘cause I had worked there for some time and the people had told her about me ….”
