Floyd led the way back inside the house, that cool sanctuary where the curtains never parted and sunlight never touched a crack on the wooden floor. Like spurs our shoes hit the floorboards with a firmness that urged us closer and closer to the Missus’s upstairs quarters. She spun around as we entered, her skin the palest I’d ever seen on a person, its thinness like that of paper that was translucent and easily torn.
“Floyd!” she gasped. “You know not to be so loud inside the house.”
“Yes, Miss,” he said with his head low. “This here’s ma sista.”
“Even so,” she said. “There’s no need for all that noise. Gonna wake the dead, I swear.”
She stared at Floyd until she was certain he understood her severity. Then, when his head sank the lowest it could go and his eyes were infantile and teary in nature, did she finally turn to me.
“Welcome,” she now said kindly, her youthfulness evident in her mild stare.
She had to be at least a generation younger than Mr. Kern, who appeared to be in his late sixties, his skin the thickness of rubber and the color of used cooking oil. She possessed features softer than any Mr. Kern could ever imagine, her forehead plated milk and her hair golden wheat out over the plains. She was pretty, even if slightly anomalous, her one eye offset from the other, as it could never quite follow in the right direction until she had blinked several times, and then it caught up, only to trail once more.
“This here’s Miss Lula,” Floyd said to me.
“It’s my pleasure, Miss,” I replied.
“I look forward to you carrying your share,” she said distantly.
Her eyes were half closed and her gaze stuck on some item along the dust ruffle of her bed.
“Silva knows the house and will show you the rest.”
And with this unusual greeting, the young woman turned away from the door and back toward the dim space where she knitted silently, making the loops without ever looking at the work of her hands.
Floyd spent that evening acquainting me with the lay of the house and its rules, as he saw them.
“There’s talk of them out there,” he said, his cupped hands juggling pellets he spread for the chickens. “They’s sayin’ all types uh nonsense. I believe them as much as the next. But I don’t dare bring that foolsness in here. Mista Kern be good an’ you smile an’ say thank you. Here makes a good home. See it so.”
With this final order, he dropped the remaining pellets and slop for the hogs. He jostled their pens and was quiet again, if only for a few seconds, before returning to his duties and leaving me to trail behind and await his next lecture.
CHAPTER 2
The abandoned skins of the cicadas were left on the trees after that summer, and the children used them to chase each other. The countryside was filled with their screams, yet the Kern Manor sat quietly in its own blockade. Along the farthest reaches, the children’s laughter invaded, though never reaching the front porch. There hadn’t been milk-laden breath in this home for years, the little Miss of the house passing one winter, well before I arrived, as told to me by Floyd in one of his many letters.
With no children to rear and Silva to care for the family indoors, Floyd assigned me duties in the fields with him, preparing for the cotton harvest, except for at night when Silva returned to her family and I would care for the house and the Mister and Missus during her absence.
“You’re gonna need plenty of patience to deals with her,” Silva told me on that first night, awaiting any bit of dissension I might have so that she might run back and inform the Missus, I was sure.
When I merely nodded, her face turned to stone.
“Just know,” she said, “things that typically keep well in other homes don’t keep well here.”
“I keep all my things in the icebox,” I replied fiercely. “Even the flour.”
After this, she knew me and I knew her, and our paths rarely crossed, and if they did, it was pleasant. Still, when the Missus fell ill that September of 1966, Silva undoubtedly blamed me. For it was during that hot stretch of summer that Miss Lula fell victim to the strangest sickness I’d ever seen on a person, as in an instant she had gone from her normal position beside the curtained window with her needlework in her lap to one of pure anguish, doubled over on the floor. It had been only minutes since I’d checked on her when her cries rang out, as delicate as the mouse whose squeaks we’d hear echo throughout the halls at night. I did swear she was one of those creatures as I found her shivering helplessly like a rodent trapped inside the corner, and me with the broom in my hand.
“Miss!” I cried out. “What’s the matter?”
With one hand I gathered her elbow and with the other grabbed the thinness of her waist, lifting her from the floor onto her feet. She sagged in my arms, sinking like stones in the river as she took a seat in the nearby chair.
“Bernice!” she called while lurched forward and panting.
“Yes, Miss, I’m here,” I assured her.
She was whiter than at any other time since my arrival, although in her hands burned a color that swore she had made contact with the bright flesh of a beet. Floyd barged in with a look of terror, wildly throwing his arms in front of the Missus. She could barely gather the strength to shoo him away as she slumped farther in her chair like some hand puppet now done for the day.
“Hold ’er up,” Floyd said with his large palm against her shoulder. “Expedishously!”
Floyd had learned a new word recently: expeditiously, and he had taken to using it at any chance he got. Notwithstanding, we both lifted the Missus until she was seated upright and had slowly returned to her normal breathing. Floyd excused himself to go wash up, as he was still dirty from his work and would surely be scolded if seen inside the house or tending to the Missus in this condition.
The doctor came quickly and guided Miss Lula from her quarters into the Mister’s bedroom, where he laid her down. With her nightgown removed and her feet elevated on the bed, he wrapped her sickly body in towels and bade her not to move or else she might reawaken the monster.
“Miss Lula done suffered a heatstroke,” he said in serious tones. “Makes you take relief in the fact it wasn’t her normal ailment, but could’ve been—believe me, it could. Just make sure she rests. Ain’t no need of chancing it for some silly wish to get out of bed and stir about. Not in this heat.”
So this was how I would come to know her, this helpless creature, this mindless thing, this porcelain doll that we coddled and babied and wished would just fall asleep already. No detail of the doctor’s delivery was lost as, when Mr. Kern later discovered his wife’s impairment upon his return home, he blamed the staff for having left the doors wide open while running in and out. Silva then blamed me, her words coming across as clearly as whiskey on a sinner’s breath as she repeated quite viciously, “Some things just don’t keep well inside this house!”