The Untold Read Free Page B

they had been in bed. She ran her hand over the great mound that was me and she pulled up her nightgown and squatted and pissed.
    She preferred squatting on the ground to the humiliation of carrying the bedpan past Fitz in the morning. When he was not there, it was her small act of defiance; over the years she had encircled the whole house with her piss, one piss at a time, and she wondered if he would ever pay enough attention to his surrounds to actually smell it. Imagine what he would do then.
    Squatting down in the fog was like squatting in a cloud and the cloud stretched around her. She realized it was more comfortable for her to squat than to stand and she rested there for a while, rocking on her haunches. She felt a drop of water on her face and she wondered if the fog was dissolving but then there were heavier drops on her arms and her legs and the far-off sound of a storm breaking.
    She pulled down her nightdress and reached the veranda just before the rain began to pour down. She looked for the moths on the ground. They were gone or she could not see them.
    Her thoughts turned to Fitz. They were not thoughts motivated by concern for him but more the mounting concern she had for herself and for me inside her. At this hour, every minute that he was not there was a minute he was growing drunker. And no matter how far gone he was, when he returned to the house he may yet have saved a parcel of fury for her especially.
    She went inside and rocked from foot to foot by the stove. The light from the fire did not reach the edges of the room and she thought that was a good thing. There was only more dust there and bad feeling. In front of her was the same scene she had looked at for four years or so and it did not please her. It had never pleased her. A roughhewn table with a bench seat on either side and two wooden chairs at each end, and the ominous opening to the cellar, into which Fitz had thrown her too many times to remember. There was nothing else in the room but another fireplace she had seen lit only half a dozen times and two raggedy armchairs.
    The armchairs were dead weights and they faced each other. One was narrower than the other and Fitz had designated this one to be hers. It had always looked like a trap to her: so low to the ground, so tall at the sides, and it tilted back in such a way that you could not get out of it easily. The fabric was brown and gold, a pattern of leaves twisting around flowers and flowers twisting around vines, and she could still recall the uneasy feeling of when she first sat in it.

    J ESSIE HAD just turned twenty-three when, in October 1917, she met Fitz. She was to be his apprentice, breaking in horses for the war and occasionally serving as his domestic. She knew nothing about housekeeping. Every woman vying to leave prison listed housekeeping in her file, regardless of whether she had ever kept a clean house or lived in one. But my mother insisted on listing
horsebreaker
instead of
domestic
because it was the work she knew how to do
.
Although it was a coveted skill—and one Fitz was lookingfor—she was discouraged from listing her other significant talent,
horse stealing
, as it was the thing that had landed her in jail in the first place.
    As a condition of her release she had to accept an offer of employment and Fitz’s offer, as it was outlined to her, seemed to be the best by far. It was the only offer that would not have seen her working for salt in some inner-city terrace, lace upon her head, cleaning up another family’s mess or running after another woman’s children. She thought she had escaped some terrible fate.
    On the day of her release, she waited for Fitz with a warden on the sunny side of the sandstone wall of the prison. She clutched her only bag of belongings. It contained a clean shirt, two pairs of socks, a pair of men’s trousers and a dozen soaps that made the canvas bag weigh much more than it otherwise would have. The soaps were