PART 1

“Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine…”
I want my mother
“Oh what a foretaste of glory divine…”
my mother is in a box and soon she’ll be in the ground, I want my mother
“Heir of salvation, purchase of God…”
father looks cold and dead, like mother. I want my mother, I want to smell my mother
“Born of his spirit, washed in his blood”
my mother was washed in blood at the end, spots of blood on her pillowcase, blood on her sheets, blood in the handkerchief that she gripped so tightly and tried to conceal on the morning I last saw her alive, she even had blood on her teeth when I hugged her last, when she was no longer my mother but a skeletal beast imposter, like that winter litter of barn cats, born with their innards on the outside that father gathered up in a sack and drowned in a bucket
“This is my story…”
I hate this
“This is my song…”
please stop singing
“Praising my Saviour…”
I want my mother
“all the day long”
I want everyone in this church to be dead and my mother to be alive
“This is my story, this is my song…”
dead
“Praising my Saviour all the day long.”
I want my mother.

The congregation didn’t stop singing. They went on and on with open, gaping mouths and stoic, tearless, blank faces. Caring about and concentrating more on their own voices, striving to be the loudest and most devout in the small, suffocating, nauseous confines of the tidy Methodist church. Occasionally and only for appearances, one of the bland cow faces of one of the old women in the pews, would nod a forlorn, plaintive, pitying glance in Elsie’s direction and only once satisfied that their contrived, compassionate gaze had been witnessed by no less than three of their fellow parishioners, would they then resume their warbling yammer. Fortified with satisfied sanctimony, they would sing even louder. Elsie recognized many of the faces and at one time had even liked some of the people who had gathered here today, but now they were strangers and her hatred for them was increasing by the minute. They could not know; how could they know? And if they couldn’t know, then what were they doing here? Only Elsie knew what it was like to be without her mother. Whether their own mothers were long dead or not didn’t matter. Their dead mothers didn’t matter. The only dead mother that mattered was Elsie’s own. They could never feel the loss that Elsie was feeling, and their orchestrated, soothing mewing only made Elsie feel worse.

Occasionally her father’s grip would tighten on Elsie’s limp, upright and outstretched palm. This usually proceeded a heaving sob that had become so routine in its repetition that by the end of the service Elsie was counting the seconds between the squeeze of his hand and the ensuing convulsion. She found it to be a welcome distraction from the proceedings. Elsie knew that her father loved her mother because anyone who had ever met her mother loved her. Why should he be any different? Of course, he wasn’t deserving of her kind demeanor, pleasant bearing and forgiving soul, but few were. It was a standard near impossible to live up to. Not because her mother was so determinedly upright and righteous but because she was so naturally and disarmingly good in spirit. There was no one like her and because of that Elsie thought, as she sat on the cold hard walnut, maybe God had killed her out of jealousy. It was the first truly dark thought of a deluge of dark thoughts to follow. A bitterness was already taking root deep inside Elsie. A bitterness that would soon grow into a tangled, thorny vine of seething rage, resentment and hatred. A bitterness so fiercely fed and carelessly pruned that it would in years to come spread interweaved tendrils that could allow no sunlight to reach her heart and would choke out every emotion, even her grief.

The sky outside was cobalt and cloudless, and in it, a December air of conclusion. Elsie could see it clearly through the small framed windows that lined the whitewashed walls of the church, each window looking like one in a series of cheery paintings. It was so emphatically clear and blue that Elsie felt certain it was mocking her pain. It brought her no comfort and offered no portent of brighter days ahead, it only suggested to her that the natural world couldn’t care a fig for her loss. Finally, mercifully, the singing stopped, and the room began to shuffle and murmur. Everyone was standing now; coattails and bonnets and noses blowing in kerchiefs blotted the clear blue indifference, long enough for Elsie to acknowledge her father’s gentle tugging and come to her feet. It was time to carry her mother outside. “I want my mother,” said Elsie, out loud this time. With that, her father heaved and made a sound like the coffee pot boiling over and struggled to suppress an outright wail, with what was instead, an injured animal moan.

The churchyard was winter barren. Dead limbs littered the graves and here and there stones leaned precariously, clinging at desperate angles. The few that could no longer resist gravity lied recumbent on the cold, hard ground, mirroring the bones beneath, of those whose name they bore. Amongst the chiseled stones and crosses were a number of hand-hewn markers that betrayed the financial standing of the souls below. The poorest of the county were generally laid to rest in family plots on long held parcels with no more than a simple wooden cross or an upheaved rough stone to mark their memory. This would have most certainly been the case for Carra Sutton Meyer, if not for the benevolence of the congregation. Although Carra and Elise had attended services infrequently and Frank Meyer almost never, the townsfolks felt so strongly unified in their appreciation of this good and enduring woman that they pressed Frank to allow her a Christian burial. Elsie was glad she wasn’t being buried at home on their small farm. She didn’t want a daily reminder of her dead mother rotting in the earth, she wanted her mother alive and rocking her and gently singing as she had always done. Watching now as a line of mourners filed by, tossing earth into the hard-won hole in the ground, she was stricken with the realization that she would never again know that embrace.

Oh God no, and now once more the singing. I want my mother.

A decision had to be made about school. With no mother to watch over her and her father occupied as the sole laborer on their small farm, what few friends Frank Meyer had among the townspeople urged him to allow Elsie to attend the grammar school in town. They even offered to take up collection for a mule that Elsie might employ to help her cover the distance to and from, knowing that their lone plow horse could not be spared from the farm. Elsie’s mother, an inherently smart, if modestly educated young woman, had resisted formal education for her only child. The school in town was several miles away and it was not unusual for those families farthest up in the hills to educate their children from home or just as often, to not offer any formal education outside of simple cyphering and Bible readings. Many of the mountain children received their primary education out in the fields or in the woods. They learned to plow and to pick. To milk and to trap. To forage and to hunt. These were the lessons that would serve them best in their hardscrabble lives to come. But Carra Meyer had done her best to offer more. She envisioned a life away from these hills for her daughter, maybe even in a big city like St. Louis or Little Rock. So time was set aside every morning wherein she would read to Elsie from Longfellow or Tennyson or The Holy Book. They would work together on spelling and simple arithmetic assignments, gathered from donated primers, and Elsie, though she knew it not, was not lagging in any discernible fashion behind the children closer to town who attended school on a regular basis. In fact her mother’s attentiveness and broad ranging interests provided a curriculum quite superior in many ways to the education by rote and rod that was occurring in the valley below.

Carra held close the real reason she didn’t want Elsie attending the school in town. Her husband knew the reason and while less guarded, the subject remained seldom mentioned, though many of the town folk suspected her construction from the beginning. Elsie, a perfectly sweet and otherwise healthy little girl had been born with the unfortunate affliction of a clubfoot. Her left leg swung and dragged most perceptibly but in spite of the malformation she compensated quite admirably and it rarely kept her from accomplishing anything she set her mind to. She learned to hurry but she could not run, though her walking gait was no less rapid than most. Elsie’s parents agreed that it was for the best to treat her no differently than they would any other child. Coddling her was a luxury they could not afford anyway, there was simply too much work to do and so Elsie carried a similar burden of chores as to those of most of her peers.

It wasn’t the difficulty of the journey in and of itself that constituted Carra’s reluctance to send Elsie off to school but also an accompanying measure of guilt. Carra, an otherwise steady and sensible woman, found herself all too often wracked with guilt. Guilt that her darling daughter was imperfect through no fault of her own. Guilt that the difficulty of Elsie’s birth and her own resulting frailty would apparently not allow her to birth any brothers or sisters for Elsie to play with or to share in the chores. Guilt that her husband’s glaring ineptitude as a provider along with his increasing inclination for corn liquor made Carra dream often of clutching up Elsie and escaping this mountain forever. Her guilt increased tenfold on those occasions when she instead imagined escaping the mountain alone.

The feeling was only compounded when Frank Meyer in his drunken worst moments, which seemed to Carra to be occurring with dreadful, mounting frequency, would utter the most hateful, self-pitying tirades, often in earshot of Elsie. “There weren’t never no gimps on my side of the family!” or “Why couldn’t you have provided me healthy boys instead of a peg-leg girl?” Carra was always astounded that the man who had stolen her heart was capable of such ugly behavior and she was astounded further when she caught herself giving weight to his words.

Worse than the guilt was the shame. Oh Lord, how she despised herself for the shame. That insidious shame that would well up without warning when she might find herself in town or outside of church, to be suddenly confronted by a swarm of running, laughing children at play; climbing a tree or skipping a rope. All the while Elsie holding tight, tucked into her skirts and observing. She would catch herself wishing that Elsie was one of them, wishing that Elsie were whole. And then the shame would come crashing down on her. First the shame for her broken and sheltered child, here on display in the presence of the other mothers and their perfectly healthy offspring and secondly the scouring shame she felt for ever having conceived such a thought in the first place.

Frank Meyer had always thought the hours spent on studies was both a waste of Elsie’s and more importantly, Carra’s time. He needed all the help he could get putting crops in the field, slopping hogs, milking the cow, collecting the eggs and an ongoing endless number of other chores required to maintain even this modest farmstead. Carra however was no shirker and more than made up for any time lost on Elsie’s lessons. As her husband was spending more time than ever tending his still back in the woods, she increasingly carried the bulk of the load and rested rarely. An ingrained habit that would play against her when the sickness later came. Up until the time of her illness, their mostly happy home, though fraying, had been manageably maintained. But now she was finding herself increasingly weaker, short of breath and prone to spasmatic fits of coughing. Once finally diagnosed by Doctor Bancroft, Carra was almost immediately resigned to her fate. There had been some offhand mention of vaccine and the doctor alluded to a new sanitorium under construction down south in Booneville but these discussions were mostly ceremonial in nature. They both knew there was neither money nor inclination for serious treatment. If her body had enough strength left in it to fight, she might survive it. If not, she would join the infinite roll of the multitudes the disease had claimed before her.

Having gotten sick only made her feel all the more guilty. The thought of leaving poor Elsie alone on that mountain with her progressively unreliable father was more than she could bear. A meanness was growing in Frank Meyer, borne of the terror of abandonment. Carra had a sister up North and she briefly entertained the thought of sending Elsie away but she knew in her heart that her family was no better off than her own and Elsie would be viewed as a burden, just one more mouth to feed. And then out of the blue, Frank would string together a few good days and she would set the thought aside. She prayed constantly that her husband would rise to the occasion once she was gone but Frank Meyer was not the rise to the occasion type. If everything were going well, he was capable of grace and good humor but even in the best of times he was selfishly disposed to indulgent actions. In the worst of times he leaped in headfirst.

Carra persevered for over two years beyond the day her diagnosis first came, but by the autumn of 1911 her condition had grown steadily worse. By the end of November it had now been more than a week since she had last left her bed and everyone knew her end was near. She spent most of that time in a fever dream of interweaving coughing fits and hallucinatory fears. When she was at rest she would lay quietly in languid melancholy, staring out the single westward facing window, seeing little beyond what pale light and shadow the winter frost would allow. Elsie was often at her side, sitting silent, stoic and scared in the old cane rocker, staring at her mother’s pretty things arranged neatly on the little dressing table near the foot of the bed. She would pat her mother’s forehead and attend to her waning bodily needs. In moments of lucidity Elsie would read passages from The Crucifixion by An Eye-Witness, that resided on Carra’s nightstand, stopping often to exchange tearful, final good-byes, never quite sure which of these would be the last. Doctor Bancroft made one last bland appearance, offering nothing beyond the most obvious advice for providing Carra comfort in her last days. Frank was decidedly gentle and tenuously composed up until the end, allowing Carra some measure of hope and comfort here at her time of dying. Though it was not even a full hour following her last breath, that he retreated to the bottle in utter despair. Through the tears of her own grief, Elsie saw clearly her miserable path ahead.

The subject of schooling had come up often in the weeks since it became clear that there would be no recovery for Carra. While still lucid and spirited, she had implored her husband to find a way for Elsie to attend class in town. That brief apparition of Frank’s better self, had assured her that he would do so and he possessed just enough virtue left of him to follow through with his beloved’s final wish. In the days following Carra’s burial, arrangements were made and the mule was secured by the congregation. He came to Elsie already named and though the moniker was at odds with her pain, she kept it anyhow and grew very fond of Applesauce the mule, in very short order. She reserved for he alone her remaining affections. Affections she could no longer muster for any living two-legged soul.

Frank Meyer found it in himself to hitch the wagon and follow Elsie down the long mountain road all the way into the valley and in sight of the school for her first few journeys. This afforded courtesy, while never intended to be a daily ritual, was promptly disbanded after a week or so when Elise firmly assured her father that she both knew the way into town and felt fully confident in Applesauce’s ability to transport her there. The truth of the matter was that at the end of every school day, her father showed up each day more drunk and demonstrative than the last, to lead her home. The discomfiting embarrassment that his righteous display imposed on Elsie as she struggled to navigate new relationships with teacher and students, rendered her reproach of her father quite tactless. This led to a rambling tirade on the subject of her ungratefulness that she had to endure half-way to home before Frank finally slumped forward to let horse lead wagon, unmolested. Suddenly Elsie felt ninety instead of nine, but she comforted herself in the knowledge that this would be the final time she would have to suffer his damnable escort.

It didn’t take Elsie very long to acclimate to the classroom curriculum. She managed to catch up quickly in most subjects and occasionally found herself far ahead of her classmates in others. Acclimating to her classmates was a different story altogether. She found the bulk of the boys to be loud, not very bright and disruptive. She simply assumed this was the manner of all boys and men, never really having much interaction with any other than her father. Aside from their general rowdiness, she discovered them to be for the most part genial or simply indifferent to her presence. This suited her just fine, for she identified more closely with their manner and motivations anyway. As for the girls, she didn’t understand them at all. A few were sullen and shy, like Elsie, but the others, the most boisterous of them, were to her dismay, preening, nasty, ninnies. The nastiness started almost straight out of the gate with sniggering comments, openly aired on every sensitive subject from her drunken father, to her dead mother to her misshapen foot. Everything about them was crossways or underhanded and ugly;

“Did your mother really die of consumption? My daddy says it is the scourge of the poorer classes.”

“We would invite you to skip rope with us but I don’t believe you are able, still you are most welcome to watch.”

“Do you have to have your shoes made special? I suppose you could never wear a pretty slipper of the style Mother and Father gave me this Christmas.”

“I heard that Mr. Schulz the blacksmith makes her boots for her, when he’s not shoeing horses!”

“My father says your father is the most pifflicated man in the county, whatever that means.”

“My mother is teaching me to sew and we are making the most beautiful dress for my birthday! Do you sew Elsie?”

And so on and so on.

Whenever Miss Platt, the school teacher would overhear these exchanges she would scold the guilty party in an excoriating tone that would ultimately draw more unwanted attention to Elsie and make matters worse. Privately Miss Platt would commend Elsie for her aptitude and even try to mentor her in an unsophisticated attempt to ease her transition but just when Elsie would allow her heart to open to the suggestion of a friend, Miss Platt would behave the mother hen to the cliquish worst of the girls. A mother hen with no room left under her wing for a broken runt. The duplicity of every female she encountered that wasn’t her mother, only served to raise both her guard and her ire to towering new heights.

By the time Spring came around, Elsie had learned how to better disappear into the background. Most of her classmates accepted her in the same way they would have accepted the sudden appearance of an extra desk in the room. As the novelty of Elsie wore off they would torture her less frequently, but she remained a favorite target of the most devilish of them when boredom set in. She was by no means their only target, for they would malign, assault or aggravate any of the weakest among them, even the boys. It was however Elsie’s stone-faced resilience that made her something of a special challenge for Ruth Presseisen, the leader of a particular nest of rattlesnakes. It seemed as if Ruth spent all her waking hours dreaming up new ways to be mean and spiteful and once the knife was in, Ruth would always try to twist it in a new direction to see what fresh pain she could inflict. She was creative in that way with everyone, even her cohorts.

With warmer weather came new and demoralizing outdoors recess games. It seemed to Elsie that every physical activity in the schoolyard had one common theme. Running. She was strong enough for the leapfrog games but on one occasion her heavy boot came down hard on Madeline Schaffe’s foot and for all the ensuing hysterics you would have thought Elsie had dropped an anvil on her. She never played leapfrog again. She could certainly stand and swing a rope without issue if only she were ever asked. Occasionally she would find a quiet spot off to the side and play jacks or make-believe games with her sorority of fellow lessers but invariably one of the snottier girls would find a reason to chase a ball through their circle, upsetting their game. One fine April afternoon during recess, Elsie walked near Ruth and her friends, skipping rope as they were accustomed to do. They abruptly stopped their chanting and began again with a seemingly well-rehearsed new rhyme,

“Elsie Meyer while crossing the sea,
Hit an iceberg at quarter-past three,
Everyone drowned but she was carefree,
She floated on her foot down the Mississippi,
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I…”

With each letter called out the rope whipped faster but the rope couldn’t keep pace with Elsie’s heartbeat. She was fuming and it took biting clean through her lip to stem the tears. She simply would not give them the satisfaction.

Rarely did the boys and girls share the same playground space or the same games. The boys would cycle their play from week to week it seemed, alternating peculiar contests with names like Crackabout or Charley Over The Water or Fire On The Mountains. Each of these games involved their own unique patterns of vigorous running, tagging, tugging and throwing usually precipitated by sing-song rhymes,

“Charley over the water,
Charley over the sea.
Charley catch a blackbird,
Can’t catch me!”

Or

“Fire on the mountain, run, boys, run!
You with the red coat, you with the gun!”

The girls, when not jumping rope in exclusive small groups, mostly contented themselves with less strenuous games such as London Bridge, Mulberry Bush or Frog In The Middle. Elsie would sometimes join these larger, less skillful group games and would occasionally even find herself having fun.

But on most days, when the children were left to their own devices, Elsie found some way to avoid participation. She became Miss Platts most dependable eraser cleaner and when not thus occupied contented herself with a favorite book of poetry. Every now and then the teacher felt compelled to force the entire student body to play some new game she had recently discovered in a book. Games with tantalizingly descriptive titles like Smuggling The Geg, How Many Miles To Babylon or Saddle The Nag. Elsie dreaded these days and was in good company with the rest of her classmates, who resented their hour of freedom being confiscated for one more lesson. Fortunately, orchestrating the action while reading aloud the rules and objectives from her book of games, would result in Miss Pratt almost always spoiling the entire recess, so Elsie never had to get too involved. The children as a unit resisted these disruptive introductions mightily.

Spring turned to summer and with the end of the school year Elsie retreated back up the rocky hillside where she remained, for the most part, in solitude. She would ride Applesauce into town whenever her father gave her a little money for sugar, flour and coffee or the other incidentals that could not be wrung from the farm. She would sometimes run into classmates who might react with anything from a modest wave, to unacknowledged indifference, to outright insult, depending on who the classmate might be. Elsie’s hide was now plenty tough and she took each response in stride. Neither her nor her father ever attended church again since the day they buried her mother, though they would on occasion make it a point, when in town, to lay flowers on her grave in the churchyard. These weren’t her only visitations however. On more than one morning, Minister Crowley had had to rouse Frank Meyer from a shivering, drunken slumber after he had wandered from the woods like an injured animal in the middle of the night, to collapse forlorn at the foot of Carra’s grave.

For the next couple of years, schooldays and summers came and went, all the while Elsie enduring taunts and ridicule, scorn and indignation or the utter dismissiveness of her classmates. Over that time she grew evermore inwardly hostile, evermore outwardly unflappable. She had good days and bad days as do we all but her number of good days unfairly diminished with each passing year, until the horror of her homelife made the misery of her schooldays seem almost welcome by comparison.

At least her father couldn’t get at her while she was in the classroom. Drunkenness was now his waking state and he spent most of his time tending his still, cooking the corn mash, selling off what little he didn’t drink himself. In spite of this he managed to create a minor industry which was necessary to provide the income required to buy seed and feed and essentials for farm and home, though those were never now his motivations. He no longer held such noble aspirations and the lion’s share of the money was frittered away on gambling with other layabouts or tobacco. He had increasingly left Elsie on her own to fend for the farm and in doing so she had gained a healthy handle on the workings of the entire operation. It wasn’t much of a farm but she kept it productive enough to feed them both, with what money she was allowed providing for the balance of their necessities. She had learned to budget well and always made sure she had enough left over for coal oil to keep herself out of the dark. Elsie wasn’t afraid of most anything but she was afraid of the dark.

It was in darkness that her father first came to her bed. It had been some time since any remaining good had finally been gutted from Frank Meyer and now he was left with a sinister pickled brain, preserved in an alcohol brine of bitterness, loneliness and gloom. The deplorable visits had begun without infliction on a frigid winter night when he had simply come to her bed and collapsed. But soon the callings came more often, not only on cold winter nights but hot summer ones too. It now seemed that every incident in poor Elsie’s life was a trial, designed to steel her further against future injury. Her soul was becoming a dark and cagey place where misery and mirth mingled in the foul and brackish sludge of revenge. She grew quick-witted, conniving and masterful at evasion. She now plotted and schemed and daydreamed of a method for killing her father. She had been alone in spirit ever since her mother had died and she now longed to be alone in actuality. She knew she was still too young to be left unattended should something happen to her father at present but in a year or two things would be different. She waited and she endured, knowing full well her day would come and that she would be its author.