I sat, watching the country turn rich and wet, the hills rising and diving like great emerald whales, and thought: I’m coming, Father.
My Mother’s Door
The last three hundred miles reeled past as if I were wearing a pair of those magical boots that take you seven leagues forward with every step. I remember them only as a series of jarring thuds.
Thud. I am stepping off the train into the sweating sprawl of Union Train Station in Louisville. Even the sky is busy, a crisscrossed mess of electric lines and church spires and shimmery waves of heat. Bad presses close to my knees, hating it.
Thud. I’m standing in a dusty lot outside the station begging for a ride from a truck with BLUE GRASS BREWING printed on the side in black block letters. The driver tells me to go back where I came from; his friend makes obscene kissing sounds.
Thud. Bad and I are swaying westward in a creaking wagon piled head-high with earthy, green-smelling hemp stalks. A solemn black man and his solemn young daughter sit on the bench up front. Their clothes have that calicoed, mismatched look that only happens when fabric has been patched and repatched until almost nothing original remains, and they look at me with worried, warning eyes.
Thud. Ninley, finally.
It had both changed and not changed in the last decade. So had the world, I supposed.
It was still scrubby and reluctant-looking, and the townsfolk still glared in aggrieved half squints, but the streets had been paved. Automobiles putted up and down them, alongside newly rich men in three-piece suits with embarrassingly large pocket watches. The river was crowded with chugging steamers and flatboats. Some sort of mill—a hulking, ugly thing—now brooded on the shore. Steam and smoke hung above us, transformed into oily pink clouds by the setting sun. Progress and Prosperity, as Mr. Locke would say.
I’d been driven and hunted on the journey here, but now that I’d arrived I found myself strangely reluctant to take the last few steps. I bought myself a sack of peanuts at Junior’s River Supply with the last of my laundry money and found a tobacco-slimed bench to sit on. Bad perched like a bronze sentinel at my feet.
A shift bell rang, and I watched thin-faced women scurrying in and out of the mill, their fingers curled into callused claws at their sides. I watched the bent black backs of men loading coal onto docked steamers, and the rainbow sheen of oil on the river’s surface.
Eventually a sweaty little man in a stained apron emerged from the cookhouse to tell me the bench was for paying customers, and to imply heavily that I should leave Ninley before nightfall if I knew what was good for me. It would never have happened if Mr. Locke had been with me.
But then, if Mr. Locke had been with me, I probably wouldn’t have lingered insolently on the bench, staring at the man with my hand on the back of Bad’s buzzing skull. I wouldn’t have stood and stepped slightly too close to him, and savored the way he shriveled like something left on the windowsill too long. I certainly wouldn’t have curled my lip and said, “I was leaving anyway. Sir.”
The little man scurried back to his kitchen and I sauntered back toward the center of town. I caught a wavery glimpse of myself in a plate-glass window—mud-caked, oversized boots, sweat drawing damp lines through road dust at my temples, pinkish-white scars scrolling haphazardly from wrist to shoulder—and it occurred to me that my seven-year-old self—that dear temerarious girl—would’ve been rather taken with my seventeen-year-old self.
Perhaps the manager at the Grand Riverfront Hotel recognized me, too, because he didn’t immediately order my vagabondish self thrown out of his establishment. Or maybe Bad made people hesitate to throw me anywhere.
“Good evening. I’m trying to find the, uh, Larson family farm. South of here, I think?”
His eyes widened at the name, but he hesitated, as if debating the morality of directing a creature like me toward an innocent family. “What’s your business?” he compromised.
“They’re… family. On my mother’s side.”
He gave me a you’re-not-a-very-good-liar look, but apparently the Larson women hadn’t inspired sufficient loyalty in the townsfolk to keep him from directing me south, past the mill, two miles down. He shrugged. “Doesn’t look like much, these days. But she’s still in there, last we heard.”
Those final two miles were longer than regular miles. They felt stretched and fragile beneath my feet, as if a too-heavy footfall might shatter them and leave me stranded in the nowheresville of the Threshold. Maybe I was just tired of walking. Maybe I was afraid. It’s one thing to read a storybook version of your mother’s life and choose to believe it; it’s quite another to knock on a stranger’s door and say, Hello, I have it on good authority that you’re my great (great?) aunts.
I let my fingers graze Bad’s spine as we walked. Dusk settled over our shoulders like a damp purple blanket. The river—the churn and clank of boat traffic, the shush of water, and the tangy smell of catfish and mud—was slowly beaten back by honeysuckle and cicadas and some bird that cooed the same three syllables in a lilting circle.
It was all so familiar and so foreign. I pictured a young girl in a blue cotton dress running down this same road on cinnamon-stick legs. Then I pictured another girl, white and square-jawed, running before her. Adelaide. Mother.
I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t been looking: a narrow dirt drive crowded on either side by briars and untrimmed boughs. Even once I’d followed the track to its end I was uncertain—who would live in such a huddled, bent-backed cabin, half-eaten by ivy and some sort of feral climbing rose? The wooden-shake shingles were green with moss; the barn had collapsed entirely.
But a single ancient mule still stood in the yard in a three-legged doze, and a few chickens roosted in the remains of the barn, clucking sleepily to themselves. A light—dim, mostly obscured by dingy white curtains—still flickered in the kitchen window.
I climbed the sagging front steps and stood unmoving before the front door. Bad sat beside me and leaned against my leg.
It was an old door, nothing but a series of gray planks so time-worn the grain of the wood had weathered into ridges like the whorls of fingerprints. The handle was a strip of oil-dark leather; candlelight peered through the cracks and knotholes like an inquisitive housewife.
It was my mother’s door, and her mother’s door.
I exhaled, raised my hand to knock, and hesitated at the last moment because what if it was all a beautiful lie, a fairy-tale spell that would be broken the moment my hand touched the unyielding reality of that door—what if an old man answered and said “Adelaide who?” Or what if Adelaide herself opened the door and it turned out she’d found her way back into this world after all but never come looking for me?
The door opened before I brought myself to touch it.
A very old, very querulous-looking woman stood on the threshold, glaring up at me with an expression that was (impossibly, dizzyingly) familiar. It was a grandmotherly, young-people-these-days sort of look, as seamed and wrinkled as walnut meat. I had a disorienting sense of having seen it from a much lower vantage point, perhaps as a child—
