Hell's Half-Acre by Nicholas Nicastro

Author:Nicholas Nicastro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

I Will Be Reckoned With

KATE WAS TOO ill the next day to go to work. Nor did she show up at the hotel for the next three days. Instead, she lingered in bed from late afternoon to late morning, reading as long as the light lasted, staring at the wall as the gloom rose and Almira lit the lamp. Kate knew what Almira was expecting: an eruption of emotion that would mark her as weak, as defeated by circumstances she was foolish enough to challenge. She perceived her watching from the stove, spitefully anticipating.

But Kate would not gratify Almira. Instead of weeping, she kept a studious, monkish silence. And indeed, a life of penitent devotion appealed to her. Unappreciated by modernity, she came to think she had missed her proper century, that her soul was intended for a better, more profound time. In a nunnery—­or better yet as her male counterpart in one of the great monasteries of Europe—­she would have been free from the petty preoccupations of shopkeeps and hoteliers. With nothing expected of her but to pray, she could have studied the ancient classics, written masses and cantatas and requiems, become expert in mineralogy or entomology or icon painting. The potential range of her endeavors would have been so limitless, so grand compared to her life in that tiny, miserable cabin, that she felt the impulse to cry over her thwarted career. But this was exactly what she would not do in front of Almira.

And then, of course, there was the object of the praying, to that Nazarene and his entourage of hypocrites. That would not have suited her. But she guessed she wouldn’t have been the only one in the rectory who secretly despised that figure on the cross. Everyone made his compromises.

On the fourth day she got up, stripped to her shift, and bathed herself on the back porch. She used the wooden tub in which they mixed water and lye and meat drippings to make soap, still ringed with grease. When she was done, she felt not so much clean as marinaded, the soap leaving an acrid odor and a glossy sheen on her skin. After dressing, she donned her sun hat and walked the seven and a quarter miles to Cherryvale, picking wildflowers along the way to decorate the tables she would wait upon. When she arrived at the hotel, she was tired but in good spirits, glowing with perspiration and soap drippings, and not thinking of Leroy Dick at all.

Mr. Moore looked up, drinking in the image of her as he usually did. But there was a glassy impassivity in his eyes and a reticence about his mouth that she had never seen in him before. She put it down to her unexplained absence.

“Aren’t these pretty?” she remarked, presenting the flowers to him. “The lobelia are in bloom, and these are coreopsis.”

“Welcome back,” he said, in a tone not welcoming at all. Now that she was close she saw the tiny beads of sweat peeking from the pores over his mouth.

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