Stillwater by Nicole Helget

Author:Nicole Helget
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)

25

The Beloved Child and His Whore-Mother

ON A PALLET IN THE CORNER of Miss Daisy’s room at the Red Swan Saloon, Davis Christmas lay looking up at the ceiling and scraping his toe along the wall. Miss Daisy watched him in the reflection of the mirror as she sat putting white powder all over her face and chest.

She put down the puff. “Whatsa matter, dear?” she asked the boy.

“Where’s my mama now? Is she ever coming back?” asked Davis.

Davis could be a real rascal. Only this morning, he had turned over her expensive perfume bottle and used one of her best hairpieces to make a nest for the silly cat. And she had yet to bother him about the gouge in her pressed rouge and the red smear across the cat’s back. She sometimes wondered if Davis misbehaved because he was missing his mama or acted out and then missed his mama coincidentally. Miss Daisy could never scold Davis when he was missing his mama. She hated herself for thinking the boy might use such a situation to manipulate her, but she’d never been a natural mother and didn’t know about these kinds of things.

“Davis, dear, you know your mama’s in heaven,” she said. “Remember when Father Paul made the fancy ceremony over her, and we all wore our best and then she was laid to rest in the pauper’s cemetery?” She turned around on her stool and faced him. She put out her arms. “Come up here, hon. Miss Daisy wants to hold you.”

Davis pouted his lips and shook his head. “I only want my mama,” he said.

“Well now, you’re breaking my poor, poor heart,” said Miss Daisy. “I’m so sad I could cry.” She pretended to heave a little and pressed a tear out of her eye. Miss Daisy too knew how to be manipulative.

Davis sat up and crawled over like a baby. He made baby noises and put up his arms to be held, as an infant would. “Hold me,” he said in his best baby voice.

“That’s a good baby,” Miss Daisy said. “Come up here now, dear, and let’s be happy today.” She picked up the boy and cradled him and rocked him. She put her nose in his hair and inhaled deeply. He smelled of face powder and tobacco smoke, of her. And if a person who didn’t have eyesight could see them, she thought, that person would believe that they were natural mother and child. If that blind person didn’t have eyes to see her painted face or the indent above her eye where a man had punched her so hard, he crushed part of her eye socket, that person would have no sense that she wasn’t a natural mother. She tended him like a natural mother. She’s the one who had put whiskey on his gums when he was teething. She’s the one who had splattered flour on his bottom when he had nappy rash. He was hers, and she loved him better than any other mother could love her own child.

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