The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian

Author:Kelly Mustian [Mustian, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Matilda switched kitchens—Mrs. Porter’s for Mrs. Riley’s—hardly noticing the walk between farms. Her hands, washing and peeling and chopping, filling jars and sealing them, seemed to work on their own as she grappled with her thoughts. Did she owe it to Cassie Jones to speak up? And what might she set in motion if she did? Should she confide in the pastor? In Gertie? Should she tell her father everything?

Her hands continued their independent work until Mrs. Riley told her she looked peaked and sent her off early. She walked without thinking of where she was going, without noting that she turned off the Trace at Miss Bodie’s house, took the left-hand fork past Gertie’s, walked down the hill, and crossed the straddling board. She looked up, and she was home. Gertie’s walking stick was on the porch. She heard her father’s voice inside while the sun was still bright over the fields in the afternoon, and that was wrong. She pulled open the screen door. Her mother was in bed, Dalton stroking her hair and telling her everything was all right.

“I can’t lose this baby.”

“You ain’t gonna lose this baby,” Gertie said. “This ain’t nothing but too much work and you letting yourself get too dry. I see it plenty when the last weeks is this hot.” Gertie turned to Dalton. “She’ll be fine. You just keep her drinking and resting. A little water every hour till bedtime, then wake her up a time or two in the night to drink. Something salty to chew on now and again. And from here on out, till the baby comes, keep her out of the sun. She don’t have to stay in bed, but don’t let her work up a sweat or get dried out. This’ll pass.”

“I could take a little milk,” Teensy said weakly.

Gertie nodded at Dalton, and Dalton looked up, found Matilda in the room.

“You feeling all right?” he asked when he saw her, his voice so strained there was only one answer Matilda could give him that he would be able to take on.

“I’m good. I’ll get the milk.”

She went out the door, down the steps, across the road to the springhouse. She opened the door of the little stone structure, and for an instant she mistrusted her eyes, suspected her overburdened mind of projecting its fears onto the physical world. Because there was Frank, sitting on a stack of empty crates upturned on the cool, stone floor of the springhouse. He was sitting beside the stream, turning a small object over in his hand. Matilda seemed to have startled him out of whatever had been playing in his mind, and she thought he looked almost glad to see her, as if there was something he hadn’t yet said to her, some new indignity he had been saving up. But then he saw her staring—and she could not stop staring—at the object in his hand. Something she had held in her own hand in a muddy road in front of a telegraph office.

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