Free Her Kind, a novel by Robin Throne

When everyone finally accepted that she needed to keep it within her, even I knew it would never find its way out.
    A handmade pine box to hold her baby girl. Wedding satin that had lost its hope and promise was used to line the sides to comfort Hattie with her permanent bedtime and her favorite prayer.
    Now I lay me down to sleep.
    By the time I arrived, Emma had forever descended into the non-feeling place. The fixed gaze. Ruminating hands that she could not keep still even in church.
    I have heard that today’s doctors may offer a bottle of valium for such postpartum hysteria, but in those days there was no such treatment.
    Only a forever mourning.
    Some sheep just stay lost.
    Grandpa Syl told me this one afternoon as he watched me brushing my mother’s hair right in the middle of the dining room. At first, I was embarrassed that he should have seen us like this, but then he walked over and touched Emma’s crown so tenderly.
    I held my breath.
    For a moment he appeared to be Zenas, the healer. The laying on of hands was only for Ten-Mile Presbyterian, Grandpa Syl had said. He once shouted angrily in the barn to God after Zenas had offered a cure for Emma’s condition. Grandpa Syl always thought he prayed in the barn alone, but we were usually there.
    It seems we were always there.
    Unnoticed.
    The second family.
    The good, quiet children who had lived.
     



October 14, 1957
     
     
    Annie died more than 10 years ago now, and my Clara passed just three years after.
    I had been alone in Grandpa Syl’s house for almost a decade when Harry and Lillie May decided it was time for them to move in, which to them was the same as taking over.
    Harry, who had always been a bit too buttoned up for the village life of Parkhurst had somehow up and decided to move his insurance business to town from the city. His three sons were now grown and gone, so he would take the old house now, he had told me, so matter-of-factly.
    Almost as if it were his decision and his alone.
    When I am dead, it is yours, I retorted. Equally stoic in my stance.
    Such thoughts abounded as I watched Harry assume this new role.
    The caretaker.
    The last man to govern my days.
    We both knew this to be true, but he had once made a cunning plea for me to give in and move to the old folks’ home as so many of my old friends from the Presbytery ladies society had done in their final years.
    Yet, there were so few of us left now. Mrs. Davenport had lost her wits and now talked incessantly to her nephew Horace who had died in a terrible automobile accident a few years back.
    She would not even remember me if I joined her now, much less having nice chats as we await our passing.
    The real fact is that I could not bear living with such a faulty reminder of time and place and the friendship we had. They called her a centenarian in the Gazette when they celebrated the century-old birth of a woman who lived instead from her decade-past memories, but as she blew out the one candle that also stood for the other 99, she asked the year and they had paused before they told her.
    She turned to her nephew and said, Is that so, Horace?
    No such luck, dear brother.
    I will lay by this river until my last breath. I shall not be removed. That part, I would not say aloud.
    Superior or not, Harry had his own troubles in Davenport and perhaps he sought refuge in Parkhurst the same way that his grandfather had once done after Black Hawk’s war.
    Harry had been wrongly accused of running a one-man church after a disruption over the firing of an interim pastor in the twenties, and then there had been that business with the Farm Bureau and the kkk in the thirties.
    At least Harry had stood on the side of right in both cases. I had been almost proud of him then. So odd that he prefers H.D. now.
    Harry had been born for these sorts of negotiations. He had always sought attention, and everyone had obliged him.
    The influencer.
    Always.
    Especially the grandmothers.
    Harry had never been