Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

The next morning I read her instructions to Phyllis. She had moved her belongings from her cabin into the kitchen, which already began to show signs of a new administration. Seated upon an inverted wash tub she listened to my reading with sundry snorts and shakes of her head until her turban fell off and lay upon the floor.

“For de Lord’s sake, chile, is you that soft to think I can ‘member all dem things. No, sor; but nebber you mind, honey, I’se no fool, if I is a brack nigger. I’se kep’ my eyes open more’n you thinks an’ learned a heap of dem Boston ways. You’ll see; don’t you worry, nor come speerin’ ’round de kitchen. Jess stay in de parlor whar ladies belong, an’ I’ll run de ranch! I’se cap’n now.”

She adjusted her turban, picked up the mop and the broom, put them together behind the door, where Norah’s sunbonnet used to hang, and began to bustle about with the activity of a young girl. Norah’s instructions I pinned up, as I said I should, but they were all lost on Phyllis except the possibility of Mrs. Hathern’s return if things were too much mixed; that troubled her. For several nights when we were up with our baby we saw a light in the cabin where she slept. When questioned about it she owned to keeping a candle burning “So as to see de missus if she comes. I’se not gwine to be took unawares, nor be so unmanneredly as to let her stumble roun’ in de dark.”

“But, Phyllis,” Fan said, “if it is dark she can’t see the litter.”

“Dat’s so, honey, I hain’t thought of dat,” was Phyllis’s rejoinder, and that night there was no candle burning in Phyllis’s room, but the door we knew was barricaded and the window nailed down to keep out Norah quite as much as Mrs. Hathern.

The superstitious old woman had been detected so often by the former in her little attempts to deceive that she had come to look upon her with a kind of awe as one gifted with second sight, who might pounce upon her in bodily shape quite as readily as Mrs. Hathern in ghostly form. With Norah’s departure the last link was severed which bound us to the new life, and I am ashamed to confess how quickly and unconsciously we took up the old one. It was so easy to do it, with Phyllis anticipating all our wants and encouraging us in our indolence. We breakfasted when we felt like it; had dinner and supper at all hours, while the kitchen gradually came to look like anything but a place where Norah could knead her bread on the floor. Phyllis’s handiwork was everywhere. There was pot black on the sink, and grease on the floor. Her big black thumb had jabbed out the broken piece in the vegetable dish, and the hot tomatoes had been spilled, some on the carpet and some down Fan’s back. The wash boiler had been discarded for an iron kettle, and was filled with a variety of articles, conspicuous among which were father’s boot-jack and blacking brush. The griddles on the range were red most of the time and began to warp and crack; the kettles burned dry; the tea kettle leaked and was mended so often that father at last mildly protested, saying it was cheaper to get a new one, which he could ill afford as his bill at the hardware store was already a large one. Then I tried to take the helm. There were a good many battles with Phyllis, who, however, succumbed so far as to have one day in each week for clarin up, “and the Lord himself couldn’t ax more’n that ef she was workin’ for him,” she said.

In the midst of all our difficulties our baby was never for a moment forgotten or neglected. Norah had called him pimpin, by which she meant delicate, and so he was. But he was a beautiful child, with wavy hair, and eyes a cross between blue and gray, a complexion like wax and the prettiest ways, which made us all his slaves. It was Fan who devoted herself to him, while I wrestled with the house. When he began to talk, her name, or an attempt at it, was the first word he tried to speak. He had often heard us spoken of as “Fan-and-Ann,” and with a quickness and persistence for which he was remarkable, he caught it and applied it to her alone. “Fan-er-nan” he always called her, while, for some reason known only to himself, I was Annie-mother, although I didn’t take half the care of him that she did. As soon as we thought he could understand we told him of his mother, and when he asked us where she was Fan answered “In Paradise,” and tried to make him repeat the word after her.

“Oh, my lan!” came derisively from Phyllis, who was within hearing. She didn’t “b’lieve in ‘dat ar pair-o’-dice,’” she said, and when next she was alone with the little fellow she took him in her lap, gave him a lump of sugar and said to him, “Don’t you let ’em fool you about dat ar pair-o’-dice. Dar ain’t no sich place. Your mar’s sperrit is in heaven, and her body in Boston.”

After that he always insisted that his mother had gone to heaven in Boston. He knew that Carl was in Boston, and saw no reason why his mother should not be there too. We told him a great deal of Carl, who became to him a kind of imaginary hero, and whom he always remembered in his prayers, asking that God would bless “brother Tarl, make him a good boy, and keep him straight.” Mrs. Hathern’s dying injunction had been “Keep Carl straight,” and as we never saw him Fan hoped a baby’s prayers might accomplish what we had no means of doing, and taught the words to Paul. Carl was in Harvard, doing fairly well for a young man of his means and tastes. He had plenty of money, and was fond of luxury and “larks,” and sometimes wrote us letters which made our hair stand on end. It was usually Fan who took up the cudgels and berated him for what she called his “goings on.” He always answered good-humoredly, telling her she was too prudish and knew nothing of the world, living as she did in that out of the way place.

“Not that Lovering isn’t lovely,” he added, “and I’d like nothing better than to live with you in the charming old home I remember with so much pleasure.”