The Misadventures of Maude March Read online

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  For my husband, Akila.

  My husband is, as ever, my greatest supporter and champion.

  Put your feet up, honey,

  and let Maude and Sallie bring you a sarsaparilla.

  THE HEAT WAS AWFUL.

  The breeze, when we got one, felt like it came out of an oven. Aunt Ruthie hoped to take our minds off our misery by taking us to town. Even in the dim cool of the mercantile, sweat made our clothing cling to our skin.

  My dress was the worst, made out of some kind of muslin that got itchy once it stuck to me. Every two minutes, Aunt Ruthie would say, “Stop scratching, Sallie, it isn't polite.”

  The shooting didn't start until we'd stepped outside of the mercantile. The screen door whacked shut behind us, and we were greeted by a volley of shots. It was stunning really. Then it was scary. The noise was too great to take it all in at once.

  It's strange the way time stretched in that moment and seemed to go on forever. The entire morning passed through my mind, starting when my older sister Maude ate my biscuit with jelly that I had left over from breakfast.

  When I complained there were no more biscuits, and that was the last of the black currant jelly, she said, “If you wanted it, you shouldn't have left it laying around.” So while Aunt Ruthie said it was the heat, I knew it was that biscuit that had me squabbling with Maude all day.

  As we neared the barbershop, walking to town, Maude pulled Aunt Ruthie toward a stone bench, saying, “You're tiring yourself. Come sit down for a minute,” and I dragged on Aunt Ruthie's other arm, saying, “It gets too hot to sit on that rock in the sun. Let's go someplace cooler.”

  Aunt Ruthie said, “I've had enough of being pulled apart.”

  In the mercantile, she showed her teeth at us and whispered, “You are to keep your distance, both of you. I don't care to listen to you bicker for another minute.” We promised to be good. To this, she said, “Stay over there by the farm goods.”

  In these aisles, there were only smelly jars of lanolin and herbal salves to examine, and such things as curative oils for ear mites and wireworm to avoid, having nasty little pictures of the ills on the side of the bottles. This bothered me so bad that I pulled a dimer out of my pocket and set to reading it instead.

  But Aunt Ruthie was right in sending us there. It was not two minutes before Maude started up again. She told me that Joe Harden, Frontier Fighter, was never a real man. “Those books weren't meant for girls to read, either,” she said.

  “How would you know?” I said to her. Maude didn't like for me to read dime novels. Sad to say, Maude thought dimers were a waste of learning how to read.

  “It's just a made-up name for made-up stories out of books,” she said. “Boys probably look up to him, but Joe Harden is just a story figure.”

  “Like David?” I asked her.

  “David who?”

  “David who slew Goliath. Is he made up?”

  “Of course not, Sallie,” Maude said. “What a terrible thing to say. Don't you let Aunt Ruthie hear you talk like that.”

  I didn't think Aunt Ruthie would care all that much. She hardly ever cared about anything but whether the work was done right. Maude was the one who cared about such things.

  Maude and me were orphaned when our folks took sick with the fever. Aunt Ruthie had already started out from Philadelphia to come live with us and teach school. By the time she got to Cedar Rapids, Aunt Ruthie had to take us in. Or rather, we took her in, and she took care of us.

  I'm forgetting Uncle Arlen. He was Aunt Ruthie's, and Momma's, younger brother, but he had gone west not long after our folks died, and we had not heard from him in years. So he didn't count as kin. Aunt Ruthie herself said he was as good as dead to us.

  She felt he ought to have stayed around to help her raise us, I guess. Around the middle of winter, she felt he ought to have stayed around to chop wood; that was when I heard his name mentioned most often. Aunt Ruthie could hold a grudge second to none.

  “David's out of a book,” I said stubbornly, “and I ain't never seen any giants.”

  “That's because he killed them all,” Maude told me. “You have to stop reading those cheap stories. Your grammar is atrocious.”

  “You ever seen any Indians?” I asked her.

  “Not around here,” Maude said.

  “That's because Joe Harden, Frontier Fighter, cleared them all out. Single-handed.” That's what I said. But down deep, I believed Maude.

  “Single-handedly,” she said. Maude had in the past year begun to help Aunt Ruthie in the classroom, and she had become quite a stickler. “Kansas is a frontier, Sallie. Iowa is civilized.”

  “It didn't used to be,” I said, but only because it grated on me sometimes that Maude knew just about everything.

  Everything except what I had learned from those dime novels. I just knew that if I ever had to survive off the land the way the frontier fighters did, if I had to kill a bear or outsmart a wily Indian, I'd be better able to do it than my sister.

  “Ask Aunt Ruthie about Joe Harden then,” Maude said as Aunt Ruthie came our way, carrying her purchases wrapped in brown paper that nearly matched her dress.

  We'd been orphans for six years. In that time, given the choice between Maude's answers and Aunt Ruthie's, when mulling over the knobbly questions of life, I'd found Maude's to be more to the point.

  Maude said, “Go ahead, ask.”

  “Don't you dare ask me anything.” Aunt Ruthie strode right on past us. “Some days it isn't even a good idea to get out of bed,” she muttered as we left the mercantile. The screen door slapped shut behind us, and gunshots broke out in the alley between the barbershop and the saloon across the street. The noise was awful.

  A stray bullet hit Aunt Ruthie in the heart and killed her dead.

  “What's happening?” Maude said when Aunt Ruthie dropped like a stone. Although the shots were deafening, I heard this as if Maude spoke right into my ear.

  There were several other people on the street who took no notice of Aunt Ruthie at all. They were scurrying madly for their own safety. The shooting went on in fits and starts even after Aunt Ruthie fell. Only Maude and I stood like wooden Indians in those first moments.

  There was hardly any blood. On Aunt Ruthie's sacking-brown dress, it looked at first like only a dark wet spot, but still I couldn't take my eyes off it. After another moment I saw the hole in the middle of that spot and then the color, just a rim of blood-red at the edge of the dark wet. I don't believe I breathed, watching.

  It's safe to say Maude had not noticed even this much when she dropped to her knees to stuff a paper parcel under Aunt Ruthie's head like a pillow. Maude patted Aunt Ruthie's cheek rather smartly, believing her to have fainted. Yanking off her bonnet, Maude used the brim to ruffle the air around Aunt Ruthie's face.

  “Aunt Ruthie,” Maude kept saying, sco
lding really, because she'd told Aunt Ruthie she was tiring herself. Aunt Ruthie wasn't all that old, but she'd had a long bout with the influenza the winter before that left her considerably weakened. However, it had not left her with a hole in her heart.

  “Maude,” I said, and pointed.

  Maude screamed and fell over Aunt Ruthie in a faint.

  The gunshots stopped then, although probably not because Maude screamed.

  Likelier, those stupid cowboys had run out of bullets, or killed each other. Maybe one of them shot out the mirror again, the way one of them did every so often, and had stopped to think about seven years of bad luck.

  “I need help here,” I shouted into the mercantile, where everybody now lay on the floor, but not because they were hurt. They were hiding. “Aunt Ruthie's been shot and Maude has fainted dead away.”

  I tell you all this to make you understand that Maude was an upright young woman who never made mock of the truth or questioned the dark ways of justice until she saw how truth could be mangled to make a shape unrecognizable.

  To have you know her for a rightly raised person who never complained about the awful twists of fate that made her life less comfortable than it might have been.

  To show you how impossible it was for her to do the things everyone claimed that she did. For this is the true story of how my sister, Maude March, came to be known far and wide as a horse thief, a bank robber, and a cold-blooded killer.

  AUNT RUTHIE DIED THERE ON THE BOARDWALK IN FRONT of the mercantile, and our lives changed overnight. We went out in the morning to choose a box at the undertaker's and came back to find a man from the bank locking our doors.

  But I'm getting ahead of my story.

  The sheriff came running at the sound of gunshots, and the shooter was arrested. We saw this happening, but again, it hardly seemed real. Maude cried over Aunt Ruthie in a ladylike way that Aunt Ruthie would have approved of.

  I cried because Maude cried, that was how I felt right then. The terrible truth was, I was not so sad as surprised. Deeply surprised. Somehow hopeful that the school bell would ring and Aunt Ruthie would stand and say, “That's all the time we have. Put your pencils down.”

  Reverend Peasley and the undertaker arrived together. The blessing in this was that Maude and I had only to let them take things in hand. The reverend installed us in his buggy. It was a tight fit, being a one-seater, but we lived only a few streets away.

  Although it was a very short ride, we were twice nearly overcome by a terrible odor. The first time, I thought Reverend Peasley must be the guilty party. I kept this notion to myself. The second time, I understood it to be his buggy pony.

  Only the sudden gust of a breeze saved me from gagging. “A bit windy all of a sudden,” I said.

  “Thank the Lord,” Reverend Peasley replied.

  He took us to the home of an elderly neighbor lady. When she came to the door, Reverend Peasley told her Aunt Ruthie had passed over.

  “Oh, poor thing,” Mrs. Golightly said. She had to look up at him, as she wasn't any taller than myself. “Did she go quietly?”

  We heard all this, the buggy having been drawn up near the door. Maybe Reverend Peasley thought he would only upset us further, because he didn't answer that question. Instead, he asked her if we could stay the night with her, if she would comfort us in the womanly way. That's what he said to her. What was the poor woman to say to him but yes?

  I had not expected this, nor had Maude, I could see that. It came home to me in that moment that we were all we had, Maude and me. This time there was no Aunt Ruthie to take us in hand. This time we were orphans once and for all.

  He left us there.

  Mrs. Golightly did her best. She offered us cookies and cold buttermilk, but we weren't hungry. She suggested a lie-down, but we said, no, thank you. We sat in her parlor for several minutes, all of us silent, until Maude said, “I want to go home.”

  “And so you shall,” Mrs. Golightly said so kindly that we cried some more. The feeling of surprise had left me, but still I didn't feel my tears were for Aunt Ruthie so much as they were for Maude and me. What were we to do now?

  Aunt Ruthie was gone so quickly she hadn't even had time to wonder what happened. The reverend told us she'd gone to a place where no one had need to be scared. I was glad for Aunt Ruthie; I was only sorry that Maude and me had to face this worry without her stern face to guide us.

  By the time Mrs. Golightly got around to putting her night things into her knitting bag, some weather had blown in. We had to walk arm in arm with Mrs. Golightly or we might have lost her to the breeze. Not only was she no taller than me, she was strangely lighter, as if her bones had no weight to them at all.

  Maude's hair and mine whipped and snapped around our heads, and by the time we got to our house, Mrs. Golightly's hair was doing the same dance. The wind had stolen her every hairpin. We took turns brushing out each other's hair, which got us past the first rush of sadness over coming home without Aunt Ruthie.

  Mrs. Golightly made us some hot cocoa to drink. I was none too enthusiastic about this till I realized she'd made it some sweeter than Aunt Ruthie would have. Mrs. Golightly had a free hand with sugar. I had already known that about her, but I appreciated the fact all anew.

  She even lit an extra lamp to make us feel more cheerful.

  Mrs. Golightly was as kindly as could be, but she was something less than a comfort. Twice during the evening, she asked where it was that Aunt Ruthie had gone. Each time, we told her Aunt Ruthie had passed. Each time, she said, “Poor thing. She went quietly, did she?”

  In the morning, Mrs. Golightly went with us to the undertaker's to choose a box for Aunt Ruthie. In this matter, she was very helpful. Even though she seemed to think the box would be for her sister. We didn't know anything about a sister. Maude simply passed Mrs. Golightly a hankie.

  “I've been thinking about her stone,” Maude said as we stood by the bench in front of the barbershop. The bench had a message carved in the back, REST YOUR WEARY BONES, but something had chopped the center out of the o in bones. “We ought to say something pretty. She deserves that.”

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked, although Aunt Ruthie had never cared for things pretty. She liked practical. To her, that was as pretty as things got.

  On her stone, we said, HERE LIES RUTH ANN WATERS, GONE TO GOLDEN SHORES. July 23, 1840–August 9, 1869. Over this, Mrs. Golightly needed another hankie.

  Aunt Ruthie might have thought it was wasteful to pay for any letters other than her name and dates. But then Maude said the words made her picture Aunt Ruthie as a boat with billowy white sails. That was better than picturing her dead on the boardwalk, and I thought even Aunt Ruthie could see the sense in that.

  We went back to Mrs. Golightly's and made sure she knew it was not her sister, but Aunt Ruthie, who had passed. When we left her, we saw that a buggy had drawn up at our house. A man was nailing something to the door. We hurried over there to read the large print at the top: “First Bank of Cedar Rapids.” And in red, the word “Foreclosed.”

  “What are you doing?” Maude asked him. “We live here.”

  “Your aunt was behind on the payments for this property,” the man said, without so much as a glance in Maude's direction. “We need to sell it off to make our money back.”

  “Aunt Ruthie paid the bank only last week,” Maude said.

  “That payment covered last year's last payment,” the man said, now on his way back to his buggy, with us on his heels. “That still leaves you nearly nine months in arrears.” He gave us a doubtful look. “That means you still owe me money.”

  “I know what it means,” Maude said angrily. “I'll make the payments.”

  The man said, “Where are you going to get the money?”

  “I don't know just yet,” Maude told him. “But I'll manage.”

  “Your aunt said the same thing, that she'd manage. And she wasn't any green girl. She knew how to work.”

  This appea
red to strike Maude to the quick. “I know how to work,” she said in a nearly breathless voice.

  I understood how Maude felt. I was five when Momma and Daddy died, and Maude was nine. We didn't have anyone but Aunt Ruthie, and we didn't know any better than her. But that was the end of childhood as we knew it.

  Aunt Ruthie worked hard, and she made us work right alongside her. Despite being a teacher, she didn't seem to know such a thing as a child existed. Just some people were shorter and more able to clean the floor under the table than others.

  If someone was to have asked us, well, girls, do you want to work like oxen, give up playing with dolls, and wear brown dresses for the rest of your days, we'd have said, no sir, send us to the orphanage, where at least they'll let us keep our dolls. The sad fact was, Aunt Ruthie thought playing with dolls was foolishness.

  She often said to mothers, “Those girls will have real babies soon enough. Let them learn to run fast. Let them learn to climb trees. Let them learn to shoot rabbits.” I suppose she would have said, prepare them to work themselves to the bone, if she thought anyone would heed her.

  To give the devil her due, Aunt Ruthie was a right fine cook, and she never worked us any harder than she worked herself. She was a stern woman, but she was never a cruel one. I never learned what shaped her that way; she wasn't much for talk once she'd told us what she wanted done.

  She taught school the same way. She did not become a friend to her students. They did not love her, although they showed her all the respect she could have hoped for. She arrived with one small suitcase she called her “necessary,” and she left this world with even less.

  It didn't seem right to hand over all she'd worked for without a fight. “You can't take our house away,” I said to the man from the bank.

  “It isn't your house till it's paid for,” he said, “and you can't pay for it.”

  “Just give us a chance to bury our aunt,” Maude cried, clinging to his coat as he climbed into his buggy. “We'll find a way to pay the bank every penny it's owed.”

  I pulled her back just in time, for the buggy jolted as the man loosened the horse's reins. It would have knocked her flat.