Secrets of the Morning (Cutler 2)

As I dusted and cleaned the pieces of furniture near the stairway, I couldn't help but feel as though all the sullen looking ancestors with their harsh and severe expressions were gazing down at me hatefully. Miss Emily's portrait would easily take its rightful place along these walls, I thought. What an unhappy family, distrustful and afraid of the devil's presence in anyone and everything. It was easy now to understand why Grandmother Cutler was the way she was, I thought. In fact, one of the sour looking women looked just like her.

Every fifteen minutes or so, I had to carry the dirtied pail of water to my bathroom to empty it and fill it up again. It began to weigh heavier and heavier and the pain that had begun in a tiny spot on my lower back grew larger and larger like an expanding circle of fire. I had to rest more often and take deep breaths. The work was making my stomach feel like a heavy weight tied around my waist.

I was in the middle of wiping down one of the benches when I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Charlotte holding an apple.

"You forgot to eat your lun

ch," she said, thrusting the apple toward me. I paused and sat back against the wall, exhausted.

"Thank you," I said, taking the apple. She stood there with a wide smile on her face, watching me bite into it.

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away, Emily always says," she sang.

"I'm sure no doctor would want to come here anyway," I mumbled. "Charlotte," I said, suddenly thinking of a possibility, "do you ever go to Upland Station?"

"Sometimes Emily takes me to the general store and buys me some sour balls," she replied.

"Then you don't go away from the house very much, do you?" I asked.

"I go to the gazebo when it's nice out and feed the birds. Do you want to feed the birds?"

"First day off," I said dryly, but she didn't understand. She smiled happily. I took another bite of my apple and started to stand, but the pain shot through my lower back so sharply and quickly, I couldn't breathe and had to sit back a moment.

"You got a baby in you," Charlotte said, "and it might have pointed ears."

"It doesn't have pointed ears," I snapped between gasps. "What a horrible thing to say. Did Emily tell you that it did?"

"Emily knows," Charlotte insisted, nodding. "She can see into your stomach with her fingers and she knows."

"That's silly, Charlotte. No one can see into anyone's stomach with her fingers. Don't believe it."

"She saw into mine," she said. "And saw the pointed ears."

"What?"

A door slammed down the west corridor and Miss Emily's click-clack footsteps reverberated through the house like one gunshot after another. The sound put a look of terror into Charlotte's face.

"Emily says I shouldn't bother you while you're working," she explained, backing up.

"Charlotte, wait . . ." I pulled myself up on the bench.

"I've got to finish a pattern," she said and turned to shuffle quickly away.

A few moments later, Miss Emily appeared. She glared down the hallway in my direction. Then she inspected some of the furniture and some of the portraits I had cleaned and dusted. Apparently, she was satisfied.

"I have put a clock in your room," she said. "Make sure you keep it wound up so it doesn't stop in the middle of the night and you don't know what time it is in the morning.

"Dinner will be at five promptly," she added. "I expect you to come to the table looking clean."

"But where do I wash? All I can get is cold water in my bathroom and there is no place to take a shower or a bath," I complained.

"We don't take showers," she said. "Once a week we take a bath in the pantry. Luther will bring in the tub and fill it with water he heats over the fire."

"Once a week? In the pantry? People don't live like this anymore," I protested. "They have hot and cold running water and they have nice-smelling soaps and they bathe far more often than once a week."

"Oh, I know how people live today," she said with that cold smile on her lips, "especially women with their fancy smelling perfumes and seductive clothing. Don't you know that the devil won Eve's trust by appealing to her vanity and that ever since that hateful day, our vanity has been the devil's doorway to our souls? Lipstick and makeup and pretty combs, lace dresses and jewelry . . . all devices to fan temptation and drive men to the promontory of lust. They fall," she chanted, "oh how they fall and they take us down with them, down into the fires of hell and damnation. You have been singed by the devil. I smell the odor of the black smoke. The faster you come to this realization yourself, the faster you will find redemption."

"That's not true," I cried. "I don't smell like something evil, and my baby won't have pointed ears!"