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Page 6.

Kate found another position, and spent many hours working every week. She and Tom were having sex several times a week, but life with him was becoming joyless. She put a good face on things and tried to please him, but the lack of railroad work and a few gambling losses around town made him increasingly despondent. In that state, he grew more morose and violent, until sometimes she feared him.

Her other position came to an end, and she soon found a new one. She left every morning at dawn, and came tiredly trudging up the stairs every evening after dark, to find him either gone out gambling and drinking, or passed out with his head down among bottles on the kitchen table. She was thinking about giving him her extra money, just to please him. But there weren’t that many toads in the world. She always kept enough of her earnings to buy food and pay the rent, and gave him the rest as he expected and demanded. She wished they were saving some, but it wasn’t her place to tell him what to do.

Months went by, and Kate realized she had missed her period. She was throwing up every morning. Tom had been terrible lately, and she expected the wonderful news would turn things around. Maybe it was time to play the trains again. That seemed to keep Tom’s spirits up and his mind focused. But she was tired of that life. They had run away from what was burned into her mind as that miserable, empty farm village of Washington, Iowa, with its long, desolate winters and inbred, narrow-minded religious bigots full of pretension and self-righteousness. Tom had been her soul-mate. It was he and she together against a world that did not understand their wild freedom. Tom and Kate loathed the little people who moved about in stolid, everyday gray little lives. She was running away, too, from the memory of her Eddie dying in that desolation during his second little day of life.

Eddie lay on his back in the crib, dressed in white, and waved his little hands fitfully like any baby. He seemed lusty at first, trying to stare up into the light with unseeing eyes the color of sea foam. His crying changed from energetic to a heartbroken little mewling, as if he knew something terrible was happening. How she held him, so close to her heart! He stopped crying. He wouldn’t feed. By noon on the second day of his life, he not only grew silent in her desperate embrace, while she comforted him and begged him to stay, but he grew limp and cooled in her arms. She sobbed and shrieked and threw herself on the floor holding her dead baby. She raised him to her breast, and tried pushing a milk-dripping nipple into his mouth. Tom screamed and ran out of the house in terror and despair. A neighbor woman pried the lifeless, chill little body from her naked breast after a time, and what happened from there she would never rightly remember. It was all a nightmarish haze. Tom finally came and held her, for hours it seemed, and it was the closest they two had ever been.

Always the disapproving eyes of her wealthy grandfather floated in her memory when she thought of that horrific time. He had disowned Kate not long after, when it became clear she and Tom were not cut out do farming.

Now Kate and Tom were finally going to be mother and father again. As the changes flushed through her body, filling her with new life, she started thinking of maybe settling down—all sorts of weird thoughts she wasn’t used to. A little house with a white picket fence in California. Why not? They couldn’t live on the run forever. Surely Tom would see that.

Kate understood she was different in how she felt in her relationships with other people. She knew she did not have much feeling about other people. This made her cling to Tom all the more, because she loved him. She could watch Tom shoot a man dead and not blink an eye. But Eddie was the tragedy of her life, the one point where she felt like other mothers. She could never let go of the little baby’s memory, but carried his image with her with an obsessive love that turned to anger and rage, and enabled her to hurt people like the toad-master without a moment’s hesitation.

She never expected the reaction she got when she opened the door. Tom had been drinking heavily. She found him sitting at the kitchen table with his glass and bottle, staring into nowhere. “What’s the matter, honey?” she said as she hung up her purse and bonnet. As he looked up at her, with a blank, lost gaze, she could not contain herself. She sat in his lap and put her arms around his head. “Darling, I have great news to tell you.”

He looked up, his eyes blinking as if he’d been napping. “What?”

“We are going to be parents.”

“What do you mean?”

She hugged him. “Things are going to be different.”

His reaction surprised her. He seemed numb. She wondered if he had bought some heroin from the Chinese down the street. “What is the matter, darling? Aren’t you happy? We’re going to have another child.”

He pulled her arms down from his neck. “I don’t want to go through that again.”

“Oh, honey, I understand how you feel. Our poor little Eddie…”

He pushed her away so that she almost fell, and rose. “Don’t speak of him again!”

“He was your son, Tom.” She stumbled against the table, bracing herself with both hands. This was entirely different than she had expected. “He is an angel in heaven, but he is still your son.”

Tom was cool. “I can’t stand this life anymore. I’m going to cage a pair of tickets so we can take the train across country. I’ve got the dark itch in my fingers, and I know I can get some money off those stupid guys. How are you going to work your end of it when your gut’s hanging out there like a bag of oats?”

“Honey, we can’t do that forever.” Seeing the frustration in his eyes, she thought of giving him her money for his tickets. She had nearly four hundred dollars set aside. But she didn’t want to do any more of that. She had not yet told her of the toad, and her plan to fleece more like him. “I can work as a domestic. You could take some little jobs here and there.”

“Doing what?” Tom banged his fist on the table. “What’s wrong with you? We live in this slum, and you want to raise children here?” He drew closer, so that she could smell tobacco and gin on his stained teeth. His eyes were red, and she could see the mixture of rage and worry in his features. His lower lip trembled. She felt sorry for him. She started to regret not taking precautions. Maybe she should get an abortion and wait for a better day. Maybe he was right. She didn’t see him haul back.

Out of the blue, Tom’s fist collided with her face, and she saw stars. From there on, it was all a blur. She went down, and he stood over her. She tried pleading with him as she lay on the dirty wooden floor that smelled faintly like railroad ties, but words would not come out. His boot landed in her side. At first he was not kicking her hard, just more or less rolling her over so he could slap her face back and forth with both palms. When she pulled her knees up to protect her stomach, and held her arms over her head, he yelled himself into an ever greater rage. She could not make out what he was yelling. At one point, when his face was close to her, and words exploded from his teeth, she punched him. He blinked stupidly and fell silent. She scrambled back and punched him again. He fell on his rear, sitting side-saddle on the floor holding his jaw with one hand and bracing himself behind with the other.

She staggered to her feet and ran. She made it as far as the back door. There, he tackled her. She had the door open and could feel the cold night air, which was a relief after the stuffy, smoky kitchen that stank of cabbage and puke. He hit her, like a bolt of lightning that made her stagger out onto the creaky wooden landing. As she held on to the stair rail with both hands, she saw in his eyes the utter lack of love or feelings for her and her condition. He kicked her, and she was dimly aware of rolling, banging her head, bouncing down the wooden stairs, head over heels—amid splintering wood and people exclaiming in horror nearby—into oblivion.

Gradually, she woke into a hallucinatory state. The nausea and darkness told her, in caressing voices like nuns singing, that she was in the depths of an opium dream. Beyond that sphere of laudanum, she felt distant pain like broken furniture across a room. Her vision was blurry, and shadows moved around her. She smelled camphor and other pungent aromas, including the gnawing odor of hospital alcohol. Dimly, she thought she must still be alive, but something was badly broken and most of her body was utterly numb. She tried to signal to the shadows moving around her, but they had tied her hands and feet to the bed in which she lay, and she could not raise a hand though she tugged weakly. She could turn her head to look at her immoveable hand, and for a moment her near vision swam into focus so that she saw the hospital gauze with which they had bound her wrist to the bed post. But it was all a mystery to her, and she stared at her hand, and the wrist, and the gauze without being able to make sense of them. She tugged at the other hand, without looking, and it too seemed to be tied.

She heard a man sobbing in a nearby room, and voices comforting him. “My God, what has happened to her? She was just going out for some groceries, and I heard a terrible scream as she fell down the stairs.”

A stern, older woman of authority said: “I am sorry she lost your baby, Mr. Morgan. If she lives, she will never be able to have children again.”

Kate awoke a long time later. Weeks had passed. The pain, the withdrawal from opium, had all passed. Miraculously, she had not suffered any broken bones. She sat in a high-backed wicker wheel chair with great big-spoked wheels with rubber tires. Someone had dressed her in a flannel gown, and a blanket lay across her lap. She was alone in a quiet solarium overlooking a green lawn, and the city skyline loomed beyond that in glorious sunshine. She called out, and when nobody came, she threw the blanket aside and tried to stand up. Her legs would not obey, and she uttered a convulsive scream. Paralyzed! In terror, she gripped the table beside her and pulled herself erect, falling on the cold floor as she did so. Sobbing, she crawled away from the wheel chair. Two nurses with white nunnish wimples came running. “Mrs. Morgan! You’ve fallen from your chair!” said one. They helped her to her feet.

“Am I paralyzed?”

“Why no,” said the other. “You’re weak from weeks lying in bed.”

Kate, over the next few days, tested her legs—first one, then the other, and kept alternating, lifting them, feeling her rubbery muscles—but she was determined to get out of here, to start walking, to run for miles and miles and get her strength back.

“We thought we were going to lose you a few times.”

“You had a terrible infection, and you know—” They both looked at her sadly. “You lost the baby. And you won’t be able to have any more.”

Kate remembered all the things she had overheard, and fell back into the wheelchair sobbing. She cried her heart out, and the two women left her alone.