VESSY CLEARED the dishes after the noon meal and then brought the bedsheets and covers upstairs in her wiry arms. She was a mountain girl and used to steep walking, so at the top of the stairs she wasn’t winded at all. Mrs. White, in her bedroom pulling on fine gloves and checking items in her purse, didn’t look up when the cook came through the door, just said, “Mrs. Hall won’t be able to tend Madeline today. You’ll watch her for us.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Vessy had wanted to go to her rented one-room house to boil her own laundry in the yard. Usually she was off between one-thirty and four, when she came in to start supper.
“Did you hear Madeline singing with the music teacher this morning?”
“I was out back stackin’ stovewood.”
Mrs. White’s gloved hands worked like mourning doves as she picked at a spray of pills on her dressing table and placed them one by one into a little nickel-plated box she kept in her purse. “Well, this morning Mr. Stover said she sings just like a little bird and has a natural sense of timing.”
Vessy pursed her lips and slid them to one side of her face. “That so? Like she already been taught.”
Mrs. White gave her an appraising look. “Well, I’m going into town to shop at Welford’s.”
“Yep.”
“Listen for her when she gets up from her nap. Don’t let her over-sleep because she’ll be hard to put down at eight.”
Vessy placed the sheets in the bedroom armoire and listened to Mrs. White’s slow tread on the stairs. When the car started up in the drive and backed toward the street, she bent to pick up a cream-colored pair of gloves discarded in the wastebasket and pulled them on. They were a short style that betrayed her freckled skin. Vessy was twenty-seven years old, had taken care of herself, and still had her teeth, except for a molar knocked out when her father punched her for leaving a saddled horse in the rain. She’d wanted to get married more than anything, but being a bit plain and more than a bit plain-spoken, it took her a long time to get someone to court her. She might have stayed in the eastern Kentucky mountains forever, but one Sunday her mother served an old, undercooked pork roast and killed the whole family with food poisoning, except for her, and she lay on the back porch and puked for two days before a neighbor found and rescued her. The man courting her stopped the relationship, believing she was a bad-luck woman, and that had hardened her outlook on life. Vessy admired her hands for a moment, then pulled off the gloves, dropping them back into the can. She might ask for them later but couldn’t bear Mrs. White thinking that she’d been stealing out of the trash. Then again, what need did she have of dress gloves? To handle stovewood? She spat into the can and went down to wash the dishes.
At two she walked into the child’s room and frowned at the ruffled bed, the expensive small furniture, the assembly of dolls lined up against the wall. Pulling a chair next to the bed, she studied the girl, narrowing her eyes at the flawless pink fingernails that showed no splits or coarse cuticles, no signs of roughness. She turned the sleeping child’s palm into a beam of sunlight and examined the skin. She woke up and pulled her hand back to rub her eyes.
“Little miss, you want to put on your nice new sundress?”
The girl sat up and smiled at her. Vessy pulled off her short stockings and ribboned pinafore. The child’s knees were what she wanted to see, and the skin there was smooth and white as milk. She dropped the sundress over her easy as a lampshade and then sat her on the bed to buckle on a pair of brown sandals, cupping the feet in her rough palms and feeling the soft bottoms. “Let’s see those toes.” Vessy flashed a playful smile and the girl giggled, drawing back her feet and sitting on them.
“I bet you want Vessy to play little piggy with them tootsies?”
“No,” the girl said, but she still held out her feet for the sandals.
Vessy wiggled the big toe and saw not a callus, dirt stain, or crookedness. She examined her ankles for scuffs and little scars. She held and turned the feet the way she would examine sweet potatoes at the market. Then she put on the sandals and led the girl downstairs for a glass of milk and a slice of sugar bread. They sat at the little porcelain breakfast table set by a window, where Vessy usually enjoyed the view down the hill toward the river. But now her eyes took in every detail of this child, sensing that something was badly wrong. Suddenly, she jerked up her right arm and feinted at the girl’s head as though she would strike her. Madeline looked up at the open fingers, but did not flinch.
“Orphanage my foot,” Vessy said under her breath. She knew orphans, white and black, and every one would jerk back and cower if anybody raised a hand to them. Orphans wore no shoes, or wrong-sized shoes in which their feet grew crooked. Their feet bore calluses, craters of sores, bite scars, toenails stobbed black, orange dirt stain, ankle meat clipped to white bone. Knees were crosshatched from working in crops or playing in common dirt, fingers stretched out by bucket or firewood chores. When Vessy rested her hand down on the fine hair, the child leaned into her touch and smiled. “Sweet Jesus,” Vessy whispered. “Where’d they find this baby?”