Chapter XXIII: Anne Christie’s Story

We all turned upon the nurse. Beneath our wondering gaze the bright color rose high, flooding her fair face; then receded once more, leaving her very pale. But she faced us bravely.

“I--I----You see, I’ve hated so to talk about it all, even to think about it, and especially this last two weeks.” She spoke to all of us, but her big violet eyes were fixed upon Doctor Somers. “And now, to make you-all understand, I’ll have to go back to the very beginning, I’m afraid, and tell you about me. You won’t mind?”

I suppressed an exclamation. Truly this quiet, somnolent nurse had changed! I wondered what explanation she was about to offer for her queer conduct of that night before the murder, when the name of “Roaring Lafe” Rutledge had driven her from the house; of her excitement next morning, when she had fainted at the news of Doctor Gaskell’s death. And I wondered the more what had moved her to volunteer any information about herself, for I remembered--and the thought had puzzled me more than once--that never, save once, during all her six months at Fort House, had she spoken so much as a word about her past life.

“You won’t mind?” she asked again, eyes wistfully fixed upon Doctor Somers. “And you’ll try to make allowances--not to think little of me? I----”

She stopped and bit her lips, then went bravely on, slender hands clenched at her sides.

“I was born in the mountains, up near the Tennessee border, in a log cabin on Lick Run. My mother came from the settlements; I never knew my father. He died when I was a baby. I’ve heard mother say he was educated; that he’d been to college, even. But why they went up into the mountains to live she never would tell me. All I know is that she wouldn’t go back to the settlements even when he died. A tree fell on him, mother said. When I was a little girl I used to go out and climb up to the very peak of Snagtooth Mountain and sit beside his grave and wonder--about so many things! He was buried there, on the very top of the mountain, under a big, lone pine tree.

“After that we were very poor, mother and I. I used to go barefoot, summer and winter; and so did she. We never wore shoes, either of us, for years and years.” She looked down at her slender, high-arched feet, now so trimly shod, as if in wonder at their being covered.

We were all very still. Somers’ deep-set gray-green eyes were inscrutable. I blew my nose hard, seeing in fancy that little slim girl, barefooted and ragged, huddled on the peak of a wind-swept mountain beside the grave of the father she could not remember, hugging bare, brown knees and staring off across the jutting hills, wondering about so many things!

“I wore the same dress for two years,” she went on dreamily. Her tragic eyes were all for Doctor Somers; she was telling her story to him, watching him for sympathy, for approval, for scorn. She would tell him all. I fancied I could read the determination in her white, set face. And then, if he turned from her--well!

“I wore the same dress for two years. Mother patched it and patched it--poor mother--until I’d forgotten its original color. There were homespun patches, I remember, and blue-jean ones, bits of flour sacking and burlap. We were very poor. There was only the small piece of cleared land, and mother wasn’t strong enough even to take care of that. The weeds grew higher than the corn. And she’d take my father’s ax and try so hard to chop down a little tree and blister her poor hands and cry.

“We couldn’t live that way. Then this Lafe Rutledge began coming. They called him Roaring Lafe even then, fourteen years ago. He was a great, big man and strong! I remember once there were two city men out hunting. They were so wonderfully dressed, I thought! I’d never seen such clothes. They stopped for a drink of water from our spring and stood talking with mother. She was so pretty, my mother! And they talked and laughed, and seemed so surprised that mother spoke like a lady, had read books, and everything. And she stood there with her poor cheeks so pretty and pink, and Lafe Rutledge came through the woods behind these two men, looking as big as both of them together, with his great beard blowing in the wind--it was black then--and he just made an awful, roaring noise like some great bear. Then he ran at those poor men and caught them, each by his neck, and swung them right up off the ground and carried them off like that, at arms’ length. And then we heard a scuffling and sliding, as he just threw them down the mountain, and he came back, laughing, and threw their guns after them. I ran away and hid. I was always afraid of him.

“He used to come like that, twice every week, with his big boots greased, his hair slicked down and shiny, and bear’s grease and cheap perfumery in his beard. I remember still how it smelled. I was afraid of him, and I think mother was, too. He didn’t know how old he was; he couldn’t write or figure, and he couldn’t read much. I suppose he was fifty, even then. He’d had two wives already, and both were dead.

“I don’t know how it came about. Perhaps she did it for me. We were very poor--starving, almost, and Lafe Rutledge was rich, as the mountain folks count it. We didn’t know then how he made his money! Anyway, mother married him. That was twelve years ago. She married him, and we went to live in his house on the Devil’s Branch. She was his third, he said, with that awful, roaring laugh he had; but, then, he was her second, so that was all right. Poor mother! After all she’d told me about my kind, gentle father, to marry Roaring Lafe Rutledge! I hated it even then; I ran away and hid and wouldn’t go there until I was starved to it. But I didn’t know, I couldn’t understand then, what it meant to her.

“And yet the man was good to her, according to his lights. He never beat her; he bought her a new dress every year. But he used to go down to the store and get drunk, and then come home running his mule and beating the poor beast. He was dreadfully cruel to animals, and it was hard enough for any horse or mule to carry him; he was so big and heavy. And he’d come up the Branch, beating the mule and shouting and roaring worse than a wild bull; that’s why they called him Roaring Lafe, I suppose. And then he’d sit by the fireplace, with a jug at his elbow, and he’d drink and drink. We didn’t dare go to bed; mother would sit beside me in a corner, very still--frightened, I suppose, just as I was frightened--until at last he’d drop over right where he sat. Then we’d drag his boots off and get him to bed some way.”

She stopped and wet her lips, looking round at us in apology. “You see, I’ve had plenty of experience in caring for drunken men,” she said. Somers flinched visibly.

“It was like a nightmare,” she went on, “and it only got worse. Mother got thinner and thinner and whiter and whiter. She knew long before I did; she tried to keep it from me, but it wasn’t a year before I found it out, too. Lafe Rutledge was running a still. He made moonshine whisky up on the slope of Snagtooth Mountain, made it by the barrel and sold it all over that country. And nobody dared do anything about it; they were all afraid of him.

“Ten years ago the revenue officers made a big raid up there, and they nearly caught my--my stepfather. He shot one of them and killed him. He had to hide out in the laurel for months and months, but they never caught him, and pretty soon he’d started up another still in a new place. Then he came home to live, quite openly. I think that killing had been too much for mother. She died about six months later.

“I lived on with him. There was nothing else to do. I was growing up, and I was strong; mother’d taught me to cook; I had to stay; I’d nowhere to go, and I was afraid of him. When he was angry with me he’d threaten to get married again and bring another woman home with him to keep me from getting ‘uppity.’

“And then Doctor Gaskell came. He was on a hunting trip, and my stepfather brought him home to supper one night. I’d never supposed there were such men in the world. He was wonderful! I lay awake all night, just thinking about him. He told my stepfather he was forty-nine, I remember; and that was just the age my father would have been if he’d lived. I lay there--I was only eighteen--and pretended Doctor Gaskell was really my father, and we were just visiting up there, just camping out, and in a few days we’d go back home, down the mountains, into the settlements, which mother used to talk about sometimes, into a real house, with carpets and hard-wood floors and a bathtub and a furnace and all the wonderful furnishings I’d dreamed about and never seen. It was a very beautiful dream.

“Things were worse than ever just then; my stepfather was ‘sitting up,’ as they call it, with a widow on Lick Run, and I just couldn’t bear to think of another woman in the house where mother had died. And so I slipped away and went to Doctor Gaskell’s tent on the other side of the mountain, and I talked to him. I’d never been to school a day; for one thing, we were too poor, and I had no dress to wear, and then my stepfather wouldn’t let me. He didn’t believe in schooling; said it made women high-toned and finickin. He used to laugh and sneer at my poor mother, because she wasn’t strong, and say it was book learning made her that way. But mother’d taught me a lot.

“And Doctor Gaskell was so good to me! If he’d really been my own father he couldn’t have been better. He offered to take me down to the settlements with him and find me work there and fix it so I could go to night school. I didn’t dare at first; I told him Roaring Lafe would kill us both. But he just laughed. That was the most wonderful thing of all--he wasn’t afraid of Lafe Rutledge! Until then I’d supposed everybody in the world must be afraid of him.

“So, the end of it was, I slipped out in the night, and Doctor Gaskell took me with him down the mountain and into Asheville. I was so frightened; I thought that must be the biggest city in the world. I’d never dreamed of anything so grand. And we took the train there and went to Raleigh, and the doctor got a place for me in the hospital as an attendant. I studied at night and worked hard! After a year or two I got into the nurses’ training school, and I went through it and graduated. The whole world seemed going just right for me; I was very happy.”

She paused and sighed. Her dreamy eyes seemed to dwell on that vision of past happiness.

“But it didn’t last,” she went on. “I knew all the time, some way, that it couldn’t last. I don’t know how he found out, but one night my stepfather came to the hospital and asked for me, just as I was going on duty; I was charge nurse on a ward then. I came out, wondering who it could be, for I hadn’t many friends, and thinking perhaps Doctor Gaskell might have come down from Pinelands--I hadn’t seen him for a year almost--and it was Roaring Lafe! I just stood there dumb. He told me to get my bundle and come with him. I was frightened to death. I’ve been afraid of him all my life. But I think I’d have found courage to refuse, to call the police, to do _something_, rather than go back with him, but he just stood there, pulling at that great, bushy beard, and he laughed that awful, roaring laugh, so that the orderly ran out to see what the noise was. Then he caught my arm--I wore the mark of it for a month--and dragged me close and whispered in my ear. The smell of raw corn whisky was on him, and his eyes were terrible.

“‘You come along quiet,’ he told me. ‘If you don’t, to-night that mis’able furriner, Gaskell, will git his comeuppance! I’ll go plumb f’om here to Pinelands, a-puppose t’ waylay him; I’ll fill his gizzard with buckshot. You comin’, you huzzy, or do you aim t’ stay here with these furriners in th’ settlemints?’

“So I went with him. What else could I do? I could have screamed for help, though I don’t believe he’d have laid his hand on me in anger. But I knew he’d keep his word. I knew he’d leave me there at the hospital and go straight here to Pinelands and kill Doctor Gaskell, just as he said. And I couldn’t bear that, after all he’d done. Why, I wouldn’t be alive, if it weren’t for him! Because I might just as well be dead, as buried up there in the hills, as I was till he came. And I’ve always made believe in my own mind that Doctor Gaskell was my own father come to life again; I’ve always thought of him as a father; it was just like hearing my own father had been killed, that morning, when you told us, Mr. Uhlman.”

She turned to me, as if to apologize for her fainting that fateful morning, and her big violet eyes were tragic.

“So I went back,” she said, as she took up her pitiful tale. “I went back to the log house on the Devil’s Branch and put by my nice clothes and wore homespun again and cooked salt pork and corn pone. At night I waited alone for my stepfather to come home, shouting and roaring. I used to sit huddled in a corner, shaking all over, while he drank raw corn liquor until he fell over, dead drunk, and I pulled off his boots and put him to bed. And all the while I was frightened, frightened out of my wits, though he never laid his hands on me. But there was a devil peeping out of his eyes at me. Oh, he’s a terrible man!

“And yet I do believe that he thought he was doing the right thing by me. He always used to say he’d saved my soul by bringing me back there.

“It went on from week to week and month to month, for three whole years. At first it was unbearable, and I used to cry all night and think of killing myself. After a while I got sort of deadened and lost interest in things. The days slipped by, and I dropped into a daze and went on like some machine, without even thinking any more. I put on flesh, and my stepfather gloated over the fact, saying how strong I was, as if I’d been a horse or a mule! He insisted that I was outgrowing my finical ways and book learning, and getting to be a healthy, honest woman. If he could have had my poor mother earlier, he used to say, before she was plumb ruined with education, she’d have been healthy, too. And even that didn’t rouse me much. I felt so dull and stupid, and I got so I’d sleep all the time. There are women like that in the mountains, strange, fat, stupid-looking creatures, with wide, flat faces, who just sleep and mope around all the time, like cows, without ever caring about anything. They look almost deformed; they’re unnatural. Some of them have great goiters. I used to wonder if I’d ever be like them, but I didn’t care much, even for that.”

Her voice fell. Behind the impassive, commonplace words I felt such a bitterness of desolation, such a gripping, terrible memory of those monotonous, lifeless days, that my throat closed upon the words of sympathy I strove to utter.

Doctor Somers raised his head, his gray-green eyes impersonally alight. “I thought so! A goiterous region! Mighty interesting, that! You know there is a similar region in the mountains of Switzerland, where most of the women have goiter. We used to think it was the water; but we know better now. I must go up there and investigate. You haven’t any struma, Miss Christie,” said Somers, stooping forward to touch her rounded throat, at which the girl blushed vividly, “but you developed a condition of hypothyroidism instead.” And he went on didactically into a maze of “hormones” and “endocrines” and “internal secretions,” which nobody understood. “But you’re safely out of that hole now,” he concluded practically, “and your condition is practically cured, thanks to the thyroid I gave you. You’ve changed wonderfully in just this ten days, child! You’re a hundred per cent brighter, less somnolent. And,” as if the idea had just struck him, “you’ve grown mighty pretty. Why, Anne, child--you’re really beautiful!”

The girl’s first name came from his lips unhesitatingly, as if he thought of her thus, and not as Miss Christie. His tone was one of naïve surprise at this discovery.

“You’re a raving beauty, Anne!” he repeated.

The girl blushed vividly, the bright color sweeping up to the very edge of her fair hair. Her eyes, which had been so bravely, so candidly fixed upon Somers throughout her pitiful story, dropped modestly and were veiled by long, curved lashes.

“Do you think so?” she asked demurely.