Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Thirty Eight
Two years came and went before Taryn let it slip that Phillip had gone up to Rotary house, his cap in hand. The proud and usually unchangeable man pleaded and begged. There was no doctor of course, nothing so grand, and no hope that any dwindling family coffers would be drained in having one come from town. Any of the woman from Rotary house would do though, most knew enough to be a better hand at sewing up such a wound than an old groundskeeper and his inept offspring. When his request was denied and he was also informed that his services as groundskeeper would no longer be needed Phillip demanded medicine and proper bandages as severance. Phillip left that encounter empty handed.
Felecia didn’t remember a lot from those weeks spent sleeping on a make shift cot in a corner of Phillip’s living room, but she remembered being held down, nearly sat on really. She remembered Phillip’s still choked off voice speaking calmly to her, explaining how the wounds on her lips wouldn’t stay closed and how stitches were needed. There was no sort of pain killers on hand and no way for Felecia to adequately express her terror. The concussion still left her seeing double, her right arm was wrapped up and tied to a couple of lengths of broom handle. Her ribcage was wrapped in old, torn shirts. The groundskeeper was coming at her with a curved needle used for working leather and strung with fishing line.
The sickness came on the heels of that ordeal, the terrified agony of having to cough but not daring to. Waking up coughing anyway and spewing broth and water and mucus all the while trying not to tear any of the ragged seems stitched into her face. Fevers, long ugly lucid affairs had been common since that night in the village but they were worse during the sickness.
Mother came by Phillip’s small house. Felecia wasn’t even sure it actually happened, not at first and even then, she argued with herself how much of what she thought she remembered was what actually happened or what she imagined in her feverish state. Again, two years later Taryn filled Felecia in. Her memory hadn’t failed her that night.
Mother’s silver scales shined against the moonlight in the doorway as she removed her shawl. She came in, grimacing at the spectacle of the place, and the smells no doubt. Phillip and his boy exited the house and Felecia was left there, laying on the make shift cot, propped up against an ottoman near the hearth fire. The woman who had been mostly a shadow in Felecia’s life kept to those shadows at first. She inspected the place and found it lacking and then came closer, not to hug or comfort her daughter, but to inspect her as well.
Cold, delicate fingers brushed Felecia’s fevered brow, they pushed painfully at her side and her still broken arm wrapped up in its crude tourniquet. There was a familiar tsking sound until the latest poultice was lifted from Felecia’s mouth. Mother’s breathing hitched a few times and then the water works began in earnest. Felecia was teetering between life and death and her mother fell onto her injured body in a pile of worthless sobs. Her good hand found its way to a carefully presented crest of hair nearly glued in place and lined with familiar lines of fine beads and pearls. The strands of precious preoccupation Felecia’s mother still chose to weave into her hair could have fed everyone in the village for an entire winter, maybe two.
Felecia found her way to doing what she always did with her mother, being the rational one and the truly comforting member of their mutually exclusive pack. She took her tired, weary voice out for a spin and instantly regretted the effort. “It looks worse than it is, mother.”
There was a lengthy, almost interminable period of continued sobbing and even mournful wailing before mother regained enough composure to speak. “You’ve been disfigured, girl. There is nothing worse than that!”
Mother pulled away and stood up, she took a few medicine bottles and a half of a loaf of carefully wrapped bread and set them down nearby. “You should have come back that next day. Mother was waiting, all you had to do was bend the knee and all would have been forgiven.”
Felecia didn’t need to think long on a response, not with the fever raging and her grasp on the real world and what was imagination so loose. “All you needed to do was stand up and let me stay. All you needed to do was stand up, ever, and she would have stopped hitting us, stopped belittling me, stopped tearing me apart. All you ever had to do was be our mother and everything could have changed, for all of us.”
Staying true to what mattered to her, Mother ignored those damnations and stuck to what always mattered to her. “All you ever had to do was be obedient, you could have lived a real life, been married to a gentleman and moved off to the mainland maybe. Now, if one of these peasants hasn’t already rutted you, they surely will now, you’re no good for anything more, not now, not mangled like that.”
Felecia thought about what more could have and maybe should have been said in that moment, she had a lot of spare time and awful, sober moments in the night to think about strategic counters or social rebuttals over the years since then. All Felecia had to offer at the time was her resume and her anger. “I know how to mend a fence, and build one too. I know how to make candles, sew garments, make tents and build houses. I know how to tend livestock, raise and feed chickens and goats. I know how to hunt wild game and to fish from the beach head. I’ve learned all of that in a year! What have you learned, mother?”
“My place, Felecia. I learned my place, a long time ago, before you were ever born. I learned it the hard way but I didn’t throw away my chance at redemption. I had a good life and the sea took that from me. As for you, you took everything your good life had to offer and you threw it away for the sake of pride.”
Felecia was exhausted and thoroughly worn out from the ordeal, she had nothing left to offer as mother arranged the medicine bottles and carefully laid out the half loaf of bread. “Mother doesn’t know I’m here, if she did, I’d likely as not be left out here to fend for myself like you. I brought what I could, I hope it helps. Phillip was always kind to me, regardless of his status, he was a good man and a friend of your fathers. He did you a genuine service and you nearly got him killed for it. If he wants you as a distraction now, it seems only fitting you oblige. Otherwise, well, looking the way you do, it’s not like you have any value at all.”
Felecia couldn’t help it then, not with the pneumonia, not with the fever, not with the lingering double vision or the patchwork of misery her face had become. Felecia cried and let the despair soak in. Her mother was only too happy to smile for the first time and pat the crying girl on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, he’s a good man, if not a recently fired one, but resourceful and no doubt willing since he has you trussed up here.”
Felecia moaned piteously and then yelled at the woman fussing over her. “Get out!”
Mother left Felecia in her dingy world and likely without a second thought as she wrapped her shawl around her head and shoulders and saw her self out of the awful little hovel.