They Call Her Dana Read online

  They Call Her Dana

  Jennifer Wilde

  Book One

  The Waif

  Chapter One

  I HAD THE DREAM AGAIN during the night, and it was the same as always, vague and puzzling and pleasantly disturbing. He was standing in the mist and his eyes looked searchingly into mine and there was water nearby, a great river, and then he took my hands in his and squeezed them and pulled me to him. He smiled then, and then the mist swallowed us both up and I felt that peculiar feeling, warm and kind of itchy, and sweet, like warm, sweet honey flowing in my veins. I moaned and turned in bed and the old springs creaked loudly and I woke up, still feeling that delicious feeling, groggy, thinking I must be going barmy, dreaming that same dream over and over again.

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and the springs creaked once more. The corn husks that filled the mattress rustled noisily. It was still dark, although black was lightening to gray and I could see the outlines of the old dressing table and a murky silver blur that was the mirror. Almost dawn. Time to get up. Naked under the single worn sheet, I lingered in bed, thinking about the dream. Mama Lou could probably explain it to me. Folks in the swamp called her a witch and were scared of her, but they still went to see her whenever they needed potions or ointments or herbs. Mama Lou had the sight, and she knew things beyond the ken of ordinary folk. Why should I keep dreaming of the same man? He was tall and good-looking, I knew that, and he was wearing fine clothes, but I could never recall his features. Strange though it might seem, I knew that I would recognize him immediately were I to see him in real life.

  Stuff and nonsense, I thought, climbing out of bed. He was just a figment of my imagination, and what chance would I ever have to meet a man like that here in the swamps? The rough oafs who lived hereabout certainly didn’t wear elegant breeches and fine white silk shirts, and not a one of them had ever made me feel so … so taut, like I was stretched on a rack, aching pleasantly, suspended, waiting for something wonderful that was bound to happen as soon as the ache exploded inside.

  Shadows were fading, outlines growing clearer, and a faint pink and gold mist was blending with the gray. No need to light the candle. I dipped the rag into the ewer of water I kept on the rickety old dressing table and washed myself. The water was wonderfully cool. My breasts seemed to swell, nipples like tight buds as I rubbed the damp rag over them. Why did I keep dreaming about him, and why couldn’t I remember what he looked like? It was unsettling … and kind of spooky. Was I really going barmy? Wudn’t likely, I told myself. I had just turned seventeen three months ago, and that was much too young to be losing your mind.

  Forget it, Dana, I scolded. Get dressed. Get on with your chores. You ain’t got time to get all fanciful, thinking about some mysterious man who keeps poppin’ up in your dreams. Your problem is you ain’t had no man yet and your cherry is gettin’ too ripe. You need a tonic. Maybe Mama Lou will give you one when you go to fetch Ma’s medicine.

  I pulled on my ragged old white petticoat. The hem of the full skirt was torn and uneven and ended at midcalf, and the bodice was much too tight across my bosom, although I’d let it out twice already. Fancy owning a new petticoat that wudn’t three years old. Fancy owning a new dress, I added, reaching for the tattered pink cotton frock that was the only one I owned. It was much too short, too, and the neckline that had been demure at fourteen was almost indecent now, barely containing my breasts. If I were to sneeze too hard, they’d likely pop right out. I adjusted the short sleeves that fell off the shoulder and smoothed the cloth around my waist. It was a snug fit, all right, but the dress wouldn’t stand another lettin’ out. I was going to have to get another one before long, else I’d have to clothe myself with leaves, like Eve.

  The first thin rays of sunlight were slanting through the window now, all wavery and weak, and I could see myself in the murky mirror hanging over the dressing table. I examined myself critically, feeling the same disappointment I always felt when I was vain enough to study my reflection.

  “Men are going to look at you, Dana,” Ma had told me. “Men are going to want you, so beware, child.”

  Ma was wise, of course, and I loved her dearly, but she didn’t have to warn me about men. They’d been looking at me since I turned thirteen, and I had long since learned to deal with them. You had to be sharp and you had to be quick and you had to be prepared to fight if need be. Men looked at me, all right, but I really couldn’t understand why. I wasn’t at all fetching. My hair was neither blond nor brown but, instead, a curious combination of the two, the color of dark honey, tumbling to my shoulders in thick, unruly waves. My eyes were hazel, flecked with gold, and my cheekbones were funny-looking, high and prominent. My lips were too full and too pink, and my complexion was a deep creamy tan.

  I was too tall, with long legs and a narrow waist with far too many embarrassing curves above and below. Why would any man want to look at someone as plain and gawky as me? Beat all, it did. I guess men didn’t really care what a girl looked like. They just wanted to get into her pants. They were a horny bunch, the lot of ’em. A girl had to watch out for herself all the time if she wanted to keep her virtue intact, not that many girls did here in the swamps.

  Running my fingers through my hair to work out the tangles, I unlocked my door and started down the creaky old backstairs. My attic room was off to itself, originally intended for a maid’s room. Clem O’Malley had never been able to afford a Negro maid, but he didn’t really need one. He had me. I’d earned my keep ever since I was old enough to remember. Stepping into the kitchen, I shoved waves from my temple and got the fire started in the old pot-bellied black iron stove that gave me so much trouble. I poked at the coals, prodding them, and when they finally caught and began to glow, I sighed and shut the door and set a kettle of water on to boil.

  I moved down the narrow, dingy hall and stepped outside, pausing on the sagging front porch. It was already warm and sultry, with wavering rays of sunlight streaming through the cypress trees and making pale golden patterns on the dirt. No grass grew here. Our farm, if it could be dignified with such a name, was completely surrounded by swamp. I could hear the pigs snorting unpleasantly in their sty, and the chickens clucked impatiently. How I longed to flee. How I longed just to take off and discover that world I knew existed beyond the swamps. One day, I promised myself. One day I would know something besides these swamps, this squalor.

  I crossed the yard to the old barn. It was small, almost tumbling down, and I smelled damp hay and manure as I pushed open the door. Mollie stood in her stall, chomping with contentment on hay. She lifted her head and mooed when she saw me. She was a placid, stupid creature with huge bovine eyes and a mottled gray-tan coat, utterly indifferent as I picked up the tin bucket and pulled the three-legged wooden stool into place. I gripped the udders firmly and squeezed and tugged, and streams of milk spewed into the bucket. It was almost full when I had finished. Later I would separate the cream and churn it into butter. Mollie was still chomping hay as I left the barn and carried the milk inside to the larder.

  Milking done, it was time to feed the chickens. They fretted noisily as I passed the coop on my way to the dilapidated old shed. A rat darted across the dirt floor as I reached for the chipped porcelain pan. It didn’t bother me in the least. You soon got used to rats, and this one hadn’t even been that large. I filled the pan with feed and stepped back outside. The Spanish moss hung limp and lifeless on the cypress trees, not a breeze stirring, and I could feel the perspiration on my body. Hardly daylight, and it was muggy as could be and I didn’t have a single thing to look forward to.

  Seventeen years old, I thought, and trapped. Out of bed when the sky was still dark. Start the fire, milk the cow, feed the chickens and cook b
reakfast for Clem O’Malley and his two sons, take a tray to Ma, clean the kitchen, sweep the floor and do my other chores and check on Ma and then start preparing lunch. Work and worry all day long, ignoring my stepfather’s brooding silences and surly manners and avoiding my stepbrothers as much as possible, fighting them off if necessary. Seventeen years old, and I was little better off than a Negro slave. At least my cherry was still intact, and that was quite an accomplishment for these parts. If a lass wasn’t married and a mother at seventeen, chances were she’d long since been despoiled, often by some man in her own family.

  One day, perhaps, I’d give myself to a man, but he wouldn’t be one of the oafs from these parts. He would be tall and clean and speak in a soft, cultured voice. He would wear fine clothes and look at me with love and see something besides a piece of tail. He would see Dana O’Malley, someone special, someone with a heart full of love and a head full of dreams. He would help me make those dreams come true. He wouldn’t laugh at me because I wanted to better myself. He wouldn’t scoff because I could read and write and speak French as well as English.

  Those accomplishments weren’t worth spit here in the swamps, I realized that, but out there in the world beyond, there must be lots of girls who were able to write their own names and read a page of the almanac without stumbling over too many of the words. How patiently Ma had taught me when I was a child, and how Clem had resented it. No need for me to learn to read and write, it would just give me airs. No need to be able to jabber in a foreign language either. Ma had been born French. I had spoken both languages from infancy on.

  The chickens squacked noisily as I opened the gate and stepped inside the coop, and I was immediately surrounded by savage creatures with wildly flapping wings who clucked and pecked and did acrobatics in the air as I scattered handfuls of feed over the ground. Nasty, ill-tempered, greedy beasts, they were. I had been fiercely pecked many a time as I gathered eggs, but I still refused to wring their necks when it came time to take some to market. Jake did that, and with considerable relish, I might add. Jake was a bad one, a bully, genuinely vicious, and Randy wasn’t far behind. Randy was twenty-one, Jake twenty-three, both hellions of the first stamp. If I was known in the swamps as the little wildcat, it was because since early childhood I had had to learn to defend myself against that pair.

  Actually, Jake and Randy didn’t bother me nearly as much as Clem. Clem had never laid a hand on me, treated me with surly disdain, yet somehow I felt he was a far greater menace than either of his sons. I had seen that brooding speculation in his eyes when he thought he wasn’t being observed. I was safe as long as Ma was in the house, but if anything happened to her … I hurled yet another handful of feed into the air. The chickens flapped with frenzy, fighting each other for the grain.

  Ma had had another bad turn last night. I had spent over an hour with her, holding her hand, bathing her brow with a damp cloth, trying to coax her into drinking a few sips of milk. I tried not to think of the racking cough, the blood-streaked handkerchief she had tried to conceal. It was … it was just the fever, I told myself, and it would soon pass. Ma would be all right. I tried to believe that. I had to believe that. Without Ma I couldn’t possibly endure this life. It was just the fever, and Ma would soon be on the mend. Ma wasn’t yet forty, but she was already an old woman, so thin, so drawn, her honey-colored hair limp and streaked with gray. Life with Clem O’Malley had done that to her. Why, oh why, had she ever married him?

  He had been an overseer at one of the larger plantations, I knew, a strapping Irishman with two unruly young sons whose mother had died giving birth to the younger. Ma was barely twenty, just recently widowed, and I had been born four months after she married Clem O’Malley. He wasn’t my father, although he had given me his name. He had lost his job at the plantation when I was still an infant in arms, and we had all come here to the swamps shortly thereafter, poor white trash as far as the rest of the world was concerned, scratching out an existence raising pigs and chickens on this poor excuse for a farm.

  Ma never talked about her life before Clem, quickly changed the subject whenever I tried to ask her about it. I had never known anything but these swamps, this run-down farm, the filth, the squalor, but Ma had known a much finer world, I sensed that. Long ago, when I was still a very little girl, I remember her speaking of fine carriages and gleaming silk gowns and perfumed gardens, promising me I would know that world, too, one day, but that was before her lovely hazel eyes were filled with permanent defeat, before her spirit was completely broken by the man she married and the bleakness of life here in the swamps. Who had she been before she married Clem O’Malley? Who was her first husband, my real father? These were questions that had plagued me for years, questions Ma staunchly refused to answer.

  “It’s better you never know,” she had told me. “It would do no good. Know only that you—you’re someone very special, my darling.”

  You could say that was just Ma talking, of course, but I was different. So was Ma. I had always known that. Ma didn’t belong here, never had. She was too gentle, too refined, with none of that tough, gritty fiber that marked the other women of the swamps. Most of them were slatterns. Ma was kind and soft-spoken, dreamy, and her health had never been good. She had worked like a slave on the farm, trying to do her duty by Clem O’Malley, but it seemed to me he had always despised her, as though … as though he knew something about her that gave him the upper hand. Ma never complained, but over the years she had gradually retreated into that dreamy world of hers, smiling gently as she did her chores, building a fragile wall around her that kept harsh reality at bay. How I wished I knew what went on in her mind when she smiled that gentle smile of hers and gazed into the past, remembering.

  I didn’t belong here, either, but I was made of sterner stuff than Ma. I dreamed, sure. Without my daydreams to keep me going, I would never be able to face the grim reality of my life, but I didn’t retreat into that dreamworld. I accepted the reality and vowed to change it. I might just have one ragged dress, might not have time or opportunity to bathe properly or keep my hair clean, but I wasn’t trash. I’d never gene to school—there wasn’t a school in the swamps, wasn’t a church, either, only a motley ragbag of shanties we called “town,” three miles from our farm—but I could read if the words weren’t too big, and I could copy the words on paper and write my name in big block letters. That was more than most folk hereabouts could do. They might poke fun at me, think me odd, but I wasn’t ever going to let them pull me down. Someday, somehow, I was going to make a better life for myself.

  I tossed the last handful of grain into the air and left the coop, fastening the gate behind me. It seemed even warmer than before. My dress was soaking wet under the arms, and my whole body was bathed with a sheen of perspiration. My face was undoubtedly streaked with dirt, and my hair was filthy. I returned the pan to the shed and started back to the house, thinking about the dream, the mist, the man, recalling that pleasant, tingling ache I had felt when I woke up. What did it all mean? Why did I keep dreaming the same dream? I was eager to ask Mama Lou about it.

  Back in the kitchen, I discovered that the kettle wasn’t steaming. Damnation, I thought, opening the door of the stove. The fire had gone out. I had to start it again, jabbing vigorously with the iron poker. I could hear loud clumping noises down the hall. My stepbrothers were awake, banging about as they always did first thing in the morning, ignoring the fact that Ma was so ill and needed her sleep. Sod the bastards, I thought angrily. They had no consideration whatsoever, never had a thought for anyone or anything but their own greedy appetites.

  Jake came tromping in fifteen minutes later, brushing locks of dark blond hair from his brow. He was a tall, hefty brute with a square jaw, sullen blue eyes and a nose that had been broken more than once. Jake was a ruffian, the terror of the swamps. Liked nothing better than a good rowdy fight, a grin on his thick lips as he smashed a jaw or broke an arm. He was wearing old boots and snug gray breeches and an old
blue silk shirt with full sleeves gathered at the wrists. It bagged over the waistband of his breeches where he had tucked it in loosely. Perverse as it seemed, a lot of girls found him exciting, and Jake never suffered for lack of tail.

  “Mornin’,” he growled, giving me a surly look.

  “You and Randy might try to be a little quieter when you get up,” I said coldly. “You know Ma’s ill.”

  “Don’t ride me,” he snarled.

  “You don’t care, do you? It doesn’t matter to you that—”

  “Shut up, slut.”

  “Go sod yourself,” I retorted.

  “You’re gettin’ awfully lippy, girl. You don’t watch it, one-a these days I’m liable to bust your mouth for you.”

  “Try it. You don’t scare me none. I’ll kick your balls so hard you won’t never be able to have another whore.”

  Jake scowled, remembering the tryst behind the pigsty, remembering what I had done to him that time. Like most bullies, Jake picked only on the weak and defenseless, and he knew I was neither. He glared at me with blue eyes full of hatred, full of lust, too. I was the only girl around these parts Jake hadn’t had his way with, either by force or with consent, and the fact that I was his stepsister didn’t mean a thing. He wanted me, all right, but he knew full well I’d make good my threat.

  “You think you’re somethin’, don’t-ja?” he said.

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Think you’re better’n anyone else ’cause you can read some and write your name down and speak frog-talk. That don’t mean nothin’, wench. You’re a swamp girl, just like th’ rest of ’em, good for nothin’ but spreadin’ your legs for a man an’ cookin’ his food for him. One day I’m gonna—”

  “You’re gonna what?” Randy asked, strolling into the kitchen.

  “I’m gonna show this lippy little wench what’s what.”