If We Have Tomorrow

When I was a baby, my mother was sure that I was destined for her best friend’s little boy. She used to say “Melody will be the most beautiful bride for sweet darling Charles,” whenever she gazed into my infant face. At least, that was what I was told. Truthfully, I don’t remember ever having a mother. I used to look at pictures of her around our empty, windy house, and all I would see was a picture of a strange women smiling with all the joy in the world. Her pictures would collect dust on every surface they laid on. The happiness in them was not fit for our sullen mansion. I cannot quite bring myself to believe that she had ever lived here. Perhaps, that was why the house could not keep her.

I never knew that little boy my mother had betrothed me to either. Apparently, he and his charming family had regrettably moved west shortly after her death. I was four when I watched my mother die. The memory left me in a hurry after they carried her body away. For a very long time I didn’t know that I had a mother and I didn’t know that I had watched her die. It was a great mercy for a small child to not be burdened with the weight of murder and death. Father was not so fortunate. He was too old for fate to shelter, and he had to bear his grief with its sharp edges all alone. When I saw him, he was quite and dismissive. My governess had taken pity on my disappointment by comforting me, saying how I reminded him of my deceased mother. Perhaps his withdrawal from my life was why I never much cared for him. He did not love me, so I did not love him.

My nanny told me once that the limp I thought I had lived all my life with joined me only after the tragic incident. That was what they called it. The tragic incident where little Melody Harper saw a man shoot her mother with a shotgun. I would hear the servants whisper in the halls, trading gossip about that day fourteen years ago. The halls where they talked, like all rooms in my home, were cold and silent. I could hear everything they said when I pressed my ears to my bedroom door. Listening to them talk and wonder was how I pieced together my missing memory. Their words were what told me of the tragedy my young life had suffered.

They said that one day fourteen years ago, my mother took me to a place in the country. On the way there, our carriage was stopped in the road by a very poor man who was very evil. He flung open the carriage door and pointed a gun and me and my mother. We were taken to a very poor shack that the very poor and evil man lived in, and, there, he shot my mother then killed himself. Some of his neighbors heard the loud sounds and came to us, and that was how I was found standing between two corpses. This story was all I could riddle out from their idle chatter. It is a profoundly sad story, but for many years it seemed so impersonal, as though the little girl in the story was not myself. I pitied the little girl for seeing her mother die, but I felt no overwhelming despair for the loss that was my own. Later, I reasoned that it was due to the difference in truly remembering and being told a memory.

My past was accounted for, but my limp no one could reason. Nanny had said it just appeared one day when I was four, a little after my mother’s funeral. At first, she thought that I had just hurt myself, but quickly we all found out that my right leg had become deficient. I could no longer walk like the good little girl my mother had so hoped for. For the rest of my days, I would walk around with one leg always trailing behind me. It was like dragging around dead weight. Father pushed me away further after my mysterious injury. He did not want a daughter with a limp, a burden tied around his neck for the rest of his grim days. I was all he had left of my mother, and he did not want it.

It’s strange that I can’t remember the tragic incident. It is so horribly lurid that even a little child should have some inkling of it, but no, I spent the next fourteen years completely detached from that day’s events. Life was good to me, in that respect. I could not mourn if I could not remember. The distant memory was locked and buried somewhere deep in the world. I was the only vestige to survive it, and I could not place myself in it. However, as I grew older, I began dreaming vividly of a winding country road and a room with row after row of looms and machines. The room I knew to be my father’s old factory. He had made his money selling the textiles many men and children made for him. I had seen it a few times prior but never since the tragedy. Night after night I would dream about the road and the factory. I could hear horses neighing and men huffing. They came to me in shards and fragments while I watched from somewhere. As my eighteenth birthday neared, the dreams grew even more vivid. I could hear more and see more. The scenes given to me became longer and more coherent.

The night before my birthday it all came back.

I saw men rioting outside the factory. They were thunderously yelling for the payment of their wages. “Coward,” “Bastard,” “Cheat,” were the things they were yelling up to the windows of my father’s office. I know now that he had cheated them in his business venture. He had taken the men’s wages and now their families would starve. One man stood on top of a crate, now taller than all the others. He yelled louder than all the others, too. “You will pay, Harper. You will pay. What you have taken you will give back.” His words had never rang truer. My vision then shifted to that country road. I listened again to the horses neighing in the reigns of the driver. “Stop,” a man’s voice yelled. The carriage stopped and our door was flung open. A blonde woman gasped next to me. She looked just like the women in those dust-covered photographs. “Get out,” the man said. He was dressed from head to toe in rags ripped at the edges. His face was grimy and twisted in rage. I could almost make out his bottom lip trembling along to rhythm his hand was shaking to, the hand that held the gun pointed at us.

We were ushered to a small shack not far from where we were stopped. It was falling apart by the seams, the roof was gaping, the windows smashed, the door we entered through just barely hanging on its hinges. It was the picture of poverty. The inside was even more broken. There was one bed, and on it were four people and a weak crying baby in the arms of a woman who did not move at the sound her its waning cries. Three little children were tucked around their mother, equally unmoving. They were draped in the silence of death. The man pointed his free hand at his dead family. “This is what he has done,” he bellowed, “he has starved them to death.” A tear fell from the corner of his eye and traced the outline of his shaking cheeks. As I listened to my mother beg him for mercy, it dawned on me that the little baby’s cried had halted. Eternally. My mother became hysterical at which point I felt myself in my four-year-old body begin to violently cry. The man had no pity for us just as my father had none for him.

He lifted the gun and pulled the trigger. Bang. Thud.

My mother’s pleads stopped and her body hit the dirty floor beside my feet. She fell so close to me that my right leg could still feel her body heat on my skin.

The man pointed his gun at me next. My cries ceased when I watched my mother’s body hit the ground. I looked at him now. I looked into the barrel of his gun. It was dark and empty, much like death. Silence stretched as I gazed into the depth that had just ended a life. The silence was ghostly. There was nothing between my young life and that barrel now. “No,” he screamed, as he lowered the gun to his side. “No,” he said again. This time quieter, strangling the word. I looked into his eyes. They were filled with tears as they looked back into mine. His shack was not large, and we were standing quite close together, separated only by my mother’s corpse and the blooding oozing out of her wound. I could see my little reflection in the pond of his tears. He was shaking violently now, like a beggar in the dead of winter. “They are all dead,” he whispered into the hand covering his face. I watched him cry and cry, silently, hopelessly, when suddenly he stopped. He uncovered his face and turned toward his family. He wasn’t facing me now. I could see nothing but the hunch in his back from years of hard labor.

My mother’s killer lifted the gun to his head and shot himself dead. Bang. Thud.

I stood before them now, my mother and her killer. The eerie silence filled with the smell of bloody iron. Her body and his laying side by side, their blood mixing together into a pool around my feet and before my eyes. I was standing in the room of death, breathing in the air of fresh murder.

It was not the neighbors that came to help but the coachmen who had been driving our carriage. He came with a swarm of constables who quickly whisked me out of the room. The images began jumping again, but they finally stopped on that winding country road again. I was now sitting inside the carriage, covered in blood, going back up from where we had came. Alone this time, like I would be for every day after.

The world decided that I had come of age. They returned the lost tragedy to my memory with such sudden urgency, not unlike when I began limping. My father’s curse had become a reality, and now I lived in the haunted aftermath.

I laid in bed for days after my memory returned. The scene’s from my past replaying constantly in my head. I could hear no pleas from my governess or servants. The only sound I could hear was Bang Thud Bang Thud, again and again, Bang Thud Bang Thud. I could not find the will to rise from the darkness shrouding my thoughts. My mother’s screams sometimes pierced through the haze cocooning my body. At times, The baby’s weak, waning cries would float in and out of my mind. It was the sound of a little life dying of hunger. The only image that appeared when I closed my eyes was his hunched back facing me before--

Bang Thud.

The ragged man had killed my mother for the death of his wife and children. He said they had starved to death. They had starved to death because my father wouldn’t pay his wages. My father had cheated him of the lives of his family, so he forced my mother to even the debt. A woman punished for a man’s crime. The little children tucked into the sides of his dead wife’s body had been so thin and shriveled. How long had they not eaten? My father had bought me toys and my mother jewels with the money he stole from those dead little children. How many more had he killed? How many more lives became my dolls and dresses? I have eaten their bread and drank their blood. I now know that I am the daughter of a murderer and his victim.

The thought weakened any resolve I had to return to my life. I spent my days weakly listening to myself breathe in bed. I laid there like that starved wife had on her deathbed. I laid like my mother’s dead body on the floor beside my feet.

How many lives have I been complicit in taking? I would wonder in the folds of darkness. At times, my body would feel paper-thin, as though a light gust of wind would blow me away. Other times, lying on my bed, draped in the linen bought by selling lives, I felt like a stone slowly sinking into the ocean. When I had strength I would shoot up to my feet in a fit of hot rage and pull all of the sheets from my bed. My head would spin and my lungs burn as I keeled over the mess, my knees hitting the hard wood floors. I would kneel before the heap of white I made on the floor, staring down at the creases, imagining the thin nightgowns covering those shriveled little bodies.

Those children long been buried in unmarked graves somewhere near nowhere for nobody to visit, while my father still lived largely on the backs of those men rioting outside his office. He may be silent but he did not starve. His wife died and his daughter scarred all for the money that he scavenged from the hands of starving little children. He made a father a killer, a mother a victim, and a daughter broken. How would my mother meet the wife and little children of her killer in heaven? I would press my hollow cheeks to the cold glass of my bedroom window just to feel the ice of their death on my own face.

They say my mother was a kind woman. Would her kindness extend to those that caused her own death?

I should hate the man that killed her. I should hate him like he hated my father. It would have been easier to hate him if he had shot us out on the road, but I had seen his children. I had watched the baby die. There was death before we arrived. How long had he lived alongside those little corpses? I had never seen such squalor and have not since. It is easy to hate the poor if you do not see how they live. It is easy to loathe their poverty without knowing its cause. With the little they had, it could not of taken much to help them. But he was beyond help.

There were hundreds of men outside my father’s office, hundreds just like him. I remembered that one whisper I heard in the hall, “there are more like him than ever, men who have lost all sense.” And now I join them in insanity.

My poor mother died at the hands of my father. Brutality is always bred by the selfishness of men.

Why had the killer spared me and not her? I am just as much complicit. A murder’s daughter. A guilty innocent. A damned fool. He let me live with my sin while he punished her purity.

In those following days, I had never longed for death more. Each passing moment of life I had been spared cut scars into my flesh.