“Don’t have much of one. Father ran off when I was a little thing. He could
come begging at my door, I wouldn’t know who he was. I got two older sisters,
but it’s been a good, oh, I’d say ten years since I seen either a them. I do got a
cousin I’m in touch with, Susan, comes to visit me once a year or so.”
“That must be nice for you. But what about your mother?”
Jettie studied her plate for a moment, then looked up, smiling and shaking her
head. “She warn’t much of a mother. Was my sisters what raised me.”
“Why? Was she sick?”
“Yes. Bad case of bottle-itis. Maybe she was nice when she was sober, but I
couldn’t say. I don’t know how, but she did manage to hold a job, cooking at one
of the hotels.”
“Where did you live?”
“Up in Erie. Had a little shack on the water. I’ll tell you one thing, owner of
that hotel found her real entertaining. Said the customers loved her. He woulda
let her tend bar, if he warn’t afraid of her drinking him stick dry. See, she had a
friendly streak. Loved to talk with anyone what would listen. Her opinions about
life on this planet kept everyone laughing. And once she got started drinking, she’d set into philosophizing and using a lot of them sayings, only she’d get them all mixed up. ‘Well, you can’t teach a sleeping dog to lie,’ she’d say. Or,
‘You can beat a dead horse, but you can’t make it drink.’ My favorite was,
‘Spare the rod and spoil the victor.’”
Olivia grinned and asked, “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”
“Since she fell off a boat and drowned. Day after my fifteenth birthday.”
“Oh.”
They finished that meal in silence.
Chapter Forty-Four
Olivia spent the next day in the company of Pocahontas.
“That must be some story,” Jettie said that evening, when Olivia barely
looked up from the pamphlet to say a word.
“The play’s okay. But trying to decide what you think about the comments
Mrs. Steadman wrote in the margins is what’s interesting. She says all kinds of
stuff about what really happened to Pocahontas. Want to hear?”
“Sure. Everyone always said you’d grow up to be a teacher and here’s me
having a private lesson.”
“So the Pilgrims were going to starve their first winter until Pocahontas
showed up with a raft of food, right? Miss Evans taught us that she did that in
secret, against the wishes of her father, the Chief. But Mrs. Steadman says that
wasn’t true. Her father was the one who sent her, only he didn’t want anyone to
know that. He couldn’t figure out what to make of the Pilgrims any more than the Pilgrims knew what to make of the Indians. So he sent just enough food to
keep them alive, and he sent it with his daughter, so she could spy on them.”
“Smart Chief.”
“But Mrs. Steadman says that when the Pilgrims kidnapped Pocahontas, it
