ADELINE HULBURT

ADELINE HULBURT 

            Most likely, I’ll never be buried in the church cemetery although, they’ve yet to turn down my money in the collection plate, but I’m good to my girls. Today everyone gets a chance to be out in the fresh air. Laughing together and enjoying God’s creation is good for the soul and anything that ails ya and today was just perfect after a long, dusty, summer. You could kinda feel the fall nipping at our heels, but the sun was bright and the leaves ain’t turned just yet. Tomorrow it will be business as usual, but today was our treat. Like I said, I take care of my girls, we ain’t clap infested, crib whores, we are ladies.  Cultured and clean ladies who smell of rose water and wear silk chemises. 

            My girls work hard, even if it is the devil’s own work, and they attend to their deportment in their free time. I won’t have slacking women. There’s a reason they talk about us all along the Santa Fe Trail, my girls know how to make a fella feel comfortable. Why we even get ‘pokes to bathe before they spend the night. They’re good girls, all of them. They’re making an honest living if you ask me, even if it’s not all that respectable to our “good citizens” of Trinidad. Occasionally, even I take a special customer, despite the fact that I’m getting a bit long in the tooth. A girl can’t work all of the time, if you know what I mean? 

            Like as not, Mama would roll in her grave if she saw me today, all my finery and fancy digs, but I’m not sure how she’d feel about how I earn my living. Mama scrubbed so much laundry her hands bled all the time; her skin peeling and sickly looking from all that ash and lye. I can still smell the damp of the hot water and wet wool in the tenement apartment we lived in with its suffocating heat and steam year ‘round. 

            Mama insisted there’s no shame in being poor if you were working hard; an honest job lets a man sleep peaceful at night, she said. But I’d had enough potatoes and cabbage in watery broth to last a lifetime. I’d rather give a man a smile and spread my legs for a few dollars than for a tenement on the East Side and gristly meat every Sunday. Maybe if I had stayed there, I’d have died birthing a squalling child who would waste away in the putrid air of the city. But I ran as soon as I could, as far from there as I could get. It doesn’t take a girl long to figure out how to use her assets to get some coins. I was lucky, I wasn’t pox scarred and I looked innocent. I learned to use chicken blood and every customer was my first. A girl needs to have some security in her purse, how she earns it is up to her. 

            I met Arthur heading west, I helped him bury his wife on the trail. He needed looking after and I needed protected. It was a business arrangement. Arthur never suffered for having taken me on. Out this way, we all got pasts we try to run from so most people don’t ask a lot of questions and just accept you at your word. Even out here, I couldn’t own his house if I wasn’t his widow, and so his widow, I became. All Arthur left became mine, this house, his debt and a stash of silver under the floorboards. Only ways I could keep a roof over my head was to do what I knew how to do, and I never learned to like scrubbing laundry. Can’t no one prove I’m not the real Adeline Hulburt and Arthur never said otherwise when he was living.