Family Secret by Erika Nichols-Frazer

When my youngest sister, Idabelle, was taken by consumption, Ma insisted we have a photograph taken of all of us together, so she could remember all of her children. We couldn’t bury Ida until the photographer could come from Boston. And so, we had to put her in the root cellar. Pa and my brothers, Richard and Paul, wrapped her body in blankets and carried her down the steps. She stayed there for nearly a week, next to the turnips and potatoes, wrapped and perfectly preserved at four years old.

Ida had been dead a week by the time the family photograph was taken. Ma wanted it done sooner, while her body still looked like Ida, but the photographer got delayed by the storm. We had to wait six days past when he was supposed to come to town for the Easter festival. It was a big deal that a photographer was coming to town for the first time ever. Most townspeople couldn’t afford to have their photograph taken, but many had been saving up, waiting for the chance.

The festival was postponed because half the town was snowed in. I don’t remember a snow ever being that heavy in April before, but Pa says that’s cause I’m too little, and back in 1869, when I was just a baby, it snowed so much in early May that he couldn’t plant corn until the beginning of June on account of the ground being froze.

We’d never had a family portrait taken. None of us had ever had our photographs done, except for Pa, during the war. His whole regiment sat for a photograph together. It’s printed and framed in the living room. My older sister Pamela wanted to have a photograph of herself taken at the county fair. Pa told her that a photograph just for the sake of having a photograph is too great an expense.

“Then how come there’s one with you in it?” she asked.

“That’s different.” He ran his fingers over the dusty glass of the image of him as a young solider next to other soldiers whose names I do not know. It’s the only photograph in the house. There’s no proof of the rest of us. I read in school that some cultures think a photograph captures your soul, as if it were a concrete thing that could go missing, trapped in sepia forever. Maybe Pamela wants to be trapped, to live forever.

Ida was the youngest of the five of us; she took over for me as the baby. I remember when she was born, even though I was only five at the time. The midwife came from across town and Pamela, the eldest, took us kids to play outside while my mother howled. When we came back in after hours of playing in the woods, a slippery little thing was crying in Ma’s arms, and they called her Idabelle.

I went down cellar when no one was paying me any mind. I sat with Idabelle, pretending we were playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie, playing sleep, playing dead. Without Ida, I have no one to play with, no one to teach how to jump rope or make corn husk dolls, no one to whisper secrets to.

Richard and Paul were always annoyed at Ida tagging along, slowing them down, at all her incessant questions, but I adored her and treated her like my real-life baby doll. I liked braiding her hair, playing Pat-a-Cake and house with her. Pamela insisted she was too old for such silly games, so it was usually just Ida and me.

Her sickness came on quickly. Her skin went flush and hot. We weren’t allowed in the room with her, in case we got sick, too. It was only a matter of hours before Pa walked out of the room, shaking his head in defeat. Ma wouldn’t leave Ida’s side.

Once the photographer finally arrived, I helped Ma and Pamela make Ida look alive again. Pamela did not want to touch the dead body, but Ma insisted we help. She did not say much as she painted her youngest’s cold face, trying to bring her back to life in appearance at least, rouging her ghost-pale cheeks. Pamela used a stick of coal to smudge her blue eyes, make them look alive again. I tied her favorite yellow ribbon in her curly hair, which I swear was longer than it was last time I’d braided it. She always asked me to do her hair like mine.

We had to prop her up against Pa’s trunk and Richard and I were stuck holding her shoulders to keep her in place. Her body was cold from the cellar and stiff as wood, half-frozen.

The photograph sits on the mantelpiece beside the photo of Pa and his fellow soldiers, all of us together. You almost can’t tell that Ida isn’t as alive as the rest of us, except for the eyes, vacant and looking far-off, as if she has a secret.

………………..

Erika Nichols-Frazer won Noir Nation's 2020 Golden Fedora Fiction Prize. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Lunate. Her work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Red Tree Review, Lunate, Literary Orphans, HuffPost, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a Developmental Editor at New Degree Press and the Communications Manager at the Children's Literacy Foundation.