The Maidservant in Cabin Number One

My father died when I was young, leaving me and my mother alone in a one-bedroom apartment, that even with my mother’s meager wages, they’d barely afforded. Mostly, her earnings helped pay for our heat, and now, with my father gone, we were often so cold, we sometimes wore three or four layers of clothing. Weather in Seattle was always unpredictable; even during the dead of winter, it could be foggy and raining in the mornings and clear and sunny in the afternoons. I remember the skies were mostly gray.

But maybe that was because of how we lived.

We originally came from rural Nashville, Tennessee, way before it became famous for country music. I was five, and I don’t recall much about our home there; but what I do remember was that my father was a drinker. When he was sober, he was my idol. He’d read to me at bedtime, and then when it was time for me to go to sleep, he’d tuck me in so snugly, he’d say “you’re snug as a bug.” He was always coming up behind my mother while she was at the sink, giving her a hug, snuggling her neck, or grabbing her caboose, as he called it.

During the day, he worked for the railway, and at the end of his long shift, he spent his nights drinking at the local bar. He called it is “winding down place.”

My mother worked at the gunpowder plant.

After the 1918 train wreck, they laid my father off while the tracks could be repaired, and he took this as a premonition he would permanently lose his job. For months he hung around the house until one day, my mother pointed out that we needed his wages to survive and she suggested he look for a job at the powder plant where she worked.

When she said this, I could see the wheels moving around in his head; he silently worked his mouth, chewing his cheek. Then he pushed his tongue around his teeth, pushing his upper lip out.

“I ain’t gonna work at some woman’s job,” he said, an edge rising in his voice…

That was the first time I remember him hauling off and hitting her.

Eventually, they called him back to the railway, but by this time he’d been drinking so much, even I could smell the alcohol coming through his pores. The first day he went back, they fired him.

My mother never said a word, but my father took that as a silent accusation of his failure, and he raised his arm to strike her. That was the second time he hit her. Over the next few weeks, it got worse. One day, thinking I could stop him, I gallantly stood in front of my mother and acted as her shield.

“Get outta my way,” he yelled.

He pushed his mouth forward and pursed his lips before he backhanded me and knocked me down. I fell flat on my back and I instantly felt the wind leave my lungs. I couldn’t breathe and I thought for sure I was going to die. When my mother kneeled beside me, he kicked her, and when she tried to get up, he kicked her again.

After that, he was gone for two days, and when he returned, I stood in our doorway and said, “If you touch me or my mother again, I swear I’ll kill you in your sleep.”

“Shut up,” he said, pushing me down. “We’re going to where I can find a better job.”

In 1919, we made it west to Seattle, and to my father’s credit, he found a job at the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway. By the end of that year, my mother answered an ad for a maid’s position for a wealthy financier who owned a hilltop mansion in the Harvard-Belmont Historic Landmark District.

While I had no actual plan to actually kill my father, for a while, I thought he took my death threat seriously. He still drank, but he left us alone, and we made it a point to stay out of his way if he was riled. My mother sometimes worked until all hours of the evening, so I learned to make our meals. The first few times my father didn’t come home for dinner, I thought maybe he too had to stay late, so I’d cover his dinner and set it on the table. But then his drinking got worse, and even if I was sound asleep, his body odor and sour breath would wake me. Prohibition had no impact on him finding something to drink. After about a week of this, I quit making his dinner. This infuriated him, but I was wasting the little money we had on food that had to be dumped into the garbage because he didn’t eat it.

That Christmas of 1920, like so many in the past, we had no tree, and there were no packages to open. My mother brought home some leftovers Cook had prepared for the servants, and she and I sat and ate them. When my father finally came home, he’d been drinking, and wanted to know where his dinner was.

“There was just enough for me and Ruthie,” my mother said calmly.

“Well, then, you won’t get to eat either,” he said, reaching for her plate and throwing it, food and all, on to the floor. Instinctively, my mother jumped from her chair and pulled me to her. I know she was thinking she’d be able to protect me from his rage. As he’d done before, he shoved me to the side and grabbed my mother’s arm, twisting it until she cried out in pain.

He finally released her, but not before he threw my plate on the floor, too. Then he stomped out of the apartment and didn’t come home until the next evening.

On New Year’s Eve, my mother worked late to help with the party at the mansion. I made myself a simple dinner of bread and cheese, and then I went to play Parcheesi with the girl who lived next door. At midnight, we watched the fireworks from her apartment window, and then I came back home. I lit the kerosene lamp that sat on the kitchen table and fully intended to read The Swiss Family Robinson book she’d lent me, but I fell asleep.

It was still dark out when the door to our apartment burst open, crashing against the wall and jolting me awake. Even in the dim light of the streetlamp outside our window, I could tell it was my father. I even smelled him. I jumped to my feet and there in the threshold he stood, drunker than a skunk. His eyes squinted as he tried to determine who it was that had been sitting at our table, and then when he figured out it was me, he looked around for my mother, who hadn’t returned from work yet.

“Where the hell is she?” he bellowed.

I didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer, which made him furious. He staggered to the table and picked up my book and began ripping pages from it.

“Stop!” I yelled.

But he kept on tearing pages and watching them fall to the floor. He came around the right-hand side of the table as I backed closer to the sink. I hoped to give myself space enough to run from the apartment, but even though he tripped on the leg of the table, he was quicker than I was. He grabbed my left arm as I grabbed onto the sink. I kicked him in the shin and he momentarily released me, giving me just enough time to turn and pick up our cast iron pan.

When he looked up at me, I swung the pan at him with all my might. He fell to the floor, out cold. Suddenly, my mother was there, standing in the doorway, and she looked in horror, first at me, and then at my father.

“Dear god,” she said, dropping her bag on the table. “Help me get him up. He’s bleeding.”

I’d broken his nose, and his face was black and blue for two weeks.

My name is Ruth Ann Landry, but most people called me Ruthie.