Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “I saw ’em walkin’ down the lane when we come out here. I reckon they’re goin’ into town to see how the folks grow.”

  He turned and looked over the acreage.

  “Imagine the seasons here, Little Indian.” He smiled. “The rest of this spring, you’ll climb that tree there.” He gestured to the large and crooked pin oak in the yard. “Then when summer arrives you’ll spend all day eatin’ tomatoes in the first vegetable garden, which will be over there.” He pointed to a patch of long grass toward the side of the house. “In fall you’ll sit on the back porch, watchin’ the leaves go to ground. When winter comes, you’ll tease the bare trees and say they all look like spiders on their backs.”

  He dug his heels into the ground, staring at the small stream of water running at the back of the property by a persimmon tree.

  “There’s no better place than right here at the end of Shady Lane,” he said. “It’s like God picked us up and tucked us in His pocket.”

  A crash of thunder echoed across the sky. Lint came running out of the barn toward Dad as I looked at the gray clouds gathering over the top of the tree line.

  “Looks like smoke from fire,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s all a storm is.” Dad squinted toward the clouds. “We best get everything in before it really comes down.”

  Me and Lint followed Dad to the drive, where he flipped the mattress off the top of the car and onto his head. Lint mimicked Dad as they walked in step toward the porch.

  I turned to the property beside ours. In the cut and neat yard was a young girl with a head full of short golden curls tied with a white ribbon. She had a big red ball in her arms. She bounced the rubber ball high over her head.

  “I’m seven,” I told her when I got close enough.

  “I’m six,” she said.

  Her dress was an adorable blue and her socks had matching blue ruffles on them.

  “I like your socks,” I said.

  She smiled. I looked behind me to see who she was smiling at. When I realized it was me, I beamed at her. She bounced the red ball toward me. I caught it and tossed it back to her. We passed it several more times. When she laughed, it sounded like a little bell.

  “Throw higher,” she said.

  I threw as high as I could.

  “You’re my best friend,” she said when she caught the ball.

  “You’re mine, too.” I jumped up and down, clapping my hands.

  “We’ll play every day,” she said as she bounced the ball back to me.

  I caught it just as the freshly painted screen door on her stone house opened. A man, wearing blue pastel slacks, came out pointing at me.

  “Give that ball back. Right this second,” he said to me. “We don’t steal things in this neighborhood.”

  “We’re playin’,” I said.

  “We’re playin’, Daddy.” The girl agreed.

  “I ain’t stealin’ nothin’,” I was sure to add.

  “Ain’t is a word for heathens,” he said as he yanked his daughter behind him. “Now hand the ball over.”

  I threw the ball to him. I noticed he didn’t have the hands of a poor man nor the invisibility of one neither. The face of his wristwatch reflected the sun in a blinding spot of light. His cold eyes appeared to do the same.

  “Dear?” A woman’s voice emerged as the screen door opened a second time. She seemed to float down into the yard and by her planted zinnias until she was standing behind the man. Looking over his broad shoulder, she asked him, “Where’d she come from?”

  “Came from back there.” I didn’t mind answering her myself as I pointed to our house. “We’re movin’ in.”

  Her pearl earrings shook as she grabbed the man’s forearm.

  “A colored family?” She gasped. “When a colored moved into Mother’s neighborhood, she said even the water started to taste different.”

  “Don’t surprise me none,” he said, before nodding to the ball. “She tried to steal this.”

  “We can’t have the ball back now. Not after she’s touched it.” The woman scooped her little girl up. “The coloreds always have some sickness. Her germs are all over that ball.”

  “You’re right.” He quickly dropped it and got his crisp handkerchief out to wipe his hands on.

  “Ruthis, you must be careful who you play with, darling.” The mother cradled the girl’s head against her shoulder as she carried her inside the house. “Dirty children will give you dirty things.”

  After his wife and child were safely inside the house, the man clapped at me.

  “Get outta here. Go on. Get.” He clapped louder, as if I walked on all fours and rubbed my belly in the dirt.

  “I said get.” He stomped his foot and took a big step toward me.

  I ran back and stood in our driveway. He kept an eye on me as he walked up onto his porch. He fluffed the green striped pillows on the white wicker furniture before he went inside.

  I made a quick decision to return to their yard and grab the red ball. I thought I heard their door open again, but I didn’t stop running until I was safely in the tall weeds of our property. I bounced the ball up our driveway as I thought about the man and the way he had clapped his clean, white hands.

  THE BREATHANIAN

  Window Shatters in Dead of Night

  Glass crunched underfoot as workers at Papa Juniper’s Market began cleanup early this morning after discovering a large front window shot out. Several nearby residents came forward to give reports of having heard a gunshot in the vicinity around 1:30 in the morning.

  When questioned on this act of vandalism, the sheriff commented, “We take intentional destruction very seriously here in Breathed.”

  Witness reports testify they saw a figure running from the market after the shot was heard. There has been no clear description of the suspect.

  Local resident Grayson Elohim of Kettle Lane came to see the damage.

  “It’s a shame to see the window broken,” he said. “It was good glass.”

  Blood was thought to have been found on the scene, but was later identified as being ketchup spilled from a broken bottle.

  6

  Hide me under the shadow of thy wings.

  —PSALM 17:8

  I remember the sweet smell of the earth and of the squash vines stretching out as long as my legs and arms as I lay in the garden. The prickly stems, the sound of dirt moving with the rocks. I stared into the squash’s dark green leaves like I was staring into dark green eyes. The plant was still too small to bear any fruit. It had come up from Dad’s seeds and it was late in the season by the time we’d moved into the house. Still, Dad reckoned we would have a crop before the first frost.

  “My, my, there’s a big squash,” Dad’s voice came, followed by a spray of cool water on my face. I opened my mouth, drinking the water from the hose in his hand.

  “I envy you, Betty,” he said. “You’re free as a plant.”

  “You can be a plant, too, Dad,” I said.

  “All right. Let me try.”

  When he lay beside me, the sun washed over our faces.

  “Do you like our garden, Betty?” he asked.

  “I love it.”

  Gardening, in those early years, was always a family affair. In the garden, Dad would talk as much as he labored.

  “To the Cherokee, the earth had a gender,” he would tell us. “The mother. The she. The first she was Selu. She could make corn by patting her stomach and she could make beans by stroking her armpit. But her magic was seen as witchcraft and she was murdered by wild boys. Her blood seeped into the soil. From it, everything grew. Even today, the blood of Selu is in our ground.”

  Though our grass would never be cut, the garden would be kept neat and trim by Dad, who mapped two vegetable plots separated by the eighty paces me a
nd my sisters took. The first plot would be planted for three years, while the second would be left dormant.

  “Ground has three good years in it,” Dad told us. “First year will be a spectacular crop. The type you never forget. Second year will be a decent crop, but you’ll only recall certain things about it. Third year will be a crop you don’t remember at all. That’s the ground sayin’ it needs rest. So, you let that ground sleep for each of the years it gave you. Three years of gardening, three years of leavin’ it alone.”

  He surrounded each plot with a grapevine fence made from the measurements of mine and my sisters’ body parts.

  “Where’s my tape measure?” he would ask until one of us came up to him to offer our arm or the length of our finger.

  He used soapberry bushes as fence gates. The bushes weren’t for ornamental purpose, but rather they fed nitrogen naturally to the soil. Dad knew these things the way other men knew they could buy fertilizer already mixed in the store.

  Dad was an encyclopedia of plants, especially the medicinal uses of them. Wherever we went, he always seemed to collect a small gathering of folks willing to pay him for teas, tonics, and other concoctions. Breathed was no different. Already he was helping an old man suffering from dropsy by brewing him a weak tea made from dogbane. Dad never claimed to have the cure. He only offered the botanic wisdom he said we were forgetting.

  “Everything we need to live a life as long as we’re allowed has been given to us in nature,” he’d say. “That’s not to claim if you eat this plant, you will never die, for the plant itself will one day die, and you are no more special than it. All we can do is try to heal the things that can be healed and ease the complaints of the things that cannot be. At the very least, we bring the earth inside us and restore the knowledge that even the smallest leaf has a soul.”

  It was important to our father that each of us learn how to garden ourselves, but Trustin wanted to draw the garden more than he wanted to be in it. Lint put all of his attention on collecting rocks. Flossie, meanwhile, kept stopping to sunbathe while reminding me that Mom had said for me to stay in the shade.

  “You’ll get too black.” Flossie smiled, turning over on her back to tan her front.

  Fraya was most interested in the garden’s flowers. She liked the zinnias and peonies, but her favorite were the dandelions. Flossie always called them weeds, but Fraya never thought of them as anything less than roses. She would sit in the grass and eat the bright yellow blossoms until her tongue colored. She’d flash her yellow tongue from time to time as Dad spoke about what it was like to be Cherokee women in the past. These things he told me and my sisters because he said it was important we know how it used to be.

  “In the old days, before the white man had yet to cast his shadow,” he said, digging his spade into the earth, “it was the Cherokee women who gardened because women had the blood of Selu inside them. Blood is very powerful. After rain, after dust, it is blood that remains. Cherokee men didn’t have the blood of Selu, so the land nor the crop belonged to them. It belonged only to the women.”

  “Then how come you garden now?” Flossie asked. “You ain’t no woman, Dad.”

  “I garden because my momma and my grandmomma gave me permission. They taught me everything. I may not have their power of bein’ a woman, but I have their wisdom. And that I can share with the three of you.”

  He grabbed a handful of soil. It was soft from him having burned dry twigs and saplings on top of it. He poured this loose dirt into my hands and those of my sisters.

  “It isn’t the sun that grows the crop,” he said to us. “It’s the energy comin’ out of the three of you. Imagine what each of you can grow with the power you got inside you.”

  By a tree stump next to the garden, Dad built a stage of timber slabs raised on four wooden posts. The posts were about five feet high and set firmly in the ground. Dad cut steps into the stump, turning it into a ladder.

  “A stage like this one was in my mother’s garden,” he said, “and the garden before hers, all the way back to the beginnin’ of time. Women and girls would sit on a stage, and they would sing to keep the crows and insects away from the crop. As the women sang, their voices seeped into the ground, nourishin’ the roots of the plants and makin’ ’em stronger.”

  “Boys didn’t talk and sing on the stage, too?” Fraya asked.

  “No,” Dad said. “They didn’t have the power that the girls and women had.”

  Me and my sisters named the stage A Faraway Place, because even though it was in our yard, it seemed to be so far off in the distance, we were bound by no one and nothing. It was our world and if you would have heard the language we spoke there, it would have sounded like English to your ear, but we would swear it was something incomparable. In our language, we told stories that didn’t end and songs were always of infinite choruses. We became one another until each of us was a storyteller, an actress, a singer-songwriter who measured the things around us until we felt as though we had mapped out the geometry from the life we had, to the life we felt certain we were destined for.

  In many ways, A Faraway Place was our hopes and desires manifested into four corners of wood. I saw this in the way each one of my sisters would stand on the edge of the stage, the wind whipping their hair as they stood ever so still. They had never seemed so tall to me before as they each planted their feet at a distance that felt powerful to them. One hand would be bunching the fabric of their skirts, the other placed out in front of them, feeling the wind against their palms. The way they looked out from the stage, it was as though they’d been alive so long, they were already women.

  Yet, we were still children there, too. We would run around the stage, never venturing beyond its edge as if the whole world was right there and it was large enough for the dreams of three girls. We pretended to be shot in the heart, only to rise from the dead. The sky turned upside down in an ocean we swam in, kicking our legs in the water as we kept one hand on the floating stage, the other free to splash in play or reach toward the whales swimming by. At night, when we felt the hard wood, it became the soft warm body of a bird large enough to break from the earth and fly us so high, there was no unhappiness to tell of. Flossie would run out onto a wing and say she was going to dive into the stars to become one. We shared one imagination then. One pure and beautiful thought. That we were important. And that anything was possible.

  There would always be so much dancing at the end, we would fall asleep on the stage, only to wake the next morning at the very moment the sun rose. The pink and orange clouds performing, it seemed, just for us.

  “That’s a whole lot of sun,” Fraya always said.

  “Not enough,” Flossie would reply.

  I always fell somewhere in the middle when I said, “It’s just right.”

  And so, it was just right on our faraway place.

  “The curse cannot have us here.” Flossie spoke in a particularly heavy southern drawl. “No, it cannot have us here.”

  But once we were off the stage and walking away from our world, reality was right there to greet us. The curse was part of that reality. Flossie seemed to embrace it as she often used the curse as material to hone her acting. She would rest her hand on her forehead and cry out, “The torment, our plague,” before falling back as if she’d fainted.

  I didn’t want to believe there was a curse on us nor the house. Not after we had worked. We swept dust and debris out the door and into clouds that billowed down the porch steps. We scrubbed floors on our hands and knees and washed the walls until even the shadows were clean. I remember how the paneling shone after my mother had polished it. Later, the wood would swell in the heat, telling its own story.

  Creak, creak.

  Mom decided to hang the short yellow curtains from her childhood bedroom on the small window over the kitchen sink. She said it was a nice place for them as she stared at the white
flowers printed on each panel. She then picked up her bucket and washed around the bullet holes. I expected to see blood on the rag afterward, but there was only plaster and splinters of wallpaper and wood.

  During this time, my father worked on the house as well. He seemed like just another ordinary man with a hammer in hand. That is until he started telling stories to each nail he banged in. In between once upon a time and work, Dad cleared the bats out of the attic and reused leather from onetime belts as hinges for any door in need. He replaced the broken window glass and fixed the holes in the roof, walls, and floor, but the house would never look like it did in its heyday. Maybe if you looked at the house from a good angle, you could still see glimpses of what it had been. But seasons are hard for a home left all by itself. We did our best against the ruin. Despite its failings, I liked the house and I wondered if it liked us back. We had tried to fill it with nice things like the deerskin Dad hung to be the door for his and Mom’s bedroom since it was without one. We laid our rag rugs on the floor throughout and moved in what furniture pieces we had. Any remaining tables, chairs, cabinets, or other fixtures still needed were items Dad would make over time in the tradition of his father.

  We got some appliances from Cinderblock John, who, in addition to buying houses, bought the things that went with them. Dad paid Cinderblock John for the items by doing work on his rental properties. Soon, we had a monitor-top refrigerator and a chest freezer.

  It wasn’t long after that, Leland showed back up on our doorstep. He brought a cabinet television with him.

  “How much you have to give for somethin’ like this?” Dad asked.

  “Just about free.” Leland looked away and chewed the inside of his cheek. “You want it?”

  “Oh, please, please, let’s keep it.” Flossie tugged on Dad’s shirt.

  “All right,” Dad said before helping Leland carry the TV into the living room.

  The picture was black and white, but Flossie squealed like it was a rainbow of color.