Me and my sisters hurriedly swam out of the water. Lint started praying on the bank for Trustin to be okay.
“Are you all right?” Fraya asked Trustin as she stood over him. She was out of breath. I wasn’t sure if it was from the quick swim, or from the way Trustin was lying facedown.
“You dead?” Flossie nudged him with her toe.
“Stop that, Flossie.” Fraya smacked her on the arm. “Trustin?” She turned back to him. “Can you hear us?”
He rolled over and stared up at the clouds floating above our heads.
“Just had the wind knocked out of ya, huh?” Fraya helped him sit up.
“Ain’tcha gonna say nothin’?” I asked him. “You get your voice knocked out of ya, too?”
He looked up at the tree he’d fallen from as if it was so very tall.
“Well,” he said.
If we thought he would say anything more, we were mistaken as he stood and walked in the direction of home.
Funny thing was, Trustin hadn’t screamed as he fell. When we told Dad later that night, he said it was a good thing we were around.
“A boy who falls that silently,” Dad said, “needs someone around to scream for him.”
8
They are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.
—ISAIAH 56:10
I lost whole afternoons to the hills, running into caves and kissing their cold walls. I splashed in the brown water of the ponds and swung on grapevines until I became dizzy enough to scatter like a light beam. Flossie, meanwhile, was kidnapping Corncob Diamondback.
Flossie loved movies. The drive-in and cinema were her favorite places on earth. As the movie played, she would copy her idols’ gestures and facial expressions. She became obsessed with screen star magazines and their full-color photographs of actresses lounging on sofas at home.
“They all live in Hollywood, Betty,” she said while flipping the pages of the magazines in my face. “I was born in California for a reason. I’m meant to live there. Not here in silly old Breathed. I need neon lights and white velvet.”
Flossie thought if she kidnapped Corncob, she could buy a bus ticket with the ransom money. There was a reason she chose Corncob. He was the dog of Americus Diamondback. Flossie heard Americus had come from New York City in the 1930s. Every day he wore a three-piece suit with a Cottle watch in the pocket. He always had a cigar and wore a fedora garnished with the feathers of a golden pheasant. He carried The New York Times under his arm and read it daily on a bench in front of the barbershop.
Flossie knew Americus wore the same herringbone suit every day and that it was tattered and torn, but she didn’t care. Nor did she care that he read the same New York Times from 1929 with the headline THE GREAT CRASH. His fedora had a rip in the side while the pheasant feathers had become broken quills. The single cigar was his only one. This was why he never lit it, though he would rest it between his lips as if he had. Americus was no richer than we were, but for a ten-year-old girl desperate to run away to her dream, it’s easy to believe a man who used to be rich always would be.
It wasn’t difficult for Flossie to capture Corncob. The dog was often in the fields, slowly searching for corncobs he would pick up and carry in his toothless mouth as he dug holes to hide them. Flossie wagged one of these corncobs until the dog came ambling toward her. She led him through the woods. It took her all afternoon. The animal had gotten as slow as all old things do. Flossie only rewarded him with the corncob once he was in the shed.
Throughout dinner that night, Flossie bounced in her chair. Dad asked her what she was smiling about. She crammed more succotash in her mouth and said, “Nothin’.”
Later, after Mom and Dad had gone to sleep, I sat up in bed writing a poem about a girl shrunken to the size of a leaf.
She rides the acorn cap down the side of a hill, I wrote, avoiding the wolves at the bottom—
Flossie yanked my pencil out of my hand and tried to stick it up my nose.
“Get away.” I slapped her off.
“C’mon. I wanna show you somethin’,” she said.
“I’m writin’.”
“Betty, what I have to show you is more important than one of your stupid stories.”
“Leave me alone, Flossie.” I growled like a dog at her.
“Fine.” She growled back like a wolf. “I won’t show you then.”
She slid away with my pencil still in her hand. Stopping in front of our dresser mirror, she pulled her shirt up. When she placed my pencil on her bare chest, I asked her what she was doing.
“The pencil test,” she said as if I was the stupid one for not knowing. “I read about it in a magazine at Papa Juniper’s. You put the pencil beneath your boobies and if it stays there, then you’re ready for a bra. But if it falls, you’re still just a little girl who shouldn’t wear anything more than flowers in her hair.”
When she let go of the pencil, it fell and clinked against the floor.
“You’re not gonna grow boobs tonight, stupid,” I said.
She did the test a few more times before dropping the pencil for good. She stepped over it and pulled on my arm.
“C’mon, Betty. I wanna show you somethin’ incredible.”
“I’m not interested.”
“It’s alive.” She widened her eyes.
“Alive?” I stood out of bed, wrapping the blanket around my shoulders. “You didn’t tell me it was alive.”
“I knew you’d wanna see it, Betty.”
We peeked our heads out of our bedroom. Then we quietly slid our feet across the hall floor so as not to chance a creak of the wood.
“Don’t you like bein’ awake when everyone else is asleep?” Flossie spoke into my ear as we walked against the wall down the stairs.
Once outside, she tried to get under the blanket with me. I pushed her away and pulled the blanket tighter as she stomped ahead. She startled at the possum crossing her path.
“Funny how the night makes everything so spooky,” she said as a gust of wind came and seemed to rattle the ground. In the distance, an owl hooted. Flossie walked even closer to me.
“You’re scared,” I said. “Scaredy-cat. Meow, meow, meow.”
“Shut up.” She stopped and looked behind us. “Do you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“Feels like someone is followin’ us.”
We heard a twig snap underfoot. Flossie breathed in deeply.
“You smell that?” she asked. “Smells like myrrh.”
“Myrrh? What movie you see that in?” I asked.
“I really smell it.”
“You know why it smells like myrrh, don’t you?” I asked in my best ominous voice.
She shook her head.
“It smells like myrrh,” I said, “because that’s the odor one always smells when the man with the red belly is near.”
“Why’s he got a red belly?” she asked, darting her eyes from shadow to shadow.
“Because his belly is soaked with the blood of all the girls he’s murdered and devoured in the middle of the night.” I blew on the back of her neck. “You can always tell when the man with the red belly is gettin’ closer ’cause the smell of myrrh gets stronger.”
“Shut up, Betty,” she spoke in a whisper.
“What’s that movin’?” I pointed toward the darkness. “Oh my God. What is that, Flossie?”
“Stop it, Betty.”
“I’m serious. There’s somethin’ out there. It’s—it’s—the man with the red belly!” I grabbed her.
She jumped and cried out. “Don’t let him eat me.”
When I laughed, it took her a few seconds to realize there was no real danger.
“I wasn’t ever scared,” she said, huffing as she walked ahead.
&nb
sp; “You sure looked it.” I skipped up by her.
“I was only perfectin’ my fear face for all the horror pictures I’ll be in one day.”
Saying no more about it, she led me to the shed built onto the back of the barn. At one time, the shed had been constructed with an aviary. The screens were long gone, birds had not been there for years, and vines wrapped around the wood frame until it was partially collapsed. The shed had housed supplies for the aviary.
Flossie turned to me and laid her fingers against her lips before quietly unlatching and opening the door. A soft snore floated out from the darkness of the shed. Flossie pulled the string on the lightbulb. In the wash of bright light, my eyes first scanned the dusty shelves before dropping to the sleeping dog, his gray head resting on an empty birdseed bag. Before I could ask any questions, Flossie explained in detail how she’d trapped the dog and what her plans were.
“You’re rotten,” I told her. “Kidnappin’ a dog just to get money.”
“I’m not gonna hurt ’im or nothin’,” she said. “Besides, maybe he likes the fame of bein’ the kidnapped dog. We can be famous together.”
She got down and wrapped her gangly arms around his neck, waking him. He did little more than yawn. While his mouth was open, she looked inside and said he only had one tooth.
“Must be a lucky tooth.” She spoke to Corncob.
“He never barks or nothin’?” I asked.
“I think he’s too old to remember how to,” she said.
I laid beside Corncob and scratched beneath his chin. The corners of his mouth curled up as his back leg thumped the ground.
“I bet by tomorrow Americus will have a thousand posters up on every tree in Breathed,” Flossie said. “How much you think he’ll pay, Betty?”
“I’d say everything he has,” I said as she nuzzled noses with Corncob.
“You really think so?” she asked.
“Sure.” I nodded. “Dad says if you have a hard heart, an old dog will soften it. That’s why they’re so valuable.”
“I wonder how you get a hard heart.”
“Eat a lot of Lint’s rocks, I guess,” I said.
We giggled as we left the shed. Flossie talked more about how much money Americus was going to pay.
“Probably more money than I’ll even need,” she said, grinning ear to ear.
But Americus did not put up posters. What he did do was get a runt from one of the local hog farms to take Corncob’s place. Flossie was so angry, she ran up and slapped the runt on the behind. Americus and Flossie locked eyes before she ran away.
“This is what we’ll do,” she said to me later that day after she’d sat on a tree stump and thought. “We’ll take a photo of Corncob.”
“We don’t have a camera,” I reminded her.
“Well, then Trustin can draw Corncob and that’ll be just as good.” Her voice rose in excitement. “Then we’ll take the drawin’ to Americus. Maybe he got the pig because he thinks Corncob is dead. We’ll put a note with the drawin’, askin’ for fifteen dollars. No, wait. Twenty dollars ought to do it.”
“Why you keep sayin’ ‘we’?” I crossed my arms. “I didn’t kidnap him.”
“I’ll give you some of the money,” she said.
Before I could answer, she threw in four marbles, a fireball, and the cracked turtle shell she’d recently found by the riverbank. That was a million dollars to a dirt road kid like me. We instantly spit on our palms and shook on the deal. When we went out to the shed to tell Corncob about the plan, we found him lying on his side. His mouth was open, resting in a puddle of foam.
“Have you been feedin’ him?” I asked.
Flossie dropped to her knees by his side. “Yeah. I fed him biscuits and gravy just this mornin’.”
“You leave him any water?”
She nodded to an old coffee can sitting under the shelves. Floating on top of the water was a small tin.
“Rat poison.” I read the label to Flossie.
She quickly stood and looked into the murky water, then up at the shelves the water had been sitting under.
“The poison must have fallen off and opened in the water,” she said. “When he got a drink, he drank poison.” Her eyes widened. “He’s dead, Betty.”
“Dead?” I realized Corncob hadn’t moved since we’d been there.
“Of all the things that could have fallen in the water, Betty. That box of buttons or those broken hat pins.” She pointed these things out to me so I’d be sure to get her point. “Why the poison, dear sister? And why, after all these years? That rat poison belonged to the Peacocks. Hidin’ on the shelf for decades. If Dad had found it, he’d have gotten rid of it. You know how he hates poisons. But it lay undiscovered, been here all these years, and just now happened to fall off the shelf. Why? I’ll tell you why. It’s the curse of the house.”
She grabbed both sides of her face as though she was in a horror movie.
“Why’d you have to set the can beneath the shelves? It’s your fault, Flossie.”
“Is not. I didn’t want the sun heatin’ the water. It was nice and dark beneath the shelves. I wanted him to be able to get a cool drink.”
She placed her hand over her heart.
“Oh, we’ll have to bury the body so no one knows but us,” she said.
“We have to tell Dad.” I carried the can outside and dumped the water so nothing else could drink it.
“Please, Betty. If Dad knows, the boys will find out. The whole town will hear about it. I don’t wanna be called a dog killer. Besides, if I go down, I’ll say it was your idea to kidnap Corncob. An actress knows how to lie until everyone believes her. I was born on Carole Lombard’s birthday. I know how to take on a role. C’mon, Betty. Please help me.”
She wrapped her arms around mine and made her eyes large and teary.
“Fine.” I gave in, stabbing my finger into her chest. “But you’re diggin’ the hole.”
“Of course.” She nodded. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Together we lifted Corncob’s body into the wheelbarrow.
“Wait.” Flossie picked up the corncob she’d used to lure him. She placed it beside his body. “Everyone should be buried with somethin’ they love.”
We laid the shovel across the top of the wheelbarrow and pushed it together until we got to the railroad tracks.
“That way he can watch the trains comin’ and goin’,” Flossie said as she tried to hand the shovel to me.
I reminded her I wasn’t digging the hole.
“But, Betty, I just painted my fingernails.”
She held her nails up. She didn’t have money for store-bought polish and she knew better than to use Mom’s, so Flossie got the idea to melt our beeswax crayons. She used a cotton swab to apply the wax onto her nails. This left little strands of cotton sticking out of the wax after it dried, but you couldn’t see such imperfections from far away.
“My nails are too pretty to ruin,” she added.
“So are mine,” I said, showing my bare fingernails crusted with dirt from digging for earthworms earlier.
Flossie rolled her eyes before reluctantly stabbing the shovel into the ground. The dirt was not soft, so she couldn’t get the blade to dig deeper than a few inches.
“Please, Betty. Help me.”
“I knew this was gonna happen,” I said, grabbing the shovel’s handle. Together we dug a hole wide enough for Corncob to be laid in it.
“I’m sorry, Corncob,” Flossie said as we let his body slide down the side of the hole. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. You weren’t supposed to die.”
She got the corncob out of the wheelbarrow and tossed it on top of Corncob’s body.
“You think the old dog thought I poisoned him?” Flossie asked as we filled in the grave.
She raised her eyes to mine.
“Do you think it was painful when he died, Betty?”
I remembered the puddle of foamy saliva beneath his mouth. I quickly shook my head. That seemed to satisfy her.
“We should go now,” I said before she could ask anything more.
When we got back to the barn, Dad was inside getting more nails to finish his work on cold frames he was building out of old windows.
“What you two doin’?” Dad asked as he stopped to stare at the shovel between us.
“A wild turkey got hit on Shady Lane,” I said. “We took him into the woods to bury him like you always do when you see a dead animal.”
“It ain’t respectful to leave ’em to keep gettin’ ran over,” he said. “How’d you manage to lift such a heavy bird by yourselves?”
“We did it together,” Flossie said before I could answer.
“Well, you two done right by the turkey. The earth will remember.” Dad picked up a can of nails and turned to leave.
“What if there is a curse?” I asked, stopping my father in his tracks. “What if the dog—”
Flossie elbowed me.
“I mean the turkey.” I avoided Dad’s eyes. “What if the turkey dyin’ is the first?”
“The first of what?” he asked.
“The first of all of us disappearin’. Like the Peacocks.”
“Critters get hit in the road, Betty. It’s not hocus-pocus.”
While Dad hammered, me and Flossie headed out to A Faraway Place, where she had the broken turtle shell. Together, we lay back on the stage, staring up at the sky. We didn’t say anything. We merely passed the shell back and forth, running our fingers down the crack until we closed our eyes.
9
In the midst of wolves.
—MATTHEW 10:16
Jack-o’-lanterns out on porches quick to greet me with a smile and triangle eyes. Grocery store candy rustling in bags while crisp leaves blow past the rake of the old man too weary to pile them. A single purple scarf carried by the wind down a dirt lane and a crow of no name flying overhead. This is October to me. A conquering circle of autumnal shadows, ghosts, and mothers.
Betty Page 10