Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “No wonder a woman is mostly anger,” Fraya said, staring at the dress in her hands. “There’s no room for happiness. Not after they get done with us.”

  I felt my way up the rows to the first pew, where I laid my dizzy head down.

  “Eve ate the apple,” Fraya said as she picked up the candle. She took her time staring at the flame before a smile crossed her lips. “Well, good for Eve, because the first thing we learned from that tree of knowledge was how to start a big goddamn fire.”

  “Fraya, don’t,” I said.

  “We have to prove we can burn things, too, Betty,” she said. “If we don’t, the beasts will rule the world.”

  Her eyes widened as the flame reflected and flickered in her pupils. She tilted the candle, causing the hot wax to spill out as fire and fabric made contact. The cotton became engulfed, the smoke curling up toward the ceiling.

  “It’s so bright.” Flossie laughed, then covered her mouth as if she wasn’t sure whether the fire was funny or scary.

  Once the flames started to crawl up the fabric toward Fraya’s hands, she let go. We held our breath as the candle and dress fell onto the moonshine-soaked carpet. In an explosion of light, the flames fed on the liquor, growing larger and more devastating.

  Fraya grabbed the vase full of wildflowers off the sideboard.

  “Go out, you stupid fire.” She dumped the water from the vase onto the blaze. The wildflowers spilled out, burning on contact.

  “You’re not gonna get the fire out.” Flossie threw the cigarette into the flickering orange flashes as she danced around them. “It’s the curse. We’re all cursed.”

  “You’re not supposed to use water to put fire out, Fraya,” I told her as she yanked me up from the pew by my arm. “You know you have to use soil.”

  “We gotta get outta here, Betty.” She pulled me down the aisle, all the while yelling for Flossie to follow us. Flossie continued to dance as she took her ponytail out. Her long hair glided across her back as she swayed from side to side.

  “Dammit, Flossie. I said come on,” Fraya said again.

  Flossie ran up behind us giggling. When the three of us were safely outside, Fraya let my arm go.

  “What have I done?” she asked as the flames reached up to devour the white cross on top of the steeple.

  Flossie cheered and clapped. I pushed her out of the way and ran toward the church. I got as close to the inferno as I could without becoming ash. Reaching into my pocket, I found Fraya’s prayer and threw it into the flames.

  “Betty, look out.” Fraya screamed as fiery beams crashed beside me.

  I was knocked to the ground, where I could feel the heat coming off the grass. I thought I might lay there and melt. Then I felt hands wrapping around each of my arms. My sisters were saving me.

  As we escaped up the nearby hill, I kept falling, but my sisters kept lifting me up. We were all breathing so hard, I didn’t know how there wasn’t something that came from our exhales, like a great wind or a flash of lightning.

  We collapsed once we got to the top of the hill, where we watched the blaze. We knew one of the nearby farmers would see the fire soon, and call the sheriff.

  “Damn this night,” Fraya said, picking up a small rock and throwing it off the side of the hill. When she figured the rock had made it to the bottom, she asked me why I was running toward the fire.

  “You could have burned up, Betty,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you why she did it,” Flossie answered for me, “because she’s drunk off her ass.”

  The three of us listened to the fire truck’s horn in the distance. While my sisters kept their eyes on the flames, I kept mine on the smoke.

  “Smoke is sacred,” I said, believing if smoke could carry fear up to the clouds, then it could carry Fraya’s prayer farther up, to heaven.

  12

  The hills melt, and the earth is burned.

  —NAHUM 1:5

  Even after bathing that night and washing my hair, I could still smell smoke coming off my skin like it lived there now. I lay in bed with my damp head and listened to Fraya’s Japanese music box play from down the hall in her room.

  “Goodnight.” Her voice floated to me and Flossie.

  “Goodnight,” Flossie replied.

  The silence waited for me.

  “Goodnight,” I said before closing my eyes to see three sisters. The orange flames. The dark night. The white boards of the church blackening to ash.

  The most Flossie said about the fire was to melt an orange crayon and paint her nails. She would leave marks on the wallpaper from where she dragged her fingernails along as she walked. More marks were on her pillow from how she slept with her hands tucked under. I’d started to catch her running her nails on empty spaces of paper, drawing little orange streaks I realized were an inferno.

  Fraya wouldn’t even admit we’d been out the night of the fire. Then one day, about a week after the incident, she grabbed my hand and led me out of the house. I thought she might be taking me back to the eagle for another prayer.

  “We’re goin’ to Papa Juniper’s,” she said when I asked.

  She bought us each a bottle of pop, along with a pail of crushed ice. She placed the bottles in the pail to keep the pop cold as we walked up into the hills and sat in a meadow of tall grass the same color as the green dress she was wearing. She took the bottles out of the pail, then reached her hand into the ice.

  “I feel somethin’, Betty,” she said as she moved her hand toward the bottom. “There’s somethin’ in here.”

  She dumped the ice out onto the ground. We watched a small orange roll out.

  “God is meltin’,” Fraya said as we watched the ice go to liquid in the sun. “But the orange is still so very cold.”

  She picked up the orange and held it to her sweet, soft cheek.

  My sisters had their own way to accept what we’d done. Mine was to go into my parents’ bedroom, where my mother’s nylons were. She had enough to make a soft pile in her drawer, her extra garter belt lying on top. She bought nylons that had the seam running down the back. A line that traveled up her leg like a snake too honest to coil.

  The nylons would hold the shape of my mother’s calves and feet. I would sometimes put the stockings on my arms, thinking I could still feel the warmth of her body from when she’d last worn them. Most of the time, I would drape her nylons across the seat of the vanity chair so they hung from the cushion. I’d then lay on my belly beneath the chair, the stockings dangling and grazing the floorboards as if they were her legs.

  I would perch my face in my hands and knock my heels as I hummed, imagining my mother sitting in the chair above me and putting her makeup on. Despite my mother’s moods, I wanted to be close to her, at least to be in her orbit during the feminine routines that were still baffling to me at that age. I found comfort being at the feet of the stockings while imagining my mother sitting in the chair above me, tweezing peach fuzz off her cheeks.

  This was the sort of comfort I pined for in the heat of the fire. I pushed the deerskin hanging in my parents’ bedroom doorway aside, and stepped into their room. Mom was downstairs rolling out dough for noodles. I tiptoed to her vanity and opened the top drawer, lowering my hand beneath the nylons. I liked to feel their thin fabric against my flesh. It was like dipping my hand into a sea my mother kept as her little secret.

  I usually never reached so far back. Flossie had warned me Mom fed on serpent tongues and kept a sealed jar of them in a drawer.

  “If you so much as touch the jar, you’ll go mad like Mom,” Flossie swore. “You’ll start eatin’ serpent tongues, too, until only the things with forked tongues will ever love you.”

  Flossie told me Mom moved the jar into a different drawer each night, which was why I tried to never feel blindly into a drawer. But that day, the nylons w
ere so very soft. I closed my eyes and let my hand sink deeper. It wasn’t long before my fingertips brushed against something.

  Had I found a serpent tongue fallen out of the jar?

  I wrapped my hand around what I felt. When I pulled it out, I discovered it was a stack of identical photographs inside of a stocking. The image was of a little girl in a dark dress with a big cream bow, which dropped from a sailor collar. The girl was thin, her arms hanging awkwardly at her sides. Her pale hair fell forward across her small shoulders and down into her even paler face. She was not smiling. Her gray eyes almost looked white in the photo, but I could still see the fear in them. She seemed to be the type of child who could startle at the sound of rain. It was then I noticed her two fingers were crossed as if she was making a prayer.

  Standing beside the girl was a man who looked to be in his twenties. His arms were straight by his sides. I took the photo over to the sunlight. I wanted to see the man’s face clearer. There was something familiar in it. The bold but hard stare. The white-blonde hair. I instantly despised his clenched jaw. Something about him reminded me of bitter herbs.

  “Who are you?” I asked the man in the photo as if he would come alive to answer me. He was wearing high-waisted work pants, suspenders, and a button-down that I could see the undershirt sticking out of.

  Like the girl, he wasn’t smiling, though he was looking straight at the camera, almost daring it to preserve his image. In body, he was a man. But in spirit, I knew he’d be a wolf.

  I carried the photo downstairs. Flossie was in the living room, dancing to American Bandstand. Lint sat on the sofa, coloring little red dots all over his skin.

  “What’s the red dots, Lint?” I asked.

  “F-f-fairy bites,” he said. “I got ’em in the woods.”

  “Ain’t he s-s-stupid?” Flossie mocked him as she kept dancing around us.

  “I am not s-s-stupid,” he said to her. “It’s true, Betty.” He looked up at me. “They are fairy bites. Most folks think it’s m-m-mosquitoes bitin’ ’em, but go catch one and you’ll see. You gotta l-l-look close enough and you’ll see it’s really a tiny fairy, her teeth sharp as k-k-knives.”

  “C’mon, Betty.” Flossie pulled on my arm and tried to get me to dance with her. “You don’t wanna hang around Lint. His stutter might be c-c-contagious.”

  Lint made a face at her as he colored a large red dot on his arm.

  “I can’t stay,” I said, breaking free from Flossie and heading toward the hall.

  I went into the kitchen, where Mom was cutting dough she’d just rolled.

  My mother always cooked barefoot. She was forty-two at the time, but seemed younger when she was bare-legged. Just a girl, really, who would stand with one foot on top of the other when she concentrated, as she was then.

  I tried to tell what type of mood she was in. After she cut the dough, she put the knife off to the side and used her hands to delicately separate the noodles. She was humming. When she started to sing aloud, I knew it was okay to step closer to her.

  “Who’s this little girl and man?” I asked in a particularly sweet voice as I held the photo up for her to see.

  When she saw the photo, she immediately slapped me across the face. I inhaled the small cloud of flour expelled from her palm.

  She turned back to the noodles and I saw how her pale hair fell into her face. I studied the little girl in the photo and saw how her pale hair did the same. The girl had seemed stuck in time, incapable of aging one day more than the moment the photo had captured her in. And yet, that little girl had grown up. She stood before me, unraveling noodles to dry.

  I wondered if my mother and I had grown up together as two girls, each no older than the other, if we would’ve been friends. I knew she would have been so quiet, I would have had to do all the talking. I could have taken her to A Faraway Place. Maybe we would have shared secrets there. Covering our mouths and whispering softly.

  Mom set the timer for the noodles to dry. Only once the ticking began did she speak.

  “Pappy’s thirty-two there,” she said. “A young man, if ever I’d seen one.”

  She dusted flour off her hands. When she began to peel potatoes, she told me to put the photo back where I’d found it.

  I backed up so I would be out of reach of another slap as I asked, “Why you have so many copies of the same photo?”

  She inhaled sharply, but didn’t have the anger I expected as she said, “You can only step on somethin’ so long before it disappears beneath your heel.”

  When she started to cut the potatoes into chunks to be boiled, I carried the photo back upstairs.

  Instead of returning to my parents’ bedroom, I followed the humming I heard coming from down the hall. It led me to Fraya’s bedroom, where I found Leland propped against her wooden headboard, his legs stretched out on her bed. He had his boots on. Their dirty soles were leaving mud on Fraya’s blanket. He hadn’t noticed me yet and was still humming. I recognized the song as being one of Fraya’s. I watched him a few seconds longer as he ate pickled beets out of a jar.

  “That ain’t your bed,” I told him. “It’s Fraya’s.”

  “That ain’t your bed.” He’d repeated what I’d said, trying to make his voice sound like mine. “You need to stop bein’ such a pest, Betty. Why don’t you worry about your own damn bed.”

  I stared at Grandpappy Lark in the photo. His eyes were the same eyes looking back at me from Fraya’s bed.

  “Why you frownin’ like that?” Leland asked.

  When I didn’t answer, he patted the bed.

  “C’mere,” he said. “Tell me your newest story, Betty girl. I promise not to ruin the endin’.”

  I ran into our parents’ room. I couldn’t move quick enough putting all of the photos into the stocking. When I was placing it back into the drawer, I discovered more photos in a different stocking. I knew they were photos my mother had already stepped on. I could tell from the way the images were faded until I could see nothing more than the outlines of the trees. I closed the drawer, feeling as though I had found the serpent tongues after all.

  On my way out of the room, I looked out the window and saw Fraya sitting on A Faraway Place. I whispered her name as I ran outside to her. The closer I got to the stage, the louder her singing became.

  “Demons and angels, they spell my name, in fire and halo it all feels the same.” She sang the lyrics she’d written herself. “I thought you’d open me like a song. Boy was I wrong, boy was I wronnnggg.”

  I climbed up onto the stage and sat beside her.

  “You sing like a honeycomb,” I told her.

  “I do?” She turned to me. “Hey, Betty, you got a fallen eyelash.”

  She pressed her fingertip against my cheek, picking up the fallen hair.

  “Your fingers are stained red,” I said.

  “I was eatin’ pickled beets.” She held the eyelash in front of my mouth. “You get to request somethin’ from the wishin’ well.”

  I looked over her shoulder and saw Leland standing on the porch. He held his lighter to a cigarette. Just as the end of it lit orange, I closed my eyes and blew the lash off my sister’s finger.

  THE BREATHANIAN

  Devil Blamed for Shootings

  The preacher has suggested the shooter is none other than the devil. He says this revelation came to him when he was buying a shiny new shovel from the hardware store.

  “I come in to get a shovel to dig the hole for the best dog I ever had,” the preacher said, “when I see a monstrous face reflected in the shovel’s blade. I looked behind me but no one was there.”

  The preacher believes that, due to the church fire and the continued blasts of gunfire, our town is falling victim to sin.

  “I’ve fought the devil no less than seventeen times,” the preacher added. “I know when he’s around.
He likes to gnaw on hearts and rob you of your soul. I suspect the devil is shooting Breathed because he knows we’re straying from our good Lord. I invite everyone to our evening prayer. We need to pray this devil away before evil blooms on all sides of us.”

  13

  He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.

  —PROVERBS 11:29

  Dad’s traditional tobacco plants bloomed toward the middle of June. We would pinch the blossoms off with our thumbnails, squinting when we did because after a while the tobacco stung our eyes like cutting an onion would.

  After harvesting, we spread the blossoms out in the sun so Dad could oil them with animal fat. The flowers would dry all day, after which Dad chopped them into fine pieces. Unlike the leaves of the tobacco plant, which Dad smoked in rolling paper, he would save the dried blossoms to use in the soapstone pipe that had been his mother’s.

  “Blossoms are so darn pretty, they deserve somethin’ better than the leaves,” he’d say, content with the pipe in his mouth and the smoke from the flowers filling his nostrils.

  Trustin and Lint were still young enough to sit at Dad’s feet and pretend a stick was a pipe. Flossie called them babies for doing so, but when no one was looking, me and her would put sticks in our mouths, too. Dad tousled our hair and said it was all fine and good to pretend to smoke, but that we should wait until we got more than half a century on us before we smoked a real pipe.

  “Save your lungs to run the fields with,” he’d say, looking out at the garden, ever watchful on its yield.

  Summer was a busy time for him as he grew herbs and harvested wild plants for his growing list of customers. Not only did Dad make recipes for what was becoming a fine business, but he also had to do the same for Lint and his fake ailments. Just that morning, Lint had started clenching his hands, saying they were turning into talons. He held his fingers at such an awkward angle, they did look akin to the nails of a hawk. Dad got his spoon and filled it with a decoction that he held over Lint’s head.