My hand shook as I grabbed the dustpan and held its edge down so she could prod the kittens’ bodies up on it. As she did so, I looked away.
“Get ’em out of here,” she said afterward.
She stood the broom up before starting to strip the bed.
“Put this in the wash.” She balled up the quilt and shoved it against my chest.
I nearly tripped on its falling edges as I tried to carry the dustpan carefully down the stairs. When I made the turn into the hall, I saw Dad’s carving of the ark sitting on the table.
I quickly removed the ark’s lid, then carefully let the kittens’ bodies fall from the dustpan onto the carved pairs of animals inside. I placed the lid back on it and dropped the dustpan into the sink on my way to the side porch to stuff the quilt into the washing machine. I knew to use cold water for blood. I set it on boil wash anyway.
I ran back inside and grabbed the ark just as Mom was coming down from upstairs. Crossing her path, I quickly darted out the screen door. I struggled balancing the large ark in my arms as I carried it through the woods to the river. I dropped to my knees in the mud by the flooded edge and sat the ark on top of the water. I gave the ark a gentle push, watching it float away.
Thunder clapped across the sky. The rain was returning to fall hard against me. I sat so long in it, I thought I was going to sink into the mud.
When I got home, Mom was sitting on the back steps. There was a muddy mess by the side of the porch. On top of the mounded earth, a shovel lay.
“I buried the mother,” Mom said as she looked at the dirt on her hands and bare feet.
I sat beside her, both of us trembling in the cold rain.
As she watched lightning streak across the sky, she asked, “Why did you mail storms to my people, Betty?”
I looked at the dark clouds, realizing the storm I gave was the storm I got back.
“Because they put you in a bag and smashed you against the floor,” I said.
She stood and went out into the rain to the honeysuckle bush. She pulled off two blooms, carrying them back with her. She gave me one as she kept the other for herself.
“In between your two fingers,” she said as she showed me how to pull the honey string.
Together we tasted the sweet nectar, along with a drop of rain that had watered the sweetness down until all we had was the taste of the storm.
THE BREATHANIAN
Infant Startled by Gunfire, Mother Distressed
Late last evening, a mother reported her baby was startled awake by the sound of gunfire. Afterward, the mother said the baby would not stop crying. “It was a different cry,” the mother said. “It didn’t sound like my baby’s cry at all.”
The baby was crying so severely, the mother reported that she stripped the baby nude and checked for a gunshot wound.
“I thought my baby had been shot from the way she was crying,” the mother said, but she reported finding no visible wounds to her child. However, the mother feels the bullet did indeed shoot her child’s soul.
“I truly believe my child has been shot dead,” the mother, by all appearances normal and sane, said. “The child that’s here before us now is an intruder,” the mother went on to say. “It is a changeling. I know because when I asked this changeling to look upon my face, it could not.”
The mother now feels her house is haunted by the ghost of the bullet.
“I can feel the bullet’s presence. It passes through my walls all hours of the night. I can feel it whish by my face. This ghostly bullet will fire for all eternity.”
When questioned on what she plans to do with her child now that she believes the baby to be a changeling, the mother responded, “I have an older sister. She’s always wanted a child.”
The woman’s husband said his wife has no sister and that he’s concerned about the child’s safety.
“I blame the shooter,” he said.
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For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.
—PROVERBS 23:27
I never did tell anyone about what Mom had done to the kittens. When Dad saw the grave in the yard, I told him that Birdie had gotten hit by a car and that I’d buried her. I thought that would be the last of it, but I had washed the quilt in hot water, so the blood had set into the fabric.
“What happened to the quilt?” Dad asked.
Mom told him she had fallen asleep on it and it was her time of the month.
“It’s always a wonder how much a woman can bleed,” she said.
Still, there was the ark to account for.
“Where’d it go?” he asked, tapping his hand on the empty space on the table.
“Well,” I said, keeping my eyes down, “when the storm came, I had to sacrifice somethin’.”
For months after, all my nightmares sounded like the cries of kittens. I even started to believe I was seeing their ghosts, running through the house at night. The little white paws they’d inherited from their mother, galloping up the staircase and into my room.
Why didn’t you save us, Betty? I imagined them asking as they jumped up onto my bed. We wanted to live, too. Meow. Why didn’t you protect us?
They were so real to me, I could feel their soft paws walking across my face until I cried. I wanted nothing more to do with 1964 and all of its ghosts. I hoped that by the time the New Year rang in, I could at least forget the way their bodies had sounded when they hit the floor.
Betty. Meow, meow. Save us. Don’t let us die.
I tried to start 1965 believing I could shed the past. But I had learned that just because time has moved forward, it does not mean something so terrible ever gets easier to bear. I waded through the cold hours of that winter. I turned eleven but did not celebrate it. Only when spring had changed to summer, and the heat of the sun was shining on me, did I start to feel as if the meows were not quite as loud as they had been.
By that time, I was at a point in my life where I had a very particular image of God in my head. I imagined God was a woman in a torn satin bed jacket with falling curlers in her messy hair. She sat in a bed of dirty sheets, surrounded by a canopy of sheer curtains spiders clung to. She ate chocolates from a box until her teeth were rotted and the box was empty, ready to be piled with the smashed boxes already on the floor. Blush was streaked across her cheeks like something trying to run away. Lipstick bled outside the lines of her lips as if they were melting. She was a woman used and left by humanity in ways only we know how to consume and leave.
I was writing this as I lay on my belly on A Faraway Place. I didn’t even notice Flossie until she was waving her hands in front of my face.
“In your own little world again, I see,” she said.
The sticky air smelled of the lavender in the garden. She said the flowers stunk like a grandmother as she made a circle around the stage. I immediately noticed hickeys on the side of her neck. They made me think of hard rocks splashing the surface of the river.
“I’m busy, Flossie,” I told her.
“Busy, busy, busy.” She muttered, looking out at the tree-lined peaks of the hills. “I’ve always thought the hills look like wives bent over, eatin’ their offspring. What you reckon the hills look like, Betty?”
Before I could answer she said, “Never mind.”
I continued writing until she snatched the page out from under my pen.
“Give it back, Flossie.” I stood and made a swipe at the paper.
“I will once you guess what I lost, Betty.”
I looked at her in her loose blouse. It was unbuttoned enough to see she had no cleavage to show. She’d been ironing her hair recently. She’d stand at the ironing board and lay her head down, stretching the long wavy strands across the board so she could use the hot clothes iron until her hair was straight enough for her to feel pretty. The
straight hair made her seem taller.
“Just tell me, Flossie, so I can get back to finishin’ my story.”
“You and your stupid little stories, Betty.”
She dropped the paper. I sat back down and tried to finish writing, but she stared at me until her eyes popped out. I slammed my pen onto the stage and stared back at her.
“What’d you lose that was so damn important?” I asked.
“I wanted you to guess.” She pouted and flopped down beside me. She held her arm against mine. “God, Betty, you’re so black.” She said it like it was a disease. “Mom’s gonna get after you for not coverin’ up.” Flossie ran her fingers up her own arm. “I’m just the right amount of tan, don’t you think?”
Flossie could spend as much time in the sun as she wanted. Her skin was pale to begin with like Mom’s.
“You know what my friends call you?” She looked at my skin until I tried to pull my short sleeves down to cover my arms more.
“I already know what they call me,” I said. “I don’t need to hear it from you, Flossie.”
“Isn’t it terrible.” Flossie pretended to be offended. “I mean, you’re not even colored.”
“They shouldn’t call anyone that name.” I turned back to my story while she watched me.
“Are you mad at me now?” She nudged me with her toe, but I ignored her.
She looked off into the distance as she widened her eyes.
“I have an idea.” She hopped off the stage and ran into the house. She returned with Dad’s bone needle and a cube of ice.
“I also grabbed this.” She pulled a dish towel out from her pocket. “For the blood.”
“Blood?”
“It’s time you do it, Betty.” She held up the bone needle. “It’s time you pierce your ears.”
“Nuh-uh.” I shook my head as I stood.
“Betty, it don’t hurt that bad. One little prick. Well, two of ’em. But I’m real good at it. You’ve always thought mine looked nice.” She turned so her dangling star earrings swung. They’d been a gift from Fraya.
“Your piercings are crooked, Flossie.”
“You’ve never said so before.”
“That’s ’cause I promised Fraya I wouldn’t make fun of ’em.”
Flossie grabbed my earlobe and pinched it.
“Take it back,” she said.
I grabbed her star earring and pulled.
“Let go of mine and I’ll let go of yours,” I said.
She instantly held her hands up.
“I surrender, my lord.” She faked a bow before softening her voice to say, “Think of all the things you could do with pierced ears, Betty.”
“Will I be able to fly?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Will I be able to raise Emily Dickinson from the dead?”
She looked me up and down. “No.”
“Then why would I want my ears pierced?”
“Stop bein’ a baby.” She stomped her foot. “The ice will numb it.”
“Then how come you screamed when you did your ears?”
“I was only actin’. It don’t hurt. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“It better not hurt.” I turned my head and offered her my ear.
She pressed the ice against my skin. The thawing cube dripped onto my shoulder as she held up the bone needle.
“It’s the same needle me and Fraya used,” she said. “It’s got our blood on it. And now it’ll have yours, too. Did you ever guess?” she asked.
“Guess what?”
“God, Betty. Did you guess what I lost?”
“A button? Is that why you can’t button your shirt?”
“For your information, I lost the girl in me.” She removed the ice. “She’s gone. I’ve lost her. Can’t you tell? I’m no longer virginal.” She jabbed the needle quickly into my earlobe.
“Ow.” I winced.
“I wonder if I can still wear white?” she asked as she dug into her pocket and pulled out the cameo earring. She swiftly made the exchange of pulling the needle out and pushing the earring wire through.
“That wasn’t so bad. Was it?” she asked.
As she held the ice cube against my other ear, she asked, “Are you gonna call me a slut now?”
For years, I had listened to others call my sister this.
“Don’t you know Flossie Carpenter?” they said. “She’ll sleep with anyone.”
Yet when all those rumors started, Flossie was fourteen and still a virgin. Sure, she danced in short skirts and flirted, she kissed boys, went skinny-dipping, wore lipstick to bed, and let her bra strap show. But she was a heck of a lot more than the sum of all these things put together. Still, she was judged by them because she had dared to collide with the image of purity.
My sister was just another girl doomed by politics and ancestral texts that say a girl’s destiny is to be wholesome, obedient, and quietly attractive, but invisible when need be. Nailed to the cross of her own gender, a girl finds herself between the mother and the prehistoric rib, where there’s little space to be anything other than a daughter who lives alongside sons but is not equal to them. These boys who can howl like tomcats in heat, pawing their way through a feast of flesh, never to be called a slut or a whore like my sister was.
“I’m not gonna call you a slut, Flossie,” I said as the ice melted until it dropped like rain from her fingertips.
“I did it with that boy who’s been takin’ me to the movies,” she said, stretching my earlobe out and finding the center of it with her finger. “He bought me all that popcorn. He told me it was time I pay ’im back. Jesus Crimson,” she said, imitating Mom’s voice as she stuck the needle through my lobe, this time slower.
“Ouch.” I jumped. “That one really hurt.”
She quickly pushed the earring wire through. The cameos felt heavy on my ears. What little numbing there had been was wearing off. The soreness was starting to creep in.
“I don’t know why they say you lose it,” she said as she walked into the center of the stage. “Losin’ somethin’, it’s like you’re at fault. Your teacher says, ‘Did you lose your homework?’ Mom says, ‘Did you lose your shoe? Why do you keep losin’ your shoe, Flossie? Goddamn it, Flossie, why do you lose everything you’re given?’ ” She played with her hair as she said, “They shouldn’t say it’s like poppin’ a cherry. It’s more like smashin’ it.”
She frowned and looked down as she said, “I told him no. He did it anyways.”
It took me a few seconds to register what she was saying. Flossie was strong. In my mind, she could crush stone and face a storm with her eyes wide open. And yet, at that moment, she was as quiet as I’d ever heard her be. That silence frightened me. Not the silence itself, but the fact that I could not find the right words to say to my sister, who was waiting for me, at the very least, to lean closer to her and tell her she did nothing wrong.
“Right on.” She flipped her hair back and hopped off the stage.
I was glad she was leaving. I feared if she lingered, I might cry. I knew she wouldn’t like that. Flossie could cry, but other people’s tears were never her thing. She didn’t know what to do with them.
She stopped and turned back to say, “A girl’s first mistake is to give chance to a kiss. They think they can take everything from you after that. I’m tellin’ you this as a warnin’, little sister. Oh, and don’t take those earrings out. You can’t let the holes close up before the wound dries.”
After she was gone, I turned back to my story and tried to finish it, but couldn’t. I ended up writing Flossie’s truth instead, drawing the letters as straight as her hair. I folded the pages before the ink had dried on the last sentence. It smeared, but I thought that was okay. I slipped the pages into my pocket as I left the stage.
When I got to the back porch, I found Trustin painting with a small tin of watercolors Dad had bought for him at the hardware store.
As I stood over him, I looked through the kitchen screen to see Lint was standing at the ironing board, ironing his clothes. It was a habit that, at eight years old, he had started to pick up.
“I told ’im he ain’t got no more wrinkles in that shirt,” Trustin said, nodding toward Lint. “He won’t listen, though.”
“Are these the illustrations for my story?” I asked Trustin as I picked up the stack of paintings by his side.
“Yeah.” He looked at me. “Hey, you’ve got things in your ears.”
I reached toward the earrings, but thought better than to touch them because of how sore my skin was. I flipped through the drawings instead.
“You like my illustrations?” Trustin asked. “I followed your story, just as you wrote it. If you want, I’ll draw your other stories, too.”
“I’d like that,” I said, before carrying the illustrations inside the house.
“Hey, Lint.” I stopped at the ironing board. “Ain’t no more wrinkles in that shirt.”
“Gotta be sure, Betty. I heard M-m-mom and Dad fightin’ this mornin’. I gotta make sure all the wrinkles are out. The d-d-devil uses wrinkles as paths into our world. The more p-p-paths we leave him, the more ways he can get into our f-f-family.”
“You’re always protectin’ our family. Ain’tcha, Lint?” I smiled at him.
“Me and the r-r-rocks are, Betty.” He smiled back.
I could hear voices out on the front porch. When I opened the screen door, both Dad and Cinderblock John turned to look at me. They were sitting in the rockers. From the hammer and pile of nutshells on the table between them, I knew they’d been there for a while.
“Hey there, Little Landon.” Cinderblock John always called each one of us kids “Little Landon,” as if we didn’t have names separate from our father’s.
As for his own name, John was the one his parents had given him. Cinderblock was the name given to him by Breathed because he dragged a cinder block everywhere. It was tied to a rope with the loose end draped across his shoulder. He’d hold the rope end tight as he bent low and forward like he was struggling to drag the weight of a tanker. I guess you hold on to something for that long, it’ll weigh on you in more ways than one. He started carrying the cinder block after the woman he had lived with for three decades had up and died from pneumonia. Lose a woman, gain a cinder block. Maybe in the end it was him needing to feel the weight of something more than the weight of his grief.
Betty Page 28