Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  She looked from her reflection to mine.

  “Don’t let it happen to you, Betty. Don’t ever be afraid to be yourself. You don’t wanna live so long only to realize, you ain’t lived at all.”

  29

  And seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not.

  —JEREMIAH 45:5

  Flossie and I broke step to stand off in the thigh-high weeds as a brown car passed, the wheels kicking dust into the air. Plumes of tan smoke settled on our wet hair slicked back from our swim in the river.

  “One day, I’m gonna get me a yellow Corvette,” Flossie said, stepping back out onto the lane. “Vroom, vroom.” She pretended to steer sharp turns. “Maybe I’ll let you drive it, too, Betty.”

  It was the end of that August. The warm light devoured the shadows around us as our hair dried and sweat beaded down our foreheads. Late summer in southern Ohio was a beautiful challenge passed from the sun to the child, Can you survive my heat and still love me?

  The fat-bellied beetles seemed to pop while rippling lines rose up off everything in a trick of the eye.

  “Let’s go to the railroad tracks,” Flossie said as she turned around to walk backward in front of me. “The noon train will be goin’ by soon.”

  She was wearing cutoffs, but they were hidden by how long the baseball jersey fell on her. The jersey belonged to her latest boyfriend. A guy named Minford. I forget his last name. They were never that important to remember in the first place.

  “Hey, Betty?” She looked up at the sky. “Where you gonna live?”

  We stumbled into the same conversation we usually did.

  “I’m gonna live on the best street in the world,” she answered the question herself before I could. “Lined with palm trees and in walking distance of the drugstore Marilyn Monroe bought her hair dye at. You know, before she died and everything.”

  Flossie dug in her pocket and pulled out some dry corn silk, rolling paper, and a lighter. We bunched the corn silk and rolled the paper around it. Once it was lit, we quickly took turns puffing the cigarette to keep the end glowing.

  “I’m gonna be more famous than Elizabeth Taylor,” Flossie said on an exhale of smoke. “They’ll write my name in those big black letters at all the theaters. ’Course they’ll probably give me a stage name to make me more Hollywood. I’ll have to lose my accent.”

  We shared the cigarette as she added, “I’ll definitely never smoke corn silk like some backwood hillbilly.”

  She grabbed the cigarette from me and sucked on it until it got so small, she had to drop it.

  “You’ll live in a farmhouse, Betty,” she said as though a crystal ball was right in front of her. “You’ll have a dog and a cat and a mouse. The dog won’t eat the cat and the cat won’t eat the mouse and everyone will die of old age and boredom. You’ll have to marry the lonely moon just to give you somethin’ to do.”

  She ran ahead as if in a race to the finish line, her long hair flying back.

  When we got to the train tracks, we did hopscotch on the wooden sleepers. In the distance, a train’s horn blasted.

  “Won’t be long now,” Flossie said, slipping out of the jersey. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her nipples reminded me of the shrunken tops of what we use to call miracle mushrooms when we were still young enough to believe miracles existed.

  “C’mon, Betty. Take your shirt off, too.” She tossed the jersey out to the brush.

  “Don’t want to,” I said.

  The train’s engine appeared about a mile down the track, its black smoke curling up to the white clouds.

  “What you so afraid of, Betty?” she asked.

  I watched her spin, holding her arms open to the sky, a smile on her face. I thought of Slipperwort standing in her room at night, mourning all the choices she had been too scared to make. I didn’t want to end up like her. Locking myself away until I was nothing but some far-off scream no one could hear. I wanted to smile as wide as Flossie was. To be as free as she appeared to be.

  “I’m not afraid,” I said, taking my shirt off.

  I dropped it in the grass, but still kept my arms crossed over my chest. Mom had said I should start thinking about wearing a training bra as if my growing breasts had to be taught like the cucumber and bean vines that Dad trained to grow up string.

  “So they don’t get out of hand,” Dad would say about the vines.

  I imagined my breasts being attached to a trellis as if central to my gender there was an expected weakness and irresponsibility the world had already created a bra to train out of me.

  “Uncross your arms,” Flossie said. “You have boobs. Is that your big secret?” She laughed.

  She grabbed my hands away from my chest and together we spun in a circle.

  “I imagine this is what it feels like to be famous.” She hooted until her high-pitched calls echoed.

  “Time to get off the tracks,” I said as the engine blared louder.

  She continued to giggle and twirl. I had to yank her into the grass with me.

  “Thanks, Mommy.” She made kissy noises toward me before turning around to face the oncoming train. “Oh, hello, train.”

  As the train blew past, Flossie jumped with her arms raised in the air like she was on the flag-painted roller coaster at the Fourth of July fair.

  “C’mon, Betty.” She grabbed my hand.

  Together, we screamed and laughed the entire length of the train. We were still jumping long after it’d gone.

  “Did you see those hobos?” Flossie thrust her hips like the men had.

  “The one with the burlap hat was kind of cute,” I said with a straight face.

  We broke out in more laughter as we fell down together on the tracks, unintentionally burning our skin on the hot rails.

  “Shit fire.” Flossie rolled over onto the wooden sleepers and turned her back to me. “Did it leave a mark?”

  “It’s a little red.” I lightly brushed my fingertips over the flat, dark moles that seemed to make a constellation of stars on her skin.

  “It burns,” she said before falling quiet. Her next question was to ask if I remembered when we burned the church.

  “Yeah, Flossie. That’s not somethin’ one forgets.”

  “You think God will punish us for it?”

  “I don’t think it’s really somethin’ God thinks about.”

  “I think He thinks about it all the time.” She laid back and squinted toward the sun.

  “If He was gonna punish us, Flossie, He would have by now.”

  “Naw.” She shook her head. “He’s the type of man who waits. Gets ya when ya least expect it. When it’ll really hurt.”

  She seemed to drink the sky with her eyes, all the clouds and the light pouring into her. She said the sun was so warm. Then she began to pet her face, her hands softly rolling over her cheeks.

  “I’m beautiful, don’t you think?” she asked. “I’m gonna be on every magazine cover in the world. There’s no way I’m not.”

  When I think of Flossie now I always remember her as sitting in the sun on the green grass, squeezing lemons out on the top of her head, the juice dripping through her hair. She’d do it nearly every day in summer. By the time August ended, her light brown hair would be gilded in highlights. Sometimes this is the only way I want to remember her. The sun. Green grass. Yellow lemons. My sister with her head tilted toward the light.

  “What time you think it is?” she asked. “Minford has baseball practice. I better go or I’ll be late.”

  She stood, knocking off the little pebbles that had embedded into the backs of her tanned legs.

  “A boy really likes you if he wants you to watch him play ball,” she said.

  “Gee, sounds like fun,” I said, shaking my head. “You know, Flossie, you don’t always have to put on an act.�
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  “Who said I was actin’?”

  She put the jersery back on and, without saying goodbye, skipped down the tracks.

  I slipped into my own shirt, staying to watch her run off into the distance until she was nothing more than a tiny fleck shimmering like the heat.

  Once I got back to the house, I stepped over the vines in the garden and picked a tomato. I ate it whole, the juice dribbling down my arm. When I turned, I saw Dad sitting in the swing on the back porch. I carefully tiptoed around the lettuce heads and broccoli florets, past the cucumbers trailing up the trellises as I wiped tomato juice off my chin.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, coming up the porch steps.

  On the floorboards by his feet was a pile of pants he had patched. Another pair, about to be fixed, was draped across his lap.

  I leaned against the rail and watched him search through buttons in a cigar box beside him. His right leg was stretched across a stool he’d brought out from the living room. I could tell his knee was acting up from the way his leg would twitch.

  “Why don’t you ever mix any plants for your own aches and pains?” I asked.

  “I guess I never thought I deserved to be free of ’em,” he said, still studying the buttons. “Some pain you know you’ll always hold on to. Maybe if I was younger, lookin’ ahead at things, I might feel differently.”

  I tried to think of my father as a boy under the stars, dreaming he would have a life no harder than the boards of his front porch. I knew my father in his youth must have been stirred by legends and myths, hoping to become a legend himself. Only to then have to leave such fancies in the musky earth when it was time for him to grow up and become just another man as invisible as dew on any given morning.

  I stared into his wrinkles. They reminded me of ridges in sandstone. High on the sides, carved out in the middle like the soft stone it was. His face was becoming as ancient as the land. One day, I thought, I will wake up and he will have moss growing on his eyelids. His cheekbones will have pushed through his flesh, like rock pushing through the hillside. Erosion will turn him into something I barely recognize until I will have to lay him on the hills amongst the stone most like him.

  “Dad, what’d you wanna be?”

  “What did I wanna be? Don’t you mean what do I wanna be?”

  “When you were my age.” I sat on the swing beside him. “What’d you think you’d do with all your life?”

  “Oh, when I was young, you mean. Well, when I was a boy I always thought I’d stay that way. It’s so much easier to be a boy than it is to be a man and it’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, so I reckoned I was gonna be eleven forever.”

  And yet, he was decades older than the boy he thought he’d spend eternity being. A large part of my father’s life had become him trying to catch his breath. He’d had a hard time with hard jobs. It was no wonder his body was giving in. His cane was solid proof of that.

  Dad had made the cane himself with our faces stacked in the order of our births. Around Leland’s head, Dad carved half the sun merging with the moon, the stars shaping a crown. Fraya was surrounded by dandelions, the bright yellow blossoms nearly covering her face.

  Though Yarrow was dead and gone he was not forgotten, nor was the buckeye nut that took his life. Dad spent time carving the delicate features of Waconda’s infant face. Flossie was given a little gold Oscar statuette, which made her squeal in delight when she saw it. A rainbow extended around Trustin’s face, while Lint was carved with enough plants to remedy any complaint.

  In between Flossie and Trustin, I was carved with a raven feather. When I asked Dad why a raven’s feather, he said that many years ago, when the trees and mountains were in their infancy, great beasts roamed the land while people sat around fires and told stories.

  “The ravens,” Dad said, “hearin’ these beautiful stories, knew they needed to be written down to be preserved. So each raven decided to pluck a feather from their body. They offered these feathers to the storytellers. But a pen needs its ink. A raven’s blood runs black as the night sky, so the wise birds bit their own tongues, their black blood spilling to the pens of the poets and storytellers. By the sacrifice of the raven, stories found wing from one generation to the next.”

  Some men carried photos of their children in their wallets. Dad had his cane. Maybe he thought carving us in wood would force time to stand still. Our faces never to age beyond the youth he’d sculpted with his knife.

  “This one will do,” he said, deciding on the brown marbled button from out of the cigar box.

  I watched his shaking hands thread the needle.

  Decades of gardening had stained his hands. You could see all the seasons he had hulled black walnuts and all the times he had pulled weeds. Green and brown and black. The colors of the stains settled into the deep cracks and splits of his fingers. Green and brown and black and violet. The color of the berries he canned, mixing together into hues that splashed his skin. Green and brown and black and violet and red.

  The stains had tinted his skin the color of the earth itself. I was certain that if I laid a seed inside his hands, that seed would root and grow from his palms as if buried in dirt. This same dirt crusted around his short nails. The beauty and the hardship of working with the land had formed calluses in the very spots he’d held on to a hoe the longest. People would use all kinds of words to describe my father’s hands. Tough. Leathery. As split and grooved as tree bark. Folks would say his hands were, above all else, rough, but I knew his touch was soft.

  Everyone just took one look at my father’s hands and thought they knew his worth in the world.

  “I was always told I wasn’t significant,” he said as he began binding the button to the pant flap. “You get told that enough and you start to believe it.”

  He tied off the thread before snapping it with his teeth.

  “Some men ain’t worth mentionin’.” He held his pants up to look at his work. “They’re fillers. That’s what I am. A filler. A step others climb on to get to the top. A paint drop on the portrait of a greater man. It used to bother me. But now, I’m too old to give a damn.”

  He laid his pants aside as he stood up from the swing and grabbed the broom leaning against the wall. For the next few minutes, I watched an old man sweep dust off his porch. If there is anything more to be said, it is that the dust he swept off blew back into his beautiful old face.

  30

  A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

  —ECCLESIASTES 3:2

  Bean threshing was done in early autumn. We pulled up the vines and spread them on the ground until both vine and pod were dry. We would rake them all together with our hands until the pile was a few feet high. Then came the fun part, when we jumped onto the heap and stomped our bare feet over the parched pods until they broke open. The sounds of the threshing were like the steady beat of a drum, our feet pounding, the pods reacting, the beans shooting forth.

  “You thresh like an old woman, Betty,” Flossie said to me as she elbowed my side.

  “I break more pods than you,” I said.

  “I’m not talkin’ ’bout you bein’ slow like an old woman.” Flossie crossed her arms. “I’m sayin’ you thresh like an old woman whose belly depends on a winter storage of beans. Like you can’t go to Papa Juniper’s Market and buy whatever you want. You take it too seriously.”

  “That’s because her blood remembers,” Dad said as he rolled a pod against the side of his foot. “It remembers the long cold winters of our ancestors, whose bellies did depend on a storage of beans because without them they’d’ve starved.”

  After threshing came the winnowing, which was when we would collect the harvest from the ground. The smallest pieces of pod were light enough to be blown with our breath, filling the air with small particles. To separate t
he larger pieces, we used shallow-bottomed baskets. Winnowing was done best on a windy day so as we tossed the beans in the basket, they fell against the weave, while the wind blew the light husks away.

  “They have machines that thresh and winnow now,” Dad said, tossing his beans high in the air. “But what we have done here with our feet, hands, breath, and wind is as ancient as the first bean seed. We must not forget the old ways. We must try to hold on to them as long as we can.”

  Out of all of the work in the garden, the threshing and winnowing season was Trustin’s favorite to paint. At nine years old, he was showing techniques in his art that were bold and abstract. Many of his pieces held a primitive feel as if they were his versions of cave paintings. The raw images of animals on a cold cave wall, infused with the reality that we now lived in houses. He was able to take these two states of mind, the wild and the tamed, and overlap them like lines off center.

  Trustin used all sorts of things as his canvases, from old fruit crates to empty flour sacks. Even Mom’s metal mop bucket. Dad eventually bought Trustin card stock from the hardware store. It became Trustin’s favorite canvas for watercolors.

  “You know, son,” Dad said to Trustin when he saw the paintings, “you’d be able to sell these. That’s the first step to makin’ a career out of it.”

  “You think my paintin’s are good enough?” Trustin asked.

  “Son, they’re the best in the world. I’m so lucky to be able to say I’m the father of such an artist.”

  A few days later, Trustin dragged a small wagon out of the barn. He gave it a fresh layer of green paint and drew little blue and purple flowers, using the rust spots as the flowers’ centers. He wrote on the side of the wagon, “Dreams by Trustin.”

  The first time he went out with the wagon full of his paintings, he sold enough for him to believe he was capable of creating something people wanted.