“I called Dad and the doc,” Flossie said as she ran up from the darkness. When she saw Trustin, she asked, “Is he…?”
Fraya nodded. “He’s gone.”
It sounded so final when Fraya said it. I realized then, never would I have my little brother to yell at when he got his fingerprints, black from his charcoal, on my clothes. Never again would I have him to share binoculars with to look across the river at the distance on the other side. This boy who had drawn his family was gone. I was certain that, when I got back home, the roof itself would be gone, leaving the house exposed to the elements. That’s what losing a brother feels like. Like a part of the house is missing, the part that shelters you in a storm.
Headlights lit us up. A car door flew open and Dad ran out.
“Oh, my boy.” He dropped at Trustin’s side. “What have you done, kiddo?”
Dad slapped Trustin’s cheeks as if trying to rouse him in the morning from sleep.
“C’mon, get up now,” Dad told him. “You’re still a newborn. An infant. You can’t go yet. You haven’t drawn all the hills. You haven’t mapped the river. Wake up, my boy, wake up.”
“Dad, he’s not gonna wake up.” Fraya spoke softly.
Dad raised his eyes to hers as if needing to see the sadness in his daughter in order to know his son was truly dead.
“Oh, my boy.” He wailed. “My little boy.”
Trustin hadn’t screamed that first time he fell. And he hadn’t screamed this second time either. The only sound had been of the three of us playing in the water. I suppose that’s why my sisters looked down, feeling we had let something slip so easily through our fingers.
“I’ve got you.” Dad gathered Trustin up and carried him toward the car.
Left on the ground where Trustin had been lying were the two leaves I’d given him. I fell to my knees and dug up the earth enough to bury the leaves, wishing I could bury them miles down, the distance of my deep-reaching guilt.
33
Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.
—ECCLESIASTES 7:3
The first music I ever heard was the way my father drummed the side of my cradle. Thump, thump, thumpity, thump, thump. Yes, that was music. Yes, that was a song. Same song Dad played on the side of Trustin’s coffin. Thump, thump, thumpity, thump, thump, my father’s fingers drummed as he stared at his son’s body.
We had Trustin’s funeral on the back porch. It was nice with the posts and the morning glory vines climbing up them. The sunlight seemed slower there as if it were watered down, giving a sort of pale, yellow flesh to everything. It was a good thought to have that the back porch was the sitting view to long woods and slowly-gotten-to pastures where life nested and fit into the whorls of a wildflower. If you stood far enough away and only kept your eye on the possibility, you’d see these things. A place of noon and iced tea rings on the rickety wooden table by the white swing.
Earlier that morning, me and my sisters picked forget-me-nots. They were Trustin’s favorite. It’s said that when God was walking, he heard a tiny voice say, Please, God, forget me not. When God looked down to see where the voice had come from, He saw a small blue flower.
“I’ll always remember you,” God told the flower.
The funeral was for family only. For all of Trustin’s life, I never saw him with a friend or a girl he might one day kiss. Perhaps he knew he was not long for this world and was saving more people the heartache. A heartache that caused Mom to get up early and break all of the small jars in the kitchen.
As Dad cleaned up the shards, Mom stepped outside. She was barefoot and in a pale pink housedress. Sweat drenched the cotton and left marks beneath her armpits and at the small of her back until she looked like she was carrying an ocean. She seemed to like the sweat slipping down her face as she walked out to the tree swing and sat on it. As she swung higher and higher, she threw her head back and clung tight to the rope.
Flossie went over to sit on the top porch step, frowning as she watched Mom. Flossie had whispered to me about the curse all night, despite my telling her to be quiet.
“But don’t you understand, Betty,” she had said. “The curse has a plan for all of us.”
I stood by the coffin. Dad had made it himself out of pine he painted yellow. The color of the first daffodils. He painted the inside bright blue with little white clouds.
“So Trustin will always have a piece of sky with him,” Dad had said.
Fraya came up beside me.
“Don’t you wish you had a sack full of good days, Betty?” she asked. “Whenever you were havin’ a bad day you could reach into the sack and make everything better. If I had me a sack of good days, I’d reach inside right now and Trustin would stand up and dance, even though he never really danced, did he? I know he would, though, on a good day.”
She turned away. When she walked by Leland, he looked at her. Digging his heels against the porch post behind him, he lowered his head and slipped his hands into his pockets. I thought he might say a verse from the Bible. He had started to deliver a few sermons at a church. When Flossie found out, she said, “Good Lord. Leland? Preachin’? How much you wanna bet he’ll put a collection plate in his car and start drivin’ around.”
“He won’t need to,” I told her. “He’s already got a collection plate built in. His hand.”
She laughed, then her eyes clouded over as she said, “Why is it so many men of God are not of God at all, Betty?”
This echoed in my ears as I watched Leland at the funeral. He was twenty-seven then. His brow cast an even darker shadow over his eyes.
“I got these from the garden.” Dad appeared behind me. He was holding bouquets of fresh thyme and mugwort tied with long white ribbon.
“The thyme is the herb of all travelers,” he said as he attached the bouquets to the small hook he’d screwed into the underside of the coffin’s lid, directly above Trustin’s head. “It will keep you safe on your journey.” He spoke directly to Trustin. “And the mugwort is for kind dreams.”
Dad had cut the white ribbon long enough to reach Trustin’s hand.
“For you to hold on to,” Dad told his dead son.
My father’s tears were things it hurt to see. They could lay against you like a beast who, by all of its downward weight, keeps you trapped until you starve the belief that a miracle will come, that a God will save you, that pain is no more than the shadow of the best home you’ve ever lived in.
Needing to get away, I decided to go to the front porch, where the sun was brighter. I removed a pencil and pad of paper from my dress pocket. Sitting at the small metal table in the corner of the porch, I tried to write.
Yes, that’s right. No, that’s wrong. Try again. Breathe. Write these words faster. Those ones slower. Look at the dish towels drying on the porch rail. Stories hide in the usual places. Write the magnification of this Ohio town. In rural land, light is king and I am young and green, fun and fine. Remember to smile while writing a beautiful name for the hurt.
I ended up writing three words. I killed him. At twelve years old I believed that. It was my secret, my confession, that I tore up. I dropped the pieces into a glass jar full of half-drunk moonshine there on the table. I watched the liquor bleed the ink away, and sat there long enough that the shadows shifted in the lowering sun.
When I returned to the back porch, Flossie was standing against a post. Lint was leaning over the rail as he watched Mom, still swinging. Leland and Fraya were watching Dad pick dead blooms off the hanging baskets of petunias.
“Dad?” I touched his forearm. “It’s gettin’ late. We might want to…”
He began picking off the live blooms.
“Those flowers are alive, Dad.”
He looked at the petunias in his hand. He laid them on the porch rail before r
eaching into his pocket, pulling out one of Trustin’s charcoal sticks. With it in hand, Dad stepped toward the coffin. He started to close the lid, but was unable to follow through.
“Get the lid for me, will ya?” he asked me. “I can’t close the lid on ’im. I just can’t give ’im that darkness.”
As I slowly lowered the lid, the shadow fell on Trustin’s face until all we were left with was the way the hummingbird darted back and forth overhead.
On top of the coffin, Dad gently laid his left hand and traced it with the charcoal. He colored the outline in until the handprint was solid black. When he offered the charcoal to us, Fraya was the first to take it. She laid her hand on the coffin.
“Storms in my heart will never go away,” she sang as she traced her thin fingers with the charcoal. “Tearstained days are here to stay.”
One by one, the rest of us shared the charcoal. When Lint did his hand, he said to Trustin, “Thanks for paintin’ eyes on my r-r-rocks for me.”
I was last. I traced slowly, feeling the charcoal’s edge on my skin. I outlined my right hand, putting it close and at an angle to the shape of Dad’s. It looked like the symbol of a heart.
Once I’d finished, Dad took the charcoal stick from me and went out into the yard to try to get Mom to stop swinging.
“Trace your hand for Trustin.” He waved the charcoal at her.
She kept swinging until I thought she’d go so high, she wouldn’t come back down.
Dad gave up and laid the charcoal on the porch rail. He looked at the hands on the outside of the coffin before saying, “Dear Son, we send you away on your great journey with extra hands. May you find them useful as you use the sky as your canvas.”
Along the sides of the coffin, he had hammered in leather handles. One for each of us. I was on the right side with Lint and Dad. Leland, Fraya, and Flossie were on the other. Only after we picked the coffin up did Dad say we were not to put it down until we got to the cemetery.
“But, Dad, aren’t we p-p-puttin’ the coffin in the car?” Lint tried to get a better grip on his leather handle as we maneuvered the coffin down the porch steps.
“No, son,” Dad said. “We carry our dead all the way.”
As we passed through the yard, I stared at the handprints on the barn. I remembered what Dad had said all those years ago about the hands being left by those who could not let go.
“I wonder what they could not let go of?”I remember Trustin asking Dad. “I bet it’s a treasure or a secret world that belongs only to them.”
It was difficult enough to carry Trustin down Shady Lane. By the time we got to Main Lane, we were really struggling. Leland kept yelling at Flossie for not carrying her weight.
“I’m tryin’,” she said. “He’s heavy.”
Those out on Main Lane stopped to stare and whisper about us strange Carpenters, who carried our dead through the middle of the lane as if we were laying down the mayor.
“What’s those black things on the coffin?” I heard someone ask.
“Hands,” another person said. “The black hands of death.”
Then a strange thing happened. Men started removing their hats to hold them to their chests. Women told their children to stand up straighter.
“There’s a coffin, for Christ’s sake.” They slapped the backs of their young.
Someone threw a flower. Followed by another and another. The people were picking flowers from pots lining the lane and tossing them in our path. We stood taller. The weight seemed not as heavy.
When I saw Ruthis, she was holding a red geranium. It reminded me of the first time I’d met her, when she had held the red ball. A group of girls laughed behind her. She told them to shut up. Then, just as she once threw the red ball to me without hesitation, she did the same with the flower.
Everything became vibrant as if the whole moment was awash in Trustin’s paints. Breathed seemed to glint like a kaleidoscope’s edges.
“If one day I’m ever gone,” Trustin’s voice echoed in my ears, “you’ll know I ran away to the back of that man’s suit.”
I wanted to believe that’s where he was. Alive and where he wanted to be, even if it wasn’t with us. But as we got closer to the cemetery, and the geraniums were no longer falling in our path, the coffin began to feel the heaviest it ever had. We alone stepped into the cemetery with our dead son and brother. There is no wash of color or kaleidoscopic edges in a place of cold hard stone and disturbed soil.
Trustin was not to be buried on Reflection Hill, which was for the wealthier families of Breathed, who could afford to have effigies made of their loved ones. He was going to be buried in a cemetery built on three corners of land that had, in the 1700s, been owned by three different men. These men quarreled over the property lines, which in those days had been decided by the length of time it took for one man’s cigarette to extinguish. The argument escalated until they drew their gentlemen swords. As if it had always been their fate, all three men were fatally wounded. Theirs were the first graves upon that land, which eventually became Landlord’s Cemetery. It was also known as the field of stone angels because those were the only gravestones. Trustin’s stone would not be placed until a year later, when Dad saved enough to buy the little stone angel with the big wings.
We walked by an old tractor’s steering wheel left to rust and a piece of till that’d been abandoned years ago. Trustin’s plot was toward the back of the cemetery, where a series of oaks sat at bough’s length apart from one another. There we set the coffin down. I could no longer feel my hand. The leather strap had left the beginnings of a blood bruise on my palm.
“It doesn’t feel real until you see the hole,” Flossie said.
The hole had been dug that morning and the shovels were still lying on the ground. At times, the hole seemed too deep. Other times, it appeared too shallow.
“I want each one of you to never forget to say his name,” Dad told us. “When someone asks you how many brothers you have, you don’t stop includin’ Trustin just ’cause he’s gone. Don’t say he’s dead either. Say he went off into the field to draw his pictures, and he’ll be back before dinner.”
“But h-h-he won’t, Dad,” Lint said.
“Hell.” Dad stood at the edge of the grave and nudged a pebble into the hole. “I know that.” He squinted at the sun. “If any of you have anything to say, now is the time.”
We looked at one another to see who would speak.
“Not all at once, now.” Dad chuckled like it was the best he could do. “Betty? You got the poet in ya. Say somethin’ we’ll remember.”
I swallowed hard. My thirst had gotten worse in the heat.
“Sure, Dad,” I said, my voice trembling. “Trustin was…he was one hell of an artist and—and—do y’all feel the ground movin’ or am I the only one who—”
I would later wake up in my bed with a cool wet rag laid across on my forehead and ice melting in a bowl on the bedside table. I saw a smiling face hovering over me.
“God?” I asked.
“Naw, it’s your dad. You fainted,” he said. “Fell in the hole of all places.”
“What hole?”
“The one dug for Trustin. You gave your chin there a good scrapin’, but other than that you’re fine. At least now we know you can survive six-foot falls. When we carried ya home, folks thought we lost another one. A couple of people have dropped casseroles off. I didn’t know they’d be so nice.”
He frowned and thought for a minute.
“The coffin was too heavy to carry that far,” he said. “I put ya through quite a strain, didn’t I? How ya feel now, Little Indian?”
“Well, I ain’t dizzy no more.”
I sat up and saw dirt on my dress. I still had some tiny pebbles on my legs. Someone had removed my shoes. They were by the door.
“Are we goin’ back t
o the cemetery to bury Trustin?” I asked.
Dad laid me back and put the rag once more across my forehead.
“He’s already buried,” he said.
As he slipped an ice cube into my mouth, I shut my eyes, listening to the tree branch outside creak under the weight of my mother, swinging high enough to dry her tears.
THE BREATHANIAN
Teenagers Spooked by Gunfire
In the late hours of Saturday night, a teenage couple, spending an unchaperoned night in the local cemetery, was frightened by nearby gunfire.
When the two got up to run, they became separated. The boy claimed to have been chased to the train tracks.
“I could hear heavy breathing and footsteps behind me,” he reported. “A ghostly voice told me I was going to die tonight.”
The girl ended up lost in the woods. She was found several hours later with leaves in her hair. She said when the gun went off close to her, she hid behind a fallen log.
She claimed to have smelled thyme and mugwort in the area during the time of gunfire.
The boy says he will no longer see the girl.
“I believe the gunfire was a warning I shouldn’t be with her,” he said.
The boy did not want to be identified, though the girl insisted she be.
“I’m Flossie Carpenter,” she said. “I’m the one whose brother fell off the water tower. But he’s not really dead. He’s just drawin’ pictures of things in the field. He’ll be back before dinner.”
Part Four
Seed of Woman
1967–1969
34
They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man.
Betty Page 35