Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

—JOB 12:25

  After Trustin was gone, my father went away, too, in little ways. He no longer ate the vanilla cream drops he kept in the little tin in his bedside table drawer. Newspapers went unread and the slingshot he’d made for him and Trustin was put in the kitchen drawer and never taken out again.

  “It’s a father-son slingshot,” Dad had said when he presented it to Trustin for his birthday a couple years back.

  Dad had made the slingshot to have three prongs. The middle served as the base around which rubber bands from the outer prongs were tied. This was so two people could fire the slingshot at one time. But in order to do so, each person had to grip on to the single handle. Dad would always put his big hand on the handle first. Trustin would then lay his small hand on top.

  “It’s pretty well on the nose,” Dad said to his own amazement at the slingshot’s accuracy.

  Together, the two of them would fire pebbles into the woods. They’d also gather the bodies of the moths from our porch each morning. They would take them to the river and shoot them onto the surface of the water.

  “To feed the fish,” Dad would say.

  Really, I think it was so they could give one last flight to the winged creatures who had died by the light of our porch.

  Months passed since Trustin’s death. That autumn came and went, it seemed, as quick as a week. Pumpkins on Monday, the gray sky perfected by Wednesday, all the leaves fallen by Sunday. When winter came, it proved long and cold, months of bare branches and frozen ground. There would be an ice storm that year. It knocked the electric out for days.

  In February of 1967, I turned thirteen. I sat at the small square table Flossie had put a mirror on to turn into a vanity. Her makeup was scattered on it. I picked up her red lipstick and put it on, smacking my lips as I stared at myself in the mirror. I used her purple eye shadow and colored in my thick eyebrows with eyeliner. Lastly, I applied mascara until my lashes were hard.

  “Ugh. You look like a clown, Betty.” Flossie snickered as she stepped into the room.

  I tried to dart past her to the bathroom.

  “Wait.” She stopped laughing. “I’ll do your face for ya.”

  She sat me back down at the vanity and used a tissue moistened with grapeseed oil to remove the makeup, replacing it with brown eye shadow, black liner, and a single coat of mascara. She took my hair out of its braid, letting both sides hang long over my shoulders.

  “Never s-s-seen ya with makeup on before, Betty.” Lint smiled from the doorway.

  “Who you think’s prettier?” Flossie turned to face him. “Me or Betty?”

  “You’re both p-p-pretty.” He shifted on his small feet.

  “How so?” Flossie put her hands on her hips.

  “You look more like M-m-mom. B-b-betty looks more like Dad.”

  “Hear that, Betty?” Flossie asked. “He’s sayin’ you look like a man.”

  “That’s not what I m-m-mean,” Lint said.

  Flossie mocked his stutter before shooing him out of the room.

  When she came back, she turned me away from the mirror.

  “This will be the perfect color for you,” she said, picking up the red lipstick. Instead of applying it to my mouth, I felt her draw two lines on each of my cheeks.

  She started laughing as I turned to look in the mirror.

  “Your war paint,” she said. “I guess that’s why I’ll always be the prettiest.”

  She left, grabbing her coat on her way out. I looked one last time at myself in the mirror before leaving.

  Downstairs, I found Dad smoking in a rocker on the front porch. He had a jar of moonshine.

  “Do you remember who all bought a paintin’ off Trustin?” he asked with his eyes down. “I think I’m gonna buy ’em all back and hang ’em on our walls.”

  As he took a drink, he saw my face.

  “What’d you do?” He frowned. “Why’s your face got all that crap on it?”

  “Flossie put it on me.”

  “A girl changes when she wears makeup,” he said. “The way she sees the world and the way the world sees her.”

  He swallowed back more of the moonshine, his hand covering the stars painted on the outside of the jar.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He wiped his mouth as he asked, “Why, what?”

  “Why’s a girl gotta change when she wears makeup?” I leaned back against the porch rail and dug my nails into the wood. “Why can’t I be the same wearin’ lipstick as I am when my lips are bare? Shouldn’t it matter more what comes out of my lips than what is worn on them?”

  “That’s not what I’m sayin’.”

  “You don’t know what you’re sayin’ with all that moonshine in ya.”

  “I’m sayin’—”

  “What, Dad?”

  “When a girl puts on makeup, it’s her first step out the door. The eye shadow, the lipstick, it’s you leavin’ me. Why can’t ya stay a little girl?”

  “Same reason you couldn’t stay a little boy, Dad.”

  “Naw.” He looked past me. “I couldn’t. But Trustin will.”

  He nursed the moonshine as I walked back into the house.

  Later that night, I would see my father hopelessly lost for the first time.

  It turns out he was a yeller when he was drunk. Not a mean yell, but a sorrowful one. A cry, really, that echoed throughout the hills as he wandered from the house. I put on my coat and boots to go in search of him. If he passed out, he’d freeze in the February night. When I found him, he was banging his cane against the Shady Lane sign.

  “Dad, stop that.”

  He looked at me like a child getting caught. As sudden as anything, he ran up the nearest hill. Along the way, he dropped both the jar and the cane.

  I watched my father wildly climb, grabbing onto the sandstone edges. The exposed rock was like a woman popping out of her dress to me. Each ridge and cliff like the revelation of the woman’s collarbone or shoulder blade. This made the hills seem alive, as though they had at one time walked on two legs and went through hot-blue heavens and red-burning hells.

  God exists here, demons, too, the hills seemed to say what we already knew.

  I climbed up after my father, collecting his cane on my way and feeling the hardness of the frozen ground. The winter was something the hills had to bear. Something we all had to.

  “Dad, let’s go home,” I said. “You’re gonna fall and hurt yourself.”

  Still he climbed and still I followed, uncertain of the end for both of us.

  Before, I might have felt Dad could outrun me up a hill, but now, I knew my stride was wider. My arms and legs had grown longer. In some ways, I felt less like a child following my father and more like the young woman I was becoming. Maybe it was only the joint at each of my wrists that seemed solid, like pure muscle. I could feel a strength in me, lengthening with each new year. I imagined all the things my strength could be used for. To own crop. To sharpen a blade. To bear the load of each new harvest across my shoulders. Now my strength was to chase an old man up a hill.

  Once he made it to the top, he lifted his arms and screamed.

  “Give me back my boy.” He shook his fists at the sky as he yowled.

  I imagined people stopped what they were doing and looked outside to find the animal that had made the sound.

  He fell back onto the ground. For a moment, I thought he’d passed out, but he was awake and staring up at the sky. He was sweating from drunkenness and freezing from the cold at the same time. I sat beside him and listened to his sorrowful cry. I laid his cane on the ground between us.

  “Where is my son, Betty?” He grasped at me as if I was the one thing he had to hold on to.

  “Dad, stop.” I peeled his fingers off my coat.

  He looked at his hands as he said, “You know, I
’ve been wonderin’ this entire time, who’s gonna wash the small jars?”

  “Mom broke all the small jars,” I reminded him.

  “Not all of ’em.”

  “I can wash what’s left, Dad.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “No.” He slammed his fists against the ground.

  We listened to the silence around us for the next few moments. When he spoke, he used his deepest voice, as if he had to in order to go back so far in his life to say, “My daddy used to take me up into these hills. We’d dig up arrowheads. My daddy would hold up an arrowhead and say, ‘Think of how many animals this brought down. It’s been on every hunt and in every war. It’s almost a livin’ thing, this flint. Because of what it’s done, it has energy.’

  “I wanted to feel that energy so I carved an arrow and bow. I went up into the hills and I felt our ancestors in the way I pulled the bow back and released the arrow. I practiced on trees, imagining they were deer runnin’ the great field. When I took aim at an old black walnut, the arrow missed and killed a real deer I didn’t know had been standin’ there the whole time. The blood was awful to see. Sometimes all I can remember is his blood. As if it came in red sheets. I think my mother hung those sheets in the trees.”

  He picked up his cane and held the carving he’d done of Trustin’s face.

  “My boy, my boy,” he said over and over again.

  Unable to bear my father’s cry any longer, I released my own.

  “I killed him,” I said. “I killed Trustin.”

  Dad laid the cane down. He blinked his eyes, trying to figure out if he had heard me correctly or if it was only the moonshine in his ears.

  “You said you killed him?” he asked.

  “I gave him leaves and I told him they were wings. And that if he fell, he would be all right, because the leaves would turn into wings and he would be able to fly.” I tasted the salt of my tears slipping into my mouth. “He never would have climbed that ladder if I hadn’t of led him up it. It’s my fault he’s dead, Dad.”

  “Oh, no, no, no. C’mere.” He wiped my cheeks with his hands as if he was using my tears to wash my face. “No, no. You didn’t kill him. It may feel that way, but you didn’t.”

  He laid my head against his chest as he looked at the land around us.

  “You know why hills were made, Little Indian? Hills were made so men could stand at the top of ’em and roll their sins down. Creator is wise, Betty. It’s why He didn’t make this whole damn world nothin’ but a big flat piece of land.”

  He stood and rubbed the toe of his boot into the ground. He managed to loosen two rocks from the cold earth.

  “All these hills around us,” he said, “God must have known us Carpenters would call this place home.”

  He handed me one of the rocks, keeping the other. With a grunt, he cast his rock down the hill.

  “C’mon, Little Indian.” He held his arms out. “Give it to the hills.”

  I stood and threw the rock so hard, my body pitched forward as I screamed in the tradition of my family. The rock hit a tree branch, knocking the ice off before falling to the ground. It rolled the rest of the way down the side of the hill.

  “What happens now, Dad?” I asked.

  “We believe.” He stood taller. “We believe we are free from our sins and that maybe one of these days the land will flatten out and we will be good enough people to not need hills.”

  35

  Strength and honour are her clothing.

  —PROVERBS 31:25

  In spring of 1967, the world was preparing for a summer that would have lasting meaning in the annals of human culture. In Breathed, however, we were more concerned with the birds. They circled at first, before briskly flying as if falling for dear life. They crashed into windshields and houses. They even struck people, like Cotton, who watered his lawn at exactly 6:30 every morning. He walked into town with a bloody nose and a dying sparrow in his hands.

  Dad said the birds were suffering from grass river sickness.

  “It sometimes happens,” he said. “The trees become like smoke rising off water until the birds believe grass is the surface of a river. The birds are flyin’ low to see their reflection. To see if they are still made of feathers or if they are merely men uneasy in the wind.”

  Mom’s belief, however, was intricately tied to a forecast.

  “A creature of the sky will only fly low when bad weather is approachin’,” she said.

  Not wanting to be plowed into, Mom would squat and sit in between the large bushes at the side of our house, where she was able to view the birds zigzagging in front of her.

  One night at dinner, she said she knew the point of the whole thing.

  “What is it?” Dad asked her.

  “To let us know there’s one hell of a storm comin’,” she said, startling at the sound of a wren colliding with the side of the house.

  Some folks, like Dad, buried the dead birds. Others burned them out of fear of disease. Cinderblock John was one such person.

  “This is all happenin’ because of the aliens,” Cinderblock John said. “The Martians, Venusians, whatever you wanna call ’em, they’ve given all our doves, swallows, and thrushes death to carry inside ’em like a chill. The aliens want us to be infected, too, until we start walkin’ so low, we start shovelin’ out our own graves. Only fire can destroy such cold infection.”

  I thought smoke from the burning birds might be colored like their feathers. Red for a cardinal. Blue for a jay. Yellow for all the darling warblers. But the smoke was as gray as ever, if not black, as it rose against the white clouds.

  Business owners took on the responsibility of collecting dead birds out of the lanes. Sheriff Sands warned cars not to drive over the bodies before they could be picked up.

  “Go around ’em,” he said. “If you smash ’em, it releases blood. Makes more of a mess. Might end up bein’ what helps spread this thing.”

  I always liked to go on foot to school, but even walking through the woods, using trees as a cover, was becoming increasingly difficult. However, no matter how bad the birds were outside, they were worse inside the school.

  Walking down the hallway, I dodged the birds’ beaks. They seemed to want to peck my breasts off. The beating of their wings, like a strong gust of wind that tried to knock me down. I fought to shield my face from their sharp talons. I covered my ears from their vulgar shrieks.

  “C’mon. Show us your tits.” They screeched, circling me. I beat them back with my books and ran into my classroom.

  The birds followed, taking their seats. One in particular turned to look back at me. I thought he resembled a woodpecker. His long thin nose. His small beady eyes. I squirmed in my seat as he continued to stare at me like I was something he wanted to eat. He leaned down and looked toward my legs. I held them together as tight as I could.

  “I think I see a bloody pad,” he said. “You wearin’ a bloody pad, Betty? I can smell it.”

  Funny how much teenage boys behave like birds flying too low.

  Each day, I tried to ignore the growing attention from the boys. I learned not to write so much in class because the more I wrote, the more the lead of my pencil wore down, which meant I would have to go to the sharpener on the wall. Every time, my skirt would be yanked up. I held my hands against the fabric, trying to stop it. Whichever boy had lifted my skirt would laugh and tally his score against the others.

  Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants or shorts in class. As girls, we were deemed not to be able to make our own decisions. As if we were not smart or capable enough to decide how to dress our own bodies. I didn’t have anything against dresses, but I also knew shorts were best for hanging upside down from tree branches in and for walking by boys who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves.

 
; One day that spring, I looked at the dresses in my closet. Pushing them aside, I made the decision to wear something else. Shorts. I’d taken my seat before the teacher, Mrs. Cross, or any of my fellow classmates noticed. We started the morning by reading passages from our history books aloud. I continued to watch the birds outside because I was never called on to participate in class. It made no difference if I was paying attention or not. The teachers had their favorite students. I was never one. I turned in my work, and that seemed to be all that was asked of me. The teachers had already determined I wasn’t going to do anything with my life, so why bother with me? I might as well not have existed. But that day, Mrs. Cross did the unexpected. She called my name.

  “Betty, read the next paragraph for us.”

  Oh, God. I’d never been called on before. To read? Me? The very thought of my voice in the room caused my stomach to hurt. I broke out in a cold sweat and my hands shook as I picked up my book. The words on the page blurred as I tried to focus on which paragraph.

  “The one at the bottom, Betty.” The teacher impatiently tapped her pencil on her desk. “C’mon, c’mon.”

  “Lincoln…” My voice quivered as I crossed my legs tight at the ankles. I thought I might pee. “Abigail…I mean Abra—Abraham Lincoln was ass—” The kids laughed.

  “God, what’s the matter with her?” they whispered to one another. “What a weirdo.”

  My mouth felt so dry. I could drink the whole river, I thought, and still be thirsty by the end of it. If I was home, I would read aloud without issue, but there at school, I had become someone afraid of being heard and of being seen.

  I had to fight each word just to get through a single sentence. It was as though hands were choking me. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was going to die.

  They’ll collect my body from the desk, then go about reading the rest of the book like I didn’t matter.

  “Lincoln was…assassinated…April fifteenth, eighteen sixty-five…”

  “Betty,” Mrs. Cross said, “you’re readin’ like you got gum in your mouth. You know gum is not permitted in class. Take it out this instant.”