“I think spiders sing,” Flossie would say. “The web is her song.”
After Flossie left, the web broke. I never saw the spider again.
THE BREATHANIAN
Man Questioned in Ongoing Shooting Investigation
One Landon Carpenter was questioned after a witness reported seeing Carpenter in the vicinity gunfire was heard. Carpenter stated he was only taking a nap in the sun.
While Carpenter was being questioned, another call came in from a resident reporting a figure holding a shotgun had been standing in her yard late last night.
This resident, who wishes to remain anonymous, said she spoke to the figure and even offered the person a glass of milk. When she turned around to get the milk, the figure had stepped closer to her house. The woman said she found it odd, so she made another turn, only to discover the figure had stepped even closer and was now on her front porch.
“I knew my door was unlocked,” the woman said. “Never in my life had I locked it. Just when I started to scream, the figure backed and left, dragging the barrel of the gun against the ground.”
When asked if she thought it was a man or woman, she said the light was too poor.
“But they kinda smelled like a man,” she was quick to add. “Unless it was only a woman who had a man on her earlier in the evening.”
36
I am like a broken vessel.
—PSALM 31:12
My favorite dress was one that had been passed down from Mom to Fraya to Flossie to me. In its beginning, the dress had been bright red. By the time it got to me, the years had dimmed it to a color becoming pink. Sometimes I would imagine all the red had been bled out by the women who’d worn it.
I was wearing this dress in the garden, where I was with Fraya, Lint, and Dad. We were picking vegetables for a fry when Leland came driving up.
“Who invited you?” I asked him once he stepped into the garden.
“Why do I got to be invited to see my own family?” he asked.
I looked over at Fraya. She was placing zucchini into a basket. I watched Leland step past her to the rows of corn. He scanned the stalks before choosing an ear to peel the husk back on.
“You’re ruinin’ the corn,” I told him.
“Oh, I forgot.” He waved his arms in the air. “You’re squash. The protector of the corn. Mighty Betty.”
“All right, that’s enough, you two.” Dad began cutting off okra to add to the basket.
He held the longest of the okra up against each side of his head as if they were horns. Lint laughed before picking up two more out of the basket to make himself a pair that he then pretended to spar with Dad’s. Fraya smiled at the two of them while Leland opened yet another ear of corn.
“Stop.” I pushed him back from the stalks.
“Let’s try to have a good time together.” Dad dropped the okra into the basket.
“Yeah, Betty,” Fraya added.
I turned to her and frowned.
“Why is it my fault?” I asked. “He’s the one spoilin’ the corn. No one even cares.”
“Forget it. I’m outta here.” Leland left through the garden, trampling vines.
“You’re killin’ the plants, you jerk,” I said, bending down and checking on the vines.
Leland turned around and gave me the middle finger before getting in his car. Dust churned up as he sped out of the drive.
“You need to learn to ignore him, Betty,” Fraya said.
She was using a sharp knife to cut ripe cucumbers off.
“Ignore him?” I asked. “I’m tired of ignorin’ how he destroys everything. I’m not gonna ignore him anymore.”
Fraya slowly stood.
“Betty,” she said. “Don’t start anything.”
“Dad.” I turned to face him. “I’ve got to tell you somethin’.”
“Shut up, Betty.” Fraya stepped out of the cucumber vines. She stopped in front of the row of cabbages.
“Dad.” I took a deep breath. “Leland—”
Fraya kicked the head off the cabbage plant in front of her.
“Fraya?” Dad turned to her. “Why’d you do that?”
She looked at me, then kicked the remaining cabbages so hard, they rolled across the ground like the heads of women with their hair coming undone.
Stomping into the melon patch, she stabbed the honeydews and watermelons. She next threw her whole body into the pole runner beans, pulling the long pods off until it looked as though she had a handful of snakes she was strangling to death.
“Stop, Fraya,” Dad said. “You’re murderin’ the garden.”
Entangling herself in deep green vines, she cut with the knife in her hand as if she was shredding wallpaper off a wall. She wrapped the cucumber vines around her arms, heaving them up by using the weight of her whole body. Dad had to grab Lint out of Fraya’s path as she yanked up carrots like a mother yanking her children up by their hair. She bit into each carrot, the mud spreading around her mouth as she spit the pieces out.
She squeezed the tomatoes to death, their innards spilling between her fingers. She did the same with the berries, the multicolored juices staining her hands. Turning her attention to the corn, she ran into the stalks. Their tassels shook as she bent the stalks until they snapped at the base.
“What is all the yellin’ about?” Mom came out onto the porch.
When she saw what was going on, she could only stand back with the rest of us, watching Fraya attack the garden.
At the rear of the garden were grapes that grew alongside a wooden fence Dad had built. Fraya busted the fence, slashed the vines, and stomped the grapes to death, their sweet aroma permeating the air.
When Fraya stopped, she stared only at me. She still had the knife in her hand. Her grip was so tight, I thought she was going to shatter the wooden handle.
“Fraya?” Dad slowly walked through the carnage. “How could you do this?”
“I know why she did it,” I said, my anger a match for Fraya’s. “She did it because Leland—”
In one quick slash, Fraya slit her left wrist open.
“Jesus Crimson.” Mom pulled Lint into her and covered his eyes.
“You gotta stop the blood loss, Landon,” she told Dad as he raced to Fraya.
Fraya stared down at her wrist. She seemed surprised herself that she had done it as she dropped the knife. Dad used his handkerchief to wrap the wound.
“It’s not so bad. I can stitch it,” he said, leading Fraya into the garage.
“Betty,” he called back to me. “I’ll need your help.”
Lint and Mom were left to stare across the garden. I could hear Mom trying to get the story of what had happened out of Lint.
Once I was in the garage, Dad told me to keep pressure applied to the wound. I laid my hands over top of the handkerchief. I could feel her warm blood.
As Dad searched the garage for thread, Fraya whispered to me, “I told you I’d kill myself. You believe me now?”
I slowly nodded.
“This should work,” Dad said, pulling a spool of black thread from a tin.
He gave her a piece of bark to bite while he poured moonshine on the wound.
“I’ll get ya all fixed up,” he said as he threaded the bone needle after disinfecting it with more moonshine.
Fraya spit the bark out and drank some of the moonshine. As she did, she watched out of the corner of her eye the way Dad pinched her skin together just before pushing the needle through. When she started screaming, I ran out of the garage and into the woods.
I searched for the tallest tree, burying my face in its bark.
Only when evening set in did I head home. When I got there, Fraya’s bedroom light was on. Mom was downstairs in the living room watching TV. Lint had fallen asleep beside her, his head re
sting on her lap.
The steps creaked under my feet as I walked upstairs. I tiptoed down the hall and sat by the wall outside Fraya’s room.
“Ya know, God had to wear a bandage like that once,” Dad was saying.
I peeked around the doorway to see him on the edge of Fraya’s bed. He had a jar filled with sand in his hands. Fraya was sitting against the headboard. She had her knees pulled up under her chin. The white bandage on her wrist needed to be changed.
“God slit his wrist, too?” she asked.
“Nothin’ like that.”
“Then why’d He have to wear a bandage?” Fraya looked down at her own.
“It was after He made the sun,” he said.
Fraya was silent for a few moments. Then she asked how God had made the sun.
“Kind of like how you’d make a pie,” Dad said. “There’s sugar involved, some flour, some butter. I don’t know the exact recipe. If I did, well, I’d make my own sun. But I do know that after God whipped up His ingredients, He put ’em all in a big pan and shoved it in the oven to bake until it got golden and hot, ready for the sky. Some folks think God burned His hands on the actual sun after it was baked. To God’s own embarrassment, He burned His hands on the damn pan. He forgot to put on oven mitts before He got the pan outta the oven.”
Dad chuckled at the thought, but Fraya didn’t, so he joined her in the silence until she said, “That’s a silly story, Dad.”
He perked up at the gentle way she had said “Dad.”
“Why you got that jar?” she asked.
“It’s from heaven,” he said. “Last night on my walk, a rope dropped from the sky. I waited to see if anyone was gonna come down. When they didn’t, I tugged at the rope to see if it was sturdy. I reckoned someone wanted me to climb up.”
“But you didn’t know who dropped it,” Fraya said. “What if at the top of it was a demon?”
“It came from the sky,” Dad told her. “The only thing I can think of that’s in the sky is heaven. I reckoned the rope couldn’t be all that bad, so I laid my cane down, spit on my hands, got me a grip, and started climbin’. Here I was, an old Mr. Nobody, climbin’ up into the sky. The stars got so close, they looked like the lights of Breathed while the town was so far away, all its lights looked like stars. When I got to the top of that rope, I found it’d been dropped from an open winda suspended in the sky. A bright light shone from the winda. I climbed through it and fell out onto the Beach of Time.”
“What’s the Beach of Time?”
“Come now, Fraya. Everyone knows what the Beach of Time is. It’s where our jars of life are kept. Each jar is full of sand that measures our time on earth.”
He showed her the strip of paper he’d taped to the outside of the glass. It had her name written on it in his cursive.
“I searched through all them jars until I found yours,” he said. “And look at it.” He held the jar up in front of her. “It’s full to the top with sand. Any more and it would be pourin’ out from under the lid. God’s given you more days than most, Fraya. I should know. I saw the jars. I saw how some were filled with only a spoonful of sand and some with just a grain. God has great plans for you, my girl.”
He handed her the jar. She looked at it before saying, “This is just sand from the riverbank, Dad. Nothin’ more.”
Dad grunted like an old bear as he grabbed hold of her bandaged wrist.
“Don’t you know what happens if you end yourself?” he asked. “Your jar will break and the sand will spill. For all eternity, your punishment will be to gather every shard of glass and each grain of sand. When the time comes that you do, don’t think you’ll rest, for the devil will kick your gathered pile, spreadin’ it all over again. This is how it’ll always be. You tryin’ to find what you’ve broken—tryin’ to put it back together again—and the devil, never lettin’ ya.
“God opened that winda for me and dropped that rope so I could find your jar in order to show you how much life you have yet to live. You’re meant to grow old, Fraya.” Dad ran his hand through her hair. “Your hair is meant to turn white. Your skin is meant to wrinkle. You’re destined to die an old woman. A very happy old woman. Do not be the fool who spits in the eye of the Great Spirit.”
She nodded.
“I’ll let you rest now.” He tucked her in bed. She held the jar against her chest as if it were a teddy bear.
“Goodnight, Fraya,” he said before walking out of the room and closing the door behind him.
He wasn’t surprised to find me listening. He merely waited for me to stand so we could walk down the hall together. I suppose we would have been on our way out, perhaps to look at the very spot where the garden once grew. But we never got there because the sound of breaking glass caused us both to turn around. We ran to Fraya’s door. When Dad opened it, we saw Fraya out of bed and standing over the broken jar. She was looking at the sand and the way it seeped into the cracks of the floorboards around her.
37
She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers: her labour is in vain.
—JOB 39:16
“Is there ever gonna be light in this world for me?” Fraya’s whisper filled the room.
After breaking the jar, she walked across the hall and climbed into my bed. When I lay beside her, she wrapped her arms around me. Her breathing warmed the crown of my head tucked into her chest.
Only after she was asleep did I softly slide off the bed and go back into her bedroom, where Dad was holding a magnifying glass, searching for every last grain of sand. To him, Fraya was as savable as the smallest slivers of glass that he removed from the floorboard crevices using a pair of tweezers.
Fraya helped him believe she could be saved when the next morning she raised up out of bed with a big stretch that arched her back.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
Dad made her a large stack of pancakes. She ate them with a smile on her face. For my father, that meant his daughter was okay. My mother and I knew better, so while Fraya went into the living room to watch TV after her feast, I took the knife and went out to A Faraway Place. I carved a deep cut into the stage. I held my hand over the gash and tried to believe I had enough power to heal Fraya by myself.
I started to sing the song me, Fraya, and Flossie had sung for Mom after she had cut herself. Only I changed the word “Mom” to “sister.”
“Sister, come home, we love you so. The house is cold without you, the flowers won’t grow. We miss you dearly, we send you a kiss. Sister, come home, we love you so.”
But those lyrics soon dropped away to a chant.
“Tsa-la-gi. Qua-nu-s-di. Tsu-we-tsi-a-ni-ge-yv. U-la-ni-gi-dv.”
They were Cherokee words I’d heard Dad use, but having those few, I tied my soul to their rhythm.
“Tsa-la-gi. Qua-nu-s-di. Tsu-we-tsi-a-ni-ge-yv. U-la-ni-gi-dv.”
I became tempted by my father’s stories to create an ancestral origin out of the earth, one that knew me before I even knew myself. This came with a feeling that the past had power and if I could just summon that force, maybe I could help my sister. Which is why, every day, I chanted until Fraya no longer had to wear a bandage.
“I reckon it’ll be an ugly scar,” she said, staring at the way her skin was healing.
She wanted to return to work more than anything else. Folks had heard about the incident and would glance at her, only to later discuss it amongst themselves. Fraya pretended not to notice. Instead she focused on taking another order, cutting another slice of pie, saving enough energy to turn the door sign over at close. This was the routine she fell back into.
“I’m fine,” she’d say when Dad asked her how she was feeling. “I just want to forget it ever happened.”
When that autumn of 1967 opened the door to everything crisp and brown, the focus changed from Fraya to Flo
ssie, who carried her growing belly like a girl carting an unwanted burden. She complained about her back, her swollen ankles, and her substantial weight gain. She would eat celery sticks in the morning, only to give in to her cravings by night. Potato chips. Pop. Dishes of chocolate ice cream. She’d flop back on the bed she shared with Cutlass, listening to him snore as she stabbed her fingernails into the silk sheets.
Ever since Flossie became a Silkworm, she would appear at random. All of a sudden she would be on our front porch, her belly grazing the rail. Other times I’d go into my room to find her lying in her old twin bed, sleeping on her side. I would place my hand on her taut stomach. She would continue to sleep, her mouth open enough for a tiny string of drool to settle on the cotton sheet. When she would wake, she would forget she was pregnant and would startle at the sight of her stomach. She’d try to knock it off like she was knocking off a spider only to remember the stomach was part of her.
“Bein’ pregnant is like havin’ a wound you have to bleed out between your legs, Betty,” she said one time, raising her shirt and showing me the stretch marks. “Look at the scars it gives.”
The bigger she got, the less she took care of herself. She would wear the same shirt and pants for days. She no longer brushed her hair nor painted her fingernails. By the winter of 1968, she looked nothing like the sister I had known. Her pregnancy eclipsed her. The bright light that had shone from her became darkened by the sphere she carried on her body. In this shadowed state, she seemed meaner, as if soaking in viciousness. No more so than that February. As the icy winds blew, I turned fourteen. One of my birthday gifts had been white go-go boots from Fraya. Nearly everyone at school, including Ruthis, had a pair. At first, I’d been embarrassed to say I wanted them.
“Out of everything in the world, you seek some flashy boots?” Dad had asked when he heard. “You used to reach for turtle shells and whippoorwills.”
Betty Page 38