Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “Not as bad as I thought it would,” she said. “You know what’s scary, Betty? How easy it was to do. But I won’t do it again ’cause I’m gonna leave.”

  “Leave?” I raised up.

  “I think I’ll live somewhere by the ocean. I could pick up seashells and play in the waves.”

  “You can’t leave.”

  “You can come, too. We’ll both go. We’ll make necklaces out of our goodnights and throw ’em on the water.”

  We sat there a moment longer before she wrapped her arms around herself and said, “Betty, let’s go see a movie. There’s an uneasiness in the air tonight. Don’t you think? We could go to the drive-in. They’re screenin’ that film with Shelley Winters and Geraldine Page. The Three Sisters. It’s based on a play, I think, but it sounds like Dad’s carvin’. You remember the one he did of all of us?” She ran her fingers along the carved corn of her necklace. “Yeah, we’ll go see if the movie is like his carvin’ of us.”

  We climbed back into the room as she told me there was a piece of vinegar pie she’d saved for me.

  “Run along and eat it,” she said. “I’ll be down after I change.”

  “I don’t think I’m very hungry. My stomach hurts. It’s hurt all day.”

  I turned around to pet Hank. He had gotten up on the bed behind me. As I scratched under his chin, I felt Fraya’s hands on my shoulders.

  “Your stomach’s hurt all day?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Do you know why, Betty?”

  “No.”

  She took me into the bathroom, where she turned my back to the floor-length mirror.

  I stared at the reflection of the red stain on my skirt.

  “No.” I tried to wipe the stain off. “I don’t want it. I don’t want the blood.”

  “You know in some cultures a girl would be slapped when she first bleeds,” Fraya said, softly resting her hand on my cheek. “Slapped hard, right across the face. But in other cultures, like the Cherokee, blood was seen as power. In fact, the Cherokees believed a woman had so much power when bleedin’ that she would stay in a hut constructed for the purpose of shelterin’ her on her cycle. There she was kept away from everyone else.”

  “Kept away as punishment?”

  “No.” Fraya shook her head. “The hut was not forced upon the women. They could choose to enter it or not. That was our power.” She held my face in both of her hands.

  “How do you know this, Fraya?”

  “I read it in a book at the library. It had a Cherokee legend in it about a man made out of stone. When the stone man came to terrorize the tribe, a line of menstruating women stood on the path. Each woman he passed, the stone man grew weaker and weaker, until he crumbled to the ground. The women had destroyed him with the power of their blood. They saved their village and all the lives there.” She tilted her head. “If we were back in those days, I would honor you by weaving you a belt. I would make you a skirt out of deerskin and a brooch out of bone. But now, all I have are these.”

  She reached over and grabbed her box of sanitary napkins out of the cabinet. She showed me how to use them along with instructing me on the sanitary belt.

  “You can wear a clean skirt of mine.” She handed me one. “Put your stained skirt in the sink under cold water.”

  I closed the door to the bathroom after she stepped out of it. As I opened a napkin, I heard the phone ring. Fraya must have answered it because I could hear her voice on the other side of the door, but it was too muffled to make anything out. Then her voice raised as if she was arguing with someone.

  After she hung up, she spoke through the door, “You know what, Betty? I don’t feel very well myself.” Her voice sounded strange.

  “You don’t?” I opened the bathroom door.

  “How ’bout we go to the movie tomorrow night?” She turned away from me. “That okay?”

  “Sure. If you don’t feel good. Who was on the phone?” I asked.

  “The phone didn’t ring.”

  “I heard it and I heard you talkin’ to someone—”

  “I’ll see ya tomorrow, Betty.”

  Standing with her back to me, she touched the Japanese music box Leland had given her. After carefully opening the doors, she watched the female figurine twirl to the music.

  I said goodbye to Hank before leaving. Just outside the diner, a car turned on Main Lane. I was embarrassed the bloodstain on the back of my skirt might be seen, so I quickly ran, making it around the corner before the car’s headlights could shine on me. I looked back, but couldn’t tell what type of car it was or who was driving.

  Instead of walking home, I headed out of town, far from lamplights of front porches. I ended up on the dark dirt lanes where large farms were separated by fields of crop and cattle. A barbed-wire fence became my only companion as I walked the length of it. The cold, twisty wire seemed to wrap around me as I clutched my stomach.

  When I heard a rustling, I thought it was something on the ground, moving through the tall grass. But when I followed the sound, I discovered it was coming from the barbed-wire fence, where I saw a barn owl with a beautiful white face. I could tell she was female from the way she frowned. She was crucified, her wings outstretched and impaled on the top line of fencing. Her chest was pierced by the middle line. She watched me, unsure if I would hurt her further or save her.

  I stepped closer. She flinched. I stepped closer still.

  “You’re on private property.” A woman’s voice and the cocking sound of a shotgun came behind me. “Well?” she said. “Say somethin’.”

  I felt the barrel of a gun pressing against the back of my head.

  “The owl,” I said. “She’s caught on the fence.”

  “An owl?” The woman lowered her gun and stepped past me. “Such a bird is considered an evil omen, you know that?” she asked. “It flies the night sky with the witches.”

  She was a woman with long silver hair that perhaps used to be black, for the ends were still charcoaled. She had the thick strong brows of her youth while her eyes had spent a lifetime staring at the hills around them until they were as clear as light between tree branches.

  “Ya ever hear of a shrike?” she asked me as she studied the owl up close.

  I saw her hands were aged by field and plow, her nails darkened by the seasons. Her knuckles were either arthritic or merely enlarged by the burdens and blessings of owning land. She was tall the way I thought her father might have been and she wore pants the way I thought her brothers might have. Her blouse was silky and flowery. Perhaps something her mother had left her. Maybe it wasn’t a blouse at all, but the top of a dress she had tucked into her pants, doing what her sisters had taught her.

  “A shrike is a small bird,” she answered her own question. “They haven’t got any talons so they impale their prey on somethin’ sharp like thorns and barbed wire. I come out here all times of the night, and find moths, lizards, snakes even. Shrikes hang their prey like a butcher hangs meat up on a hook. That’s why most folks call a shrike a butcher-bird. Ya ever hear of a butcher-bird, girl?”

  “My father told me about them once.”

  “My father did, too,” she said. “I suppose it’s merely another warnin’ to all little girls.”

  She pointed out the impaled mouse below the owl on the fence.

  “The owl flew to get that rodent and made the mistake of her life,” she said. “She’ll need to be shot.”

  “No.” My cry carried into the hills. “We can cut the wire.”

  “Wire is expensive,” the woman said. “If I cut the wire, I’ll have to replace it.”

  She stood back and held her gun up, ready to fire.

  “Please.” I stepped in front of the owl. “Don’t kill her.”

  Slowly, the woman lowered the gun and met my eyes.

&
nbsp; “Don’t ever lose it,” she said.

  “Lose what?” I asked.

  “That thing that makes you wanna save a life.”

  She laid the gun on the ground so she could remove a pair of wire cutters from her pocket.

  “Hold the bird’s chest,” she said. “Keep her steady. If I cut her wing tendons by accident, she’ll never fly again. She’ll need to be shot then.”

  I held the owl’s chest as steady as I could. When I looked into the owl’s eyes, she was staring back at me.

  “Everything is gonna be okay,” I told the owl. “You’ll be free soon. Nothin’ will hurt you again. I swear.”

  “Don’t swear to somethin’ that can’t be sworn to.” The woman cut the wire.

  I thought the owl would fly off once she was free, but she merely dropped to the ground. The woman removed her jacket and wrapped the owl up inside it.

  “Will she be okay?” I asked.

  “If she survives the night, she’ll fly again,” the woman said. “I’ll take her back to my barn.”

  The woman gestured to the other side of the lane, where a large yellow farmhouse sat. Beside the house was a barn not so different than the one on Shady Lane.

  “There’s a loft up in that barn, warm and nice,” she said. “I’ll stay with her.”

  “Can I stay, too?” I asked.

  “Go back to your people. You can come over in the mornin’. See if she survived.”

  I looked one last time at the owl. In many ways, I’d seen her face before. In every way, it is a face I still see.

  “Take care of her,” I told the woman, who looked less at the bird and more at me.

  She nodded and turned, carrying the bird across the lane and toward the barn. I ran the entire way back to the diner. I checked the door. Fraya still hadn’t locked it yet, which I found odd. I went inside and treaded softly to the back, where I waited at the bottom of the stairs. I could hear music playing from the Japanese jewelry box.

  “Fraya?” I called. “You awake?”

  I tiptoed up the steps and found her door slightly open. I pushed it the rest of the way. I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the room before I could see her lying in bed. Hank was curled up into a ball by her side.

  “Fraya, wake up,” I said. “I have to tell you about the owl. She was so beautiful. She was caught in barbed wire, but I freed her. Well, me and the old woman. The woman thinks the owl will fly again. Fraya?”

  I nudged her as I climbed up into the bed. She didn’t move. The moonlight hit her bare clammy skin.

  “You don’t have to get up,” I told her. “I’m sleepy, too.” I laid beside her and stroked Hank’s fur until he purred. “The owl was beautiful. She reminded me of you, Fraya. She’ll fly again, I’m certain of it.”

  I spoke to her about the owl some more. Then I told her goodnight. I watched the girl twirl in the jewelry box until I fell asleep.

  I dreamed of a fire. Me, Fraya, and Flossie danced around it. We were dressed in animal skins and feathers. Dad was there. He came and placed a necklace around my neck. As blood dripped from the necklace, me and my sisters swayed around the fire while our ancestors spoke to the moon and made sacred prayers over the blood dancing out of me.

  I woke early the next morning at the sound of the cook’s voice calling up the steps for Fraya. Hank was already gone from the bed. I looked at my sister. In the morning light, I realized how still she was. Only then did I notice the mayonnaise jar.

  “It’s okay, Fraya,” I said before kissing her cold cheek. “You can sleep in.”

  I stood up out of the bed and saw the bloodstain on a blanket I’d been laying on. I quickly checked Fraya’s drawers for some scissors. Finding a pair, I cut the stain out before rolling the rest of the blanket up in the laundry basket just as the cook called up one more time for Fraya.

  “You’re just tired,” I said to her as I tucked her longest curl behind her ear. “I’m gonna go check on the owl. Then I’ll come back and tell you some more about how I freed the bird. Tonight we’ll sing and dance and make fudge. I’ll poke enough holes in the sky for us to fly out of. Okay?”

  I put the piece of bloodied blanket into my skirt pocket before crawling out the window and onto the roof. I fell, landing on the dandelions below, bees buzzing around them. Without stopping, I ran to the old woman’s farmhouse, but it wasn’t there. Neither was the barn. There was only a field of cows with their old farmer.

  “Where’s the yellow farmhouse?” I asked him. “Where’s the old woman?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman. The barn.”

  For a moment I thought I was on the wrong lane. But then I looked at the barbed-wire fence on the other side and knew I was in the right place.

  “You okay?” the old farmer asked as I stepped toward the owl still crucified on the wire.

  Her eyes were closed and her head was hung. The morning flies were landing on her beautiful white face.

  I covered my own face with my hands, which still smelled of Fraya’s dandelion lotion.

  “Shush, dear child,” the old farmer said. “Was only a bird.”

  39

  I bare you on eagles’ wings.

  —EXODUS 19:4

  I imagine that at the same time they were collecting my sister’s body, me and the old farmer were burying the owl in the field along with the bloody scrap of blanket I had laid on top of her.

  “You can’t cry over every one of God’s creatures that die,” the farmer said to me. “Or you’ll be cryin’ forever.”

  I suppose all sisters look like birds on their way out of this world.

  They thought there would be answers in one of Fraya’s diaries. She had hid them around her room in all the familiar places. Beneath the mattress. In the back of a dresser drawer. Even one under a loose board in the floor.

  Her writings showed a range of emotions, but Leland’s name was not mentioned in any of them and neither was the abuse. There were chunks of text that were unreadable, written in the code known only to Fraya herself. I imagined that in these entangled secrets, Fraya wrote about Leland at length. But without the key to the code, they became the hieroglyphics of a girl burying her words. The only readable parts were her song lyrics, which had the answers hidden in plain sight, but only to those of us who knew her secrets.

  Dad collected the diaries, placing them on his bedside table. He would regularly read them, a piece of paper and pencil nearby as he tried to figure out Fraya’s secrets. Maybe he thought if he figured it out, Fraya would rise from the dead.

  Mom’s response to Fraya’s death was to take a pair of scissors and cut each of the white flowers out of the yellow curtains hanging on the kitchen window. The sun came through the holes and cast orbs of light on the kitchen floor. Mom took the fabric flowers and wrote dates on them. One date I recognized as Fraya’s birth. Another was the day Fraya was first stung by a bee when she was five years old.

  “She swelled up so big,” Dad said. “I thought we done lost her.”

  There were about forty flowers in all. Forty significant months, days, and years. Mom put them in a jar, then poked airholes in the lid as if the dates were alive and needed to breathe.

  They had ruled Fraya’s death a suicide.

  “She’d tried it before,” folks whispered back and forth. “Finally got what she wanted. She wasn’t doin’ nothin’ with her life anyways. She was probably gonna be a waitress forever.”

  I informed the sheriff I had spoken with Fraya before she died.

  “She was plannin’ on leavin’,” I told him.

  “Leavin’?” The sheriff’s ears perked up, as did Dad’s. “You mean, leavin’ as in killin’ herself?”

  “She was gonna leave for the ocean,” I said.

  They both looked at me as if I’d co
nfirmed her state of mind.

  “She meant the real ocean.” I tried to clear it up. No one seemed to listen.

  We held no funeral for her. No burial either. Dad had her cremated. They burned her in a bright yellow dress. The carved ear of corn Dad had made her was nestled between her breasts until the fire reduced all that yellow and all that flesh to nothing more than ash.

  When I asked Dad why he let someone burn her, he said, “Suicide is a sin. God punishes all those who commit it, but He can’t punish the person unless they’re whole. If we scatter her then God can’t send her to hell until He finds every last piece of ash. Maybe by the time He does, His heart will have softened. Maybe He’ll forgive her and take her home to heaven. Don’t you understand, Betty? Fraya had to burn in order to be saved.”

  The morning we got her ashes, Dad started washing the Wagonaire.

  “It has to be spotless for Fraya’s last ride,” he said.

  I picked up the extra sponge and helped him. We spoke mostly about how hard the dead bugs clung to the windshield.

  As Dad sprayed the soap off, I dried my hands on my skirt before picking up the urn he had made to hold the ashes. It was carved as Fraya’s face. Dad sculpted Fraya’s hair long. When I saw it, I thought only of the truck in the barn and its window crank.

  Me and Dad were the only ones going to spread her ashes. Mom was lying in bed, clinging to the jar of dates. As for Leland, he had left town at the news of Fraya’s death.

  “That church in Alabama is lookin’ for a new man of God,” Leland told Dad. “Now’s as good as any time to leave, I reckon.”

  Flossie wasn’t coming because she said she had to go to the vineyard with Cutlass.

  “We have to examine the vines,” she said.

  “You never go to the vineyard,” I told her.

  She paused before saying, “Yeah. But I can’t spread Fraya’s ashes. It’d be like sayin’ goodbye, for real. If I can pretend I’m just sayin’ goodnight to her, then it’s like she’s still alive, only sleepin’. But if I see her ashes, that breaks the spell.”