That is absolutely slanderous, I say before I can stop myself. That is just a terrible thing for anybody to say.
I didn’t say it was true, Suzanne reminds us. Y’all know how rumors spread.
We sure do! Mrs. Shepard laughs out loud, a big, off-key, honking sound that reminds me of the homely sand hill cranes I left behind at the ranch. She arches eyebrows that, thankfully, she remembered to draw on this morning and takes several steps back from the group to blow her cigarette smoke away from the baby.
That does indeed sound slanderous, Mrs. Shepard says, but what do you expect from a bunch of bigots?
Suzanne rucks up her lips and sucks in some air. Well, you can speak for yourself, Corrine, because I’m no bigot, but— She stops for a few seconds and looks around the group for some acknowledgment that her statement is true—Suzanne Ledbetter is no bigot. But Mrs. Shepard and I are silent, and Mrs. Nunally has already started walking toward her car, saying, You ladies have a nice afternoon. Suzanne excuses herself and begins to walk slowly, as if a little lost, down the street. Upon arriving at her house, she makes a big show of checking her mail and yanking a couple of dandelions that had the nerve to make a home in her St. Augustine. Finally, she grabs a broom off the porch and swipes at the sidewalk.
Mrs. Shepard, who apparently has nowhere else to be and nothing better to do, watches me nuzzle my son. He is new enough that I still want to sniff at him from time to time, just to know he’s mine.
New baby, Mrs. Shepard says. Only thing that smells better is a brand-new Lincoln Continental. Let me have a little sniff? She holds the cigarette behind her back, leans forward, and breathes my son in. Girl, she says, I don’t miss the dirty diapers, and I sure don’t miss the sleepless nights, but I miss this smell.
I tuck the blanket under the baby’s chin and look at her. You should have seen Gloria Ramírez. He beat the living daylights out of her. The baby jerks in his sleep, his mouth opening and closing. I lean closer and lower my voice. Mrs. Shepard, it was like an animal had got at her.
Please, call me Corrine.
Corrine, I say, Dale Strickland is no better than a feral hog. Worse, actually. They can’t help themselves. I wish they would put him in the electric chair, I really do.
She drops her cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and nudges it off the curb with her foot. We both watch the smoke rise off the filter while she immediately lights another and considers her words. She smiles and tickles the baby’s chin. I know it, honey. Let’s just hope they get a half-decent judge. You going to testify?
Yes, I am. I can’t wait to tell them what I saw.
Well, that’s good. That’s all you can do. Let me ask you something, Mary Rose. You getting enough sleep?
I jerk my head up from the baby, ready to tell her that I’m fine, my kids are fine, we don’t need anything from anybody, but Corrine is eyeing me like a blackjack dealer watches a card counter.
I could tell her the truth, that some nights I dream Gloria is knocking on my front door again, but I don’t answer it. I stay in my bed with my head under the pillow as the knocking grows louder and louder and when I can’t stand listening to it anymore, I get out of bed and walk down the hall of my new house. When I pull the heavy door open, my Aimee is standing on the porch, beaten and torn up, her feet bare and bleeding. Mama, she cries, why didn’t you help me?
I could tell her about the phone calls I’ve been getting, almost since the day the phone company turned on our new line, and I could say that some nights I can’t tell the difference between being tired and being afraid.
Instead I say, I’m just fine. Thank you for asking.
Corrine starts digging through her pack for another cigarette, her third, but finding it empty, she crumples the package and shoves it in her pantsuit pocket. I could have sworn I had at least a half pack of cigarettes left, she says. Since Potter died, I can’t remember a damned thing. Last week, I lost a blanket. A blanket! She looks longingly across the street at her garage door. Well, I better go move the sprinkler and fix myself another iced tea. Going to see a hundred degrees today. In June!
She has already disappeared into her house by the time I realize she left Debra Ann Pierce in my front yard. I stand there and watch the girls, who occasionally look over at me, grimace, and then ignore me completely. When the baby wakes up, I shepherd everyone into the house and lock the door. While the girls play in Aimee’s room, I try to nurse him. My right breast is burning up, and a hard knot next to the nipple suggests an infected milk duct. When the baby latches on, the pain travels the entire length of my torso.
By the time we are ready to leave for the Ladies Guild, it is nearly ninety degrees out and Aimee is mad that I sent her new friend home. She sits in the front seat kicking the glove box and fiddling with the air-conditioning vent while the baby fusses on the seat between us.
Did you have fun with Debra Ann? I ask.
It was okay, she says kicking, kicking, kicking.
Stop it, Aimee. Do y’all have a lot in common?
I guess so, she says. She has a bunch of friends, but I think most of them are imaginary.
This will be my second meeting with the Ladies Guild. When we moved to town, I decided we should maybe give up our Baptist radio and find a real church. It might be good for us to be part of something, and Aimee has started to talk about getting saved. But today’s meeting is a horror. The swamp cooler runs constantly, to no avail, and the heat only exacerbates the burning in my breast. When I arrive, some of the ladies are talking about having their husbands take boxes of old summer clothes out to the families living on the outskirts of town, in makeshift oil camps that have appeared overnight, it seems.
Those camps are just awful, Mrs. Robert Perry tells us. Trash everywhere and most of them don’t even have running water—she pauses and lowers her voice—and full of Mexicans.
A murmur of assent goes through the room. It’s terrible how they do, somebody says, and someone else reminds us that it’s not all of them, just some, and I sit there with my mouth hanging open. As if I have never heard this kind of talk in my life, as if I didn’t grow up hearing it from my daddy at the dinner table, from all my aunts and uncles at the Thanksgiving table, from my own husband. But now I think about Gloria and her family and it rankles, like an open sore that I can’t stop picking at.
Aimee and the baby are down the hall in the church nursery. This is a church, I told myself when the teenaged girl squealed and plucked the baby from my arms. They will be safe here. I close my eyes and press my hand to my forehead. Maybe I’m running a little fever. My right side, from beneath my armpit to my rib cage, feels like someone took a blowtorch to it.
Mary Rose, are you all right? B. D. Hendrix’s wife, Barbie, is standing next to my chair. She lays a hand on my shoulder. Someone says I’m probably worn out and then someone else mentions the awful business with the Ramírez girl, and there is another murmur of assent. It’s a real shame. How on earth is Mr. Strickland’s mama sleeping at night? She must be worried sick about her boy and all because of a misunderstanding.
This was no misunderstanding, I say. It was a rape, and I am sick and tired of y’all pretending otherwise. I pause and let my eyes wander around the fellowship hall. It is hot as perdition in here. Several ladies who have been fanning themselves with their copies of the charter now sit perfectly still on the edge of their folding chairs, as if they are awaiting a revelation, and I take this as a sign that I ought to continue speaking. In a few short hours, I will recognize this for the terrible error it is, but not now.
Because you can call a sandstorm a little breeze all day long, I tell them, and you can call a drought a dry spell, but at the end of the day, your house is still a mess and your tomato plants are dead and—my voice tightens up and, to my horror, my eyes begin to fill. I am not going to cry in front of these good ladies. I can still stop talking and everything might be okay, eventually, more or less.
I saw her, I tell them. What he did to her.
<
br /> Excuse me, Mary Rose—the voice comes from over by the swamp cooler—I know what you think you saw, but last time I checked we still live in America, where a man is innocent until proven guilty.
A murmur wanders around the room, gentle bullshit passed from one good woman to another. While they are right about Strickland’s constitutional rights, it seems to me they have already convicted a teenage girl. If y’all will excuse me, please, I say, and make a break for the ladies’ room.
Eventually they send the treasurer, Mrs. L. D. Cowden, to check on me. Mrs. Cowden is a senior member who claims her grandmother planted the town’s first row of pecan trees back in 1881—the same year the five Chinese railroad workers died in an explosion out near Penwell. A windstorm snapped all twenty-five of the first saplings in half. The story is a bald-faced lie. Everybody knows it was Mrs. Shepard’s granny Viola Tillman who planted those trees, but nobody likes to admit it. Corrine was asked to resign her membership six years earlier, Suzanne told me, after a little scuffle with Barbie Hendrix. It all might have been forgiven, or at least lived with, given Corrine’s deep roots in the community, but then she stopped getting her hair done on Thursday afternoons. I’m done with all this, she told the good women of the guild. From now on, I’ll jack it up my own damn self, all the way to Jesus.
Mrs. Cowden finds me in the ladies’ room next to the fellowship hall, hunched over the sink and trying not to cry. She leans quietly against the bathroom door while I splash lukewarm water on my face and mutter to myself. What bullsh— What bull. Can’t even believe this.
Can I bring you a glass of iced tea? Mrs. Cowden says.
No, thank you.
Listen, she says, people know what that little gal is saying happened out there. We just don’t need to be reminded of it all the time. And that word is so ugly.
I turn off the water and stand up straight to face her. You mean rape?
She winces. Yes, ma’am.
When I went into labor several weeks early with unpacked boxes at the new house and Robert losing his mind over a missing bull, Grace Cowden brought over a week of dinners and a stack of Archie comics for Aimee. She hasn’t spoken a single unkind word to anybody in her life, as far as I know. I hold my hand out to her. I’m sorry, Grace.
She takes my hand and presses it to her heart. Well, I’m sorry too, Mary Rose. She chuckles gently. What a few months it has been. A preacher’s son sitting downtown in a jail cell. Ginny Pierce running off to God knows where, leaving her family like that. And you with a new baby son, and a trial to boot. And this heat, it’s mean as a snake.
She holds my hand while she wonders aloud if the judge might let me just write a letter or something. It might be less upsetting for my family and me. Besides—she leans in close—Lou Connelly heard the girl’s mother was deported and the girl had been sent to Laredo to be with family. Heck, she might not even come back for the trial. Not unless there’s some money in it for her.
I gently remove my hand from Grace’s heart and turn back to the sink, my fingers working the faucet, while she yammers on. As for the Ladies Guild, she says, well, these meetings are supposed to be fun. Nobody comes to these meetings to feel bad about herself.
Mrs. Cowden says she and some of the other ladies have been thinking that I might not want to come to any more meetings for a little while, just until the dust settles and all this ugliness is behind us. Just until I start feeling a little more like myself.
Yes, I think, the old Mary Rose. I hold my fingers beneath the tap for a few seconds and watch the water meander across my skin, the smell of sulfur and dirt rising from the basin. That morning on my front porch, when he was already cuffed and sitting in the back seat of the deputy’s sedan, one of the paramedics, a young man with eyes the color of sandstone, pressed his fingers against the knot on the back of my head. The other handed me a glass of ice water that smelled like cold and sulfur. What the hell happened, they both wanted to know. And I shook my head. I shook and shook, but I could not find one word to say. The medics told me they couldn’t get the two little girls to open the front door, and once they did, Gloria wouldn’t let either of the men near her. I drank the glass of water, and the two men waited on the porch while I went inside and dampened a washrag and held it gently to her cheek.
You’re going to be fine now, I told her, as my daughter stood silently at the edge of the room, watching. You’re going to be fine, I said again, and this time I made sure to include both girls in my glance. I kept washing the child’s face and telling her that we were going to be fine, we were all going to be just fine.
Out there the water flows out of the faucet ice cold, even in the summer, but here in town it comes out warm, with none of the debris and grit of well water. Clean water, clean start, clean slate. She had not cried, not even once, but when the paramedics tried to get her to climb inside the ambulance, when one of them put his hands on the small of her back, she screamed as if she’d been stabbed. We might as well have stood her up on a tree stump and driven an ax through her longways. She fought and kicked and screamed for her mother. She ran over and held on to me as if she were caught in a tornado and I was the last fence post still standing. But by then, I was worn out and heartsick, and I turned away. Even as she was reaching for me, I turned away and stepped inside my house and closed the door. I listened while the men grabbed her and wrestled her into the back of the ambulance and slammed the door closed.
And now, here in town, people are making this child out to be some kind of liar, or blackmailer, or slut. Forgive us our trespasses, all right. I cup my hands together and allow the water to pool in my palms. What will I be a part of, here in Odessa? What will my days look like now, and who will I become? Same old Mary Rose? Grace Cowden? I smile just a little and when the water begins to seep between my fingers, I squeeze them tightly together. I can drink from it, this cup made with my own hands, if I hurry up—and so I do. I slurp loudly, water dribbling down my chin while Grace makes little sounds in her throat. Again, I bend down and allow my hands to fill back up. Maybe discretion is the better part of valor. Then again, maybe it isn’t. And knowing that I have failed another woman’s daughter in all the ways that matter, I now want badly to be a person of valor.
And what will my great act of valor look like?
This: Just as the esteemed Mrs. L. D. Cowden begins to talk about how I should get more rest and maybe think about supplementing with baby formula, I lift my face from the lavatory, hold up my two cupped hands, and fling the water into her face.
Grace stands perfectly still. Finally, she has nothing to say. After a few seconds she lifts her hand and wipes the water from her forehead and flicks it to the bathroom floor. Well, she says. That was rude.
Go to hell, I tell her. Why don’t you go pack boxes for those poor people y’all can’t quit judging?
I could have two sick kids and a pantry full of nothing, and Robert would complain about having to leave the ranch. But the moment he hears about this, he drives into town. It takes nothing for me to close my eyes and imagine the phone ringing off the hook in our farmhouse kitchen, Robert standing there with a bologna sandwich in his hand while some woman, or her husband, expresses grave concern for my well-being. After the kids are in bed, he follows me from room to room hollering and raging while I pick up Aimee’s books and toys. My breast feels like someone is holding a lit torch to it. I fight the urge not to tear off my nursing bra and fling it on the living-room carpet.
Can’t you even try, Mary Rose, he says. Every day, I’m doing my damnedest to keep us from losing everything out there, land my family has worked for the past eighty years. He follows me into the kitchen and watches me pull out a paper bag and start filling it with cans of food he can take back to the farm. You think you’re doing our family any favors by making yourself out to be the town lunatic?
I kneel down and stare at a shelf full of canned goods, trying to do some math. I could have sworn there were still two cans of Hormel chili in there, an
d a can of corn too.
Robert’s boot is right next to my leg, close enough that I can smell the cow shit lingering on the leather. In the last forty-eight hours, he has lost more than a dozen cows to blowflies. The ones that didn’t die outright, he had to shoot and because blowflies lay their eggs on fresh carcasses, he pushed the corpses into a pile with his bulldozer and poured kerosene over them.
I stack the dinner dishes in the sink and turn on the hot water. What do you want me to say, Robert? People in this town seem bound and determined to believe that this whole thing is some sort of misunderstanding, some sort of lover’s spat.
Well, how do you know it wasn’t?
I plunge both hands into a sink full of water as hot as I can stand it. The smell of bleach wafts off the water, strong enough that I think I must have measured wrong, and by the time I pull my hands out, they are dark red.
Are you shitting me, Robert? Did you hear what they said about her injuries? They had to take her spleen out, for God’s sake. For that matter, did you hear what I told you?
Yes, Mary Rose. I heard it, all thirty times you told it.
I press both hands into a dishrag, trying to take the heat out of them. Everything in the kitchen stinks of bleach. As calmly as I can manage, I speak to my husband. Robert, Gloria Ramírez is fourteen years old. What if it had been Aimee?
Don’t you compare that girl to my daughter, he says.
Well, why the hell not?
Because it’s not the same, he is nearly shouting now. You know how those little gals are.
I pick up a stack of plates that are still in the dish rack from yesterday and set them down on the counter so hard the cabinet door shudders. No, I tell him. You shut your goddamned mouth.
Robert clamps his lips shut. When his eyes narrow and his hands curl into a fist, I yank the kitchen curtains open and start looking around for my big wooden spoon. If we are going to start hitting each other, I want to strike first. And I might want witnesses, too.
Valentine Page 11