Hazard

by Margaret Combs

  In the showroom, cheeriness swirled all around me, and the air buzzed with a rare liveliness, a feeling that stayed with me through the afternoon and evening as we drove the few miles to my grandparents’ farmhouse. That night, around the supper table, my parents lingered over a second slice of lemon pie, and then we all drifted outside to the porch, the evening light closing in lazy folds around us. Roddy chose his favorite spot on the porch slider, next to Grandma, and the two of them rocked happily, back and forth, while Barbara Ann and I ran willy-nilly up the steep hillside, catching fireflies blinking in the black night.

  At the top of the hill, I paused, breathless, gulping in warm wet air and looking down on the porch with its globe of light. I imagined hundreds of Roddy’s words flashing out from the dark hollows and pinging around everyone’s heads. In that small moment, I believed in miracles—the kind in the Bible, when a loaf of bread breaks into a thousand pieces.

  Thrusting my hands into the night, I cupped and closed my palms around a sparkling fairy-fly. Her wings buzzed, making me laugh, and when I parted my thumbs, there she was—twinkling, and wondrous.

  Chapter 5

  Jesus Is Calling

  Papaw’s rooster bellowed in the early morning dark. I burrowed deeper under the quilt, tangled in the smell of cedar and clove and the flush of damp leaves coming through the window.

  “Hop up and eat some Cheerios,” Barbara Ann whispered, jiggling my shoulder. Mama rustled outside in the hallway, packing jars of fresh honey and rattling bags of shucky beans into our suitcases.

  My doldrums over leaving Kentucky were softened only by my new companion, too precious to pack away in my suitcase. “Cornelia” had come to life in my own hands the week before. She was a homemade ragdoll, the only sort of doll my grandmother, Mamaw, ever had as a child growing up on a farm. With wonder, I had followed Mamaw’s amused instructions, and, swiftly, Cornelia had emerged from measly things found in the kitchen and yard: her body a tubed and folded dish towel jointed with rubber bands, her eyes and nose nothing but touches of charcoal, her red lips a finger brush of blackberry juice, and her hair a globe of corn silk, the same reddish-gold as Mamaw’s soft cap of curls. I imagined lifting Cornelia’s rag body out of her Kleenex box and holding her aloft to the gasp of my new fifth-grade class.

  Twisting around in the back seat, I wagged my fingers at Mamaw and Papaw standing on the porch steps. The car tipped forward down the steep driveway and Papaw’s scuffed, brimmed hat sank below the crest of the hill.

  In the first of many shifts the year would bring, I found myself two weeks later riding on the school bus, all alone. For the first time in my life, Barbara Ann wasn’t beside me. She’d mounted a different bus that morning, riding to her new seventh-grade life at the junior high school across the street, a life I couldn’t imagine. Even more troubling was the surprise that Mama wasn’t with me either. As I’d crunched on my toast that morning, she’d reminded me that Roddy was starting school, too, a special one, far away—meaning she wouldn’t be able to drive me on my first day, as she’d always done. Now, butterflies batted soft wings against my ribcage. I squished myself against the bus window and imagined her driving with Roddy somewhere on a long stretch of highway.

  When we arrived at Bear Creek Elementary, I climbed off the bus and stood on the sidewalk, gaping. One hand clutched my lunchbox, and my other arm encircled both my new notebook and Cornelia’s shoe box, crushing them against my chest. A wave of kids and parents parted and surged around me, moving toward the front door. I felt lost in a place where I wasn’t informed, where everyone else seemed to carry a mysterious set of instructions not in my hands. How did everyone know where to go?

  Puffing in tiny breaths, I moved forward, my feet carrying me up the steps and through the front door. My belly stirred, as if I’d eaten a plateful of watery scrambled eggs, a sensation I’d later come to know as panic. Flitting my eyes from face to face, I looked for someone I knew. A whispery memory brushed my ear: Mama saying the fifth grade was so big this year they’d had to open two new classrooms. But where?

  I swept along with the other kids past the cafeteria to a great intersection of corridors. Straight ahead was the kindergarten, so I veered right, down the hallway where I remembered Barbara Ann’s fifth- and sixth-grade classes had been. The crowd thinned around me as kids and mothers arrived at doorways and vanished inside. I hoped something would sort out by the time I reached the exit sign at the far end of the hall. But even as I plowed on, I sensed something awry: the kids around me barely came up to my shoulder. No one was my age. Dread rose in my chest as I neared the end of the hall and slowed to a halt before the last door. Taped on its face beside the tiny slit of a window was a brightly decorated piece of construction paper, announcing “Mrs. Robinson’s 4th Grade.”

  My stomach clenched and I backed against the cold cinderblock wall, flattening my shoulder blades and pressing everything—notebook, lunchbox, and Cornelia’s cardboard cradle—to my ribs. The box’s edges gave under my sweaty palms. From somewhere down the hall, a door clicked and the sound racketed toward me. Then, all fell utterly silent.

  If I were my friend Natalie, who’d never been afraid of getting into trouble, I might have rapped on Mrs. Robinson’s door and demanded to know where she’d put my fifth-grade class. Or if I were Lily, my friend from Sunday school, who came from a big, noisy, forgiving family, I might have giggled in a spurt, thrilled to be missing a few minutes of sitting still, and hummed a silly song for as long as I dared, before Mrs. Robinson opened the door.

  But I was me: a shy, observant child, sensitized to shame, who already wore a layer of uncertainty from fuzzy forces I didn’t understand. In my family I’d learned there was little room for missteps; the stress was too high; mistakes often drew a sharp swipe of words and sometimes a swatting hand. Clemency was for other children, not for me.

  I don’t recall how long I waited there, my ribs moving beneath the cotton of my new blouse. When Mr. Tony, the gym teacher, lumbered in from the baseball field and boomed in his deep voice, “Are you lost, young lady?” I nodded without looking at him. My eyes hitched onto his big sneakered heels, and I followed him out the door and around the side of the school, where we entered a hastily renovated building. There, I stepped from behind him into Mrs. Larson’s fifth-grade class.

  The flat speckled tile stretching from the door to the first row of desks looked like the wilderness to me. I clopped across the vast expanse with my strange shoebox cinched under my arm, aware of the pack of eyes tracking my journey. Thirty-five faces, most of whom I didn’t recognize, watched as I slid into my desk.

  “Well!” Mrs. Larson exhaled an exasperated puff of air. I ventured a darting glance upward. Her clipped black hairdo, blunt at the jaw, turned away from me.

  “All right then,” she went on. “Let’s start again. Who would like to share a summertime story?”

  Cornelia’s box rested on my lap. I was glad to feel eyes slip away from me and back to Mrs. Larson. If I hadn’t been so anxious to impress her, I might have rested for a moment, taking in my surroundings. Long enough to notice everyone’s blouses and shirts bore brightly colored nametags: badges of goodness handed out to those children who, unlike me, had arrived on time. Instead, I slipped off the crumpled lid from Cornelia’s box and plumped up her silken hair. Then, I raised my hand.

  Mrs. Larson’s dark-rimmed eyes swiveled as she panned the room, fixing on my hand poking up like a periscope among the sea of heads. I wasn’t prone to sharing my stories, partly out of wisdom. Young as I was, I knew moments in my family weren’t meant for telling: my mother heaped on the floor, my brother’s flapping, the yawn of silence in our home—these weren’t for others to know. But now I had a bundle of good stories. Cornelia’s for one, and then Papaw’s beehives and chickens; and maybe, if there was time, I’d even tell them about my brother’s miracle, his first word. My heart thrummed, and I shifted to stand up.

  Mrs. Larson’s gazed at me levelly from
across the room. She was young and smartly groomed, with pale, powdered skin and thin, ruby-painted lips. Her white blouse, cool and crisp, was buttoned high to her throat. As she folded her arms across her chest, the sunlight glinted off a tiny glass button on each cuff. The room was quiet, and somewhere, a pencil rolled off a desk, pinging to the floor. I blinked and glanced away. When I looked back again, the point of her chin thrust toward me, and she tilted her head, first one way and then the other, aping a kind of foolish and exaggerated search for my name tag.

  “Well, now, seeing that you don’t have a name, young lady, how do you expect me to call on you?”

  Clots of heat sprouted under my collar and bloomed upward to my ears. I stared at the cover of my notebook. Its illustrations of clouds ran down the left side: cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, and, in the bottom corner, a blackish-yellow storm cloud that looked like a dark smear.

  “That one there’s a supercell,” Daddy had told me the night before when I’d padded out to the garage to show him my new notebook, the one I’d chosen out of all the others. Daddy knew everything about clouds, why they formed and how they warned us. The supercell, he’d said, was liable to drop a twisting tail to the ground, and then coil and thrash the dirt all the way to your feet.

  “If you ever see one of those,” he’d teased, looking up from his workbench, tapping the cover, “pick up your heels and run.”

  Mrs. Larson’s pinpointed heels pivoted on the floor, and I listened as her heel-toe, heel-toe crossed to the far side of the room.

  “Now, who do we have over here—Lynette?” she read from a nametag somewhere near the far wall of windows. “What a pretty name.”

  With a happy rustle of petticoats, Lynette stood up. She began her story, her words muffling in my ears as if the air were full of cotton. My eyes slid from my notebook into my lap where Cornelia gazed up from her blue-padded box. Her eyes looked like two tiny pinholes. With one hand, I shifted the lid out from underneath her and slid it closed, across her face.

  The rest of the school day blurred by with a shuffling of books and papers, a writing of numbers, a fleeting breath of fresh air on the way to and from lunch. When I arrived home, I put Cornelia’s wrinkled box away in my closet. Then I peeled off my naked blouse, still without a nametag, and stuffed it into the hamper. Mama was lying down in her room, stilled under the covers, a washrag covering her eyes. I paused for a moment at her bedroom door, barely able to make out her curved form through the shuttered dark. I didn’t go in. Instead, I turned and followed the sound of marbles plunking through holes and scurrying down chutes, pulling me into Roddy’s room.

  What could I have said to my mother, anyway? It had begun to dawn on me that she was no longer available to me and might never be again. In the way that children know things, I knew her sadness had grown to be the biggest part of her, much bigger than I could be. How was I to explain that I missed her, and because she hadn’t been with me, I’d faltered, setting off a cascade of consequences that ended with a sharp and searing rebuke? I couldn’t sort it even to myself: why Mrs. Larson would swing her eyes around the room and not only pass me by but mock me, even though I had something good to say, something proud to tell the world. If I’d tried to tell Mama what happened, she’d only doubt my story. As a rule, she and my father always sided with grownups.

  I found Roddy sitting on the floor by his bed, riveted to his favorite toy: a wooden marble chute crafted by my father. Constructed of six grooved dowels, the contraption provided a zigzag joyride for each marble, starting from three feet off the floor and, a few seconds later, spitting out the bottom, thrilling Roddy to no end with the tumbling and rumbling. He swung a fistful of marbles up to the chute’s mouth and plunked them, one at a time, down its throat.

  “Hi,” I sighed.

  He didn’t look up. He was too busy buzzing like a current. His legs, stretched out straight, jittered like two metal rods, rigid at the knees and bowed upward, his ankles and feet fluttering an inch off the floor.

  I didn’t have the energy to make him say hi to me. Instead, I folded my legs down to the floor, settling myself at one end of the chute so I could catch the helter-skelter orbs as they spit out at the bottom. I wished I could ask him things. Like, how was your first day? Did you get a nice teacher? And why was Mama in a dark room, stirring now, from the sounds of it, and rising long enough to shut her bedroom door?

  Years beyond that moment, I’d know that despite Roddy’s “hi” that summer, he was headed into a miserable year. My mother had already sensed what would prove true: his new school would utterly fail him. Not only would he lose his “hi,” but he would also backslide in other ways, wetting his pants again and refusing to get dressed. Mama would finally discover halfway through the year that he’d been parked in a class for deaf children.

  Scooping up marbles, I sensed Mama’s door would stay closed until my father came home. I didn’t have to get up and tiptoe over to its brown face, or lay my ear up against it to know she was kneeling beside the bed, her elbows softly denting the mattress, her slender fingers clasped and pressed to her brow in prayer. I knew enough to leave her there. If I could have slipped under her bed, I’d have heard her whisper, “Dearest Heavenly Father, forgive me my sorrow, my weakness. Help me.”

  Though I wasn’t certain, I felt something new brewing in my mother. Her sadness was taking on a new energy, slamming doors and bursting through the cracks of our afternoons and weekends. Some days she prayed in her room, but other days she grabbed a hair brush or a yardstick, lined us up and spanked us, one by one. Saturday was her blackest hour. In the far reaches of the house, her anger gathered like a distant thunder, at first nearly inaudible over the roar of the vacuum cleaner, her words tangled and swept away in the din. Soon, the vacuum would snort and root its way around the living room baseboards, round the corner, and burst into the hallway, snarling its way to where I scurried about with my dust rag from table to lamp to baseboard.

  Somehow, the crushing tedium of housework, with its endless renewable whine, ignited my mother. A poorly folded sheet corner, a scantily dusted window sill, a wet towel dropped in the dirt on the way to the clothesline were slips she couldn’t bear from me or Barbara Ann. She told us we were quick-brained girls who ought to learn on the first try, unlike Roddy who needed endless repetition just to get his pants zipped up and keep his fingers out of his food. I believed my mother. She shouldn’t have to teach me over and over, like Roddy. I knew I tore her patience into thin, ragged shreds.

  A few months later, on a Saturday in December, I was fumbling with my bed, botching the sheet corners. They were supposed to be done with hospital edges, the clever lift-tuck-fold-tuck that cinched the sheet corners like cupped hands around the mattress, the way Mama had taught me. But my fingers fumbled and it came out wrong. I heard my mother knocking about in the living room, the uncoiling whip-whip of the vacuum cord, the quick bite of a plug thrust into the wall. In the next instant, the Hoover’s vroooom shook my ears.

  Clawing at the cotton edges, wadding and shoving them deep into the fissure of the mattress, I felt a pinch of tears prick my eyes. My mother’s voice sputtered up like sparks above the vacuum, reaching my ears in short hot bursts: “… you girls need a blistering … within an inch of your life … I’ll give you something to cry about… .”

  I thought of running to Barbara Ann, knowing she was nosing along in the next room with her dust mop. I imagined her pushing the handle in quick, tight strokes and then, as my mother came into the room, snapping to attention, saluting, and then bowing her head toward the floor in one fluid motion, offering her bottom up for whacking and saying, “Go on, Mama, get it over with.”

  But I didn’t have my sister’s courage. Abandoning the sheet, I flashed across the hallway, lunging into the bathroom and shutting the door. Thumbing the lock, I backed away, scooting my haunches onto the toilet seat. On the other side of the door, the vacuum burst from the living room, rumbling and whacking down the hall toward me. By
the time it reached the bathroom door, I’d slipped off the toilet seat and stood, blue-legged and trembling, with my hand cleaved around the cold chrome of the toilet handle.

  “Who’s in there?” The door knob rattled.

  Silence.

  “Answer me!”

  “I am.”

  “What? What are you doing in there?” Her words coiled and squeezed through the wood fibers of the door.

  I cocked my wrist and flushed, letting the whoosh and pebbly gargle do its best to back me up.

  For a moment, I heard only the open-mouthed roar of the idling vacuum, and then my mother’s voice again, saying, in a knowing tone, that if she caught me dawdling she’d give me what for. These last two words punched from her throat and hit the door, pow pow. Then, I heard her throat catch, as if someone had clamped her windpipe, but only for an instant. The motor revved up again and growled away, first into Roddy’s room and then into our girls’ room, where it faded behind the door.

  I held my breath. I knew my faulty sheet corners were only seconds away from discovery, and I’d only a fraction of time before my mother would holler my name. This time I’d have to give in, open the door, and stand before her. But several moments passed and, finally, I realized she’d stopped vacuuming. I heard only the rasp of the Hoover as it stood still, waiting.

  Cracking the door, I saw Barbara Ann, a few feet away, tip-toeing toward our bedroom door. She had on her straw “coolie” hat, the one my father had brought home from some office party long ago. Barbara Ann had started wearing it on Saturdays so she could amuse herself during my mother’s rants. If she got caught in a room where my mother was vacuuming, she only had to dip her chin ever so slightly to make my mother disappear. Now, as I came up behind my sister, she lifted one finger to the wooden door, and softly pushed.