Hazard

by Margaret Combs

  “Did you say something?” my mother asked from the front seat. Her gloved hands turned the wheel, fluttering over and under one another, like doves.

  “No ma’am,” I said.

  I had never questioned these things before. Always, I’d trusted what my parents believed: that cruelty was a part of life, of a just world—things had to be this way. How else to make things behave—and how else were we to stay alive? It was impossible to tell a snake to retreat and leave me alone—its brain was too small; it didn’t know what was what.

  Still, doubt swam around in my belly like a tiny minnow, fluttering against the walls. It was alone in there, in a place it didn’t belong. As we turned off our dirt road and headed east out of the valley, I took the hankie my sister had given me and swaddled the rattle inside, folding in the corners and rolling the cloth into a puffy cocoon. Then, I let out a small breath and closed my eyes. I thought of the snake’s startled surprise, the tiny frantic flame of its tongue, and, then, its helpless, conquered head. It stirred in me a memory I didn’t want: of another particular day, another flurry of death. I pushed the memory back again, shutting it away.

  “Do animals go to heaven?” I asked, opening my eyes.

  My mother’s ear angled toward me.

  “No, honey. They don’t have souls.”

  “They don’t?” I said.

  Barbara Ann’s fingers reached back between the seat and the door and yanked, one-two, on my ruffled hem. We’re Baptists, her tug was telling me, in case I’d forgotten; doubting God’s rules is a sin. The car slowed as my mother paused, looking both ways, and then moved onto the main road that took us out of the valley.

  “Haven’t you been listening in Sunday school?” she said, finally.

  Silence.

  “They’re not in God’s image, honey, you know that.”

  I’m not either, I thought. God was a man, a giant who swirled around in a lot of folded fabric—a mighty two-legged being, who, once shaved and trimmed, would look like my father.

  “Is that their fault?”

  My mother’s chin darted up. Barbara Ann’s fingers yanked, harder. A tiny pop sounded in my ears as a stitch of my ruffle gave way.

  “No-o-o,” my mother said, her patience pulling on the word. “They don’t have the brains to understand.”

  “Their brains aren’t big enough?”

  “Mmm-mm. And not the right kind.”

  I turned my head from the window and looked over at Roddy. He had his spy hand pressed up to his face, peering with one eye through the wedge of his thumb and forefinger. He was making his sounds and rocking. Whomp whomp whomp, he bounced off the seat, little puffs snorting from his nose.

  I thought over the truths of heaven. You needed a big brain to get in, a people brain. But also, it had to be stuffed with the right thoughts, the beliefs inside your head. Otherwise, how to account for damning the Catholics and the Jews?

  “Does Roddy have beliefs?” I asked.

  My mother tsked, glancing disapprovingly in the rear-view mirror. Barbara Ann didn’t look around. Her fingers let go of my hem and slid back to the front seat. I lurched onward.

  “Does he have a soul?”

  As soon as I let go of these words, they flew like windy seeds around the car and I couldn’t catch them back. My breath caught in my throat. We reached the bottom of the off-ramp and my mother pushed the lever into park, then twisted quickly to look at me, eyes darting back and forth between my eyes. She didn’t say how dare you wonder if your brother is human? How could you? But I felt her fury like a heat, and if not for the seat back separating us, my leg would burn with the sting of her palm. One day, I would understand her. Why she couldn’t, at times, bear the world with its gray areas and complexities of belief. There was too much complexity already in our family, too much disappointment and confusion around my brother. I knew only that she had misunderstood me. Is Roddy safe, I’d meant to ask, from a choosy heaven?

  I dropped my gaze into my lap and then out the window. I didn’t yet know I was a doubting, inquisitive, resistant child—a rebel as it would turn out, destined to challenge the arbitrary lines of any heaven. This part of my nature had only begun to stir.

  She slipped on her sunglasses and turned back to the windshield, easing the car back onto the road. When we pulled the car into the church parking lot, I got out, trailing after Barbara Ann and my mother, who was holding Roddy’s hand. Once inside, my mother paused at the door to my Sunday school class and lifted one hand to my face. Smoothing a stray curl behind my ear, she said, in a softened voice, “God forgives those who can’t understand,” before turning and moving on with Roddy down the hall.

  Though I felt relief at her words, I didn’t feel comfort. I went in and chose my seat, without fanfare. When Mrs. Desmond, minutes later, announced show-and-tell, I kept my hand down, holding my rattle beneath the table, deep in its burrow of cloth. I sensed it was asking me for this, for a closed-in darkness.

  On the way home, after sermon, I said I was tired when my mother asked, “Why so quiet?” But once in the house, I slipped from my gingham into pedal pushers and headed for the back door. Barbara Ann looked up, quizzical, as I brushed past. She was camped beside a plate of Honey Grahams and two iced teas (one for me), and her long limbs spidered around the funny pages on the living room floor. I said nothing. I couldn’t explain. Something inside me was rumpled and unquiet.

  At the end of our driveway I turned, opposite from where the snake dropped to its weedy grave, and headed instead across the field where our cambered lot sloped down to the dirt road. My breath steadied as I took in the wilderness. The sweet tang of prairie grass mingled with a toasted coconut smell I’d know one day was the sap of ponderosa pines warming in the sun. From farther away, gusting down from the escarpments, came a loamier smell, of needled trees and buried roots. I thought of that cottonwood tree I’d once scaled at our old house, spending a long afternoon in its branches, surrounded by the touch of its leaves. But even as I wished for its height, I realized it wouldn’t be tall enough for me today. I needed something higher.

  At the edge of the field, I stepped into the dust of the road and followed its puffs, veering off onto a smaller path. Riding deep inside my shirt pocket, the snake rattle knocked out a tiny rhythm on my breast bone. Though I didn’t know why or how, I knew I needed to mark the snake’s death.

  When at last my feet slowed to a halt, I stood at the mouth of Colorow Cave. Its enormous crescent-shaped maw arched overhead, and I felt suddenly as if I’d paused in the opened mouth of a whale. I’d only been here once before, never alone. Light spilled down through the water-carved cleft in the roof, splashing on the flagstone floor and illuminating the sides and back of the cave with its crenellated walls harboring bats and pigeons.

  What was I here for? A voice, a soft footstep, the smell of horse? I didn’t have native ancestors to teach me how to honor a death. I didn’t know what I expected to feel or what I should do. Arching my neck back, I loosened my tongue and clucked into the air, startling a swallow that flew from the shadows and spiraled up through the rain-carved crevice in the ceiling. Its tail feathers vanished like black points into the sky. Suddenly, I saw where I wanted to be.

  Turning on my heels, I exited the cave and circled to the right, picking through scrubby pine, searching for a place to hoist myself up. The cave’s roof slanted like a giant ramp, starting low on the front side and sloping up toward the back, where it peaked several hundred feet above the ground. If I had any hope of mounting the cave, I’d have to bushwhack through some brambles and find a foothold somewhere along this front face.

  Stomping my way into the bushes, I was elbowing branches aside, scratching my face and forearms when, suddenly, I stopped. A deep-throated drone pulsed inside my ears. In a split second, I knew it wasn’t human. Yanking my eyes about, I looked left and right, glimpsing a blur of color, and then, holding still, spotted a sparkling orb of green. I gasped, holding my breath, enchanted. What
was it? Thumb-sized, it hovered no more than six inches away, upright, gazing straight at me. A hummingbird, I marveled. I’d never seen one before. Its throat, a deep rose, and the iridescent green of its crown startled me. Darting once to the left, then right, it met each of my eyes. I didn’t move. The world was utterly quiet. I knew I was being observed. It whirred around my shoulders and then back to look again on my face. When at last I blinked, it disappeared.

  A puff of loss escaped from my throat and I swiveled my chin to one side and the other, searching for its fluorescent whir. I had never been close enough to a wild animal to see its consciousness. More than its beauty, I wanted to feel its curiosity again, its measure of me. For those few shimmering moments, I had slipped behind its eyes and was looking back at what I must have seemed: a large featherless thing, agile but earthbound, less marvelous and beautiful. What am I to you? I wanted to ask. What do you call me? I stared again at the spot where I’d last seen it hover, willing it to reappear, but, instead, I spotted the foothold in the rock-face I’d been hoping for, a rain-carved gully wide enough for my shoe.

  In another minute I was up on the roof, pushing my feet against the iron-red rock, heading straight up the incline. I practically ran, like a goat up a gentle mountain, hopping small crevices and scrambling with my hands and feet. As I reached the uppermost edge, I halted, just short of where the rock fell away. Holding my breath high in my chest, I inched my feet to the edge, keeping my eyes down on the red-scuffed toes of my shoes, afraid the slightest extra movement might send me, footless and gripless, into the open air. At last, I lifted my chin.

  “Ah!” I drew in a sharp breath.

  Everything about my axis vanished. Space swooped away from my feet, rushing across the valley clear to the foothills, wrenching and breathtaking. The earth opened in every direction, hazing into the sky, the horizon gone. To my left and right, golden fields stretched and rippled in waves, and there, in the middle, impossibly small, floated my house, its dark roof tiny and rafted in the sun-fired ocean. The sight stilled me and, at the same time, plunged me backward.

  I knew, now, what was bothering me most: a fear summoned by the snake, not by its fangs, but by its death. I’d come here to reckon with it, and I could no longer hold off the memory of one afternoon, on a particular Saturday, right after we’d moved. The image of Barbara Ann, pale and breathless, coming into my bedroom, flooded my mind.

  “Daddy found the babies,” she had whispered, flicking her fingers as she stood there, as if burned.

  “How do you know?”

  We’d kept our secret, a pink and sightless tangle of fourteen babies in our hamster cage, for nearly a week. This was the third litter, one my father had forbidden.

  “No more,” he’d said, hard-jawed, after the second batch had been ferried out to friends. Wedging a wooden divider down the middle of the cage, he’d banned Whiskers to one side and Millie to the other.

  Their scratchings—Whiskers raking and gnawing at the wood, Millie pacing frantically along the wooden wall—weakened us. They were the sounds of sadness. We knew nothing of hormones or bad timing. One afternoon, home by ourselves, Barbara Ann and I had lifted the furred bodies out of the guillotined cage and placed them together in the wheel barrel, free to waddle and wrestle, we thought, harmlessly, for a short while.

  When eight weeks later the babies arrived, we dove into fluffing up the shavings around the nest, plucking up a wobbly straggler when it toddled out from under Millie’s pillowed belly. I couldn’t say what our plan had been. We hadn’t had one, beyond a vague reasoning that if we stretched out our secret, long enough for fur to sprout and eyes to open, the babies would grow too cute to do away with. Shifting the cage deeper into the basement, we created decoys of noise, setting up our homework on the card table, ironing, sweeping surreptitiously.

  My father rarely went to the far side of the stairwell, even on a weekend. His workbench kept him for the most part on the front side, directly in front of the door. Still, when Barbara Ann and I left our vigil on a Saturday morning, shopping with our mother, he must have heard something out of the ordinary that breached the rustlings of his workbench: a new muddle of movement. Little stars of sound.

  “How do you know?” I asked Barbara Ann again, standing still, my legs surrounded by shopping bags, dumped and unopened.

  She didn’t answer. On some level, I believed our father would forgive. Partly because we hadn’t meant to disobey, and partly because, I believed still, his heart was the same as mine.

  We stood, not moving, and listened. The cage, directly beneath my bedroom floor, whined open and snapped shut, followed by my father’s shoes tromping up the steps leading to the yard. He didn’t stop to put on his boots, even though it was March, the ground chilled under a blanket of late snow. The basement door slammed hard. Neither Barbara Ann nor I went running down.

  I didn’t ask how they died. Barbara Ann, later, went down alone, peering into the cage, confirming what we knew was true. Summoning enough courage, she’d approached my father’s bench.

  “They’re gone now,” he’d answered, sanding a piece of wood, not looking up.

  Turning, she’d gone to the door and climbed the steps out into the yard, far enough to see his footprints marking a path out into the snow, before coming back in and closing the door.

  Standing, now, on top of an ancient cave, troubled and wondering, I couldn’t erase the scene I’d conjured in my mind during the weeks that followed: my father, far out in the snowy field, stomping the babies, the shock of black hair flopping as his shoulders snapped forward, driving his heel deeper into the earth. Had he done so? Even as I wondered, a far more weighted question entered my heart. What was his dark anger? Did he know that stomping on our hamsters would wound me and my sister? His aloofness to their suffering made me feel alone.

  Balancing there, perched at the edge of the world, the ground dropped away from my feet, I felt the different levels of life push up against my shoes. I was going against my primitive brain, trying to break through to broader ways of seeing the world, to understand the death of blind, tender rodents, to determine my place in the universe.

  Reaching down into my pocket, I drew out the rattle and placed it into my palm. It felt like an old thing, fragile and everlasting. With one finger, I touched the papery rings, the hinged joints movable but silent without the muscle of a tail. A kind of knowing arose in me. I felt I knew something about snakes. They wanted to live as much as I did.

  It came to me, what I would do. I’d honor this death the only way I knew how. Carrying the rattle home, I’d find the smallest of my jewelry boxes, the white one with its blanket of cotton. Lifting the lid, I’d move aside my birthstone pearl, and lay beside it the rattle’s rings.

  I felt some comfort, then. With funneled fingers, I slipped the rattle back into my dark pocket and, one foot at a time, stepped away from the edge. Turning, I eased down the keeled rock, knowing I was returning with new bundles of nerves, a re-circuited heart. As I touched ground, I paused long enough to mark the gully point in my mind; then, I stepped again into the field.

  I couldn’t have known this fully, but I was moving toward wisdom and who I was going to become. I was beginning to touch what makes up a soul. These moments—the hummingbird, a spate of senseless snowy deaths, and the untimely fall of a reptile—had opened a path for me I now chose to turn down. Away from dominion and judgment. Toward mercy.

  I am a creature, too, I thought, pushing through the long grass home, stirring, with each step, a soft rustling sound—a rattling of grass.

  Chapter 12

  Laundromat

  A mile or so out of downtown Hazard, Bea’s Laundromat sagged off the back of a Phillips 66. Little bigger than a shed, it offered six worn washing machines pushed against the back wall, three dryers, two of them broken, a cement floor with a gritty drain, and four sorry kitchen chairs clustered in the middle of the room. Water stained the concrete, meandering in a slow ribbon across the floor
, puddling in the corner. I trailed my sister and mother toward the back, set my basket on the floor, and stood up to assess the situation.

  “Don’t,” my mother whispered. “That floor’s filthy.” She swooped up the basket and put it on one of the dead machines.

  At eleven years old I had never seen the inside of a laundromat. As frugal as my parents were on my father’s salary, we were never without our own washing machine. Neither were my grandparents. Both sides of my family in Hazard had the very best of GE and Maytag: washers, refrigerators, electric stoves, huge hulking freezers.

  Still, even the best of machines broke down, and a few days into our summer visit the wringer washer in my grandmother’s basement had made a raucous noise and conked. We were still waiting for a repairman. So here we were, on a Saturday afternoon in sweltering humidity, with a wicker basket and two pillowcases full of sorted shorts, sheets, underpants, Roddy’s corduroys, and my father’s shirts.

  “Start the machine before you put in the soap,” Mama instructed, still speaking in a low tone. “And don’t crowd the clothes.”