Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Will you make me one?” I asked. I felt very close to Dudley that night, watching him at his desk, risking a whipping to finish his work. He was brave, braver than I was in every way, and I loved him, with his thin face and his long thin arms and high intelligence quotient and his ability to stand up to and get along with our father. I had seen our father pull off his belt and beat Dudley in front of his friends and Dudley would never say a word. He took punishment like a man. He worked like a man. He was a man. I was safe in his room. No mummy or vampire would ever come in there. It was worth five cents to get a night’s sleep without having to worry about the closets or underneath the beds.

  “I might,” he said. “If I have time.”

  “Will I get to be in the fort?”

  “I doubt it, Shorty. You’re a girl. Girls aren’t supposed to be in everything.”

  “I’ll make one of my own, then. Can I have part of the trees?” He shook his head and went back to work, enlarging the place on the stock where the clothespin would fit and lock in.

  “I’m getting a diamond ring,” I said and slipped back down beneath the covers. I liked to keep my neck covered at all times when I was asleep. Even in Dudley’s room you couldn’t be too careful about vampires. “When Momma dies she’s leaving me her ring.”

  “Go to sleep,” he said, and held the gun up to the light to inspect it. “You’re making too much noise. You’re going to wake them up.”

  The fort became a permanent fixture in the back yard. The fort stayed. Winter progressed into spring. The Christmas trees turned brown and brittle and lost their needles and the needles were swept up and used to mulch the rose garden, which had been rebuilt by Dudley and his gang. All our roses bloomed that spring, American Beauties and Rosa Damascena, which dates back to the Crusades, and the dark red Henry Nevard and Rosa Alba, the white rose of York, and Persian Yellow and Fruehling’s Gold and Maiden’s Blush, our cutting of which had come to Indiana from Glen Allen, Mississippi, hand-delivered by our cousin, Lauralee, who was a lieutenant in the navy.

  The fort grew, taking up all the room between the back porch and the rose garden and the alley. The cedar and pine needles were reinforced by boards donated by boys from around the neighborhood. A tower was added and a permanent scaling ladder. Paths were worn along the sides of the house as invading forces charged down the hill. Later, the spring rains turned the paths into gullies.

  The manufacture of rubber guns proceeded apace. The strips of rubber were of varying sizes, as Dudley experimented with different types of inner tubes. He would sit for hours in the evenings, sanding and polishing the stocks and handles, cutting old inner tubes into strips, sewing holsters from scraps of unbleached domestic and suiting samples.

  March turned into April and April into May. The Allies were winning the war in Europe. The clock in my second-grade classroom was the cruelest clock in the world. The days until the end of the school year seemed to last forever. At last my trunk was brought up from the basement and aired out and I began to fill it with T-shirts and socks and shorts and flashlight batteries. In June I was going to camp. I loved camp. I adored camp. I would have liked to go to camp all year. At camp I was the leader. At camp I had people sleeping around me every night. Without paying a single cent I had a whole room full of people to sleep with.

  This year I was going to a new camp in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus Girls’ Camp. A letter came with a sticker to put on my suitcase and another one for my trunk. I forgot about the fort. Who needed the hell damn fort? I was going off to Columbus Girls’ Camp to row boats and swim in races and make lanyards and build campfires and sleep in a cabin with people all around me, far from the vampires and mummies and holy ghosts who inhabit real houses where families live.

  So I was not there when he lost the eye. “The eye is a tiny balloon that grows at the front of the brain.” So it said in a book I took home from the library. “The cells at the back are tuned to be sensitive to light, enabling us to see the world around us. The eye is so delicate that it has to be protected by a bony socket and eyelids to cover the window and a flow of tears to keep the window clean.”

  On the day he lost the eye, Dudley and Billy Bob and Miles and Ronnie were attacking as a tank corps. Wayne and Sam were inside the fort. The other boys were pushing wagons loaded with staves down from the back porch. There was an incline of about forty degrees, plenty good for accelerating wagon-tanks. Dudley was standing up in a wagon holding a loaded rubber gun and Miles was pushing him. Billy Bob was beside him in the other wagon. It was the tenth or twelfth or twentieth time they had run the wagons down the hill toward the fort. They were getting better and better at guiding them, but somehow or other this time Billy Bob’s wagon ran into the side of Dudley’s wagon and in the melee Dudley’s rubber gun backfired and the thin band of old inner tube managed to elude the bony socket and the eyelid and dealt a blow to Dudley’s eye. There goes my eye, I guess he said. It’s a good thing it’s on the left side. Anyway, there was blood, lots of blood. The German housekeeper held Dudley in her arms while Momma and Sam and Wayne ran for Doctor Shorter, and later that night, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop, they took him to the doctors at the Air Corps base and the next day the Air Corps flew him to Memphis to an eye surgeon.

  It took all summer to heal. It was September before Dudley came home with his eye still swathed in bandages.

  When the bandages came off he could see light and dark and distinguish shapes, but nothing more. There were blood clots behind the iris, and the doctors were afraid to operate for fear it would set up sympathetic problems with the good eye. That’s all we talked about from then on. Dudley’s good eye. How to protect his good eye. How never to take chances with his good eye. How his good eye was doing. Thank God for his good eye. Pray for his good eye.

  While Dudley was in Memphis the fort had fallen into disrepair. Children from all over the neighborhood came and inspected it and told each other about the tank battle. An aura of mystery and danger hung around the circle of trees, timeless, Druidic, threatening. I never went near the place. I knew bad karma when I felt it. The sleeping bags were in there rotting away but I didn’t go in and drag them out. By the time Mother got home from Memphis they were filled with ants and had to be pitched out for the garbagemen.

  Dudley had a strange relationship with the fort after he returned from Memphis. I remember him standing there with his big black patch on his eye, wearing his brown and white tweed knickers, his hands on his hips, looking at the fort, not defeated or scared or really puzzled even. Just standing there looking it over.

  Then one day the following spring, after D-Day, when the pressure was letting up all over the United States and men could go back to ruining the lives of their children, my father looked up over his breakfast oatmeal and said, “Son, today we are going to have to get rid of those trees. Your mother wants the grass to grow back before the owners of this house return.”

  “They will think we are white trash,” my mother added. She was poaching eggs in a black skillet, a little blue and white apron over her blue shirtwaist dress. I was sitting in the corner of the breakfast nook pulling on my hair to make it grow.

  “Let’s clear them out,” my father went on. “Get Wayne and Billy Bob and let them help.”

  “I’m not helping,” I said. “It’s not my damn old fort.”

  “I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap,” my mother put in. “Dudley, please do something about her.”

  “No one expects you to help,” my brother said.

  “No one expects you to do a thing,” my father added. “You are a very selfish little girl.”

  I slid down under the table and climbed out and stood beside my mother. I didn’t care what they thought. As soon as the war was over I was going to be a movie star. When I got to Hollywood I would probably never even write to them again. Dudley looked at me out of his good eye. He looked so thin and sad. I guess he was thinking about how terrible it was going to feel to have to drag all
those prickly trees back to the alley and then rake up the yard and even then get yelled at and probably get a whipping before the day was out. I’m glad Daddy doesn’t like me, I was thinking. The more he likes you, the more trouble you are in.

  “Clean up your room,” someone called after me but it was too late. I was through the dining room and past the green chair and out the door. I could feel the morning calling from the front yard and I ran on out and headed down Calvin Boulevard to see what I could find to do.

  It was a glamorous spring day. The gold star in Mrs. Allen’s window gleamed in the light. The apple trees in the Hancocks’ yard had burst into bloom. Elsie Carter came riding down the boulevard carrying her sack of Saturday Evening Posts. One of my molars was about to fall out. I could taste the wonderful thin, salty taste of blood. I was eight years old. In five years darker blood would pour out from in between my legs and all things would be changed. For now, I was pure energy, clear light, morally neutral, soft and violent and almost perfect. I had two good eyes and two good ears and two arms and two legs. If bugs got inside of me, my blood boiled and ate them up. If I cut myself, my blood rushed in and sewed me back together. If a tooth fell out, another one came in. The sunlight fell between the branches of the trees. It was Saturday. I had nothing to do and nowhere to go and I didn’t have to do a thing I didn’t want to do and it would be a long time before things darkened and turned to night.

  The Time Capsule

  Nineteen hundred and forty-four. In a year the Japanese would surrender but Rhoda did not know that yet. She was worried sick about the Japanese. Forty years later she would smell a fig tree beside a bakery and remember how her swing looked down on fig trees during those fateful years while she waited to see who would win the war.

  It was not an ordinary swing. It was the tallest back-yard swing in Seymour, Indiana, thirty feet high, constructed of tall pine uprights sunk in concrete shoes. The rope was an inch thick. There was a seat of solid pine fitted into the rope by hundreds of hours of Rhoda’s relentless swinging. She could swing holding a doll or a sandwich. She could swing standing up or sitting down. She could swing so high the ropes snapped at the top. Every morning she would come down the back stairs and across the yard and get in and take off. Off we go, she would be singing. Into the wild blue yonder. Climbing high into the sky.

  One morning in August she was swinging more slowly than usual because she was thinking about fate. Anything could happen to anyone at any time. That much was clear. You could be on the losing side of a war. You could fall in love and get married. Hollywood could come and get you for a movie star. Your mother could die and leave you her rings. You could die.

  Rhoda stopped the swing. She dragged her toes in the dirt. No, she would never die. She was not the type. It was probably a lie like everything else they told you. She smelled her arms. They smelled alive. She lifted her head. She tossed her hair. To hell with death, damn it all to goddamn hell. She concentrated on the fig tree above the sandpile. Let them come with death. She would smash them in the face. She would tie them to a tree and beat them with willow whips and jump in her plane and take off for the island where her mother waited. She dug her toes deeper in the soft, loose dirt beneath the swing. Red dirt, as red as blood, not dark like dirt in the Delta, like black dirt and black skin and rivers. This was the red dirt of Indiana, where they had to live because a war was going on. This was the war and everyone must do their part. She leaned far out of the swing until the ropes cut into her arms. She dug her toes into the dirt until her sandals were covered with it. Then she pushed back off into the sky. She pumped with her arms and legs. She went higher and higher, this time she would go forever, this time she would flip the swing over the uprights and come plummeting down.

  It had been a bad summer. First Gena’s sister told her blood was going to come out from in between her legs one week out of every four. There was nothing she could do about it. No one was excluded. Then her father took her and her mother to see The Outlaw with Jane Russell and made them leave at the part where Jane was warming her boyfriend’s body in the haystack. “I’ll keep you warm,” Jane was saying. “I’ll save you.” Big Dudley had grabbed them up and dragged them out of the theater. He was furious with Ariane for exposing Rhoda to filth.

  But the main thing was the newsreel. The news from the Pacific did not look good. Americans were dying on every island. It was possible they would lose the war. Rhoda stopped the swing. It was time to make a time capsule. She must leave a record so future generations would know she had been here. She got out of the swing and dusted off her dress and went into the kitchen. Mrs. Dustin was there, the German lady who worked for the Mannings now that they were someplace where there weren’t any black people. Mrs. Dustin wasn’t nice like black people. She only worked for them because she had to. She didn’t even love them. “Stay out of the refrigerator,” she said now. “Your mother doesn’t want you eating between meals.”

  “I need this matchbox,” Rhoda said. She took it off the stove and dumped the matches on the table.

  “Don’t take that,” Mrs. Dustin began, but it was too late. Rhoda was out the door, the sash of her pinafore trailing behind her. She was dressed up today, wearing a green and white checked dress and an organdy pinafore. She had a green velvet ribbon tied around her wrist to ward off the story of the blood coming out down there. Down there, down there, down there. Do not put anything down there. Do not stick anything inside yourself down there. Wash your hands before you touch yourself down there. There was a wonderful quality to her mother’s voice when she talked of it, scary and worried. Now, on top of everything else, there was this goddamn story about the blood. “It happens to every single girl,” Gena’s sister had said. “No one can escape it. You can never go swimming again. You have to have this big lump of absorbent cotton between your legs and it hurts so much you have to go to bed.” The minute Rhoda got home she had fallen down on her knees beside her bed to beg God not to let it happen to her. As usual there was no answer, so she got up and went to find her mother. “Why would Gena’s sister tell you such a thing? I can’t believe she told you something like that,” Rhoda’s mother said.

  “Then it’s true?”

  “No, it’s not exactly true. It will be a long time before it happens to you and it doesn’t hurt. It’s God’s way of making us able to have babies.”

  “Blood comes out from in between your legs?”

  “Yes, but not for a long time. Rhoda, you are just a little girl. You don’t have to worry about this yet.”

  “I hate God. I hate His guts. That’s just like Him to think up something like that.” She left the room. When she got to the door she called back across her shoulder, “I wouldn’t have your old God for all the tea in China. I think He looks like hell in that old robe.”

  That was the day before. Today Rhoda was on the offensive where fate was concerned. She went down the back stairs, holding the matchbox in her hand, and up on a rise to a place where she had been digging a foxhole the year before. She had abandoned the project because of a book she read about a little girl who went blind from staring at the sun. She had stayed inside for weeks after she read it. The shovel was still there. She picked it up and began to dig. Her hands were so strong and so valuable. Her mother was a princess, her father was a king, she was so wonderful and valuable. She must never die or be lost in any way. She dug as fast as she could, thinking of things that must go into the capsule. A picture of herself, the picture she sent to Margaret O’Brien after seeing Journey for Margaret. A man had left his luggage in London so that Margaret could get on the plane and fly to safety. I would do it, Rhoda decided. I would leave all my worldly goods behind to save a little girl. She dug awhile longer, imagining it. Then she dropped the shovel and took the matchbox inside to fill it up. She walked through the French doors and into the living room of the high-ceilinged stucco house someone in Seymour, Indiana, had copied from a picture of a French château they found in a magazine.

&n
bsp; Rhoda took down the photograph album from a shelf and dusted it off with her skirt and found the photograph she wanted. It was a picture of herself sitting on a Persian rug in a white dress. Yes, it would do to carry her into the future. She tore it out of the book and sat down at her mother’s desk to write the message.

  My name is Rhoda Katherine Manning. I weigh 82. We are in a war. They might come at any minute. I have auburn hair and brown eyes. I was born on a plantation in the Delta and as soon as the war is over I’ll be going back. Mrs. Allen’s son died in the war. She has a gold star in the window and I go and visit her quite frequently. The pope wouldn’t let her be my brother’s godmother. She isn’t allowed to go inside our church. No one tells me what to do. I am just like my father.

  Well, I see I am running out of paper. When you find this think of me. It is summer and the sun is shining and everything is fine around here so far. I will include my fingerprints.

  Yours truly,

  Rhoda Manning

  She looked up from her writing, stuck her thumbs in the inkwell, added her thumbprints, blew the ink dry, then rolled the message up into a scroll. She went into the kitchen, got some wax paper, covered the scroll with it and added a rubber band. Then she went up to her room to see what she could find to put in the capsule. She chose a picture of Alan Ladd, a string of beads, three pennies, and an empty perfume bottle. She arranged the things neatly in the matchbox and pushed the cover shut. There. That should give them a pretty good idea of what Seymour, Indiana, was like in nineteen forty-four. She marched back out to the garden and began to dig again. The smell of the earth came up to meet her, cold and fresh. A robin called. A breeze touched her face. It was perfect. Rhoda sat back upon her heels and thought about the inside of the earth, how many things are buried there. Valuable things you could find, things you could eat. She put her face in her hands, sank back deeper on her heels, thinking of her victory garden, how small and tough the carrots were, what a disappointment. Dudley had laughed at her carrots. He said a rabbit wouldn’t eat the carrots that came up in her patch. Dudley. Why did they like him so much? Why was he so good? Why did he always get away with murder? Why did he have all the friends?