The Sisters of Glass Ferry

by Kim Michele Richardson

  Mama wouldn’t budge and dug deeper into her despair.

  It nearly drove Flannery crazy, and at times she was sure she’d done went and caught it. Sometimes Flannery slipped outside and ran down to the barn. Inside, Flannery would kick and cry her pent-up howls, soak the worm-worn rafters and dirt floor with her helplessness, cursing Patsy for the nightmare she’d left Mama and Flannery to live with.

  “Patsy,” she’d cry, “how could you do this to us, how could you? Damn you! Damn you to Hell for leaving me. Come home now!”

  And in a while Flannery would plead and beg God, “Bring her home, Lord, bring Patsy back to us. Keep her safe and lead her home.”

  Then splintering her pleas, Flannery’d bargain. “I promise to be the best sister. Promise to take care of her and treat her like the queenie she is if You’ll only just return her to us. Just please, please give me back my sister, and I’ll never be jealous or angry with her or You again. Please, God, please.”

  One day, Mrs. Henry stopped by. Flannery rushed out to the porch to greet the sheriff’s wife before Mama could snatch her daughter back inside. It didn’t look like Mrs. Henry was faring any better than Mama. Or herself. She had a dish in her unsteady hands. “I brought you and Jean some of my chicken corn casserole.”

  “Mama’s resting,” Flannery told her, dying to know if she had any news.

  Mrs. Henry handed Flannery the dish and pushed back the flowery scarf covering her head, letting it hang off her shoulders.

  Flannery could tell Danny’s mama had been “resting” too. The worry over her missing son had kept her confined to the house, left her with dark bags under her eyes. Mrs. Henry stood there balling up the side of her pretty, blue-blossomed dress. She looked frailer than the last time Flannery had seen her at Spanks Grocery a few weeks before.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Flannery said. “Uh, is there any word about my sister? Danny?”

  Mrs. Henry shook her head. “No, I thought I could ask the same?”

  “No, ma’am. Nothing.”

  “Flannery, I’ve been thinking. Is there anything Patsy might’ve said that night about leaving Glass Ferry? Hinted where she might’ve gone?”

  The question struck a nerve. Flannery and Hollis hadn’t rehearsed that one. It made lots of sense for Patsy to have hinted, to have packed something if she and Danny had planned to run away. It’d be best to take the easy way out. “I don’t recall Patsy saying anything about leaving, ma’am.”

  “Are you sure they didn’t mention where they were headed to?” Mrs. Henry looked at Flannery, her soft brown eyes desperate. “Anybody say—”

  “Nuh-uh. I . . . Uh, no, ma’am.” Flannery felt the lie bloom on her cheeks. “I’ve been here, helping Mama.”

  “Have ya heard anything? Any kids talking? Anything? A letter from her?”

  For a second, Flannery wanted to tell. Tell Mrs. Henry everything she and Hollis hadn’t. “Nothing, like I told Sheriff. Maybe Hollis knows some of Danny’s friends who might know more?”

  “Hollis has left for the university. He hasn’t called much. His father is still looking for the missing automobile—and no one’s seen it.”

  For the first time ever, Flannery thought about leaving too, thought about going to school in the city. Getting herself a higher education to snag one of those fine secretarial jobs like the ones the teachers raved about. Leave this old town. Maybe go to work at the Stagg distillery downriver. Flannery’d heard the talk, how the company was getting bigger, and liked hiring educated folks and smart females for their secretaries. Who knew, maybe she could open a liquor store and saloon, get herself a bartending license like Abraham Lincoln had done over in Illinois. After all, if a president could do that, it surely was a smart thing to do.

  “We haven’t heard a word, Mrs. Henry. Sorry, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Henry grimaced. “How is Jean?”

  Flannery looked over her shoulder to the door. The sheriff’s wife grabbed hold of Flannery’s hesitation. “Maybe I’ll send the doctor out,” Mrs. Henry said. “I’m sure he’d like to see how she’s doing. Might have some tonic for her ailings.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’d be real nice. Mama’s been a little peaked. Well, I . . . I better get this food inside and check on her.” Flannery patted the casserole lid. “Smells real good. Thank you. We’ll return the dish soon.”

  The doctor came by, but he didn’t seem concerned with Mama’s withering state. He told Flannery the rest would do her good, then left pills to help with her female nerves too. The doc peered over his thick glasses, studied Flannery, and said, “If yours act up some, you can take half a pill with your meals, same as her. Mighty fine for the female hysterics.” Then he wrote the instructions on the bottle and left.

  Many times Flannery fell asleep on Patsy’s bed, hoping she would awaken to find her sister across from her. That Patsy would again be able to raise a fuss, telling her to get her lazy bones into her own bed. And Flannery would yell back at her twin for leaving, but then they’d make up, and everyone, especially Mama, would be happy.

  Each morning Flannery awoke to silence, rousing to a startled hopelessness, her heart knocking her fully awake, her thin gown soaked in panicked sweat. Hollow, she’d beat the pillow and mattress with her fist, damning Patsy for abandoning her, screaming inside herself for her sister to come home. When Flannery wore out her bruising knuckles, she grabbed her baton out of the closet.

  One morning in late August, Flannery stood breathless over the bed, slamming the short metal rod against the feather pillow, again and again, tearing the ticking, whacking until she couldn’t lift the baton another inch. Couldn’t drag another ugly fit across those silent sheets one more day.

  She watched the feathers sail into the charged air for a good while, fearing she’d gone mad. Flannery thought about her sister crying in school for her when they were young. Clung to the one thing she could always count on Patsy for. Clawed to keep it. If she could hold on to that till Patsy came home, it would keep the insanity away.

  Who would care for Mama if they toted Flannery away, locked her in an asylum like the one way out off State Road 80? Mama was already as good as there in her folly; Flannery knew folks were speculating, talking. How else would Mrs. Henry know to send the doctor around if they weren’t?

  Flannery tried to fill her mind with sensible, calm things to keep her sanity, but soon it would all slip and she’d push her angry face into the pillow, or bark wretched sobs into a pile of bed linens, fearing Mama or anyone else would see she had caught the madness.

  School started in September, and Flannery was more than ready to escape the house and Mama. Excited to push through her senior year, yet scared she would be doing it without her twin.

  She had not done a single thing alone, Flannery realized, and with that thought her stomach grew queasy, and she had to run to the bathroom.

  Flannery had barely slept the night before her first day back, up several times emptying her nervous stomach. She dreamed Patsy had come dragging in. Same ol’ Patsy, but in a new pink dress, all darling and dazzling, wearing her pearls and carrying schoolbooks. And Mama’d never said a word. Not one in her dream. Just sent Patsy off to school with a big piece of strawberry cake. The dream roused Flannery from her sleep, and it had felt so real she jumped up and checked the drawer where she’d stashed the pearls.

  But it was only that, a dream. Flannery walked alone on the first day of school.

  A carload of boys slowed just enough to toss out a jar and a curse. “Bootlegging floozy.”

  “If you’re gonna drink ’shine, Luke Spears, at least make it better than that nasty cat piss your daddy sells,” Flannery yelled at them, booting the empty Mason jar of hooch out of her way.

  Spears stuck his arm out of the window and raised his middle finger.

  Flannery and Patsy were used to the kids’ teasing about moonshine, getting railed upon despite Honey Bee’s good reputation, his business license, and the hills being full of bad bo
otleggers like the Spearses. It wasn’t a big deal except to the kids whose parents had found other jobs, who thought they were better off finding a different trade that might make them richer: mechanic, shop owner, preacher, or such.

  Most everybody in Glass Ferry had kin who were, or who had been in the whiskey business. It was a way of life here, food on the table, a roof over heads, a means of survival. And it had been that way for her parents in the ’20s and ’30s and their parents and those ancestors who’d started before them with the old, squatty turnip-pot stills.

  Mama’d enjoyed the money from it until Honey Bee got sick and before the sheriff began taking more food from their table with his higher protection fees. The taxes.

  Even Violet Perry’s preacher daddy was the son of a moonshiner, but he’d snuck and bought the best spirits off Honey Bee instead of from his kinfolk.

  Some kids had lost relatives who’d been killed in moonshining raids. And more than a few teachers had husbands working at the legal distilleries downriver, and even more kin lighting illegal stills tucked way up in the hills—with one family going so far as to dig a room-sized cavern into the grounds of their family cemetery, then covering it with borrowed tombstones to hide their operation down there from the government agents.

  “There’s a lot worse things a man could become in this dark, bloody Kentucky land,” Honey Bee’d said. “Kentucky without its whiskey men, its stills, would be like New York City without business suits and buildings.”

  But everyone knew being a floozy—a mother having a baby out of wedlock—was the very worst a girl could become around here.

  Flannery wished she had fixed the flat tire on her bicycle before school started. She picked up her pace and hurried down the road.

  “Heard tell Patsy ran way.” The kids in the school lot pushed and poked for answers. “Heard she ran off to marry Danny,” they whispered. “Heard why, too.” They looked over their shoulders for teachers, snuck hands to their bellies and poked them and then one another for amusement.

  Violet Perry perched on the rail leading into the school building. She wore a tight new sweater she’d pinched her falsies into despite the hot September day. Her friend Bess leaned in beside her. Violet pointed her finger and said under her breath, but loud enough for Flannery to hear, “Imagine we won’t be seeing Patsy again until that bread in the oven is good an’ done.”

  Bess smirked. “Maybe a tad longer. Loaves from two bakers might need to bake extra long.”

  “Don’t you know it,” another girl squeezed in and smarted. “What with two bakers there’s no telling how many are in that twin’s oven.”

  “Humph, twins, have you ever?” someone else squeaked. “My mama said it ain’t natural for a woman to have a litter like that. Them’s circus freaks.”

  “Dumb bootleggers,” Violet muttered.

  “Like your kin,” Flannery said low.

  Violet glared.

  “She’ll come back a’toting,” the girls pecked. “Toting a double stack of diapers.”

  “Ew,” one girl said. “My daddy hadn’t never seen twins ’fore the Butlers and says it’s bad luck for folks and only fit for beasts to birth more than one at a time.”

  Flannery hated how they were the only twins around, the only ones that folks from around here had ever seen, despite Mama insisting it was doubly good.

  “My girls have what others don’t,” Mama had told them.

  “An extra life inside them, another branch, reaching, sheltering the other, like God’s angels protecting this old earth when He’s busy. Look after each other, girls.” She’d hugged and reminded them when they worried about their peculiarity.

  Flannery and Patsy’d been relieved last winter when they heard about a set of boys born two counties over on New Year’s Day. “1952’s newest babies are, of all things, twins!” the radio announced.

  Flannery growled at the girls’ bad-mouthing Patsy like that and pushed past them, biting down on her tongue.

  “Flannery Butler,” the girls called after her, “where’s Patsy Baker?” Their laughter trailed.

  Inside, Flannery headed to her classroom. A few girls from baton practice huddled together in the hall. They shot Flannery nervous smiles, but never called her over.

  Wendell Black spotted her and raised a shy hand. Flannery stopped and tossed one back. For a second it looked like he might come over and talk to her. Then her freshman teacher, Mrs. Goebal, called, motioning Flannery to her side. “You look lost. Looks like you lost your other half, Miss Butler. Did Patsy join the circus with that clown Danny?” She chortled low with another teacher locked beside her in a classroom doorway.

  The gossip punched to the bone. At that, Flannery drew back her shoulders, screwed her face, and lit a look that meant to do a’cuttin’. Slipped the teacher the meanest eye she could muster for trashing her sister’s good name.

  Mrs. Goebal dropped her jaw and pressed a hand to her chest. “Well, I never,” she exclaimed, patting. “Heathens.” She snatched Flannery’s sleeve. “I should paddle you.”

  But something in the hardness trapped in Flannery’s eyes made the woman release her.

  When Flannery got home from school that afternoon, she found Mama on the porch, upset, clutching something wrapped in cloth.

  “What is it?” Flannery said warily, grabbing the wooden porch rail. “What you got in there, Mama?” She lumbered up the steps with her schoolbooks and set them on the rail.

  “Those awful kids,” Mama said. “They came speeding down the drive, and one of them jumped out and threw this on the porch. I was resting, but I came running when I heard them whooping it up out here. I saw the two Scott boys and the Franklin girl in that old green pickup of the Scotts.”

  “Bess Franklin,” Flannery said.

  “Yes, that’s her. Violet Perry’s friend. See what they left? Look, Flannery. Look . . .” Mama worked up a wail and shoved the lumpy package in her daughter’s face.

  Flannery peeled back a dirty blanket and saw the small baby dolls, their bald, rubber heads marked in thick, tomato-red paint that read PATSY’S BASTARDS.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Nothing but school-yard shit then and nothing that needs attention now,” Hollis repeated, thumping the dash again.

  “It was more than that,” Flannery whispered. “That’s your brother and my sister in your car.”

  “It’s over, dammit. I’m not going to be hurt anymore,” Hollis said, pressing down on the gas, eager to drop her off.

  “We’re all hurting.” Flannery tried to reason with him.

  All those hurtings eventually drove Flannery away. In her senior year at Glass Ferry, she’d kept her nose in the books, earning good grades and the principal’s favor.

  Before the ink dried on her high school diploma in ’53, Flannery fled Glass Ferry for the city and the University of Louisville.

  Mama’d cried and begged Flannery to stay. And if the principal hadn’t intervened on Flannery’s behalf, she surely would’ve been stuck. In the end the principal called Mama and insisted that Flannery should have the higher learning so Glass Ferry could get themselves a new teacher. Mama sold some of Honey Bee’s things to pay for that learning, and soon Flannery left.

  Getting miles away from Glass Ferry and her mama’s sadness, from those rumors and half-truths of small-town living, helped some.

  * * *

  In Louisville, Flannery kept her eyes peeled for a glimpse of her missing sister. But it wasn’t long till she forgot, hardly bothered, and only then if a familiar sound or sight jolted her into remembering to be on the lookout for Patsy. She pretended to be an only child to those she met. And soon she believed it. Isn’t that what Patsy was doing, probably at this very second? Flannery always rationalized.

  A sound sleep still was difficult to get. Class work in Latin and geography seemed easy enough, but Flannery still missed more than a few lessons. It was hard to memorize all the Latin grammar rules, rivers, mountains, and country capitals wh
en she couldn’t fall asleep sometimes until near morning.

  But the one class she’d roll out of bed for in her sophomore year, be on time for no matter what, was better than all the rest. His name was Mark Hamilton, a visiting lecturer for one of her sociology courses. He talked soft and slow like Honey Bee, reminded her of him and the other kind but strong menfolk back home. “I’m in ministry training across town at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.” His words slid all over her. “From Alabama now, but as the son of missionaries who struck out early in cotton and other goods, I’ve been all over,” he’d said at the start of that first class. A dreamy Ashley Wilkes-looking fellow, everyone thought.

  He invited questions after class. She found one, though the second she asked, it was lost to his boyish smile, his big green peepers. And when he looked at her like no one else had, she felt alive. His eyes roamed appreciatively, more boldly and unapologetically than those of others had, and for once she knew she looked like Betty Grable, her flat tires aired nicely.

  They’d stood there for a few sparking seconds, taking each other in, when he grabbed his jacket and said, “Let’s go get coffee, and I’ll give you a better answer.”

  “Let me powder my nose,” she practically sang. Inside the bathroom, Flannery freshened her makeup and at the last minute reached under her sweater and rolled up her skirt. She gave the waistband another tuck, looked at her legs. Just another inch, enough that she hoped he’d notice.

  Shifting her weight, she popped out a knee and inspected. Her nylons had been cleaned just last night with the Lux Flakes that Betty Grable advertised on their box, washed gently with the tiny diamond soap flakes. Flannery smoothed down her skirt and smiled.

  Coffee turned into lunch, a lazy stroll around the campus, and then a fine steak dinner at a restaurant called Hasenour’s, the fancy kind of place she’d read about in books.

  Inside the darkened restaurant foyer, Flannery looked beyond to the black leather booths tucked along ruby-red walls against a backdrop of tall, gleaming mirrors that circled a large room in a dizzying display.