With a Hammer for My Heart

by George Ella Lyon

  Now this ruin made out of me and Lawanda. You can have your luck. What we’ve got is grief.

  You know why I got to live up on the ridge? Because I don’t meet nobody at the corner of my bus. I don’t pass nobody in the aisles. No old women bowing to the Lord’s will, no men saying his country will be proud.

  A thousand wonders. My thousand wonders is that, given what we know, any of us goes on.

  LAWANDA: Nearly a week had gone by and I hadn’t heard from Garland, so I decided to ask Dad what was going on. It was Saturday afternoon right before the football game came on TV. Dad was sitting on the couch with his little kit of polishes, ready to take on every shoe in the house. He had them lined up on the floor like birds on a wire.

  “Dad,” I started out, “you didn’t forget to give Mr. Ballard my letter?”

  He looked up but then it was like his eyes backed away.

  “No. I didn’t forget.” He turned a key on the oxblood polish.

  “But he didn’t give you an answer?”

  That wasn’t my real question. I knew if Garland had written something I’d have it, but I didn’t know what else to ask.

  “Lawanda,” Dad said, still holding his face toward mine but not looking, “sit down.”

  I started toward him.

  “Not on the couch. I’ve got my work set up over here.” There was only the ragbag and the shoe-shine box, but I didn’t argue. I just sat in the “dump chair” across from him. Noonie calls it that, but we didn’t really get it at the dump.

  “Okay,” I told him.

  Dad was so fierce rubbing and rubbing his work boots, you’d think he could warm the hide back to life.

  “I wish you had a middle name,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Growing up like you are, you ought to have something new to be called.”

  He plunged his fist in the other shoe and rubbed and rubbed.

  “Ricky calls me Wanda,” I offered. Ricky is this guy in band who likes me, I think. He drops his valve oil whenever we talk during breaks.

  “That don’t help me,” he said. “I’ve got to know who I’m talking to.”

  “Dad …” I was starting to feel weird, the way he was acting.

  “Lawanda Jean was what I wanted to name you.”

  Another time that would have been interesting.

  “So what happened to the letter?”

  He thunked down one shoe, snapped the oxblood lid shut, and rattled tins till he found the black. Then he said, “I’ve still got it.”

  I was mad and confused both. “You said you would give it to him. That’s not fair!”

  “We’re past fair, Lawanda.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you’d gone by my word, this wouldn’t never have got started.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This thing with Amos Garland.”

  “What ‘thing’?” I stood up and went over to the couch. I couldn’t help it. “We’re just friends. What’re you talking about?”

  Dad clenched one good black shoe between his knees and took a rag to it.

  “I want you to tell me the truth, Lawanda.”

  “I’ve never told you anything else.”

  “What were you doing up there?”

  “Talking.”

  “Why would you want to talk to an old man?”

  “He’s interesting, Dad. He knows about all kinds of things. And First Bus has about a million books and maps in it—”

  “I don’t want to hear about his bus!” He shook his head and almost groaned. That’s when I realized he was worse than mad.

  “Why not?”

  “Look here, I’m the one asking the questions.”

  “Okay,” I said, my throat hurting like I might cry. “You didn’t do nothing but talk?” He had the black shoes done and was shaking a bottle of sponge-on white. The ball game came on. He got up and turned the sound off. The whole house sort of sank.

  “No.”

  “Well, what in creation did you talk about?”

  I tried to think. “School, music, Cardin. We joked a lot.” I didn’t tell him that sometimes Garland pretended he was a teacher again and I was his student. It would sound dumb, maybe even made up, when it was kind of sweet, really.

  “Did he ever hurt you?”

  “What?”

  “Did he ever touch you?”

  The words made me sick, like the time I slammed my hand in the car door, but Dad just went on daubing white on Ray’s high-tops.

  “Did he?”

  “No! That’s a filthy thing to say. If I thought up something like that, you’d—”

  I was starting to cry now and wiped my sweatshirt sleeve across my nose. Dad handed me a rag, forgetting it was salved with polish.

  “Lord God, Lawanda. I don’t want to tell you this.”

  I blew my nose, then tried to wipe the greasy streaks off. “I don’t want to hear it either,” I told him, “but I’ve got to, so go on.”

  “You know them Messer boys got into his bus?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t reckon they found much worth taking, but they did carry off one of his books.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I nodded again anyway.

  “One he’d been writing in.”

  For the first time all afternoon Dad looked at me. There was something he expected me to figure out, but I was mostly amazed.

  “I didn’t even know he wrote in books.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to. But Galt read some of it when he hauled them boys in—”

  “He had no right to do that!”

  “He wrote about you, honey.” A little coat of pleasure slipped over me before I could stop it, before I could tell myself that Dad meant something bad. “He wrote ugly things, Lawanda. Real ugly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About you.”

  “I don’t believe that!”

  “Well, it’s true.” Dad looked away again. “Sex things.”

  “You can’t make me believe that!”

  “I’d not have believed it either, Lawanda. I don’t want to believe it. That’s why you’ve got to tell me what went on.”

  “I told you! Nothing!”

  “Then we have to show the old man’s crazy and clear your name.”

  “No.” I said it plain.

  “What?”

  “He’s not crazy!”

  “You haven’t seen what he wrote,” Dad insisted.

  “Have you?”

  “No, but Galt says—”

  “Then you don’t know!” I snatched the shoe out of his hands and threw it to the floor. “How can you accuse him when you don’t know him? You haven’t even read—”

  “Galt says—”

  “Galt’s not God. What’s Galt got to do with it?”

  All of a sudden Dad grabbed my arms and shook me hard.

  “Stop it, Lawanda! You’re a kid! You don’t know a thing about the world. You got into something you ought never to have touched and you still don’t know what it was. I’m your daddy. I’m here to haul you out.”

  “Garland said how did I know you were my daddy.” He let go my arms. He pulled his hands back, open and empty.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I slid over to hug him and knocked the shoe-shine box off the couch. He smelled so good, like coal dust and dry-cleaning fluid, as well as the polish. The smells were like his arms holding me in.

  We sat there. On TV, the red guys were slaughtering the blue ones. I wished I had a helmet like that, and armor. I wished I knew where it was I was trying to go.

  HOWARD: I held Lawanda for a few minutes, all the time thinking how fake it was, feeling I could keep Lawanda safe. Whatever had gone on had already happened and I hadn’t known about it; whatever was up ahead—well, she’d be on her own soon. I could no more protect Lawanda than I could stop the earth from turning.

  When the kids was little, it was June worrying all th
e time. What if Noonie’s rash got infected? What if Lawanda’s cough settled in her lungs? It was June who sat up through the night, not able to let go even if they slept like babies. Now it’s me. Noonie’s clean gone and I’ve had to accept that. He’s nineteen—practically a man, though what kind, I can’t tell. Lawanda’s an egg that thinks she’s a rock—that’s what Lawanda is. She can’t just go hurling herself into the creek like Noonie and expect to make a right pretty splash.

  No sir, I can’t protect her from what’s happened, but I can sure make Garland pay. If Lawanda won’t talk, that notebook will. Let Garland’s words speak against him. Then, by God, we can hang him from his own rope.

  FROM GARLAND’S NOTEBOOK:

  … and I’ve got all these younguns, children, bodily U.S. government issue, army-approved. Girls and boys I kicked once. Do they remember. Weeds in a ditch. I couldn’t lift him. My own boy.

  Nora all loose-limbed like Lawanda. Those times she was under me. Nora with a face like anybody’s. She didn’t bite. The wind, the kid, the dog. Lawanda hasn’t had it yet. Cool as a refrigerator. Humming. I can’t turn the world around. Couldn’t even get him out of the ditch.

  Teeth in the water.

  I got maps of it. A real place where it happened. You could go back, find the ditch, the tree. Not him. But who was he, anyway ?

  Some Creation. Look at what we’ve got: the forked kind and the pronged kind: push them together and you got more forked and pronged. And you can love them. You can love a dog. A rock.

  Down through the weeds, that’s where they are—the spit of their breath caught like eggs on the grass. What eats its mate. When the procreation’s done.

  Are you pro-creation f Guess it don’t much matter, once you come down the chute, once your mama grunts you into this world.

  I like Lawanda’s front, don’t like her back. I like what she reaches for only I don’t want her to get it. Wide shivery mouth, little tits pointed with cold. Shift an old man’s gears.

  Then pull out and scratch off and fly down the road into dust. Go wherever the rest of them forked things go. Go after Nora. After Chloe and Nancy Catherine. Go on. There’s ditches for everybody.

  It’s a fine line, buddy. It’s hotter than whiskey, colder than a froze-up bus. Fine, but we crossed it so far back, we don’t remember. Crossed with our helmets on. Way the hell in Germany, way the hell in the wheat field. You ain’t seen nothing yet—that ought to be their motto. You ain’t done nothing till you pumped in the bullets, bashed in the face till you didn’t care, you could drink blood.

  Nora bleeding after Eddie was born, bleeding in the floor and me screaming and the light swaying like a goddamn eyeball. No, no, no … That’s what they do— they bleed. Lawanda does it, right there between her legs. There’s a place—I ain’t been there in a long time. A ditch. A sharper blood than what you blast out of a man, staining her skirt like wings.

  And all the time it keeps happening. When the stars threw down their spears. That’s where. Right there. I can put the pin in the map. Pushpin. I can push it into my thumb. But his face won’t come back, won’t go away. Wound of the world, don’t get in my bed. I did it! I did it! You’ll have to come get me. Weeds die down. You got to take me alive.

  LAWANDA: The only place I could think of to go was to Mamaw—I guess because she sees stuff other people don’t. Lucky for me, the next day was Sunday and Mom and I were going over to Little Splinter Creek to make stack cakes.

  If you’re not from the mountains, you’ve probably not tasted stack cake—thin layers like white gingerbread, with spiced apples in between. The apples have to be dried, then soaked and cooked and sweetened. Fresh apples don’t give it the same taste. It’s musty, wintery, like you cooked it in a closet. Geological, too, with the layers. That’s the kind of thing Garland would say.

  Lucky for me, too, making stack cakes takes a long time— all afternoon, with little pauses while you’re actually baking. I planned during these hot times to get Mamaw to myself.

  When we got going, though, I realized I hadn’t thought this through. Mamaw gives the cakes away for Christmas. That meant we had to make a lot of them. (She stores them in lard cans on the back porch so they don’t get moldy while they age.) Because of all the layers, we had to keep washing the pans. Between mixing, greasing and flouring, baking, filling, stacking, and washing, we never left the kitchen. By 4:30, I was getting panicked. There were eight stack cakes cooling on the table and the layers for number nine were in the oven. We were all dusted with flour like we’d come in from snow. Now or never, I said to myself.

  “Mamaw,” I said into the room, “could I talk to you a minute? It’s about Christmas.” I hated to straight-out lie, especially on Sunday, but I was desperate.

  “I reckon, honey, if Junie can watch them cakes.”

  “I hate to,” Mom said. “We haven’t burnt a batch yet, and I hate to be the one to do it.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was kidding or jealous.

  “You’ll bring them out alive,” I said, and patted her on the shoulder. She was wearing a painted-on sweatshirt I’d given her for her birthday, KENTUCKY IS MY LAND, it says on the front. I thought she’d like it and she’s worn it a lot. But its softness just makes her seem bonier.

  Mamaw and I went into the back bedroom. She had washed her gauzy curtains and one was spread over the ironing board like a veil.

  “I made that up, Mamaw, but I’ve got to talk to you,” I said as soon as she shut the door.

  She sat on the bed and shifted a stack of curtains. “Set and breathe, Lawanda.”

  I did. Breathing was hard. The air seemed to catch on the knobs at the bottom of my ribs.

  “Do you know why Garland’s in jail?” I asked her.

  “I know why they say they’re a-keeping him.”

  “Because of the notebook?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I believe they’s a notebook and it’s got your name in it and it talks about some things people don’t like to read, but I can’t say if it’s what Galt says it is. I don’t take the same view of the Devil as him.”

  “You don’t talk much about the Devil.” I’d never thought about that before.

  “I’m trying to see what’s in the light,” she said.

  I wanted to hug her but you don’t hug Mamaw. She’s like a tree.

  “I’m scared of what they will do to him.”

  “You’ve got cause.”

  “What can I do, Mamaw?”

  “Pray.”

  I knew she had to say that, but it wasn’t what I came for. “But you don’t just pray. You go out and do something. You heal people.”

  “When they call me.”

  “Well, I think I’m called.”

  The winter sun was like a big persimmon. Through the window I could see it slipping behind the mountain.

  “Hold up a minute now.” She put her hand on my knee. It was as solid and full as Mom’s is bony. “Called to do what?”

  “When you told me about Amos”—I called him that to remind her that she knew him—“you said you didn’t know where his family was. Is there any way to find out?”

  “What for?”

  “They’re what he needs, Mamaw. Not me.”

  “But do they need him?”

  “They’d have to decide that themselves.”

  “Lawanda, it don’t do to play God.”

  “What about laying your hands on people and making them well?”

  “I can’t help that. She give me that.”

  “Well, maybe She gave me this too. I saw something before I ever met Garland.”

  “Saw it in church?”

  “No. ” Mamaw forgets that we don’t go to the Pentecostal. You’re not supposed to see stuff at the Methodist church.

  “It was the first morning I set out to sell magazines. I was tired, almost finished, and stopped to rest. When I put my head down and closed my eyes, I saw Garland. He took my sales fo
lder and turned it into an accordion. And he played wonderful music, like trees and stars and creeks. So I went to see him, though Daddy had told me not to. And that’s how this started, Mamaw. The little dream sent me. I’m not saying what it was.”

  Mamaw took a deep breath. She lifted her apron by the corners, separating it from her dress skirt. Little puffs of flour came out.

  “This is steep ground, Lawanda. I’ve got to pray on it. Just hold your horses till we can talk again.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Wednesday, I have to go to Cardin to the bank. Let me meet you at the schoolhouse.”

  “What about the bus?”

  “Tell Junie we’re going shopping and I’ll bring you home.”

  “Mamaw—” Another layer of lying made my stomach hurt. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She studied me. The room was fading out.

  “I’m sure I don’t want you doing any more alone.”

  She got up then and we went back to the kitchen. It was all warm steamy light. “I did it!” Mom said, showing us five layers, all brown and brickle. “Reach me the sugar, Lawanda. This is going to be the sweetest one yet.”

  MAMAW: I got to think, Mother Jesus. I got to study. I got to listen to the wind. Maybe when our walls close in, it’s just Your big old heart a-beating. Listen. John’s snoring in his La-Z-Boy; the stove clock’s ticking. Except for them, it’ll stay quiet as Jell-O till the 2:00 A.M. train rolls through. Nothing but floors creaking if I walk, water rushing if I fill up the tub.

  There don’t seem a right move to make and I can’t stay still. I promised Lawanda. I promised Lawanda to save Lawanda and I can’t. I have got too far up, Sweet Mother. I’m in the air with feathers and no wings.

  O come, Angel Band

  Come and around me stand

  O bear me away on your snow-white wings

  To my immortal home.

  Only I can’t come home now, You know that. But if I could see You, if I could be lifted up … We all need resurrecting, and not just when we die.

  Like that long-ago time at the church. Air thick, room swaying. Body not heavy no more. Oh Jesus! Oh Mother, gather me in Your arms!