Susannah believed that her knowledge—her hunches, as they came to be called—came instead from the time she had spent in Bayliss’s cow-calf herd, from whatever it was that had kept her there two whole days. There was debate, that would still come up, as to what it could have been. It had been the Herefords, she knew. In her dreams, they swung their enormous heads back, like heavy bells, against the flies on their shoulders. Jo was the artist but Susannah took pride in being the one who dreamed every night and recalled it all in the morning.
Asleep, in the middle of falls from heights or insoluble multiple-choice tests or driving with no steering wheel, she had come to expect the appearance of cows, a circle of white-faced cows. She would lean forward, right out of whatever disaster it was, and look between the blunt red knees. She would be able, staring with unspeakable pleasure, to see calves through the legs, as they watched with outstretched necks but kept their distance, and the dark pink heads of Big English Red clover plunging under the weight of bees. Some of the clover would have already gone a brownish violet in the heat that the dream somehow conducted.
The heads swung back. There was a foaming in the air, of flies starting up all at once. But someone was coming. She was so hot she would throw off the blanket and wake up. No matter that she had been dreaming of the ordinary landscape where she still lived—though she lived in town now—she would experience the stunned, triumphant feeling of having gone through the earth to China.
Sometimes she woke up with sound in her ears, the hum a cow draws up from the bags of her neck to address her calf, and the infantile m-m-m the calf makes in reply. Her husband Larry knew about this. “Cattle say much?” he sometimes said at breakfast.
THEIR mother never made peace with normal life. She lost her place in it and then she forgot it. She forgot about shoe sizes and the Methodist Church and friends for her daughters, and her own friends, if she had had any before, and eventually about combing her hair or the girls’ unless she was reminded, or giving baths, or going into town, or going forth at all from her place at the window where the slipcover was tanned by the sun and her cushion was squashed thin. Once in a while she reconstructed accomplishments she had had, or thought she had had, but she burned red stripes onto her hands with the skillet, or ran the sewing machine needle into her finger, and these things made her cry quietly, almost tearlessly, not at all as Susannah cried at first when she saw what her mother had done to herself.
Sometimes, too, she groaned, about nothing they could see, in a protest that did not really disturb them until they got older. Before that it was just a noise coming from the living room, one of the sounds of the daytime, like a kitchen chair being pushed back or the tractor belching, way out on the back of the farm.
In time—in high school, when they began to put thought into her—they thought she was hardly any different from the crazy woman with the dogs, except that she would not have shot at people or gone out to rescue them.
What could be said about her? That sometimes she spoke and made perfect sense, but speech could not be touched off in her by anything that was said to her. That every night, while she was still eating with them, she stood up from the dinner table and went to bed as soon as it was suggested to her, although if they woke in the night they would hear her moving around downstairs. Or they would hear, through the floor, her voice suddenly speaking, sharp and afraid. And then the creak of the stairs and their father’s voice, and water running in the kitchen as he filled the hot water bottle for her, and the stairs again as he came back up with her, in the days when she still slept upstairs.
There were no pictures of her to study later, of things she might have done in the time when she did things; certainly there were none of her on the couch with her hot water bottle, slumped in the sun flooding off the windowpane, with the radio on. Even after they got a TV she liked the radio. She didn’t really listen. If they asked her a question about a program, she would give them a slow, appalled look, and sometimes she would close her eyes.
That was all later. At first she just needed help.
She needed help when the hospital finished with the baby Mary Jo and let her come home, after many weeks. Their father hired a woman to live with them, a girl, really. Stevia, the daughter of the tenants who had worked the farm down the road for twenty years and had so many children nobody knew where they had all got to. As the oldest of the six that remained at home, Stevia knew how to take care of children. She took over Susannah and the baby and most of the housework.
Stevia was a laugher, a chaser, freckled all over in a sandy pink, the possessor of movie magazines and Little Lulu comic books and a red vanity case full of cosmetics, with a mirror in the lid. She was devoted to home permanents for Susannah and three-heart barrettes for the baby’s fine hair, and a succession of styles for herself derived from pin-curl diagrams in her magazines, which she called books: “Hand me my book!” “Where’s that book with Janet Leigh on it?” Susannah and Jo paged through those magazines kissing the ink lips of movie stars, ran up the back stairs and down the front and through the living room past their mother with Stevia in pursuit. They sat in kitchen chairs on newspapers having their Toni’s, with shudders as the lotion crept down their necks and Stevia hissed “Stay still! Stay still!” and the smell bloomed up around their faces with its tender promise of change.
These things took years. Almost six years. For Susannah those years had an aura of put-off effort that was like being on a school bus that is still a long way from your stop.
Stevia did not read to them, though she took them to the library when their father said to, and brought back books picked out by the librarian, who was Mrs. Bayliss of the Bayliss Polled Hereford place, where Susannah had been found.
Mrs. Charlotte Bayliss had been among the legendary group seen from a mile away rising over the hill in the late afternoon bearing Susannah aloft, calling something that could not be heard. She was one of the women who took an interest in their family. She treated Stevia in a funny way, as if she were the same age as Susannah and Jo. Sometimes she walked them all down the library steps and out to the car, and peered in to see the groceries. “Tell your momma hello, now,” she always said. Stevia always gave Susannah a secret cross-eyed look as Mrs. Bayliss went back up the stairs.
From Stevia’s trouble with what was printed under the pictures in her magazines Susannah knew, eventually, that she would not pass easily on to a library book. But Stevia knew how to draw people and showed Susannah, and Jo in time, how to do hair and noses, and lips, a top and a bottom, and she drew hundreds of girls, pressing so hard her dimpled fingers bent backward at the knuckle, always erasing until everything was perfect, and sweeping the eraser dust off onto the floor, where they rolled it under their bare toes.
Stevia was fat but she had a lot of slow-burning energy for coming up out of a chair and grabbing them, toppling them onto her wide, freckled knees and tickling them.
Sometimes after dinner a car horn honked for her and she went out the door and was not there to put them to bed. On those nights they left their father sleeping under the lampshade with his Farm Journal and tiptoed down the back hall to her room, and pulled open her dresser drawers, stopping each other when they creaked.
They lifted out the nylon underpants inflated with Stevia’s shape, and untangled the huge yellowed bras from the Avon jars and the pink canister of talcum powder, with the holes in its lid never quite closed, so that everything in the drawer was roughened with powder, and held them up against each other in voluptuous disbelief.
“Shh! Someone’s coming!” They froze at the sight of their mother in the doorway. Before she drew back into the hall she said something distinctly, she said, “Your mother wouldn’t like that.”
JO said, “Stevia made us give her all our meat. She took it home on Sunday.” Susannah did not remember that. She could not really see how it could have been so, because of getting meat off their plates and into the refrigerator and keeping it there until Sunday, Stevi
a’s day off. And their father had been there somewhere watching over things. He was certainly in the house in winter, when there was less to do outside.
Susannah tried to hear his voice from that time, laying out rules or giving directions to Stevia, but she could summon him only in his commanding passage among the cows and in the smell he still had: the little wake that followed him of grease and gasoline in the knees and seat of his pants where he wiped his hands, mixed with soap from washing udders and the smell of the truck bed: rags, bitter little weeds sprouting in the rust, brown rained-on feedbags going to mulch. He had all these smells. He was not part of the house, and why would he be? “He never had any control over Stevia or anybody else,” Jo said, spying out Susannah’s mental defense of him. “Stevia tickled us until we threw up.”
Then Stevia was going to have her own baby, even though she was not married, and would not agree to stay on, even until the baby’s birth, and went away.
Stevia was going to stay with her sister in Georgia. She was going to have a boy. No girls for her. He would be named Steve, after herself and the dead brother for whom she had been named. She showed them a brown line going up and down from her navel, like the beam of a star. Even though Susannah knew better, knew from Stevia herself how her mother had labored ten hours to get out something even as undersized as Jo, the line made Susannah imagine a painless splitting there. Out would press the baby, Steve. A strong, grinning baby with the yellow eyes of the elf boy on the cover of the fairy tales Mrs. Bayliss had sent home with them. The same little horn nubs on either side of his head. Devil or calf, creature to be chased on his delicate little hooves, and seized by Stevia, and nursed until his mouth frothed. Or just a baby. The thought of this baby, born and named and carried around in Stevia’s fat arms, would not be banished from the house, no matter how they raced and fought and teased in the hope of raising Stevia’s intent pink face from her stack of maternity patterns. Their father had given her the old sewing machine, and she sat making giant gathered tops for herself out of flowered material, flouncing them up against her chest with pins in her mouth and going to look at herself, severely and respectfully, in the mirror.
The vanity case had come back out from under the bed and she had taken her egg shampoo and her jar of bobby pins off the bathroom windowsill, and packed her magazines and the framed picture she said was her boyfriend, that Susannah thought was cut out of one of the magazines.
All the last week, Susannah rummaged through drawers looking for a school picture of herself to give Stevia. At the end, with no picture to leave behind her, Stevia waved her soft plump hand at them when she left them off at Sunday school, as if it were any Sunday and she would be back in the morning.
Jo had just turned six and Susannah was nine.
Different women came in to help. Jo went to the doctor with a scabby rash on her face and neck and chest. No one knew if the rash was contagious, and eventually the doctor said it was because she was scratching at herself. But for a while, to Jo’s shouts of fury and misery at bedtime, Susannah was allowed to sleep in Stevia’s room. There she found the pile of their drawings, years of them, on a musty shelf in the closet. “Jo!” she yelled. She remembered this, yelling for Jo, who had not mentioned Stevia’s name once since she left, or looked into her dresser drawers to see if anything remained, or even gone into her room.
During this summer Jo liked to sit in the kitchen doing nothing. She sat at the table scraping out the spaces between the little glass tiles on the salt and pepper shakers with her fingernail. The women who came in for part of the day to look after them stayed in the kitchen away from their mother and ironed, but Jo did not enter into conversation with them. The house was quiet, except for a groan now and then from the living room. At least Jo would snap at Susannah, if Susannah bothered her. At six Jo had a deep, angry voice she could summon up out of her chest when she wanted to. But when Susannah put the drawings on the table Jo bent over them with her.
Girls. Not a boy among them. There was a kind of sigh from both of them. Jo broke her silence and said in a whisper, “Stevia liked my drawings better than yours.” This did not surprise Susannah because Jo was going to be an artist. She was already better than Stevia, even making fun of the black-haired girls Stevia drew, with eyelashes like ant legs and high heels on tiny, sideways feet. “Stevia! Skirts don’t look like that, like triangles.”
“See, those dumb clothes she made us do! And these are babyish!” Jo was suddenly furious, and began to tear up her own drawings, one by one. She flung the pieces all over the kitchen, and the woman who was ironing that day left them there so their father could see how Jo had carried on. Susannah felt a certain bitter elation while Jo was doing the tearing. But she kept her own drawings. There were smudges of Stevia’s Trushay hand lotion on them. There were certain sacred noses and mouths in the margins, drawn with such careful pressure that the pencil lead still shone, and places where the paper was almost erased through, and passing back in time to the days when Stevia was newly in the house, before Jo could pick up a pencil, larger and larger faces for Susannah to copy, larger and simpler renderings of her name in Stevia’s broad print. “Suzzana.” In the first grade, she had taught Stevia how to spell her name.
Of her mother in the same period her memories were vivid but sparse, and not really shareable except with Jo.
There would be no one else to whom she could mention one dress of their mother’s. It had a lint-filled pocket where Susannah put her hand as they sat on the couch together while her mother was giving the baby her bottle, and felt with her fingers through to her mother’s thin leg, almost the same size and inertness as the banister.
Sooner or later they would be alone together, because the baby would start to cry and this would cause her mother to breathe faster and then shrink and squirm as if somebody had put a groundhog in her lap and not a baby in need of a burp. Stevia would swoop down on the dark-faced outraged baby. After a while Susannah could do it too.
Susannah did not look up at her mother’s face, with the dark oily hair falling over it, the rubbed eyes and the chapped lips. Not right at it. They just sat there. She was astonished to think how many times the dress with the pocket must have been worn. In fact she thought now that her mother might have worn nothing else.
“I’m sure she wore it until it stank!” said Jo.
Had their mother always been like that? Why hadn’t they asked their father? Or had he married someone who seemed no different from the women other men married? Where were the grandparents, the aunts and uncles, who should have appeared from North Carolina, so nearby, and cleared everything up? There was only their mother, fetched from her previous life as if she had called him to come and get her. Susannah saw her father leading her mother down out of the humped Smoky Mountains. But something was not left behind.
Sometimes they had misgivings in school, away from the habit and familiarity—as expressionless, as consoling, when they burst through the screen door in the afternoon, as God—of the house. There was their mother, as she ever was. There was the kind of greeting that was hers, a look. Was there a shiver, at the sight of them? There was the hot water bottle, as ever, and why not, exactly, why not? And yet . . . They felt questions in themselves, but the questions, when the time came that they had pushed up far enough to be asked, seemed not to be there after all, like those mushrooms in the woods that turn to brown smoke when you step on them.
Eventually the questions were simpler, specific ones, such as where had their mother gone, the times she went away? Their father said it was not a hospital but a kind of boarding house in Maryland. You went there and people saw to whatever you needed. For a while boarding house gave Susannah a queasy picture of boards being used in some way that people—certain people—needed. It was not anything that hurt them; it was an involved, agonized shuffling back and forth and carrying and piling up. Boarding. How had their father decided when she ought to go, had to?
Why did he twice hire someone to
do the milking, and go and get her back? It was not a subject you could pursue with a man like their father, then or later. “Don’t you worry about it,” he would say.
For years, Susannah and Larry took their children to the farm every weekend. There were always things for Susannah to do. When Jo came home from Chicago the first few times, she would pull Susannah away from the babies at milking time and drag her to the barn. There, while their father was hitching up the milking machines, she would storm about their mother and the way they were living, their father and Susannah and Larry, with their mother in the middle of them all like a bag of feed. With her groans! For other people, there were medicines! Hospitals!
“Well, my advice, Miss Mary Jo,” their father would say from behind a cow, after letting her go on for a while, “would be, you just worry about the war.” Or, “You concentrate on the show you folks are putting on out there in Chicago.” He meant the Democratic convention. “Now, hospitals, and the rest of that. That isn’t what you really want,” he said, relenting and coming out to put his arm around Jo. “For your momma. Is it now.” It was not a question. “Don’t you worry about it.”
Years before, somebody had worried about it. Who was it asking them questions and writing down their answers in a stuffy office in town? Who decided it was a shame they had no outings, a shame they could not swim, and bought them bathing suits and put their mother in the car with them and drove them all, with Stevia not even there, the time they went to the swimming pool?
Susannah must have been eight, the first and last time she was in the town pool. And Stevia was there when they got back after the accident, to say, “Betcha the kid that did it gets a licking,” and to touch behind Susannah’s ears with perfume when she had her put to bed in her figure-eight bandage.
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