Given

by Susan Musgrave

tree bline mice.

  Dem suckers be runnin!

  Dem suckers be runnin!

  Dey all run atta dis white man wife,

  She done whacked dare tail wid a fuckin knift.

  Whassup, you ever see anything dat bad in yo life,

  As tree bline mice?

  Rainy and Frenchy had spent years of their lives arguing about God, and being executed had only further entrenched them in their positions.

  God exist, why he walk on by? Frenchy said. She figured God must be playing a big joke on people like Rainy who went around praying he would answer their prayers. You think prayin’s gon save you? God gon gatt yo ass one day, same’s the rest of us.

  Rainy, who sat on the floor, bent double, biting her toenails, wasn’t fazed. God just be doin his job, she said, policin the hood.

  Frenchy got up from where she’d been sitting and curled up next to Rainy on the floor.

  What colour you figure God be? she persevered, as Rainy spat out another toenail. I told her to pick it up, but she ignored me.

  I figure God be white and fat, weigh more than a secondhand Cadillac, Frenchy continued.

  Rainy looked up, and narrowed her eyes. You barkin up the wrong dog, she said, colouring what was left of her toenails Mauvelous with a Crayola from the box Frenchy had lifted. Me, I figure everythin in this world be ’xactly the colour it stupposed to be. She emptied the Crayolas into her lap, picked Burnt Sienna and began drawing a portrait of herself, and her twins, emerging from a pale brown mist, on the wall.

  You got a broken brain, Frenchy said. It always been broke. Your daddy give you a money shot right in the soft spot before you pop out. You certified retarded, he get that extra money welfare gives people with dumbass kids.

  Rainy stuck out her bottom lip. You not the smartest crayon in the box, yo own self, she said, selecting Lima-Been-Green for her twin’s hair. ’Sides that, Holy Spit-it be the only father I got to look up at. Ain’t nobody smoke his ass on Nintendo.

  I listened to them argue and thought of our care and treatment counsellor who used to say, to Rainy and Frenchy, “You two, you bicker-nicker-natter. Like two peas and pods.”

  Frenchy kept on at her. God tough, like a $2 fry-steak maybe? What you think? God made of steel? Like yo mama’s dildo?

  Rainy shook her head. It sounded as if a bag of nails and bolts and other shrapnel the HE picked from his body had been dropped into a metal bucket and kicked across a pit of pointed rocks.

  Ain’t got no mama. My mama dead like a doorknob, Rainy said. She sucked in her lower lip, scribbling over the drawing she’d just made with a fistful of jarring colours, obliterating herself and her twins. Frenchy said it was time her twins got names, like George Bush or Osama bin Laden.

  Them tags been already used, Rainy fired back. Rainy had refused to name her twins, from the moment she gave birth to them and saw how they were joined. When you named someone it made them harder to kill, and she hadn’t wanted to get attached.

  That Rainy and Frenchy had decided to come along for the wild ride I was on, hadn’t struck me as strange. I wasn’t surprised when my mother tried to make contact with me, either.

  Once a month I had been allowed to make a phone call from the Facility. Most times when I called home my mother seemed to remember who I was, but occasionally she would apologize and ask me to tell her again where I had been for so many years, and why I had never come to see her, why, especially, hadn’t I come when my father had been ill and asking for me. I reminded her, as gently as I could, that they didn’t issue day passes from Death Row, not even to attend funerals. Their rationale? “You knew your father was old and would probably die one day. You should have thought about that before you committed your crime.”

  “I don’t know from one day to the next whether I’ll even have a place to live,” my mother had said, the last time I’d called. “Vernal’s got the house up for sale. I suppose he didn’t mention it?”

  “He told me he doesn’t expect it to sell,” I’d said, quickly. “Not anytime soon. I know he’s happy to have you living in the house, Mother.”

  “Vernal wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a burden on anyone,” my mother sighed. “He doesn’t even call. Unless he wants something — last time it was the car. I told him the tires needed rotating and if he took it and something happened to him, your father and I would never be able to forgive ourselves. You know how your father feels about lending his car; he’d rather lend his toothbrush. At least if something happens to a toothbrush, it’s replaceable.”

  My father had been dead for six years. I didn’t think he’d mind lending his car or his toothbrush under the circumstances.

  I never got to say goodbye to my mother. She died two weeks before I was permitted a call to let her know I was being transferred and that if my new trial went according to my lawyer’s plan, I would be coming home to take care of her.

  Now with Vernal out of the house, the phone calls began: the first came when I was getting ready for bed, and by the time I got downstairs to answer it, the caller had hung up. The second call came a little earlier, around nine o’clock on Tuesday evening. But while I heard nothing but laboured breathing over the line, I could hear a familiar impatient grinding at the edges of my own words.

  “Mother, it’s me. I know you’re there. Please talk to me.”

  She didn’t speak, and I began picking at the dry skin around my fingernails, then biting, tearing the skin off in shreds, with my teeth. I’d picked up Frenchy’s flesh-eating habit — the way she kept trying to consume herself, bit by bit, before the world swallowed her whole — when we were in prison. Frenchy used to say she wished she could have been something normal, like an alcoholic or a heroin addict, because then she would have had Twelve Step programs like AA.

  “Mother?” I repeated, emptily. Two of my fingers were bleeding and I was working on the third. I had half-hoped, in that way in which we never stop being our mother’s child, that she might ask how I was getting along, but that was selfish of me, I knew.

  Be patient, I told myself. Be kind. I remembered the last words I’d heard my father say: “Hasn’t she hurt us enough?” How much is enough? How much more could I do?

  Rainy and Frenchy were still at it when I went back upstairs, the sound of their bones rustling like insect wings through the darkening room. Frenchy wanted to know who I’d been talking to, and why I was bleeding like a nailed-to-the-cross Jesus.

  I climbed into bed and drew the covers over me. The HE, who had been trained to feel at home in a coffin, had made up a bed for himself in one of the Chrysalises; the Twin Terrorists had taken possession of the other that they’d moved as far away from the HE and his white rat as possible. Rainy wouldn’t go near them — she believed they were “attempting fate”. Coffins be for dirt napping, best believe. Gooey brown tears began oozing from the corners of her eyes, and around the needles in her neck, whenever she saw her twins lying in repose. The HE had found my blow dryer; he turned it on, shooting hot air into Rainy’s face until she started to melt. Then he turned it off and tossed it onto the floor, where it lay clicking as it cooled.

  I closed my eyes. Rainy, her face a bloated mass of wet darkness crawled in beside me. She whimpered like a small animal and I wanted to put my arms around her but was afraid I’d get jabbed by the needles. Frenchy got under the covers on my other side. She said Rainy and I had all the blankets, and Rainy said she didn’t get any pillow; Frenchy said Rainy didn’t need a pillow because her neck was full of spikes so she couldn’t lay her head down anyway.

  You dissin me? I be doin aight, Rainy said. You try holdin yo neck up, walk round like a pincushion.

  I lay in the middle, growing more awake by the minute. I realized I’d have to go and sleep downstairs on the couch, that perhaps this was what they were hoping for, that I would vacate the bed so they could lie in it, side by side, and bicker-nicker-nacker all night. Two peas and pods. I made a motion to get up, but Frenchy reached over to hug me wi
th her helplessly out-of-control arms.

  Don’t go, she said. Chill here wid us. I wasn’t used to hearing such tenderness coming from Frenchy’s sloppy mouth.

  I lay awake between them until they fell asleep, listening to the cry of the peacocks, and beyond, in the forest, the cedars speaking in tongues, the giant spruce trees creaking like old planks. Overhead the buzz of a jet drilled in the reminder there was nowhere, finally, you could go to be alone. Not even up there close to heaven, where flight attendants were moving through the cabin distributing complimentary headsets for the movie about to begin. And suddenly I felt a tremor, a series of tremors, in my heart, as if it wanted to share with me the secret of how it went on beating while being locked inside a place of inescapable darkness, alone.

  On Tuesday morning I drove to Mystic to do laundry and pick up more cereal and a bag of sugar at Natural Lee’s. I was leaving the market when I saw Grace Moon and Al coming out of the liquor store.

  Al carried a six-pack under each arm. When I stopped to say hello to Grace and ask how she was doing, Al answered for her. “She’s doing good, got me on a new health kick,” he said, nudging her in the belly with the six-pack’s sharp edge. Grace blushed and wrapped her arms around her body, as if by doing so she could hold herself, and her baby, together.

  I started to ask Grace about her brother, but at the mention of Hooker’s name Al’s eyes flared as if I had struck a fistful of matches behind them. I said I had to run, I was on my way to the airport, which was true, and that I’d catch up with them later, which was a lie. If I never laid eyes on Al again it would be too soon.

  I got to the airport early — Vernal’s flight wasn’t due in until 10:15. I waited in the arrivals area that smelled of freshly baked bread. Two island entrepreneurs had opened a coffee and baked goods stand called All Your Kneads in a quiet corner of the anything-but-busy terminal. When the plane still hadn’t arrived by eleven forty-five, I ate a bowl of Happy As a Clam Chowder and two pieces of bread still baking-hot from the oven, then ordered an organic shade-grown-bean latte. I took a sip and thought, for a moment, something was wrong with it. It didn’t taste like tea.

  Vernal was uncharacteristically quiet when he got off his flight at twelve-thirty. The rain-slick road gleamed a royal grey-blue and, as we drove, Vernal, for once, didn’t point things out to me — the small white dog in a red raincoat poking along the ditch, a matted teddy bear impaled on a stick — before I’d had a chance to notice them myself. I asked him if anything was wrong, if something was bothering him. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s everything. It’s killing me.”

  I knew what this meant. If Vernal wanted a drink, he would find any reason to have one. In the past I had always known, without even being anywhere in his vicinity, when he was about to fall off the wagon. Vernal said I was the only person he knew who could smell the thought of vodka over the telephone.

  Back at the farm Vernal fixed himself a small lunch of aspirin and ice cream. The Walled Off had finally sold, he said, to a wealthy Asian couple who had arrived to close the deal in a black limousine that took up most of the driveway. If he’d seemed upset when he got off the plane, he said, it was because he’d forgotten my mother’s ashes.

  My mother had requested that she be scattered in the garden where she could go on being useful, fertilizing the flowers for others to enjoy. Since the house had been sold, Vernal didn’t think the garden a suitable depository and had set the urn on the kitchen counter, in a container, but at the last minute they had slipped his mind and he’d left in a taxi without them. He had called his house-sitter and asked him to put the urn in the freezer until he could get back to the mainland to empty out the house.

  “I don’t think Mother needs freezing,” I said, feeling protective, suddenly. “Ashes don’t come with a Best Before date.”

  “I’m sorry,” Vernal said. “I’m doing the best I can. I’m sorry.”

  I heard the soft rattle of the dustpan and the thump of the wooden broom handle against the wall above my head. When Vernal lay down to take a nap on the couch, I went upstairs and found Rainy sweeping my room, which was unusual because she most often swept in the middle of the night. She and Frenchy had stayed up all day, awake and waiting, expectantly, for news from the outside world. They wanted to know everything I had seen and heard in town.

  I told them I’d stopped to buy groceries and that I’d run into Grace and Al outside the liquor store. It was Rainy’s indignant opinion that Al had no right leading Grace, in her condition, into temptation.

  Rainy claimed she always knew the difference between bad and wrong. At least she had a pretty clear idea about what was wrong. Wrong was what had happened to her when she was a kid.

  Rainy’s father had been a man who believed in beating the gentle Christ into his unruly children. Her brothers got the full force of his anger but when he beat Rainy he kept a Bible under his arm so as not to administer the lashes too heavily. Ain’t no makeup thick enough to cover yo father’s fist kisses, either, Rainy was fond of saying.

  Because she wet the bed every night, Rainy had been forced to eat soap and recite the alphabet endlessly — the reason, Frenchy figured, she never learned to read or write. Her father, convinced that she was too lazy to get up and walk as far as the outhouse, sewed up her chocha. Rainy peed through the stitches in her sleep, and that made him so mad he beat her with the toaster cord and made her stand in his bedroom doorway, until dawn, in a half-packed suitcase. Some nights she said it felt as if her heart had got away on her, quit her body for good.

  Frenchy figured the reason Rainy kept doing it in her sleep was because peeing wouldn’t have hurt so much when she was unconscious. (I felt guilty over how I had treated Aged Orange when I remembered this. To think I had accused him of incontinence!)

  Every night at the Facility, Rainy wet the bed. Every morning she changed her sheets, and every night before going to sleep she kneeled at the foot of her cot and prayed for God to help her make it through at least one night dry. Help me to grow up, she prayed. Help this foolishass pissin baby.

  Muh Nigga, Dat Be in Heaven,

  Chillin Be Thy Name, Yo.

  You be sayin’ it; I be doin’ it

  In dis hood and in Yo’s . . .

  Cut me some slack

  So’s I be doin’ it to dem dat diss me

  And keep dem muhfo’s away

  Cuz you always be da Man.

  Vernal stood by the stove, tiny white feathers floating all around him. “He can’t say he wasn’t warned,” he said, when he looked up and saw me staring at the albino peacock he’d just finished plucking. I watched as he dropped the bird into the stockpot on the stove, then gathered the elegant tail feathers into a bouquet and arranged them in a vase. My mother believed having peacock feathers in the house was bad luck, that they brought troublesome spirits inside, but Vernal had never been superstitious.

  He leaned over the pot to sniff the broth, and added more salt. Behind the vase I saw the shot glass and the bottle of whiskey. He must have seen the worry on my face.

  His lips had that soaked overnight look. I asked him if he didn’t think about the future, about what was going to happen to him if he continued to drink.

  Vernal said he didn’t expect to live forever. “That’s as far ahead as I’m looking.” Whiskey didn’t make you drunk, he said, just brought you to a higher level of lucidity.

  He said he was sorry. He had been concerned about me, which was part of it — having to leave me alone at the farm. He was afraid something might happen to me. He picked up the shot glass and held it in his hands as if it contained the rest of his life, then emptied it in the sink.

  I looked away as the room filled with things left stubbornly unsaid. I couldn’t bring myself to say he was mistaken, that Vernal was ringed by doubts far bigger than my plight. The landscape of living together never changed. It rolled on and on until it became indistinguishable from the horizon.

  I heard a car pull up in fron
t of the mounting block. Vernal said he was going to attend an evening AA meeting at the Brew, and had asked a friend to stop by to give him a ride. He pushed the pot to the back of the stove where it would simmer until the fire went out.

  I followed him to the front door, where I stood watching him try to manoeuvre his shoes onto his feet.

  “Don’t wait up,” he said, adding, “I’ll see you in the mañana,” as he had always done, in the old days. He reached down to kiss my cheek, but stopped at a comfortable distance without having to risk making contact before his lips touched my face.

  I sat for a long time at the kitchen table, staring somewhere beyond the white peacock simmering on the edge of the stove.

  The next morning Vernal was not where I expected him to be, passed out on the green leather couch. I ate a bowlful of cereal, then left the house. The Christian vegetable man had posted his thought du jour: “Jesus Didn’t Know My Alcoholic Father”.

  I parked in front of the church, and stepped inside in time to catch Vernal ordering a last double single malt from a man who looked like a cross between Friar Tuck and Popeye.

  Vernal looked tiredly guilty. “I’m sorry,” he said, “this isn’t going to become a habit. I’ve been having a nice little relapse, that’s all.”

  Vernal told me he hadn’t made it home because he had arrived at the Brew halfway through Holy Hour, when the drinks were two for one, and then his ride had left halfway through the AA meeting that followed. Vernal introduced me to “his saviour,” Father Tunney, who had given him a bed for the night. When Father Tunney blushed, even his neck turned red.

  “What’s your poison, Missus?” he said. He made “poison” sound like “pie-zin,” and when I didn’t answer right away he went back to staring mournfully out the window where the rain fell like a curtain between the church and the town.

  The wall behind the counter was plastered with placards about the haplessness of the drinking life: “Religions change; beer and wine remain”; “A Hangover is the Wrath of Grapes.”