by Leah Weiss
“You don’t know any such thing, Prudence! The Lord doesn’t relish a lost soul gone astray. Please don’t spread falsehoods whose truths you know nothing about. You should pray for this poor girl’s safe return.”
Prudence looks at me with such raw hatred that it sucks my breath away. Then she walks to her room, softly closes the door, and locks it. I’m sobered from my convention high, and in that moment, all ties with potential love and happiness I felt in the valley evaporate, and I’m left standing in my sister’s poisonous air. I always forget how acrimonious Prudence is until I’m gone and return. I pray for her most fervently.
• • •
It’s Sunday afternoon, two days since I’m back where I belong, even more ill-placed than before. I endured Henry’s inappropriate jokes about love during the days we were together. I stumbled through this morning’s lackluster church service. I now know this: love is no laughing matter.
Today Prudence sits by a window and mends socks. I catch sight of her out of my peripheral view and see her stop and watch me stare out the window.
“You sick?” Her voice holds no sympathy.
I don’t know why I don’t answer her. It miffs my sister to no end when I don’t answer.
“Brother, you hear me? Got cotton in your ears?”
I square my shoulders. This is a new low for me, a rebellion suited for a two-year-old. I stand, pull on my coat and wool scarf, and head to the workshop. I even slam the door behind me for spite, though I will pay for my insolence. I’m guessing Prudence won’t fix supper tonight but stay in her room and fume. Or she’ll let the woodstove fire die out on purpose, and somehow I don’t care—and I’m shocked! I’ve cared about consequences every moment of every day since I was born. Now I don’t.
I haven’t been to see Kate since I returned. I’ve had sitting by the door the penny candy, three used readers, two new magazines holding articles about Loretta Lynn, canned tuna, jars of peaches, and the dog food she ordered. To trudge them to her cabin and leave them at her door is beyond me. If she’s there she’ll be polite and offer me tea and ask about the convention. I’ll have to confess I went to only three one-hour lectures and didn’t listen to any of them, and no, I can’t remember the topics so we can’t talk about them. Then she’ll ask if I’m sick, and surely she’ll understand when she sees me that I’m not myself. In truth, to explain it all is too much to take in today.
I sit out in my cold workshop among the sawdust and worn sandpaper and unfinished stack of block toys I need to tend to. The frigid wind comes through the opened door that I don’t close. My nose runs, and my fingers and toes grow numb. My chest aches like I’ve got pneumonia. I must be getting very sick. I deserve to get a fever and even more body aches than I already have.
If this is what love feels like, why would anyone seek it out and want to hold on to it? It hurts so much I can’t breathe right. Food is tasteless. Sleep has been elusive these recent weeks. To move my arms and legs simultaneously is a weighty chore. When I hear a voice sounding like Kate’s call my name, I cringe. Oh Lord, now I’ve done it. I’m hallucinating.
Then the woman who absconded with my thoughts, and who lives behind my eyelids, sticks her head around the edge of the open doorway to my workshop. Her face is flushed healthy, and around her neck she wears a green tartan scarf the color of her eyes. I close mine for a moment because I think she’s a mirage.
When I open them, she’s still there! The dog stands beside her and whips his tail, and fresh joy floods through my veins like rain in the desert. Kate has her walking stick. She sought me out. She found where I live!
“Well, hello, stranger,” she says. “Welcome home.”
Prudence Perkins
Hell is being born into a family of preachers named Eli.
A person can’t have a thought to herself without some rule taking the starch out of it. From the time I could walk, the path was marked and only a fool would wander. And I won’t a fool. I settled for scraps if I wanted something cause Brother got the choice. Being the boy and all. Being another Eli.
Daddy and him sat round the woodstove and talked like equals bout the heavenly plan for salvation and their divine part in it. I was stuck to the ground with thoughts nobody wanted—a girl nailed in a sorry place.
Like today. I wait for that new teacher in the schoolhouse instead of visiting at Fleeta’s house with Alice Dickens and Laura June Mayhew, eating molasses cake Fleeta promised to bake. I’m in a bad mood missing cake and gossip cause Brother had to preach a funeral and I’m stuck here, and she’s late so I wait.
I was six to Eli’s eighteen when Daddy got cancer and Brother left home for preacher schooling. I emptied slop buckets and hauled wood, baked biscuits and tended garden. Lye soap cracked the skin open on my fingers when I helped Mama do laundry in yard pots. Everything I did was coated with the Lord’s slippery words. I almost drowned in verse. I learned to breathe underwater was what I did, being the daughter of a Eli.
After two years gone, Brother come home a preacher, third generation. Daddy waited till he did and died, and Brother cried cause he was scared. Mama got old fast after that. When she passed on the eve of my thirteenth birthday, only one last Eli needed tending to, and that fell to me. From the outside I stayed pretty much the same after Mama passed. Plain, modest, quiet Prudence.
Then something changed.
Eve’s curse come a year later, and blood ran down my skinny legs and stained the very ground I stood on. I kept more thoughts to myself. Course, Brother don’t study me like Mama used to. He don’t know what ragtime done to the insides of a lone girl without a mama to guide her. Ragtime cramped, and twisted flesh made nothing fit right over tender skin.
God must have hated womankind something terrible to punish her month after month, and leave the mark of blood as her shame.
Jumbled in all the new strange, I had private thoughts bout the boy, thoughts that sprung outta the air when I turned sixteen. Thomas James Slater was his name. Folks called him TJ. Nobody called him Thomas cept me, and that was inside my head and never out loud. He come to church regular. I watched his hair sweep cross his high forehead and curl at the nape of his neck. I wanted so bad to touch one of them curls, pull it open, and watch it spring back and grab holt of my finger.
He was a year ahead of me and already had man’s hands—square fingernails with rough palms. One of his fingernails was always bruised from the missed strike of a hammer when he fixed a roof or put down a floor. I wanted to lift that hand and kiss that bruised finger. I wanted to take all his hurt away.
Thomas had a dimple in his right cheek that showed when I caught his eye and made him smile. I did things I never done before to make that dimple come. Cut my eyes down and back up. Glanced over my shoulder to see if he looked my way. I thought that dimple belonged to me.
I lived for Sundays that took me to Thomas Slater cause not much else did. The in-between time I talked to Thomas in my head, and he said nice things back. What do you think, Prudence? You’re a good cook. You work hard.
Once he walked in at the Rusty Nickel for supplies when I was there, and my tongue got tied in a knot. Before it come undone, he tipped his hat and said, “Afternoon, Miss Perkins,” flashed his dimple, and was gone. For the life of me I couldn’t remember why I come to the store that day. I was such a fool for that boy. I found out how much a fool at the pie auction on Homecoming Sunday.
Thomas Slater’s mama let it slip one time at church that he liked apple pie best. I tucked that secret in my heart when pie auction time come, and I made the best, most perfect apple pie for Thomas Slater. I cut out all the brown spots on the apples, put extra butter in the crust, did a lattice weave for the top, and brushed it with a egg white before it baked and turned golden. I even sprinkled sugar on top and watched it careful so it won’t burn. I never put this much care in a pie before. I made it for my Thomas. His dimple told me to.<
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The night before Homecoming Sunday, I washed my hair. Used one of them little bottles of shampoo Brother brought back from convention in the valley. After I rinsed the bubbles outta my hair, I poured a whole cup of apple vinegar on for extra shine. My fingers glided through the strands to the ends, slick as silk. I wanted to smell clean when I stood beside Thomas tomorrow, when he held my prize pie.
That year I was sixteen, Homecoming Sunday was a blue-sky day. Planks on sawhorses was set up in the churchyard and made a table to hold dozens of pies. I held on to mine so Thomas saw me with my perfect pie. I set it on the table last, right front corner. Then the auction started.
I stood off to the side so I could watch Thomas out the corner of my eye. I don’t care how many quarters the other pies brought. I waited for Thomas to declare to the congregation he had his sights on me. That day, when I waited for love to pick me, I was happy.
When Thomas raised his hand and called out “fifty cents” as a high opening bid, I was puzzled. That won’t my pie Burnell Sheets held up for bids. It was some sort of rhubarb thing, lopsided, with a burnt crust. I thought Thomas made a mistake or was being kind.
But he paid a whole dollar for that rhubarb thing made by Susie Domer, the little mouse of a girl with limp hair and a lisp. She carried her ugly pie and placed it in Thomas’s bruised, strong hands, and his dimple turned on and stayed on and shined down on her scrappy head.
I don’t stay to see who got my perfect pie. I don’t tell nobody when I go. I walked home, filled up to the top with broken hate, working on a plan.
• • •
Old memories more than twenty-five years back get more idle time today than they have a right to. Even when your hair turns gray, they don’t stay away on this kinda low-cloud day. Thomas Slater never showed his dimple for me again, but I remember what it looked like.
Now this new teacher comes who must not have a watch cause she still ain’t here.
The other teachers before Miss Shaw were girls, really. Not what anybody’d call a real teacher. Nervous and jumpy, they won’t much good to anybody. I already know this one won’t do cause she’s old as Brother. Why can’t we get somebody in between? Or why can’t the valley leave us alone? I heard hope in his voice this morning when he said Miss Kathleen Shaw’s name, and that’s gotta stop. Brother’s a dreamer who’s got to wake up. He still believes life in Baines Creek is gonna get better when there’s not a speck of proof to show for it. Case in point: this here teacher. She’s late by a lot. Said she’d be here at two o’clock, and now it’s half past on Mama’s watch pinned to my bodice. I’ll give her five more minutes.
Now four minutes and I’m outta here.
Three.
Two minutes and I’m gonna leave.
Mixed in the shrill of the rising wind before a storm lets loose, I stand at the open door and hear a car struggle up the road, pull in front of the schoolhouse, and stop. It’s gotta be Miss Kathleen Shaw, but it looks like a man inside. The person raises a hand as big as any I’ve seen, and right then, the rain lets loose and blots out the car behind a wall of water. If that’s not a bad omen, I don’t know what is.
I close the schoolhouse door to keep out the wet and lean up against it. The empty room and extra time pulls me back to Thomas and my perfect pie. Now the shawl climbs into the story.
• • •
Susie Domer, the simple girl Thomas claimed with a lopsided rhubarb pie, was the same age as me back then—sixteen. She always wore the same shawl to church, foggy gray wool with one embroidered red rose that lay between her shoulder blades. After I knew Thomas’s dimple was for Susie and not me, I wanted to pick out the threads of that rose, but I did something better.
Susie was careless. She wore her shawl to Mr. Simmons’s funeral visitation, and cause the day turned from chilly to warm, she hung that shawl on the back of her chair. I watched it slip into a soft heap as she stood to talk to his widow. Then she walked into the sunshine without a look back. I slid my foot over and pulled the shawl beside my chair, reached down, and bunched it under my sweater. I took my leave and walked home, stitching my plan into place.
That plan was the bend in the river where good God-fearing girls don’t go.
Soft grass grew high there. When bodies lay down, the grass stayed down, and the cost to go there was a girl’s reputation. I knew the way. Everybody did. On the day it rained too much for anybody to go to the tall grass, I took Susie’s vain shawl to the bend in the river. Through the soft, broken grass I threaded her shawl, then backed my way out and went home.
Every day, hope got bigger like a bubble growing in my belly. I could only do this cause Mama was dead. If she was here, she’d see straight into my heart and make me undo it all. With Mama dead, Brother was blind.
In the days to come, the hairs on my body would tingle at the thought of the lost shawl being found. I squeezed my legs together and made a moment of bliss thinking bout that shawl, the tall grass, and the trouble them two would make for Susie Domer.
Next Sunday at church, Susie wore one of her mama’s cast-off shawls, and she looked the plainer for it. In the churchyard she stood beside her parents with Thomas off to the side.
“What happened to your shawl, Susie? It’s got a pretty rose on the back, don’t it?” I asked cause I want her mama and daddy to know everybody knew what her shawl looked like.
“Yeth. I lawthed it,” she said in her pitiful, muddled lisp. Her homely face all innocent-like, unafeard, when she should have been scared for her very life.
“Well, it’ll turn up, and you’ll remember where you left it.” I put on my biggest smile, said my farewell, and walked away, surprised to feel my stomach turn sour.
• • •
Now the rain that pounded on the roof stops quick as it come, and the quiet makes me leave Thomas and Susie back twenty-five years where they belong. That sour taste stays with remembering. I swallow and open the door as Miss Shaw steps outta her car.
She’s a long-legged giant of a woman who’s got on man’s trousers, for Lord’s sake! Her hair’s chopped off, too. She’s an insult to womankind is what she is. She’s a talker, too, and she talks to hear her mouth rattle on bout the ride up the mountain like she done something special. I watch her mouth move but don’t listen close. She puts out her hand and I take it, but not really. Miss Kathleen Shaw has got a lot to learn. She come to the right place that’ll do the teaching for her.
“I’m sorry, so very sorry you had to wait on me,” she says, like two sorries will make it stick better. I don’t like this big, old person and hope she goes back to the valley quick. Brother’s gonna be surprised. He’s gonna feel puny beside this one.
• • •
I get home from meeting Miss Shaw and got me a headache like I get a time or three a year. It starts small but it’s gonna grow, so I take to bed in the late afternoon and put a warm rag over my eyes to block out the harsh light. My world goes small on headache days. Brother knows to fend for himself and leave me be.
I pull up the crazy quilt from the foot of my bed made from scraps of cloth in colors of faded leaves. This won’t a hand-me-down. Mama made it just for me. She used pieces of our dresses, Daddy’s work shirts, and some of Nana’s dresses I never saw her in but know they’re hers cause Mama said.
There’s one curious piece. It’s a sky-blue scrap with red specks. I never saw that color in a dress Mama or me wore. I asked Mama where something that bright come from, and she always spoke in riddles. The first time she said, “From a dress I wore a long while back.” Another time she said, “It’s from a store-bought dress that got torn.” When I needled her too much, she said, “Prudence, you ask too many questions. Let it be and appreciate it cause it’s special.”
Sometimes I saw her smile when she touched that blue scrap. Once, she cried.
I don’t like a mystery in my quilt but I can’t rip it
out and mess up Mama’s fine stitches, so I let it be. She holds me together with her tiny stitches. I feel close to her when I’m under my quilt. It’s a comfort is what it is, and my life is sparse of comforts.
Mama used to quilt with the ladies from church till she got sick. She had a fine stitch the others don’t, but Mama don’t boast. She knew it was a sin, and she was a righteous Christian woman with few blemishes on her soul. She took me quilting with her most of the time, and I stayed right by her side, quiet, while she stitched and the other women gossiped more than they sewed. My stitches won’t fine enough to put in, so I sat on the floor when I was little and on a stool when I got bigger. I practiced my stitches on a quilt square nobody wanted.
I heard who had trouble with a husband, whose gout flared up, and whose conscience bothered em. I heard bits bout babies who don’t get born, the key to secret recipes, and pieces of meanness nobody had use for. I heard about places I’d never see. Land as flat as a tabletop covered with waves of wheat. A river so wide you can’t see the other side. On the way home, Mama said, “Prue, don’t believe everything you hear. Folks like to talk, and some like to talk too much, specially when stitching is going on.”
When Mama passed, a lot of things left with her. One of em was the answer to the mystery in my quilt. Today, my headache sends me to bed, and like I do sometime when I lay under my quilt, I hope for a clue bout a piece of blue.
• • •
I was four when Nana died in this bed I rest in. She lived with us till then and did the cooking. When she won’t working in the garden, cooking, or canning, she held me and brushed my hair, singing “Jesus Loves Me” in a shimmy voice. I slept with Nana most nights to keep her warm. I rubbed her cold, knotty feet with my hands, and wrapped em in my scrap of baby blanket, and curled up behind her knobby knees with very close veins.