by Lisa Hannett
Once upon a time, before Queenie had wheeled groundwards, Buddy used to haw on the harmonica between harvests. Even gathered a decent following--or so he says--at honkytonks here, there, and everywhere, thanks to the unique style of bluegrass he played. Tunes whined extra soulful against that ugly set of metal teeth he wore, temporary inserts he kept in permanent on account of the sharp glint they gave off, the steel shine they lent his smile.
“These chompers of mine’s worth their weight in twenties,” Bets’ daddy used to say, especially when whiskey-soaked, too numb to fly anywheres much less lift a blues-harp to his lips. Thick-tongued, he’d toy with the bridge, running the blunt tip along silver valleys and peaks. “They’s the brightest map outta here, understand? The trustiest, most valuable map ... ”
Mesmerised, baby-girl Bets had watched the thing wiggle in and out of his mouth. She’d read about touch-maps them Artick injuns used, little sculptures that looked every bit like her daddy’s teeth, except they were whittled hunks of wood. Those carvings’ dips and whorls, Bets later learned, were landscapes shrunk small, coastlines and mountain ranges tucked in pockets or carried inside seal-fur mitts. Portable 3D worlds, in other words, and more reliable than paper or memory. At high noon or moon-dark, travellers could run fingers over them cracks and bumps to get their bearings, certain they’d never be led astray.
Now standing on the back porch her Nanna Teenie built, Bets hefts a shovel and looks out on the hummocked land Great-Grandaddy Winston claimed. Releasing a pent breath, she pats her back pocket for the hundredth time that morning, feels the folded paper’s reassuring crinkle. Guts all a-flutter, she sends a silent prayer to the gods. Thanking any and all of them for blurring Daddy’s sights with clouds and moonshine, filling his mouth with them precious silver directions. Asking--not begging, she’s too reasonable for that--any and all of them to look kindly on her venture, to reward her for putting herself out there, putting on a brave show. Gods favour the bold, she tells herself, hoping their invisible eyes have already turned her way. Hoping they’ll approve. Hoping they won’t leave her stranded.
* * *
More than halfway through spring, the ground’s still almost hard as it was in mid-January. The last shaded knolls of snow finally sank about a week ago, leaving patches of grit on winter-squashed grass in the backyard. Filth gathers like crumbled shadows under the boundary’s split timber fences. Weathered barriers divide dirt for the living from that for the dead, keeping ever-fallow acres separate from budding maples and crabapple trees, and from planting-fields in the back forty beyond.
In the distance, a range of low mountains gently curves across the horizon. Each greystone peak is bare and blunt as a molar. Six or seven of the things are pressed close together, so’s the ridge as a whole looks to Bets like a broken set of dentures. Closer to home, between the rusted swing-set she used to ride for hours--failing to muster enough courage to leap off the seat at its highest point, to wind up and let go, to fly--and the ploughed rows waiting for the new season’s crop, three soft hillocks push their swollen bellies out of the earth.
Until last autumn there’d only been the two big ones on the left, bulging side by side, reminding Bets of that joke about Dolly Parton lying in the bathtub. Islands in the Stream. Now that the third’s been added, a much smaller mound they barely got covered in burlap before the blizzards set in, she thinks the trio looks more like a giant snowman got drunk and toppled over, his soft noggin slumped to the right. It was a hasty job, building that grave, but Mamma only became more pig-headed when upset, less inclined to listen to--much less heed--anyone else’s advice. She’d wanted that soil piled high while the body was still warm, understand? It wasn’t skimping if it meant getting her own way. Hell no it wasn’t. Just get the burial over and done.
Don’t cut no spirit ditch round the site, she’d said to the teamsters Daddy had booked for the job ages ago. Waste of time. Any soul what can scrape its way free from all this ain’t going to trip up on a little ol’ channel in the ground. Don’t be too precious with the backhoe; the hole ain’t got to be perfect, just deep. Y’all know the drill. Speaking of which: don’t fetch no auger for this dig, no concrete, none of them posts neither, nor them two-by-fours, nor them planks. Why fuss with tombs or chambers when already we’re sinking a case of good steel down there? How many coffins does one corpse need, anyways? This ain’t ancient Egypt and sure as hell ain’t no pharaohs round here. Waste of good money, that’s all this burial business is, a waste of good goddamn cash. Go’on and bulldoze the dirt back where it were scooped from; we’ll tamp it ourselves later on. Nope, nope. Don’t bother stacking no cairn over the whole shebang. Our goats can’t graze on no goddamn heap of stones.
When it came time, Mamma wanted the mess of death scrubbed clean out her house, swept from the yard, put in its place. Out of sight, out of mind.
Red Lucifer’ll trade his pitchfork for a halo, Bets knows, before the old lady ever admits she might or should have done otherwise.
* * *
There’s a whiff of clay in the breeze this morning, damp leaves and workable mud. Bets tucks the legs of her baggy overalls into knee-high rubber boots. Zips her acid-wash jacket up to the chin. Sucks in cool air, breathes it out warm. It’s too early yet for the sun to offer much in the way of heat, but already it’s squint-making, bright as the bell-song luring folk down the lane to church.
“Ain’t going to make much progress with that,” Daddy had said a few minutes ago--words slurring across his bare gums--before answering that bronze-tongued call hisself. Normally, the cinder shovel Bets swipes from the fireplace set goes unnoticed; it’s so small, she’s carried it outside three times this week alone, used and returned it, without once getting caught. Today, though, she’d misjudged. Thinking he’d already jammed a cap over his balding head, pocketed a few coins for the collection plate, and hustled off to Mass, Bets had snuck into the sitting room and lifted the tool. She’d made it down the hall, through the kitchen, and had just slipped her boots on when Daddy had come clomping up the back steps.
“Forgot my Hail Marys,” he’d mumbled. Reaching inside the door, he snagged a strand of beads off the key rack. Stopping long enough to deride Bets’ choice of shovel. Not to ask why she was digging. Or where. Or what she hoped to find. Not to make a better suggestion.
Only to offer another two cents out of an endless wealth of criticism.
“Reckon Mamma had the right of it,” Bets had muttered after him. “Without teeth, you sound just as stupid as you look.”
Now she waits for the bells to hush before setting out across the yard. Blue jays razz her from cedar bushes nearby. Further afield, nuthatches and robins chirrup between the stark cornrows, beckoning her with sweet promises of summer. Smiling, she wonders what tunes birds warble in the city, if their notes are smoggy, thick with tar and rust. She tosses the shovel over the low fence, clambers after it, then trudges round to the newest mound’s far side. In the field beyond, cheeping their hayseed chorus, a crew of brown-hooded sparrows scolds her for being late. Bold little buggers, they flit and hop and pip-pip-pip as Bets unearths a feast of worms.
Despite the harsh ground and harsher opinions, she has made decent headway. Kneeling in the groove she made yesterday, Bets digs into a hole already deep and wide as an apple barrel. The shovel’s cast iron pan shunts into cold soil, clanging against pebbles. Scoop after scoop of dirt avalanches down the mound beside her, slow but steady. A regular rhythm of progress.
Few more hours should do it, Bets reckons. Not quite so long as it’ll take Daddy to cycle through his Thorsday rituals. Reverend’s sermon always runs just shy of noon. Wine and bread comes next. Confession and penance after that. Once all tears have been sopped and hankies wrung dry, the congregation drags itself a half-mile north for a palate cleanser of donuts, cherry pie, and sweet tea. As afternoon shadows start reaching for night, folk dust the icing sugar from their laps, brush the crumbs from their whiskers, drain their cups. A short marc
h through the diner’s parking lot and they’ve left the vinyl and Muzak, but not the sugar buzz behind them. After fetching cats and boars and billy-goats from pickup trucks on the way, they assemble in the Lady’s glade beyond the streetlights. Knives come out in the gloaming. Bowls.
By the time these gifts have been offered and accepted, the ale-horn passed round, blood and verses spattered upon ancient oaks, Bets is bound to be done digging. She’ll have made it through. And down. And out.
All by herself.
All with folks none the wiser.
Bets learned real young to keep any hopes to herself. Any efforts. To dream the same way she now shovels. Carefully. Quietly. Secretly.
It’s the only way to stave off collapse.
* * *
Bets must’ve been ten or eleven when she first recognised that sudden burn in her belly, that hot flutter above her liver, for what it was. Not instinct so much as a flash of true understanding, a gut-deep feeling of rightness, of knowing what she has to do, what’s to come. Call it a psychic moment. Call it divine intervention. Call it grit. When faced with important decisions--say, whether or not to sing at the Sunday school talent show--Bets felt a blazing hand gripping her innards. Twisting her resolve. Yanking her across the line between missing out and daring to try.
Silently telling her which path to choose, which future to follow.
Truth be told, the talent show was no big deal. A bunch of local folk and their kids gathered in the church’s back room, Reverend on steel guitar and Miss Shayanne on piano. There were no prizes, no ribbons, no certificates. All the same, it was a challenge for a shy gal like Bets. A chance to be seen. To be heard.
To be noticed.
So she’d picked ‘Song for the Asking’, a number she loved, one that ran well short of two minutes. A minute and a half, really. Next to nothing. In the lead-up she’d practically wore new grooves into Daddy’s 45 LP, replaying that tune on the spinner in her bedroom, memorizing the words. Singing quietly, ignoring the strain on her throat. Bets had never mastered any instruments--she could get through ‘Heart and Soul’ on her plug-in keyboard, and the first few bars of Stand by Me--so she’d decided to sing a capella. She’d wondered what the phrase meant, so went to the bookmobile and looked it up. A capella. In the manner of the chapel. Arranged that way, the familiar letters felt foreign on her tongue. Strange and lonely. Fitting, she reckoned. After all, it’s just going to be her voice, open and vulnerable. Just her and whatever ears might listen.
Nerves jittered her down the gravel road to the church, then kept her standing in the small square room while most grown-ups sat on cheap plastic chairs, kids cross-legged on the floor. As other acts drew applause--for what, Bets can’t recall--she leaned against one of many pin-boards, sweater snagging on hymns and construction paper art. Gaze fixed on her boots, she strained to remember the first line of her song. Grasped for the verses dribbling out of her mind. Blanked at the whole melody.
When Reverend finally called her name, so many faces had turned her way, some clearly bored, some smiling. Jesus and all them other wooden gods frowned down at her from painted bricks on high. Breath coming fast and shallow, Bets had pushed herself away from the wall. Heels scuffing between rows of seats, she’d made it to the front of the room. Swayed there a minute. Searching the darkness inside her skull, desperate for the right words.
Thinking it over I’ve--
What?
So sweetly I’ll make you--
What?
Ignoring the burn, the twist, the knowing yank in her guts, she’d lifted her chin. Smiled at her audience. Chickened out.
* * *
“I still sang,” she’d told Mamma later. Her folks hadn’t known about the contest; it hadn’t been in her plan to tell them at all. Her plan, such as it was, had been to amaze the crowd with her talent. To blow them so far away, it’d take weeks to bring ’em back down to earth. We heard your gal the other day, they’d gush to Mamma and Daddy at the Holloway feed store or the Napanee auction house or the gas station at Miller’s Point. They’d brag on Bets’ behalf. What a set of pipes she gots! Swear to God, that child’s part canary.
The plan, such as it was, had been to surprise them into being proud.
Once it was over, though, Bets knew she’d missed the mark. Knew it but wanted to be told she hadn’t done half bad. That she’d come close, which wasn’t nothing. That she’d thunk on her feet, even, changing songs at the last minute, choosing a tongue-twisting choir tune folks could tap their feet to, instead of a two minute lullaby. That she’d done something, hadn’t she just, never mind that she was only a kid.
“I hit all the notes, got all the words,” Bets had said. Standing stiff in her bedroom doorway, she’d admitted failure to her mother’s back. High up on a barstool, Mamma was hanging wallpaper she’d got on clearance: Christmas green spattered with cream-coloured hearts. Bets had wanted navy, plain and dark and classy. Mamma had said it was too boring. Too mature. Too expensive. It was hearts or Holly Hobbie. Her choice.
“Everyone was right kind. Clapping and whistling like that.” Bets had paused, grasping. “Still, I wish I’d done the other song.”
“Guess you should’ve practised more,” Mamma had said, without so much as a glance over her shoulder. Cocking her head, she ran her palms over the strip she’d just hung, checking for bubbles. Glue smacked underneath each blister she’d found. The paper bulged, resisting each poke, each prod.
“Hand me a pin,” Mamma had said.
* * *
The hole’s waist-deep when Bets breaks for water and a piece of cold chicken. She swigs out of a dented plastic bottle. Gnaws fried flesh straight from the bone. Sweat’s collecting above her lip, trickling down her temples and back, so she unzips her jacket and lets the breeze whisk the salt from her skin. Better that, she thinks, than going underhill like a living salt-lick. Practically begging ghosts to rasp their dry tongues across her damp places when, really, she’d rather they didn’t.
Nanna Teenie has only done it the once, drawling a long cow-slurp across the cheek, after Bets had crawled into her grave that long-ago Sunday, determined to sing that goddamn tune from start to finish. Never said nothing, did Nan, but neither did she discourage. As a rule, she nodded way more than ever she shook that veiled head of hers. Like Mamma, she wasn’t all that keen on hugging, but showed affection in other ways. She paid attention when Bets read aloud from her library books: atlases, mostly; outdated encyclopedias; dictionaries, so she’ll know what’s what. While Bets twanged through the entries, Nanna Tee placed a cold hand atop her warm one, squeezing support. And just that once, licking.
“Thanks, Nan,” Bets had said, always meaning it, even while inching away. Far as she’s concerned, it was a lucky bolt of storm-light that had cracked the middle mound’s shell. A garden trowel Bets had wielded just so built on that god’s work, widening a gap between the metal struts and scaffolding that held the burial chamber up, keeping the space below clear if not always dry. Most times Bets visited Nanna Tee--dropping through dirt, then dank air, then a hole torn in the soft-top of a ’57 Buick--she wound up shivering on the car’s oversized front seat, wet as clay.
Stuck behind the wheel of her finned casket, the old revenant really listens. Teenie doesn’t agree with Bets just for the sake of it, but doesn’t patronize. She’s there for Bets, body and spirit. She’s present.
She understands.
* * *
Mamma pretended not to know about the tunnel Bets had followed into her grandmother’s chamber, nor the tarp she’d taken from the garage to cover it. She and Daddy never did care much what Bets did with her time, so long as she kept to herself, and kept that sameself here. After seventeen years under their roof, she’s still cheaper than hiring seasonal labour and, in the long run, easier to manage. Though Winston and Queenie once thought it grand indeed, their farm’s really too small to support many hands; the annual yield’s not worth the price of extra mouths nor fancy machinery t
o replace ’em. A full pantry come winter relies on Bets helping with the spring planting, the harvest come fall. If she chooses to burrow into the dead lands in between, so be it. No reason the girl shouldn’t always be covered in dirt.
Whenever Daddy was away dusting crops, doors were best kept closed at their place. Eyes lowered. Sketchpads held close to the chest. Notebooks scribbled in at night, under cover. Songs breathed, not even hummed. Unseen, unheard, Bets listened while Mamma grumbled on the phone about the sorry state of her house. Her marriage. Her life.
Sure as sunrise, the Aunties would come over next morning, armed with bottles and casks, to float Mamma out of her funk. They’d have Dolly on the turntable, a glass in each hand, smokes burning between chapped lips. The lot of ’em hooting and hollering, having such fun, it never failed to entice Bets into the living room. Soon as she peeped round the jamb, they’d call her in, put her on the spot, ask after her drawings or beg for a ditty, using words like clever and perceptive and dark-horse when she’d finally relent and pass her rough pictures round. Clutching her calico skirt, she’d creep in closer, passing the couch and coffee table, the uncomfortable rocker, and step up on the cold stone hearth to watch the hens peck and cackle. Searching for falsehoods in their flattery. Condescension in their comments. Finding none.
When they put the sketches aside, Bets saw their honesty, generous and plain. They wanted nothing from her but delight, maybe a song. Puffed as a robin, she’d sing ’til her face was pinker than theirs.