All the Forgivenesses

by Elizabeth Hardinger

  After while I got hungry and thirsty, but Daddy’d told me to wait there, so I done what he said.

  Finally, a white-haired woman come up to me, leaning on a cane. “You lost?”

  I shook my head. I wondered, was there a rule against tarrying by a church if you didn’t belong to it.

  “I been watching you.” She pulled her shawl around herself. “The mare yours?”

  “My daddy’s.”

  “He the horse trader?”

  I nodded.

  She looked at me like I was dirt. “You’ll find him out back of the . . .” She never said what, only pointed to the building Daddy’d went into. “In the alley.”

  I couldn’t hardly take in what she meant.

  “You better go get him before the sheriff does,” she said.

  In the alley I found Daddy laying next to the trash cans, groaning. He stunk of drink, and there was blood on his face and neck. His saddle was laying a ways away. I stood there. Tell the truth, I was just as afraid he wasn’t dead as he was dead.

  “Daddy?” I didn’t want to get close enough for him to swat at me. “Daddy?”

  He turned over, and I seen one eye was swole closed. His shirt was stained halfway down with blood.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  He moaned and opened his good eye. “Help me up. Help me up, I said.”

  I stretched out my arm, and he grabbed it and got to his knees. A cry of pain come out of him.

  “Ain’t got time to strop you for swearing.” He couldn’t hardly get his breath, and he forced his words out. “But don’t think you ain’t going to get it.”

  Now he rose up to his feet and moaned and hoisted up the saddle on Blue’s back. There was many a time my daddy surprised me with how strong he was, hurt or not. He wasn’t a tall man but barrel-chested.

  I don’t reckon I have to tell you, I didn’t ask him how come him to get beat up.

  * * *

  We got home after dark. Mama was setting out on the porch with the lantern lit, and she stood up when we got there.

  I slid off of Blue and walked up to the porch. She pulled me to her, which surprised me, and she held up the lantern and looked me over. “You eat?”

  I shook my head.

  Now Daddy dismounted, real stiff, and she aimed the light at him. You could see he was hurt.

  “Don’t you never take one of my girls out of my sight again,” Mama said, slow, almost in a hiss.

  I felt a thrill go through me. Her girls.

  Daddy, breathless with pain, said, “The boys, they had the runs this morning.”

  “You hear me?” she said.

  “Pump me a bucket of water,” he said.

  “You hear me?” Her grip tightened on my elbow till it hurt.

  Daddy tried to stand up straight, but he ended up leaning against Blue. “Horse needs water.”

  Nobody said nothing for a long time. The silence was broke by the baby crying in the house. My littlest sister, Opal, still a shoulder baby.

  Mama set down the lantern, and our shadows whirled around the porch, now big, now little. Then she took me inside and fed me and put me to bed. When she leaned over to pull the quilt over me, what come out of her big apron pocket but her ball-peen hammer. It clattered onto the floor. Without one word she picked it up and put it back in her pocket and left. Later on I wondered did she intend to use that ball-peen hammer on Daddy, depending.

  I let myself feel bad that Daddy only took me on the trip because my brothers was sick, but I didn’t stew over it for long. At least he forgot to strop me for swearing. I was wore out, and sleep come quick.

  * * *

  I never found out how come Daddy got beat up that day at Feldspar. Like as not, it was over money, or a woman. All’s I know is, it wasn’t but two or three days later, why, Mama told us children we was fixing to move. We was going to Obsidian, Missouri, which was north and west of Galena, mostly west, five or six hundred miles. Daddy was going to take up farming. Ain’t no doubt in my mind this move was on account of the trouble Daddy got into at Feldspar. No telling how long it had been going on, whatever it was. And Mama’d been wanting to get away from Daddy’s people for some time on account of their ways, which she never approved of. Not that she told me that, but I heard things. I knowed they done snake handling, but I didn’t know what else they done to earn her wrath.

  Before we went, me and Mama and the children spent a day at Grandma and Grandpa Sweet’s place. Mama took me by the hand and had me to walk with her out to the mossy rock where they’d buried Timmy. I’d never went out there since he died, and Mama never made me go till that day. She reminded me, we wouldn’t be there to leave flowers on Decoration Day come May. Grandma and Grandpa and the aunts and cousins would be, but not us. I wondered how come she was trying to make me feel worse—did she think I wasn’t missing Timmy because I wasn’t bawling?—but if that was in her mind, it wouldn’t work. I didn’t care nothing about Decoration Day.

  It turned out they’d put him a ways west of the rock and planted a wild rose bush nearby. There wasn’t no stone. “Where’d that cross get to?” Mama said, and she started looking around.

  Me, I stood there with my teeth clenched. I’d always pictured Timmy on the south side of the rock, where it was warm and where he always used to hide when we played hide-and-go-seek. It hit me hard that nobody’d thought to put him there, and then I realized probably nobody knowed about it but me. They never paid no attention to how he was like to get tangled up in thorn bushes, neither.

  Mama found the little wooden cross, which looked like animals had drug off a ways. It was white, but the paint was near gone. She brushed off the dirt and cobwebs and set her foot on it and pushed it back down in the dirt. She asked me to say a prayer, but I turned away and shook my shoulders like I was crying, so she done it. I don’t remember what she said.

  It took all I had to walk away and leave that cross there where it wasn’t supposed to be.

  * * *

  On moving day a man in a big straw hat come with a wagon, and me and the boys loaded up our things. We couldn’t take most of the furniture—it was mortgaged—but we’d stuffed the clothes around the pots and pans and put everthing in two wooden crates plus Mama’s green wedding trunk Grandpa made her.

  Dacia, now, she screamed and cried and kicked Mama in the legs as Mama drug her out of the house.

  When we was ready, Mama led us in a prayer. She asked the Lord to bless our move to Missouri, and she asked the Lord to bless and comfort her kin, who was going to miss us something fierce, and she thanked the Lord for Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, and she thanked the Lord that Daddy was well enough to go with us. The whole time, Dacia was screaming crying.

  Then there was a long goodbye with the kin, and we set off. My brothers, they rode Blue, and Daddy rode Sparky, and the dogs followed along.

  Once we was under way, Mama nursed Opal and then give her to me. I put the baby up to my shoulder and patted her while she burped. The roads was bumpy, and she spit up ever little bit.

  I seen Mama had dozed off, so quietly I sung my song to Opal. Then I said to her, “You’re so lucky, Opal. We’re going to a whole nother place, and things is bound to be new and different.” Then I took up the song again. Of all the things I needed, hope was the biggest.

  Whenever I think about that trip, I remember the grapefruit smell of Opal’s spit-up. She kept spitting up for the two weeks we was traveling. The rest of it’s a blur, which is just as well.

  Not then, but later on, I often asked myself how Mama had the strength to move away from Kentucky, no matter what Daddy and his people done, and leave all her kin like that, the aunts especially, and I wondered whether the loss of her kin nearby was what caused her to turn later on like she done. But at the time I never said nothing. Us older ones, we never put up no fuss. We knowed Mama wouldn’t tolerate it. You went where you was told and made the best of it.

  Chapter 3

  By the time we g
ot to the new place it felt like we had traveled to the other side of the world. Missouri didn’t seem like there was hardly no woods. Seemed like knee-high grass growed everwhere, and prairie flowers. Our house was a tiny thing. If you pushed on the walls, you felt them give a little. One blessing, the water pump was on the back porch instead of out in the yard.

  One day about a week after we got there, I was out in the yard killing three chickens for a lady name of Florence who lived in town. I’d been dressing chickens and game for people back home, and it wasn’t hard to find customers in Missouri. I’d just went door-to-door in town, asking. At first I just killed birds they’d boughten, but later on we built up our flock to where sometimes I sold them the chicken, too. Or either way, whichever they wanted.

  That day I’d just set the first one’s head under the broomstick when I heard female voices coming, an older and a younger. From the road, there was a big bend and a long rise before you got to the house, and I heard them before I seen them. I pulled the chicken’s head off and tossed the carcass. It begun running around like they will.

  Now I could make out what the older woman was saying. “Alta Bea, I want you to keep a civil tongue in your mouth.”

  “Don’t I always?” the younger one said.

  “They have a nine-year-old girl you could walk to school with”—I realized with a start she must mean me—“and for heaven’s sake, don’t act stuck-up.”

  “Mother, I—”

  “And don’t mention your father’s a banker unless they ask, and then say he works at the bank. Or works in town. But only if they ask.”

  “I am not stuck-up,” Alta Bea said.

  “There’s no shame in honest work,” her mother said. “God is no respecter of persons. Remember, there was a time when your father and I hardly had anything, too.”

  “I know.”

  I pulled off the second head and let go the carcass.

  “We don’t have to be friends with them,” the mother said. “But I won’t have it said that I’m not neighborly.”

  I watched them make the rise just as I was tossing the last carcass. I felt warm drops of blood on my ankles.

  They walked up to me, and the mother gasped. “Well, forever more.” The girl, Alta Bea, stared at me with big eyes. She was a head and a half taller than me, and she had more hair than I ever seen on a human in my life, more than Dacia. This girl’s hair was almost black, and spilling out of its pins.

  “Mama!” I hollered. “Company!”

  I seen Alta Bea look down. I followed her eyes, and there was the broomstick on the ground and the three chicken heads lined up next to it.

  The woman said, “Hello, I’m Mrs. Snedeker from across the road, and this is my daughter, Alta Bea. She’s twelve. What’s your name?”

  “Mama!” I called again. I felt shy. It was Mama always met new people.

  Alta Bea stared at a headless chicken laying on its side with its feet opening and closing like they does. “How’d you do that?” she said.

  “I’ve brought a pie,” Mrs. Snedeker said. “Do you like green-apple pies? Some people think green apples will give you worms, but I always—”

  Now Mama come to the door, drying her hands on her apron. “I’m a-doin’ some warsh,” she said to them. “I got a pot of coffee, want some?”

  Alta Bea and her mother walked in, and Mama said to me, “Bertie, rench out a cup.” I heard Mama say “warsh” and “rench” because already I noticed how these strangers talked different.

  “Bertie?” Alta Bea said. “Did you say ‘Bertie’?”

  Now Dacia jumped up from the little bed in the corner. “Birdy!” she hollered.

  “Mind you don’t wake up Opal,” Mama said.

  “It ain’t Birdy, it’s Bertie,” I said to Dacia, “which you know good and well.” I shook the water off the coffee cup.

  “Birdy Birdy Birdy,” Dacia said on purpose.

  Mrs. Snedeker set the pie on the table, and Mama brushed off a chair with her apron and motioned for her to sit down. Alta Bea, she perched on the edge of the bed.

  “My husband, Albert, why, he’s off trading horses,” Mama said. “He’s fixing to plant a crop when the time comes. Rye, I reckon, or wheat.”

  “My daddy?” Dacia said, blinking, like she didn’t know that. Seemed like sometimes she wanted people to think she was younger than she really was. She liked people to make over her.

  Mrs. Snedeker smiled. “My husband works in town.”

  Mama said to me, “You better finish them chickens before the dogs get ’em.”

  Alta Bea jumped to her feet. “I’ll help.”

  Outside, I picked up two of the chicken carcasses and motioned for Alta Bea to go get the other’n. She walked over and looked down at it.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Ain’t you never dressed a chicken before?” Well, of course she hadn’t. “Just take it by the feet,” I told her. But when she touched it, she yanked her hand back.

  “Won’t bite you,” I said.

  “I know.” But when she picked it up, the toes curled around her fingers. I seen a shudder run through her, and she looked like she was like to gag, but she held fast to the carcass and followed me back inside.

  Now Mama dunked each chicken one at a time in the pot. She used the feet like spoons to push it under the steaming water. Alta Bea’s mother was chattering, telling Mama how our house used to be a pump house, but Mr. Packebush, the landlord, he’d put on the front room and the porch after his wife died and he wanted tenants to farm this eighty acres. Things like that. Her voice sounded pinched, I reckoned from trying not to breathe in through her nose on account of the smell of blood, feathers, feet, innards, and dirt.

  When the chickens was hot, me and Alta Bea carried them back outside, and I showed her how to pluck the feathers. You start with the pinfeathers. I pulled them out by the handful—they made a soft plock sound. Didn’t take but a minute.

  I seen she was watching me. “Go on,” I said.

  It looks easier than it is, I reckon. The feathers stuck to her fingers like hair, and the more she tried to grab aholt of them, the worse they stuck. “I can’t do this,” she said, sniffling.

  “Here.” I took her chicken and finished the pinfeathers. Then I spread out a wing, took aholt of a long, stiff wingfeather, and yanked it out. “Here, while it’s still hot.”

  She took aholt of her chicken and started in ripping.

  “Don’t tear the skin,” I said. “It’s like to tear.” I wondered, could she really be twelve years old and so ignorant?

  “How’d you get the name of Bertie?” she said.

  “Short for Albertina,” I said. “He wouldn’t have no boy named after him, said it wasn’t nobody in this life that was, or ever would be, like to him.” Daddy’s very words. “But Albertina, that was a name he liked, though it seemed too fancy for the plain baby I was. So they named me Albertina and called me Bertie.”

  “Oh.” She jerked on a feather.

  “How many brothers and sisters have you got?” I said.

  “Not any.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t.”

  “Huh.” I watched her for a while. “Well, besides them two girls in the house, I’ve got two big brothers. They sleep in the barn mostly.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mama’s like to have another’n before you know it.”

  She looked surprised. “She is?”

  I could tell her chicken was cooling down. “Here,” I said, and I give her my two to hold while I tried to clean up the mess she’d made of hers. After while I looked up at her.

  “Stop staring at my hair,” she said.

  “I never seen so much hair on a human head.”

  “My dad says I cost a fortune in hairpins.”

  “You could braid it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Only little girls braid their hair.”

  “My memaw braids hers ever day of her life.
”

  “‘Memaw’?”

  “My grandma on Daddy’s side.”

  “Well, maybe grown women braid their hair in Kentucky. Around here, it’s only little girls.”

  I wondered how she knowed where we was from, but I reckoned her mama knowed everthing about the neighbors, like mine knowed everbody back home. “I seen a picture one time of a Chinaman had a braid halfway down his back,” I said.

  “Well, you won’t find any Chinamen in Obsidian.”

  We looked at each other and busted out laughing, the both of us. I felt a stab of pleasure.

  Just then Mama stepped outside and called us in to have a bite of pie.

  Soon’s we eat, Alta Bea and her mama left. I watched from the doorway as they walked down the rise. Just before they went out of sight, I seen Alta Bea smell her fingers. She looked at her mama, and when she seen nobody was looking, she put her hands close to her face and took in two deep breaths. It was a wonder. Her hands must’ve stunk of raw chicken.

  “She sure is tall, ain’t she?” I said to Mama. “For twelve.”

  “Who? Oh, her. Stuck-up.”

  “She is?” I turned to look at her, and I seen her roll her eyes. Dacia was setting on Mama’s lap, acting sleepy, and Mama petted her hair.

  “Her mama seemed nice,” I said.

  “Can’t say I favor her pie crust.”

  “Maybe Alta Bea and me, we could walk to school together.”

  Mama sighed. “Come and get her, will you? My arms is played out.”

  Dacia was dead weight, and I had to buck her up on my shoulder. She mewed like a kitten, but she never woken up.

  “I know you like school,” Mama said, “but I’m going to need you home for a while.” She rubbed her one shoulder. She looked more tired than I ever seen her before.

  “Oh, I know. Just sometimes.” In Mama and Daddy’s room I laid Dacia on the bed. I seen her eyelashes made a shadow on her face. She was sweaty, but she was still of the age where it smelled sweet. I pulled her hair back off of her neck.

  Directly Mama come in the room and laid down with her, and I left them be. Mama, she slept half the day.