All the Forgivenesses

by Elizabeth Hardinger

  And Mama started up sneaking out of the house without a word to nobody. You might find her anywhere—in the barn, out by the fence, laying down under a tree in the old orchard. Might be gone for an hour, two hours at a time.

  It irked me, since I didn’t have no time to go looking for her. For one thing, Opal started up crawling and then took steps, and directly she was running hither and yon. Dacia, at least, seemed like she was content to go off and play by herself. That age—three—likes to play with chickens and barn kittens. Still, you had to check on her ever little bit, since she was like to tease the animals till they scratched her.

  It was hot now, hotter than it ever got back home, a wet heat that left you slick with sweat. When I wasn’t checking on a child or Mama, I was dressing chickens, sweeping floors, scrubbing pots, putting meals on the table, doing the wash, cutting firewood. I spent the evenings going through the clothes, seeing what could be mended and what could be made over.

  William and Buck, they worked out in the pasture over the south ridge, cutting prairie hay to feed the cow come winter. That’s hard labor, bent over with a scythe morning to night in the heat. Them boys didn’t have their whiskers yet—Buck was twelve and William was fourteen—but working in the field they turned into little men, seemed like. They was like to chew tobacco.

  Daddy, after visiting with people in town, he decided to sow hard red winter wheat come fall—bragged on it, said it was the best kind, sprouted in time for the fall rains, rested under the winter snow, already up two-three-four inches come spring. So one day he hitched Blue to the plow and started in preparing the ground. On the second day, he come in the house at noon. Me and the girls was eating dinner at the table—salt-meat gravy and bread. Ate a lot of salt-meat in them days.

  “Blue, she ain’t no plow horse,” Daddy said to me. “Don’t have the right conformation.”

  “What’s that?” Dacia said.

  Daddy picked up a piece of bread and looked around the table. Not seeing no knife, he grabbed a spoon and scooped a blob of butter on it. “And Sparky, he won’t let himself be broke to the plow.” He eat the bread in two bites, and then he reached into the gravy and fished him out some salt-meat with his fingers. “Fix me a supper to take with me. Gonna go get me a plow horse.”

  I never said nothing. I pictured how he’d looked in the alley back in Feldspar, drunk and bloody and beat half to death. Plow horse, my eye. He was heading back down that very same road that’d ran us out of Kentucky. I give him a look, but it didn’t do no good coming from a girl. I stood up and started rummaging in the trunk where we kept the food.

  “Where’s your mama?” he said.

  Dacia said, “In the grove, laying on a blanket.” This surprised me—I thought Mama was taking a nap in the bedroom—but I never said nothing.

  Daddy belched out a bad smell. “What the Sam Hill’s she doing out there?”

  “Daddy, I don’t rightly know.” When she felt like it, Dacia was like to imitate her elders’ talk.

  “You want a can of beans?” I said to him.

  He swore, and then he went around the table looking for food. He grabbed up half a loaf of bread and throwed it in the saddlebag. Then he headed for the back door.

  “When’ll you be back?” I said.

  “You’ll see me when you see me.”

  I picked up Opal and walked over to the doorway and watched him ride off. Opal started squirming, and I let her down. She scooted back to the table and started picking up crumbs off the floor.

  I peeked in the door to the bedroom, which wouldn’t close all the way on account of the floor was crooked. That door was always partway open.

  Sure enough, Mama wasn’t in there. “Mama’s in the grove setting on a blanket?” I said to Dacia.

  She shrugged. “We out of bread?”

  I set down at the table. “Was you out there with her?”

  Opal let out a cry. I looked down and seen Dacia pulling her foot back. “I didn’t mean to!”

  I was too out of sorts to scrap with her, so I let it go. “Nobody said you did! Hush up!”

  Now I heard the pump being worked on the back porch. “What’s all this hollering?” come Mama’s voice. “Lord Amighty.”

  She come in and picked up the baby. “Sounds like a bunch of heathens in here.” She tickled Opal, and in a moment they all three was laughing.

  “Daddy’s went to buy a plow horse,” I said to Mama. “Or so he says.”

  I expected her to be mad, but she just said, “I reckon he’s the one knows about them things.”

  “He wouldn’t say when he’ll be back.”

  Opal stuck her fingers in Mama’s mouth, and she laughed and turned her back to me. “You make the coffee yet?”

  “Where was you?” I said.

  “Who’s been in the trunk?”

  “Dacia, she said you—”

  “Stop picking on your sister.” She looked inside the trunk. “We out of coffee?”

  I was wroth Mama wouldn’t tell me where she’d been—or hadn’t told me she was leaving the house, come to that. Her and Daddy both, and the relations back home, why, they was like to tease a child. You’d say, “Who’s coming for supper?” and they’d say, “The boogeyman, and he wants fricasseed childern for dessert.” But this wasn’t no teasing matter, seemed to me like, so how come Mama done me that way? It tied me in knots trying to work out how come she done the things she done.

  Two days later, Daddy come home with a half a dozen horses, which he put in the corral next to the barn. Nobody said another word about hard red winter wheat. All that was left of Daddy’s notion of farming was two crooked furrows next to the fence.

  * * *

  Wasn’t long after that, maybe a week, me and Mama and the girls was setting on the back porch, me snapping string beans. We had a bushel of them from Alta Bea’s mama. She said she didn’t have no time to snap them, would I do it and keep a peck for my trouble? I wanted to do them beans up right, being’s it was charity.

  I said something to Mama, and when I looked up, she was gone.

  “You seen Mama?” I said to Dacia.

  “She was in the backhouse while ago.”

  I stood up and shaded my eyes and run my gaze over the area behind the house. There was the backhouse, with its halo of buzzing yellow jackets looking to fatten up the queen before winter, but the door was half open. Wasn’t no Mama out by the chicken house, and she wasn’t out in the garden neither. Wasn’t nothing but flies stirring out by the barn, the corral, and the horse tank, and I couldn’t see nothing out by the smokehouse.

  I glanced at Opal asleep in her basket. “Keep an eye on the baby,” I said to Dacia. I pulled a couple of red flowers off the trumpet vine. “Here, make you some trumpet dolls.”

  In the barn I searched through the stalls and the tack room, and then I climbed up in the haymow and stood inside the big square door up there and looked all around the place. Nothing. Maybe she’d went down to the slough, see if there was water in it yet, or maybe she’d took some old leaky pot to the wash on the other side of the ridge, where we throwed out junk. There was lots of reasons for her to be someplace, but not no reason for her to go off without telling me, anyhow no reason I seen.

  I glanced over to the back porch and seen Dacia get up and wander around the yard, so I give up looking for Mama. I walked back and took up snapping beans again where I could keep an eye on the girls.

  I was halfway through the bushel when I heard Mama come through the front door. Her bare feet swished on the floor as she walked through the house and out to where we was. She set down heavy, her face flushed, and she dusted the soles of her feet with her hands. “Floor needs swept.”

  Dacia set down next to her, and she started combing through Dacia’s hair with her fingers. “Rat’s nest! Go get me the hairbrush.”

  “Where’s it at?”

  “I don’t know—go look.”

  After Dacia left, Mama leaned back on her elbows and rocked her h
ead till her neck popped. “Woo, I’m wore out.”

  “We didn’t know where you was at,” I said—light, so she wouldn’t get mad.

  Dacia come to the doorway. “I can’t find it, Mama.”

  “You didn’t look,” I said.

  Now Mama set up straight and then got to her feet. “I’m gonna go lay down for a minute—don’t none of you bother me.”

  “Can I come? Can I come?” Dacia said.

  “I’m just gonna sleep.”

  “I wanna sleep, too,” Dacia said.

  Mama sighed and took aholt of her hand. But ten minutes later, here Dacia come back, bawling, saying Mama’d kicked her out of the bed. Now Opal woken up, and she started in crying, too. I was hot, I was tired, and I was wroth and worried both, so I busted into tears myself. The little ones stopped crying like they was shot, but pretty soon they took it up again, and we all set there and bawled. I took Opal out of her basket, the both of us still crying, and I changed her pants. Then I put her on my hip and took aholt of Dacia’s hand and started walking.

  “Where we going?” Dacia said through her tears.

  I didn’t have no idea, so I said, “Let’s go pet the horses,” and then our bawling petered out to sniffles. We walked out to the corral, wiping our noses on our sleeves.

  Mama, she slept through supper and was still sleeping when I put the girls to bed on their pallets. We heard her cough ever little bit, and I looked in on her a few times to see was her chest moving.

  When she finally got up, long after dark, she had me to pump her a fresh pitcher of water, and she gulped down two big glasses’ worth.

  “You feeling puny?” I said.

  She set there and daubed water on her face. “Just wore out. Go on to bed.”

  Daddy, he never come home that night, or, if he did, he slept out in the barn.

  * * *

  July come, with heavy air inside and out. My brothers was still cutting prairie hay on the south ridge. One night late, they come to the house for supper with me and Daddy after the smaller children was asleep. Buck set down and started cramming food in his mouth, but William, he never eat, only talked about how the two of them ought to hire theirselves out. It would take a good six more weeks to cut enough Goddamn hay to feed the cow for the winter, when, hell, they could work on a wheat harvest crew and buy the Goddamn hay, with money left over against the rent. Hell, people with any sense was using steam thrashing machines, you could cut six tons a week, didn’t make no Goddamn sense to cut nothing by hand no more—hay, wheat, nothing.

  If you didn’t know no better, by the tone you would’ve thought it was Daddy talking.

  Now Daddy didn’t want to lose them boys as hands, and him and William got to arguing about it. Directly William said Daddy was an old drunk who didn’t know shit, he was fifty year too Goddamn late. The stupidest horse in Creation—Lord knowed, horses was stupid—had more Goddamn sense than Daddy had.

  Daddy throwed his whiskey bottle across the room, liquor spewing. Then he grabbed up his belt and chased the boys out of the house. He stood on the front porch cursing them for ungrateful and wayward bastards, and then he stepped off the porch. Pretty soon I heard him saddle up one of the horses and take off, but I knowed he wasn’t going after the boys. He was going into town to get drunk.

  * * *

  We didn’t see William and Buck again for four days, till Daddy packed up his saddlebags and took off someplace. That night, William come to the house and told me and Mama that him and Buck was by God joining a harvest crew. They’d start up south in Texas and work their way north. They calculated they could send us forty dollars a month for the next four or five months and see us again come winter.

  About that time Buck come in, took off his hat, and stood there behind William’s chair. His eyes was red.

  “You’ll do no such of a thing,” Mama said, but she hardly had it out before she broke down, and we all knowed she wasn’t going to stop them. If Daddy was making money horse trading, he wasn’t bringing it home, seemed like, and we was having a hard time making the rent.

  William stood up. “Truck’s coming to the bridge west of town at four in the morning, so we better get going.”

  The two of them walked to the front door. William, he looked back and nodded to me, and Buck come over and touched me with his fingers on the top of my head.

  Mama walked with them as far as the road and then come back crying. “I’m losing my boys,” she said. “Won’t nothing be the same again.”

  “It’s only for harvest,” I said, though it felt like she was right, wouldn’t nothing be the same again. I felt like I should cry, too, but it had been a long while since I thought of the boys as part of the house family. I let loose a tear or two, but pretty soon I wiped my face and set down to the mending.

  * * *

  After they left, Mama got to where she’d turn up missing ever day. I tried keeping track of her, but there was always a child or animal needed looking after, and if I turned away for a minute, she’d be gone. And when she come back, she’d go to her room and sleep. I’d never knowed nobody could sleep that much if they tried.

  After a week or two, it dawned on me something must be wrong with her. I remember when it happened. I was washing dishes, and Opal and Dacia was playing on the floor. I wasn’t thinking about nothing special. I reached for a dirty pan, and at that moment, a feeling of dread settled on me like a blanket. I stood there and stared at my bare dripping arm. Why, something must be wrong with Mama. It just come to me.

  The next morning, early, I seen Daddy out front, astride Blue. I run out there and grabbed aholt of his leg. “Daddy, Mama ain’t hardly been out of bed for a week now.”

  “Got no time for this.” He smacked Blue’s rump with the reins.

  I felt myself lifted off my feet, but I held on. “She’s awful puny, Daddy! I don’t know what to do.”

  He reined Blue in. “A week, you say.”

  “Maybe two, I don’t know, I got the girls to look after.”

  He peered at me. “You got any notion what doctors cost?”

  Wasn’t nothing I could say to that. He wheeled Blue around and galloped off.

  Late in the afternoon, why, here come a man in a buggy, an old man wearing a black suit. I opened the door, and he said, “Where’s she at?” He had thick white eyebrows that stuck out like wings.

  “Who’s that man?” Dacia said. Her and Opal was setting at the table.

  The doctor ignored her and looked at me. I pointed to the bedroom door. He walked on in and tried to shut the door behind him. He yanked on it, but as usual it wouldn’t go shut all the way.

  “Floor’s crooked,” I said, but seemed like he didn’t pay me no mind.

  I heard Mama cry out a little bit in surprise and him answer, and then I heard the two of them talking, though I couldn’t make out the words.

  “Who’s that man?” Dacia said again.

  “Hush, it’s the doctor.” I was struck by a strange man’s voice—reedy, womanish—coming out of Mama and Daddy’s room.

  “How come?” Dacia said.

  “Hush, I said.” I set down at the table. “You got to be quiet or he can’t make Mama well, hear me?”

  “She going on her trip?” she whispered.

  “Where’d you get that notion? What trip?”

  She pursed her lips. “Could we play buttons? Let’s get out the button box and play buttons.”

  “Hush up,” I said.

  Pretty soon I got up and peeked through the door, and I seen the doctor pull a hypodermic needle out of a medicine bottle. Not that I knowed what a hypodermic needle was—I’d never saw such a thing. Mama tensed, and the doctor leaned over and poked her in the hip with it. It like to scared me to death. Then he pulled it out and peered at Mama’s face, and he took the needle apart and put it away in a little leather case lined in purple velvet. He fingered a drop of sweat off of his nose.

  Mama begun whining with each breath, like a cat will sometim
es when it’s licking its fur.

  I showed the doctor out and went in to Mama. Her face was pale. She shifted her eyes to look at me, and she muttered something I couldn’t make out. Then she closed her eyes, and her head sunk hard into the pillow. Her breathing was rough.

  I stood and watched her for a while, and ever little bit I placed my hand on her stomach to feel her breath. Thinking about that needle give me the willies. It was slick and shiny, and it seemed mysterious and deadly as a snake. Modern.

  Mama mumbled and sighed for a while but never opened her eyes. It got deathly still in the room.

  Now Dacia come in and wrapped her arms around my leg. “I wanna play buttons! Let’s play buttons!”

  I clapped my hand over Dacia’s mouth, but Mama never stirred. Through my hand Dacia tried to say something, but I never let go. Then she stuck her tongue in my fingers, and I was so surprised and disgusted I let loose of her and she run out of the room.

  I stood there and tried to picture what it done to somebody—what kind of doctoring it was—when you poked a needle in them. I’d had hot mustard plasters on my chest for colds, I’d drank castor oil for the runs, I’d took aspirin powder for the headache, but I couldn’t fathom what a needle done to you. Maybe let bad air out?

  What was in that shot, I reckon now, was opium. That and other kinds of dope, they was in the patent medicines. I don’t know how come the doctor give Mama a shot of dope. I don’t know was it something Daddy’d said to him, or something Mama said, or what.

  Now her face looked relaxed, sure enough, the wrinkles flattened out like melted candlewax. Maybe she wasn’t getting good sleep, I thought. Maybe all she needed was a good long rest.

  Wasn’t long before Dacia come back in and drug me out of the room, saying she wanted to go outside, she had something to show me. I figured Mama would be sleeping for a while, so I put Opal on my hip, and Dacia led us out to the old smokehouse about a hundred yards from the house. This little building hadn’t been used for a long time, and a volunteer tree had heaved up one side of it, making the whole thing slanted. Inside, it was dark except for strips of light leaking through the walls where the daubing had been eat by rats long since. All around the ceiling was iron hooks, otherwise you might not’ve knowed it was once a smokehouse. That and the smell.