When my eyes adjusted I seen that Dacia’d fixed her up a playhouse in there, with two turned-over buckets for chairs and a fruit crate for a table. There was dishes and silverware she’d stole from the house, and an old bent-handle pan. She also had pickle jars filled with dead bugs, bird’s eggs, rocks, feathers, buttons, and square-head nails. I don’t reckon I’d been inside the smokehouse but two or three times, and none of this had been there. I wondered what-all else Dacia had been up to that I’d never paid no mind to, and I felt a pang.
“I’m the mama,” Dacia said. “Now you two, you sit on this chair.” Which we done, Opal balanced on my knees.
Dacia played like she was serving us up some fried chicken, biscuits, and pie, and me and Opal eat it, smacking our lips. Dacia, she was correcting our table manners when I all the sudden realized she wasn’t just playing like she was a mama, she was mimicking Mama herself—the sound of her voice, the way she twisted her neck and made it pop, the way she slapped your hand if you tried to fork something off the serving platter.
“Who showed you how to do that?” I said to her.
“Don’t leave that gristle—chew it up. It’s good, and good for you.” She lifted her cup and slurped it just like Mama done, and her not quite four year old. I never heard the like.
“You sound just like her,” I said.
Now she frowned and pinched her lips. “Go fetch me a rag—Opal spit up,” she said in a sharp voice. “Hurry up, before it gets all over, you hear? You hear?”
I started to laugh, and then it hit me, she was imitating me. “I don’t sound like that.”
She wiped her face with her hand and curled a lock of hair back behind her ears, which I was like to do. “You don’t do as you’re told, why, Daddy’s gonna strop you when he gets home.”
I felt my neck and face go red.
Now she put her thumbs on her eyebrows and got a fierce look on her face. “Where at’s yer mama?” she said, low-pitched but womanish.
“The doctor!” I couldn’t help getting caught up in it. I laughed, and Opal got to laughing, too. Then Dacia started in singing, Soft as the voice of an angel, and I joined in, and Opal, she started half-singing and half-babbling in her baby way. There we set, singing and laughing, like in a dream.
After the song, Dacia said in her own voice, “It’s hot in here.”
“Race you to the pump!” I said, grabbing up Opal.
I let Dacia win, and I was pumping us a bucket of water when I remembered Mama’s shot. I left the girls there to splash in the water and went inside.
Mama’s eyes was closed, but she stirred when I come in. “Water,” she said. It come out “warr.” There was a line of dried drool on her chin and down her neck.
“You feeling better?” I poured water from the pitcher.
She set up and gulped down the water. Then she laid back on the pillow and closed her eyes. She had hollows under her eyes the color of rust.
“More?” I said.
She shook her head. I waited for a minute and then turned to go.
“Brr,” she said. She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her belly. “Baby.” Then she turned over on her side, facing away from me.
A feeling of blessed relief run through me. No wonder she’d been puny! Now she would be fine. Everbody loved babies, Mama most of all. A new baby would make things better—they always did. I hoped it would be a boy. Daddy would like that.
Mama slept through dinner and supper, and she was still sleeping when I put the girls to bed. I heated up some broth and took it in to her, but she pushed me away and turned back over. I set the bowl on the washstand and crawled in the bed with her in case she should need me in the night. I started thinking about the coming baby, but sleep come to me before I could picture it.
Chapter 5
“You have to go to school,” Alta Bea said. “It’s not too late. You could catch up. I’d help you, I would.”
I looked up at the sky and started pulling the clothes down off the line. “It’s coming up a bad cloud—we better hurry.”
“You could ride to school in our car.”
I’d saw that car, long and black, driving in and out from their house. Alta Bea’s mama knowed everbody in Obsidian, and she rode into town most ever day to “see” her friends. That was a new one on me. Mama’d always had friends and kin aplenty back home, but whenever they got together, they was doing something, not just “seeing” each other.
“Don’t you smell that rain?” I took down a shirt of Daddy’s and moved on to a pair of overhauls, which I flicked a piece of bird shit off of.
Alta Bea reached out and put her hand on my arm. “You want to be ignorant all your life?”
Wasn’t no use getting my back up. To her it was just a fact, not an insult. I shook her hand off. “You going to stand there, or help me get these in before the rain comes?”
She sighed and reached in her pocket. “Here, I brought you a book.”
I dropped the little book in the basket. “Help me with the sheets, will you?”
I pulled the sheet down off the line and motioned with my head for her to grab a corner, which she done, and then she leaned over and caught the other’n. We brought our hands together, and I took aholt of four corners in each hand and pulled the sheet toward me.
“Read it, Bertie, you’ll like it,” she said. Hearing somebody use my name—and not to curse me out or ask me for something—I confess that made me glow a little bit.
The two of us brought our hands together again, and I pulled the sheet to my chin and finished folding it. I put it in the basket, and Alta Bea pulled down the other sheet. “After you read it, we could talk about it.”
“Like school,” I said.
We brought our hands together again, and she blurted out, “Nobody at school likes me. My parents don’t even like me.”
We was face-to-face, real close, and I felt the heat coming off her. “I like you.” I couldn’t think of nothing else to say.
“No, you don’t.” She frowned and curled her lips, and you could see the creases coming off her mouth like an old woman’s. There was tears in her eyes.
I blowed out my lips to show her I was vexed, and I pulled the sheet away. I busied my eyes and hands folding it.
“Nobody likes me,” she said.
Now the clothesline started bouncing. I looked up and seen she was banging her forehead against it like she’d banged her forehead against her knees that day we played with paper dolls at her house. She was like to do that when she was riled.
“Quit it,” I said. “You’re like to—”
She stopped and looked at me. “You’re the only friend I have, Bertie, truly.”
This touched me. I knowed it must be true, and I felt sorry for her. And her and her mama had been awful good to us. I started to say something—I don’t know what—when I seen little splotches on her sleeve and then felt raindrops on my face. I hurried to pull down the rest of the clothes while she stood there without moving, getting wet. When I clutched the basket to my chest and turned around, I seen she was running off toward their place, hairpins flying and her hair bouncing on her back.
I pictured Mama or one of my kin shaking their head and saying, “Don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain,” and what-all else they might say if they seen how Alta Bea acted—Don’t have the sense God gave a goose, ain’t worth the salt in her bread, don’t got all what belongs to her.
Alta Bea was a strange one, all right. But then Mama also used to say, it was the ones that was hardest to love that needed it the most. And Alta Bea, she was hard to love, sure enough.
When I got inside the house, I dug through the basket and pulled out the little book. It was called Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Inside she’d wrote her name—wrote, not printed—but I could read the A and the B, so I knowed what it must say. I put the book on a high shelf next to the rat poison so no grubby little hands would get it dirty. I told myself I’d read it when I could. It would
give me and Alta Bea something to talk about.
* * *
Deep in winter—January 1910—Mama had the baby, which turned out to be twin boys, James and John. I don’t know where them names come from, Daddy just picked them. I knowed he had a brother name of James.
We was snowed in at the time, and Daddy, he never tried to dig us out for five-six days. That surprised me. Ordinarily he couldn’t stand being inside four walls that long. And he helped me out, even done some dishes. I can’t forget walking into the front room and seeing him standing there over the bowl and stacking clean dishes on the table. It was like some fairy tale come to life, where a bear or a wolf opens its mouth and talks, and you never knowed it could do that, or any of its kind. I remember what Daddy’s broad back looked like and him bent over the bowl. It was a wonder.
And it surprised me, too, when he changed the babies’ pants, washed them out in a bucket, strung a cord across the front room, and hung them up to dry. For months, wasn’t a place in the house didn’t have diapers hanging there like sails on the sea.
He was crazy about them twins, sure enough. He hadn’t had him a little boy since Timmy died, and now he had two. They was pretty babies, rambunctious like Dacia. He’d put one in the cradle and rock it with his foot and hold the other’n on his knee. When he finally dug us out, why, first thing he done was ride to town and send a telegram back home to the relations.
That day he come home with a bag of groceries, a sack of hard candy, and a fat black cigar. He set at the table and lit the cigar afire. He wrapped his lips around it and drawed in the smoke, draw after draw, like it tasted good. Finally, he let out a sigh, and curly streams of smoke leaked out the sides of his mouth. The girls set there watching him and sucking on the candy.
I had one baby on the shoulder and the other’n in the cradle.
Daddy coughed and spit on the floor. “You take good care of them boys,” he said. “I’ll be needing them before you know it.” This is the closest he come to talking to me about William and Buck. They was back by now, taking care of the outside chores during the blizzard, but they built a fire outside to melt ice to water the stock and keep warm by, and they hardly ever come to the house when Daddy was there. I don’t imagine they’d said more than a dozen words to him since they got back, and him neither.
“They’s only babies,” I said, meaning the twins.
He give me a hard look. “Too bad they grow up and get a mouth on ’em.” He leaned back and hitched up his pants, touching one hand to his belt.
“You getting a whipping?” Dacia said to me, losing spittle from the jawbreaker in her cheek.
Nobody said nothing. I wasn’t afraid. Something told me Daddy wasn’t going to whip me no more. His spirit had got broke, I reckoned, when him and William had their fight about the horse business and the boys took off and left. For Daddy, seemed like horse trading had turned sour. It wasn’t like back home, where he rode into the woods knowing everthing and everbody, and them knowing him. Now it was him by himself, clopping along dusty roads with fields stretching out as far as you could see, maybe a half a dozen people to a mile section, and him not knowing nobody. And William was right—people was using machinery to do things more. Daddy wasn’t nothing special no more in his own mind, is how I pictured it, and he was bitter how his life had turned out.
Now he stood up and grabbed his coat and took his cigar out to the front porch, paying no mind to the cold.
That night he slept with Mama in the bed, which he hadn’t done for a long time, and the twins laying in the cradle in there.
By the time I made up the girls’ pallet in the front room, Opal was already asleep. She never batted an eye when I laid her down.
“Tell me a story, tell me a story,” Dacia said, bouncing like a baby.
“This ’n’s a story Daddy told me one time. Stop bouncing, you want to hear it.” I set cross-legged on the pallet. “Daddy had this cousin.”
“What’s his name?”
“Who’s telling this story?” I said. “Wasn’t a he but a she, and her name was Violet.” I made that name up, and the cousin part, too. I couldn’t remember was it a cousin or aunt or what. Some relation, didn’t matter who.
“Now Violet, she had a”—I searched for a word—“she had a bump on her leg.” Actually, it was a cyst, but I didn’t want to get into some long conversation with Dacia, which she was like to do when she heard a new word. “It was brown and purple, this bump was, the size of your fist.” Dacia curled her hand shut and looked at it. “Now Daddy said, Velma’d had this bump—”
“Violet. You said Violet.”
“Quiet down. I was just seeing was you paying attention.”
She give me a doubtful look.
“Now Violet, her bump on her leg got to bothering her, so she went to see Dr. Rumpelstiltskin.” I made up the part about his name, of course.
“The man turned the straw to gold?” she said.
“No, his brother.” I waited to see would she think that was the end of the story and drift off, but she was too smart for that. She said, “Then what happened? What happened?”
“He cut it off, that bump, cut it right off of her leg. And you know what was in that bump?”
“What?”
“Teeth! And hair, and fingernails, rhinoceros horn, I don’t know what-all!”
Another doubtful look.
“You know how come?”
She shook her head.
Now it dawned on me—this wasn’t no story to be telling a child. I had to think quick. “’Cause his brother, Rumpelstiltskin, had put all that stuff in there! And when Dr. Rumpelstiltskin cut off that bump, why, his brother Rumpelstiltskin lost all his hair—ever hair on his head, and his beard, too. And he got so mad, he grabbed aholt of his feet and tore himself in two!”
Dacia narrowed her eyes. “Is that the end?”
“They all lived happily ever after, the end.” I laid down next to her and wriggled to get myself comfortable.
“Can we talk?” She loved to lay in bed and talk.
“If you’re quiet.”
I wish I could remember some of Dacia’s sleepy talk that night—and for that matter, the things they all said to me—but it goes out of your head soon’s you hear it. Prattle. I sure wish I could put my mind back there and hear some of it again. No telling how much you’d learn from it if you only listened.
As Dacia fell asleep, I thought about the rest of Daddy’s story. The actual doctor told this cousin, when you’re a baby in the womb you might have a twin but swallow it, and some of its parts end up inside you, so maybe she had a twin that ended up in that cyst on her leg. The first time Daddy told me this, I’d wondered, did I have a twin that I swallered? I’d looked all over myself to see was there a cyst with my twin’s parts inside of it. I wondered if maybe one of my moles would grow into one. I felt like there was something missing off of me, but maybe it was inside where you couldn’t see it. After that, I’d went around for a long time wondering about my twin, though I’d forgot that story till James and John was born.
It was a wonder—two whole babies and not just one that swallered the other one. Daddy, he said it was two for the price of one. That tickled me.
Now that I think of it, that night of the cyst story was the last time me and Dacia was happy with each other. It was like Dacia herself was two people—one sweet, one curdled—and that night was the last time she showed me her sweet side.
* * *
Now Mama, the twins’ birth was hard on her. Seemed like after they come, she hardly left her room all winter. She never wandered around outside like she done before, it was too cold and snowy. I remember wading through drifts up to my thigh, in bright sunlight, and the snow sparkled to where it hurt your eyes. You get snow like that, seems like time stops.
The months after the twins was born, it was like that. Then come the day I realized Mama had set up her bed to live in.
It must have been March or April—the outdoors was th
awing out. The house had got to where it stunk. I swept the floor and washed it, but the smell stayed on, so I opened the front windows to let some air in.
I dished up dinner for Mama and carried it into her room, and the smell in there was awful, worse than the front room. Mama was in bed, scooted up almost against the wall—sleeping, it looked like—and there was Dacia in the bed, too. She’d found some playing cards and strung them all over the quilt and on the floor. Ever card, even the number cards, had pictures of ladies and men and horses, ladies fanning theirself or eating watermelons, men playing mandolins or waving swords. You could tell a lot of stories with them cards, and Dacia’d pawed them to where they was grimy and tore. Besides the cards, there was pictures cut out of catalogs, there was combs and a hairbrush, there was underdrawers, there was dirty cups and bowls.
Watching from the doorway, I seen Dacia cutting up a piece of paper with the scissors. She had a gummy blob of Mama’s face powder in her hair, which hung down in strings, and she was murmuring to herself.
Then it come to me—Dacia’d been staying in here in the room with Mama most of the time for a while, maybe weeks. I’d been so busy with the twins I’d never noticed.
I started to say something, but then I heard Dacia say “Rumpelstiltskin,” and I set the food down and just listened. “She had a bump on her leg with teeth in it, and the brother tore his beard in two, and all his hair fell out.” She throwed up her hands, and the paper and scissors went flying. Then she arched her back, arms still straight up, and leaned back till her head touched the bed—I seen her eyes was closed—and then she started to slide off. I run and caught her before she hit the floor. She let out a scream, not so much from falling, seemed like, as me being there all the sudden.
All the Forgivenesses Page 7