I remember us standing there all in a row—Daddy, Buck and William, me, Opal, Dacia, and the twins. Of course Alta Bea and her mama was there. Alta Bea had on a black band around her arm. The schoolteacher Miss Snow, she was there, and old white-haired Mr. Tibbets that owned the dry goods store in Obsidian where we traded—sometimes I sold him eggs—plus two ladies from the church who I don’t know their names, and two gravediggers standing a ways off. One of them was sucking on a pipe, and you could see the smoke rising out of his lips and pipe both. We was standing there, and the clouds was chasing after their shadows, and the thrasher was thrashing, and the men was shouting, and the gravedigger was smoking, all of it just like Mama wasn’t dead.
When the preacher finished, Dacia took a step toward the grave. I grabbed aholt of her arm—wasn’t no telling what she might do—but she shook me off and started in singing “soft as the voice of an angel.” A few people started singing with her. I tried to, but my throat closed up. She knowed the words by now, of course, but she got some of the lines mixed up, and people just dropped out and let her sing. She had a strong voice for a child.
When she finished, the preacher give the benediction, and Daddy took to sobbing. His voice went high like a girl’s. He moved his mouth like he was talking, but it wasn’t words that come out, only squalling. Opal and Dacia and the twins, when they seen he was bawling, why then they started up, too. Dacia howled like a coyote. Me, I stood there dry-eyed. I didn’t feel like I could afford to let go. Maybe later out back of the barn.
Afterward the people that was there, one by one they come by and spoke to us. Alta Bea’s mama, I heard her say to Daddy, “I hope I never get as tired as she was.” She squeezed my arm till it hurt and I pulled away. Then people wandered off to visit the graves of other people.
I knowed Daddy wouldn’t leave till Mama’s grave was filled in. Any funeral he went to, he always stayed till they filled in the grave. William and Buck, they waited with him.
Directly I gathered up the children, and we all started walking back to the house.
With ever step, I felt like I was walking futher away from Mama, now that she was done with. In my heart I’d always hoped she would go back to her old self, like she was back in Kentucky, when she’d put the fear of God in me, when she’d laughed with the other women, when she’d stood up to Daddy with a hammer and called me her girl. Mama never once in her life told me she loved me, but ever little bit, she praised me for doing house chores like I done, and me the oldest girl. That always give me a contented feeling.
Even in the long months—the years—when I couldn’t count on her to help out, I counted on her to know things. More than how to lance a boil, how to tell if an egg has gone over, how to cut hair—all that was important, but what she knowed was, she knowed stories about the Sweets going way back, Bible stories, songs, jokes, games, prayers. None of that was wrote down, of course, and with her gone, we only had what we could remember, which I knowed we would forget with ever day that passed. Just like with Timmy, I knowed how utterly you could forget. Time was streaming away from me and Mama, rushing away from us like a flood, and not toward us no more. It was hard to see down through time what my life would be like without her.
Something landed with a thud next to me, and I looked up. The twins was pulling weeds off the side of the road and throwing them up in the air, whooping and chasing each other like pups. Dacia hollered at them, but I told her to leave them be, they was just boys. I took aholt of Opal’s hand, and we never let go all the way home.
* * *
The minute we got home I fetched the buttonhook and undone my shoes and run to the back porch. Dacia tagged after me. It was afternoon, and the porch was mostly in the shade of the trumpet vines.
“Bring me the pitcher off the table, will you?” I lifted up the pump handle and poured in the bucket of priming water.
“You ain’t my mama,” she said.
“Ain’t you thirsty?” I grabbed the handle and started pumping, and it made the grinding, swirly sound it always made when the water started to rise up. The porch boards had soaked up heat all day, which I felt now through my stockings even in the shade.
“I ain’t gonna call you ‘Mama’ if that’s what you think,” Dacia said.
“Who said you had to? Go get me the pitcher.” I swatted at a fly buzzing around my head.
“You ain’t my mama,” she said again. “Mama’s in Heaven with the angels.” She twirled around and waved her arms in the air like a child would, one younger than her. Seemed like she done it just to rile me.
“If I lose my prime—” It was hard work, priming that pump, and you didn’t want to have to do it but once.
“I’m calling you Birdie, just like I always has,” she said.
“It’s ‘Bertie,’ Day-see-uh.”
Now the water started flowing out of the spout. It was so cold, it felt like sparks on my arms. I cupped my free hand and sucked down a swallow, and it spread cold all the way down to my belly.
“You know better!” she hollered. “Mama was right! She always said you was hateful!”
Without hesitating, I reached out and slapped her hard on the face, and instantly you could see where my fingers had been. There they was—my jealousy and pride and wrath—right there on Dacia’s face. I was shocked. I felt a cold chill up and down my spine. My pride was telling me I done the right thing, just like Mama would have, but my envy and wrath was telling me something different.
Dacia screamed and jumped off the porch and took off running, and pretty soon she disappeared over the south ridge.
I looked at the red smudge on my hand. Hateful? Had Mama really told Dacia I was hateful? Would Dacia tell a lie this evil—one that tarnished Mama’s memory, never mind how it hurt me? My heart pounded, and my throat closed up till I could hardly get my breath. It felt like Dacia would kill me and stomp on my corpse, and I had no notion what to do about it.
I heard Opal sniffling, and I seen she was setting on the far edge of the back step next to the trumpet vine. I reckoned I’d been hearing her in the back of my mind all during this commotion but didn’t pay it no mind. She was sucking her thumb, which she hadn’t done for a while. I hated Opal seen me slap Dacia. I hated to think that sweet child would be afraid of me.
I grabbed the pump handle and kept it going. “Opal, go get me the pitcher.”
When she brought it I filled it up, along with the prime bucket, and let the pump go slack. I drunk down swallows and swallows of cold water and give some to Opal. Then I set down on the steps and took her on my lap and petted her and cooed to her. She was quivering like a bird.
* * *
Daddy never got home for supper, though Dacia did. I put out the leftover short ribs and noodles, and afterward I put Opal and the twins to bed. Directly they closed their eyes, their heads fell back, and they looked dead, like children will when they’re clear wore out. Dacia, she went into Mama’s room, and I never stopped her.
I myself set down at the table and untied the string from around Mama’s Bible, which was like to fall apart. I turned to Matthew and read the words Blessed be they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. I had heard them words before, back home. I wished they told me how on God’s earth I was going to be the mama of these children, especially Dacia, but the words didn’t mean one thing to me. They was just words. Don’t you do this to me come back to me. Them was the words on my mind. I felt like I was hollowed out and, at one and the same time, like I had a belly full of fire. I hadn’t never felt like that before. I wanted to climb up on the roof and scream, but I wasn’t about to wake up the children. I closed the Bible and tied the string around it with a knot, and I put it away on a high shelf.
Daddy, I don’t know when he got home. He was passed out on the front porch when I got up in the morning to build the fire to get breakfast so William and Buck could get an early start back to Kansas, where they was hired out. I poked Daddy in the ribs with my foot, but he just laid there snoring
.
When William and Buck come up to the house, bleary-eyed, I reckoned them and Daddy had shared a bottle or two at the grave.
“You make your peace with Daddy?” I said.
William shrugged. “He’s the one ain’t made peace—with the whole Goddamn world.”
Buck blowed on his coffee. “You gonna be all right?” he asked me.
I slid eggs onto their plates. “Or else what?”
He winced. “Damn, we hate to just . . .”
“We’ll be sending money regular still,” William said. “Don’t let Daddy get his hands on it.”
I turned back to the stove and stirred the potatoes. “You think I don’t know that?”
“See to it, then,” William said.
* * *
The second night after Mama’s funeral, I dreamed she stood next to the bed and tried to say something to me. But when I woken up, the dream disappeared.
It was still dark out. I was in Mama’s bed. William and Buck had left, and it was just me and the children in the house. Daddy was off to wherever he was at.
I felt like I’d been hit square in the face with a rock.
From far back in my childhood come the words sacred task. Mama, she’d give me a sacred task, sure enough. I never wanted it. I never asked for it. I didn’t feel like I could do it. Looking after children, which I’d done, ain’t the same thing as being their mama. There wasn’t nobody I could send them to with the stomachache—it was on me. I couldn’t say I can’t no more. I can’t get up, I’m too tired. I can’t make supper, ain’t no fire. I can’t wash the clothes, my arms is like lead. I can’t take care of these children no more.
And then a picture come into my mind of my little brother Timmy. For a minute I just laid there and marveled, since I hadn’t been able to picture him for some years. There he was, clear as anything. I seen his hair falling raggedy past his collar, his pretty lips, his shoeless feet, his blue-and-red-checked shirt with the pig’s blood on it. Electricity went through me. There he was. Then I strained to remember his voice, and the funny thing he used to say all the time, something we all laughed at—what was it? Some word he said wrong? Some saying he copied from a grown-up but didn’t get quite right? Whatever it was, it wasn’t nowhere I could call it back from. Wasn’t nothing there. Then I tried to recall what he smelled like, what his hand felt like curled up in my bigger one—and as I strained to recollect these things, it all vanished. All I could remember was, on his last day me and him played leapfrog, and they found him wedged in the rocks, and he was there all alone in the water all night long because I never looked after him like Mama told me to.
Now I relived the shame of it, felt those feelings all over again like it’d just happened. I laid there on my back and felt like I was sinking into the bed and suffocating. Like I halfway wanted to.
I remembered Mama saying, long ago, God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble. I waited for that refuge and that strength, I longed for it, but it never come. Nothing come. I felt like the Lord wasn’t no more real than Rumpelstiltskin, else he would be standing next to the bed giving me refuge, giving me strength—and where was he at?
Where you at? Where was you when Mama was gurgling her life out?
I wanted to lay there and cry and throw things and break them against the walls, but it was past time to make the fire. I could almost hear Mama saying, “No fire never made itself.” I got up and pulled on my skirt and my shirt and my apron. Before I even got to the backhouse I heard the twins tearing around in the front room. I never felt so tired.
* * *
I fed the twins and sent them out on the porch, where they started rolling their one-wheeled toy wagon around and around. I seen Daddy out there sleeping, and I didn’t care if the boys waked him up or not. Serve him right.
I called in the girls to breakfast. “You wash up?” I said to them.
“I did,” Opal said.
“Dacia?” I made my voice, as much as I could, sound like Mama. Certain.
Dacia leaned her elbow on the table and her face on her hand and stuck a bite of egg in her mouth. She narrowed her eyes and looked at me like I was Satan himself.
“I asked you a question.”
She chewed on her food and acted like she didn’t hear me.
Her silence give me courage. I reached down and took her plate off the table and pointed with it. “Go stand in the corner.”
“I’m hungry,” she said. “You can’t keep me from my food.”
“Go stand in the corner till you’re ready to act decent.”
Opal put her hands over her face.
“You ain’t my mama,” Dacia said.
This time I was ready for it. “You ain’t my daughter neither. Now do what I said.”
She squinted but didn’t say nothing.
“You want a whipping?”
“She washed up, I seen her,” Opal said.
“You hush, or you’ll get what she gets.” I gritted my teeth. I’d have sooner took a whipping myself than raise my hand to Opal.
Well, Opal busted into tears. I knowed what that felt like, when you’re crying with food in your mouth, and the crying makes salt that gets into your spit, and the salt gets mixed in with your food. Makes a taste in your mouth like blood.
Dacia throwed her fork across the room. Then she got up and sashayed over to the dish bowl and stuck her face down into the cold water. She kept it under a long time, and of course I held my breath right along with her, couldn’t help it. I felt dizzy by the time she finally lifted up her head. She never dried herself off. With her nose in the air, she walked, dripping, back to the table and set down.
I put the plate and the dirty fork in front of her, and nobody said nothing while she finished her breakfast. Opal, she never eat another bite.
* * *
In the next days it seemed like I was falling headlong, like I’d just tripped over something and was dropping into some strange new place. I went over and over what I could remember about Mama. I recalled asking her how her and Daddy met, and she told me that tale about the two of them drifting together, and then she laughed. She was like to tease me that way, like we had all the time in the world. She’d showed me how to cook okra and get out spit-up stains, but I hardly knowed nothing about Mama herself, what she was like. It was as if Mama was what she done, and not who she was. It wasn’t nothing I’d thought about before, her being somebody like everbody else, and now I’d never know her, not that way. It made my skin cold to realize how long eternity was.
Daddy, you couldn’t ask him. You couldn’t believe nothing he said. It was all stories. What he wanted you to hear.
But I didn’t have no time to set around and grieve for Mama. There was chores to do ever minute and meals to get. You do what’s in front of you, hour by hour, and you hope to fall asleep at night before you think too much about where you’re headed.
Chapter 7
One day about a month after Mama died, with fall coming, me and the girls was sorting through school clothes when little James come running in all out of breath. “Slow down,” I said. “You’re like to—”
“Come quick! John’s a-hangin’ from the tree!”
“What?” Opal cried, but me, I was out the door and running fast as I could to where James was pointing to—where the road met our place, next to the bent cottonwood. Halfway there I seen John hanging in the tree by the neck. I screamed fit to die. Dacia and Opal, behind me, they started up screaming, too.
When I got there, I throwed myself at John and started pushing him up by the legs. “Dacia! Help me! Opal! Run to Alta Bea’s house! Get somebody! Fast as you can!”
I looked up and seen John’s eyes was closed, and without a thought I started in praying. “Lord, save this boy! Save this boy! Dacia, grab his feet!”
Me and Dacia, we neither one was quite tall enough just to raise him up and hold him free of the rope, so we inched him up the tree trunk. We got him up high as we could, with
our hands on the very bottoms of his feet. It felt like his neck was free a little bit, but we neither of us could see good enough to tell for sure.
“Bertie, Bertie, save me! Lord, save me!” come a high-pitched voice, and my heart about busted out of my chest.
John’s body started buckling, and Dacia let out a terrible scream.
“Hang on, don’t let him go!” I said to her. “We got him! Just hang on! Help’s coming! Opal’s getting help!”
Then I heard giggling. “Dacia!” I hollered. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Wasn’t me,” she said.
“What?”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait just a Goddamn minute.”
Now I heard more laughing, and I knowed that whinny. “Daddy?”
“ ‘Hang on, don’t let him go! Help’s a-comin’! ’” Daddy stepped out from behind the tree.
I choked back the curse words that come to me. Me and Dacia, we was still leaning there, holding John by his feet. I felt the bark digging into my arms.
Now Daddy started laughing his fool head off. I felt John laughing, too, at least I thought it was laughing, I felt it in his feet. James, I heard him back behind us sniffling.
Daddy laughed a good long time. Several times he started to say something and then laughed so hard he couldn’t get the words out.
Dacia, she let go of John and pulled back. I felt him slip a little bit and held myself where I was. I felt a moan go through him. I smelled where he had wet his pants.
Finally, Daddy grabbed aholt of a fruit crate hid in the grass, and he leaned it up against the tree. When he stepped up onto it, it wobbled. I thought he might fall—I halfway hoped he would—but he steadied it, pulled the knife out of his pocket, and cut the rope. John come down on top of me, and we both skinned up our knees and elbows in the loose sand.
All the Forgivenesses Page 10