“That recommends a girl,” he said.
“How about you? What’s your family like?”
“Well now, I’m the third youngest of thirteen,” he said. “I got more nieces and nephews than you can count on two hands and feet.”
That made me laugh.
He told me he’d moved away from home—his folks lived in Nebraska—more than ten years ago. He tried to get up there once ever year or two. “My sisters, they’ll make up a big dinner. ‘Don’t forget your fiddle.’ Them kids can’t get enough fiddling—set still for an hour sometimes.” He clucked to the mules. “They love songs that tell a story. You know, ‘Do “Frog Went a-Courtin’,” do “Clementine,” do “Clementine!” ’ ” The way he said this, in a child’s voice, went a long way with me.
Wasn’t long before we got to the river. We eat our sandwiches and set on the blanket afterward and talked some more. We never hardly took our eyes off of each other, seemed like.
I asked him about his religion.
“I’m a believer, I reckon,” he said, “but as far as church, I ain’t been since I left home.”
“Me neither, for a while now.”
“With us, it was the wife took the children. The men went Easter and Christmas.”
I knowed what he was saying. I nodded, and he never said no more.
After while he took me by the hand, and I let him. My sweat broke out, and my hand felt like it had electricity in it. I hadn’t never felt of electricity at that time, of course, but that’s what it felt like. That feeling I had in me was desire, sure enough. Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And soon’s I felt that desire inside me, in my mind I pictured ever woman whose talk I’d ever listened to around a kitchen table or over a tub of washing, all the way back to my earliest memories as a girl, and now I heard all that talk anew, with new understanding. I pictured ever last one of them, and especially Mama, and I felt a whole new kinship with them that like to stole my breath away. I ached so bad for Mama, I started up crying, right there setting next to Sam on the blanket.
He took me in his arms and said, “Little bird, what’s wrong? I won’t hurt you none. I won’t never hurt you.” He always, even from the first, called me his little bird since I was so short and tiny. He told me I was pretty, too, like the man teacher done. I thought about how Mama always said that, being’s as how I took after the Winslows, I had eye-colored eyes and hair-colored hair, and I wondered what Alta Bea and the man teacher and Sam seen in me that Mama never done.
We stayed out by the river till mid-afternoon. As we drove toward home, I asked Sam to let me off at the road, ahead of the bend.
He pulled up the mules. “You don’t want your dad to meet me? Or even see me, evidently.”
“He’s an old fool, and he thinks he runs the world.”
Sam winced. “I hate to hear you talk that way about your dad.”
“It’s the Lord’s truth, though.”
He studied his hands for a minute. “Maybe so, but it don’t show you in a good light. Or me neither.”
I reached back to fetch the picnic basket, but he took aholt of it first. “I don’t like this,” he said. “I ain’t no slinker.”
“I know you ain’t.” I took the basket from him, miserable.
“I don’t see how I can keep on seeing you this way.”
My chest buzzed, and I put my hand in his. “He’ll come around.”
“And if he don’t?”
There wasn’t nothing to say to that. For a minute we neither one said nothing. Then I told him about a little cabin on the Snedeker property about two miles and a half from the house—one of the places me and Alta Bea used to explore when we was younger. “If you want to meet me, come to the cabin late in the day tomorrow. If you ain’t there . . .” Then I leaned over, kissed him like a brazen woman, and leapt down from the buggy. The mules shied, and I took off running and never looked back. That kiss burned my mouth all the way home, being the first time I ever had that kind of a touch anywhere, let alone my lips.
Halfway to the house I seen Daddy standing in the front yard, his feet planted wide apart. “Where the Sam Hill you been?” he hollered.
I never answered him. I felt defiant, though I wished I didn’t have the picnic basket with me.
“The whole town seen you!” he bellowed. “With a man! Headed to the river!”
This stopped me. But then I walked up to him and looked him in the eye. “You’re drunk.”
“I said where was you,” he said, but he did back off a step. He rubbed himself where the hay fork had gashed his arm.
“You never told us you was going out,” come Dacia’s voice. She was on the porch, swinging by one arm on a post.
Daddy give me a look of disgust. “You made yourself a hussy in front of people.”
In my mind, rage wrestled with shame, and it felt like the air went out of me.
“Are you intact?” he whispered, breathing alcohol on me.
Instantly I let out a sound I’d never uttered before, a kind of an animal scream, my arms flew up in the air, and I run toward him. I don’t know what I expected to do—it wasn’t like I had a hay fork this time—but he shrunk back a few steps, and I stopped short of him and stood there with my fists clenched. It seemed like my bellow echoed for a while, and when it got quiet again he said, “I forbid you to see this man again, you hear?” Now his voice was whiny like an old man’s.
“Go to hell,” I muttered. I turned on my heel and started walking off toward the road.
“Or any man, you hear me?” he called.
I needed to talk to somebody that knowed something about life. I went over to Alta Bea’s house. Wasn’t nobody else.
* * *
Alta Bea was in her bedroom having a dress pinned on her by a lady named Mrs. Benson. She was a seamstress and tailor, somebody everbody in town knowed, and a hero to Opal.
Alta Bea told me to come on in and not to mind the mess, and I come in and set on her bed. Mrs. Benson never looked at me nor said nothing, just worked. I never seen nobody could pin as fast as she done.
Alta Bea and me visited till Mrs. Benson finished and packed up the dress in a big round box. She gathered up her things and said to Alta Bea she’d come back next Tuesday for a fitting, and she left.
Alta Bea pulled on a skirt over her chemise. “What’d you come to talk about? You were sweating when you came in.” Now she reached for a blouse and put it on. I never smelled no whiskey on her.
Well, I told her the whole story. She asked me did I like Sam, and I told her I did. I told her he was the one, sure enough, and my heart fluttered.
She was setting in her chair at her desk, and now she begun pinning her hair back in place, eyeing herself in a mirror propped against a stack of books. “You scarcely know him,” she said. “You only met him last night.”
This took me aback. “But I like him.” I seen her roll her eyes, and I felt burned. “And I ain’t got till kingdom come.”
She stopped messing with her hair and looked at me in the mirror. “I’ve been thinking about it.” She turned toward me. “You’re too young to get married, Bertie—you are. Maybe you should board with some widow in town, like your brothers said.”
“But—”
“It doesn’t have to be forever—a year or two, maybe three,” she said.
“But I thought—”
She turned back to the mirror. “It’s too risky to get married—don’t you see that?” Her voice sounded like she was speaking to a child.
I fought back tears. “How comes you to do me this way? You was helping me. You said—”
“I say a lot of things—don’t you know that by now?” Seemed like she was trying to sound superior, but it come out shaky.
I felt confused and, strangely, more humiliated than when Daddy bawled me out in front of Dacia. Most of all I felt betrayed. I didn’t trust myself to say nothing to Alta Bea. I just hurried out of her room and down the stairs and out t
he door.
When I got to the bent cottonwood tree, I slowed down. I pictured Alta Bea on the day we played paper dolls, the first time I was in her house. I recollected how strange it was there, how odd her daddy acted. Alta Bea, she was smart, she knowed people, she understood things I never had no notion of—but, I realized now, she was somebody didn’t have no nerve. She wanted to, that was the hell of it. But when things got serious, she turned tail and hid, just like she told me she used to hide behind the paint on the wall. I myself had plenty of things to be afraid of—a sight more than her, truth be told—but there was something inside me give me nerve, and something inside her didn’t, whiskey or no whiskey. Me and her needed each other, seemed like, but I couldn’t count on her but only so far. It give me a feeling of deep loneliness.
When I got home, Daddy was gone, which I figured he would be. I cooked me and the children some salt-meat and gravy, thinking about Sam the whole time. Only thing I was worried about was, did he like me as much as I liked him. If he did, wasn’t nothing going to stop me from marrying him.
Dacia, she never said nothing. She just chewed her food and studied ever movement I made.
Chapter 11
That night I put Opal and the twins in Mama’s bed—that was a rare treat—and asked Dacia to set with me at the table. I told her I had something to talk to her about.
“I want popcorn,” she said.
“Ain’t enough fire left.” I got up from the table. “How about cornbread? I got some strawberry jam set by.” We had a rule, no piecing, which I was breaking. I wasn’t one to bribe a child, but this wasn’t no time to be particular.
I set the food in front of her. “We’re in debt, and we got to fix it.”
She didn’t say nothing. I doubt she knowed what that meant.
I set down at the table. “We owe near forty dollars to the store, and we ain’t paid the rent in two-three months.” She licked syrup from her fingers. “Ain’t made the payment on Mama’s coffin.”
“I don’t know nothing about none of that,” she said.
“Time you did. I was your age, I dressed chickens and took in ironing.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I need a glass of milk.”
I set my hand on her arm. “Listen to me.”
She stared at my hand till I let go. “You ain’t my mama.”
Picturing Sam, with his whole face smiling, helped me hold my temper. “Dacia, we’re about broke, is what I’m telling you.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That ain’t right. William and Buck, they send money, I know they do. And Daddy—”
“William and Buck can’t support this whole family, they’ve got their own plans to think about. And Daddy—how long have we had them three horses out there in the corral? That paint and them two bays? Feeding them?”
She rolled her eyes. “How would I know?”
“Before last Thanksgiving,” I said. “Daddy ain’t sold a horse in months.” I waited till she looked me in the eye. “If it wasn’t for Alta Bea and them, I don’t know what we’d even eat.”
“What plans?” she said.
It took me a minute to understand. “They’re growed men. Things is different when you’re a growed man.”
I was tiptoeing around some things—I reckoned if she knowed what-all was coming, she’d have a fit and fall in it. She seemed satisfied with this answer, though, so I went on. “I can’t get a job and leave you out here ever day to look after the children—that wouldn’t be fair.”
Her eyes got wide. “By myself? All the time?”
“I said, I ain’t—”
“You can’t do that!” she cried.
“Hush, you’ll wake them up.”
“We ain’t going to the poor farm? We going to the poor farm, Bertie?” she said, tears in her voice.
Now there wasn’t a child nowhere, except maybe Alta Bea, that wasn’t scared to death of being sent to the poor farm. We heard a lot of tales about children worked to death at them places. Truth was, a lot of them, if they got sent there without their people, they never come back home, but I doubt any of them died from overwork. They just growed up and left. Still, wasn’t no worse threat you could use on a child.
“I’m trying to talk to you like a grown-up,” I said.
“I ain’t going to no poor farm,” she said, sticking her chin out.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I met this man.”
“The one you sinned with?”
It took all my strength not to snatch her by the hair. My voice, when I spoke, I heard the wrath in it, quiet though it was. “I never sinned with him nor nobody. Understand that.”
“But Daddy—”
“Christ,” I said. “Daddy.” It wasn’t no use. Even ten year old, she was too little to comprehend Daddy’s ways. To her, he was funny when he was drunk. Her and him, they was all the time laughing and joking, just like her and Mama. Everybody always said Dacia could charm the spots off a leopard, and she could, when she wanted to.
“Look,” I said, “this man I met, he’s going to fix things so we don’t have to go to the poor farm.”
She leaned toward me.
“But we have to pull a joke on Daddy,” I said.
“We do?” Her eyes got bright.
“We have to keep a secret. Just between you and me. You can’t tell nobody.”
So that’s how I got her to lie for me and Sam when we was together. I bribed her, I threatened her, I made her think it was a game. Worst of all, I made her think she was older than she was, that I was letting loose of her, that she was going to have freer rein than I ever planned to give her after I got done what needed done.
I ain’t proud of it. We all needed Sam, but the truth is I wanted him, too, and I wasn’t above corrupting my sister—lying to her and threatening her and getting her to lie—to get what I wanted.
* * *
When I got to the cabin late the next day, Sam was there waiting for me. It was cold in there and smelled clayey, like dirt ain’t seen the sun in years and years. There wasn’t no place to set, so we just leaned against the wall.
I asked him about his music, how come he was so good at it.
“Not near as good as I hope to be,” he said. “Good enough to make pocket money, is all.” He pulled out a cigarette and offered me one. I shook my head.
“You wanting to go to Nashville or someplace?” I remembered the other Dacia in the family, who sung there.
He drawed in the smoke. “It’s just something I do. I want to get better.”
“How many songs do you know by heart?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“You know ‘Whispering Hope’? That’s my favorite.”
He nodded. “Nice tune.”
“Mostly I just heard people sing at home. Never been to dances much.”
He nodded again and kept smoking. Pretty soon he said, “How come you don’t want your dad to meet me?”
“He’s a drunk, Sam. He don’t pay bills.” I held my breath.
He bent his knee and stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of his boot. “That ain’t no secret around town.”
I felt hot and cold at the same time.
“How this is gonna go, that’s up to you,” he said. “But you’ve got to know, it ain’t no good to try to fool people.” It was getting on dark, and the only light in the cabin was through a tiny window half caved in. I seen Sam’s outline, and I seen his eyes, and I heard his voice, ghostlike.
“I ain’t trying to fool you,” I said.
“Then tell me what you want from me.”
“Ain’t what I want. Well, I do, but . . .”
“But?”
“It’s what I need,” I said. “Me and my little sisters.”
“Need,” he said, and hearing that word in his mouth like to killed me.
I took a step back and told him the whole story. He’d heard about Daddy’s reputation, but he didn’t know how bad things was. He didn’t know about my brothers’ plan to bre
ak up the family. He didn’t know I’d been looking for a husband to take us in. He didn’t know about my date with Bernard or the one farmer. It like to shamed me to death, telling him all this.
When I finished, he picked his words. “Bertie, I ain’t fixed to where I can marry nobody, especially one comes with children.” He was staring at his boots.
I sucked in so much breath I near choked on it. I nodded and backed away from him.
“I got some money put by, but . . .”
“No, I understand,” I said.
We stood and looked at each other for a long time. “This ain’t what I reckoned on,” he said finally.
“Nor me neither.” I walked over to the window and looked out. “It’s getting on dark. I better get home and make supper.”
He walked over to me. “I still want to see you.”
“What for?”
He blinked. “Shit—you’re a hard one.” By the light of the window I seen he had a moony look on his face, and I felt certain he loved me, or at least he was took by me. I felt a surge of hope.
“All right,” he said, like something was settled. “Meet me here day after tomorrow, in the daylight.”
“Reckon I could.”
This time he kissed me, and my heart went wild. I kissed him back and leaned into him, and when I felt his response I got light-headed and pulled back away. I couldn’t hardly get my breath. For the first time in my life I felt my power as a woman, and it thrilled me. I couldn’t picture what it would be like, only felt it, but it excited me. Then the smell of Mama and Daddy’s sheets come to me unbidden, and it made my eyes water.
After while me and Sam walked outside, and he give me a ride as far as the big bend leading up to the house.
* * *
“Coming up a bad cloud, looks like,” Sam said when we met again. “We better not dawdle.”
I nodded, and we went inside the cabin.
He wiped his hands on his pants. “I never reckoned on marrying no sixteen-year-old.”
I nodded. “I been keeping house, looking after the children, for a long time. It ain’t like you’re starting from scratch.”
“I know. It’s just—it’s—”
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