While the men went to rent a horse and wagon, me and Alta Bea went in the store and bought some light bread and lunchmeat and a box of little lemon cookies. “Do you feel different?” she asked me, but I just said, “I forgot to bring aspirin powder, I got a crick in my neck,” and walked over to where the medicines was at.
Harold come into the store and asked the lady where could he get some cold beer, but it turned out Oklahoma was dry like Kansas. He grumbled and bought us some pop, the first time I ever seen pop in a bottle. Sam got a pack of cigarettes.
Outside, Sam jumped up in the wagon seat and then reached down to help me up. He wasn’t paying much mind, and when he grabbed aholt of my arm just above the elbow, he squeezed so hard it hurt like the very devil. I don’t believe he knowed his own strength. Either that or he’d been working with horses and men for so long, he wasn’t used to handling a woman’s flesh. Anyhow I yelped like a pup and jerked my arm away.
Seemed like everthing stopped. Alta Bea and Harold froze where they was. Sam turned his face to me and give me a look like I was blaming him for hurting me apurpose, which I wasn’t. It felt like I needed to say something, or he did, but I didn’t have no idea what.
The moment passed, like they all does. Harold made a joke, and I grabbed aholt of the wagon seat and climbed up. My arm felt like it had a rope burn.
We drove out to the falls to eat our dinner. Where they had dug ditches along the road, you could see the dirt was red as rust. I never seen nothing like it.
The falls, now, they was real pretty, with the water all boiling up and foamy. There was one channel in the stream where the water flowed ankle-deep over flat rocks, rippling the moss like hair. Harold dared me and Alta Bea to go wading, and we pulled up our skirts to our knees and stepped in, but only for a minute. The water was ice cold. Me and her, we got tickled and laughed till we couldn’t hardly breathe.
* * *
That night in the room I put on my nightdress and crawled into bed while Sam washed up in the washbowl. He’d pulled off his shirt and had his suspenders hanging from his waistband. He rubbed his face and run his wet hands through his hair. Then he slipped off his trousers and come to bed with his underdrawers on.
I recollected something Memaw had told me when I was a girl—“The only thing uglier than a naked woman is a naked man.” But then she always had a hard time taking pleasure in life, seemed like.
“Big day,” Sam said.
I nodded.
He give me a smile and leaned over. I held my mouth up to let him kiss me, but when I felt his tongue, which he hadn’t done before, why, I pulled back. I reckon it was just nerves.
He slipped off the bed and reached into his bag. “Here, look at this.”
I could see it was a photograph, but the light was dim and I couldn’t hardly make it out. There was a window on the wall beside me, so I pulled back the curtain to let some light in. It was blue twilight.
When I seen what it was a picture of, I like to died—a woman with her skirt pulled up. Her hands was holding her legs apart, and you could see everthing she had. I hadn’t never saw a woman’s parts so close. Even when Mama had the babies we kept her covered up with sheets. And then off to one side a man was standing there, naked as a jaybird. All you could see was his front half. Couldn’t see his face.
I never had imagined such a picture existed.
“Lord God.” I dropped the picture, and it fell into Sam’s lap. I dug my heels into the mattress and shoved myself backward as far as I could into the corner.
Sam’s eyes got huge. “Oh. Oh, Bertie. Oh.”
I pulled my nightdress tight around my ankles. I couldn’t tell which I was the most—shocked, mad, disgusted, scared, or just bewildered.
“Oh, Bertie.” Sam’s shoulders slumped down. His face had a dejected look, and he sounded like he was about to cry. “I got shit for brains.”
The words that come to me was, “You won’t get any argument from me on that,” but to tell the truth I couldn’t hardly get the breath to speak.
“I don’t know how to treat a nice girl,” he said. “Or any girl, come to that.”
A shiver run through me. “You been treating me fine till just now.”
He looked at the floor. “I’m gonna go outside and smoke.” He got up off the bed, and it swayed. The picture fell off the mattress and rocked like a leaf to the floor.
“You coming back?” I said.
He pulled on his trousers. “You want me to?”
I wanted to say something—I started to—but he put on his hat and walked out the door. His feet was heavy on the floor planks.
After he left I picked up the picture and looked at it again. I covered up her parts with my hand so’s I could see her face. She had a wrathful expression on her face, and she looked a lot older than me. Who was she, I wondered. Where was this picture took? Was she married to this man? Did they have children? I thought about it awhile, and then it occurred to me she must be a harlot. There was a woman back home that people said was one. Annis Drosselmeyer. People said she didn’t have good sense, so I don’t know. Maybe it was the only way she knowed.
More I thought about it, more I felt sorry for the woman in the picture. The man, him I wasn’t so sure about.
It was a pure mystery to me why Sam would have such a thing. Seemed like there was a lot I didn’t know about men, and a lot Sam didn’t know about women.
In the morning he was there in the bed, snoring. I reached over and touched his bare shoulder with my fingers, and he moved a little. His flesh felt hard and cool, with a few coarse hairs, not like a woman’s or a child’s flesh, not like nothing I’d felt before. Then I smelled him, a horsey man smell, and I felt desire rise in me. I was shocked and surprised how like it was to hunger, how much it made my muscles twang and at the same time filled my heart. It felt like the whole world, everthing that mattered, was in our bed, the whole future, the whole past—everthing I ever wanted but didn’t know I wanted. I understood then how come people sinned in that way. We was married, it wasn’t no sin, but still it felt like it somehow, and somehow that didn’t matter. I scooted up against his back and whispered to him was he woken up.
Now I’d seen animals mate, but I never knowed exactly how it worked. I thought the man just laid himself between your legs someway. I never knowed he put himself up inside you. I never knowed there was such a place in a woman, tell the truth—in our house, it was just “down there,” and nobody talked about it, not Mama nor nobody. I was that ignorant. I closed my eyes and let him do it, and afterward I laid there and tried not to cry. Sam, he held me tight and rubbed his face on my neck. He kissed me and kissed me, all over. After while I felt like I wanted to open up my very skin of my whole body and wrap him up in it and never let go.
* * *
The train depot had a water closet for ladies, and me and Alta Bea went in there before we got on the train to go home. She grabbed me by the wrist. “Bertie!” She pointed to the bright purple bruise on my arm.
“Don’t know his own strength,” I said.
* * *
When me and Sam drove up to the house, why, Daddy was setting on the front porch with his arms folded. Soon’s we got within fifty foot of him, he said in a loud voice, “If you’re a married woman, you can just turn that buggy around right now. Won’t have you on the place.” He said “married woman” like it meant “hussy.”
Sam pulled up the mules. “Sounds like he’s been drinking.” He handed me the reins and started to climb down.
“Where you going?” I said. “Let’s—”
“What’s he gonna do—shoot me?”
“He just might.”
Sam smiled his big smile like he done. “I’ll talk to him.”
“He’s got a long rifle,” I said, but Sam was already halfway to the house. He took off his hat and stood back a ways. I seen Daddy reach down between his knees, but all he pulled up was a whiskey bottle.
Sam started talking real low. I could
n’t hear what he was saying, but directly he walked slow up to the porch, still talking. Now Daddy, he dropped his head down, and his shoulders started shaking like he was sobbing. Sam stepped over to him, leaned over, petted him, and pretty soon Daddy and him was both setting there talking, and then after a little bit they was leaning back against the wall, drinking and crying and carrying on. If it wasn’t for the drink, I might have laughed. They put me in mind of a couple of old biddy hens.
After while I clucked to the mules and drove on up. “I need to use the backhouse,” I said, and Daddy shrugged and tipped up the bottle.
Sam, he had more of a silver tongue than I knowed. He wormed his way into that old man’s heart, sure enough. He never told him yet we was breaking up the family, of course. That had to come from blood kin.
Later on I got a little supper, and Sam treated Daddy and the children to tales about the wedding trip. “We drove the wagon as far as Milan, and then we caught the train down to Turner Falls, Oklahoma. Went all through Kansas.”
“You own a wagon?” Daddy slurped his coffee.
“Well, sir, that’s how I make my living, hauling goods,” Sam said.
“What’s ‘goods’?” said Opal.
“It’s ‘bads’!” Dacia cried. “He hauls bads! He’s a bad man!” You could tell she thought this was funny.
“He’s a bad man!” one of the twins hollered. The other one made a face.
“You’re the one that’s bad,” I said to Dacia from the stove. “If you’re not going to behave—”
“You’re not my mama!” she hollered. “My mama’s went to Heaven!”
“You’re not her mama!” the twins cried.
“Hush,” I said. “We all know that.”
“You don’t!” Dacia hollered. “You think you do, but you don’t! Mama, she—”
“Dacia, my girl, my sweet little sister-in-law,” Sam said. “Looky here what I found.” He reached over behind her ear and pulled out a shiny quarter-dollar, which she grabbed out of his hand. She folded her fingers around it. She was too old to be fooled by this trick, but seemed like she was content to have the money. Then he done it to Opal, who almost bawled, and the twins, too. Them boys whooped and hollered and run around the house like banshees.
“Wait till you see what I got you in Oklahoma,” Sam said to Dacia. “You too, Opal. After supper.” Both girls started up squealing, and there wasn’t going to be no waiting till after supper. He raced them outside, and they come running back in the house carrying human-hair dolls dressed both alike in pink petticoats. They had bisque heads with glass eyes and painted-on eyelashes and lips. Dacia had the brown-haired one with the blue ribbon, and Opal had the one with the yellow hair and the red ribbon. The dolls’ eyes opened and closed as them two girls run all over the house with them. You never seen the like.
I don’t have no earthly idea when or where Sam boughten them human-hair dolls. It wouldn’t surprise me none if he took them dolls with us just to have them for the girls when we got back home.
James and John, he’d got them each an iron truck. Them two flew out of the house and drug them trucks in the dirt till the chickens started following them to eat the bugs and worms they laid bare.
* * *
Things went bad for Alta Bea, just like she figured. While we was gone, her daddy’d had her things packed in trunks and set out by the road. Nobody said nothing about the money she took. It was enough of a scandal she went on the train overnight with a man.
Well, what did she do but move in with Harold, who lived in a boardinghouse in a town about ten miles from Obsidian. When I heard it, I was shocked and mystified.
She wrote me and asked me to meet her at an eating place on the road between the two towns. I drove our little buggy. When I got there, Alta Bea was setting in an enclosed automobile, black, which I gathered was Harold’s. I walked up to the passenger side, but I couldn’t figure out how to work the door handle. She leaned over and pushed the door open, and I climbed in. I was surprised how bouncy the cushion felt.
When I got a good look at her, I seen she had had her hair cut short and marcelled into finger waves, like the fashion was, and she had on pants like a man. She wasn’t the only woman that wore them, of course, but I still wasn’t used to how odd it looked. “You don’t hardly look like yourself,” I said.
“Oh, not you too.” She made a face.
“Me too what?” I reckoned she meant Harold. I never knowed a man liked short hair on a woman.
“Never mind.” She took out a cigarette and lit it. I was shocked she was smoking, but not surprised. She leaned back and gazed at me with her eyes half closed like a woman in a Lucky Strike ad. The smoke curled around her face and then floated out the window. “You’re wondering when Harold and I are going to get married,” she said. “Well, I’m not in any hurry.”
“You ain’t?”
“Why should I be?”
“But what if you . . .”
“There are ways, Bertie,” she said.
I’d heard there was ways, but they didn’t always work. I never said nothing about that. Instead I said, “But don’t you want to get married?”
She took a deep drag. “Will you come and call on me?”
“It’s hard for me to get around, what with the children. But I will if I can.”
She narrowed her eyes and then nodded.
We talked some more, but it was strained. I couldn’t get used to how much my idea of Alta Bea had been turned upside down, and how fast. And I didn’t believe she was as calm and cool as she acted like. She didn’t drink in front of me that time, but I reckoned she still was. I never knowed nobody that quit drinking once they got used to it.
When I got home, Sam wasn’t a bit happy. “I don’t think you should be seen with her.”
I took off my hat and put it on the hook. “She’s my oldest friend. And Harold, he’s yours, ain’t he?”
He winced. “It ain’t good. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Are you forgetting we was there, too? Eloping?”
“It ain’t just that. She’s flighty—you know she is. And a drinker.”
“Who’s flighty?” Dacia, she come sneaking up on us.
“You are, that’s who,” Sam said, and he pretended like he was about to grab her up. She run off, laughing.
Sam turned to me. “I wish the best for them two, but I don’t see it coming to a good end.”
“All the more reason to stand by them,” I said.
He shrugged. “I better go unhook the mules.” He put on his hat, and he kissed me on the way out.
I put on my apron and got out the skillet. I was halfway done with scraping the potatoes before I realized me and Sam’d just had our first argument as man and wife. I wondered, did Mama and Daddy ever fight like this and have it end without hollering? But fact is, even though it ended, the argument wasn’t settled. I didn’t like that feeling. I knowed it would stay there like a knot in a neck chain, rubbing your neck ever time you wore it.
* * *
Now Daddy, after the hullabaloo died down, he just assumed things was going to go along as they had been, only with Sam moving in and taking care of the farm while I minded the children, and nobody didn’t tell him no different. It was less than two months before William and Dora was to be married, so Sam just kept paying rent on the rooms behind the dry goods store and hauled a few of his things out to the farm. Daddy moved into the barn permanent, and me and Sam slept in Mama’s bed. That’s where we made our first baby, there in that bed, if not in the hotel in Turner Falls.
Sam, he likes to tell the story of driving up in the buggy and Daddy setting there on the porch. What’s he gonna do—shoot me? I’ve heard it a thousand times. Never gets old.
Chapter 13
Sunday week before William and Dora’s wedding, we had a dinner at the house. The bride and groom was there, and Buck, the children, me and Sam, and Daddy. We’d told Daddy we wanted to have a final meal all together before the w
edding, which Dora’s kin was putting on at a church in town. Truth was, it was just an excuse so the three of us could tell him we was breaking up the family. I reckon we was twitchy as cats.
Now Dora, it was the first time I’d spent much time with her. She was the same age as William, but she looked like a girl. She was a little thing, smaller than me, and she had light-colored hair she wore in a pigtail down her back. While I was making the gravy, she set down on the floor and watched the twins playing with their trucks. After while she asked them did they like fishing, and they told her they’d been to the creek, but they’d only ever fished for crawdads. Dora mentioned her and William’s place in Trenton had a pond full of pumpkinseeds. They asked her what pumpkinseeds was, and she leaned in close and told them they was also called sunfish or bluegills. She looked from one to the other like they had a secret, and she pulled a pencil and a piece of paper out of her pocket and drawed one for them. Then she asked them did they know what a tadpole was, and she drawed a tadpole, and then she made the frog legs on it, and the twins laughed and said that wasn’t no frog, and she said, “Really? Because I have some in a Mason jar out in the truck, want to see them?” and they all three jumped up and run out of the house.
I was glad she come. I was used to the idea of losing the twins, much as I hated it, and it was a load off my mind to see how their new mama liked them and their ways. William, he could be stand-offish, and his squinty look could give children the willies.
When the twins come running back inside with the jar, I let them put it on the table to keep us company while we eat, though normally I wouldn’t allow nothing filthy like that on the table. It was a noisy meal, so most likely Daddy didn’t notice how quiet me and William and Buck was. We never hardly eat nothing. Most likely it wouldn’t have set well on our stomachs.
After dinner, Sam pulled out four cigars, one for himself and one apiece for the other men. Buck, he had a bottle of whiskey. Then the men stood up and walked out to the back porch. Daddy didn’t seem suspicious, though neither one of my brothers had ever drank in front of him since Mama’s funeral that I knowed of.
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