Dora helped me clear the table, and then her and Opal and the twins took out the scraps to feed the chickens. Dacia dried three dishes. Then she flopped one back in the washbowl, splashing me with greasy water, saying, “This ’n’s still got gravy on it.” I told her to leave me be, and she went into Mama’s room. Played cards by herself or set there daydreaming, most likely.
After a little bit I went out on the porch where the men was. The sweet, cool air raised goose bumps on my arms. It was the finest spring day we’d had so far that year, the kind of a day you want to run outside till you can’t run no more and then lay in the grass and just open up your nose and smell. Seems like you can hear little plants and grubs pushing up through the dirt to their life. Time was, a day like that made me feel grateful to the Lord to be alive. Seemed like I still had a feeling for the Lord deep in me somewhere. Couldn’t help it. I’d knowed about the baby for a while, but I hadn’t told Sam yet.
First we had business with Daddy.
The men was crowded together, standing around on the small porch. When they seen me they moved apart, and I walked through the smoke and set down on the steps. Cigarettes was bad enough, but the smell of cigars like to made me throw up, which I was like to anyhow on account of the baby. But I felt like I had to be there. William and Buck, they was doing what had to be done, and Daddy needed to see we was all in on it. I felt like the girls and the twins, they had to see we wasn’t making him do nothing but what had to be done. They was too young to understand this separation, but I knowed they would remember it all their lives, and I didn’t want Daddy’s sorrow or wrath to be the thing they remembered. My knees was knocking together, tell the truth. How did we know, really, that we was doing the right thing? I hoped we was. I hoped I was, and it wasn’t just about me getting shet of Daddy.
William cleared his throat, and Buck said, “Daddy . . .” But he stopped.
William give him a look, and Buck started again. “Daddy, we think—I mean, we’ve decided—”
Sam put his hand on Buck’s arm, and then he clapped Daddy on the shoulder. “Two of them married off! How’s it feel, old hoss!”
Daddy seemed took aback for a minute, and then he grinned. “I know how to pick son-in-laws, don’t I?” He had took to Sam, sure enough. He never bothered to hide how much he liked him, even in front of my brothers.
We all laughed. I slipped off of the steps and stood up in the grass.
“Who do you suppose’ll be the next one to fall into the pit, after William?” Sam said.
Daddy sucked on his cigar. “Well, I reckon it’ll be Buck’ll leave the nest directly.”
Sam said, “I reckon so.”
Buck said, “See, Daddy—”
“How many more you got to go through?” Sam said. “After Buck, then there’s Dacia, Opal—they’ll go young, most likely, girls—but how long till the twins go? Twelve, thirteen, fourteen more years?”
Daddy upended the bottle and drunk.
“You’re still a young man, Albert,” Sam said. “Fourteen year, long time to wait.”
Daddy closed one eye and peered at him. “For what?”
Sam looked around at the other men and then at me. “Bertie, will you excuse us?”
I truly had no notion of what was going on in Sam’s head, and, by the looks of them, nor did my brothers. But me and Sam, we both trusted each other. I walked back into the house. I washed the roasting pan and put it away, and then I got out some ironing. I heard them out back, laughing and talking.
After while, everbody left except me and Sam and the children. Dora, she surprised me by grabbing aholt of me and hugging me close. Me and my kin, we wasn’t huggers.
Buck drug Daddy out to the barn and put him to bed.
* * *
That night when Sam and me went to bed, he told me what happened out on the porch after I left. “I said how sad it was, him losing your mama,” he said. “ ‘She was sick for a long time, you was so patient, Albert, you helped her best as a man could.’ Now your brothers, they like to choked on that, but Buck, he chimes in, powerful good husband and father, and so forth.” Sam had drunk some whiskey himself, seemed like—I smelled it on him. I shivered in the bed.
“Well, next thing you know, your daddy says he’s sorry how much he likes his drink—don’t pinch me, he said it—and I says, ‘Well, who don’t?’ and we all laugh. We was passing around the bottle, but it was him done most of the drinking.”
I reached over and petted his arm.
“I told him, ‘It’s going on a year since Polly went—ain’t it time you started back up?’ And he looks at me fishy-eyed. So I says, ‘You’re a young man still, Albert.’” Then Sam, he painted a picture of Daddy living the life of a man-about-town, cock of the walk, women hanging off of him.
“He must’ve been drunk to believe that line of malarkey,” I said.
“Who’s telling this story?” he said. “So we bring up the children, how they love their daddy more than anything in this world and so forth, but, I asked him, ‘What kind of a woman’s gonna want a man with a brood already? Marrying kind, is what—last thing you’re looking for.’ And I poke him in the ribs, and he laughs. And then I say, ‘Wouldn’t it be a fine idea if us older ones was to take over the children’s daily care at our own place?’”
“How’d he take it?” I whispered.
“Before he said anything, why, Buck says, ‘I’ve got you a nice clean room over the barbershop,’ and I said, ‘Private! You can sleep late! Have your friends over, no squalling children around!’ And Buck says, ‘Two saloons close by, Daddy.’ And William says, ‘You can come and see them whenever you take the notion,’ and your daddy says, ‘See who?’ And we all laughed like heathens.”
I took the Lord’s name in vain then, and Sam was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “He whimpered some, and he hung his head for a while, but directly he seen the light.”
“He give his blessing?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “But he asked Buck, did that room have a rope bed or a spring bed, ’cause he wanted a spring bed.”
“So it’s over with.”
He sighed. “It’s over with.”
I felt a surge of relief, sure enough, but somehow at the same time I was wroth Daddy didn’t put up no fight. Maybe wroth ain’t the right word, maybe it’s more like sad or let down. But I didn’t have no right to whatever feeling it was, I reckoned. After all, he’d done what I wanted him to.
Then Sam said, “There’s more than one way to kill a cat besides choking him on butter,” and in the darkness of our room I could almost hear the smile on his face. It made me smile, too, and then I felt like I knowed what it meant to be married—the world didn’t have nothing for the two of us to be afraid of, and our life was going to be filled with wonder. I felt the strength that comes from cleaving together as one flesh, and I turned to him in bed full of heat and promise, and afterward we both cooed like the angels do, and in the darkness I told him our news, and we wept for the joy and marvel of it. We hadn’t been trying to have a baby so soon, but we wasn’t trying not to, either, and it seemed like things was turning out as good as we could have hoped for.
* * *
A week later, William and Dora got married, and we all started moving off of the farm, one by one. Daddy, he went first. Buck come to pick him up in his automobile. Me and Sam stood there, Sam with his arm around me. Before Daddy got in, he looked around the farm and said, “Seems like this family died when your mama went.” He stared at me. “Too bad you ain’t half the woman she was.”
I opened my mouth, but Sam tightened his arm around me. “Don’t be a stranger, Albert,” he said, his voice cheerful. “It’s only five blocks.” He meant from our rooms behind the dry goods to Buck’s barbershop.
As for me, Daddy’s words, ever one of them, was branded in my heart. He was right—I wasn’t half the mama that Mama was. When she died I had felt like I’d been hit in the face with a rock, like I couldn’t do right by
the children, I felt tired down to my bones, abandoned. And in the end I had failed them, especially the twins, and it ate at me, sure enough. But I didn’t need to hear it from that old drunk, that liar and storyteller, who never loved me for a minute and who I once loved but now despised, and what the hell had he ever done for Mama but cheat on her, spend our money, and come home and get her pregnant again.
As I watched the car disappear over the ridge, it was like a fifty-pound sack of flour was lifted off of my back. That old cottonwood where Daddy’d hung John was still there, but Daddy was gone. One thing I knowed—it wouldn’t be me walked them five blocks.
* * *
The next day William and Dora, they come by to take the twins home to their place. I served cookies and coffee, and while the four of them eat I gathered up the twins’ clothes and toys in a cardboard box and carried it out to William’s truck. When I got back, Dora was telling them there was a kite to play with when they got to Trenton. None of us told the boys they wasn’t coming back to the farm, so when they left, they was bouncing around and hollering like it was a party.
Me, I held my tears till they was gone. I had Sam, Opal, and Dacia, and one on the way, but one child don’t make up for no other one. It hit me I was losing the twins’ whole rest of their childhood. Fifteen mile might as well have been fifty, and them living in another woman’s house, no matter how much I liked her.
Sam, he seen me crying and come over and held my hand and just let me cry. Never tried to talk me out of it, like most men will. I was too young, and married too short of a time, to know then how lucky I was to have him.
The next day after that, why, me and Sam packed up the girls for the move into our rooms. Come time to go, I couldn’t find Dacia nowhere—the house, the barn, nowhere. Finally, I remembered the smokehouse, and sure enough there she was, setting on a fruit crate among all the junk she’d drug in there. She was too tall now for the crate, and her knees stuck up in the air.
“Smells like dirt in here.” I went around and picked up cups and saucers and silverware she’d took from the house, gathering them in my apron. They was coated with grime and dust. “So that’s where my berry bowl went.”
“You think you and Sam can make me go with you, but you can’t,” she said.
I walked over there and stood over her. “Dacia, we can. But that ain’t the point.”
“No, you can’t.”
“We’ll be happy, we will,” I said. “You’ll see.”
She put her hands over her face.
I wrestled with myself over my feelings—pity for her, pity for me, anger, impatience, defiance, fear. Finally, I said to her, trying to keep my voice even and calm, “This ain’t my doing, Dacia. It had to happen.”
She dropped her hands and narrowed her eyes like she was like to do. Cold as ice, she said, “You might fool Daddy, you might fool Sam, but you ain’t fooling me.”
I took in a sharp breath. There was so much wrong with what she said, and a tiny kernel of truth. I must’ve jerked my hands without realizing it—the dishes rattled in my apron.
She stood up and brushed off her skirt and walked out ahead of me to the wagon. As I followed her, trembling a little as I walked, I figured something out. In her eyes, we wasn’t making her go. She was choosing to. I admired her backbone, though I feared the complexion her defiance might take, down the road.
Chapter 14
The rooms Sam’d rented, they opened onto the alley behind a block of businesses downtown. There was Karlsson’s dry goods, then there was an empty storefront that used to be a millinery before the lady died that had it, and then there was a creamery. On the corner was a livery and auto repair shop. In Obsidian you’d see a dozen automobiles during the course of a day if you was out on the street. I say street, but it was just a wide dirt road.
We had three rooms—a front room and two little bedrooms—on the ground floor. There was “a path” in the alley, like we said in them days, meaning a path to the backhouse, and there was a pump. We shared both of them with the stores. Our rooms used to be storage, evidently—the windows was high up near the ceiling. We had three windows, and sure enough, Opal made up three sets of ruffled curtains, a child her age. And matching dishtowels, which she called “tea towels.” Learned that from a book, I reckon.
It was different, being in town. Noisy compared to the farm, and you run into people a lot more. Everbody scurried around, seemed like. Reminded me of a saying of Mama’s—“Ain’t nobody happy where they’re at.”
Now that things was settled, Sam went back to fiddling for dances ever little bit. He was a caller, too—all the square dancers knowed him. It’s hard to find a good caller like Sam.
Seemed like whenever he had a minute, he was making music or thinking about music or talking about music or listening to music. He purely loved it, and he was good at it. He had a strong singing voice—gravelly, though he could bring it down soft in certain parts. It was hard not to like his singing, and you sure felt the lack of it whenever he finished a song. You wanted him to start another one soon’s he got his breath. It wasn’t just me, everbody loved to hear him, and he loved playing and singing, especially if there was people there to listen. He wanted you to sing with him. He’d say the words before each line so you could join in. He wanted you to laugh, and he wanted your heart to get lifted up. Even sad songs made him smile all over his face like he done. It was a wonder.
He knowed ever song anybody’d ever heard of. He made them up, too, by the dozens. He liked silly songs about frogs and grasshoppers, and he liked serious songs about broken hearts and salvation. If you sung a tune, he could play it, first the melody and then the chords. He never could read wrote-down music.
Besides the fiddle, he played the mouth harp. He was passable on the ukulele and banjo, and whenever he was in a room with a piano, he’d play that, too. He could drum, in a pinch.
Of course, we didn’t have no radio nor electric yet, and at home it was just him playing for me and the girls, practicing like. Whenever Sam would get out his fiddle and start in, it give me that same feeling I had that first time at the dance. I always said, it felt like Sam’s music went right into my heart without even going through my ears. And him always smiling, and his strong voice. Having music in the house made it seem like someplace you wanted to be, not just someplace to eat and sleep. Someplace special. Before Sam, I never knowed that would happen, or could happen. One day I was doing up the dishes, humming a song, and I felt something flood me and the thought come to me, I’m happy. This is what it feels like. Then I pictured the twins, how much fun it would be if they was there, too, and next thing I knowed I felt a couple tears trickle down my chin.
* * *
It’s a wonder Sam had the breath to sing, he was working so hard. There was a lot of hauling to be done that summer, and he worked six days a week, sometimes seven. After while he sold the mules and got four draft horses and a spare, which he kept at the livery. He loved them horses, and he was partial to the work and there was plenty of it, but seemed like no matter how many hours he worked, he couldn’t hardly make out. We was running a bill at the store, for one thing, and it was hard to always keep up with it. And getting ready to put the girls in school, I was shocked how much clothes and shoes cost, even with Opal making over my old dresses for the two of them. And doctor bills. Dacia was plagued by sick headaches. I give her cinnamon in milk, and if that didn’t work I had her drink quinine salts—she hated the bitter taste—and if that didn’t work, I built a big fire and heated water as hot as she could stand it and put her in a hot bath. I also bought aspirin powder and had her to sniff it in through her nose. Sometimes nothing worked, and she shut herself in their room and had me to hang a quilt over the window to keep out the light. She set in the bed with a bowl in her lap to throw up in.
And of course on the sixth of the month Sam wrote Alta Bea a check for seven dollars and mailed it to her in care of Harold’s boardinghouse to pay back what we owed her. He never fai
led to make that payment. And there was feed and doctoring for the horses, a new axle or wheel for the wagon. Things added up.
Then the day come when I found out how come we was having such a hard time. Out on errands I run into a man we knowed, Abel Kressler, who Sam hauled with sometimes. Kressler was the kind of man that swung his hips when he walked like he owned the world.
When he seen me, he nodded. “Mrs. Frownfelter.”
We was standing in the doorway of the lumberyard. I caught the insect smell of sawdust. “How’s Orpha?”
“Tolerable.” He pulled a knife out of his pocket and started in paring the nail on his middle finger. A bit of nail come loose, and he blowed it away with his mouth.
A dog barked nearby, and Abel turned to look. “That Herman Doering’s dog? Sounds like her.” He looked at me like I knowed all the dogs in Obsidian, or ought to. “Queenie,” he said. “She does holler. Needs to be taught some manners.”
He took off his hat and run his fingers along the brim. “Say,” he said, “would you give your husband a message?” He put his hat back on. “Would you remind him he owes me near sixteen dollars?”
My face went red. “That’s your business. You can tell him yourself.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said in a false voice. “I never knowed you was so—”
“Excuse me,” I said, and I admit I flounced my skirt at him as I walked away.
“If he collected his own bills, he could pay what he owes.” His voice caught up to me, but I didn’t look back nor answer.
Now I’d knowed Abel Kressler for a while, and I knowed he would sooner jump up to tell a lie than stand on the ground to tell the truth. But soon’s he said this, I reckoned it was a fact. Sam was a soft-hearted man, and a lot of his customers was folks like us. If they couldn’t pay him what they owed, I was sure he wouldn’t hound them.
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