I never said nothing.
She smoked for a while, and then she said, “You know, on the train, when the girls were sleeping and Harold was reading his oil book, I had some time to myself. I enjoyed that.”
I nodded.
“I love how you can look out the window and watch the world go by.” She had a dreamy look on her face. “I was so conscious of how far we were traveling.”
“It’s a long trip.”
“Children would wave, and I wondered what they thought about us. I wanted to jump off the train and go look inside their houses.”
“You did?” I felt my mouth twitch. She was a strange one, sure enough.
“I wondered, what do they eat, what’s in their closets, what do they read, what do they talk about at meals.”
I cleared my throat. “You must be wore out.”
“It was like the train window was a picture frame,” she went on, “and suddenly I could see—I only have one lifetime, and I’ll never know what’s just outside the frame.” She give a big sigh and pulled her flask out of her pocket.
It give me a sick feeling. I hadn’t said nothing at dinner since Harold was there, but now I felt like I had to. “I thought maybe you wasn’t drinking no more. In your letter—”
“Helps me sleep.” She took a sip.
Neither one of us said nothing for a while.
“I hope the girls didn’t give you no trouble,” I said.
She laughed through her nose. “That Dacia, she pitched a fit when we left. ‘My daddy! My brothers! My mama’s grave!’” She said this sarcastic, like she thought Dacia’d been faking.
I wondered. I myself had felt those same feelings. Maybe in this new place, me and Dacia would get along better, maybe she wouldn’t be so hardhearted, maybe . . . I hardly dared to think what it might be like if me and her got along—for all of us. Life would be different for me, for sure. Dacia hung over me like a cloud about to bust open.
“And when we got here today and I went after her?” Alta Bea went on. “I found her stuck barefoot in the middle of a sand burr patch. By the time we got them all out, her feet were specked with blood. But she didn’t say a word.”
“She is contrary.” I wilted a little bit.
“But Opal, she was so sweet. She never complained about her motion sickness, and she helped us pass the time. ‘Let’s play poor pussy, let’s play poor pussy,’ which I’d never heard of.”
I smiled. “Opal always liked that game.” You try to make people laugh by acting like a cat.
“It took two seconds for Dacia to make Opal laugh, and me too. Dacia does have a gift for mimicry.” She took another drink. “She does you, did you know that? ‘Now, you childern, you remember how Mama was all the time a-callin’ us a buncha heathens? Well, you know she never meant nothin’ by it, now quit actin’ like a buncha heathens.’”
I felt my face go red.
Alta Bea chattered on. “And Harold, he kept repeating things from his oil book—the driller this, the roughnecks that, the tool-dresser, the pumper, and so on and so forth. But what he’s aiming for is brokering leases. That’s where the big money is, he says.”
“I imagine so.”
“Funny thing is, they’re called lease-grafters, did you know that? But it doesn’t mean they’re crooked, supposedly. They have to be ‘good talkers’ and ‘have nerve,’ the book says. So Harold says, ‘That’s me! That’s me all over!’” Now she rolled her eyes and laughed.
I yawned. “It’s awful late.”
“You go on. I want to smoke another cigarette. I’ll be in soon.”
“Good night, then.”
I peeked in on the girls in the little bedroom, and they was sleeping real hard. Wore out. I thought about the two of them, how different they was. Opal sick as a dog and never complaining, and Dacia acting like she hated the world, me especially, for no good reason.
I leaned on the doorway and watched as they slept. How come my raising of them didn’t take with Dacia—and Opal sweet as could be? How come Dacia, my own blood, to hate me after all I done for her, all I suffered? I recalled when I slapped her on the day of Mama’s funeral. Did my jealousy infect her somehow? Is that how come she was so hateful? I wanted to banish that notion. I couldn’t hardly bear it.
I leaned my head back against the doorjamb and reached under my blouse and run my fingertips over my belly like I’d done a thousand times, in circles, and circles within circles, as lightly and gently as I could and still touch the skin.
* * *
Before too long Harold got on with Cities Service, and him and Alta Bea moved into one of the company houses in Oil Hill. These houses stood all in a line not far from the oil field, ever one of them painted gray. People called them shotgun shacks because they was long and narrow, with the rooms in a row and a door at each end. Four rooms, and free gas piped in. The neighbor ladies brought food the first day, but Alta Bea wasn’t much for making friends. She’d ruther travel the eight miles to our house as neighbor with them. I don’t know if she thought she was above them—stuck-up, our mothers called it—or if she had turned back to being shy like she used to be. With Alta Bea, it was hard to tell.
One morning, with the men working and the girls off to school, here come Alta Bea in their car they’d bought. She never opened the gate, just set out on the road and beeped her horn till I went outside. She hollered for me to come for a ride, so I grabbed my sweater and off we went. Pretty soon I folded up my sweater and set on it, but, little like I was, I still had to stretch my neck to see out the windows. Cow pasture, creek, alfalfa field, wheat field, cow pasture, a tractor pulling a disc. A field of oil derricks and pumpjacks.
“That smell,” Alta Bea said, and it was like I woken up from a dream. “I don’t see how a person can ever get used to it.”
I just shrugged.
We must have gone six or seven miles when she jerked the steering wheel, sending the car into a skid. I braced my hands, and we come to a stop by the side of the road. Dust rose up all around us.
“What in the Sam Hill.” I put my hand on my belly. It hit me—one thing I hated about riding in cars was, you was at the driver’s mercy.
She laughed and scooted back against her window frame. She pulled out a cigarette and blowed out smoke, and then she started pulling out pins till her hair fell in loose waves. She was growing it out again, I seen.
“Don’t you just love cars?” she said, her eyes closed. Now she squinted against the smoke. “You’ve gained weight around the middle.”
“Oh.” I felt myself blush.
“You aren’t, are you?”
This wasn’t the way I planned on telling her. She’d caught me by surprise. I just nodded.
“Damn.” She looked at me sideways. “I told you before, there are ways.”
“Too late for that.” I used a smart-alecky tone that made it sound like me and Sam never meant to have a baby so soon, that we wasn’t careful, and now I had to go through with it—though none of that was true. Alta Bea brought out the worst in me, seemed like. Made me say things I didn’t feel, act like somebody I wasn’t, which wasn’t something I done except when I was with her. Now I felt so bad about what I said, I never noticed she wasn’t happy for me like I thought she would be.
“When are you due?” She reached under her seat and pulled out a glass candy dish and stubbed out her cigarette.
“Soon after the first of the year, looks like.”
She never said nothing, just looked past me out the window.
I felt bad. I felt like I had tempted bad luck, just to go along with her. I wanted her to know how I really felt. “Me and Sam, we’re excited. It’s what we want, tell the truth.”
She turned to the front and pushed the button to start the car. She gunned the engine. “I’d have thought you’d had enough of babies.”
“We’re excited,” I said again.
“If you say so.” She cranked the steering wheel and turned around, headed toward home.
“I do,” I said. “I’m the happiest I ever been.”
She sighed. “I’m glad for you, then. Good for you.”
Pretty soon I turned a little away from her and petted my belly. I told my baby, I can’t hardly wait to meet you. You got the happiest mama and daddy there ever was.
Chapter 17
That fall Sam got more hauling business than he knowed what to do with, only this time he was contracting with oil companies, and they paid good money. Not enough to get rich, but enough to pay the bills and put food on the table with a little bit left over. That little bit made all the difference. From the Sears catalog we got Dacia and Opal each their own pair of school shoes. Dacia put hers on the moment they come and wouldn’t take them off to save them for school. Then come the rocking chair and the iron crib on legs.
Opal, she never stopped talking about the baby that was coming—the baby this, the baby that—and she sewed up half a dozen gowns and made flannel burp rags. Dacia never said nothing about it. She complained about having to sleep in the bed with Opal—said Opal kicked her—and here she was sleeping in a bed regular for the first time in her life. Wasn’t nothing she liked about this new place, seemed like.
Come late one night near the end of November, I started in with my pains early, and I labored with the baby from one in the morning till five the next afternoon. I remember laying in the bed all night till the pale daylight come, and the sun’s shadow crept over the quilt hour by hour. Opal come in ever little bit and asked me did I need anything. She was big enough, I counted on her to help if I needed it. Dacia, I don’t know where she got to. At the time I reckoned she was afraid I might die like Mama done, and she didn’t want nothing to do with it.
When the light was almost gone I knowed I needed help, and I sent Sam for the doctor. When he got there he reached in and pulled on the baby’s head. The baby come out finally, but the top half of his left ear got tore off, evidently. We never noticed it for a while, and by the time we did, why, we couldn’t find the tip of his little ear. I said, it was probably in the cuffs of the doctor’s pants—you’d be surprised what-all gets in pants cuffs, I should know, and the baby’s ear was tiny—but when the doctor went to sew it back on, nobody could find it nowhere. So the baby was left with a ragged edge on his ear. I whispered to him, Never mind, we’ll just comb your hair over it, nobody’ll notice.
The baby’s head and eyes was too big for the rest of him, seemed like. To me he looked like a baby bird that fell out of the nest, with papery skin pocked where the feathers never come in. Laying there in bed, I rejoiced when he started up squalling and the doctor laid him on my chest and he dug his face into me. Sam leaned over and asked me how did I like our boy, and then he out-and-out bawled, Sam did. He petted the baby on the back and smiled and wiped off tears for a good long while.
We named the baby William Winslow Frownfelter and we called him Will. Early like he was, he didn’t weigh but five, five and a half pounds.
Dacia and Opal, they come in the bedroom and looked at him. Dacia said, “Is that what he looks like?” And Opal, she touched her finger to his hair and said she never felt of anything so soft and to be sure to save a lock of it.
But Will, he never sucked very good, and seemed like he spit up most everthing he swallered. Ever little bit he’d open his eyes and look around, but he never curled his hand around your finger. He kept waving his arms trying to dig at his hurt ear. His breaths was raspy.
In the middle of the fourth night I woken up, and when I touched him in his crib he was already cold. I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him outside. He hadn’t been outside before, and I wanted him to feel what it was like. It was pitch-black out, with a sliver of a moon, cold. There was a whistling wind in the trees.
I walked over to the little stone wall the Whiteside boys had built, and I set down with him. I put my hand on his face to make sure. I never had sang to him yet, and all I could think of was “Jimmy Crack Corn,” so I sung that. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, my William’s gone away. Babies, they don’t care how silly the words is—could be about pickling watermelon rind, for all they care—only what it sounds like. I heard my voice get real low. It broke into cackling, my throat was so wore out. I set on the wall and rocked him and sung to him. I felt a little warm blood oozing out between my legs, and I clamped them shut.
Directly the sky begun to lighten and the crows started in cawing. Not long after, Sam come running outside in his underdrawers. Soon’s I seen him, I jumped up and took off running. I knowed he would take my baby, and wasn’t nobody going to take my baby away.
* * *
Now I have to tell the part I always left out of the story.
When I got out of bed to check on the baby, I couldn’t see good in the half-light, but things was so quiet I had a real bad feeling. I never reached down and touched him and found him cold—that’s just the way I always told it. Truth is, I picked him up and pulled him close, and when his little cold face touched the flesh of my neck—well, I can’t hardly stand to think about what happened next. Lord help me, I throwed Will down on the floor. I done that. It was like my very skin couldn’t abide the feeling of him cold on my neck. I throwed my baby on the floor, I did. Then I stood there still and silent, seeing would Sam wake up. Seemed like the whole world would have heard that sickening thump. Standing there in the darkness, it felt like my spirit was cut open like raw meat, and something touched the rawness, and pain went through me, and if I could have took back what I done, I would. I surely would. I wanted to go back five minutes in time, just five minutes. I felt like I could live with him dead, maybe, but not with what I done, and then I thought, No, go back five hours or whatever it needs, make him alive again and warm against me. Now according to what Mama told me, wishing unnatural things contrary to the Lord’s will, that’s blasphemy, it’s defiance, it’s disobedience. And I said to myself, The hell with the Lord, where was the Lord when this innocent child breathed his last, ain’t nobody taking my baby. Will, he ain’t been outdoors yet, I’m taking him outdoors so’s he can feel what it’s like, and that’s what I done. I said, The hell with the Lord. The Lord can go to hell, and, Mama, I’m sorry, but ain’t nobody going to take my baby away from me.
I never told nobody what I done, not even Alta Bea. Not even Sam.
* * *
Mrs. Whiteside, she talked to Sam and had us to bury Will in their family graveyard up on the hill east of the big house. There wasn’t no arguing with her, that’s how she was raised, to help people in trouble, we didn’t owe her nothing. She told Sam they’d planted lilac bushes on the north for a windbreak, and there was always flowers for Decoration Day. She paid for the funeral home, the coffin, everthing.
A storm come up the night before the burial, coating the branches with ice. I remember they clicked ever little bit as we stood there by the grave. Afterward I walked by the graves of two girls and a boy Mrs. Whiteside had lost herself. That’s all I remember from that day.
That, and Dacia asking me, over and over, how come the baby died, what did I do to him, what did I feed him, did it hurt when he died, how come he died. No matter what I said, she looked at me with her eyes narrowed, like I was the liar of the world. It made me hot and cold at the same time. I don’t know what would’ve happened if Sam hadn’t pulled her away from me and took her somewheres, I don’t know where.
* * *
In the months after Will died, I started in having bad dreams. A cat would be talking to me, smiling, and then I would look away, and when I looked back, the cat’s face would be a baby’s—not Will, some baby I never seen before—and then its eyes would go glassy, and then I knowed it was dead. Or I would feel myself getting pulled into a room, and then I would see a tall iron crib in there, and I’d grab aholt of the doorjamb, trying to keep myself from getting sucked into the room, but my hands would lose their strength and I’d get sucked in there, and just w
hen I was about to get in sight of the crib—I couldn’t look, I couldn’t not look—I would wake up sweating and crying. Or I walked up to a winda and just throwed Will out of it, just throwed him out, and then I wouldn’t know for sure was he dead first—what if he wasn’t dead first?—and a feeling like a razor would come up in my throat. I had a lot of dreams like that. And in the daytime, when the memory of what I done come over me, I withered, and it took all I had to just raise my head up.
In the mornings Sam looked wore out. Over them months his voice got softer and breathy. Seems like he never got shet of that rasp after that. Sometimes when I woke up in the night he would be crying next to me in the bed. When that happened I just laid there. I didn’t figure he’d want me to know he’d broke down like that. And wasn’t a thing I could do for him.
Day by day I didn’t feel like doing nothing. My arms was heavy. I did the chores that had to be done, but I didn’t take no pleasure in it. Half the time I couldn’t remember, did I just wash this plate or not? Off and on I wondered, would we ever be as happy as we was? I woke up one morning and couldn’t remember why I ever liked the house. Now I hated it.
Opal, why, she took to making pies and things to cheer us up. For a while, Dacia couldn’t hardly get a rise out of me. I just set and looked out the kitchen window. I felt like I was waiting to wake up.
Alta Bea drove over from Oil Hill most ever day. She was pregnant herself, but she never hardly mentioned it, only casual-like, and we never made no fuss about it, which I reckon she understood. At first she wasn’t happy about it. She complained to me her diaphragm didn’t work. Now me, I didn’t have no use for such a thing, and it half scared me to even think about sticking something like that inside me, but Alta Bea’d said to me many times, she was determined to “space out” her children. But as time went by, seemed like she got used to the idea of the baby. At least she stopped complaining about it.
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