I couldn’t see Alta Bea’s face from where I set in the backseat, but I seen her stiffen and the back of her neck get red.
That night after supper Sam got out his fiddle case and headed out to the porch, and me and the girls looked at each other and grinned and followed him. Sam set in one chair and me in the other’n, and the girls on the floorboards with their legs dangling off the edge.
He played for a long time just making chords, tuning the bow, trying it out, back and forth, his eyes closed. For a long time he picked and plucked scales and pulled the bow with his ear up close to it. After while Dacia said, “ ‘Careless Love’!” and Opal called out “ ‘Frog Went a-Courtin’!” and Dacia said, “That train song about the oranges!” And so none of us noticed at first when Sam dropped his arms. He give me a bewildered look and shrugged.
“Sam’s wore out,” I said to the girls. “Had a big day. He’ll—”
Dacia stood up and turned to me. “No, he ain’t,” she said. “He’s never too bushed to play music.”
Sam hung his head. I seen his hands was shaking.
My instinct was to hustle the girls off to bed, but they had gotten too independent in the last year for that. I didn’t want to holler at nobody on Sam’s first day home.
Opal, she got to her feet and set her hand on Sam’s knee. “He’s tired in his spirit, ain’t you?” she said, solemn as a forty-year-old.
We all froze, even Dacia. I felt spit gather in my mouth, I was so like to cry.
But Sam just smiled his big smile and leaned over and kissed Opal on the forehead, and then he packed the fiddle away in the case and nobody said nothing else. The girls went to their room without being told, and me and Sam went to bed shortly after.
* * *
Sam woke me in the middle of the night, must’ve been three, four o’clock. “My time’s mixed up,” he whispered. “Can’t sleep.”
I scooted over and laid on my side with my stomach against him. “I’m so glad you’re back.” There was a rumble. “That me or you?”
“Thunder, off a ways,” he said. “Fixing to rain.”
“We could use it.” I rubbed my face against his chest.
He sucked in air and sighed real deep. “Can we go to Will’s grave tomorrow?”
“Sure enough.”
There was a long silence, and I thought he’d went back to sleep. But he said, “Seen a lot of graveyards.”
I petted his arm.
“Little white crosses, by the acre.”
I groaned.
“Didn’t want to get buried over there,” he said.
“Thank God you never.”
“You should’ve saw them farms. Hedges, they had hedges for fence? So thick a sheep can’t get through. You never seen the like.”
I started to say, “You told me all this in your letters,” but I never did.
Sheet lightning crackled in the window.
“And the houses was made of rock mostly, a lot of them thatch roofs,” he went on. “We’d come across a burned-out house, dead horses, dogs.” He was talking fast now, like he hardly ever done. “This one time, there was these two old people and a little girl. You could see what happened. Machine gun. They was running through the grass to the house. Got the old man first, fell on his face, old lady, landed on her side with her arms flung out, little girl, throwed her up in the air like a rag doll, landed all twisted.” He sniffled. I thought maybe he was crying, but I put my hand on his chest and he wasn’t.
“I figured, grandparents, granddaughter. Maybe an orphan. Seen a lot of children wandering around, beg for food.”
“That must’ve—”
“Me and Harold, we was on our way back to camp one night, we eat supper at a family’s house in town. This was before the battle of the Argonne. I told you about that, the people in Beauchamp? They’d have some of the fellas over to eat, bottle of wine, flowers on the table? A mother, little boy, daughter, grandmother—nice folks. So Harold, he gets drunk, and I haul him out of there, and we was walking back, and we come up on this little family graveyard. It was dark out. We seen this lady, I thought she was a growed woman, but closer I reckoned she was fifteen, sixteen, she was laying facedown on this grave, new grave, bawling, and Harold, he goes over to her and gets on his knees and touches her, you know, and she screams, and I tell you what, Bertie, I had to punch him a time or two to get him off of her. I thought I might have to shoot him, the son of a bitch.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Next day, he says, ‘I done what? Me? I don’t remember.’”
“Hard to trust him after that,” I said.
“Things in a war, they ain’t . . .” I felt him shrug.
We was both quiet for a long time.
“It light enough out yet?” he said.
“For what?”
“Go see Will.”
That would have been the time to tell him about the other baby if I was going to, but I never did. I just said, “Let me get my shoes on.”
It was cold out, and the air was wet, but the rain hadn’t came. There was a thick fog along the ground. We tromped up there, him and me. The little duck Opal had made, we found it stuck in the lilac hedge and put it back on Will’s grave. We didn’t stay but ten minutes. Sam didn’t say much. I had the feeling he’d said all he was going to.
* * *
A couple months later Sam come home with a truck that somebody’d made by putting a truck bed onto a Model T Ford. It was already three or four years old, seems like, but Sam had learned a lot about motors during the war, and he knowed how to make it go no matter how old it was.
Opal and Dacia heard him coming and went running out to the road. I watched them from the front porch. He drove that truck right up until the tires almost touched the house. They all three was laughing fit to die.
Sam pumped the foot-feed. “Come take a ride!”
“I got supper to get!”
“That can wait! Come take a ride!”
Well, of course I pulled the pan off the fire, got me a sweater, and went out there and climbed into the truck. It made an awful racket. I had to put my hands over my ears. Off we went, heading toward Wiley.
The road was mostly ruts, and we rocked back and forth and up and down, and after while my breakfast wasn’t setting on my stomach too good. I had Sam to stop, and I got out of the truck and throwed up by the side of the road. I felt awful, shaking. Opal climbed down after me and petted me on the shoulder, but then she got a whiff of it and throwed up, too. She was always sympathetic like that.
Inside the truck Dacia got to laughing, and she couldn’t hardly stop.
Now Sam got out and come around to where me and Opal was. “You sick, little bird?”
“I bet she’s expecting!” Dacia hollered through the window.
“Are you?” His voice had hope in it.
I heaved twice and throwed up again.
Opal groaned and walked to the back of the truck. I heard her choking back her bile.
“They’re both expecting! Opal too!” Dacia yelled.
Now Opal was ten or eleven years old and of course hadn’t never done nothing, so what Dacia said was preposterous. But still it made me mad. “You take that back,” I said to her.
“Bertie and Opal’s in the family waaa-ay,” Dacia said in a singsong voice.
“That ain’t funny,” Sam said.
I was so riled, I swallered hard and climbed into the truck and snatched her by the hair and pulled her down onto the ground, her screaming the whole time. “Say you’re sorry!” I hollered. “Say you’re sorry!” I had her by the arm, and I was shaking her, making her head snap once.
Then I heard Sam say, “That’s enough, that’s enough, let her go now, that’s enough.”
I let loose of her hair, and she took off running back toward the house. I was panting like a dog, and my throat gurgled. I heaved again but nothing come.
Sam petted me on the back. “You got to be careful. You got to take care of yoursel
f.”
Opal walked toward me. “Are you?”
I hadn’t told nobody yet, and I was loath to, afraid I would miscarry again and shame myself. But Opal had caught me by surprise, and I nodded, and, to my shock, her and Sam throwed their arms around me and rocked me.
I lost that one a while later, couple weeks maybe. It wasn’t as hard as the other one. One night I felt that ache like before, and I went out to the backhouse and that was it. To comfort me, I told myself a story. I told myself this baby come too soon after the war, while the bad feelings from Sam’s war stories was still hovering in the bedroom where he told them. So the baby’s spirit refused to come into this awful world. It was the kind of a story they used to tell back home in Kentucky, like the Rumpelstiltskin story I made up for Dacia—a story to explain how come something happened—and I thought it through sundry times. It meant that when things settled back down, when the leftover ugly war feelings went away, me and Sam would have our baby and live happily ever after.
Next morning I told Sam and the girls it was just a false alarm, like I’d said to Alta Bea the first time. Dacia, she give me her stink-eye look she had, but she never said nothing.
Chapter 19
“They opened a picture show in El Dorado,” Sam said. “Let’s go Saturday, want to?” He folded the newspaper on his lap and drawed on his cigarette. He and Harold, they’d been back home for a year.
“Ain’t you playing at the dance?” I waved smoke out of my face. Only thing I didn’t like about setting out on the porch. But I had a mess of peas to shell, and it was a nice summer evening.
“They ain’t finished painting the hall yet, so no dance this week.”
“Well, if you want to.”
“I wouldn’t mind it.” That was Sam, talking sideways.
Come Saturday, me and Sam and Opal took baths and put on clean clothes. Dacia, she folded her arms and said she wouldn’t go. Said we didn’t really want her along—meaning me, I didn’t want her to go—and I said well of course we wanted her to go, wouldn’t have asked her otherwise, and she could just climb down off of her high horse, and she said she didn’t want to be seen with us nohow, we was clodhoppers, and I said well, whatever we are, you’re one, too. But I told myself she was fourteen now and thought she knowed everthing, so I said she could just stay home by her lonesome then.
It riled me how she was like to spoil our good times over nothing. She looked like a growed woman, a pretty one at that, awful pretty, but you couldn’t trust her like a growed woman. She acted like a child, like she didn’t care what nobody thought or needed. I often asked myself, what if I’d acted like her at that age? When I was taking care of Mama and Dacia and Opal and the twins? But it wasn’t no use. She acted like what she wanted to.
* * *
It was an evening like I like, not too hot and not too cold. There was mackerel clouds high in the sky and a little breeze. Sam drove us in the truck. Without Dacia fussing over who got to set where, the trip went quick.
I never seen nothing fancier than the Belmont. The lobby walls was decorated with curlicues made out of plaster and painted gold, and there must’ve been a dozen giant chandeliers with sparkling crystals swaying with the movement of the air. The ladies’ bathroom, which they called the “ladies lounge,” had a carpeted room with couches and chairs before you went into the toilets, and that part was white marble, floor to ceiling. Real modern.
I don’t remember what was playing—something about Indians and two white sisters. I think Wallace Beery was in it. Opal bawled her eyes out, I know that. Plus there was two silly comedies and a newsreel. It cost a dime apiece to get in.
Opal fell asleep on the way home, and Sam carried her to bed. When I got in the house, I like to died—there was Dacia setting at the table with the scissors and Opal’s doll, and all its pretty human hair strung on the floor. Its head was nothing but frizzy clumps.
“What the Sam Hill?” I felt froze to the spot, like I was looking at something impossible. What girl her age would do such a thing?
“She don’t play with it nohow.” Dacia had already ruined her own human hair doll by leaving it outdoors in the rain. But Opal had kept hers nice all this time and made dresses and coats and hats for it. She treasured that doll. She herself was eleven, just about old enough to give them up, but this one was special because Sam’d give it to her.
“I don’t care if she plays with it or not! Ain’t yours to ruin!” I grabbed the scissors out of Dacia’s hand and throwed them across the room. I felt a fury in me. My wrath felt like it was a long time coming—fierce and righteous.
She jumped up from the table. “She’s your pet! You always take her side! I hate you!”
“What in the world? How come you’re so hateful? What did Opal ever do to you?”
“Me hateful? Me hateful?”
“Ain’t nobody in this house acts mean like you do.”
“Christ Almighty,” she said. “You ain’t got no idea. You’re blind, deaf, and dumb!”
“You don’t even know what ‘dumb’ means.”
“I know ten times as much as you. I know things you never even thought about!”
This brought me up short. It was true, Dacia’d been to school a whole lot more than me. And seemed like she knowed things, things you never learned in school, things I couldn’t hardly imagine what they was. She was all the time giving me that narrow-eyed look she had, like there was a secret she knowed.
I was sick of it. “You don’t know half the things you think you know!”
She throwed back her head and laughed. A woman’s laugh, low-pitched, a laugh that sent a charge up my spine.
“I know things about Mama,” she said. “You think you loved her and she loved you—well, you don’t know nothing. You don’t know the first thing about her.”
I took in air through my nose. I heard it whistling. “If you think you’re too big for a whippin’—”
“Mama, she killed herself, and don’t nobody know it but me.” She looked me in the eye.
I reached out to slap her face, but she dodged my hand, and I brought both hands up and covered my own face. I stood for a moment not knowing which it was—a lie straight from hell, or a lie but she believed it. Sorrow poured over me, damping down my wrath for the moment. “Don’t go saying nothing like that,” I said. “Don’t conjure.” Even I didn’t want Dacia to burn in hellfire for all eternity, which might be a real thing for all I knowed.
“You never believe me,” she said. “You don’t never believe nothing I say.”
“Dacia.” I was having trouble getting my wind. I wanted to wail like a heathen.
“I swear to God, she did, she killed herself, and I knowed it all along. I knowed it, but I never—I never understood it, what it meant.”
I took aholt of myself best I could. “Look, I was with Mama when she died,” I said. “I seen her take her last breath. She just drifted away.” This wasn’t strictly true. I’d went to the backhouse, and Mama was dead when I got back. But I wasn’t about to give Dacia something to hold over me.
It was like she wasn’t paying no attention. “She was standing in the kitchen,” she said. “She was holding that box, you know the one—Rough-on-Rats.”
This was too much. I almost laughed. “Oh,” I said, sarcastic. “And when was this?”
“The middle of the night, the night before she died.” Her voice was calm.
“What time?”
This got a rise out of her, seemed like. She looked at me and squinted. “How do I know what time? It was dark. I got up to pee. There she was. I asked her, ‘Mama, can I have a drink of water?’ And the box flew up out of her hands, and she hollered.”
I sighed. “I never heard her holler. Nobody heard her holler. How comes you to make up this lie? Can’t you let her rest in peace?” I knowed I should just let her foolishness roll off of my back, but seemed like I couldn’t. I was always asking myself, Why why why? Never asked myself that about Opal. Never had to.
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Now Dacia frowned. “Maybe it just sounded like hollering to me,” she said. “It was the middle of the night, real quiet.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “She couldn’t hardly get out of bed. I was with her. She was practically dead already the night before, when I fell asleep.” Now I pictured the whole thing, me and Mama laying in bed in the blue moonlight. I felt her, hot with fever, against me. I remembered don’t you do this to me coming from inside the walls. Don’t you do this to me coming from somewhere.
I pulled out a chair and set across from Dacia at the table, only half aware I done it till I felt myself setting there.
“Rough-on-Rats,” she said. “And I said, ‘Can I have a drink of water?’ And the poison, it flew all up in the air, like sawdust.” She cleared her throat. “And she grabs aholt of the broom and starts sweeping it up. Says, ‘Go back to bed, I’m gonna blister you.’”
“Quit it,” I said. “You’re making this up.”
“Said, ‘Go back to bed, Dacia, I’m gonna blister you.’ Couldn’t hardly talk. Like whispering.”
I dipped my chin and stared at her. “Not one word of this is true.”
“Rough-on-Rats,” she said. “You remember—had a picture of a dead rat on it. Laying on its back with its legs waving in the air. Flew up in the air like sawdust.”
“Of course I remember. She kept it on top of the cupboard.”
“She eat that rat poison, Bertie, she did. They say if you take a little bit ever day for some while, why then, by and by you just close your eyes and stop breathing. Nobody knows no better.”
“She never done that,” I said. “She died from the childbed fever.”
“She told me, she never wanted no more children. She was too tired. She told me, said—”
“She never told you that!” Now I was so mad, everthing in the room took on a purple tinge.
“The twins, they was little,” she said. “One day they got to squalling, and I went over there, and she whirled around and seen me, and she screamed like she seen a bear, and I said, ‘Mama, what’s wrong, Mama?’ And her mouth opened and closed, and she never said nothing for a long time. Her eyes, they had such a look, it scared me. The skin all around them was red, and you could see the whites. Then she started bawling, and I bawled, too, and pretty soon we all four was bawling—me, her, the babies. We was scared. Nothing scares a child more than its mama crying. You know that.”
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