“Dacia!” I hollered. “You couldn’t have been more than four or five! Nobody remembers that far back!” I stopped and looked around my own front room to be sure I was in the real world.
“She said, ‘I’m tired—I’m going to Heaven,’ and I said, ‘Can I go?’ and she said no, I was to stay and help you look after Opal and the twins. Told me, said, ‘Don’t you fret,’ she was gonna be wearing a snow-white robe and singing with the angels. Said, ‘Ain’t no tears in Heaven, ain’t no dirty diapers neither,’ and she screamed laughing. Said she couldn’t stand to have no more babies, she was too tired.”
I set there with my mouth open. Ain’t no tears in Heaven. Mama was like to say that.
“Her and me, after that, we talked about it ever little bit, though I never knowed she meant she was gonna kill herself, I swear I never,” Dacia said in a flat tone. “We just talked about it like it was a trip she was going on. It was like it made her happy to talk to me about it. She said, ‘Dacia, you got eyes in your head. You see things how they is. Not like Bertie, I don’t know where her eyes is, she’s always looking somewhere off a ways. But you,’ she told me, said, ‘you I can talk to. You see things how they is.’”
Dacia looked down at her hands. “Said, ‘You and Bertie put together, you’re me. She’s me on the outside, and you’re me on the inside.’” Now Dacia looked up at me. “That’s what she said. God’s truth.”
I set there with my mouth open.
“Said, ‘Don’t tell Bertie. She’ll want to go, and you know what a fuss she’d make. It’s our secret.’ Oh, I liked that—loved it. Our secret, just me and her, not you. I used to look at you and think, ‘Mama’s going on a trip with the angels, and I know it, and you don’t, ha ha ha.’ Only thing I had all to myself, see?”
All the while she was saying this, I was picturing times I seen Mama and Dacia together, giggling, Mama so wore out she couldn’t hardly hold her head up, but still tickled by Dacia and her ways. And Dacia glancing toward me and then turning her head, something secret in the corner of her eye. Me feeling fretful, feeling left out, tucking the covers around Mama, bawling Dacia out, smacking her, shooing her off. Jealous.
The shame I felt filled me up with pain, but it didn’t excuse these lies Dacia was telling. I said to her, “How comes you to blacken our mother’s memory this way?”
“It’s the truth,” she said. “I swear to God. I swear on a stack of Bibles.”
“How comes you to tell this lie? You got nothing to gain. Is it just to hurt me? You just evil?”
Now her voice dropped, and it was like she was pleading with me. “It haunts me, Bertie—why else?” she said. “Haunts me like a ghost. Gonna haunt me till the day I die. I can still see her standing there, pale white, her nightdress hanging from her shoulders like her body wasn’t even there. That snow-white robe she talked about. Singing with the angels.”
I pictured that nightdress. I remembered how fragile it was. I remembered ripping it in half when me and Alta Bea was washing Mama’s corpse.
Now I lowered my voice. “The kindest thing I can say is, you was dreaming.”
Dacia give a long sigh. “I was always so jealous of you.”
What? went through me. I almost choked. Her jealous of me?
“You done everthing together, you and Mama,” she went on. “ ‘You’re too little, Dacia, you’re too little, leave us alone, shoo, shoo, we’re getting supper, can’t you see? Go play. We’re workin’, leave us alone.’”
Dacia, she was always good at imitating people. In her mouth, my voice was hateful, prideful, mean. Took the air out of me.
She went on. “Me and Mama talking about her trip, it was the only thing I had that was mine, all by myself. Can’t you understand that? All I had.”
I got out, “I can’t help it I was born first.” I felt how small that sounded.
“Try to understand,” she said. “Me and Mama’s secret turned out to be the awfulest thing, the horrible, awfulest thing. Mama’s trip to Heaven. All that time, what she was really talking about. I only just realized it, not too long ago, what she meant, she was going to kill herself. Maybe just in the past year I put it together in my mind.”
It felt like we was rolling downhill like a rock, getting faster, and I tried to slow it down. “You was dreaming, hear me? That night? You was dreaming you seen her in the kitchen.”
“I never knowed she was going to do it, don’t you see? I never knowed she was going to eat that poison, I swear I never. I thought she was just going on a trip, all that time, even when I got to be, I don’t know, seven, eight, that’s all I thought she meant, I swear. Going on a trip.”
“Don’t matter,” I said. “It’s all a lie.”
“How old was I when she died?”
I heard myself growl.
“Six? Seven?” she said.
“You know how Goddamn old you was.” I hated she made me swear.
“No, I don’t! I never knowed what year nothing was. How would I?”
“You know what year you was born, and you know what year Mama died.”
“How would I?” she said again.
It shocked me, now that I thought about it. None of us at home never said what year nothing was, and Daddy, he never put up no stone on Mama’s grave. I knowed what years things happened, but I was older than Dacia, and I cared about them kind of things. “You was almost nine,” I said finally.
“So, eight.” She nodded. “When she died, I never put it together in my mind. I just thought she died, like people does. Afterward I’d think about it ever so often, but I would get to some certain place in my mind, and then I couldn’t get no futher.” She cleared her throat. “One night a while back—Sam was still in the war—I dreamed about her, and when I woke up, I all the sudden got it. I just knowed. Mama, all that time she was really telling me she was gonna kill herself if she got pregnant again. Not go on a trip—kill herself. And then, by God, she done it. And the baby, too. Not in so many words, but she was telling me.”
She fell silent then. I took this all in. The cords in my neck was twanging.
After a little bit she went on. “That night she died—she couldn’t hardly stand up straight. She had one hand on the table, and her other hand around her belly, bent over. Her nightdress, it was draped on her like it was hanging on a hanger.”
I heard the tears pooling in her mouth, and then she started crying full out, sobbing.
I was stunned. “Oh my God, you really believe it, don’t you?” I said. “You really believe this story you made up out of whole cloth.” It was all a lie, of course, but I got a picture in my mind’s eye of something like that, true or not, hounding you as a child—something sneaking up behind you ever little bit, something you can’t quite see or hear or touch or smell, but you can just barely taste it in the air. You would get close to it, and it would slip away, just out of reach. Something like that would warp you, sure enough. For an instant I seen Timmy, smiling, heard his voice piping leapfrog, leapfrog, and I didn’t know where I was at or what year it was or if he was really dead or not.
Then I reminded myself, what Dacia was saying wasn’t true. It wasn’t possible in this world. I felt like I had to make her own up to that. “She died of the childbed fever,” I said. “You didn’t have nothing to do with it.” I said it sarcastic, but then it hit me, Maybe she feels like it was her fault Mama died. Like she could have stopped it somehow. But she was just a child. What could she have done? Nothing. Just a child.
But anyhow, it was a cock-and-bull story.
Dacia sniffed and took up a napkin and blowed her nose. “Don’t matter what I say. You believe what you want to. Don’t matter what nobody says. She just drifted off, that’s what you want to believe, so by God that’s what happened. Don’t matter what nobody says, me nor nobody else.”
“Not when it’s a lie straight from hell,” I said.
Now I heard a throat being cleared behind me, and I like to jumped out of my skin. I whirled in t
he chair, and there was Sam standing there. He was holding a dishtowel twisted in his hands.
“How long you been there?” Soon’s I asked, I realized I’d heard him come in a while back, but it hadn’t registered at the time.
Before he could answer, Dacia jumped up and flew at the mess on the table—the doll, the clothes, the bits of doll hair. She flung her arms left and right, scattering the scraps. “She don’t believe me!” she hollered at Sam. “She don’t believe nothing I say!”
“Dacia—” Sam said.
“You’re evil!” she screamed at me. “You’re the liar!”
Sam took a step toward her.
“You’re a slattern! You was throwing yourself at all kinds of men, trying to get a husband! Don’t say you wasn’t!”
I let out a howl, and I jumped up from the table so fast I slammed hard into its edge. But I never paid it no mind. I run to the stove and grabbed my stoutest wooden spoon, my pickle spoon. Now this wasn’t no spindly, thin-handle pine spoon like you buy in the store. This one had been Mama’s—a big old handmade hickory spoon with a burl in it, a good fifteen or twenty year old, hard as a rock—and I took it and started hitting Dacia with it as hard as ever I could. She screamed and run, but I caught her and swung at her—her back, her behind, her shoulders, wherever the spoon landed, I didn’t care. I heard Sam hollering at me to stop, but it was like something had aholt of me. I’d never beat nobody like that before. I kept beating on her, and her running around the room and screaming, till all the sudden I hit something—the wall or the table, something—and the spoon split in two along the line of where the burl was, and one piece of it went flying.
It was like a spell had broke. Sam caught aholt of Dacia and pinned her arms at her sides. “Hold still,” he said to her. “Calm yourself. You’re gonna make yourself sick.”
“She busted the pickle spoon on me!” she hollered. “The Goddamn pickle spoon!”
“I never!” I hollered, but my hands was trembling like I had.
Now Opal come out from their room, sleepy, and stood next to the door. “Please don’t whip nobody, Bertie, please.”
Dacia hollered to Sam, “Even Mama never whipped us with the pickle spoon!” Her hand went to the back of her neck, where I seen a red welt starting to swell up.
I just stood there by the stove, panting like a dog, holding the pointy end of the spoon. I heard Dacia yelling and Sam trying to talk sense into her, but my mind went someplace else. Of all things, I had a picture of Mama showing me how to kill a hen, years and years ago. If you hold her by the feet and don’t joggle her around too much, she’ll keep her head upright and level, like an Arabian dancing lady, and she won’t get fretful. You just tenderly lay her down on her side in the grass, put the broomstick across her neck, set your feet on the broomstick astraddle her head, and give her feet a good firm yank. “Her head slips right off, see?” Mama’d said. I remembered some kind of a pink tube unspooled from the carcass where the head used to be. “She don’t feel a thing, see?”
Now Opal started up wailing, and I come back to the present. My heart was beating so fast it hurt, and my muscles felt electric. I felt like I was about to fly right off of the earth.
“I ain’t never having no children,” Dacia said to me. Her voice was vibrating, but she wasn’t hollering no more. “And if you’re smart, you’ll wish your next baby dead, too.” She pointed to my belly.
I started after her, but she wriggled out of Sam’s arms and run past Opal into their room and slammed the door.
I groaned and lowered myself into the chair. I felt a bruise on my hip where I’d bumped into the table before. I was still panting.
Sam, he walked over to Opal and petted her arm. “You want to sleep in the bed with us tonight?”
She nodded and walked into our room. She was in a daze, seemed like. I cringed when I seen she was sucking her thumb, and her eleven.
Sam pulled up a chair and scooted close to me.
“You hear all that?” I said.
“Enough.”
I wiped my nose with my sleeve. “You know I never throwed myself at no men.”
“I know.” He put his hand on mine.
“Them lies about Mama . . .”
Now he didn’t say nothing.
“It was lies, Sam.”
He sighed. “I never knowed her.”
Anger rose in me. “Well, I’m telling you, it’s lies, all of it.”
“I know.” He petted my arm. “But could—I mean, could some of it be true?”
Now I stood up. “I’m gonna go for a walk.”
“Must be coming on ten, eleven.” He rose up from his chair.
“I won’t be long.” I got my shawl and walked out of the house and onto the road and turned south, away from the big house. I walked along the road for I don’t know how long. It was pitch-black out, and there was a warm wind, like breath. I felt sand on my ankles. Thoughts flew at me, one after another. Dacia knowed exactly what she was doing and knowed exactly how I would feel about it, and where on Earth did she come up with that story about Mama? How come her to say such evil things? I felt bad—it was true I favored Opal, who wouldn’t?—but that didn’t explain how come Dacia was so angry so much of the time. I thought about her playing with cards on Mama’s bed when she was little, making up stories about the kings and queens. I felt my shoulders slump. She was doing the same thing now, only she wasn’t a little girl no more, and her stories was made up to hurt people. Before, it was horses sprouting wings and flying off, and now, it was rat poison flying up like sawdust, the picture of the dead rat waving its legs, Mama saying ain’t no tears in Heaven. Rough-on-Rats. I pictured that box up high on the shelf.
And then, just then, I recollected the day, back when Mama was still living, when I was hunting for the blue colander and I dumped out the junk drawer and found that thing—the two pieces of corrugated cardboard with white feathers stuck in the folds, them two cardboard ovals tied together with string. I’d thought it was Dacia’s childish attempt to make an Indian headdress. I recollected the blood spots in the feathers, the silverfish chew holes. That thing Dacia made with feathers, that thing she said was something she’d made to play with, I’d threatened to beat her with a switch over it, and she’d gone out and cut a switch and stripped the leaves off, preparing herself for a beating, rather than tell me the truth. Which was, I now understood like I’d been hit over the head with a rock, the truth was, that feathered get-up was angel wings. Dacia’d made angel wings for Mama to take on her trip to Heaven. Mama’s big secret trip, the one she talked about with Dacia all that time they was living in her bed.
Walking down the road in the dark, picking my way so’s not to step in a hole, I knowed it for the truth. They was angel wings. Mama’d told Dacia if she got pregnant again she was going on a trip to Heaven, and Dacia’d made her wings to fly with, and she’d hid them in that dresser drawer you couldn’t hardly open. And when Dacia was telling her stories, them angel wings turned into horse’s wings and the horses took off and flew to Heaven.
The truth was right there in front of me, just like it was for Dacia. Mama, my own mama, she’d put this burden on that child, a burden nobody could bear, or should have to. How bad do you need company, to make your child an unknowing partner in something so awful? Bad, I reckon. My mama done that, the very mama who I washed her body after she died and petted the bulge in her belly. Everthing Dacia’d said about Mama was true, and, like as not, Dacia herself didn’t understand to this day how bad of a thing it truly was, how much it had warped her.
I felt skinned. I felt like the very meat and blood of me was open to the air. As far as Mama killing herself and leaving everthing up to me—four little children and a drunken father and a failed farm and all the rest—that thought skipped across my mind like a flat rock on a creek. I wouldn’t let myself hate Mama that much or, worse yet, let myself picture what she must’ve been like inside, the part of her that she said Dacia was like. I didn’t want
to look at that. I put it away someplace deep. I told myself, Mama’s over and done with, don’t make no difference now. Dacia’s the one I got to contend with.
And Lord help me, I’d just beat Dacia till I raised a welt on her neck. And I knowed she had more bruises and welts to come in other places—I’d felt them in my hands by the reverberations in that hard old pickle spoon. Dacia’d took it too far, she had, like she always did. She’d lied in the end, lied to spite me in front of Sam, told a stupid, obvious lie that cast doubt on the whole fantastical story about Mama. That was Dacia, sure enough. But that didn’t make the rest of it untrue. I knowed if I thought about it some more I would remember other things that happened when Mama was sick, little things, things that would point to the truth.
I spread my shawl wide and let the wind swell it like a kite. Then I pulled it in and wrapped it around my face to hide my terrible shame, and I turned for home.
I tried to plan out what I would say to Dacia. I wouldn’t say I was sorry for beating her. What she’d said about me, them names she called me in front of my husband, she’d asked for it, she deserved a beating. No—I would say I was sorry for that, it was too harsh, I’d lost my temper. I would ask her to forgive me. No—I would say it was awful hard being the oldest, trying to keep the family together, she never understood . . . No—I would start with Mama. I would ask her about the poison. Did she see Mama eat it? When? Where? And as soon as I thought that, I remembered Mama’s mottled rash she got off and on. Was that from the poison? Did she eat it for a while and then quit, and then take it up again? What else did Dacia know about it?
All the Forgivenesses Page 24