And then I would tell her I remembered the cardboard thing with the feathers, and I would ask her, did she remember that thing? What was it? And listen for what she said. Maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe it was all made-up, all lies, maybe . . .
All the way home I planned and planned. One time my mind wandered, and I even planned a way to tell Sam about the baby I lost during the war. But I drove that thought away when it come to me that Dacia wished the next baby would die, and my stomach turned over, and I vomited there on the road. I told myself, Stop, just tell her what’s in your heart, and, for God’s sake, tell her you’re sorry, since you are, and tell her you wish to God you could take it all back.
And even then, I didn’t know, could I do that, would I have the fortitude to bear her wrath, her throwing it up to me for the rest of our lives. Maybe it was best just to let it lay there.
* * *
In the morning Sam woken me up, breathless, saying he couldn’t find Dacia. Her things was gone, the eight dollars he kept hid in the toe of his good boots was gone, he’d looked everwhere, she wasn’t nowhere on the place.
Chapter 20
When a fourteen-year-old girl runs off without no note or nothing and you don’t know what happened to her, you spend your days in a fearsome place where you dangle between wrath and dread and regret. Your throat gets swole up and stays that way, and your stomach grinds itself into meat. If you get distracted and forget it for a minute, why, soon’s you remember again, ever hair rises up. That’s where me and Sam was at after Dacia left. It’s a hard place. I done my best to act hopeful around Opal, but she wouldn’t hardly say two words in a row, only set and embroider like her life depended on it.
That first day, me and Sam acted like maybe Dacia wasn’t gone for good. Sam rode into town and asked around for her, and he talked to the sheriff. Nobody seen her, nobody knowed nothing.
Soon’s he come into the house he said to me, “She home?”
I was setting at the table, mending the elbow of his good shirt. I shook my head.
“Where’s Opal at?” he said.
“Took her up to the Whitesides’ to oil their mopboards. Should keep her busy all day.”
“I don’t suppose any of them seen Dacia?”
I shook my head again.
“Could she be playing a joke?” he said. “Trying to scare us?”
I never answered. We’d already had the same conversation before he’d went to town.
“Wouldn’t hurt to go look down at the creek,” he said, casual-like. “I’ll round up some men.”
“Sam?” I said. “Set for a minute.” Then, choking and swallowing, I told him what I’d puzzled out the night before—the angel wings, the rash, Dacia’s stories. I told him it must’ve been true, what she’d said—Mama had killed herself, and she’d brought Dacia in on it—and I’d beat her for nothing. When I was done my throat was dry.
It was a while before he spoke. He opened his mouth several times, and finally he said, “She couldn’t have been right in her mind, your mama.” His voice was quiet.
I nodded. I knowed he was walking on eggshells. Much as I craved that, I hated that he felt he had to.
He got out his cigarette lighter and fiddled with it. “I reckon Dacia can’t stand what your mama done, and she takes it out on you.”
We was silent for a long while, the both of us. Finally, I said, “I just wish—”
“We’ll find her,” Sam said. “She couldn’t have got very far.”
* * *
They never found no trace of her down at the creek, nor anyplace else we could think of. We talked to everbody we knowed, and Sam, he called on ever sheriff and pastor he met up with in his hauling work. We wrote William and Buck in case she went back to Obsidian, but they never seen her. We put ads in the papers in Kansas City, Wichita, Omaha, Denver. Nary a word.
There come a time—I don’t know when, after a month maybe—when me and him stopped acting like she was coming back, and we settled into that place where dangling people live at. Ever time Sam come into the house, he give me the look that asked had I heard anything, and I give him the look said I hadn’t. There ain’t no mercy in living that way. You don’t feel like you get any rest.
Opal, she slept in the bed with us for a week or two before she give up and went back to sleeping in her and Dacia’s bed. I heard her crying in there ever little bit.
Over time, Dacia faded into the back of our minds, like she was bound to. Humans has got to be able to see far enough to put one foot after the other, or else they lose their mind. Me and Sam still had a child to care for, after all.
* * *
And things change all around you, all the time. Wiley got electricity in 1922, and Alta Bea and Harold built themselves a big house by the river, and they paid a fortune to have electric wires strung out there. The new house had four bedrooms and three water closets and a telephone. I’d thought Alta Bea’s folks’ house was fancy, but this one outshone it. I never seen nothing so modern.
One Sunday me and Alta Bea made pickles while Sam and Harold went fishing. Her new kitchen give water with a turn of the faucet handle. Canning takes a lot of water. Seems like there was spoons, rags, jars, jar lifters, lids, pans, pots, teakettles, and cucumbers everwhere you looked. By late afternoon the house smelled like sugar and vinegar and pickling spices. Smelled so strong, her little girls Alice and Ruby run outside to play, like we’d been telling them to all day.
Alta Bea, she was pregnant again. Little Alice’d told me, “We’re going to get a baby boy, and his name’s Harry.” When I asked her how she knowed it was going to be a boy, she said, “Because Daddy said so.”
Me and Alta Bea got to a stopping place in the canning, so we set down and put up our feet. Alta Bea made us some ice tea. She poured whiskey in hers.
Pretty soon the side door banged open, and Harold come in carrying a mess of catfish on a stringer and plopped them down, all slimy, in the middle of a cookie sheet full of lids we’d just scalded.
Alta Bea said something like, “Don’t put those filthy things there—can’t you see we’re canning?”
Harold stood there looking riled, didn’t say nothing. Directly Sam come in.
The air in the kitchen was crackling with bad feelings between Alta Bea and Harold. It hit me I seen this before between them, plenty of times, and never hardly noticed how hateful it had gotten. When Mama was alive it was like that ever little bit between her and Daddy, too—there was something there that wasn’t getting talked about but everbody felt it. Funny how you can watch something happening like that for a long time without hardly paying it no mind, like you feel something tickle your hair and you reach up and grab it, and when you look down in your hand, there it is, a bug, and you ask yourself, how long has that been there.
“Did you hear me?” Alta Bea said. “Get those fish off my table.”
Harold leaned over, picked up the fish in his two hands, and carried them over to the sink, paying no mind to them dripping on the floor, like men will. Plopped them in the sink. Got out his knife. Reached in a drawer, grabbed the sharpening stone, started scraping the knife. It was peculiar to see him in work pants and boots and a dirty, tore-up shirt. You usually seen him in a suit and collar, either leaving for work or coming home from work, all shined up. He was doing real good. Seems like they wasn’t finding new pools like they once was, so he’d gotten out of lease grafting. Now he had him a job with a big company from back east, bossing all their drilling and pumping operations in south and southeast Kansas. Getting a little paunch, I noticed.
Sam set down next to me and put his arm around the back of my chair.
Now Harold picked out a fish and thumped it on the head with the knife handle. Grabbed it behind the whiskers with his first and second fingers and under the chin with his thumb, started stripping off the skin with a needle-nose pliers. Of course blue cat don’t have no scales, they have skin, and it’s slicker than snot. It took some tries before he got all the
skin peeled off. Me and Sam and Alta Bea all just set there, watching, not saying nothing.
Then he sliced through the belly and wrenched out the guts, and then there was the gristle noise, ragged, as he sawed off the head. You leave the head for last so you have something to hold on to while you’re skinning it. You don’t want to touch them whiskers. They’re stiff and pointed as a knitting needle, and they can give you a nasty jab. That’s how come you keep your fingers flat on the head and curl them around the base of the whiskers.
There was a moaning-like sound as the gills let go of their air. The smell, mixed with the pickling smells, was disagreeable.
I looked over at Alta Bea and seen her staring at the back of Harold’s head. She tipped up her glass, but there was only a couple drops left. She licked at them.
I expect it took fifteen or twenty minutes for him to clean the mess of fish. Thump it, strip off the skin, gut it, cut off the head. Nobody moved, nobody said one word that whole time. I got to thinking about the story Sam told me, when Harold pounced on that French girl in the graveyard and Sam like to never got him off of her. I hated to think what kind of a man Harold was, underneath. And Alta Bea, I thought about her as a child, wanting to slide behind the paint on a wall whenever she was around people, and how things in that house seemed off to me. Her and Harold’s new house was big and modern and had electric and indoor plumbing, but things was off there, too. I wondered, was Alta Bea sorry she’d married Harold? And her with a third child on the way. And her drinking like she done. I couldn’t see no way out of where they was at.
Now Harold rattled the cupboard as he jerked out a pie tin. He plunked the pink flesh on it and set it down on the table. He glanced at Sam and tromped out the kitchen door. The guts and heads was still laying in the sink where he let them drop.
Alta Bea stood up and got out the fry pan, the lard, the flour, the cornmeal, the salt, the pepper, and proceeded to fry the fish.
Me and Sam set there waiting for somebody to say something, but things was silent till we heard the girls squealing outside, “Daddy! Daddy!” You know, that delirious way children holler when they see their father.
After we eat, we played cards until late. Alta Bea got drunk. Before we left, Sam offered to help Harold get her up the stairs, but he said no thanks, he could handle her.
Me and Sam, we never said much on the way home.
Over time, seemed like we had less and less to talk about, beyond the weather, the bills, Opal’s schooling, things like that. For one thing, there was Dacia. But then there was the other thing we never talked about—I was having miscarriages ever four or five months, seemed like. I kept wondering, what if I never was able to carry another baby? What if we went on and on, month after month, never knowing would I or wouldn’t I, till I got so old we just give up? After my war year when I lost the first one, I’d felt like I was strong enough to get through anything. But this I didn’t think I could bear. Ever time I felt the stickiness between my legs or discovered the stain in my underwear, the shame of my failure fell upon me. I come to dread the sight of blood, which had never bothered me before, and even just seeing the color red give me a feeling of bereavement. I remembered Mama saying, “The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” but to me it never felt like the wind let up.
The Wiley doctor never knowed how come I kept losing them. “It’s just something that happens,” he told me. “If you could see the women coming in here with seven, eight, nine of those brats, you wouldn’t be complaining.” After that I started going to the doctor in El Dorado, but seemed like he didn’t know how come neither. Told me to stop several times a day and put my feet up, which I done, but didn’t make no difference. Sometimes Sam knowed when I lost one, but if he didn’t, I didn’t tell him.
I prayed to God, let me carry a baby. I ain’t asking for riches or nothing, just a baby. A little head of hair to smell, lips making a little O, arms and legs flailing. Can’t I have one, like everbody else? Just one?
But truth is, I never actually believed the Lord heard me. Or if He did, He kept saying no. No, no, no, no, no, and again no, month by month, year after year. No.
Me and Sam, we growed rough edges, prickly, to where we irritated each other when we rubbed together. The months melted away, and then the years.
Chapter 21
In 1925 Daddy died, and Alta Bea, she went with me to Kentucky for the funeral. Sam was busy working, and Opal, she wouldn’t go. Said she didn’t hardly remember Daddy anyways, she was only a child when we broke up the family and moved to Kansas, and she was only a baby when we left Kentucky, and she didn’t know none of them people, and how come was we burying him in Kentucky anyhow, with Mama in Missouri. It was a shock for me to hear all this. The older ones and younger ones in a family, it’s like they have whole different lives.
I told her, Daddy bought that plot back home years ago, and maybe he was too cheap to take Mama home, but we was too stubborn to do like Daddy done. And I told her, you only got one daddy and he’s only going to die once, and you can’t go back and do it over again when you get older and understand why you have to go to your daddy’s funeral. And I said, what about the twins, and William and Dora and Buck? Didn’t she want to see them again?
She told me, I ain’t a child, stop preaching, and there wasn’t no more time to argue with her. The train come when it come, and you had to catch it or wait another three days.
Only when me and Alta Bea was on the train did I recollect Opal had been sick on the ride to Kansas as a child. I wondered how hard it must have stuck in her mind, that even now she wouldn’t complain about it but let me go on and on like I done, and her making up excuses. With Opal, if you wasn’t careful you could just forget she even existed.
* * *
Buck and William and Dora, they’d already rode with Daddy’s remains to Galena, and they met me and Alta Bea at the train when we got there. At first we all stood in the spitting snow and looked at each other, not being huggers. Then Dora broke away and come and throwed her arms around me and started dancing me around. The two of us started crying, and then she let go of me and everbody took a turn. Alta Bea, she stood off to the side. After William embraced me, he offered his hand to her, and she shook it and smiled. “You remember me,” she said, like she was surprised.
Then everbody was talking at once, smiling and crying. Something happens when you see your beloveds you last seen years ago, and you see the age on their face, but at the same time you also see them like you remember them. It’s like the years come and go on their face even as you’re standing there.
Buck, he took Daddy’s death hard. He never did get married, and him and Daddy’d lived together over the barbershop for nine years. It’s a mystery to me how Buck got along with Daddy like he done, and me and William never did. I will say, Buck was always sweet and patient like that. Opal takes after him, sure enough.
William and Dora had the twins with them, who of course I hadn’t saw since we moved to Kansas. They was fifteen now, and both just alike. William had them to look me in the eye, and I babbled on about taking care of them when they was little, but of course they just stood there red-faced and dropped their eyes to the ground like boys does. It was more like they was nephews or cousins than brothers, which I knowed would happen, which is how come I cried bitter tears when we moved. But they was good-looking boys, healthy and sound, and they done William and Dora proud. Them two also had four of their own, two boys and two girls. You could see the Winslows and the Sweets in them.
I’ll never forget that trip, and not just because we was burying Daddy. Seems like it was the first time in my life I had the feeling people was looking at me and saying to each other, “That’s her.” It turned out, I never knowed how notorious I was back home, nor what for.
* * *
Seeing Daddy in his coffin made me remember washing Mama. I recollected what she looked like, gray like he was now, and I thought about the sound of the water trickling into the bowl as I wrung ou
t the cloth. The memory of it pierced me. But Daddy’s death never hit me like Mama’s. I thought, Well, like everbody else, he won’t suffer nor cause suffering no more.
It was a relief when they closed the lid and my brothers and a couple of cousins carried the coffin out of the church. We had the funeral in Mama’s church because most of Daddy’s people had scattered hither and yon, and the few that was left wouldn’t set foot in our church. Besides, they never had no church, they met in people’s houses.
“You ready?” I said to Alta Bea, and we headed to the basement for the funeral dinner. Halfway down I smelled pork and game and corn and greens and meringue. I was back home, sure enough. A girl again, six year old.
They had four long tables for people to set at, and two tables set end to end filled with food. Lines of people was moving along either side. People was talking, laughing, crying. They was putting their hands on either side of people’s faces, staring at them like they was looking at a picture.
A heavyset woman, about sixty, trotted up to us, her hands fluttering. “Albertina, Albertina!” she hollered. “Come set with me!”
I cocked my head to one side.
“I’m Ina, I’m a cousin of your mama, I’d know you anywhere, you look just like your folks, I remember you like it was yesterday, you won’t remember me, you was too little, but I remember you like it was yesterday, who’s this?” She didn’t talk fast like people in Kansas, but she did talk continuous.
“This here’s my friend Alta Bea,” I said.
Ina grabbed me like a prize and set me down in a folding chair. Then she started in naming our relations and enumerating where each one fit on Mama’s side. Behind Ina’s remarks I overheard a man’s voice. “I walk in the door, and she says, ‘If that’s a box of candy, you can just throw it in the trash.’ So I walked outside and throwed it in the trash.”
“Good thing the ground ain’t froze yet,” a second man said.
“Third funeral we been to this month. Hope Flora don’t catch a cold like last time.”
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