All the Forgivenesses

by Elizabeth Hardinger

I heard the doctor say, “(Something) she (something)?”

  “Well, she (something) the boy (something). She (something).”

  “She (something)?”

  Seems like all I kept hearing was “she,” “she,” “she.”

  “She (something),” Sam said.

  “I mean she (something). How many?”

  There was a silence.

  “Sometimes they (something), like a cat,” the doctor said. “Just (something) and act like (something). She.”

  “She,” Sam said.

  “Well, she won’t (something) (something),” the doctor said.

  I kept hearing “she” over and over again all the time I slept. Seemed like I slept a long time. In my sleep Mama come to my bed and kept saying, “Shhhh, shhhh, shhhh.”

  * * *

  Some days later the doctor come in with Sam. “How you feeling?” the doctor said.

  “Tolerable.”

  “You hurting anywhere?”

  “In the belly down low.”

  “Let’s have a look.” I flinched when he pulled back the blanket—it’s surprising how just sliding a piece of material across stitches makes your belly scream—and lifted off the bandages. He looked at the wound and then retaped it and covered me back up.

  I caught my breath. “When can I go home?”

  “Don’t you like the service here?” he said, like it was a joke.

  “I got things to do. You know.”

  “We’ll see how things look in a week or two.” He wrote something down. Then he nodded to Sam and walked away.

  “How you feeling? Really?” Sam said. He set down on the bed, and I felt an itchy pain. He jumped up and the bed bounced, and it felt like I’d got kicked by a mule.

  I motioned with my hands for him to ease himself onto the bed. “How’s things at home?”

  “Don’t worry about that. You just get well.”

  “I’ll thank you not to tell me what to worry about,” I said.

  He sighed. “Opal, I don’t hardly see her no more. When she ain’t here, she’s at the shop all day and half the night.”

  I nodded. “You getting enough to eat?”

  “Mrs. Whiteside sends food down ever little bit.” He looked at me. “You in pain?”

  I shook my head.

  “You look like it.”

  I closed my eyes and laid my head back, acting like I was falling asleep. I had something to say to him, but I hadn’t figured out how. I felt him touch my hair, smoothing it with the back of his fingers.

  Pretty soon he said, “Had to call Hollis Laird over to the house. Bluebell, she throwed a shoe.”

  “Is that right.”

  “Got a letter—”

  “I’m barren, Sam,” I blurted out. Waves of shame rolled over me.

  I felt him startle. The bed was thrumming. “I know,” he whispered.

  My face felt so tight it hurt. “You can divorce me,” I said. “You got ever right.”

  “Open your eyes,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Marry somebody that can give you children.”

  “Goddamn it, open your eyes.”

  I gritted my teeth, tasting salt. I opened my eyes and looked at him.

  “Don’t you never say that again long’s we live,” he said.

  “Sam.”

  “Don’t you know we almost lost you?” Now he covered his face with his hands and broke down.

  “Go on home,” I said. “I’m wore out.”

  He drawed his arm over his face to wipe the tears off. “You just get well.” He petted my shoulder.

  I pressed my hand against my stitches and heaved myself over on my side, facing away from him.

  “You just get well,” he said again.

  “I’m wore out.”

  He sighed. Pretty soon I felt the bed rock a little and then settle. He laid a hand on my hip for a second, and then I heard his boots on the slick linoleum floor.

  There’s punishment, and then there’s punishment. I felt like I could endure God’s wrath for the things I done, but for one thing—I couldn’t bear the look I seen on Sam’s face. Pity. Pity like I used to feel for Mama, even as she turned her bed into her coffin.

  Now I felt afraid. I wanted to believe Sam still loved me like he done before, but I never had the courage to. Besides, there was things he didn’t know I done—to Timmy, to Will—things I never told him, coward that I was. I felt like there would be a lot to go through coming up, and I couldn’t see how things could ever be the same between us again.

  Chapter 22

  After three weeks in the hospital, I come home. Then a couple days later, when Sam and Opal was both at work, I went through all my underwear and rags and gathered up the ones that had bloodstains on them, half a bushel basket’s worth. I carried the bundle out in the yard and throwed it on the ground and set a newspaper on fire and throwed it on the pile. I stood there and watched the flames and smoke rise and curl. Goodbye, you blood, you pain, you Goddamn misery, I said to myself. I was half scared, acting like such a heathen, but I stood there and let the fire mesmerize me. As it sputtered down, the word that come to my mind was never. I was never going to have another miscarriage, and I was never going to have no children. I was twenty-six. Never seemed to stretch out over a long time.

  As the next few months went by, what I felt was just empty. Sam, he was gone, working, in the daytime and sometimes overnight, and the same thing with Opal in her shop. When she was home, it was the shop this, the shop that, her fabric order was late, Mrs. So-and-So had gotten fat, her best seamstress had the pleurisy. It didn’t feel like I had nothing to say to neither one of them, nothing that amounted to very much. Sam, seemed like he didn’t hardly play the fiddle at home no more. Seemed like he couldn’t keep the look of pity off his face.

  I’d set in the daytime and ask myself, what did I used to do? How come I used to be so busy from morning till night, and now I can’t hardly fill up the days? There was chickens to dress and ironing to get done, but seemed like they didn’t hardly take no time no more. My own chores didn’t seem to take much time neither. I hated feeling useless, which was what I felt like.

  Alta Bea would come over with her girls, and they’d play outside while me and her talked. One time she told me she’d started sleeping in the baby’s room. Harold still wanted a boy, but she was determined she wasn’t having no more babies. I wondered how long Harold would put up with that. Me and Sam, when I healed up we started having relations again, but for a long time I never took no pleasure in it. Seemed unnatural—wasn’t nothing going to come of it.

  Nobody hardly ever mentioned Dacia, but seems like I thought about her more often than before. Seems like most ever night I dreamed I was searching for lost things, with a bear or coyote or flying horse chasing me. I had forgotten the last thing she said to me, and I got to where I would spend hours thinking about nothing but that last awful night. I felt like I couldn’t stand not knowing what happened to her. It gnawed at me.

  But like a lot of other things, wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

  * * *

  One June day the next summer, I was dressing a chicken when a redheaded boy rode on a bicycle up to the front porch. “You Mrs. Bertie . . . ?” He looked down at a piece of paper and tried to sound out “Frownfelter.”

  I wiped my hands on my apron and told him to help himself to a dipperful of water while I read the note. A Mr. Newt Stiggins of the train depot said there was three children there by themself, asking for me. Said they was my niece and a nephew and another boy. Said Mr. John Naab at the sorghum mill had told him where we lived at.

  Didn’t make no sense.

  “You got the wrong house,” I said to the boy. “I don’t have no niece and a nephew—well, but for my brother William’s children, but they—”

  “Mrs. Frownfelter, south corner, Whiteside farm,” the boy said. “That’s what it says, look for yourself.”

  “I’m telling you, child, I don’t—” And then
something went through me.

  The boy said, “You all right, Missus?”

  I said, “Lord Amighty. What has she done.” I backed up and set down hard on the edge of the porch—collapsed, more like.

  “Any answer?” the boy said.

  “Surely not,” I said. “Surely not.”

  He swung his leg over his bicycle.

  “Wait.” I stood up. “If you wait till I get the horse hitched up, you can ride to town with me.”

  When I got there, there they was. The littlest, the girl, looked like Dacia through and through, but with Mama’s eyes. She had long, wavy chestnut-colored hair like Dacia’s, filthy though it was. She couldn’t have been much more than two or three year old, I reckoned. The middle boy, maybe five, he looked a bit like Opal, with deep-set eyes, bags underneath. He stared down at the ground and never looked up at me. The biggest one was white as a ghost, with the whitest hair I ever seen on a child, white eyebrows, white eyelashes, white hairs on his arms. You would’ve thought he was an albino, but his eyes wasn’t pink. He looked too old to be Dacia’s natural child, maybe eight.

  They all three was deep-down grimy.

  I stood there and stared at them for a good minute. They stared back, except for the middle boy, who kept looking at the ground and fingering his shirt buttons.

  It felt like I was spinning.

  The pale boy unpinned a note from inside his trouser pocket and handed it to me.

  Dear sister. Am sending three mouths to feed but have took ill and cant manage. I pray you still live in the same place, if not they will find you. The older boy is one we tooken in, he was lost. I am certain you will be mercival, you always was. I hope the day will come when I can reclame them. Mama always said, I was her on the inside, and you was her on the outside. My best to Sam.

  There wasn’t no name, but of course I knowed who it was. She was alive. She wasn’t dead on the railroad tracks, or murdered, or raped, or drowned, nothing like that. Then I thought, well, raped maybe, and I felt my skin quiver.

  For some minutes I stood there just breathing. It was like I hadn’t took a natural breath for the six years she’d been gone.

  Dacia was alive.

  I read the note through three times, studying the scribbly writing like it would answer me all the hundred questions that was in my mind. She knowed I would be merciful? Where was that feeling when I was looking after her? “Mouths to feed”? Like I would see her children as livestock? Even in her extremity, whatever it was—“took ill” was like to be a lie—she’d managed to get her digs in.

  But I took aholt of myself, swallered hard, and put the note in my pocket. I looked up at the oldest boy. “Where’d you come from?”

  He fidgeted.

  “I mean, what town? Where did you-uns start out from on the train?”

  He sighed. “She took us from camp into town, and then into a bigger town to where the train was at.”

  The little girl sniffled. You could see she was about to cry.

  “You don’t know the names of the towns?”

  He looked at me and squinted. “There’s a long creek, maybe a river, by where the tent was at.”

  “Tent?”

  “Where we lived at.”

  “You know the name of the river?”

  He shook his head.

  I nodded. “What’s your names?”

  “I’m Hiram,” the boy said. “This here’s Trouble, and her name is Sorrow.”

  The boy he called Trouble gasped and let out a big breath, and I realized he’d been doing that all along ever little bit without me paying it no mind.

  “Can’t you get your breath?” I said to him. I tried to look him in the eye, but now his eyes was fixed on my mouth. I dipped my head, but I couldn’t catch his gaze.

  “He does that,” Hiram said. “Don’t mean nothing.”

  I looked from one child to the other. I felt my heart slowing down. They was just children, after all. “You hungry?”

  “A man with a round red hat give us bread-and-butter sandwiches yesterday,” Hiram said. “On the train.”

  “Yesterday.” I reached out my hand to Sorrow, but she ducked behind Hiram. “Let’s go get something to eat, want to?” I said to him, and when he followed me, the other two followed him. I took them to the alley pump to wash them up—they seemed to drink as much water as got on them, they must have been thirsty as fish—and then we took the back door into Arbogost’s. Tillie looked close at the children but didn’t say nothing. She give me a questioning look, but I didn’t feel like talking just then. I got a pound of sausages and a loaf of bread, and me and the children set down in a grassy spot by the tracks and eat sausage sandwiches. They eat like they was starving, which I guess they was. We visited the privy. Then I asked myself, What now? What happens now? You ever think about that, Dacia? Then I felt bad. It wasn’t like I myself didn’t have nothing to be ashamed of.

  I got out the note and read it again. Mouths to feed.

  Seemed like there was only one thing to do, which was get in the buggy and ride on home. Which we done. We didn’t hardly say a word to each other. They just looked around, curious, except for the middle boy, who kept his eyes cast down.

  Sorrow, she fell asleep on Opal’s bed as soon’s we got home, but she said her first words to me as she laid there with her eyes blinking. “My mama give me some red mittens.”

  “She did?”

  “Uh-huh. Red ones.”

  “I bet they was warm.”

  She held up her hands and waggled them back and forth.

  “Mittens is a nice present,” I said.

  “My daddy let me put a plate in the river.”

  “He did? What for?” I wondered did this have anything to do with mittens, but children is like that, moving from subject to subject, especially when they’re sleepy.

  “Trouble, my brother?” she said. “He caught a crawdad.”

  “In the river?”

  She said, “Can I go home now?” Then she closed her eyes and slept like she was dead.

  * * *

  At suppertime Opal come walking up the road as usual, and there we was, me and the children. She took off her hat and give everbody a friendly smile. “Well now, who are you folks?”

  “Opal—” I started to say.

  “Who’re you?” Sorrow said.

  “Opal Winslow. Who’re you?”

  Sorrow scooted behind Hiram, and her thumb went to her mouth. Her hair looked like a rat’s nest after her nap.

  Me, I was trying to find words to explain things to Opal without coloring them for the children. While I stood there with my mouth open, why, Opal smiled at Hiram and stuck out her hand. “Hello there, pleased to meet you.”

  He nodded. After a moment he shook her hand. “Him, that’s Trouble,” he said, pointing. “He don’t say much.” Trouble was standing in the futherest part of the room, with his back in the corner, where he’d been all afternoon. His hands was planted against the two walls like he was about to push the walls back. It was hard to know what he might be thinking. His face didn’t have the look of a simple person, but the expression he wore was like he wasn’t quite there with you.

  Opal looked at Trouble but talked to Hiram. “Trouble? You say his name is Trouble?”

  “Yes’m.”

  Opal bowed her head toward Trouble. “You shake hands?” I seen he was looking at her mouth, like he done me.

  “He don’t like to be touched,” Hiram said.

  Opal smiled. “Me neither.”

  Trouble started rocking on one foot. He still hadn’t uttered a word.

  I started to tell her who she was dealing with, but she just kept going. She was having a good time. “How about you?” she said to Sorrow. “Your name Trouble, too?”

  Around her thumb Sorrow said, “A course not.”

  “A course not,” Opal said. “Well, let me see. Is it Mary?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “How about Jane? No? Well then
, Adelia? Emily?”

  Sorrow stared at her with big eyes.

  “I know—Obadiah. That’s it, I bet. Obadiah.”

  “Man name,” Trouble screeched. “Man-name, man-name, man-name.” His voice was like an animal’s, a coyote’s maybe. Even as he howled, he stared at the ceiling.

  We all looked at each other. “We heard you,” I said.

  “Man-name,” he hollered.

  I took a step toward him, but Hiram stuck out his arm to warn me back.

  “Man-name, man-name.” He was panting.

  “What on earth?” Opal said. She looked from me to him and back again.

  Hiram took Sorrow’s hand, and the two of them walked to the corner. Slowly and softly, Hiram said to Trouble, “It is a man’s name. It is a man’s name. We know.”

  “Man-name,” Trouble yipped. He let go one hand from the wall and run his fingers up and down his three shirt buttons, up and down.

  Hiram dropped Sorrow’s hand and squatted down. “Let’s go outside. How about it?” He stretched out his hand, and Trouble took it. As Hiram led him outside, Trouble turned around and walked backward, his eyes on the floor.

  “What the Sam Hill?” Opal said.

  “You must be thirsty,” I said to her. “I made some lemonade, want some? And cornbread?” One thing I knowed, you can always feed people.

  “What’s wrong with that boy?” Opal said. “Who are these children?”

  Sorrow, she walked over to where Trouble’d stood and run her fingers along the wall.

  “Wore out,” I said. “Rode the train for days. Didn’t hardly have nothing to eat.”

  “Train?”

  I got out plates and glasses and set them on the table.

  Hiram come back into the house and stood there looking from me to Opal. “It bothers him when things don’t make sense.”

  “There’s something wrong with that boy,” Opal said. “A blind man could see that.”

  “Well, at least we know he can hear.” I pulled the towel off the top of the pitcher. “And he don’t abide teasing, evidently.”

  “He don’t get jokes,” Hiram said. “He don’t mean nothing by it, he just don’t get it.” He blinked like he had a tic. “He likes to be in a little place by himself, so I fixed him a nest out by the woodpile, temporary. We stay, I’ll build it up.”