“Lord Amighty,” said Opal.
“Dacia gives him a strong cup of coffee when he gets like that,” Hiram said. “Seems to help.”
“Dacia!” Opal hollered. “My Lord in Heaven! Dacia! Where’s she at?” She looked around. “Where’s Dacia?”
“Where’s Dacia?” Sorrow said. “Where’s my mama?” She begun crying.
“Best not mention D-a-c-i-a,” I said to Opal.
“My mama!” Sorrow cried. “Where’s my mama!” It near broke my heart, how pitiful that child’s cries was.
Then we heard Trouble start up hollering out in his hidey-hole.
Hiram didn’t make a sound, but tears started running down his face.
“What the Sam Hill?” Opal said.
About that time we heard Sam come driving up.
I never knowed what to do. I felt like the world had turned upside down, and me with it, which I reckon it had. I’d heard tell of people with a fever, how they might turn delirious, and I always wondered what it felt like. Now I felt like I knowed.
* * *
That evening, Trouble took to standing in the corner like he done before. Ever three or four breaths his chest caved in like a hiccup. Now Sam, without so much as a by-your-leave, he brought out his fiddle, and Trouble snuck a peek over there ever little bit. Seemed like he got curious in spite of whatever else was going on in his head. Sam set on the edge of his chair like he always done, and slowly he drew the bow across the strings half a dozen times, and then zing, zing, zing, three short notes, and then he run up and down the scale, and then some more zings. All this real soft without paying no attention to Trouble. Now Trouble, why, he started up fingering the buttons on his shirt again. If he saw you noticing that he was looking at Sam and the fiddle, he looked away and put his hand back on the wall. I wondered, had he ever heard music before?
Sorrow, now, she sidled over to Sam and stood next to the chair and bent over and stuck her fingers on the strings and made a sour sound. Sam laughed and pulled the fiddle up to where she couldn’t reach it, and she laughed and jumped up and tried again, and he laughed some more, and they went back and forth like that for a while. Sam, he was being careful not to go too far with his teasing and hurt her feelings, like some people does. There’s an art to it.
Trouble, he never said nothing. Hiram looked over at him ever little bit, like a cat keeps her eye on a sleeping baby.
Pretty soon Sam lowered the fiddle and let the girl pluck the strings. Right away she broke one, but Sam never got mad. He just took it and pressed it between his thumb and forefinger and stretched it out a little bit and gently sawed it with the bow and made it squeak. Well, Sorrow screamed laughing. Even Hiram smiled.
This went on for maybe an hour, Sam letting her play with his fiddle and make funny noises. For a player that always took his fiddling serious, it was a wonder how patient Sam was. Then after Sorrow got tired of that game, he played “Three Blind Mice,” and then he sung it with his eyes closed and his face transported. Sorrow’s eyes followed ever motion he made, and her little mouth moved like she was singing, too. I peeked over at Trouble, and his left hand was fingering his buttons just like Sam done the fiddle. He was looking afar off.
Me and Hiram happened to look at each other in that moment, and I seen his chest rise and fall. I got the chills. The look on his face—a hunger to hope, but a fear to—was one I never seen before in nobody under forty. I didn’t know a child that age could even playact what I seen on that face. Them two boys, it was hard to see how they would turn out all right, all they had going against them.
After while Trouble and Sorrow fell asleep where they set, and me and Sam and Hiram went out on the porch. It was gathering twilight, and there was a breeze sprung up. You could see the moon rising and hear the trees rustling. Sam said, “Nice night.”
We all three set there for a while thinking our own thoughts.
I looked at Hiram. “Looks like you’re the one been looking after them two.”
“Yes’m.”
“For some while.”
He nodded.
Sam pulled out a cigarette.
“You mind telling us how you come to be with them?” I said.
Hiram give a big sigh. “Dacia, she . . .” He sighed again, a ragged sound with tears in it.
Sam said, “Take your time, son. We got all night, or however long it takes.”
Chapter 23
Hiram told us it all started when he was living with his own mother and father in a house in some woods. He didn’t know where this was at nor how long they lived there. About two-three years ago, he reckoned, when he was about five, his mama woken him up in the middle of the night and hollered, “Run! Run! Get up! The woods! Run! Run!” She raised up the window and pushed him out, and he done like she said to. He run as fast as he could up into the woods.
He run till he couldn’t run no more, and when he was wore out, he burrowed in a place between a tree and a bush and fell asleep. When he woken up it was daylight, and he was in his nightshirt, he was barefooted, and his feet was raw and cut up. It took him a minute to recollect what happened.
He wondered how come did his mother push him out the window. Did a bear or a mountain lion get into the house? Did the house catch on fire? He remembered his father coming home one day a while before this, talking about a bad man that killed some people for their gold. Had that bad man come to the house? Should Hiram wait in the woods, or go back home?
He turned it all over in his mind but didn’t get no closer to knowing what to do. Directly he decided to walk back home, but soon he realized he was lost. Maybe he’d got turned around when he stopped to sleep. Maybe he’d been walking futher away from home instead of closer. He was scared. But he felt like there wasn’t nothing to do but keep on walking, so that’s what he done.
He slept two or three nights in the woods. He got hungrier than he ever was before, and so thirsty he couldn’t make no spit. He felt like he might die of thirst. Sometimes he thought he seen things.
Then he found himself a little stream. He put his mouth in the water and drunk like a horse till he throwed up, and then he drunk some more. He laid down and slept, and when he woken up he decided to walk downstream. If he stayed close to the creek, he at least would have water. He stopped seeing things.
Inside half a day, he come to the camp. A woman, or maybe a girl, was setting cross-legged on a blanket in front of the tent. He hadn’t saw very many womenfolk in his life, and he never had no idea they could be so beautiful.
I wasn’t surprised by that. Dacia always had been a pretty girl.
“Are you an angel?” she said to him. “I never seen an angel so white and shiny. Trouble, come out and see this angel.” A little boy crawled out of the tent. Hiram heard hiccupping from inside, and he guessed it was a puppy or a baby.
“No’m, I’m lost,” Hiram said.
She laughed and raised a brown bottle to her lips and drunk from it. “ ‘No’m, I’m lost,’” she said. A drop trailed down her neck. The little boy scooted close to her and sucked on his thumb.
Hiram said, “I wonder, could you give me something to eat?”
“Your bellies, that’s all you men ever think about,” the woman said. “Your bellies and your pricks.”
Hiram swallowed. He hadn’t heard that word before, but from the way she said it, he reckoned it meant something bad. “I been lost for a long time.”
She sighed and jerked her head toward the tent. “Might be some biscuits.”
In the tent a baby was laying on a blanket in a wooden box, and next to her there was a cloth bag. He tore into it and eat the three biscuits and a moldy piece of salt-meat. He dug his fingernails into the seams to get the crumbs. A baby bottle was laying on the blanket. He turned his back to the baby and sucked out half of what was left in it.
After while, a man come, carrying a bucket of little trout. While Dacia and the children slept in the tent, the man, Tom, cleaned the fish and showed Hiram how to
pack them in mud. Then he built a fire and put the mud balls on rocks near the edge and left them to bake.
Hiram, he never knowed nothing about living in the woods. He didn’t recollect ever seeing a campfire before, nor eating outdoors. His parents must have been city people. He remembered horses walking along mud streets and buildings with windows that went up high and the sounds of many footsteps on wooden boards. They must not have lived in the cabin very long. He wondered, had his mother and father give up searching for him and gone back home by now?
While the fish was cooking, Tom set on a blanket near the fire. He was a short man, thin, with a long beard and long hair. He reminded Hiram of the boogeyman from a fairy tale his mama had told him—the troll under the bridge.
“Come on, boy, I won’t bite you.” As long as Hiram knowed him, Tom only called him “boy.” Hiram had to keep thinking his own name to himself so he wouldn’t forget it, but after while—months or years—he did forget his last name.
He set down next to Tom on the blanket. “Where’d you come from?” Tom said.
Hiram told him the story.
“Well, don’t fret yourself,” he said. “We’ll find your folks. Can’t be far.”
Hiram was relieved. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Can’t be far.”
Tom smiled. “I like a boy that ma’ams and sirs. Your folks done right by you.” He got to talking about gold then, his eyes bright. He claimed he’d found lots of gold dust and two nice nuggets, and any day now he was sure to find a big vein. Meanwhile, he was living a man’s life, the only life a true man, beholden to nobody, would be content with. That word beholden stuck in Hiram’s memory.
Some days later Tom walked Hiram into town, set the boy on the bar in one of the taverns, and hollered for quiet, saying the boy was lost and looking for his folks. Hiram looked around, among all them strange faces—mostly men, a few women—for somebody he knowed. By and by the noise took up again, people laughed and drunk, and Tom, he got to talking to a woman over a bottle of whiskey. He whispered to Hiram, “Be right back, boy, keep an eye on things,” and left the room with her. When he come back, Hiram jumped off the bar and most knocked him down. Tom vomited on the floor. Somebody carried him outside and throwed him in the street, with Hiram following. Tom laid there all night. Hiram waited next to him like a dog.
After that, Tom nor Dacia made no more effort to find Hiram’s folks that he knowed of.
Over the months, Tom showed Hiram how to catch and clean fish, how to clean the pistol and shoot squirrels and rabbits, gut them, skin them, cook them. How to build and stoke a fire, how to make biscuits and coffee.
Tom was careful to do his panning far from camp. Hiram asked him to show him how, but Tom said the boy had no business panning. He never showed Hiram none of the gold he found. He took it to the assay office in town and sold it, and Hiram thought he hid most of the money somewheres away from camp.
Dacia, she showed Hiram how to change and wash diapers, and she learned him, as well as she could, his letters and numbers. Sometimes she wrote down little poems for him to read. She walked him to town once and showed him where to buy canned milk, flour, coffee, and whiskey. After that he went by himself. He went to ever building and asked after his folks, but he had no luck. Once in a while he found a newspaper on the ground. He would take it back to camp and read it, working it out word by word. He didn’t know what a newspaper was. The stories seemed like fairy tales.
Tom, he started going futher and futher out to pan, staying for three-four days. Dacia drunk her whiskey, cried sometimes, laughed sometimes, and slept. Mostly slept.
Sorrow, why, she growed and discovered things like a baby does—how to hold her head up, turn over, set up, crawl. Whenever Hiram fetched firewood or fished or hunted, he tied her to a tree so she wouldn’t end up in the water.
The children never had enough food to fill them up. They eat meat ever four or five days, and the rest of the time it was biscuits. Hiram learned how to make gravy, and then he started saving grease, and that give them something to eat on the biscuits.
Hiram found out he liked to build things. He started simple: a stick buried in the ground, stacks of rock. Later he fenced in a place for Sorrow to play in so he could stop tying her up. He built a seesaw and a target to throw rocks at.
After two winters and a spring, the day come when Hiram found a gold nugget the size of his thumb. He seen a glint in the water, and he worked the nugget back and forth with his knife till it let go. It was heavier than he expected for as little as it was. He kept it hid for a few days, till Tom left to go panning. Then he give the nugget to Dacia.
“God in heaven,” she said. Her eyes got big. “Let’s go to town! All of us! Everbody gets a toy! And shoes! And cake!”
“Cake cake cake cake cake cake,” said Trouble.
Dacia screamed laughing. She took Trouble by both hands and danced with him around in a circle. “Cake cake cake cake cake cake!” Sorrow laughed and burbled.
But as they walked toward town—all of them, even Hiram, chanting “cake cake cake cake cake! ”—Dacia got quiet. She didn’t hardly speak at all. When she come out of the assay office, she said, “We’re going on a trip. We’re going to a fairy land far away.”
“Cake cake cake cake cake cake,” said Trouble.
“No! No cake!” Dacia said. “And don’t you cry or I’ll slap you silly! You’re going to a fairy land! I been waiting for a miracle, and I got one!”
“Fairy land,” said Sorrow.
Dacia lifted the girl to her hip and grabbed aholt of Trouble’s hand, and Hiram followed as she walked with them to the livery. The two little ones was excited to see the horses, and Hiram watched them while Dacia rented a buggy. Even Trouble forgot about cake when she piled them in the buggy and it started jerking along. The children never seen the like, nor had they felt what it feels like to be pulled along by a four-legged animal in a buggy. Once you’ve felt that, you don’t never forget it.
They rode for several hours till they got to a bigger town, and then they waited at the train station. Dacia brought them bread and a hunk of dried meat to take with them, and she wrote the note and pinned it inside Hiram’s pocket. She forbade him to read it, and he obeyed.
When the time come, she put them on the train and pretended she would be right back and left them there.
* * *
The story finished, Hiram set there on the porch, staring at the floorboards, his forearms on his knees.
“Jesus Christ,” Sam muttered.
“Dacia, she ever talk about me?” I said. I ain’t proud of it, but that’s what was on my mind.
Sam put his hand on my arm, and I shrugged it off. Nobody said nothing for a while.
“I made you a pallet,” I said to Hiram.
“Yes’m.”
But none of us moved. It was like we was too stunned to.
Hiram said to me, “So you’re Dacia’s sister, right?”
“What’d she say about me?”
“Her? I don’t know. I just thought—I don’t know.”
Sam cleared his throat. “Don’t matter.”
Hell it don’t, I thought.
After Hiram went to bed, me and Sam set side by side on the porch in the dark. The stars was out, and the cottonwoods was swaying and clacking like they does.
“Well, Bertie,” Sam said. “Some fun.”
It felt like I was teetering on the edge of a tall cliff. Me and him both. “Get serious.”
“What for?” He laughed through his nose.
Some time passed.
“That Dacia,” I said.
“No telling what-all happened.” Now his voice had an edge to it.
“Well, it happened,” I said, sarcastic. “At least twice.”
He stiffened and never said nothing.
I felt stung. “You on her side?”
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cigarette, but he made no move to light it. “None of that don’t matter no more, can
’t you see?”
I felt my wrath rising. He never understood the simplest things, seemed like.
“What do you want to do?” he said. “Tie ’em in a gunny sack and throw ’em in the Walnut River?”
I blowed air out between my lips. “I never said nothing like that.”
“What’re you so afraid of?” he said, point-blank.
“I ain’t afraid.” Which of course was a lie. What wasn’t I afraid of, more like. What if I went through all it would take—looked like it would take plenty, a blind man could see that, like Opal said—and then Dacia come sashaying home one day and wanted them children back, like she said in her note? Be just like her. And what if she didn’t, and it turned out Sam couldn’t make himself love these children? How could he, rough like they was, and not even his? Children couldn’t live just on pity, I should know. And three at once, who’d been through what they’d been through. What if I turned out like Mama, one eye on the rat poison—but I couldn’t bear to think about that, never could.
“I know this ain’t what you figured on,” Sam said.
“They ain’t even your kin.”
He crushed the unlit cigarette in his fist, drew back his arm, and throwed it out in the yard. I heard him grunt with the effort. It’s harder to throw something light than something heavy.
“Well, they ain’t,” I said.
Now he wrestled his boots off, swearing under his breath, and stood up in his stocking feet. “We ain’t going to fix this all tonight,” he said. “Better get some sleep.”
“You go on,” I said. “I’ll be in after while.”
“Suit yourself.” He never touched me, just walked inside the house.
Oh, I was afraid all right, and broody and mean. I knowed I was taking my wrath toward Dacia and trying to wrap it around my shame like a thin, scraggly shawl, just like I always had. Didn’t seem like I could help it.
Chapter 24
I woke up before dawn the next day. The bedroom was dark, and Sam was still sleeping. I heard birds scratching around outside, or maybe a possum. My first thought was, Dacia’s alive, she’s got children, they come on the train yesterday. I pictured Opal’s room, on the other side of the wall, and little Sorrow sleeping next to her. I pictured the boys’ pallet in the front room. It was true all right.
All the Forgivenesses Page 28