All the Forgivenesses

by Elizabeth Hardinger

  Alice, the oldest, she gasped ever little bit and said, “Mother?” like I was about to kill us all.

  “Quiet down, Worrywart,” Alta Bea said finally. To me she said, “Harold just had the driveway graveled, and the tires made this growling sound, and Alice—you know Alice—she said, ‘But, Mother, what if they pop?’ ” She laughed, and I smelled the liquor on her breath. Then I leaned forward so I could look in the rearview mirror—it was on the outside of the door—and I seen Alice stick out her lower lip and slide back in the seat with her arms folded.

  “Oh, there’s a nice grove of elms,” Alta Bea said, pointing out the window. “Pull over!”

  Now Alice jumped up in the seat. “Why are we stopping? What’s wrong?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out. Wait here. Don’t move. You too, Bertie.” She had her door halfway open before I got the car stopped. She jumped out and went searching among the trees. I seen her take a sip out of her flask. Pretty soon she was out of sight.

  Meanwhile the girls reached their arms out the windows and pounded on the car. “Mother!” they hollered. Ruby started to open the door, but Alice said, “Mother said not to move! Mother said not to move!”

  Sarah, she climbed into the front seat and slipped onto my lap.

  Now Alta Bea come back to the car. “I found us a place! For Christ’s sake, stop screaming, you girls! Come on, we’re having a picnic! ” She throwed open the back door, and the girls jumped out of the car, laughing and chattering. Alta Bea took off running. Me and Sarah got out, and I went to the back of the car to get the picnic bundle.

  Alice was waiting. “I want to carry it.”

  “It’s too big for you,” I said.

  “I want to,” she said, and she pulled it away, stretching her little arms around it.

  “Mind you don’t drop it.” Sarah took my hand, and we started walking to where Alta Bea had run off to.

  In a moment Alice trotted by us, holding the bundle to one side so she could see her way. “I’m coming, Mother, I have the—” Then pop! she barreled into little Gladys, knocking them both to the ground.

  Gladys screamed, clutching a bleeding knee. “Mommmm-ee-hee-hee-hee- hee-!” Pauline, standing next to her, started hollering, too, sympathetic.

  Ruby stood for a moment blinking and then started laughing. Meanwhile, Alice laid there clutching the blanket. A dark spot was spreading from something wet inside.

  “Hold still,” I said to her, hurrying over. “Might be broken glass in there.”

  “She’s bleeding! There’s blood on her dress!” Pauline hollered, meaning Gladys and her skinned knee. “Where’s Mother? There’s blood on her dress!”

  I separated Alice from the blanket and opened it up. Sure enough, there was pieces of glass scattered on the soaked wool, along with soggy sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Must’ve been lemonade in a fruit jar. “You all right?” I reached out and took aholt of her arms and turned them over to search for cuts. I didn’t see none.

  Now Sarah busted into tears. “It’s broke! It’s broke!”

  “Where’s Mother?” Alice wailed.

  “Stop! Just stop, everyone stop!” come Alta Bea’s voice a few steps away. There was a screech to it I hadn’t noticed before. Everbody froze. There was a stunned silence except for Gladys hiccupping and sniffling.

  Alta Bea walked over to her. In a quiet voice she said, “It’s just a scratch, for Christ’s sake, Gladys—stop blubbering.”

  “I have a scra-haa-haa-haa-hatch,” Gladys said.

  “Mother,” Alice said, rising to her feet. “It’s wet! It’s all wet! The picnic’s ruined!” She motioned toward the blanket. Me, I was picking out the pieces of glass and wrapping them in my hankie. Sarah was setting next to me, sucking her thumb and blinking and taking it all in.

  “There’s blood on my dress, too,” Pauline said. “I have Gladys’s blood on my dress!”

  Now Ruby busted out laughing. “It’s not blood, it’s booger-snot!”

  “No, it’s not!”

  “Snot! Snot! Booger-snot!”

  Now Alta Bea started laughing. She laughed so hard she drooled, and tears come down her face, and she wiped her eyes with her hands. After a minute she lowered herself to the ground and pulled out a cigarette and lit it, still laughing.

  “Mother,” Alice said. “Daddy says you shouldn’t smoke.”

  “Well, darling, should I kill my children?” Alta Bea said. “Because, after all, those are my two choices!”

  She laid back, laughing and smoking. Then she started to gag, and in a moment it got away from her, and she laid there gurgling and trying to get her breath. I hurried over and throwed away her cigarette and turned her on her side and pounded on her back, and pretty soon she was just regular coughing. You could tell from the high-pitched sound how much her chest must hurt.

  “You all right?” I said, pounding on her back. “You all right?”

  She nodded and coughed some more. She tried to take in a deep breath, but it set her to coughing again. It took a while for her to get to breathing normal.

  The girls never said nothing, just watched her. In a little bit they wandered off, dragging the soggy blanket with them. Alice took Sarah and Gladys each by the hand. The five girls settled in underneath of a tree and started pulling up dandelions and whatnot and playing make-believe like girls does. I kept an eye on them.

  Alta Bea laid on the ground for a while, and then she set up and got out another cigarette and pulled the smoke into her lungs. She coughed and cleared her throat and smoked some more.

  I was wroth with her—I knowed that words from a mother could haunt their children. But I didn’t know how to say nothing like that to Alta Bea, never had. So I just said, “I reckon this is the kind of a day your girls will remember all their lives.”

  She shrugged. “Alice will, and maybe Ruby. The younger ones, it’s just impressions—blood on a knee, crying, spilled lemonade.”

  “I hope—”

  “They’ll argue about it when they’re older. ‘You broke the jar. No, you did. I did not.’” She laughed.

  “I hope . . .” I said again, but I didn’t finish. I wanted to say I hoped none of them would remember what their mother said about killing them, but I was too worried how Alta Bea might react.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and pulled out her flask and drunk. Then she put her face to the sky and breathed deep, coughing a little bit. She was about thirty now, and more handsome than ever, relaxed, smiling, like somebody posing for a picture in a magazine. Watching her, I seen something: She was at the peak of her strength as a woman, as a person. Unhappy as she was, this, right now—setting in the sun and smelling the sweet summer breeze—this, slight as it was, was the happiest she would ever be. Clear as anything, I seen the road she was going down, and I seen where it would end up. I wondered—where had it started, this road? When she started drinking? Or was it a long time before that, before I even met her? I remembered thinking, as a girl, that Alta Bea was poor in spirit. So it wasn’t the drink made her that way, not exactly. I wondered what had.

  “Bertie?” she said. “Why so serious?”

  I blinked and looked at her.

  “Aren’t you the sourpuss,” she said. She lifted the flask to her mouth.

  I shifted my weight. All the sudden the ground felt awful hard on my hip.

  Now she glared at me. “It helps me relax.”

  “I never said nothing.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I got up my nerve. “Drink kills people.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “Who do you think you’re talking to.”

  There it was, after all. Her and me, we wasn’t on the same road, and finally I faced up to it. I was drawed to her the same way you’re drawed to a three-legged orphan lamb—wanting to tend to it, but also wanting to get a close look at the place in its shoulder where the leg’s missing. I felt ashamed and downhearted, confused and sad.

  I r
ose and brushed my skirt off. “I reckon we better get on home.”

  “But the night is young,” she said in a mocking tone, raising her flask.

  I walked over to the tree and took aholt of Sarah, and Alta Bea’s girls followed me back. What was we going to eat, Alice said, the sandwiches was ruint.

  I loaded the girls up in the car and got in the driver’s seat, and pretty soon Alta Bea got herself to her feet and stumbled over and climbed in. The girls chattered like magpies, but me and Alta Bea didn’t say one word the whole way home. I reckon we both knowed—at least I did—that things between us wouldn’t be like they was before, and they couldn’t be put right.

  * * *

  With everthing that happened, that summer went by before I knowed it. I felt like a horse getting broke to the saddle without no saddle blanket—pretty soon I was too busy paying attention to my new sores to fret very much about the old ones. Looking back, I see it was a blessing.

  Chapter 26

  Sam’s new job was hard on him, harder than driving the truck. Roustabouts, they done the dirty work that other men was too important to do—straightening up the site, lugging tools and materials, scraping and painting, cleaning the drill threads. He come home filthy and wore out. And ever day, the minute he walked in the door, Trouble’d jump up and down and make motions with his hands like playing a fiddle. Sam’d smile and say, “After supper,” and Trouble might holler or scream, but Sam’d get himself a bucket of water and take it outside to clean up with, and Trouble’d head to the corner and spread his arms out on the walls, or he’d take off for his fort out behind the chicken house. Then after supper, Sam’d play for a while, with Trouble setting in the corner and rocking and playing with his shirt buttons. Me and Sarah would sing, even Hiram ever little bit. Seemed like Sam was never too tired to play of an evening. Seemed like it revived him. I hoped he would get promoted to pumper soon.

  In late August it come time for school to start. On the papers, we give Hiram June 12 for his birthday, the day they’d got to town. On the first day of school he wore new pants and a shirt Opal’d made, and Sam greased up his hair, and we all rode to town with him and walked him to his class. Me and Sam both had tears on the way home.

  The teacher set Hiram with the first graders to start out with, but wasn’t long before she moved him to the third graders. He was always good at reading, but arithmetic was what he was real good at. I myself was always good with numbers, but I never seen no eight-year-old do number problems like he done. To Hiram, they wasn’t hard. Not only that, but Sam showed him how to tinker with my car, and wasn’t long before he figured out how it worked. That Hiram, he was one smart boy, and so grown-up acting.

  With Hiram gone most all day and Sam at work and the weather cooling down—seemed like fall come early that year—me and Sarah and Trouble started spending more time in the house. When you’re in close quarters with young children, why, time slows down. You notice things.

  Sarah, now, she poked around in ever cranny of the house, looked inside ever drawer, looked underneath of the beds, just everwhere, like a cat. She looked at ever quilt we had, asking me about the patterns and colors. Sam brought her home a doll one day, and you’d have thought it was a five-dollar bill the way she got excited. Opal brought us bags of scraps and odd notions from the shop—velvet, wool, gabardine, jacquard, fancy buttons, beads, I don’t know what-all—and her and me and Sarah made everthing for that doll. Why, that doll had more clothes than I had in my whole life put together, and Sarah played and played and played with her. Done my heart good.

  Me and Trouble, though, in the daytime when Sam and Hiram wasn’t around, it seemed like we was at each other’s throat. Little things set him off, or nothing. When he got in a mood, I would creep around the house and mind I didn’t bump into the furniture. It didn’t set good with me, spoiling him like that.

  More than anything else, he got frustrated when me and Sarah couldn’t understand something he was trying to get across to us. He would make his animal sounds and wave his hands, and me and her would guess wrong, and he would get madder and madder. Didn’t do no good to say something to him, even something sweet and soothing. Only made him scream the more. Then I’d get frustrated, and him and me would holler at each other, and Sarah would start up bawling. One day I got so desperate I give him a cup of coffee—like Hiram told us Dacia done—which Trouble drunk right down. I give him another one, and he drunk half of it. Then he wadded himself into the corner of the front room and just set there, still as a bird, his face a blank.

  Then one day I was hanging out wash when I heard voices coming from Trouble’s fort. I wondered who that could be—Sarah was taking a nap. I snuck close to listen. “I tell you what he done?” Trouble was talking. “He had him two sticks, and he was playing them just like a fiddle—just like he seen you do. Not sawing, but real fingering and bowing—fast, slow, short, long—you know. Dipping his head and shoulders, then raising up smiling, just like you.”

  I thought, what’s this? It’s Trouble’s voice, but how?

  Trouble said, “His mama, she was good at imitations.”

  Whose mama? It was Dacia was the one that was good at imitations.

  “I wonder, does he hear the music in his head?” “Could be. Him and music, something there. Maybe.”

  Now the hair on my arms stood up. I recognized this conversation. It was me and Sam, talking in bed, from a couple weeks before. I couldn’t hardly breathe. Trouble’d heard us? He remembered ever word? And now he was repeating what we said?

  Trouble made a yawning noise. “Gonna go in early tomorrow,” he said. “Got to plait cable for Sweeney and them.” “Want me to get your breakfast in the morning?” “If you feel like it, but I can.”

  Then nothing. Things got quiet.

  I was flabbergasted. It was a wonder, sure enough. My heart just about wouldn’t stop pounding.

  I wanted to go over there, but I reckoned he would have a screeching fit if he knowed I was there, so I just walked back to the clothesline and leaned against the post. I thought, as bad as things was when I couldn’t understand him, and him able to talk, how come he didn’t? Nobody was so bullheaded they’d suffer when they didn’t need to.

  I stooped over the basket and pulled out a pair of overhauls. As I pinned them up, I took it into my head that we was trying too hard to understand his wants, so he didn’t have no reason to talk. We had to change our ways.

  That night after supper, Trouble made his usual motions and Sam got out the fiddle case and set it on his lap. I said to Trouble, “Don’t make motions. Say it in words. You know how.”

  Sam looked at me. “It’s just noises to him. Like the wind in the trees.”

  “If we let him have what he wants”—here I made motions with my hands—“he won’t never talk.”

  “He don’t know what it means,” Hiram said.

  I said to Trouble, “Say, ‘Please play the fiddle.’ That’s all. ‘Please play the fiddle.’ I know you can.”

  Trouble let loose a screech. Sarah put her fingers in her ears.

  “Go on,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Go on—‘Please play the fiddle.‘”

  Now Sam set the case on the table and stood up. He took aholt of my arm. “This ain’t the way.”

  “He can talk. I heard him.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I seen Hiram get up and go over to Trouble and start murmuring.

  Sam tightened his grip on my arms. “Let’s me and you talk later.”

  My nose filled with angry tears. “I heard him. Out in his hideout.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s just noises,” Sam said.

  “You ain’t with him all day. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “This ain’t the way, Bertie.”

  I felt myself get hot inside, like I might explode. I put my hand out to Sarah. “Come on, you can sleep in my bed tonight.” But she never moved, just set there sniffling.

  I felt dizzy with anger and shame bot
h, and I put my chin in the air like a child and walked into our room and shut the door behind me. In a little bit I heard the fiddle start. I took up my book off the nightstand and tried to read, but I didn’t have the patience for it.

  Pretty soon I heard Sam help the children wash their teeth. Then he herded them into their room and talked to them a while. Telling them a story, I reckoned.

  He come into our room and dropped his boots next to the bed. “He tries a person’s patience, sure enough.” He set on the bed and pulled off his socks and rubbed his feet.

  “He gets in these moods.” I put the book on the nightstand. “Seems like I have to creep around the house, and mind I don’t look at him wrong.”

  We both laid down and pulled the covers up.

  “You know I’m not the kind of person likes to conform my ways to somebody else’s, let alone a child’s,” I said. “Goes against my grain.” I thought, Mama’d know what to do—she’d take a switch to him. But I didn’t picture me doing that, and I didn’t know why.

  I don’t know if I said that last part out loud. If I did, I doubt Sam heard me. He was asleep in seconds.

  I wondered, was Sam right—talk was just sounds to Trouble? Was his whole life just imitating what he seen or heard other people do? I couldn’t help but think, that must be a hard way to live, going through the motions without no feeling behind them. You would have to be guessing how to act all the time. I felt tenderness toward the boy. I wanted to get up and go pet him, and it hurt me that it wouldn’t do no good. It’d just set him to screeching.