What Makes a Family

by Colleen Faulkner

  It was my grandmother who brought Birdie to Brodie Island. As Mom Brodie told the story, she found Birdie in an orphanage in Baltimore and brought her home to help with housework. Growing up in this house, she was some sort of cross between a hired girl and a stepdaughter, I guess. I never really understood it; my grandmother’s pat explanation had always been “things were different here in those days.” My mother never gave any explanation at all.

  As the years passed, Mom Brodie realized she had the perfect opportunity to raise a good Christian woman to become her son’s wife. Mom Brodie taught Birdie how to cook and clean and grow a garden and be a good wife to a Brodie man. And when my mother turned eighteen, she married Mom and Pop Brodie’s only living child, my dad.

  “She doing okay?” my mother asks.

  I study her.

  Birdie is short and round and lumpy, the way women who eat biscuits and bacon for breakfast in their sixties are. She has a helmet of old-lady gray hair, pale blue-green eyes, and a sour puss. That’s what Mom Brodie used to call it. A sour puss. Right to Birdie’s face. Mom Brodie was the only person I ever knew who called my mother on her behavior, on the terrible things she says sometimes.

  Birdie wears her usual uniform: faded stretch pants, a nondescript, beige top, and a full, colored apron over it. And cheap, canvas shoes with stained toes. My mother is by no means an attractive woman. Some might call her ugly. No amount of makeup or designer clothing could make her beautiful. She looks older than her years. Always has. But a nice pair of capris, sandals, and a decent haircut would go a long way. I gave up years ago trying to get her to dress better, maybe use a little foundation to even out her ruddy complexion.

  “She doesn’t seem to be in pain,” I say. My voice sounds breathy and far off. I feel as if I’m on the verge of a crying jag, but I don’t know why. I didn’t feel like this until Birdie came in.

  Birdie walks to the bed and straightens the sheet beneath my grandmother’s chin. The sheet that doesn’t need straightening. The interesting thing about the gesture is that it seems tender. And tenderness isn’t something I’ve ever seen in my mother. That’s not to say she isn’t a good person, because she is. In a lot of ways, she’s a better woman than I’ll ever be. Any of us Brodies will ever be. She’s a good Christian with respectable morals. She’s the first one to volunteer in her Methodist Women’s Circle, the first one to send a card for a new baby, and the first in line at a viewing. But tender, my mother is not.

  “Air’s on,” she says, pointing her chin in the direction of the window. It’s an accusation; I hear it in her tone. Birdie is all about tone, and she’s the master of it.

  “You need to lower the thermostat, open some more vents. Something.” I close the window slowly, already missing the smell of the bay. I think maybe I’ll go for a walk later. After I’ve gotten a chance to talk to Daddy for a few minutes. After Sarah retires to our room to text her friends. “It’s hot as hell in here, Birdie.”

  She ignores my “swear word,” as she calls it. I guess Birdie knows something about picking her battles, too. The thought is intriguing, but I’m too upset and too tired to contemplate the complexity of it right now.

  “I don’t want her to catch a chill,” Birdie says. She’s still looking down at my grandmother, studying the wrinkles on wrinkles of her face.

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to say It’s not as if it’s going to kill her, but I don’t say it. I’m really not that person. That spiteful person who says mean things just to be mean. Not usually. That would be my sister Celeste’s modus operandi. But there’s something about my mother’s constant judgment that puts me on edge . . . and sometimes pushes me over.

  “What made you decide to put her in here?” I ask, walking over to stand beside my mother, who is several inches shorter than me. “Instead of her room?”

  Had it been my choice, I’d have wanted Mom Brodie to die upstairs in the bedroom she’s slept in since the day she arrived on the island as a new bride at eighteen years old. If possible, I’d have tucked her into the bed she shared with my grandfather for forty years before he died in the bed in his sleep of a heart attack.

  “Stairs,” my mother says. The puss again. “Arthritis is acting up.” She rubs her hip. “Change in weather coming I imagine.”

  “Well, I’m here to help. To do whatever I can to make things easier.” I gaze down at my grandmother’s face, and I feel the tears well up again. I don’t want to cry in front of my mother. Birdie doesn’t cry. “Celeste, too. She texted me. She’s on her way.” I give a little laugh. “Of course we know what that means. She could be here in five minutes or five weeks.”

  “I’ll be glad to have her here to help me. Celeste. She works too hard,” Birdie frets. “I worry about her.”

  I hold my tongue on the issue of my sister’s ability to be helpful. The facts behind the works too hard statement, too. I’m not here to fight with my mother. For once, I feel as if I need to play nice. We should be on the same side. All of us: Birdie, Celeste, Sarah, me. The Brodie women. We’re here for Mom Brodie, to help her pass quietly, without pain and with the dignity she deserves. The same dignity I hope someday my children and grandchildren will give me. Looking down at my grandmother, I realize this is where I want to die, too. In this house. Maybe even here in this sewing room.

  “I gave her some macaroni and cheese and some fruit salad. Sarah.” Birdie tugs at the bedsheet again, this time retucking it under the mattress, sealing Mom Brodie a little tighter in her sheet tomb. “Didn’t want chicken and dumplings.”

  “She’s a vegetarian.”

  Birdie sniffs. “So she said. Nothing but nonsense. God put chickens on this earth for us to eat. ‘Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you,’” she quotes.

  “Genesis,” I say.

  “Nine three.” Satisfied with the sheet, Birdie stuffs one hand in her apron and pulls out a crumpled tissue. She leans over and gently wipes beneath my grandmother’s nose. “Mrs. Brodie will need to be bathed tomorrow. She was always one for takin’ a bath.”

  “I can do it,” I say.

  She looks at me doubtfully. “It’s a privilege to do for family when they’re this way.” She shakes her head. “But that don’t mean it’s easy. See a woman like her unclothed, like a newborn babe.”

  “I can do it. Celeste and I will do it. You’ve got enough on your hands.”

  My mother still gets up at five every morning. She tends to her chickens and makes my father a full breakfast: eggs, scrapple, pancakes, and bitter, black coffee. She usually handwashes the dishes even though she has a dishwasher, and then she straightens up. In this day and age she still has a designated day to do things: laundry on Mondays and dusting on Tuesdays. Midmorning, five days a week, Birdie tends to our friends and neighbors who she deems are in need. She’s all over the island in her tan Buick. She drives women to the doctor, delivers homemade chicken noodle soup to the sick, and sits with the elderly to relieve caretakers. Every day of her life she either feeds my father lunch at the house or delivers it to him in a brown paper bag wherever he is on the island, here on the farm or in town. The afternoon brings more cleaning, an hour in front of her soap operas, and then she makes supper and cleans up all that. The next morning, she gets up and does it all again. I don’t know where she gets her energy or her stamina. I can’t imagine that there’s another sixty-six-year-old woman who gets done what my mother can get done in a day.

  “You have to wonder,” Birdie says, breaking the silence of the room.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  She lifts her chin in the direction of Mom Brodie. “What’s going on in her head. You think she knows she’s dying?”

  2

  Sarah Agnes

  I hear their voices, my Abby’s . . . Birdie’s, but they seem far away. I’m not myself. I feel all light and floaty. My old bones ached before, when I was in the hospital. But now that I’m home, it’s the oddest thing. I feel just fine. Better than I’ve felt i
n years.

  I told my son, my Little Joe, that I needed to come home. Home to die. That’s what I meant, even though I didn’t say it. No one would say it, but I could tell by the look on Little Joe’s face that that’s what we were talking about. On the faces of the doctors and nurses. Like a volt of buzzards sitting on a house roof waiting for chicken killing. When you hear people whisper make her comfortable, you know your days on God’s earth are numbered. And there’s no sense fighting it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that.

  Abby and Birdie’s voices drift in and out. At first, I try to listen, to follow what they’re saying, but it doesn’t seem important that I know what they’re saying, only that they’re here.

  I let go . . . let them drift away from me. Or maybe I’m the one drifting.

  The shadowy room fades and then brightens with a brilliant radiance, like a dozen sunrises spilling over the Tidewater at one time. My, oh my, it’s a sight for sore eyes.

  I smell sunshine . . . and popcorn and cotton candy. Like an outgoing tide, the scents pull me up and out of the bed, and I float to another time. Another place.

  I smile. I know exactly where I am, even before I open my eyes.

  I remember that moment as if it were only a moment ago, instead of eighty-five years. Give or take.

  I’ve been three people in my lifetime, but that day I was still Sarah Agnes. Born Sarah Agnes Hanfland, outside of Gary, Indiana, in 1917. I’d fudge that later. My Joe went to his grave never knowing I was barely sixteen when he married me. It was one of those what he don’t know won’t hurt him kind of things. I think God will forgive me for the fib when I meet him at the pearly gates; He knows I did it more for the Brodies than myself. Some would think I was too young to marry . . . but I wasn’t. I was a woman grown, and I knew my own mind as sure as anybody ever does. Maybe I was never all that young, or maybe the hard times made me what I was.

  But that afternoon, the spring of 1931, two years into the Great Depression, when I smelled the sunshine and the popcorn and I stared up at that big Ferris wheel and heard the calliope music, I was still Sarah Agnes. A little girl, as innocent as a hatching chick. A shell of a woman.

  “My mama will whip my tail if she catches me here,” Cora whimpers. She’s my best friend in the world, and I love her like a sister, but she sure can be a scaredy-cat and a whiner.

  “Hush up,” I warn her. “Nobody’ll even know we been here if you don’t tell them.”

  Cora’s eyes get bigger, and she makes a little squeak of protest, but she doesn’t argue. Which means she’ll do what I tell her, at least for now. I give her a reassuring smile and whisper, “Come on,” as if I go to carnivals all the time. I just hope I don’t look as scared as she does.

  We’re both kind of star struck. We squeeze each other’s hands tightly as we stare up at the Ferris wheel that looms overhead like a magnificent alien creature. Or God. Because for me, it was a religious experience, seeing that Ferris wheel, realizing there was a world beyond Bakersville. This is the first time a carnival has ever come to our little town that’s barely more than a crossroad in endless acres of brown fields and clouds of dust. The gossip in school is that the carnival show was headed for Gary when one of their trucks broke down, and that’s why they stayed. In any case, it’s a miracle they are here.

  Johnny Alber’s Uncle Dandy owns the garage in town. Johnny told us on the playground yesterday that the truck engine had to be rebuilt, and it would be a week. Parts have to be delivered, maybe from Chicago. Johnny said his uncle was glad to have the work. Carnies paid top dollar for a tire or a spark plug. He said his cousins might get shoes for what the carnies would pay to get their jalopy going again.

  Shoes are something we talk about a lot on the playground. Those that have them do. Some kids, the ones without, the ones we whisper about, mostly have stopped coming and stay home where nobody can poke fun at their bare feet. I’m in between. My shoes are a size too small, and my papa put cardboard in the bottoms to cover the holes in the soles, but nobody would dare tease me about it. They know better.

  But who cares about pinched toes. The carnies are in Bakersville.

  Carnies. That’s what Johnny called them. And you could tell it wasn’t a nice word by the way he said it. That’s what my papa calls them, too, from behind his newspaper. “Carnies in town, Madge,” he says. Smoke from his pipe rises above the newspaper. I never see his face, just hear him from behind a newspaper. He’s gone most of the time these days, looking for work. He used to be a salesman. Grease. He carried a leather case filled with little jars of different kinds of grease: axle grease, ball-bearing grease, household grease for hinges and such. Now he goes town to town, looking for odd sales jobs to put bread on the table.

  It’s a big table. After we lost our house, we moved in with my grandmother and grandfather Hanfland, me and Papa and his wife, Madge, and my new little brother. Then Papa’s sister Lorraine and her four kids moved in, too. Her husband, my Uncle Pat, got caught robbing a gas station last year. He’s in jail so Papa has to feed his kids, too.

  “Best keep the children away from that carnival trash,” my father warns from behind his newsprint wall. “Sixteen-year-old girl, kidnapped last year in Terre Haute. Parents said she was riding the Caterpillar one minute; the next she was gone. Never found her. Most likely dead or worse.”

  “Or worse,” Mrs. Hanfland echoes from her post at the kitchen sink. That’s what she says I have to call her, my stepmother, Mrs. Hanfland.

  I wanted to ask what could be worse than dead; I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. I was so innocent then; I knew so little. They should have told me more; I should have asked more questions. But in my grandparents’ house, children were to be seen, not heard.

  I blink and inhale the exotic scent of the carnival world that has sprung up out of an abandoned wheat field. Goose bumps rise on my arms at the blare of the calliope and the shout of barkers beckoning to passersby and waving their prizes. It’s all so wonderful, better than Christmas and my birthdays mashed up together. Better than ice cream with fudge sauce and whipped cream on top. I never tasted that, but a girl in my class bragged about having it when she went to Chicago with her mother to get new school clothes. Whipped cream with a cherry on top. She was probably lying, though. Her new dresses looking like they came out of the mission charity bin at church. Nobody in Bakersville has the scratch to take their kid to Chicago and buy clothes and whipped cream with a cherry on top.

  I feel my hand, sweaty in Cora’s, as we stare up at the Ferris wheel, watching it slowly turn. Sun glimmers off fresh gilded paint and jewels on the massive spokes; I wonder if they’re real diamonds.

  “You think they’re open yet?” I whisper. I can’t stop gazing upward. The sky is a perfect blue; not a cloud of dust to be seen, which is a miracle. It seems like the dust storms have been worse this spring. Not enough rain. People in Bakersville talk about how the worst is yet to come, drought, they say. Too much sin, my grandmother Hanfland insists. That’s why the stock market crashed, too, she says. That’s why people lost their jobs. That’s why crops have been poor. She says she wouldn’t be surprised to see locusts.

  But there’s no plague of locusts today. Today it’s a perfect spring day that’s neither too hot nor too cold. I’m so glad I wore my best dress to school this morning. It’s a shirtwaist with a blue and green plaid bodice and a blue skirt and hardly looks worn. Cora’s wearing her best dress, too, but hers has a big patch on the front. I told her just to hold her hand over it and no one would see.

  We cooked up this scheme yesterday after everyone was talking on the playground about the carnival. About sneaking off after school today. I knew my stepmother wouldn’t let me go. Not without my papa’s say-so and he’s gone again, to Canton. He heard some factory was hiring grease monkeys, men to grease big machines. It probably won’t pan out; the jobs never do. But by the time he gets back to say I can’t go, the carnival will have pulled up and pulled out. And Cora . .
. well, her papa is the Baptist minister in town, so it goes without saying, she’ll never get permission to come.

  Cora’s hand is cold in mine. “We should go,” she whispers, still staring up at the great God-wheel in the sky. “Someone who knows us might see us. We won’t be able to sit for a week after the switchin’ we’ll get.”

  “Stop whining. Just look at it. Isn’t it the cat’s pajamas?”

  As we stand there in the middle of the mowed-grass path in the field that has become a paradise of sights and sounds and smells, two boys my cousin Calvin’s age walk by and give us the once-over. One whistles and winks at me.

  “See,” Cora hisses in my ear, grabbing my arm with her free hand. She’s afraid of the boys. She’s afraid of everything. “It’s not safe.”

  I wrinkle my pretty, freckled nose. I know it’s pretty because people have told me so. And my grandmother says I’m too pretty for my own good and that girls who look like me get what they deserve. I don’t know what she means by all that, but I know that since Aunt Lorraine got me a brassiere this spring, her son Calvin’s friends have been looking at me. Early bloomer, that’s what Aunt Lorraine calls me. Cora doesn’t need a brassiere yet, so I guess that means she’s a late bloomer, like the asters in my grandmother’s garden.

  “I wish I could have a ride,” I say, feeling like I’ll die if I don’t get to sit on one of those glittery benches and ride high in the sky. I’m fairly certain that right now I would rob a gas station like my uncle or trade my salvation for a ride on that Ferris wheel.

  “You gotta have a ticket,” Cora tells me. “And you gotta have money to have a ticket. We don’t have any money.”

  What she says is true, but I don’t care. I have to ride that Ferris wheel. “We can at least go have a look-see,” I say.