by Jo Ann Beard
“You’re not going anywhere either,” my mother replies.
“I am too!”
“How big do you think you are? Because if I call you down here, you’ll find out who’s bigger.”
The thing is, now that I’ve hesitated, I’m scared to go up to the attic. For a few months, in fifth grade, I used to sneak up there every morning and every evening, taking the gun down from its case and hiding it in a box of quilts before school, and then putting it back later. In those days I couldn’t go into the house alone after school but would sit on the front steps, waiting for Meg, who got home a half hour later. My dad was usually inside, sitting at the kitchen table watching the backyard, making notes on which birds were visiting the feeders. I knew that, but I also had it in my head that whoever went in first might find him dead by his own hand.
Once, on a day so cold that the fronts of my legs were burning from walking the six blocks from school, I was huddled on the steps, breathing into my mittens, when Meg got there.
“Why don’t you go in?” she asked.
“I didn’t want to,” I said. “I just felt like sitting out here.”
“Look,” she said, sighing, and sat down on the step, took her pencil box out of her coat pocket, and opened it for me. Inside, along with pencils and pens, were the razor blades usually kept in the bathroom cabinet.
If I go up in the attic and there’s no shotgun, I will have no choice but to go back down to the basement, move the dog aside, and see what’s in the coal cellar. I lean against the wall and look at my sister, but what I see is the door to the coal cellar, which is slumped on its hinges and has to be lifted slightly or it won’t open. During the summertime, worms are kept in there: two large Styrofoam coolers filled with soggy shredded newspaper and fat night crawlers, which my brother sells by the dozen. Once a week he and my dad run the hose under the tree in the backyard and pick up what pops out on the grass. I happen to have a morbid fear of worms, which is one reason they’re kept in the coal cellar. The other reason is that it’s cool in there, like a tomb, with a dirt floor and damp walls.
Meg stares at me curiously. “Maybe go take a bath or something,” she suggests, not unkindly. “You look like shit on toast, which is why she thinks you’re still sick.”
“I’m not sick, I’m nervous,” I say.
We call them dew worms. In the mornings when the grass is wet, my dad will open the back door and say, “Get the dews, Tammo,” and the dog will hop all over the yard, chasing worms.
Along one wall of the coal cellar are rough shelves that hold jars of preserves: tomatoes, corn, beans, beets, pickles packed in brine, fruit floating in syrup, jelly in juice glasses, grape and currant, each sealed with a disk of paraffin. Eventually she’ll send one of us down there while she’s cooking.
“Everyone is nervous when they’re meeting a boy,” Meg assures me.
Meeting a boy? Oh, right.
The bathtub is long and claw footed, with a wire soap dish that hangs over the side and an old-fashioned curved faucet that I can get my head under. My meditative bath activity is to lay a washcloth flat on top of the water, poke the center of it from underneath to make an air bubble, gather the sinking ends so it looks like an air-bubble bouquet, and then pull it down into the water, forcing the air through the terry-cloth holes to make an explosion of tiny, fizzing bubbles. I do this over and over and over, without thinking of anything but the air-bubble bouquet and its offspring. By the time I get out, I’m clean and calm.
Meg has gone downstairs, leaving her book facedown on the bed: A Tale of Two Cities, which I haven’t read yet. She says it’s good, even though it was assigned for school. The cover is a black-and-white drawing of an angry woman knitting, with a guillotine in the background. The guillotine is one thing, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to read a whole book about a woman knitting. The detention monitor with her long tubular scarves; my mother, making a pink mohair turtleneck for my Barbie; me, knitting a famous pot holder that actually conducted heat instead of absorbing it. It was white with a blue edge and had a wooden ring crocheted to a corner, made at Bible school one summer, back when I was religious.
Being able to conveniently remove Barbie’s head while changing her clothes is what made the pink turtleneck possible. The book’s guillotine is crudely drawn, a slanted blade in a wood frame. The notch at the bottom of the frame serves the same purpose as the two nails in the stump outside the chicken shed: it holds the neck in place.
If only I were still religious. If something has happened already and you just don’t know about it yet, God would be the only one who could turn it around. Not that he would—he being the creator of the guillotine, the chicken stump, the shotgun, and several other devices that make it clear why people are always begging him for mercy.
Drying my hair makes me dizzy for a minute and I have to lie down again. Old Milly is getting supper in her kitchen, moving back and forth between the counter and the table, carrying things and setting them down: a plastic butter dish, a bowl of bright orange carrots, a container of cottage cheese, a white plate with flowers around the rim and a pork chop in the center. Nothing to drink. After she sits down, she gets back up for the salt and pepper. Then she sets her elbows on the table, folds her hands, puts her forehead against them, and stays like that for twenty seconds or so.
Dear God, please make my dad be out drinking right now.
Jesus I never really minded because of the way he appeared in Sunday school books, in a belted frock with a pleasant, beaten-down expression on his face, surrounded by either sheep or children—not a person you’d think would invent a guillotine or a gun, although he did turn one fish into a thousand, just to eat them. That’s not that holy, but those were different times, and look who his father was.
My dad, on our family’s fishing trips, every Saturday during the summer, would prop his own rod and reel on a forked stick, then work his way up and down the bank, baiting hooks with my brother’s worms, taking the fish off the line and releasing them if they were small, putting them on a stringer if they weren’t, tossing them back up into the weeds if they were bluegills.
Sunfish were what everyone caught a lot of, shiny and flat, like big coins; less common were the bass, with wide translucent mouths, or the catfish, with long whiskers. The whole thing made me feel desperate, from the squeaking Styrofoam cooler of worms in the backseat, to the lawn chairs that stuck to the backs of your legs, to the clouds of gnats, to the fishing hat my mother wore, to the pair of needle-nose pliers my father kept on his belt and would use, turning away so we couldn’t see, to get the hook back when a fish swallowed it. The little bluegills in the weeds would lie there forever, staring blankly up at the sun until you were sure they were dead, and then they would flop again. What was it about bluegills that made everyone hate them so? They were small, the size of my hand, not even blue.
Dear God, please. If you make my dad be drunk right now, I’ll do whatever you say.
I go back downstairs at some point and sit in the kitchen while she cooks dinner.
“You always think you’re getting the raw end of the stick,” she says to me, tenderizing a piece of meat with a pronged hammer. “Half the time when I look at you, you’re pouting.”
“Short end of the stick,” I say.
“What did I say?” she asks.
“Raw end.”
“I meant short end. And why? Because you aren’t getting what you want, is all. And that’s the action of someone spoiled. Do I like to tell you no? Do I like to tell any of my kids no?”
“You never tell them no,” I say automatically. I don’t even care about this. I thought maybe when I came down here the dog would be next to her bowl, waiting for supper, but she isn’t. “Where’s Tammy?”
“I do tell them no, not that it’s any of your goddamned business either way.” She slaps the meat into a skillet and puts a lid on it. “She better not be upstairs. If she’s on my bedspread, I’ll kill her.”
A t
errier is utterly loyal to its master, although it’s true the master is sometimes a tennis ball. My dad bought our terrier for a dollar at a body shop in a little town north of Zanesville. She’s never gotten over it—even as a tiny white puppy that he’d carried home in his pocket, she used to stand on his shoe and stare devotedly up at his knees. Eight years later, she still tags him everywhere, and when he isn’t around, she waits by the door with a pair of his old socks, knotted together. If something has happened to my father, I don’t know what Tammy will do.
“I think she might be in the basement,” I say tentatively, heart pounding. What am I saying? “Sitting outside the coal cellar.”
“Doing what?” my mother asks. She’s got a cigarette going and is staring into the cupboards.
“Just waiting at the door,” I say.
My mother whirls around, stricken.
“This is what I need now?” she cries, yanking the lid off the skillet and pressing her spatula into the meat. A cloud of sizzling rises and is muffled by the lid, clattering back into place. “Another goddamned mouse?”
She hands me a stack of plates and I put them around the table without getting up. My heart feels like the meat. She goes back to staring into the cupboards.
Silence.
“I don’t think it’s a mouse,” I say finally.
“Well, you’re going to find out, because I need a jar of green beans, if there’s a small one, which I don’t think there is. Otherwise, yams.”
“I-I-I,” I say, “can’t.”
“Now you’re afraid of a mouse? You who tripped the traps?”
“I don’t know what yams even are!”
“They’re along the bottom shelf, dark orange colored but in chunks, not slices. The sliced ones are carrots.”
“I don’t like yams,” I say. “Why can’t we have something from up here?”
“I don’t have anything up here!” she says, her voice rising. “How am I supposed to go to the goddamned store with you sick, your father drunk, and now mice?”
“I’m not sick,” I say.
She calls into the living room. “Who’ll run to the cellar for me?”
Raymond appears instantly, something all down the front of his shirt.
“What’s that?” she says, scratching at it with a fingernail.
“Not him,” I say. “I’ll get them.”
“My thing went upside down,” he explains.
“You sit right there,” she tells me.
I sit back down. “But not him,” I say.
She turns to Ray. “Can you get me a small jar of beans, and if there aren’t any, then yams?”
“Okay,” he says.
“Do you know what yams are?” she asks.
He nods.
“What are they?”
“They’re little yams, in the jars,” he explains, curling his fingers.
“Okay,” she says, sighing. “Help your sister set the table.”
She’s going down herself! Never in the history of needing preserves has she ever gone down there herself.
“Mom, wait!” I say quickly. “Just let me—I have to change the laundry.” And I push past her into the stairway and pull the door closed.
On the landing is a case of pop and two cases of empty beer bottles, other trash, a broken yardstick. In the gloom at the bottom of the stairs I can just make out the white dog, waiting.
A stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
Dear God, please. Give me courage to go in there after changing the laundry.
All the bedding is wadded together against the side of the washer. I peel it out and stuff it into the dryer, clean the filter and add it to the giant ball of lint I’ve been making, twirl the knob, push the start button, and then fold some stray things on the Ping-Pong table. The phone rings and I hear Meg call for my mother.
Dear God, please. Now is the time to give me courage.
A river rock, an elm leaf, the door to the chicken shed.
The coal cellar will have one bare bulb hanging in the center, with a dusty string you have to pull. There will be the empty worm coolers, nestled into one another, there will be the antique wicker basket with leather straps that the fish are carried home in, there will be the shelves of jars with their murky floating contents. In the corner, under the black grate where the coal used to be funneled down, there will be the shotgun and what it has shot.
Dear God, please. If you change what has happened, I will give you anything.
Why would God want anything of mine? He wouldn’t, and that isn’t how it works anyway—a bully only takes what someone else wants. All I’ve wanted recently is Mr. Prentiss.
Dear God, if you make my dad be all right, I will give up Kevin Prentiss, the guy I was going to see at the game tonight.
The door at the top of the stairs opens and my mother’s feet appear on the landing. She crouches down so I can see her face, excited and pale.
“Where are my beans?” she demands. “That was Kay on the phone and I have to go to Tuck’s. She said your dad just walked in without a coat, not a dime on him, and they’re buying him drinks to keep him there.”
If there is a God and he truly is all-powerful, then he’s the one who arranged to get me off on a technicality—the call from Kay actually coming in moments before I made my deal, thereby annulling it. While getting dressed I thought about it and thought about it, coming to the conclusion that there’s a limit to what people can be expected to believe, which is why I’m at the Grassy Knoll at the appointed hour, waiting for my friends.
Down below, the crowd shuffles along Elm Ave on their way to the stadium gates. Above, the sky is cold and sparkling, although I’m not cold at all. Just the opposite, in fact.
All the boosters come out for the last game of the season, parent-aged people wearing white carnations tipped with magenta, capping and uncapping flasks. Tonight the Zanesville Zephyrs are playing the Central Valley Voles, who always win, insulting everyone in Zanesville’s idea of proper conduct for a school that is both poor and rural. They have rawboned, implacable players who trudge out on the field like coal miners going to work, and solid, unlovely cheerleaders who wear pants. Their mascot is technically not a vole but another tiny-eared mammal, the badger. I have no idea what to do if nobody shows up. Obviously, I can’t go in there and be walking around alone; I’m supposed to be a sidekick.
How does my dad do it, going off by himself for a week, two weeks? The days, I can imagine—small-town bars where no one can find him, dark clinking places lit by Old Milwaukee signs and jukeboxes—but the nights I can’t picture at all. Eventually the bars close, don’t they? And then there’s just the big black Illinois sky stretching overhead.
Dear God, if you make my dad be all right, I will give up Kevin Prentiss, the guy I was going to see at the game tonight.
It’s like a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear—it makes a sound wave, but not a sound. If there’s no one to hear a promise, it can’t possibly count, can it?
Trees and stars, stars and trees. My feet might be getting a little bit cold in their sneakers, but in a pleasurable way, like sticking them out of the covers on a winter night. I like sitting here on this grass, even if nobody ever shows up.
A stone, a leaf, an unfound girl.
“Hello?”
She came up the side way, past the Fertilizer Home and over the big hill, so she’s breathless, appearing out of the dark in a plaid car coat and mittens. It’s like being trapped down a well and having a familiar face appear at the top. I haven’t seen any real people at all for twenty-seven hours, ever since detention let out, and now here is my friend. Tears of relief burn behind my nose. Hers is running and she swipes at it in her old, familiar way, then pushes her glasses up.
“We heard you were sick, so everybody just decided to meet at the gate,” Felicia explains. “But then at the last minute I thought, what if you really were up here?”
“Never listen to my mother,” I say.
“That’s what I told them,” she replies.
She pulls me to my feet and we head out, through the trees and down the back way. It’s so beautiful tonight, everything washed in stadium light, casting inky black shadows. Up ahead is the gravel path that leads to the side gates.
“How come you’re wearing glasses?” I ask.
“Stephanie kicked me, and my contact popped out of my head,” she explains. “It’s somewhere in that rug in front of the TV—blue and green shag and it’s a green contact! Forget it.”
“Did she get killed?”
“She got taken after with a wooden spoon, but my mother never hits, she just brandishes.”
Her mother, my mother, her sister, my sister, her, me. You can see why somebody might go into a coal cellar and never come back out.
“So, do they look stupid?” she asks, glancing over at me. Her hair is freshly washed and tied back with a ribbon, like clean, baled straw. Cheeks pink, eyes watery and magnified.
“Nobody notices glasses except the person who’s wearing them,” I remind her.
Single file along the path, which is covered with leaves. Just before we join the crowd stuffing itself through the gates, she unties her ribbon and shakes the straw loose. Suddenly I feel flushed and uncertain, coat open, hair sticking to my neck.
Mr. Prentiss is in there, somewhere in the vicinity of section C.
“I-I-I c-c-c-c…,” I say.
“You have to,” she replies smoothly, slipping her glasses into her pocket and blindly grabbing my sleeve. As the crowd surges around us, I pull her along, trying to lead and follow at the same time.
We meet up with everyone—Dunk, Maroni, Yawn, Luekenfelter, a tall, brown-haired girl who is Yawn’s best friend, and Luekenfelter’s cousin Jane—at the snack hut located at one end of the bleachers. Inside the hut, two very wide men try to work around each other, passing popcorn and hot dogs over the counter to grown-ups. It’s considered weird for kids to eat this food, although Maroni is holding a raspberry Sno-Kone in a gloved hand. I love raspberry.
“Don’t even ask,” she warns me. “You’ve got the flu.”