by Nancy Hedin
I kept my arms filled with Little Man. Even with the snow and cold, I carried him outside and ran with him around the yard, saying we were catching squirrels. I talked to him, kissed him, and said every mushy thing I could think of to him. Soon, I filled a sketchbook with drawings of my favorite little mammal—no raccoons, no mice, no sheep, no dogs or barn cats—only Little Man.
Becky had been gone a week when out of the blue Charity came to see me. Dad, Little Man, and I came out into the yard when her car pulled up. I hadn’t seen her since she left with Kelly and I lost the scholarship. She’d been on my mind every waking moment I wasn’t thinking about Becky being gone, and even some times when I should have been thinking about Becky. I wanted to run to Charity. I wanted to hug her and kiss her and handcuff her to my arm so that she couldn’t leave again, or I wanted to spit in her face for hurting me so bad. I held Little Man as Charity parked and got out of her truck. I pulled Little Man closer and covered my heart. I kept myself from running to her.
“Take a drive with me, Raine?” Her hands were pushed deep into the pockets of her parka.
“I’m pretty busy taking care of Little Man.”
“Oh for Chrissake.” Dad took Little Man into his arms and shoved me toward Charity. “I think you can spare the time for your friend.”
Charity’s truck was warm and familiar. I sat quietly as she drove to Bear Head Cemetery, parked on the service road, and killed the engine.
“My father is really mad that I went back to St. Paul. He almost threw me out and told me not to come home again. Mom is talking to him right now, and they are deciding what to do with me.”
“You can stay with me. We’ve sure got the room. Becky is missing.”
“Jolene told me when I got back. I’m sorry, you must be worried.” Charity reached out for my hand. I had never refused her touch, but I pushed my hands into my jacket pockets.
“I lost the scholarship because Momma told your dad about me. He said I can’t be around you or Jolene anymore.”
“Jolene told me that too. She’s really mad at Dad about all of it. I don’t think she’s talked to him since except to tell him that he can’t pick her friends for her.” She nudged my shoulder. “I think you’d be really proud of how Jolene stood up to Dad.”
I wanted to ask if there was any reason to be proud of her for the same reason. Had she stood up against her dad? Was she back together with Kelly? I was too afraid to ask those questions.
“I can’t believe all this is happening. How long has Becky been gone?”
“A week. There’s a missing person’s report filed, but we haven’t heard anything.” Then I told Charity what I’d learned about Kenny’s dad being a batterer, and that Kenny had hurt me once, and that I’d seen bruises on Becky too.
“That bastard!” Charity chewed on this information for a while. “You know, maybe Becky just left.” She didn’t look at me, but leaned back in the seat and peered out at the winter sky.
“No. Becky wouldn’t leave Little Man. He was the best part of her marriage. I know it.” I tightened up at the suggestion. I crossed my arms, chilled. No way I believed Becky had just left. I also couldn’t believe that we were having this conversation and that talking about our relationship was so far down the list of problems.
“Maybe it wasn’t enough to make her stay.” She started the truck again and blasted the heater.
“Then why didn’t she at least take him with her?” I knew my tone sounded snotty.
Charity rolled her eyes and matched my snotty tone. “Yeah, she’s just out of high school, no work experience, no college, no money, and a baby too. Who was going to take care of Little Man while she worked some shit job—that is if she could find a shit job and a place to live?”
“Momma, Dad, and I could have helped. We’re doing it now.” Damn it, I was crying again.
“If she’d stayed here, Kenny could have gotten at her. Maybe she figured at least if she left, Kenny would need help with Little Man and most likely look to your folks for that. And Kenny couldn’t beat her if he couldn’t find her.”
“I just can’t believe she’d leave the boy in the first place and then not contact me, Dad, or Momma. It seems cruel.” I wanted to say that leaving a note wasn’t much better than not saying anything about leaving, but I needed to keep my focus on Becky and Little Man.
“Maybe it isn’t about trying to be cruel, but about being desperate and realistic. Husbands kill their wives all the time.”
“You think I don’t know that? I’m not a kid.”
“You said she got all religious after the baby came. If she spent more time in church or reading stuff, she would have heard all that quoting about wives submit to your husband. My dad preached all that stuff every chance he got. Probably gives every man in the church a stiff dick just hearing him say it.”
This time Charity caught and kept my hand. Then she ran her finger between my fingers until I couldn’t help but clasp her hand in mine to make her stop. “Becky swallowed all that shit. But she wouldn’t leave Little Man. That’s not the Becky I know.”
“Marriage changes people, Raine. Having kids changes people. Maybe Becky wasn’t the same self-absorbed sister enamored with the glamorous life of marriage you used to know. For God’s sake, she was living on a pig farm. Her husband made love to her and beat her in the same house. She wasn’t the Becky you knew for quite a while probably.” Charity paused. “Raine, I remember you once told me about mink.”
“Oh my God. Not you too. I don’t want to hear another goddamned animal story.” I pulled my hand away again.
“Tough. I’ve listened to enough of yours. You can just listen to me for a change. You told me that a mink would chew its own leg off to get out of a trap. Maybe Becky felt trapped and was willing to leave behind something really special to her in order to be free.” She looked at her empty hands, but snuck glances at me.
“She could have told us.” I hated being mad at Charity, but I didn’t like what she was saying. It scared me. I moved closer to my door.
Charity laced her arm through mine. I pulled back, but Charity embraced my arm again and held it tighter. “I can take you, Tyler. I’m an artist. Quit this push back.” I relaxed enough to let Charity lace her arm through mine and lower her head to my shoulder. I needed every bit of this touch, but I could hardly stomach the possibility of the truth that came with it.
“If you knew, Kenny’d keep harassing you and your folks to tell him where she was. He’d keep looking for her. Remember, your momma was so set on them being married, she might have even told him where to find Becky.” Charity tried again to take my hand. I tentatively let her.
“Momma wouldn’t want Becky with Kenny if he was beating her.”
“Your momma told on you so you’d lose that scholarship.”
The whole thing stung all over again.
“Your folks had to know that Kenny was brought up that way. You told me Lucille said everybody in town knew.”
I shook my hand loose from Charity’s grasp. “Goddamn it! I didn’t know. I didn’t know about it. Why didn’t I know about it, Charity? I could have—”
Charity took me into her arms. “I know you would have tried to do something if you knew. Maybe Becky didn’t want you to get hurt too. Maybe she left to protect everybody. I’m not saying this to hurt you.”
It was too late. I hurt too much. I pushed her away. “Why are you even holding me? Where’s Kelly?”
Charity let me go.
“I deserved that. I know I have a lot of things to work out, but I care about you and I want to help if I can. This isn’t the time to go into what happened with Kelly, but there are things I need to tell you when you are ready to hear me.” She drove me home.
Becky’s disappearance had put our family in suspended animation. Momma, Dad, and I were just going through the motions of living. I released my mice in the barn, sold my rabbits and chickens, and banked that money for college, but the truth of it was that I
hadn’t much interest in the animals. I needed the energy I had for taking care of Little Man. Dad still took grunt-work construction jobs away from home, but only when Momma or I were home to watch Little Man. Kenny still hadn’t said when he planned to take Little Man, he just visited him.
Momma and I only spoke to coordinate taking care of Little Man. At night, after Little Man was in bed, I sat with Dad in the living room where he read books about serial killers.
“Dad, did you know Mr. Hollister hurt his wife and kids before I told you what Lucille said?”
He closed his book and sighed.
“Manfred Hollister. Manfred, now that’s a tough name to have—sounds too much like manslaughter. Can you tell I’m stalling?” He went on. “I heard the rumors and ill-conceived jokes about what might be happening on that farm. I never saw a thing myself. I tried pulling one of the kids to the side years ago. They didn’t have nothing to say to me. Manfred Hollister was a hard man with a sharp tongue and meaty fists he wasn’t afraid to show anyone.”
“Do you think Kenny is any different?”
“People aren’t set in stone. People have choices. They can rise above their biology and their learning, but some don’t. I know you can’t probably abide an animal story, but I’m going to tell you one just the same.” Dad cleared his throat. “There was a chicken farmer I read about, and he was set on breeding the biggest breasted chickens ever grown. I don’t know how they did it—I wasn’t there. In a few years that farmer got monster-sized chickens, but it was like both the roosters and hens forgot their mating rituals—they still mated, but the big, aggressive roosters raped the chickens and tore them apart. That was bad enough, but the farmer was so set on getting the bigger birds that he accepted the violence as just part of the process. It didn’t even register that something was terribly wrong. The farmer accepted the violence between the birds as long as it didn’t disturb meeting his goals of meatier chickens.”
“Kind of like people in Bend knowing about Hollister and not saying anything? Grind is so keen about preaching against homosexuals. Why doesn’t he rave about violence against women?”
“That’s a fair question. I don’t have a good answer. You got a good brain, kiddo.”
I didn’t know or ask what’d happened to those chickens or whether they’d corrected the breeding problem. I felt bad that those hens had no place to hide from those roosters. Was there a place for Becky to hide if Kenny was hurting her? Since Charity had seemed to know so much on our last visit, I called and asked her. She said that the closest battered women’s safe house was some place just north of Langston. She came over to my house and we called the hotline listed in the phone book.
Nobody on the hotlines I called would tell me where the place was. It didn’t matter that I said I was looking for my sister. There was a rule about giving out the address. How in hell could someone battered get to it if nobody would tell the address?
Charity said that there had to be some way to get there, but you probably needed to be a battered woman to get the map. That gave me an idea. I told Dad that I was staying overnight at Charity’s place. He probably knew I was lying, since I was forbidden to go on the Grind property, but he didn’t press me for the truth.
Charity drove me to a rest stop a couple of miles out of Langston, kissed my cheek, and then slapped me hard like I asked her to do. I called the hotline from a pay phone. I told the volunteer who answered the hotline that my name was Naomi Johnson and that my husband had tried to murder me. I needed a place to stay until I could get word to an aunt in Wisconsin who would take me in.
No, my husband wasn’t right by me now, but he’d be out looking for me. No, I wasn’t currently injured, but I had a good red spot from where he’d slapped my face tonight and some fading bruises if they needed some sort of authentication. They said they didn’t—just an identification card. Shit. I lied fast and fairly well. I told them that identification would be a problem because my bastard husband had stolen my purse, and I’d gotten out with nothing but the clothes on my back. Luckily, I lived close enough to the freeway that I could hitch and put some distance between me and that no-good man. I supposed I sounded like a bad movie of the week, but there must’ve been enough realism, because they let me go on with my story.
They asked me about pressing charges. I told them I was too scared right now. They let it go at that and told me to wait inside the gas station nearby, and a woman named Cheryl picked me up in a gold Dodge caravan.
Charity followed us in her truck.
“What’s this place like?” I asked.
“It’s safe,” Cheryl said. “That’s the main thing.”
I had naively expected Fort Knox with all the secrecy about location, but the shelter was just a big house called Raven’s Nest. Cheryl told me that Raven’s Nest was named after a woman who’d done everything people had told her to do when she got battered. She’d told her family, told police, pressed charges, and changed her locks. Her husband had only been in custody overnight. He’d gone from the jail to Raven’s house and shot her four times with a gun he carried in his glove box. He’d turned the gun on himself and committed suicide after he’d killed Raven. Their twelve-year-old daughter had been at a sleepover with her church youth group and found the bodies when her friend dropped her off at home the next morning.
Rage coursed through my veins. The bastard had moral dyslexia. If he’d killed himself first, there would have been less pain for that family. Thinking about that family made me think of Becky. Was Kenny that kind of monster? Was he that kind of coward?
The front door of the shelter was locked, and the windows were high off the ground on the first floor and barred on the patio level. A light came on in the entryway when Cheryl pushed a button on the door buzzer. A woman, who I later learned was Melba, peered through the window in the steel door and then opened the door a crack and asked if we were certain we weren’t followed.
Let the lying continue. I took a quick glance at Charity’s truck parked across the street, but Cheryl and I both shook our heads. Melba let us in. What happened the next couple of hours blurred in my memory and came back to me in pieces as I relayed it to Charity on the ride back to Bend.
There was paperwork and more paperwork. I’d never lied in writing so much in my life. I was relieved when Melba said I could take a break for dinner. Dinner was served in a large family room. Every table was filled with women, kids, babies, toddlers, and older kids too. There had to be near twenty-five women and kids. It looked like a strange sort of convent daycare center—no men. I felt conspicuous, but people hardly looked up when I came in. Another battered woman was no novelty.
I scanned the tables for Becky. Banquet tables flanked the area and were covered with bowls, sectioned plates, and institutional-sized vats of brown soup and steamed vegetables, and a platter of cheese sandwiches. I dished up my slop and took a seat. A thigh-high boy jumped up from a row of benches and shot at me with his index finger and thumb yelling, “Pow! Pow!” A woman, maybe his mom, gathered him back to her. The woman had only one eye. The other was all lid and sunken. Any appetite I had left me.
When dinner was over, Melba showed me a large open dormitory. Then she whisked me off for group. The group leader looked younger than me. The audiovisual equipment was no better than what I’d had in junior high science class. The VCR didn’t work. There was supposed to be a film, but it was canceled in favor of something called group check-in, where people said how far they were in their process of preparing to leave. There were more places to be on that road to leaving than I could’ve ever imagined. I didn’t need to memorize any of those details because I wouldn’t be there more than an hour.
It was crazy. Every woman who spoke told a story that made it sound like she was married to the same asshole the last woman had described. It was like all those men had attended some sort of trade school to learn their craft. When it was my turn, I said my husband was the same kind of asshole and I suggested we divorce them all—
well actually, I suggested we castrate them and then divorce them. I thought I sounded pretty convincing, but after group a woman named Jill came up, told me I was full of shit, and asked if I was faking being a battered woman for a school project. She wouldn’t leave me alone. Finally, I told her I wasn’t battered. I was looking for my sister.
I dug out a picture of Becky, Little Man, and me cuddled together on the couch at Kenny’s trailer house. Jill looked at the picture and said she thought she maybe recognized Becky. She took me to another woman named Rose that she said would remember better. Rose was in the TV room watching some forensic crime show.
Rose said if she ever got murdered, she wanted Bones or the CSI group on the case. She turned down the volume and listened to Jill. Jill asked Rose if she remembered that girl who kept talking about Little Man. Rose remembered. She called Becky a religious nut.
I was finally getting somewhere. I asked when she’d last seen her, but Rose wasn’t sure. She said Becky had gone out on a pass and hadn’t come back. Rose said Becky must’ve gone back to Kenny.
When I told Rose that Becky wasn’t home and we hadn’t heard from her, she said that meant that Becky must be hiding out somewhere, or she was probably dead. I couldn’t get out of the place fast enough, but took time to find Melba. I apologized for my deception. Melba was pissed. She refused to check other shelters for Becky, but she said she would leave a message on the bulletin board that family wants to hear from Becky. She said she could leave that message about every woman there.
After Charity dropped me at home, I told Dad and Momma what I’d done. If they were mad, they didn’t show it. Dad was ready to confront Kenny, but Momma stopped him.
“If she was at that shelter, that means she’s alive. We’ve got to wait until she comes home or contacts us,” Momma said. “I don’t want that boy knowing we are on to him.”