Natural Bridges

by Debbie Lynn McCampbell

  Once, our neighbor Bud Fowler’s cow wandered over the property line and got herself caught under the well while it was pumping. Cracked its skull and killed it. Since then, if Birdie so much as got a bicycle wheel in Bud’s yard, he’d bawl her out.

  Our house was big, with three bedrooms upstairs and two down. It had a really large living room, a good size eat-in kitchen, a screened-in front porch, full bath with a tub downstairs, and a basement for laundry and storage. The proprietors kept the house up real well, treated and painted the wood every other year. We all liked it, except for Daddy, because he didn’t own it.

  Ever since we had to sell our farm in Franklin three years back, Daddy hadn’t been the same. All three of us girls were born there, and we’d really settled in. Daddy had tilled most of the land and had kept dairy cattle. One year, Momma and Daddy received a certificate of achievement for producing seventy percent of the family’s food. We loved it there, regretted leaving, but the upkeep just got to be too much. The corporate farms pushed us out, and we had to foreclose. It just killed Daddy, now, to pay rent instead of mortgage. He was one of these who believed a man wasn’t worth a cent if he didn’t own land.

  I nudged Birdie. “Wake up Florabelle.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Florabelle, hoarsely, sitting up, “I ain’t asleep. Who could with that dog panting like he’s got asthma. I told you he’d stink, too.”

  I looked over at her.

  “You promised,” said Birdie.

  “Just take him right on upstairs while I stall Daddy,” I told Florabelle.

  “Hey, he’ll fit in your pocket book,” said Birdie, spirits rising. She squeezed the confused pup into Florabelle’s vinyl purse.

  Florabelle frowned. “Daddy’ll be asleep. It’s Momma I’m worried about. What are you going to tell her about not finding a dress?”

  “Just tell her we’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I said. “And Daddy will be up; we have his truck. Maybe Aunt Hazel can make you up a dress.”

  “In less than a week?”

  “We’ll figure something out. Help Birdie for now.”

  When we pulled in the driveway, it was ten o’clock. I turned off the headlights and cruised slowly up the gravel. Heidi ran around from behind the shed and barked at us. Everyone always had to be careful not to run into her since she couldn’t see. The kitchen light and porch light were both still on. I was tired, and my bottom was sore from sitting so long.

  Birdie was trying to zip up Florabelle’s handbag, but Jimmy kept poking his head out. “We better hurry,” she said, “or he’ll suffercate.”

  “Is he in?” I asked, shutting off the engine.

  “He sure as hell better not bark,” said Florabelle. “Or piss in my purse.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Birdie, you keep still. Go in and tell Momma you had a nice day and you’re tired and just want to go straight to bed. Don’t mention the dress, Jimmy, the burgers, nor the candy, hear?” Momma hated us buying fast food. She claimed it was undercooked and overpriced.

  Birdie nodded.

  We climbed up the porch steps quietly, though Heidi was still barking at our heels, and opened the storm door. Daddy was lying on the couch in front of the TV; he was still in his work uniform. Momma was sitting at his feet, in her housecoat, snapping beans. The channel six news was on.

  Momma saw us and looked up. “Well,” she said, almost shouting like she did whenever she was nervous. “We was beginning to worry. Your Daddy was fixing to go out hunting for you, in Hazel’s Dodge. Thought maybe you had a flat or the gears in the truck were missing again. Did you find Florie a nice dress?”

  Florabelle was already heading upstairs with her purse. “We’ll talk about it in the morning, Momma,” she called. “We’re just so exhausted, ain’t we, Birdie?”

  “Any trouble shifting?” Daddy was awake.

  “No, Daddy,” I said. “Truck rode fine. Rattled a little, though. Something up under the hood squeaked every time I drove over a bump. Could be the shocks.”

  “Must be the way you was braking. What bumps are you talking about? Between here and Stanton?” He scowled.

  “Birdie, Honey, come back down here and tell Momma what pretty things you seen,” said Momma, setting down the colander.

  Birdie looked down at me from the staircase. “I’m tired.” She faked a yawn. “I want to sleep and talk tomorrow. I had a nice day.”

  “I’ll get her bath,” I said.

  “I saved you girls some dinner,” said Momma.

  “What bumps?” asked Daddy.

  “Potholes, Daddy.”

  “You have on the headlights?”

  “Yes. But it was still dark and it’s raining. The truck is okay. I’ll take a look at it down at the station Monday.”

  “What time is it?” he asked Momma.

  “It’s just a little after ten,” she said.

  “What business you girls got out gallivanting around after ten o’clock? Where all did you go, Fern?”

  “Stanton, Daddy, we were home by ten.”

  “We sent them, Raymond,” Momma reminded him.

  Daddy sat up, pulled his shirt down over his stomach. “We did,” he said, yawning. “You get rid of all three of them?”

  I nodded, looked back towards Momma. It was Daddy’s belief that we went into Stanton to take the dogs to a county shelter where he claimed he had taken the first litter. But we knew the consequences there, so that’s why Momma had suggested the charity thing.

  “Any trouble at the pound?” he asked. “Paperwork?”

  “No, I’m going to bed now. Thanks for the truck.” I headed upstairs.

  “That roast’ll go to waste,” said Momma.

  “We’ll heat it for lunch tomorrow,” I said from the top of the stairs.

  “Fern, I want you to show me what you’re talking about tomorrow with them rattles,” called Daddy.

  “Yes, Daddy,” I said.

  “Good night, Birdie,” called Momma. “Fern, scrub her good. Especially if she used them public commodes in Stanton.”

  3. Threading Needles

  Sunday afternoon, after supper, when Daddy left to go check on the pump, Momma sent Birdie to go get Hazel to come over and talk about the dress. We’d told Momma that we hadn’t been able to find a thing to fit Florabelle at the garage sales.

  Hazel was Momma’s younger sister who lived in a trailer on our lot. Until last year, she lived in Dayton with her husband who was an executive for some big computer company, but he had come home from what he’d called a business trip one weekend and announced that he would be moving to Florida with his secretary. Hazel was a certified beautician and had had her own shop in Dayton called “Hair by Hazel,” but now she claimed the chemicals were getting to her and only did perms and color jobs for the old women in a nursing home in Clay City. Her charge for a permanent wave was only three or four dollars, depending on how much hair the ladies still had. She also worked in the kitchen there, four days a week, and helped administer medication to, and bathe, the residents. She made just enough money to pay Daddy some rent for the trailer and a small amount for utilities.

  “You expect me to be able to whip up a wedding dress in four days?” Hazel was a chain smoker, unlike Florabelle, who only smoked for attention. Her teeth were yellowed, tobacco-stained, noticeable when she talked. “That’s hardly enough time to pin down a pattern and cut it.” She blew smoke, hacked.

  We were sitting around the kitchen table, still in our Church clothes, except for Hazel, who didn’t go, trying to devise a plan.

  “Fern said she’d pin, cut, and hem,” said Florabelle.

  Hazel scooted back her chair, sipped coffee, propped her feet up on the counter. She had a habit of this, putting her feet on the furniture, and Momma just fumed whenever she did it.

  “Hazel, get your feet down off my countertop. We’re going to pay you for the material and threads, all you got to do is sew. We don’t have no other choice. Some of our relations are coming
in from Ohio, who we ain’t seen in ages, and Florabelle’s got to look decent.”

  “Decent?” Hazel winked, then pretended to peek under the table at Florabelle, and we all knew what she was meaning to imply.

  “We’ve all gotten used to that, Hazel,” said Momma, who tried never to judge. “What’s done is done. Now what’s it going to be? You going to help?”

  “All right,” she said, bringing her feet down. Her rubber soles screeched as they hit the kitchen floor. “But you got to help, Fern.” She looked at me. Then Momma too.

  “Fern’s good with the needle,” said Momma, smiling. “She’s the one who fixes my sink when it backs up, she can handle a tractor, and she’s definitely the one who ended up with the family sewing talent. She can put a button on a blouse faster than a hare hops.”

  It was true that I was as handy with the needle as I was with a torque wrench, but I never liked sewing. Just did it when it had to be done. Momma’s hands weren’t so steady any more, and Florabelle just didn’t have the patience. I looked at the scraps of roast fat still lying on the plate in front of me, and realized I had no choice other than to help on Florabelle’s dress.

  For the next four days, instead of helping Clem out down at the station, I sat cooped up in Hazel’s dusty, smoke-filled living room, pinning down taffeta and lace. It rained for three of those four days, and the violent torrents that thrashed down the hill through the trees shook the trailer.

  The dress took over five yards of material, and that was without a train. The style we’d decided on was straight, drop-waist, a sash belt at the hips with two tiers of lace falling from there to midcalf. It was beginning to look a lot like the M & M-eyed girl’s dress, from Rosslyn.

  Florabelle, standing up on the coffee table, with Hazel holding the pin cushion and me measuring the hem, had changed her mind at the last minute and decided to go with cocktail- instead of floor-length to save time and money. She had told Momma she’d lost that twenty-five dollars in a restroom in Stanton last Saturday, and not only was Momma mad and disbelieving, but would only give her ten more for the fabric. I paid the difference.

  As for Jimmy, things went rather smoothly with no real close calls. We kept him shut up in our room at night, and Birdie kept him in her room during the day, pretending to be playing a lot with Waylon Jennings, her Cabbage Patch doll. She would sneak Jimmy downstairs and let him pee whenever Momma went to the basement to check the wash, and Daddy was working a lot of overtime, so neither one of them had caught on. Momma just mused a little over Birdie not wanting to play outside much, which she usually did.

  Birdie was content to be alone, just as long as she was outdoors. She had some imagination and could entertain herself for hours, climbing trees, naming rocks in the creek, teasing frogs, collecting all sorts of things like pinecones and dead bugs, or chasing Heidi around the pond. Birdie was kind and patient with Heidi, in spite of her age and blindness. She’d tease and play rough with her sometimes, but she’d protect that old dog with all her little might.

  Daddy’s other dogs, the blue ticks he kept for coon hunting, stayed in pens all day, and Daddy would come home from work at night and let them run. Birdie would pay attention to them, too, talk to them through their cages and bring them table scraps. She had a gentleness about her, calming and thoughtful, a quiet little spirit that we all loved. She embraced her small world, as sheltered as it was, and loved everyone back.

  The rest of the week, we were busy with all the wedding arrangements. We were preparing the reception food ourselves and most of the decorations. Since Hazel and I were pretty much tied up with the dress, Momma made almost all the food. She fried nearly two hundred chicken wings, using every skillet we had. She made egg salad finger sandwiches, pickled some cucumbers, marinated other raw vegetables from our garden, fried up some of her famous apple dumplings, baked a couple peach cobblers, did those little hot-dogs-in-a-blanket, deviled four dozen eggs, baked seven or eight pans of cornbread, and stuffed mushrooms with pork dressing. We ordered a wedding cake from a bakery in Bowen, three layers of chocolate because that was the only flavor Jason would eat, and we were making peach sherbet punch.

  Florabelle stayed up late every night making centerpieces for the tables. She was sticking peach-colored candles in the glass hurricane lamps we kept in the shed for emergencies, and wrapping crepe-paper flower wreaths around the bases. Then she made a peach hairpiece for Birdie and me and matching bows for our dresses. We were the only bridesmaids, and we already had dresses that we were supposed to have worn in Florabelle and Skeeter’s wedding, and they still fit.

  Thursday afternoon, we finished the dress. Then Hazel drove Florabelle and Momma downtown to set up the church and the fellowship hall for the reception and to pick up the bouquets. I stayed home to clean up the fabric scraps and keep an eye on some food in the oven. It seemed, by then, the whole downstairs of our house had taken on a peach cast.

  Reverend Whitaker called twice that day to confirm the time of the wedding. He was the preacher at the Full Gospel Pentecostal Church in Bowen, where we were members. It was a big church, with a congregation of about seventy-five, over a hundred on holidays.

  We were expecting sixty to seventy guests, counting our family, a few neighbors, a couple friends of Daddy’s from work, Jason’s family, and all his buddies from the bedspring factory.

  That night, the eve of the wedding, I lay in bed a while, thinking about it being Florabelle’s last night living in our house. It wasn’t that we were close and I’d miss her, she and Jason would be living only about ten minutes away, but it would seem strange, especially at night like this, when we both lay in bed in our room upstairs and talked. I’d usually share something from a book I was reading, like a funny passage, or something profound or inspirational, and she would find one thing or another to groan about. She’d rag on Daddy, complain about Jason’s work schedule, or make a fuss over Hazel’s meddling in her life. Florabelle could bitch for an hour and never come to her point.

  She wasn’t at all like Birdie, who was accepting and grateful. No, Florabelle assumed things and expected them. She was stubborn and compulsive, but at the same time, she stood her ground on some issues and was loyal to those she respected. For a select few, she would fight a running sawmill, but cross her, and she’d just as readily drive a railroad spike through your skull.

  Tonight, though, Florabelle lay speechless and restless; tossing and turning in her bed. As I lay listening to the frogs and the creeping Charlie vine that forever scratched our window, I wondered if she, too, realized the finality of our late-night exchanges, and whether it mattered. This ritual was ceasing. To me, it was an empty feeling, almost threatening. Her being gone, I knew, would bring peace. Silent nights. But I’d grown so used to the complaining; it reassured me.

  “Fern?” she whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “You reckon Jason ever reads at night?”

  “I don’t know, probably the sports section of the paper, or maybe the comics.”

  “Maybe,” she said after a short while, and rolled over.

  I gazed out our window at the moon, and pulled the sheet up over me. I’d miss her, too.

  4. Finding Jimmy

  Friday morning, the day of the wedding, we woke up at 6:00 a.m. to Daddy’s hollering in the kitchen. I sat straight up in bed and saw Birdie crouched under Florabelle’s vanity dresser, hugging Waylon Jennings. She had her own room next to ours but came in our room when she had nightmares.

  “What’s wrong, Bird?” I asked.

  Birdie pointed to the sewing machine beneath the windowsill.

  I frowned, not understanding what she meant. “Come out from there. Did you have a bad dream?”

  “Listen,” she said. “To Daddy.”

  I sat silent. Daddy was screaming about some puddle on the kitchen floor and I could hear Momma telling him it was probably only the refrigerator leaking again.

  “Since when did the fridge leak yellow?” bellowed D
addy.

  “They’re just having an argument,” I told Birdie. “Everyone’s just tense over the wedding. Come get in bed with us.”

  She shook her head. “No.” She pointed again at the sewing machine. “Jimmy’s out.” The lid to the basket seat was flapped up.

  I jumped up and pulled on some shorts. “Where is he?”

  Birdie shrugged.

  “Florabelle, get up.” I yanked the sheets off her and shook her. She was sleeping naked, which she knew annoyed me.

  “What?” she asked, stretching out full length.

  I had my head turned away so I wouldn’t have to look at her. “The pup’s out. And Daddy’s down there yelling about a puddle on the floor. Get up,” I said. “We’ve got to find him.”

  We both dressed quickly while Birdie searched for Jimmy upstairs. We heard Daddy slam the door and leave the house. We listened until he got down the porch steps.

  Birdie came back into our room, sobbing.

  “Momma may have already found him and be hiding him,” I said. “You just go climb back in bed; we’ll find him.” I tried to smile. I knew I’d be blamed for this.

  When Florabelle and I got downstairs, Momma was on the couch, crying.

  “What is it, Momma?” asked Florabelle. “He call you a name again?”

  Momma shook her head.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Fern, you lied to us,” said Momma, not looking up. “He found it. He’s got that dog.”

  My stomach dropped.

  “Where’d he go?” asked Florabelle. She kicked the back of the couch and ran to the screen door.

  “Florabelle, sit down. Don’t be getting yourself all upset,” said Momma, pointing at Florabelle’s stomach that poked out of a Cincinnati Reds T-shirt. An iron-on baseball centered her navel.

  “Where did he go with it?” Tasked Momma.

  She pointed at the door. “Leave him be, Fern. He’s mad as a hornet and he’s made up his mind.”

  I ran out the door with both Momma and Florabelle calling after me. I headed down the path through the field towards the pond. The sun was just beginning to come up and the sky was peach and blue like the icing we’d ordered for Florabelle’s wedding cake. I could see Daddy’s silhouette as he headed down towards the bank of the pond. Jimmy was wiggling down from Daddy’s right hand like a puppet. I wiped dust from my eyes and started running.