Little Altars Everywhere

by Rebecca Wells

  Siddalee was barely in first grade when they said she had to have that eye operation. Almost paralyzed me just to hear about it. I got mad as hell at Viviane because the wandering eye came from her side of the family. It didn’t come from mine. Siddalee’s eye—the left one—was wandering off to the outside, making her see double. Hell, what’d people expect of me? People in this parish don’t get their eyes cut on. The damn operation had only been performed six or seven times in the world, and that was in places like Boston and what-have-you.

  I didn’t know what to do. Viviane had lived with it all her life and it hadn’t killed her. Hell, when her eye wandered at parties, men thought she was flirting with them. She used to make bets with people that she could see what was going on off to the side without turning her head. She made jokes about it, said she made her beer money in college taking bets in the dorm on what-all she could see with that eye.

  I just did not understand why we had to cut on my daughter’s eye. But Dr. Claude Hathaway told Vivi about this operation to correct it. Said he could go in there and take a little tuck in one of the muscles that were lazy and that’d do the trick. Siddalee’s eye would quit wandering and look straight ahead. Soon as Vivi heard about it, she just had to get it done right away. Just had to.

  I said, Well Vivi, why don’t we wait awhile, see if it doesn’t straighten itself out?

  You cheap sonovabitch! she hollered. It’s just like you to be too goddamn stingy with a nickel to fix your own daughter’s eye!

  I said, It’s not the goddamn money. I never been under the knife. None of my family has ever been under the knife.

  She wouldn’t listen to me. She didn’t know what I was thinking: I don’t want my little girl to come out blind or gouged up. I’m not cheap, I’m scared. It’s the story of my life: not stingy, just a goddamn coward.

  The whole time, Viviane and me fought like dogs. I didn’t think about my child, my hands were so full fighting her mother.

  Viviane handled it all. I’d never seen her like that, didn’t think she had it in her, taking charge like a man. She set up the hospital room, the doctor, jerked Siddalee out of school and put her up in St. Cecilia Hospital. Siddalee’s hair was that long red, almost to her waist, and she’d been wearing glasses since she was three, trying to correct that wandering eye.

  I wouldn’t have a thing to do with it.

  I told Viviane, This is on your head. If anything happens to that child, don’t come blaming me. You are the one that can’t live with the wandering eye. Siddalee’s wandering eye doesn’t bother me. I can live with the wandering eye.

  Viviane and her Mama took over. Buggy moved the four-poster bed into the living room and got it all ready for Siddalee to come home to recover in.

  Dr. Hathaway called me the day before the operation. He said, Shep, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop by my office this afternoon, if you have the time.

  I said, What for?

  I’d just like for us to have a talk before I perform surgery on your daughter, he told me.

  I said, I don’t have anything to talk about. This is Vivi Abbott’s doing. Don’t call me up again, hear?

  The day they cut on Siddalee’s eye, I went out to the duck camp. I cleared and burned some brush. Then I started drinking and cooked a duck gumbo with some birds I had in the deep freeze. I didn’t call, didn’t go back to town, didn’t do a thing. Viviane couldn’t get in touch with me and I didn’t want her to.

  I stayed gone the whole time Sidda was in the hospital. I didn’t go up to St. Cecilia’s at all. Drove in from the camp to do a little farming, then drove back out there to sleep. Didn’t come back until she was home.

  They’d set her up in the four-poster bed like she was a little princess. When I got there, her Aunt Jezie was reading Black Beauty out loud to her, and I could smell Buggy cooking some peanut-butter fudge. And there was Siddalee. Sitting up in that bed, wearing this little pink satin bed jacket one of the aunts had bought her. Her eyes bandaged from ear to ear. Nothing but white gauze.

  I stood at the doorway looking at her, and Jezie just kept on reading, like I wasn’t even there. My daughter didn’t flinch, didn’t have a clue that I was anywhere around. At one point while Jezie was reading, Siddalee asked her to stop for a minute and I thought, Maybe Sidda knows I’m here.

  But she just laid there still for a minute, then said: Aunt Jezie, would you read that part over again?

  I wish Sidda would of sensed me, would of smelled me. Would of known I was near, even though she couldn’t see me. But then I’m always expecting too much from the girl, wanting her to know things she can’t see. That’s not one of the things I’m proud of, it’s something I wish I could rip up out of the ground.

  I’d bought her some of these velveteen headbands from Bordelon’s Drugstore. I remember standing there in the store, thinking: She can rub her hands on the velvet and feel it, even though her eyes are bandaged. I got the salesgirl to gift-wrap them.

  I wanted to walk the four steps over to my daughter propped up in that bed and say: Hey, Red! Here’s a strawberry-colored headband. I know you can’t see it, but just rub your hand on it. Feel? It’s gonna look so pretty against that long hair of yours.

  But I never walked over to Siddalee laying there in the bed. I just stood right inside the doorway of the living room for a minute, then turned around and walked out.

  Buggy and Jezie Abbott both moved into the house to help Viviane with the kids. They were camped out in the kids’ schoolroom, but their stuff was spread out everywhere. You could smell them all over the place. And Buggy had brought Miss Peppy, that rat of a dog, with her. It wasn’t my house anymore.

  I left the headbands on the kitchen table and went out and checked on some business at the cotton gin. When I got back home that evening, Vivi was sitting at the kitchen counter talking on the phone, describing Sidda’s operation blow-by-blow to one of the Ya-Yas, like she’d been the one that got cut on. I walked in to look at Siddalee in the living room. It looked like she was asleep, but I couldn’t be sure with those bandages.

  Before I knew it, Vivi slammed down the phone and flew into the room. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out into the living room.

  What do you think you are doing? she said.

  Peeking at Sidda, I told her.

  You put all the responsibility on me, she said. And I don’t want you anywhere near that child now. You stay out of there. Don’t you lay a finger on her! I don’t even want you talking to her, do you understand me?

  I had deliberately not taken a single drink. Wanted to come home sober, wanted to see Siddalee myself—sober.

  I said to Vivi, Get off your high horse. That’s my daughter in there too.

  She screamed, You cheap sonovabitch, you didn’t even want to pay for the surgery! I’m the one who handled everything, don’t you show up here now acting like you’re Ozzie-goddamn-Nelson. You were gone when I needed you. I don’t need you now.

  She started to slap me, but I caught her hand. It was shaking. I looked at my wife and she looked tireder than usual, thinner.

  Then Siddalee was standing there at the doorway between the den and the living room. She was holding on to the doorsill and I could see her feet on the tile floor. I wanted to slip something up underneath those little bare feet because I knew that floor must of felt cold, with her just out of bed. The bandages and her bathrobe made her look like a real short war veteran. It like to tore my heart out.

  I let go of Vivi’s hand and she went over to Siddalee, put her arm around her. My little girl looked so pale, and someone had braided her hair so it wouldn’t get in her face. She couldn’t see me anymore.

  I started to move toward her, and then she said: Daddy, don’t hurt me.

  Those words killed me. They stabbed me in the neck. My little girl was scared of me, and my marriage was rotting in the fields.

  I said to Viviane, What have you been doing to this child to make her say that?

  I went to gr
ab my wife by the shoulders, not to hurt her, but to shake out whatever words she’d filled my daughter with to turn her away from me.

  And then the child started crying, terrified. Tears squeezing their way out from under those bandages.

  Vivi said, Now look what you’ve done. She’s not supposed to cry. It’s not good for her eye. Are you satisfied, Shep? Well, are you?

  Then Siddalee was leaning against Vivi. Her legs were shaking under that little robe, goosebumps on her freckled calves. I should of picked her up in my arms and carried her gentle and placed her back into that four-poster bed with all the pillows. But I didn’t, goddamn it. I didn’t.

  And then it was too late, the moment up and went, like time always does. They took the bandages off and Siddalee’s eye didn’t wander anymore. She had to wear a patch for a little while, but my daughter didn’t end up with any scars you could see.

  Sometimes, when I’d wake up in the middle of the night wheezing from the asthma, sitting up in the chair because I couldn’t breathe lying down, I would think: I can’t breathe because of all the things I’m too scared to do. But after getting up and pouring a drink or two, I quit thinking that way. I just kept putting cotton in the ground and hunting and doing what my Daddy raised me to do.

  Then one regular day after Siddalee’s been back in school a couple months, Pap tells me to go check on the hoe-hands at the lower place. He says, Son, you gotta learn to keep your eyes open. Farming isn’t no goddamn New Orleans house party.

  That riles me, like he knew it would, him always acting like I’m the biggest playboy in the state of Louisiana. He knows just how to get under my skin. Here I am, a grown man with four children, and he has to watch over everything I do, like I can’t tie my own shoes.

  I say, Awright, Pap, I’ll take care of it.

  And my Daddy takes off out of the field. I guess after that he stopped at the post office to get his mail, then drove on home. It was August and sticky hot, getting on toward noon. I guess he figured he’d read his mail and have himself a glass of ice tea. He was sitting in that white rocker out in the breezeway. Had his shoes and socks off to let his feet relax. They say the radio was playing, so I guess he was probably listening to the noonday farm report.

  He must of felt the pain in his chest for only a minute before he slumped over and fell out of the rocker. That bottle of nitroglycerine pills he’d been carrying around in his shirt pocket for years didn’t do him one bit of good. That bottle rolled out of his grasp over toward that big old pot of hen and chicken that Mama’d been growing forever. He couldn’t get his hands on that bottle to un-screw the lid and put one of those pills on his tongue, which might of stopped all the rest of it from happening.

  They say Mama was at the Piggly-Wiggly. She drove up in the blue Oldsmobile in a hurry because she didn’t want to be late with his noon meal. He always liked to eat his meals on time. She found him there laying in the breezeway.

  She tells me she remembers thinking, I got to put this sack of groceries down careful. I got six bottles of RC Cola in here and I don’t want to break them.

  Chaney, my right-hand man, and his wife, Willetta, are the ones who come out to the field to tell me. I’m standing under that big pecan tree where we always set up the water cooler. When they pull up in the flatbed truck I start to thinking, What the hell is Letta doing out here? She’s supposed to be cleaning up at the house.

  Chaney and Letta walk over, Chaney’s head hanging down the way it does when he’s ashamed. When he gets to me, he takes off his cap and wipes his face with a rag out of his pocket. Your daddy done passed, Mister Shep, he tells me.

  What you talkin’ about, man? I ask him, thinking maybe he means Pap had driven by in a car.

  He says, Mister Baylor Senior done passed, boss. Your daddy dead.

  He is standing there with that blue denim cap in his hands, fingering the bill of it. And he’s crying like you wouldn’t expect a worker like Chaney to do. Letta hands me a cup of water from the cooler. I can taste the tinniness of that water and hear the hoe-hands mumbling in the distance. For a second the specks of cotton I can see out of the corner of my eyes confuse me. They look for a minute like snow in another climate far away from the land where I was born and raised.

  By the time I get over to Mama and Daddy’s, his body has already been taken to the funeral home. The only thing left is his shoes next to the rocker. Big black broke-in Red Wings sitting there, pair of white socks tucked inside. I bend down to pick one of them up and I can still smell the Ammons’ Heat Powder he’d sprinkled on the inner sole that morning. I can see how his wide feet had pushed out at the sides of those shoes, just the way my own do.

  The funeral feels like a strange political cook-up. Hundreds of Pap’s friends from North and South Louisiana are there. Hell, even Russell Long puts in an appearance. And you can’t count the number of colored people there, babies hanging on their mamas’ hips. Vivi tells me what to wear, and my kids are dressed like little royalty. I think, How did my children turn out to look so damn blue-blooded?

  We get home that evening and I go back to the bedroom. I bathe and get ready for bed and don’t say nothing to nobody. I climb in the bed with a copy of U.S. News and World Report, propping up my pillows like I do so I can breathe.

  And then my children start coming back there. I can hear their feet slapping against the wood floor. First Siddalee. Then Baylor, then Lulu, and finally Little Shep. Every one of them, climbing up on the bed with me like we hadn’t ever done before. We’re not the kind of family that does cozy things. But they all pile up in there with me like a little bird had come and told them to do it. They don’t say anything. And I sure as hell don’t have any words that can get unstuck from my throat.

  Then Little Shep says, Read us what you’re reading, Daddy.

  And so I start reading out loud from the damn magazine, don’t even know what I’m reading about. I just read out loud whatever words are there on the page.

  Vivi comes to the door then, rubbing cold cream on her face like always, and I see her look at the five of us. I can smell Siddalee’s hair, all clean from just being shampooed, and her eyes are focused on the page I’m reading. Like she understands all about world affairs. Then Vivi walks over and sits on the edge of the bed. I keep on reading out loud, and somewhere in the middle of that article I start to cry. Slow tears, like my body isn’t exactly sure how to do it. I keep reading till I can’t read anymore, and then my wife takes the magazine out of my hands and lays it on the nightstand. She takes that magazine from me and lays it down, and she does the whole thing like she loves me. She makes that one little gesture with tenderness I’ve never seen before. Maybe she’s been doing things like that all along, and I just haven’t seen. Then she climbs up in the bed with us. I can feel all my children’s bodies still warm from their baths, and smell the sachet smell of Vivi’s gown. They’re like little animals, we’re all like animals on that bed in the back bedroom. Nobody says much of anything. I know we’re all crying, but you can’t tell where one person’s crying leaves off and the other person’s begins.

  My Daddy has just died. He’s left me three plantations to run. I thought he’d live forever. I am thirty-three years old and half the time I can’t even breathe. But this one night with all my family in the bed with me is like living on a safe island. It’s the least lonely I’ve been in my whole life.

  I wish I could have more times like this to tell about. I’d give them to my children, gift-wrap them myself to put in front of their eyes.

  Skinny-Dipping

  Baylor, 1963

  It’s summer at Spring Creek, and Sidda, Little Shep, Lulu, and me are getting so good at stilt-walking that I bet Ringling Brothers is gonna call us before school starts up again. Maybe we’ll get hired to perform for a bunch of money and Mama and Daddy will let us travel all over the world. And we’ll only come home to Louisiana for trips to Spring Creek.

  You have to understand that Spring Creek is heaven on eart
h for a Louisiana summer. It is always ten degrees cooler than any other spot in the state, everybody swears to it. We talk about it all year long. When things get bad crazy in the middle of winter and the windows are all shut, and Mama has her nervous stomach, she will sometimes say: Hey yall, come over here and let’s talk about Spring Creek! And then everything gets a little better.

  Every year on the day after Memorial Day, our maid Willetta helps us pack up the car to head out to our camp at Spring Creek for almost three solid months. The T-Bird is stuffed to the gills with our swimsuits, the first-aid kit, tons of Six-Twelve, stacks of funny-books, and the picnic Willetta has fixed for us. And even though there’s that hump in the back seat where it’s only supposed to fit two, three of us sit back there without pinching or fighting or anything.

  Mama says, Oh, I just wish this car was a convertible! Don’t yall?!

  Yes ma’am! we all say back.

  We’re so happy to be leaving Pecan Grove. We might live on a nice plantation, but sometimes it can wear you out.

  She says, Well, let’s just roll down all the windows and pretend we’re in a convertible!

  And we pull out of the Pecan Grove driveway with the car air-conditioner cranked up full-blast and the windows rolled down—which is a sure sign that Mama is ready for a good summer.

  All the rest of the stuff that can’t fit into the car—the town water in huge glass bottles with cork stoppers, the linens and clean towels, the tractor inner-tubes, folding chairs, ice chests full of food, and the extra rotary fans—Chaney drives all that stuff out in the pickup. He never stays long in Spring Creek because they don’t have colored people out there.

  Mama begs Willetta to come out every year and stay for the summer, but Willetta says, Thank you, but no thank you, Miz Vivi. I rather have my teefs all pulled out than spend the night in that parish.

  Caro with her kids and Necie with hers follow right behind us all the way out there. Mama honks the horn and we wave out the windows, and we’re a wagon train heading to summer—leaving all the daddies in town to work and only come out every couple of weeks. Which is fine with me, because Mama and the Ya-Yas are lots more fun without the men around. They don’t wear makeup when we’re at Spring Creek, just a dab of lipstick and toenail polish. And they don’t use hairspray at all. They wear men’s big shirts and short-shorts and ratty old tennis shoes, and at night they sleep in tee-shirts and panties. They only cook when they feel like it, they read tons of paperback books, and if one of them farts, they laugh their heads off and yell out: Kill it! Step on it! Don’t let it get away! When Mama is at Spring Creek, she does only what she wants to.