Little Altars Everywhere

by Rebecca Wells

  The sheriff is yelling out at us, I don’t care who your families are! You’re not in Thornton now! You’re in Spring Creek! We don’t act like heathens here. Women like yall shouldn’t be allowed to have children!

  Once we’re in the car, Mama floors it. Necie and Caro are right on our tail, and Mama lays on the horn and blows it all the way out from the creek and halfway down the road. We’re all crooking our necks to see if Sheriff Modine is following us—and he does part of the way. But by the time we reach our turn-off, he keeps on going straight, and then we all start hooting and hollering. Awright! we yell, yaaaay us!

  Back at the camp, the Ya-Yas tell us, Now yall go get your pajamas on.

  All of us head in and start pulling pajamas out of the chest and putting them on. My skin is all wrinkled from being in the water so long and my fingernails are white.

  Lulu says, Baylor, would you rub some Solarcaine on my back? And I do.

  And Gavin and Bernard, Caro’s twins, start a fight but their big brother Hale, who’s Little Shep’s age, says, Hey yall cut that out, or I’m gonna give yall two knuckle sandwiches!

  And if you think that sheriff scared my Mama and her friends, you are wrong. No. This is what they do. They get out of their swim coverups and put on their shorts and tops and build a fire in the pit, and we all have a weenie roast. Mama rubs Six-Twelve all over us and we turn our hot dogs in the flames, and the ladies help us put mayonnaise and ketchup on the buns. And we have this huge wooden bowl of potato chips and tall cold bottles of Cokes, and the ladies are drinking cold Jax beer out of the red cooler. And we lay up in our hammocks and then somebody goes inside and brings out a bag of Oreos that we lick the centers out of before we eat the cookie part. And the next thing you know the Ya-Yas are pretending to be Sheriff Modine, strutting around the fire, grabbing at their crotches, spitting, clearing their throats. Necie is laughing so hard she falls on the ground and kicks her feet up and down, but Mama and Caro keep on snorting and stomping, making fun of that sheriff’s accent, saying: Ah oughta turn yall in ona mahrals chahrahge.

  We stay outside with the fire and the stars and the hammocks and the mosquito coils and the lightning bugs. And we sing “Tell Me Why the Stars Do Shine.” They teach us to sing it in rounds and we sing it over and over, up into the trees and the sky, and things are so quiet around us. That song is like a bedtime prayer in the night air, and no one is laughing anymore. It’s not that we’re sad, it’s just that it’s nighttime and we’ve had a full day and we’re getting sleepy, although nobody wants to break away from our circle around the fire.

  I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I remember, one of the Ya-Yas—I don’t know which one—is dusting the sand off the bottom of my feet and tucking me into bed. And the feather pillow is soft and the chenille bedspread is the perfect weight on my body and the ceiling fan is whirring steady. The blades of that fan just circle round and round all night while I sleep. All night long while I dream, that fan keeps me cool. It keeps the bugs from biting me. It keeps the boogey-man away. It stops all the things under my bed from reaching up and grabbing me, like they’re always down there waiting to do.

  Bookworms

  Viviane, 1964

  Sidda can’t help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves those black letters marching across the white pages. When Sidda falls in love with a book, she is positive that she is the very first person in the world to have discovered it, poor child. Thinks that no one else anywhere, anytime, has ever heard of the book.

  I’ll never forget the time she flipped over The Secret Garden, which Buggy gave her. She lived inside that book for days. You couldn’t even talk to the child. Then, after a while, she went to the library and looked that book up, and when she found out that other copies existed and all kinds of people had their names on the borrower’s card, she just broke down in tears. She had truly believed that she was the only one who had ever read that book! After that, everywhere she went she stared at people, trying to figure out which one of them had trespassed on her book.

  Of course I simply adore books myself. I get Reader’s Digest Condensed Books every month of God’s world and devour every single one of them. There is nothing I like better than holing up in my bedroom with a Coke and a Snickers bar and Pearl S. Buck. Pearl S. Buck is magnificent. Oh, the details she puts in her writing. In The Good Earth, where she has the man wake up and wash himself before he comes to his wife in the morning—well that just slays me, it is so tender. And he was Chinese, to boot! I should have been a writer myself.

  I taught Sidda to read when she was four years old. Before the nuns even got their hands on her. Jezie claims she is the one who taught the child to read, but then my sister would claim she gave birth to my daughter if I wasn’t around to contradict her.

  I usually take Sidda to the library once a week while Little Shep has his tennis lessons. Sidda took tennis for a while too, but she just could not take the heat. The child did not inherit my abilities on the court. I was the captain of the tennis team at Thornton High. Everybody knows that.

  I get the biggest kick out of watching Sidda in the library. She is so serious, the way she carries her library card in that little purse of hers. You’d think she was a grown woman with a Neiman-Marcus charge card. The librarian will make suggestions about books for her age group, but they’re always years below her reading level. The nuns tested the fifth graders and said Sidda has the reading skills of a high-school junior. Well, I could’ve told them that. The child used the word “impeccable” before she even started first grade.

  Regardless of her reading level, I cannot allow her to read everything simply because she can. She is just too young. Some of the books that child is able to rip through are not even Approved Catholic Reading. I have to look over her choices carefully to make sure she isn’t sinning due to her gift of intelligence. Being a Catholic can be très fatigué sometimes.

  Sidda and I simply love the City Park Library. They have several good window air conditioners in there, and those floors are waxed so smooth that the wooden chairs just glide when you pull them out from the reading table. For her light reading, Sidda goes into the juvenile section for Nancy Drew or Cherry Ames. Then she crosses over into adult fiction for her more serious stuff. She is in the Great Books Club, which you have to be invited to join, and they have their recommended list as well. (Some of the “Great Books” I’ve never so much as heard of, so I sometimes wonder just how “great” they really are. I mean, I’m not exactly what you’d call illiterate.)

  The child would have died if they hadn’t asked her into that club. She always corrects me, saying: Moth-er, it’s not the Great Books Club, it’s just Great Books Club.

  She comes home agitated after every single one of the meetings. She cannot stand Mrs. Chauvin, who heads up the thing. Cannot take that woman tearing those books apart like a head of lettuce. To Sidda and me, books are living things with blood and bones, and it breaks our heart when people dissect them. I can’t blame my daughter. I don’t like Abby Chauvin either. She thinks she is the Lauren Bacall of Thornton simply because she went to Sarah Lawrence.

  But I tell Sidda, You have got to try and get along in groups, honey. Even if the woman is asinine.

  Sidda’s eye still wanders a little, still drifts off to the right. But only when she is very tired. Thank God I got her the eye operation or she might not be able to make out a stop sign. Or she’d be seeing double, not even able to read a sentence straight through. That’s the whole reason why I got her the eye operation, not just because a wandering eye is unflattering to a girl, like Shep claimed. He just could not bear it that I knew what to do and he didn’t. He couldn’t stand the fact that I was stronger than him, that I was smarter. He ups and leaves for the goddamn duck camp every time anything happens in this house, coward of a Baptist that he is. But don’t get me started.

  Shep does love to read, I will give him that. We fight over who gets to read a
new book first. Then, after we’ve both finished a book, we sit in the kitchen eating ham sandwiches, talking about it. Sometimes arguing just for the fun of it. He never admits it, but he gets just as excited about reading as I do. He hurries in from the fields early when he thinks the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books is in the mailbox. If I’ve already run out there and gotten it and started reading, he’ll come in and pretend to pout, and try and snatch it out of my hands to make me laugh.

  The library will only let Sidda and me check out two books at a time, which drives us nuts. We live in the country, I tell the librarian, we need more than just two books to last us! My daughter and I are fast readers, we are avid.

  But the old bat behind the counter says, Two books a patron, that’s our limit, no matter where you live.

  Sometimes I watch my daughter smuggle an extra book out, and even though I know I should, I just cannot bring myself to stop her. Sometimes you just have to reach out and grab what you want, even when they tell you not to. This is something that I have struggled with my whole life long.

  Another way Sidda gets around the two-book limit is to also check out books from the bookmobile when it comes around every two weeks. The Garnet Parish bookmobile is just an old panel van lined with shelves of books, with one tee-ninesy nook where a person can sit down, and a closet where they keep their supplies. The one thing I’ll say for it—it is air-conditioned. If it weren’t, you’d smother to death in there before getting through four chapters of a dime-store romance.

  Sidda made friends with Lenora, the lady who drives the thing, and Lenora saves books for Sidda, even though she isn’t supposed to. How can you resist a child like my daughter when it comes to reading? She is so bright and intelligent, she should have been a boy. When I want to punish her, all I have to do is take away whatever book she’s involved with at the time and she suffers madly. See, she goes places when she reads. I know all about that. When I’m reading, wherever I am, I’m always somewhere else.

  Sidda is always trying to read at the table, but I wasn’t raised that way and I’m not going to let her get away with it either. If I have to sit there and listen to all the shit that goes on around that table, then so does she.

  The bookmobile doesn’t come all the way out to Pecan Grove. It stops up at the top of Pecan Road, just like the DDT truck does. Thornton won’t send the damn DDT truck all the way to Pecan Grove because we’re legally outside the city limits, so we have to suffer mosquitoes the size of blackbirds. I’m surprised we don’t all get malaria and die. Sometimes my whole life feels like a nightmare where I’m trying to keep bugs from eating my beautiful children alive.

  The kids have figured out a way to get one over on the city, though. They ride their bikes behind the DDT truck when it comes out and they let those clouds of white chemicals just swirl around and settle all over them. Their whole little bodies get coated with that fine dust and they come back and play outside till midnight, and don’t get one single bite. Like they aren’t even in the heart of Louisiana. They beg and beg not to take a bath, just so that DDT will linger on their skin and they can go another day without being bitten to death by the blood-suckers.

  So anyway, one night Shep and I have a little too much to drink. He’s sunburned from the fields and I’m shaky to begin with. He does something and I do something back. We have this big screaming fight in the kitchen and he scratches out in the truck and doesn’t come home that night. Probably just spends the night at the duck camp. I’m used to that.

  But he always comes home early the next morning to shower and change into fresh clothes for the day. The next morning, though, he doesn’t show up. And I get possessed by the idea that he’s been killed in a car wreck the way my own father died, leaving me forever without saying a word. So I get a little upset.

  I wake the kids up screaming. Your Daddy is dead! I tell them. Wake up! We’ve got to find him. Get up! I can’t do this all by myself.

  Sidda is my right-hand man as usual and I get her to call the State Police, then Lyle Rotier of Rotier’s Bar. Nobody’s seen my husband, that sonovabitch. Sidda is all organized. Gets her spiral notebook and a sharpened pencil and writes everything down. She talks like a little adult when the people answer the phone. I have taught all my children impeccable telephone manners.

  I fix me a Mimosa and say, Sidda, call his goddamn buddies. Call Sim, call that damn Bernard, call your Uncle Pete.

  She grabs the phone list and starts dialing. I take a snippet of a Miltown and sit there at the breakfast table and stare out the window. I’m tempted to bite my nails, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let Shep Walker ruin my manicure just because he has disappeared.

  Then Sidda comes over to me and stands real close. She says, Mama, nobody knows where he is. Nobody has seen Daddy.

  I say, He is dead. I’m one hundred percent positive. I can feel it.

  I fix another Mimosa and I relax a little. Then I tell Sidda, Hand me the phone. I’ll take over now. Go away and play with matches.

  She starts that hyperventilating and splotching-up that she does just to get attention and I say, Dahling, I’m just kidding.

  She studies me for a minute.

  I say, Don’t you look at me in that tone of voice. I don’t need that, not today.

  So she goes on back to her room and I don’t give her a second thought.

  Well, finally, Shep Walker pulls in around noon asking: Hey babe! Where’s my lunch?

  And I am so happy to see him get out of that truck with his sleeves rolled up and that sun-bleached blond hair on his arms that I completely forget to kill him, and we start to have the loveliest little midday meal together.

  But Sidda runs in, hysterical, and tries to ruin the whole thing for me and my husband, crying and hanging onto Shep. She sobs, Daddy, you’re still alive!

  Shep looks at her like she’s nuts and says, Well yeah, what’d you expect?

  I tell her, Would you please leave him alone and stop being so dramatic, Miss Sarah Bernhardt.

  Still doing her sob-act, she lets go of my husband and runs out of the room. Shep asks me, What in the world’s wrong with her?

  I say, She just reads too many books.

  Then I give my husband a kiss. A nasty middle-of-the-day kiss that there are far too few of in this world.

  My One-and-Only heads out to the fields around three, and the kids are outside. I call up Wayland’s to see if they have gotten in the sunhat I ordered. They can be so damn slow getting you something you want in this town. Lulu and Little Shep and Baylor troop in, sweating up a storm.

  They lay down in front of the TV to watch The Little Rascals, and I ask them, Where is your big sister?

  We don’t know, they reply without looking at me. Last time we saw her was at the bookmobile.

  Now usually Sidda comes straight back with her books and puts the little paper-sack covers on them that she likes to make. (The child can get a little too particular sometimes. I mean, it is not necessary to put book covers over book covers. I don’t know where she gets that kind of thing from.) But I am not going to worry. I have worried enough today, I need a rest.

  So I take a delicious nap and when I get up, I rub some Pretty Feet on my toes and give myself a pedicure. You’ve got to keep your feet in shape during the summer if you don’t want to look like an ape in sandals.

  Well, Sidda doesn’t show up for supper. Which is a first. I mean, it’s not like we live in a neighborhood, for God’s sake. We live at the end of a gravel road on nine-hundred acres. There isn’t anybody she can drop in on.

  It’s getting dark and I start to worry. Shep gets home and he’s cleaning up in the utility room. I go in there and tell him, Babe, Sidda’s gone.

  He says, What do you mean, gone?

  I mean we don’t know where in the world she is. She’s been gone all afternoon.

  Goddamn it, he says.

  We start off by calling her little girlfriends who live in town. First off, the ones from the Great Books Club.
Not one of them has heard a peep from her.

  That bitch Abby Chauvin says, You mean you have no idea where your daughter is?

  That’s right, I tell her, but don’t worry your little frosted head about it.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I think, please don’t let my oldest child be molested and strangled to death. Please God, don’t let her little body be chopped to pieces lying in a culvert off Highway 17.

  I’m so shook I can’t even mix a drink. Shep has to make it for me. We dial up Buggy. Maybe Sidda’s over there, I pray. But Buggy hasn’t heard a word from her. Mother says, Light a candle to the Virgin and I’ll be right over.

  We call Willetta, and she says, Call the sisters up at the school.

  So we do. The nuns answer the phone and they have the TV going in the background.

  Shep says, So, that’s what they do with all the money we give them: buy brand new color TV sets.

  I say, Shut up, Babe, we’ve got more important things to do here than criticize the Roman Catholic Church.

  We call her piano teacher and her dance teacher. Not a thing. It is pitch dark outside with no moon and the smell of rain in the air. Shep and I stand out on the carport and he asks me for a cigarette.

  I thought you quit, I tell him.

  He says, Babe, we’re going to have to call the police.

  The police! I scream. The police looking for my child. My life is getting more like TV all the time.

  The rest of the kids are agitated as hell. Worry shooting through their bodies like electric current. Lulu starts the hair-chewing again. I swear, I don’t know where in the world she picked that up. I have to slap her pudgy little hand and say, Honey, cut that out! Do you want to be bald-headed before you even start dating?

  She starts crying and whines, I miss Sidda. Where is Sidda, Mama?

  Buggy pulls into the driveway about the same time as the police. We give the officer a description of Siddalee and one of her school pictures.