Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Tiffany McDaniel

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McDaniel, Tiffany, author.

  Title: Betty / by Tiffany McDaniel.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019041546 (print) | LCCN 2019041547 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525657071 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525657088 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C38683 (print) | LCC PS3613.C38683 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019041546

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019041547

  Ebook ISBN 9780525657088

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Photo on this page courtesy of the author

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One: I Am

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two: King of Kings

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Three: Light of the World

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part Four: Seed of Woman

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Part Five: Horn of Salvation

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  My mother, Betty, was born February 12, 1954, in Ozark, Arkansas. She was born to a woman as telling as a dream and to a man who was a Cherokee, a moonshiner, and a mythmaker. One of twelve children, my mother came of age in the foothills of the Ohio Appalachians. This book is part dance, part song, and part shine of the moon. Above everything else, this story is, always and forever, the Little Indian’s.

  I love you, Mom. This book is for you and all your ancient magic.

  MY BROKEN HOME

  You give me a wall,

  And I’ll give you a hole.

  You give me a window,

  And I’ll give you a break.

  You give me water,

  And I’ll give you blood.

  —BETTY

  Author’s Note

  This novel takes place in the foothills of the Ohio Appalachians in southern Ohio. Ohio Appalachia is a place where families are raised and individuals step into their own light. Southern Ohio has its own beautiful traditions, culture, history, and rich southern drawl and dialect. I have been honored to call this region my home. I hope, after reading this novel, that you love this part of Ohio as much as I do.

  I further hope that you enjoy your time with this story, which is inspired by generations of my family. In particular, it is inspired by the strength of my mother and the women who have come before me. In the face of adversity, they rose to their own power. It has been an honor for me to tell such a story.

  Prologue

  I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.

  —PHILIPPIANS 1:3

  I’m still a child, only as tall as my father’s shotgun. Dad’s asking me to bring it with me as I go out to where he is resting on the hood of the car. He lifts the shotgun out of my hands and lays it across his lap. When I sit next to him, I can feel the summer heat coming off his skin like he’s just another tin roof on a hot day.

  I don’t mind that the tomato seeds, left over from his afternoon lunch in the garden, drop off his chin and land on my arm. The tiny seeds cling to my flesh and rise above it like Braille on a page.

  “My heart is made of glass,” he says as he starts to roll a cigarette. “My heart is made of glass and if I ever lose you, Betty, my heart will break into more hurt than eternity would have time to heal.”

  I reach into his pouch of tobacco and rub the dry leaves, feeling each as if it were its own animal, alive and moving from fingertip to fingertip.

  “What’s a glass heart like, Dad?” I ask because I feel like the answer will be greater than I can ever imagine.

  “A hollow piece of glass shaped like a heart.” His voice seems to soar above the hills around us.

  “Is the glass red, Dad?”

  “It’s as red as the dress you’re wearin’ right now, Betty.”

  “But how is a piece of glass inside you?”

  “It’s hangin’ in there from a sweet little string. Within the glass is the bird God caught all the way up in heaven.”

  “Why’d He put a bird in there?” I ask.

  “So a little piece of heaven would always be in our hearts. Safest place for a piece of heaven, I reckon.”

  “What type of bird, Dad?”

  “Well, Little Indian,” he says, striking the match against the sandpaper ribbon on his wide-brimmed hat to light his cigarette, “I think she’d be a glitterin’ bird and her whole body would shine like little fires of light, the way Dorothy’s ruby slippers did in that movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “The Wizard of Oz. Remember Toto?” He barks, ending with a long howl.

  “The little black dog?”

  “That’s right.” He lays my head against his chest. “Do you hear that? Thumpity, thump. Do you know what that sound is? Thumpity, thump, thump.”

  “It’s the beatin’ of your heart.”

  “It’s the noise of the little bird flappin’ her wings.”

  “The bird?” I hold my hand over my own chest. �
�What happens to the bird, Dad?”

  “You mean when we die?” He squints at me as if my face has become the sun.

  “Yes, when we die, Dad.”

  “Well, the glass heart opens, like a locket, and the bird flies out to lead us to heaven so we don’t get lost. It’s very easy to get lost on the way to a place you’ve never been before.”

  I keep my ear against his chest, listening to the steady beating.

  “Dad?” I ask. “Does everyone have glass hearts?”

  “Nope.” He takes a drag on his cigarette. “Just me and you, Little Indian. Just me and you.”

  He tells me to lean back and cover my ears. With the cigarette hanging in the corner of his mouth, he raises the shotgun and fires.

  Part One

  I Am

  1909–1961

  1

  There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

  —MATTHEW 8:12

  A girl comes of age against the knife. She must learn to bear its blade. To be cut. To bleed. To scar over and still, somehow, be beautiful and with good enough knees to take the sponge to the kitchen floor every Saturday. You’re either lost or you’re found. These truths can argue one another for an infinity. And what is infinity but a tangled swear. A cracked circle. A space of fuchsia sky. If we bring it down to earth, infinity is a series of rolling hills. A countryside in Ohio where all the tall-grass snakes know how angels lose their wings.

  I remember the fierce love and devotion as much as I remember the violence. When I close my eyes, I see the lime-green clover that grew around our barn in the spring while wild dogs drove away our patience and our tenderness. Times will never be the same, so we give time another beautiful name until it’s easier to carry as we go on remembering where it is we’ve come from. Where I came from was a family of eight children. More than one of us would die in the prizewinning years of youth. Some blamed God for taking too few. Others accused the devil of leaving too many. Between God and devil, our family tree grew with rotten roots, broken branches, and fungus on the leaves.

  “It grows bitter and gnarled,” Dad would say of the large pin oak in our backyard, “because it doubts the light.”

  My father was born April 7, 1909, in a Kentucky sorghum field downwind from a slaughterhouse. Because of this, the air smelled of blood and death. I imagine they all looked at him as if he were something born of these two things.

  “My boy will need to be dunked in the river,” his mother said over his tiny reaching fingers.

  My father descended from the Cherokee through both his maternal and paternal lines. When I was a child, I thought to be Cherokee meant to be tethered to the moon, like a sliver of light unraveling from it.

  “Tsa-la-gi. A-nv-da-di-s-di.”

  Following our bloodline back through the generations, we belonged to the Aniwodi clan. Members of this Cherokee clan were responsible for making a special red paint used in sacred ceremonies and at wartime.

  “Our clan was the clan of creators,” my father would say to me. “Teachers, too. They spoke of life and death, of the sacred fire that lights it all. Our people are keepers of this knowledge. Remember this, Betty. Remember you, too, know how to make red paint and speak of sacred fires.”

  The Aniwodi clan was also known for its healers and medicine men, those who were said to have “painted” their medicine on the sick or ill. My father, in his own way, would continue this.

  “Your daddy’s a medicine man,” they would tease me in school while flapping feathers in my face. They thought it would make me love my father less, but I only loved him more.

  “Tsa-la-gi. A-nv-da-di-s-di.”

  Throughout my childhood, Dad spoke of our ancestors, making sure we did not forget them.

  “Our land used to be this much,” he would say, holding his hands out to either side of him as he spoke of the eastern territory that had once belonged to the Cherokee before they were forcibly removed to Oklahoma.

  Our Cherokee ancestors who managed to avoid going to this alien land called Oklahoma did so by hiding in the wilderness. But they were told if they wanted to stay, they would have to embrace the way of the white settlers. The higher powers had made it the law of the land that the Cherokee must be “civilized” or be taken from their home. They had little choice but to speak the English of the white man and convert to his religion. They were told Jesus had died for them, too.

  Before Christianity, the Cherokee celebrated being a matriarchal and matrilineal society. Women were the head of the household, but Christianity positioned men at the top. In this conversion, Cherokee women were taken from the land they had once owned and worked. They were given aprons and placed inside the kitchen, where they were told they belonged. The Cherokee men, who had always been hunters, were told to now farm the land. The traditional Cherokee way of life was uprooted, along with the gender roles that had allowed women to have a presence equal to that of men.

  Between the spinning wheel and the plow, there were Cherokee who fought to preserve their culture, but traditions became diluted. My father did his best to keep the water out of our blood by honoring the wisdom that had been passed down to him, like how to make a spoon from a squash leaf and stem or how to know when it’s time to plant corn.

  “When the wild gooseberry bush has exploded in leaf,” he would say, “because the wild gooseberry is the first to open her eyes from her winter nap and say, ‘The earth is warm enough.’ Nature speaks to us. We just have to remember how to listen.”

  My father’s soul was from another time. A time when the land was peopled by tribes who heard the earth and respected it. His own respect filled up inside him until he was the greatest man I ever knew. I loved him for this and more, like how he planted violets but never remembered they were purple. I loved him for getting his hair cut like a lopsided hat every Fourth of July and I loved him for holding a light on our coughs when we were sick.

  “Can you see the germs?” he’d ask, shining the light beam on the air between us. “They’re all playin’ violin. Your cough is their song.”

  Through his stories, I waltzed across the sun without burning my feet.

  My father was meant to be a father. And, despite the troubles between him and my mother, he was meant to be a husband, too. My parents met in a cemetery in Joyjug, Ohio, on a day given to the clouds. Dad wasn’t wearing a shirt. It was in his hand and fashioned into a sack. Inside it were mushrooms that looked like pieces of a smoker’s lung. As he scanned the area for more, he saw her. She was sitting on a quilt. You could tell the quilt had been handmade by a girl still learning. The stitches spaced unevenly. The crookedly cut sheets of fabric in two different shades of cream. In the center of the quilt was a large appliquéd tree made out of scraps of mismatched calico. She was seated on this tree and was eating an apple while facing the headstone of an unknown Civil War soldier.

  What a peculiar girl, Dad thought, to be sitting in a cemetery chomping an apple with all that death beneath her.

  “Excuse me, miss. You seen any of these around?” He held his shirt sack open. She briefly looked in at the mushrooms before glancing up at his face and shaking her head.

  “You ever had one of these mushrooms, miss?” he asked. “Fried with butter? Mighty delicious.”

  She said nothing, so he went on to say she was a girl of many words.

  “I bet you’re the guardian of a lost language,” he said. “That soldier one of your people?” He motioned toward the grave.

  “How can he be?” she finally spoke. “No one even knows who he is.” She flicked her hand in the direction of the headstone. “THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER. You can read, can’t you?” She asked harsher than she meant to.

  For a moment, he thought he might leave her be, but part of him existed there better with her so he sat on the grass outside the edge of the quilt. Leaning back, he looked up at the sky and remarke
d how it looked like rain. He then picked up one of the mushrooms and twirled it between his long fingers.

  “They’re ugly things, ain’t they?” She frowned.

  “They’re beautiful,” Dad said, insulted on the mushroom’s behalf. “They call ’em the trumpet of death. It’s why they grow so well in graveyards.”

  He held the small end of the mushroom to his mouth and made the noise of a trumpet.

  “Toot-toot-ta-doo.” He smiled. “They’re more than beautiful. They’re a good dose of nature’s medicine. Good for all sorts of ailments. Maybe one day I’ll fry ya some. Maybe I’ll even grow ya an acre all your own.”

  “I don’t want no mushrooms.” She made a face. “I’d like lemons, though. A whole grove of ’em.”

  “You like lemons, do ya?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “I like how yellow they are,” she said. “How can you not be happy with all that yellow?”

  She met his eyes but quickly looked away. For her sake, he turned to the mushroom in his hand. As he studied it, rubbing his fingers over its crinkled flesh, she slowly moved her eyes back to him. He was a tall, sharp-boned man who reminded her of the walking-stick insects that would climb the pane of her bedroom window every summer. His muddy pants were too big for him and were held up by a scuffed leather belt cinched around his thin waist.