“It’s only natural to think such a thing when girls are carryin’ around knives,” Flossie said as she flopped down.
“You think I’m gonna kill ya, huh?” Fraya asked Flossie before stabbing the knife into the stage.
Flossie jumped. Fraya looked at her before cutting a long slit in the wood, followed by another and another.
“They’re cuts to match the ones in Mom’s wrists,” she told us. “If we carve out the wounds here on the stage, they’ll heal faster on Mom.”
Me and Flossie watched Fraya cut deeper into the wood with the knife before Flossie said, “I wonder why Mom did it anyway.”
“Obsessed with sadness,” Fraya said, shrugging.
“Is that what Mom is?” Flossie asked. “Obsessed with sadness?”
“It’s what Leland said all women are.” Fraya looked up at us. “But he’s usually wrong about everything.”
Fraya laid the knife off to the side.
“Now that we’ve put the cuts here, they won’t have no choice but to heal.”
Flossie didn’t mock Fraya like I thought she might. Not even when Fraya told us to lay our hands with hers on top of the cuts. Flossie did so without hesitating. When me and Flossie noticed Fraya’s fingers were trembling, we thought it was part of the power, so we trembled our fingers, too.
“I want Mom to come back.” Fraya spoke directly to Flossie. “Just because I’m helpin’ around the house don’t mean I’m tryin’ to take her place. Isn’t she more than housework? Than the food on the table? Me doin’ those things ain’t bein’ Mom because bein’ her is somethin’ only she can do.”
Fraya started to sing. Me and Flossie joined in on the chorus.
“Momma, come home, we love you so. The house is cold without you, the flowers won’t grow. We miss you dearly, we send you a kiss. Momma, come home, we love you so.”
I sang loud enough to be off-note. The lyrics me and Flossie didn’t know we made up, overlapping each other’s voices.
After that night, we continued to visit A Faraway Place and sing over the cuts because, like Mom, we needed to heal, too. We thought our efforts had worked because when Mom came home, we didn’t see the wounds on her wrists. They were behind bright white bandages.
“They’re healed,” Fraya told me and Flossie. “The cuts are far away. The bandages are only to keep out the sunlight so the scars don’t shine and reopen. We have to make sure Mom never tries to hurt herself again. We’ll continue to sing over the cuts on the stage every day. It’s our responsibility as daughters.”
We hoped that by our power, Mom’s bandages would be removed. But they were still on when Leland appeared on our doorstep saying he’d gotten kicked out of the military.
“They tried to say I took things that weren’t mine,” Leland said. “They didn’t have no proof, though. Best they could do was to give me the boot. Thought I could stay here for a bit.”
He made the attic his bedroom, not doing much more than sticking bugs in his chewed gum on the walls.
With us all together, Dad decided a family picnic could lift the shadow that seemed to be cast over everything. He chirpily led the way through the woods behind our house. He held Mom’s limp hand and swung the basket with his other as we followed.
On the way, Lint collected so many rocks, he ran out of room in his pockets so he started to drop rocks in mine, Fraya’s, and Dad’s pockets. He put some in Flossie’s, too, but she took them out and dropped them when he wasn’t looking.
Dad had a nice spot for our picnic. He spread out a white cotton blanket. He put food on Mom’s plate, but the most of anything I saw her eat was a piece of biscuit.
“That’s nice, Trustin,” Fraya said when she saw the drawing he was working on. It was a still life of the picnic itself. To add color to the drawing, he pulled up grass blades and rubbed them on the paper until it was stained green.
“Do I look all r-r-right for a picnic?” Lint asked no one in particular as he rolled a rock over his shirt.
Flossie nudged me every time Mom moved.
“How much you wanna bet she tries to hang herself from one of these trees?” she whispered in my ear. “Or you think she’ll stab a fork in her throat?”
I turned to see Leland offer a piece of Dad’s jewel pie to Fraya.
“Want some jewels?” he asked her.
When cut, the pie exposed multicolored gelatin cubes suspended in pink gelatin. The dessert was Fraya’s favorite. She always ate around the cubes, then lined them up on her plate.
“What beautiful jewels,” she would say before popping them into her mouth, swallowing them whole as if her body was a vault guarding sapphires, emeralds, and rubies.
She never turned down a slice of that pie, yet when Leland offered it to her, she said she was full. He stared at the slice for some seconds, before eating it himself.
I felt a sudden jab in my side. Flossie’s elbow was pressing into me. She nodded toward Mom, who was picking up the jar of pickled beets.
Mom turned the jar, reading the label that noted the date of the batch. Without warning, she poured the beets and their juice out onto the blanket. I had never before been aware of the way white cotton can stain, so sudden and beautiful.
Dad lifted Mom up and said we were all going to take a walk. He held tight to her hand as we got farther under the canopy of trees.
“Look up,” he said.
When we raised our eyes, we saw lemons.
“Oh, my.” Mom smiled. “You gave me my beautiful yellow world.”
There were lemons dangling from maples, oaks, and sycamores, elms, walnuts, and pines. Trees that had never in their life borne such yellow fruit. This color stood out against them and was so grand, it was hard not to think the lemons were some sort of jewelry. It was like a dream. I wanted to savor it. I traced the edges of the lemons with my eyes. The yellow, so bright against the blue of the sky. In many ways they were like small orbs broken from the sun. They seemed to emit their own light.
Surely there are not so many, I said to myself, yet it felt as though my father had called all the trees in the woods to him and left his word on each one of them.
I reached my hand up toward one of the lemons. I thought of picking it, then worried the whole of them would come crashing as if they were all connected to the same stem, the same dream, the same pleasant moment I did not want to end.
“But why are they here?” Fraya asked.
“Because a long time ago,” Dad said, “a girl once told me how nice it’d be to have a grove of lemons all to herself.” He smiled at Mom. “I gotcha your lemon grove,” he told her.
I didn’t know what money Dad had bought all those lemons with. Nor did I know how he managed to hang them without great complaint about his rotten knee. But knowing such things would only have ruined the dream. None of those details mattered to Mom, either, as she pressed up against his side until I could no longer see her wrists.
Behind the lemons, a red balloon floated up into the sky.
“Ol’ Cotton never misses a letter.” Dad said what we were all thinking.
In 1935, Cotton’s wife, Vickory, was beaten and hanged in a honey locust tree on the edge of Breathed. Vickory had been impaled on the honey locust’s thorns, her arms forced out as if it was just another Sunday night crucifixion. By the time we were taking our walk beneath the lemons, it had been decades since they’d hanged her. Ever since then, Cotton had written her at least one letter every day. He would roll the letter up and put it inside a balloon he would fill with helium and release.
One time I found a balloon deflated on the ground. Cotton had written the letter inside as if Vickory had never been murdered. About the children they never had. About the life they never got to live:
My Hickory, Vickory tree,
Today our youngest stood in front of the preac
her under Papaw’s magnolia. Our boy is marrying a wonderful gal, don’t you think? You certainly embarrassed him by crying so. You made my handkerchief so wet I thought it was gonna come undone. Simply come undone. You baked our boy’s favorite for their wedding cake. Your heart-stopping honey lemon cake with raspberry frosting, so sweet to our tongues. We had quite a time keeping the bees away though, didn’t we?
My feet are furious at you for all that dancing you put them through, but I must say my heart is not. Why you still choose to dance with me after all these years, I will never know. I’m fearful, not of death, but of heaven. Why, you ask? Because I know you’ll never ask me to dance there. No. You’ll be waltzing with Hypatia and Sappho, the poets and philosophers, and God. All your favorites. I’ll be in a quiet temper in the corner. I’ll be in hell while I’m in heaven. But for now, I have you. I have you, for now. Tonight, we’ll make love and share the same dream. Come tomorrow we’ll sleep late and take a drive on the edge of Breathed. Will you be there? Please, be there. I may go mad.
A kiss on your heart from mine,
Your piece of Cotton
With racial slurs carved into Vickory’s flesh, there wasn’t much doubt about why she’d been killed. Cotton had been born and raised in Breathed and was as white as that which he was named after. Maybe those were the reasons they didn’t hang him in that tree, too. Or maybe it was because you don’t get the same thrill hanging a man as you do a woman.
“If she would’ve lived, he wouldn’t have written her a single letter,” Mom said, already gone from Dad’s side a little more than she was before. “We think they were so in love ’cause she died in the midst of it, but if she would have lived they would either be divorced or unhappily married. They most certainly wouldn’t be in love.”
I think it was at that very moment all the lemons dropped from the trees at once and we looked to be strangers of no importance to one another at all.
11
And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth.
—REVELATION 6:13
That May of 1962, Flossie found a book about witchcraft that had been left in the house. The book was titled The Dictionary of Souls. On the inside cover, there was a hand-drawn illustration of a witch dragging a bag marked “souls.” According to the directions written in black ink on the bag, if you wanted to find out if someone was a witch, you wrote their name on a slip of paper that you then put into a hot pan. If the paper did not burn it meant that person was a witch. Me and Flossie decided to give it a try. We headed into the kitchen, where Trustin was sitting at the table. He had loose paper and was sketching the way the flour, sugar, and tea canisters were lined up on the counter. Just when I would think he was a serious artist, he’d swipe his charcoaled fingers above his lip, giving himself a black mustache.
“Bup, bup, bup.” Trustin pretended the mustache had turned him into an old man as he spoke with a deep drawl. “Back in my day, God wasn’t no more than four years old.” He said the thing Dad would say when he was feeling ancient.
Both me and Flossie rolled our eyes at our brother as we set a cast-iron skillet on the stovetop. Trustin let us tear strips from his blank paper in order to write all the names we wanted to test. It wasn’t a surprise that some burned slowly.
“Your turn now,” Flossie said to Trustin as she dropped his name into the skillet. “Hey, Betty, remember when Dad told us about those wild boys who murdered that woman ’cause they thought she was a witch? Corn came from her blood after they killed her. If either of you is a witch, I’ll kill you and see what comes from your blood.”
Trustin stopped drawing to look at his slip of paper. It blackened into the pan.
“Might be nice to be a witch,” he said. “I could turn you two into a couple of ugly toads. Oh, wait. You already are.” He made a witch cackle until we pushed him back.
He continued to smile as he grabbed his art, leaving me and Flossie alone in the kitchen.
“Time for your name, Betty,” she said.
Flossie laid the slip of paper in the middle of the skillet. She prodded it a few times with the spatula, then eyed me when the paper did nothing.
“Well, Bell, Book and Candle, you’re a witch, Betty,” Flossie said.
“I can’t be a witch. I’m only eight. The pan’s not hot enough.”
“It was hot enough to burn everyone else’s name, witch.” Flossie dropped the spatula so she could hold her fingers up in a cross at me. “I’m gonna tell Dad you’re a broom hag.”
“No you won’t,” I said, shoving her hard.
She bumped against the countertop.
“You stinkin’ shrew.” She shoved me even harder. Before we knew it, we were entangled in one of our famous Carpenter sister brawls. We ended up on the floor, rolling across it and hoping to scratch each other’s eyes out. As I was biting her arm, and she was trying to pinch off my nipples, Fraya came rushing in.
“You’re gonna burn down the whole house.” She used a pot holder to shove the smoking pan back. When she looked into it, she asked, “What is this you two burned?”
I knocked Flossie off and quickly stood to look into the pan. The piece of paper with my name on it was a black crisp.
“I told you I ain’t no witch,” I said to Flossie.
The strap of her bra had fallen. She pulled it up, then checked her hair. I had yanked it out of its ponytail. Her broken rubber band was on the floor along with a few strands of her light brown hair.
Flossie glared at me as she got a new rubber band from the drawer and tied her hair into an even higher ponytail. We both had bite marks and scratches up and down our arms. It was a known fact that the one with the most scrapes lost. We silently counted each other’s badges of battle. Unable to determine a clear winner, neither of us said anything more. Instead, we both went to the window to see what Fraya had turned to look at.
“Dad’s makin’ his moonshine.” She smiled at us. “Let’s take a jar.”
“Hell, yeah.” Flossie perked up.
Seeing Flossie’s excitement, Fraya added, “As long as we remember liquor is the devil melted.”
“How we gonna get a jar?” Flossie asked, ignoring Fraya’s warning.
“One of ya will have to get Dad’s attention.” Fraya looked at me. “Betty, it should be you.”
“Why me?” I asked.
“ ’Cause you’re his favorite,” Fraya said.
“She is not.” Flossie folded her arms while Fraya shooed me out through the screen door and onto the back porch.
“Keep his attention,” Fraya said to me. “Flossie and I will sneak into the barn while you do.”
I headed toward Dad, who was dumping his fermented brew of sugar, corn, and yeast into his homemade still. He had at one time sold moonshine when we were in Arkansas. Folks would stop by our house to buy some. One day the sheriff showed up, saying he’d heard Dad had been dealing in the illegal liquor business. Dad told the sheriff it was nothing more than tall tales and that he was welcome to search the property if he liked. So the sheriff, along with his deputy, walked around our yard, which was covered in large rocks Dad had placed in rows.
“What’s with all the rocks?” the sheriff asked Dad.
“Oh.” Dad rolled back on his heels with a grin. “I’m a rock farmer.”
Dad had dug holes in the yard, placed the jars in them, then covered the holes with rocks, hiding the moonshine. The sheriff and his deputy had been walking on top of the moonshine that whole time and didn’t even know it. Dad eventually stopped selling the liquor. He did, however, continue to make small batches for his own use.
Dad always made the moonshine with a look on his face like he was makin’ somethin’ real special, or so Mom always said. I saw this very look as I stepped to the barn and watched him take a spoonful of the brew. He held a lighter to the underside of the metal, smiling at th
e clean blue flame coming off the mixture.
“Woo-wee. That’ll turn ya honest,” he said, stepping over to his makeshift table, which was a piece of board supported by cinder blocks. The tails of two squirrels he had skinned earlier were left on top of the board. Dad always used every part of an animal. He even ate the squirrel brains. He’d boil the skulls in tomato juice, where they would toss in the rolling red bubbles. When Dad cracked the skulls open with his hammer, he did so delicately, peeling back the pieces of bone until he could pull the brain out whole and pop it in his mouth.
“Mmm-mmm. Don’t I feel smarter.” He’d chew and chew.
I approached the table where the squirrels’ tails were. Dad would later prepare the hair to become bristles of paintbrushes for Trustin.
“Can we save one of the tails to put on the antenna with the raccoon’s?” I asked Dad as I leaned against the table.
He raised his eyes and saw the scratches on me.
“You and Flossie been fightin’ like rabid dogs again, I see,” he said. “One of these days you two are gonna plain devour one another. Only the serpents will be happy then.”
He came around the table.
“You get taller from yesterday?” He had his hand up and was using it to gauge my height.
“I don’t think so.” I looked at my legs to see for myself.
“That’s the thing with kids,” he said. “One day you’re all small enough, I could lose ya down the bathtub drain. The next minute, I have to remember you were ever so small.”
I stepped away from the table to sit in the yard far enough from the barn for my sisters to slip into it unnoticed.
“You got a story today?” I asked him.
“Don’t I always? And it’s a real good one,” he said as he slowly sat beside me.
He had to angle his right leg to accommodate his knee while Flossie and Fraya made a quick dash to sneak in through the barn’s side door.
“You ever hear of the Restless Star Catchers, Little Indian?” Dad asked.
Betty Page 13
