Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “Get out of my son, you predator of the sky,” Dad said as he flew the spoon toward Lint’s mouth in a motion mimicking a diving hawk. “Take your spirit and fly away from here. This body is not yours, Hawk. My boy’s fingers are not your talons. Find them where last you lost them, but do not find them here.”

  Dad lowered the decoction to Lint’s mouth so he could drink. Sip by sip, Lint’s fingers uncurled and his hands relaxed. The boy was back and the hawk was nowhere in sight.

  “Maybe you only tire yourself with that child,” Mom had said to Dad, “so you can claim small triumphs. But it’s a fool’s errand, and you should know it.”

  Dad would not give up on his son. In some ways, maybe Lint was merely just another plant Dad hoped he could ripen out of harsh conditions and against any adversity. For a good father, it is an awful thing to believe otherwise.

  During this time, Dad had been hired on as part of the crew rebuilding the church. Sometimes I would go and watch the progress. The frame being erected. The roof being laid one shingle at a time. Trustin came with me one time. He sat in the grass and dipped his squirrel-hair paintbrush into a jar of black paint.

  “Do you think someone burned the church, Betty?” he asked.

  “It was faulty wirin’,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

  That was what the investigation had concluded. The most damning piece of evidence would have been Fraya’s dress and that had burned.

  “Just faulty wiring,” I said again.

  He returned to his painting while I watched Dad and the other workers. By autumn, they finished the outside of the church and were completing the interior.

  When school started that year, Ruthis had told everyone, “Betty probably walked by the church and started it on fire ’cause of how ugly she is.”

  The others laughed at how clever she was.

  What made matters worse was that Thanksgiving was quickly approaching. The whooping calls increased, as did the bird feathers taped to my desk. On top of that, every year the second-grade class held an annual First Thanksgiving play. It was my turn to be in the cast.

  “Raise your hand if you would like to be a Pilgrim,” Mr. Chill, who was our teacher, asked.

  “Don’t even think about raisin’ your hand, Betty,” Ruthis said to me. Her red plaid headband matched her plaid jumper perfectly. “You’re gonna be an Indian.”

  When Mr. Chill saw me, he clicked his tongue.

  “You’ll be an Indian.” He wrote my name on his clipboard.

  “Told ya.” Ruthis flipped her golden hair.

  “Joke’s on you, Ruthis,” I said. “I ain’t got no desire to be some stinkin’ Pilgrim.”

  Later that day, we were called to the auditorium for rehearsals, which were led by Mrs. Needle, the music teacher. She was a tall woman whose right leg was thinner than her left. She had gotten polio as a kid and had to wear a brace, which consisted of metal rods and leather straps with uncomfortable-looking buckles. Because of the size difference in her legs, her right hip always rose slightly like she was walking out of joint.

  “Everybody listen up,” she said, stepping in front of us. Her brace squeaked as she directed all of the Pilgrims to one side of the stage and all of the Native Americans to the other.

  Ruthis giggled with her fellow Pilgrims as I stood with the black-haired kids. Mrs. Needle came and put a feathered headdress on my head.

  “My ancestors were Cherokees,” I told her.

  “That’s wonderful, dear.” She rested the back of her finger against her lips as she considered the placement of the feathers.

  “Cherokees don’t wear no headdresses,” I said.

  “Yeah-huh,” Ruthis called from across the stage. “All Indians do.”

  “I think they do, dear.” Mrs. Needle handed the boy beside me a hatchet made out of cardboard. She told him to stand over by the tepee.

  “We don’t,” I said. “And we never lived in no tepees, either.” I nudged the fabric tepee with my toe.

  “I’m almost certain all Indians did, dear,” Mrs. Needle said. “They wouldn’t know any better.”

  She told us to stand on the square of green felt she’d laid on the stage.

  “It represents the land,” she said.

  Ruthis stepped on the square at the same time I did.

  “Get off,” I told her. “This isn’t your land.”

  “It’s mine now.” She pulled the felt out from under my feet and started rolling it up to her side.

  “Thief.” I pushed her down.

  The kids around us oohed as Ruthis got up and clenched her fists.

  “Now, now, children.” Mrs. Needle raised her voice as she came and stood between us. “There’s no sense in actin’ like savages.”

  Later that same day, Ruthis accused me of stealing her coin purse. It was yellow rubber and had a smiley face on it. I would watch her open and close it in class, wishing I had one like it. Ruthis had not been blind to this.

  “Betty took it,” she said.

  That single accusation was enough for Mr. Chill to come to my desk, lift its lid, and look under it.

  “I told you, Mr. Chill, I didn’t take it,” I said.

  He ordered me to stand and empty my pockets. He found nothing more than my handwritten poems and a tiny leaf I’d picked up earlier that morning because I thought its autumn colors were pretty.

  “Take off your shoes and dump them over,” Mr. Chill told me.

  I did what he said.

  “Now shake your hair out,” he said, as if I had the coin purse hidden there.

  “All right, Betty, where is it?” he asked, frustrated to find I was not hiding it on my person.

  “All I know is I didn’t take it,” I said.

  He grabbed his ruler from off his desk.

  “Hold out your hands, Betty,” he said.

  “No.” I hid them behind me. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Young lady, hold those thievin’ hands of yours out,” he said.

  “No. I’m tellin’ the truth.”

  He backed me against the wall. I slid down it while my classmates stood on their chairs to watch. Pulling my knees up, I buried my hands in my lap.

  “I want my daddy.” I didn’t care how childish I sounded. “I wanna go home.”

  “That’s enough out of you.” Mr. Chill pulled me up by my arm and yanked me toward my desk.

  He tried to get my hands onto the desktop, but I stuck them into the waistband of my skirt and wouldn’t budge.

  “If that’s how you want to do it, then fine.” He pushed my body forward against the desk and started striking my backside with the ruler.

  “Stop, Mr. Chill. Please.”

  I cried for Dad, hoping he might hear me wherever he was.

  “Say you took it,” Mr. Chill said over my screams.

  “But I didn’t take it. I swear.”

  “Liar.”

  He struck me so hard, the desk shifted beneath me. I tried to raise my head and stare out above the pain, to imagine myself in A Faraway Place and the sweet escape of that, but each time the ruler landed, I was back in the classroom until I could bear no more.

  “I took Ruthis’ coin purse.” I cried into the lid of the desk. “I took it. Now, please, stop.”

  But he didn’t.

  “This is what liars get.” He hit me so hard, I bit my tongue. I tasted blood just as Ruthis’ voice rang out.

  “I found it,” she said.

  Everyone turned to see her sitting at her desk with its lid up. Under it was her yellow coin purse.

  “I guess it was here all along,” she said, looking at the ruler in Mr. Chill’s hand.

  Mr. Chill pushed his glasses back up on his nose.

  “Well, then that’s settled.” He headed to t
he front of the classroom.

  “Ain’t you gonna punish her?” I asked. “Ruthis lied. She had it this whole time. She lied on purpose.”

  Ruthis faced forward, not saying anything. Her legs were crossed at the ankles and her foot was quickly tapping.

  “Class, open your history books to page—”

  “It’s not fair,” I said.

  “If you don’t sit, Miss Carpenter, I will send you to the principal’s office.” He glared at me over his eyeglasses. “And I assure you, the principal’s ruler is much larger than mine.”

  I eased onto my seat, my backside throbbing. I thought the others would laugh and point, but they only opened their books and listened to Mr. Chill begin to tell us about the Civil War.

  After school, I walked home slowly through the woods. I hoped Dad might have a salve to draw out the pain, but when I made it to the garage, Lint was already in there. He had crumbled a biscuit on top of his head. He was telling Dad it was demon dust.

  I silently headed into the house and to the upstairs bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror, I lifted the bottom of my shirt and stared at the red welts on my skin.

  “What happened to you, Betty?”

  I immediately pulled my shirt down. Trustin was standing in the doorway.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I pushed past him and escaped outside to A Faraway Place.

  It was painful to sit on the hard stage, but I endured it as I took my notepad out of my pocket. I removed my poems and laid the pages in a circle around me.

  “La, la, la, go away, hurt,” I sang, “bury yourself into the dirt.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, only to open them again. The world was still right there. As the wind blew my circle of poems away, I left and went back inside. In my bedroom, I discovered birds drawn on the wall around my white iron headboard. Trustin was across the hall, laying his charcoal stick down.

  “Seein’ birds fly always makes me smile,” he said. “Thought they might you, too.”

  14

  Wander in the wilderness where there is no way.

  —PSALM 107:40

  They finished the church in time for that year’s Christmas services. Dad told us that while he was helping to build the church’s frame, he had carved our names into one of the boards behind the drywall.

  “That way no one can accuse a Carpenter of never bein’ in church,” he said with a laugh.

  But for me, Flossie, and Fraya, this made us feel as if our signature was left at the scene of the crime.

  “It was only a joke,” Dad said when he saw our faces. “Besides, who needs to be in a church. God’s in each tree, and we got plenty of them around.”

  I began to dream our names were enough to start another fire. The new flames beginning in the carvings Dad had made until the church burned a second time.

  I woke from this vision on Christmas morning. I looked over to see Flossie was still asleep. She had small dots of blood on her pillow. The night before, she had pierced her ears with Dad’s bone needle.

  I got out of bed to see crust had formed around the wires of the earrings, which were the cameos that had belonged to Mom. She had passed the earrings down to Fraya, who had passed them to Flossie when it was time. The cameos were beautiful. They were of a girl who had ruby eyes and was wearing a bonnet strewn with flowers.

  I could tell from the frown on Flossie’s face that she could wake any moment. I quickly headed downstairs and found Lint on the bottom step. Beside him was a bag of sugar and an empty bottle of milk. Leading from the front door to the bottom step was a trail of melted snow he’d tracked in from outside. In the metal bowl on his lap was snow, sugar, and milk. He was stirring the three ingredients, turning them into our famous Carpenter snow ice cream.

  “W-w-want some, Betty?” he asked.

  I looked at his bare feet. They were still so very small. When he curled his toes up, they almost didn’t exist. Snow had melted into puddles around them.

  “Did you go outside without your shoes on again?” I asked. “You’ll get frostbit, Lint.”

  “Only s-s-stepped on the porch,” he said. “Came back in real q-q-quick.”

  “Don’t do it again. Okay?” I tousled his hair.

  “Okay.” He took a rock out of his pocket and dropped it into the sugar bag.

  “Mom’s gonna get after you for puttin’ rocks in the sugar.”

  “I ain’t put r-r-rocks in the sugar.”

  “What’s those?” I pointed down at the rocks.

  “Those are s-s-sugar spiders. They’re sweet like the sugar, and they don’t bite. They’re my f-f-friends.”

  I tousled his hair and told him he was silly. I left him to follow the sounds into the kitchen, where I found Dad mixing punch in a glass bowl.

  “I’m glad you’re up, Betty,” he said, setting the punch in the fridge. “Let’s go outside and get your present while it’s still nice and quiet.”

  We opened the back door, pulling our coats tighter around us. It was snowing and had been for days. Breathed was white. It was white and cold and as Dad’s boots and my own sank into the deep snow with each step, Dad rubbed his hands together in a way that made me think he had never been so cold.

  I ran ahead to our Christmas tree, which was a spruce in our yard. We never had a tree set up in the house because Dad said it wasn’t right to rip a tree up by its roots only so it could then be decorated with tinsel and artificial angels.

  “The best Christmas tree of all,” he said, “is one that is left in the earth, allowed to live and grow and have its own life.”

  Beneath the tree, I searched through the gifts. Dad had wrapped each in newspaper and bound them in twine. I tore the newspaper off the package with my name on it and discovered a carved wooden box.

  “It looks like three curves put together.” I felt the smooth sides.

  “They’re rivers tied up,” Dad said. “That’s why I painted ’em blue and put hinges on the side so you can open those rivers up.”

  Inside the box were new notebooks, pencils, and a pen.

  “I had a dream the other night,” he said. “It was about you, Little Indian. You were on a stage.”

  “Like A Faraway Place’s stage?” I asked.

  “Naw. One with big bright lights and a velvet curtain. You were wearin’ a blue dress.” He slowly waved his hands out to either side as if framing the scene. “The stage lights were shinin’ on you as you wrote a poem. When you read the poem aloud it sounded like rivers tied up. Blue things. Things of curve that reach all the way around to the sea.”

  He cupped his bare hands and blew his hot breath in them. His fingers were red, matching the red in the plaid of his coat.

  “So much snow, Little Indian. What you think it’d be like to live inside a snowflake?”

  “Cold,” I said.

  “Betty, if you wrote about me livin’ in a snowflake, what would you say?”

  “I’d say my daddy lives in a snowflake. He is cold. I only see him in winter. One time I tried to hold him, but he melted in my hand. My daddy lives in a snowflake. He is cold. I miss him in summer.”

  He looked at me as if there was something final in the air around us.

  “I suppose it is a bad idea to want to live in a snowflake after all,” he said. “I forgot meltin’. I forgot summer.”

  “Why would you wanna live in a snowflake anyways, Dad?”

  “Snowflakes are so peaceful. I think just by livin’ in one, you’d have to be as peaceful as they are.”

  His brows settled and for a moment I lost his eyes. Before I could ask him anything more, I heard the back screen door squeak open. My siblings were coming out on the porch. I saw that Fraya had Lint’s shoes in her hand. She slipped them on his feet before he stepped out into the snow.

  L
eland was the first at the tree. He opened his gift, which was a new pocketknife. He had recently broken the blade of his old one. Fraya received what she had asked for. A brown diary that had a quilted cat on the cover.

  “W-w-what’s this?” Lint asked as he held up the horn-shaped rock he got for his gift.

  “It’s called a horn coral fossil,” Dad told him. “You know what a fossil is, son?”

  Lint shook his head.

  “It’s the remains of somethin’ that lived a long time ago,” Dad said. “That fossil in your hand is over three hundred million years old. It’s from the time Ohio used to be beneath a sea.”

  “My gift is better,” Trustin said, holding up a squirrel skull that had a paintbrush sticking out of each eyehole. Dad had made a few of the paintbrushes’ bristles out of squirrel fur, but others were made out of pine needles.

  “I can’t wait.” Flossie ripped into her gift. When she saw what it was, she was so happy, she couldn’t even speak. It was the one thing she seemed to want the most at the time. Elvis Presley. Elvis was always on the magazine covers then. Dad matted one with thin cardboard so it would look like an actual photo sent to fans. He signed Elvis’ name with a black marker.

  “Is this really Elvis’ autograph?” Flossie grinned ear to ear, her ponytail bouncing.

  “Sure is.” Dad laughed.

  I never did tell Flossie she was kissing the handwriting of her father.

  “Landon, you got a customer.” Mom came up behind us as she pointed over at Persimma.

  Persimma was an elderly neighbor from a few houses down. She had frizzy red hair and never missed the chance to wear a sequined sweater. She was holding money in her arthritic hand. She waved it toward Dad. He gestured back to her, then went into the garage.

  A couple of minutes later, he came out with a brown-tinged decoction. Before he took it to Persimma, he stopped in front of me and asked, “What type of insect you reckon these roots look like?”

  He held the jar up to the light and pointed out the blackberry roots inside. The little hairs on the roots fanned out like squirming feet.