Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  I’m not sure Fraya even noticed we were there. She could barely keep her eyes open.

  “This is stupid,” Leland said, breaking the chain to pace the room. “Where’s that damn doctor?”

  A couple of minutes later, we heard Doc Lad’s tires crunching over the gravel outside.

  “Up here,” Dad called down the steps to him.

  When Doc Lad got upstairs, he smiled at us kids. He was someone who you thought had always been old with his musty smell, messy beard, and bifocals. Regularly he would give us kids worm pills like they were candy.

  “Doc Lad’s here now,” he told us. “Nothin’ to worry about.”

  But when he saw Fraya and the blood, he seemed to brace himself.

  “Best get them youngins out of here, Landon,” he said to Dad with a quick gesture of the hand.

  Dad chased us out into the hall.

  “Wait downstairs,” he said, closing the door on us.

  “I’m not goin’ anywhere,” Flossie said.

  We each laid an ear against the door, listening to the voices on the other side.

  “Honey, you understandin’ me all right?” Doc Lad asked Fraya. “Did you do anythin’ to yourself?”

  “Why’s he askin’ that?” Trustin asked.

  Leland slapped him and told him to shut up.

  “I said did you do anythin’ to yourself, honey?” Doc Lad asked again.

  “No,” Fraya said loud enough for us to hear.

  I stepped back from the door.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Flossie asked me.

  I flew down the stairs. Not stopping until I got outside to the slippery elm, I immediately found the spot on the trunk Dad had cut out for Persimma. Beside it was a new square where additional bark had been removed.

  I turned back, falling in the drifts of snow.

  “I’m comin’, Fraya,” I said as I ran into the house, finally making it upstairs.

  “Where the heck did you go?” Flossie asked.

  “I know why Fraya is bleedin’,” I said.

  “Why?” Leland asked.

  When I didn’t answer straightaway, Leland grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me.

  “Goddamn it, Betty. Why?”

  “ ’Cause of the bark,” I said. “The slippery elm bark.”

  “What are you talkin’ about?” Leland shook me harder. “Make sense.”

  “Mom knows about it. She—”

  Before I could finish, Leland threw open Fraya’s door and pushed me into the room. He ordered me to repeat what I’d told him.

  “The bark,” I said.

  “What bark, Betty?” Dad asked.

  “Mom, you know.” I turned to her. “It’s like what you said that girl did.”

  I looked at Fraya, who was weakly shaking her head at me to stop, but I didn’t.

  “Fraya put the slippery elm bark inside herself,” I said, “like the girl you talked about. The one who wanted to lose the baby.”

  Flossie inhaled sharply and grabbed her mouth.

  “Jesus Crimson.” Mom dropped back into the chair behind her.

  “Fraya?” Doc Lad bent over her. “Did you put somethin’ inside you? Now don’t lie to me, honey.”

  Fraya licked her lips like she was thirsty, then said, “Yes.”

  “A piece of bark, was it?” Doc Lad asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How could you be so stupid?” Mom asked her.

  “I thought I had to do it,” Fraya said.

  “I won’t know the damage until I conduct an examination,” Doc Lad spoke to Mom and Dad. “When an infection sets in—”

  Fraya tugged on Doc Lad’s sleeve.

  “What, honey?” Doc Lad turned to her.

  “I lost it,” she said. “I lost the bark inside me.”

  “Good God. It’s still in ya?”

  She nodded.

  “Lord help us, we gotta get it out right now.” Doc Lad reached into his black bag and pulled out what I thought looked like a pair of large pliers. “Get them kids outta here.”

  Mom stood up from the chair and pushed us all back out into the hall. I ducked beneath her arms to see Dad grab Fraya’s hand as Doc Lad spread her legs. He looked to be preparing to dig inside her.

  “What are they doin’ to her?” I fought Mom so I could get to Fraya.

  “Stop it, Betty.” Mom struggled to keep me back.

  “Make them stop doin’ that to her.” I cried. “They’re gonna hurt her.”

  Mom managed to pick me up and hand me off to Leland, who wrapped his arms around me. He carried me out into the hall while Mom closed the door. He let me tire myself by banging his chest with my fists before I dropped to the floor and scooted back against the wall.

  Time seemed to tick by slowly. When the door finally opened, Dad emerged carrying Fraya in his arms. Doc Lad was not far behind and was saying, “We’ll take her to my office and get some penicillin in her. We’ll hope we got her early enough before the infection spread to her blood.”

  Mom had stayed in the room. I watched as she stripped the bed of its sheets. Her eyes were red as she stared at the pool of blood on the sheet. In the center of it was the piece of bark. Wet and slippery. She quickly folded the corner of the sheet up around it and carried it against her chest all the way outside.

  She dropped to her knees and broke the cold earth with a nearby rock until she had a hole she could put the sheet in. But she didn’t bury it deep enough, so a corner stuck out from the dirt, marking the spot like a grave.

  16

  Thou art my God from my mother’s belly.

  —PSALM 22:10

  The first night without Fraya in the house, me and Flossie lay in our beds saying goodnight to one another. When I said goodnight to Fraya, only the silence answered. The second evening she was away, Dad started gardening, even though it was the dead of winter. He went out to the vegetable plot and laid dry branches down and in the same direction. Then he burned the branches to loosen the soil. Bundled up, I sat on A Faraway Place and watched him stand by the fire, its flames reflecting in his glazed eyes.

  “Never put fire out with water,” he said more to himself than to me. “Fire hates water and water hates fire. Only the earth itself can come between flame and liquid to ease their old war.”

  Deciding the fire had burned long enough, Dad threw dirt upon it. With the fire out and the soil loosened from winter’s clutches, he started in with his antler rake. He had made the rake by tying the shed antler of a deer to a long stick to be used as the handle. Dad liked antler because he said slugs hated horn and in turn there would be fewer slugs in the soil.

  “The first woman was given antlers on her head to branch her power out into the world,” he said, digging the rake in deeper. “Slugs are frightened of that power because they are spineless creatures, and all spineless creatures are frightened of a woman’s power.”

  His voice faded as he let the rake drop off to the side. He used his hands to bring dirt up into rows.

  “Go get my corn seeds out of the garage, Betty.”

  “Can’t plant the garden in winter,” I said.

  “Get my seeds, Betty.” His voice rose, echoing off the side of the house.

  I jumped off the stage, landing hard on the cold ground. I ran into the garage and retrieved the sack of corn. I cradled it against me as I carried it out to him. He already had a whole row of dirt ready. He took the sack from me and put a few of the corn seeds into his mouth to wet them. When the seeds were soaked, he dropped them into my bare hand because he always said a woman or a girl had to do the planting for the crop to be worth a damn.

  “And we really need it to be worth a damn right now,” he said. “Remember, Little Indian, plant as deep as your second knuckle.”
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br />   “But, Dad, it’s winter. It’s not gonna grow.”

  “From the warmth of your hands, you will bring spring back for the seeds and for Fraya,” he said.

  I looked away from the tears welling in his eyes and dropped to my knees in front of the hill of dirt before me. Using my two fingers and thumb, I planted the seeds.

  “You’re my width, length, and depth,” he said, dropping more of the seeds into my hand. “A woman was always responsible for the gardenin’.”

  “I know, Dad.” My hands shivered as I pushed the seed into the soil.

  “If a woman fell ill and was unable to tend her garden, then her garden would be planted by the other women,” he said. “They would do it for her, allowin’ the sick woman to rest and get better because when they planted her garden, they planted her chance to get back her strength. Don’t you understand, Betty? We’re plantin’ it for Fraya. When the corn grows tall and strong, so will she.”

  I didn’t say any more about it being too cold or that the seed would not germinate. I merely kept accepting the seeds from my father’s mouth to drop them into the frozen earth until we had two rows of corn.

  “That should do it,” Dad said.

  He went into the warm garage and grabbed a gallon-size bucket full of river water. Taking handfuls of the water, he tossed it out on top of the seeds. In his mind, winter didn’t exist.

  He sat the bucket down and piled the remaining branches, lighting them in a new fire. I kept watch as he went inside the house to get coal to keep the flames burning longer.

  He returned with Flossie and the boys. Lint and Trustin helped Dad with the fire while Leland stared off into the darkness.

  “What the hell have you and Dad been doing out here?” Flossie asked me.

  “Gardenin’,” I said, as if it was perfectly normal.

  She clicked her tongue before saying, “I think Fraya’s gonna die.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “She is not.”

  Flossie looked at our father and brothers to see if they were listening. Satisfied they weren’t, she whispered in my ear, “I heard Mom cryin’. And Dad’s actin’ all strange. Maybe Fraya’s already dead and they just haven’t told us yet.”

  “I told you to shut up.” I flicked water from the bucket on her. She screamed like I’d thrown the whole river on top of her head.

  “Stop that fightin’ and screamin’ by the garden,” Dad said. “The dirt will drink your screams and your fury until the ground cries and spoils the crop we’re tryin’ to raise up. We can’t have that negative energy, not when we’re tryin’ to give all the goodness we can to Fraya.”

  I returned to watering the seeds while Flossie helped. Trustin picked up one of the extra sticks and dragged it through the softened soil, drawing the fire. Lint had turned his back and was wiping his eyes. Leland, still looking off into the darkness, walked out into it and disappeared. Dad watched, then he turned to us as if afraid we might disappear into the dark, too. He stared at the bucket at my feet, before scooping some of the water out with his hands. Mixing it with the loose garden dirt, he formed mud, which he shaped into a good-size ball.

  “I figure we got a whole hell of a lot of mud in our lives at the moment,” Dad said to us. “Might as well make somethin’ out of it.”

  He smacked the mud ball onto one of the coals burning along the outer edge of the fire, making sure to press the mud hard enough against the coal that it got trapped. When he threw the ball up into the air, the coal burned bright orange against the night, tumbling and turning as if a piece of fire was falling back to the earth.

  “Wow,” Lint said.

  “How cool.” Trustin smiled.

  “It’s a star.” Flossie clapped.

  We excitedly started mixing water with dirt until we had mud we could shape into a ball that we hit hard against the coal, picking pieces up. The night became lit with glowing orbs crisscrossing one another. I hoped that wherever Fraya was, she could see all of our stars from her window and know we had made them for her.

  Later that night, after the fire died and the coals had stopped shining, me and Flossie sat on our bed, our hair washed and our fingernails scrubbed clean.

  “I didn’t know she even had a boyfriend,” Flossie said, making a face.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Who do you think, raccoon breath. I mean, Fraya never went out on dates. I’ve never even seen her talkin’ to a boy before. Ya know, besides our brothers. But they’re not boys. They’re not human enough.” She ran the comb through her hair before saying, “That whole time she was pregnant and we had no idea. She didn’t look fat or nothin’.”

  I kept combing my hair silently. Flossie looked at me, narrowing her eyes.

  “Did you know she was pregnant, Betty? You knew about the bark. Maybe you knew she was pregnant. Oh.” Flossie grabbed her mouth, then let it go to say, “You know who the father is. Who is it, Betty? Tell me.” She hopped off her bed and onto mine. “Pretty please.”

  “I don’t know who it is. And besides, maybe she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “Don’t be a dumb dog. She put the bark inside her to kill the baby.”

  “To lose it.”

  “It’s the same thing, bucket head. What other reason could you possibly have to stick a dirty piece of bark up inside you?”

  “Maybe she was constipated.”

  Flossie started to laugh, but stopped.

  “Gosh, I wonder if she got any splinters,” she said. “I wonder if she’s already dead.”

  “I told you to shut up about that.”

  I pushed her off my bed. After turning off my table lamp, I closed my eyes and waited for Flossie to get into her bed. After she said goodnight to me, I said it back. We ended up saying goodnight to Fraya at the same time, our voices overlapping. We listened to the silence after. Unable to stand it any longer, I turned the lamp back on.

  “We should take a jar and put our goodnights in it,” I told Flossie. “So Fraya will know we didn’t forget her. We can give her our goodnights when she comes back.”

  “That’s silly,” Flossie said. A few seconds later, she asked, “How would we do it?”

  I tore a strip of paper out of my notebook and halved it, giving Flossie hers. We each wrote “Goodnight, Fraya.” Then I got a jar and dropped the goodnights inside it, shaking them every so often to keep them alive.

  We added goodnights for as long as Fraya was away. I hoped that by doing so, I could keep the fear that she might already be dead out of my mind. It was still the only thing I thought every time I saw my parents’ faces.

  In spite of Dad’s hope that we could garden Fraya back to health, the ground was too cold to grow anything more than frost. So I took a few pine needles and bunched them together before sticking them into the rows over top of the seeds as if the green needles were the first signs of corn growing. I thought it must have helped, because a few days after that, Fraya came home.

  “For you,” I said to Fraya as I presented her with the jar of goodnights.

  She reached inside and pulled one of the slips of paper out.

  “So you know we said goodnight to you,” I told her. “Even though you were away.”

  I wanted to say more, but Mom had warned me and the others not to talk about the bark with Fraya. We were to behave as if nothing had happened. Mom and Dad even flipped Fraya’s mattress so the bloodstain would be hidden. Then Mom put new yellow sheets on the bed.

  Aside from cleaning Fraya’s room, Dad baked a cake for her homecoming. He put candles on it like it was Fraya’s birthday. She awkwardly blew them out while the rest of us stood around her. Leland was the only one not home. He had gotten a job driving a truck cross-country. He said he would be gone for a few months, if not longer. Flossie said it was because he was looking for the boy who had gotten Fraya in trouble.

>   “It’s the brother’s responsibility to kill any boy who hurts his sister,” Flossie said, looking directly at Lint and Trustin. “One day, you two will kill for me and Betty.”

  “I’ll k-k-kill for you, Flossie.” Lint didn’t hesitate. “You, too, B-b-betty.”

  “I don’t wanna kill no one,” Trustin said.

  “Too bad,” Flossie told him. “It’s what you’ll have to do.”

  I thought of Leland in his truck, scouring the earth for the boy who, as Flossie put it, had hurt his sister. I was still thinking of this as I lay in bed unable to sleep that first night Fraya was home. I tossed and turned, trying to close my eyes, when I heard a soft padding coming from out in the hall. I got up and peeked out of my room. Fraya stood at the end of the hall by the steps.

  She held her finger to her lips, then waved for me to follow her downstairs. She led the way out to the side porch, where the washing machine was. Searching through the dirty clothes in the hamper beside it, she asked, “Where is it? The sheet? The bark?”

  “Mom buried it in the yard,” I told her.

  “Show me.”

  I took her out into the yard to the spot. She grabbed the corner of the sheet still sticking up and pulled on it until the cold ground broke away.

  When the sheet was free, she hastily unfolded it, searching until she found the piece of bark. She cradled it in her arms as she went back inside the house. I silently followed her upstairs to her room.

  “Get me a scrap of fabric out of my top drawer,” she told me as she pointed to her dresser.

  I opened the top drawer to find old dresses cut up for use as sewing projects.

  “Choose the prettiest fabric,” she said.

  She continued to hold the bark in her arms and tenderly looked at it while I searched through the drawer. I ended up choosing a piece of pale pink fabric with dark pink blooms on it. When I handed it to her, she wrapped it around the bark so she could once again cradle it in her arms. She sat this way in the chair in the corner, rocking the bark and singing to it.