“After my pappy fucked me,” she said as she wiped her cheeks harder, “he laid a half-eaten chocolate bar on my chest and left to have his meal. I could hear his fork hittin’ and scrapin’ against his plate as I lay there. Momma came in and told me we’d keep it all under the rose. ‘It happens in every family,’ Momma said. ‘You’ll get used to it.’ Then she told me to get out of the bed so she could slip my dress back on me. She put a rag between my legs to catch the blood. She was wrong about gettin’ used to it, though. You never get used to somethin’ like that. I suppose she said it because it’s easier to say than the truth, which is that the hurt stays with you as certain as the day is long. It’s like bein’ in a storm. The cold wind whippin’ you about. The rain beatin’ down hard. I try to find the child within me as if she still lives. I try to find her and pull her from the storm and ask her, ‘What will you be when you grow up?’ That way, I can pretend her future is not me. I can pretend the only reason her father sees her to bed, is to cover her up and wish her beautiful dreams. You know what the heaviest thing in the world is, Betty? It’s a man on top of you when you don’t want him to be.”
Mom grabbed a tube of lipstick and snapped her fingers for me to get up and stand in front of her. She held my chin with her free hand as she said, “God hates us, Betty.”
“The Carpenters?” I asked.
“Women.” She dabbed the lipstick against my lips, using her pinkie to smooth it into the corners. “God made us from the rib of man. That has been our curse ever since. Because of it, men have the shovel and we have the land. It’s right between our legs. There, they can bury all their sins. Bury ’em so deep, no one knows about ’em except for them and us.”
With a delicate step back she looked at me, her eyes cutting where they landed.
“My, my, Betty girl.” She smiled. “Red is not your color, darlin’. Now get outta here.”
I darted out of her room and into mine. I fell down in the darkest corner I could find, where I quietly cried. When I raised my head, I saw sheets of paper and a pen on my desk. I grabbed them and escaped outside to A Faraway Place.
Sitting on the stage, I wrote everything Mom had said. I sometimes had to shut my eyes to keep from reading what I was writing and reliving it all over again, but I did not lay my pen down. I wrote as if it was flooding from my fingertips. All the cruelty, all the pain, I wrote it all in a story that was destroying me even as I created it.
I folded the pages against my chest. I tried to suffocate them as I went into the garage for an empty jar and a hand shovel.
Back at A Faraway Place, I crawled under the stage and broke the cold earth with the shovel. When I got the hole dug, I placed the story inside the jar as I repeated what my mother had said.
“Bury ’em so deep, no one knows about ’em except for them and us.”
I twisted the lid on the jar as tight as I could. Then I buried the story alive, making sure it was deep enough, a wolf wouldn’t smell blood on it and dig it up.
THE BREATHANIAN
Gunfire Reported Throughout the Night
Cinderblock John, who lives on county lane 3, reported seeing a bright light followed by gunfire near his house late last night. Sheriff Sands responded and found tracks in the snow leading from Cinderblock John’s residence into the surrounding woods. Shell cases were recovered from the scene. Two trees on the property were found with bullet holes, but they were old and looked to be the result of a rifle. Cinderblock John said he saw several figures outside his window.
“They had elongated faces and silver bodies,” he reported. “I went out to ’em and by God, they smelled like my momma’s potato salad, but she’s been in the grave thirty years.”
Cinderblock John was later arrested for drunkenness as he attempted to steal the sheriff’s car for what he said was “to race the sons of bitches in their ship.” His heavy cinder block obstructed his effort. The sheriff says he will not charge Cinderblock John with attempted theft, but he did issue him a citation for being unruly.
If not for the second report made by an elderly pious lady, Cinderblock John’s account of the nighttime shooting might have been written off as madness due to intoxication.
“The shots sounded like they were right inside my home,” the churchgoing woman commented when questioned. “I was sitting up in bed reading the Bible and drinking tea. I live alone. I don’t want no trouble. I don’t know why anyone has to shoot by my house. I’m fearful now to go to the door when I hear a knock. What if I should open my door to the devil?”
Several more witnesses made reports throughout the night.
“It was as if the shooter was running all across town,” one of them commented. “Unable to stay still, running from something or to something, I have no idea.”
18
A woman shall compass a man.
—JEREMIAH 31:22
Sobered to my gender, I felt surrounded by the symmetry of the female form that shaped itself into a kitchen I dreamed my mother standing in. Her body naked, wearing only the sunlight. Her waist no wider than the water pouring out of the faucet while a swarm of children ate the flesh off her ankles as she stood at the stove boiling blood. Her throat was cracked like a porcelain vase. I could see the pink petals of a small flower protruding from the split at her collarbone. Written in small script around her nostrils were words reminding her to breathe. She had no lips. They were laying on the counter and were smiling under several layers of red lipstick. Dragging the children at her ankles, my mother walked across the kitchen and picked the lips up. She slapped them onto her face. When she moved her hand, the lips were still smiling while her fingers dissolved into gray swirls.
As I sat up in bed, still feeling the presence of the nightmare in the room, I wondered if my mother was awake on the other side of the wall, trying to time her sleep around the memories of her father. I looked over at Flossie’s empty bed. I had written her a goodnight and left it on her pillow earlier in the evening. She was staying with a friend from school. It was best she was gone. With the secret so raw inside me, I didn’t trust myself not to tell her, yet I knew Mom expected me to remain silent.
I understood why it was me my mother had chosen. Flossie would have exposed the past, if only so she wouldn’t have to bear it alone, while Fraya would have turned even quieter and more inward under a revelation of that magnitude. Mom had to tell someone and she thought I was strong enough. Truth was, I had done with it what she had. Tried to bury it. Only I had buried the story in A Faraway Place, believing it was far enough away, I’d never think of it again. But thinking about it was all I was doing.
Get out of my head.
I soon realized there was enough space on the front porch to make a maze and trap myself there with my own thoughts.
Stay close, Betty, I said to myself. I could feel I was losing something of me while I choked on the smoke pouring out of our chimneys like a long shout against the cold sky.
Every time I looked at Mom, I saw her as a little girl, rubbing her tired eyes, unable to escape the violence being laid upon her. I had to get out and away from the house. I quickened my pace across the open and barren winter fields, shivering into the rapid beating of my heart. Those haunted hours became my fever. Spinning, I collapsed onto the ground, holding myself because there was no one else to do it.
I had my father’s eyes, but now my mother’s pain. I could feel this pain becoming a solid thing I feared would always be there. I wept thinking about how small her hands were as they tried to push him off and how tiny her body was beneath the enormity of his. I didn’t know anything about sex at that age and I didn’t have the word for rape, but I knew that what had happened to my mother was as awful as if she had been killed.
I couldn’t understand how she’d endured it. I could understand even less how her heart had survived knowing her own mother was the one who carried her to the d
evil’s bed. What do you do when the two people who are supposed to protect you the most are the monsters tearing you to pieces? No wonder Mom still hurt. She hadn’t been loved enough.
I found myself holding our old family Bible. Opening it, I flipped past the dates of births, weddings, and deaths written in cursive on the interior flap. The tears that fell from my eyes dripped onto the thin paper as I kept turning. Seeing the name of God, I stopped at a page. One of my tears dropped on a single word, magnifying it.
“Faith,” I said the word before closing the Bible.
“You s-s-see demons, too, Betty,” Lint said to me later that day on the back porch.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“I’m no f-f-fool.” He started to pull on one ear, then the other. It was as though he wanted to yank them off.
“Why are you doin’ that, Lint? Stop.”
“I d-d-don’t like my ears, Betty.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not in the r-r-right place for hearin’ things.”
“They’re in the right place, Lint. Stop it.”
“All right, Betty.”
He reached into his pocket, pulling out a sack of Dad’s chive seeds.
“What you doin’?” I asked.
“I’ve got l-l-lizards beneath my fingernails,” he said.
I watched him take the tiny black seeds and push one beneath each of his fingernails.
“See the little b-b-black lizards?” He held his hand in my face, the teeny black seeds peeking out at me between his nail and skin.
I could not doubt his commitment. When he claimed to have pinkeye, he thawed a frozen strawberry and mashed it with graham cracker crumbs. He rubbed the mixture on his eyelid. When it was hay fever, he dripped corn syrup below his nostrils as if he had a runny nose and sucked on a hard candy to color his tongue and the back of his throat red. The most unusual display was when he claimed to have worms and taped white shoelaces to his belly.
“I can feel ’em squirmin’ inside me,” he had said.
For all of his faking, I don’t remember Lint ever having so much as a cold. And yet, there he was coming down with lizards before my eyes.
“I think I have them beneath my fingernails, too,” I said.
He took my hand in his. Carefully, he stuck a small black seed beneath each of my nails.
“Did you know r-r-rocks are the o-o-oldest things on earth?” he asked. “I’ve thought about it a long t-t-time, and I’m certain they m-m-must be. If you think about it, I b-b-bet the earth is one big rock.”
When he finished with my other hand, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a clear rock.
“You s-s-see this?” he asked, pointing out a discoloration inside the rock that appeared to take on the shape of something mythical.
“It’s a d-d-dragon,” he said. “A dragon caught inside a rock.”
“Who would have thought,” I said, pointing out the dragon’s tail so Lint would know I saw his dragon, too.
“You can find all k-k-kinds of things in rocks, Betty. They’re more than just hard things. They’re b-b-beautiful.”
“Why don’t we go and find some more?” I asked. “Maybe we’ll find one that has a unicorn in it or a sphinx, like what they have in Egypt.”
“Yeah.” He excitedly sat up, before remembering he was supposed to be sick. “W-w-what about the lizards beneath our fingernails? We should be confined to bedrest.”
“Wouldn’t you rather look for rocks than stay in bed all day?” I asked. “We could find big ones and small ones. Blue ones and gray ones. Smooth ones and—”
“And ones with c-c-craters?” he asked.
“All the ones there is to find, we could find.”
Lint led the way up one hill and across a meadow, where we walked through a grove of old apple trees, then past horses in pasture. The whole time, Lint spoke of sandstone and the way rock can be shaped.
“Sometimes I wonder if humans were f-f-first rocks that got r-r-rained on until we got faces,” he said.
Each rock he picked up, he would examine, telling me why its color or shape was important.
“Oh, there’s a g-g-good one,” he said of the rock he’d just spotted. “Look how it shines in the sun. God must really l-l-love us. Look at all the r-r-rocks He gave. You don’t give a world like this to someone you h-h-hate.”
As he smiled at the rock, I looked at my fingernails.
“I ain’t got lizards no more,” I said. “You don’t either.” I pointed his out. “They must have dropped out while we were pickin’ up rocks. Wherever the lizards landed, they’ll grow beautiful green things. Ain’t that nice?”
He quickly reached in his pocket for the bag of chive seeds.
“No,” I said. “We don’t need any more.”
“But we’re still s-s-sick.”
“It was only pretend, Lint. Besides, we had fun today, didn’t we? Pickin’ up rocks and seein’ all the ways they’re wonderful.”
He nodded.
“Why do you pretend anyways? To be bit by rattlesnakes? To have scarlet fever or an arm broken like a branch?”
“It really was broken like a b-b-branch.”
“No, it wasn’t, Lint. Why do you make up such things?”
He started whispering to the rock in his hand. Then he held it close to his ear as if the rock was talking back to him and he was listening to it. After a few moments of this, he nodded as if agreeing with the last thing the rock had whispered to him. When he looked at me, he lowered the rock.
“I p-p-pretend because maybe if Dad can h-h-heal me here,” he said, touching his body, “then maybe he can heal m-m-me here.” He touched his head.
“Don’t you think if that was the way it worked, you wouldn’t need to pretend anymore?”
“Maybe it t-t-takes a while,” he said. “Maybe it’s like rock. It has to be s-s-shaped.”
“I don’t think you should pretend anymore, Lint.”
“It’s n-n-not hurtin’ anyone.”
“Yes, it is. It’s causin’ cracks in Dad’s heart. Did you know his heart is made of glass?”
Lint shook his head.
“It is,” I said. “And there’s a bird inside the glass. The bird is very delicate. Everything affects it.”
“What you m-m-mean?”
“When Dad treats your fake symptoms, they become real. They float off you and into the air. But they have to go somewhere so when Dad breathes in, they go inside of him and make the bird in his glass heart as sick as you claim to be. When you pretended to have hay fever, the bird actually suffered it. When it was worms, it was the bird who got them. I can hear the glass of his heart crackin’ each time he treats you. It’s the bird beggin’ for you to stop. Don’t you want the bird in Dad’s glass heart to be well?”
He nodded.
“Then you have to stop, Lint. If you don’t, you’ll crack Dad’s heart so much, it’ll break and all that glass will do him in.”
“But if I d-d-don’t…if Dad doesn’t…I mean, what do I do with all these w-w-wars in my head?”
“I’ll tell ya what,” I said. “Anytime you feel like there’s a war you gotta escape from, just let me know and we’ll go hunt rocks together. We’ll talk about their size, their colors, and all the ways they’re beautiful and special. We’ll talk about all of that until you feel like we’ve found some peace in the war. Arrows can’t live forever, Lint. Bullets can’t either. There is calm, even amidst the storms.”
“You’d d-d-do that for me?” he asked.
“Heck, sure.”
“What if it doesn’t do any g-g-good?”
I wrapped my arm around him as I said, “You have to have a little faith that things will work out.”
19
His lightnings enlightened the world
: the earth saw, and trembled.
—PSALM 97:4
The storms of spring 1963 seemed to get inside the house, climb the walls, and shake the candle flames. Relentless lightning lit up the sky in quick flashes and crooked wonder while black clouds deepened the night. That’s a southern Ohio spring for you. Hard rain at midnight, wind until the electric cuts out, the river rising an inch at a time.
I was sitting on the floorboards of the back porch with Trustin, who was lying on his belly. I held a flashlight so he could see as he drew with his charcoal stick. I would sometimes imagine Trustin living like the artists in the photographs of the books he checked out from the library. I could see him grown up, as tall as our father, drippings of paint on concrete floors and heavy tarps covering all of his canvases to keep them out of the light. Charcoal fingerprints on everything white and enough drawings to preserve the beauty of his soul.
“You know when folks are hit by lightnin’, their teeth will glow in the dark,” he said. “I heard it from the old-timers outside the barbershop. They oughta know.”
As Trustin drew the clouds, they billowed near, but they also seemed far, as if the storm stretched for miles. In the brightness of the white paper showing through behind his charcoal strokes you could see a country pressed upon by the sky and how a night could lose everything in an unbreakable rain. He was only seven then, but this was Trustin’s gift. That he could draw a storm and make you feel the lightning in your bones.
“Why you think Mom did that with the chocolate?” he asked, looking up at me.
The day before, Mom had gone into Papa Juniper’s to get groceries. Witnesses said Mom had stopped her cart in front of the chocolate bar display. She stood there for a good twenty minutes staring at the chocolate. One of the workers noticed and asked if he could help her with anything. There wasn’t a question of if she had cried. There was a question of how. Some said her wailing was a long moan. Others said she cried quietly, the tears slipping down her cheeks while her shoulders shook. They all agreed on what happened next. They said she grabbed the chocolate bars and ripped their wrappers open. She ate half, discarding the other on the floor. She was like a starving wolf, they said, trying to devour the chocolate so quick she nearly choked. She scratched the store manager across the cheek when he tried to stop her. He’d always have a scar from it.
Betty Page 20
