Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  When Sheriff Sands got there, he found half-eaten candy bars scattered on the floor and my mother slowly pushing her cart down the aisle, sweetly checking off the remaining items on her list as if there hadn’t been a scene and she didn’t have chocolate smeared around her mouth. The sheriff ordered her to pay for each bar she destroyed. Dad worked it off by doing jobs for the market.

  When Dad tried to find out from Mom why she’d done it, she said, “Because I was hungry.”

  “But why did you only eat half of each bar?” he asked her.

  “Only half was mine.” That was her answer and there was to be no more talk about it.

  “Betty?” Trustin furrowed his small brow. “Why do you think she did it?”

  “She already said why she did it.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think she did it just because she was hungry. I think it’s because she’s plannin’ on runnin’ away,” he said, studying his drawing. “You ever hear of a paintin’ called Nighthawks? I saw it in my library book. In the paintin’ is a man sittin’ at the counter of a restaurant. In the back of the man’s suit is a shadow. I think I’d like to live there in the shadow of his dark blue suit. If one day I’m ever gone, you’ll know I ran away to the back of that man’s suit.”

  I studied my little brother as he colored the hills black.

  “Trustin?”

  “Yeah, Betty?”

  “Would you draw me a whole bunch of storms? I’d like to send ’em to someone.”

  He blew charcoal dust off his paper.

  “Sure, I’ll draw you some storms, Betty.”

  A loud bang of thunder followed.

  “It sounds like gunfire.” He turned to look at both ends of the porch as if making certain we were alone. He leaned closer to me to whisper, “I know who the shooter is. It’s Fraya. I saw her comin’ outta the woods the other day. She had a shotgun in her hand.”

  “You really saw a shotgun?” I asked.

  “I mean, it could have been a long stick. But before she come out of the woods, I heard the sound of a gun from the direction she come walkin’ out from.”

  “The woods are big and sound echoes, Trust. You can’t be sure where the sound came from. Besides, how can you believe Fraya could be the shooter? She ain’t the type.”

  The look in Fraya’s eyes as she lit her dress on fire in the church flashed in my mind.

  “Flossie on the other hand,” I said, “she’s a girl born with a trigger finger.”

  “Sometimes it’s the person we least expect, Betty.”

  He gathered his charcoal and paper and said he was going inside to get one of the spicy hermits Dad had made before the electric cut out.

  Left alone, I took a small notepad and pen out of my pocket and wrote by flashlight.

  Not long after, Dad came out onto the porch. He handed me a spicy hermit before sitting on the porch swing and looking out at the lightning.

  “Lightnin’ is the devil bangin’ at heaven’s door,” he said. “Throwin’ his whole body into it with so much force, he cracks the sky. But the devil only knocks on the door of heaven when it storms.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “So the rain will hide his tears as he bangs at his father’s door, beggin’ to be let back in.”

  I sat by Dad on the swing, eating my cookie and listening to the wind shake the house.

  “Dad?” I dusted cookie crumbs off my hands. “Do you ever wanna leave the storm?”

  “Don’t worry, Little Indian. This weather can’t last forever.”

  “I mean do you ever wanna run away? Trustin’s gonna run away to the back of a man’s suit. Mom will probably run away, too, though I don’t know where to yet.”

  Dad sat quietly for as long as it took him to roll a cigarette and light it. Then he told about the time Mom realized she was pregnant with Leland.

  “Your mom found me,” he said. “I was a lost man, but, somehow, she still found me. I had neither a purpose nor a name before your momma. When I was growin’ up folks called me Tomahawk Tom or Tepee Jack or Pow-wow Paul, every name but my own. No one ever even asked me my name until your momma did. Not only did she ask, but she tagged a ‘sir’ on the end of it. ‘What’s your name, sir?’ I had never been called ‘sir’ before.”

  He exhaled a long stream of smoke.

  “I started out life as nobody,” he said, “but because your momma made me a father, I have a real chance to end my time on this earth as somebody worth rememberin’. Why the hell would I run away from that?”

  “You are somebody worth rememberin’, Dad,” I said.

  He wrapped his arm around me and pulled me against his side.

  “Your feet touch now?” He leaned forward to see my toes resting against the porch boards. “Don’t guess you need me to swing ya anymore,” he said softly. “You can do it yourself now.”

  I lifted my legs until my feet weren’t touching the floor.

  “Nuh-uh,” I said. “See.” I swung my feet back and forth through the air. “I can’t reach.”

  “Well, then.” He smiled. “I guess I’m still needed after all.”

  He gently rocked us and looked out at the storm. Certain things about my father were beginning to chip away for me. When I had read the books I’d checked out over the years from the library, I used to think—like the stories I encountered—that my father had been born from the minds of writers. I believed the Great Creator had flown these writers on the backs of thunderbirds to the moon and told them to write me a father. Writers like Mary Shelley, who wrote my father to have a gothic understanding of the tenderness of all monsters.

  It was Agatha Christie who created the mystery within my father and Edgar Allan Poe who gave darkness to him in ways that lifted him to the flight of the raven. William Shakespeare wrote my father a Romeo heart at the same time Susan Fenimore Cooper composed him to have sympathy toward nature and a longing for paradise to be regained.

  Emily Dickinson shared her poet self so my father would know the most sacred text of mankind is in the way we do and do not rhyme, leaving John Steinbeck to gift my father a compass in his mind so he would always appreciate he was east of Eden and a little south of heaven. Not to be left out, Sophia Alice Callahan made sure there was a part of my father that would always remain a child of the forest, while Louisa May Alcott penned the loyalty and hope within his soul. It was Theodore Dreiser who was left the task of writing my father the destiny of being an American tragedy only after Shirley Jackson prepared my father for the horrors of that very thing.

  As for my father’s imagination, I believed God had stepped on Dad’s mind. It was Steinbeck’s fault, he having dropped my father’s mind in the first place, which gave God the opportunity to step on it, leaving behind a small dent and the print of His foot. Who wouldn’t have an imagination like my father’s with God’s footprint on their mind? More and more, though, this fantasy was fading and I was starting to see the flesh and bone of my father.

  His right leg continued to pain him, causing his footsteps to become the shuffling of a tired man. He still lifted loads and dug holes, throwing his back into it, but this and more was beginning to wear on his body. All of his life, he’d had hard jobs. From the time he was a boy, he’d worked in the field or in the factory, but he’d been born into the world to do something more. Maybe that’s why we had moved around so much when he was young enough to keep raging against turning a screw or punching a time clock.

  Going from place to place meant money was not steady, especially in those early years. How worried my mother would look when all of her lipstick was gone from the tube and she could no longer scrape enough color out with her pinkie nail to cover half a lip.

  “What a storm,” my father said.

  I slipped out from under his arm and returned to my notepad and pen. As the lightning crackled the sky and
my father smoked, I turned to a fresh sheet of paper and wrote about the doughnuts.

  I hadn’t been more than four years old. Leland was already enlisted and Dad had gone on a job we wouldn’t see money from until he came back. The rest of us kids were left with Mom. We weren’t in Ohio then. We were in one of the states that had us only for a bit. It was winter and we’d eaten what food we had. Mom didn’t have money to buy more. My siblings and I were so hungry that we sat on the kitchen floor as if a meal would appear in front of us. Flossie, seven, whined as she held her stomach. Trustin was too young at two to do anything more than rock back and forth. Fraya, who would have been fourteen at the time, sat with her legs crossed and played with her hair while one-year-old Lint sucked his thumb. Mom looked at us. Then she grabbed a big bowl.

  “How about we have some doughnuts?” she asked.

  We clapped our small hands and cheered while she got flour, sugar, and cinnamon. Our cabinets empty, her hands empty, the bowl empty as she stirred these invisible things.

  “Four cups flour.” She called out the ingredients. After she picked up the imaginary bag, she threw it up in the air as she laughed and said, “Look at all my flour-headed children.”

  She ruffled our hair until we imagined flour dusting off, then she pulled us up on our feet to help her with the other ingredients. You can imagine flour and eggs if you’re hungry enough. You can see the brown specks of cinnamon in white sugar if you haven’t eaten that day or the day before. We passed these empty bowls between us, wondering if we’d put in enough of something. Mom sang as she added buttermilk to the dry ingredients, making a dough she rolled out on the counter. She used a juice glass to cut circles. She told us to put a finger through the middle of each.

  “Can’t have a doughnut without a hole,” she said as we laughed and poked our fingers through the air. She followed it up with a vat of oil that was so nonexistent a fly came and landed in the very place we imagined doughnuts were tossing and bubbling until they were golden enough to be removed and placed on a rack to cool.

  “Look how pretty they are.” Mom leaned over the emptiness on the counter. “How many of you want glazed? And how many want just sugar?”

  “Me, me.” We raised our hands.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll do some glazed and some with plain sugar.”

  She handed us the imaginary sugar bag and we passed it between us, dusting half the doughnuts with sugar while she took a bowl and stirred milk and powdered sugar. She went through the motion of drizzling the glaze on the remaining doughnuts until they shone. We ate these doughnuts that did not exist on the floor of the cold kitchen. What I remember so distinctly is how my mother ate not one herself.

  “There’s only ten left now,” she would call out. “Only five now. Who wants ’em?”

  “Me, me.” We waved our hands in the air.

  She let us have all the doughnuts as if they really did exist and she would not take one from out of her children’s mouths.

  “What’s your story about?” Dad asked me just as thunder banged around us.

  “It’s not a story,” I said.

  “Oh?” He curiously looked toward the page. “What is it?”

  “A memory of the time Mom made us doughnuts when you were gone.”

  “Oh, she did, did she?” He nodded. “Good mother there.”

  “Yes.” I stared out at the lightning that was as close as it could get. “Good mother.”

  THE BREATHANIAN

  War Veteran Disturbed by Gunfire

  The granddaughter of a WWI veteran—who has been plagued by memory issues the last few years—has acknowledged her grandfather is suffering as a result of the gunfire that continues to increase throughout town.

  “He hears the shots and thinks he’s back in the war,” the granddaughter said.

  Dressed in his WWI uniform, the man has started marching and keeping guard. He has even put a barricade around his house.

  When asked what the barricade was for, the man replied, “To keep the Germans out.”

  The granddaughter makes a heartfelt plea to the shooter to quit this “senseless” activity. “Please stop. The gunfire is in my papaw’s hair, his eyes, his crying mind. Why must your misery become ours?”

  A man who lives beside the veteran believes the shooter is female.

  “It’s like a woman to do something like this,” the man commented. “When a man fires a gun, it’s a distinct sound. You never question his motives.”

  When the man was asked what he thinks the motives are of the woman he believes to be at fault for the shooting, he said, “She probably just lost her lipstick.”

  20

  We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts.

  —SONG OF SOLOMON 8:8

  Once the rain of that spring cleared, we began the growing season. The work always started with the weeding. Weeds that were too young to seed, we pulled out and threw to the wood line. The weeds that would spread were burned on the garden plot to loosen the soil for seeds.

  “Always make the dirt into hills to plant corn in,” Dad would tell us, “because hills will steady the stalks as they grow, the way Breathed’s hills steady us.” He’d wave at Breathed’s hills.

  Raising the dirt also shielded the corn’s roots from the sun, which Dad said was important because a long time ago, corn had refused to be the sun’s wife.

  “Ever since,” he said, “corn and sun have been enemies. Every chance the sun gets, he burns the corn’s roots, trying to kill her.”

  Dad told these stories each new season as we dug our hands into the earth, making low hills for the beans because, unlike the corn, beans on high hills have weak vines, putting pressure on the roots following a rain.

  “Remember all of this,” Dad always said. “So one day, when you have your own gardens, you will never raise your bean hills so high.”

  Along with the corn and beans, there was zucchini, okra, peppers, and eggplants. Dad grew different melons, tomatoes, potatoes, and just about every leafed vegetable. There were berries, grapes, and all the sweet things you could think of. He grew so many varieties of plants that The Breathanian came out to take a picture of him standing in the garden.

  THE GARDEN MAN OF BREATHED the headline read.

  With such large gardens, hoeing was done daily and in the early morning hours. Each of us had a hoe of our own. Flossie would complain, saying no actress should have blisters on her hands. Fraya seemed to enjoy hoeing as she struck her blade into the dirt, a fierce determination on her face.

  Some of the seeds, like the squash, were planted in late May. Dad had a pole we would hang seeds on to dry after blowing water onto them to sprout. We would then plant the squash in the sides of their hills because spring rain beat too hard on the hilltops, threatening to drown tender sprouts. The good thing about squash was that it grew quickly. Before we knew it, we began the blossom harvest.

  “There are two types of blooms on a squash plant,” Dad said as he pointed them out. “The female blossoms grow close to the roots and will bear fruit, but the blossoms that are male grow farther away on the stem and will bear nothing more than the color they are.”

  “How come male blossoms get no fruit?” I asked.

  “Because they do not have the strength nor the power of the female flowers,” Dad said.

  Given the male blossoms would bear nothing, we picked them to eat as soon as they came on. If you waited too long, any rain would cause dirt to spray onto the soft petals, ruining them. Most of the blossoms we harvested to eat raw, piling the bright yellow flowers in our mouths and crushing the petals with our teeth. Some we dried on the tallest of the grass. We would do so by taking a single blossom and pinching off its calyx, before laying the blossom flat on the top of the grass.

  “Now take a second blossom,” Dad would instruct like it
was our first time. “And tear it slightly on the side so it can be stacked on the first into a chain.”

  By midsummer it was a regular occurrence to see our grass tops covered. That July of 1963, Flossie and I had wandered out alone to make more blossom chains at the very back of the field.

  As we stacked them, Flossie ate some, asking me, “Betty, how much weight you think I could lose if I only ate flowers?”

  “You’re not fat,” I told her.

  “Not yet. But I’m already twelve and every actress should know her best diet by the time she’s thirteen.” She looked up at the sun. “Let’s go back to A Faraway Place. I’ve got some new screen magazines there to look at.”

  When we got to the garden, Dad was checking the tension of the string on the bean trellis.

  “I brought the radio out,” he said, pointing to the transistor radio lying on the stage.

  Flossie grabbed it after she climbed up the ladder. Turning the radio on, she bopped her head at the same time she flipped through her magazines. I sat on the edge of the stage so I could dangle my legs and write.

  The corn said to the sun, I do not love you. The sun said to the corn, I will destroy you.

  While I wrote, I listened to the radio in the background. The announcer was saying the day was one of the hottest on record.

  After the weather report, the station played Elvis’ song “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” which made Flossie squeal.