“Oh, Elvis, I can’t wait to marry you,” she said, scooting across the stage to sit beside me on the edge.
She swung her legs next to mine and asked if I thought Elvis read the letters she’d been sending him.
“You mean the letters you stuff in bottles and send out on the river?” I rolled my eyes. “Elvis ain’t gonna get letters you send out to ’im on Breathed River, Flossie.”
“Why the hell not?” She tugged her shirt down to show what little cleavage she had. “Breathed River runs into the Ohio River. The Ohio River eventually runs into the great Mississippi. The great Mississippi flows right by Graceland.”
“You think Elvis is gonna be sittin’ on the banks of the Mississippi waitin’ to fish out bottles with letters inside written by a girl who can’t even spell his last name?”
“I sure can. P, r, e, s, s, s—”
“Only one s, Flossie,” Dad said, jerking his hips in his best Elvis impersonation. He twisted off a ripe okra and held it like a microphone as he mouthed the lyric about a river flowing to the sea.
“I told you.” Flossie elbowed me. “Rivers even flow to the sea.”
Dad continued to perform, getting into his Elvis impersonation by snarling his lip as he grabbed Flossie’s hand. He took it to his mouth for a kiss. Flossie giggled until she just about giggled herself off the stage. Before Dad could grab my hand, I jumped down into the grass.
“I’m goin’ fishin’,” I said, slipping my notepad and pencil into my pocket.
I went into the garage and grabbed a cane fishing pole.
“C’mon, Flossie,” I said. “I’ll use you as bait.”
We waved to Dad, who was still dancing and singing to himself, pretending to flip his collar up and point to a crowd.
“He really thinks he’s Elvis.” Flossie laughed. “Silly Dad. He could never be Elvis.”
We laughed, running through the fields, only slowing down once we entered the woods.
Flossie wiped sweat off her forehead and said, “I doubt we’ll catch any fish today. How ’bout we go into town and see what those Carnation boys are up to.”
“Those Carnation boys are in high school, Flossie.”
“I know.” She smiled. When I just stared at her, she straightened her face and said, “I’m only sayin’ we’re not gonna catch anything so we might as well be entertained.”
“The wind is comin’ from the south,” I said. “That means we’re certain to catch somethin’. Even if it’s only the scent of hell.”
“Hold up. I gotta pee.” She looked around for a good spot to squat.
I decided to do a little dryland fishing, which was what Dad used to do as a boy when the river went dry. He’d take his cane pole into the woods and bait it with a sweet birch leaf ’cause they’re the sweetest, or so he always said. A dryland fish, Dad swore, was all kinds of creatures wrapped up into one.
“Think of a fish,” he’d say. “Then think of a squirrel. Now put those two things together and you got yourself one dryland fish out of a million others.”
I picked up a fallen birch leaf and slid it on the hook. Without looking back, I cast the line behind me. When I jerked it forward, Flossie’s bloodcurdling scream pierced the woods, causing the birds in the branches above to take flight in a great exodus.
I turned around to see why she had screamed. What I saw was her with her pants down. She was in a squat and there was blood on her butt cheek from the fish hook embedded in it.
“You did this on purpose,” she said.
“It was an accident. I didn’t know you were behind me.”
“You wanted to hook me. You had this planned to do all day. ‘C’mon, Flossie. I’ll use you as bait.’ ” She tried to imitate my voice but her rage was making it come out higher than it was. “That’s exactly what you said to me, Betty.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You’ve always been jealous of me. I’m prettier and I’m smarter and everyone loves me more. You just wait. When I get this hook out, I’m gonna stick it in your tongue.”
“I don’t suppose I’ll help you get it out then.” I dropped the fishing pole and slowly climbed up a nearby tree.
Flossie wrapped her arms around herself and stood moaning.
“Ow, it hurts. It hurts.”
If fury wasn’t going to get her anywhere, she’d try her dramatics.
“Oh, pity me.” She laid her cheek against a tree. “The beautiful girl, caught on the hook of the ugly and jealous pig goat.”
As she continued her soliloquy, I climbed higher, finding a branch I could straddle as though it were a horse. Even though I couldn’t see the house anymore through the treetops, I whistled and held my hand above my eyes as if I were seeing something spectacular.
“What you whistling at, ya old slug butt?” Flossie asked as she looked in the direction I was.
“You ain’t gonna believe this, Flossie.” I swung my arms and legs as if my excitement was too much to contain. “A pink Cadillac just pulled up on Shady Lane.”
“I don’t believe you.” She stepped forward, the fishing pole dragging behind her.
“Don’t move, Flossie. You’ll dig the hook in deeper.”
“You don’t see nothin’. We’re too far away.” She waited a second, before asking in a softer tone, “Where’d the Cadillac go?”
“To our house.”
“I don’t see nothin’.” She struggled to find a break in the trees through which to see more clearly.
“Oh, Flossie, you are not gonna believe who is gettin’ out of the Caddy. It’s Elvis.” I squealed his name like she would have. “The whole backseat of his Caddy is full of the bottles you sent him. They’re stickin’ out of the windas and everythin’. He’s got your letters and now he’s come to take you as his bride.”
I fluttered my lashes at her and made kissy noises.
She gnashed her teeth while she pulled the bark off the tree like a rabid animal. Huffing and puffing, she said, “You rat hag. You think I need you? Flossie Carpenter don’t need nobody. I’ll get the hook out myself.”
“Dad will need to snap the end off with pliers,” I told her. “If you pull on it, the hook will tear your ass out. If you ask nicely, though, I’ll get Dad for you. But you have to ask me nicely.” I grinned.
She cursed a few more times before pushing her rage deep inside her. She squeezed her eyes until tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Pretty please, Betty.” She spoke as though she were auditioning. “Won’t you get our father lest I bleed out and—”
“All right, all right, Vivien Leigh.” I got down from the tree.
She pulled up her panties so she could at least be partially covered.
When I got back to the garden, I excitedly ran up to Dad and told him I’d just caught a dryland fish.
“You did?” he asked as he dropped cucumbers into a basket.
“Yep.” I nodded. “She’s still on the hook in the woods, though. She was too big to drag all the way up here. I was hopin’ you could go and get her off the hook for me.”
“Well, what’s this dryland fish look like?” He narrowed his eyes.
“She’s the ugliest thing I ever have seen. She’s got stringy hair and caterpillar eyebrows and she smells like piss.” I held my nose. “I think the poor thing just got so scared.”
“Uh-huh.” He put his hands on his hips. “Where’s Flossie, Betty?”
“I think she went into town to find some carnations,” I said.
“Flossie don’t even like carnations.”
“She does when they’re boys.”
“All right, then.” He started to make his way out of the garden. “Let’s go see what ya caught.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I ain’t goin’ back there.”
“Don’t you w
anna keep your catch?”
“Naw, I don’t wanna eat a fish that’s pissed herself. Throw her back in the woods. Let the wolves have a go at her.”
With pliers in hand, Dad started through the woods. Once he was out of sight, I ran into the barn to hide out. I climbed up to the loft. Earlier that morning I had caught two bees in a jar. There were airholes in the lid, but one of the bees had still died. I opened the lid only wide enough to dump the body into my hand. Stretched across the loft’s window was a spiderweb. I decided to hang the dead bee in it.
“You’re pretty,” I said to a spider watching me.
A squeak from below got my attention. I peeked over the edge of the loft and I saw Fraya. She had opened the door of the old truck Cinderblock John had parked a while back in our barn to store.
From the angle the truck was parked, I had a good view into the cab. I watched as Fraya slid onto the seat, her legs hanging out the open door. She had her diary. I read it once after she left it on her bed. There amidst the unreadable lettering was a sentence:
I caught a lightning bug. It hurt my palm to kill it. But I did anyways. I find it hard to remember to believe there is light in this world.
I still think about Fraya every day. Sometimes I think she’s just hiding inside of me. If I could drop a long rope down my throat, maybe she’d climb out and eat pistachio pudding like she used to when she was still around to have dessert with. She was a wonderful girl. It’s hard to say how many ways. Her light brown hair was still long then. Her gray eyes, like the edge of a storm. Her small body, a very little thing. You could fit all of her in the palm of your hand. Lose her the same way. It’d be so much easier if the bad things in our lives were kept in our skin that we could shed off like a snake. Then we could leave all the dried horrid things on the ground and step forward, free from them.
“No, ma’am,” Fraya sang, “I ain’t got no place to go. No, I ain’t got no sense I know.”
I thought that one day Fraya would be famous. She could sing just like Loretta Lynn. Fraya had even won a ribbon at the fair once for her singing. I wondered if she thought she could be famous, too.
I was about to climb down the ladder to tell her all about sticking Flossie with the fish hook, but the shadow of a figure stepping into the barn stopped me.
Leland.
He was home for a visit after having been gone months on the road. He had more hauls that would take him to California.
He stood in front of the truck as Fraya wrote in her diary. He seemed to like her not knowing he was there. He bit his lower lip and tilted his head to the side as if something was passing over his shoulder and he had to give it room.
He removed a cigarette from his pocket and lit it with his lighter, which was a naked woman with red rhinestone eyes.
“Why’s her eyes red?” I once asked him.
“Because blood red is the color of all women’s eyes,” he had said.
The click of the lighter startled Fraya and caused her to stop singing and look up. As I watched Leland walk toward her, I found myself hiding back in the shadows.
“Don’t give me another gash,” he told Fraya as he pulled up his short sleeve, showing the fresh cut on the very top of his arm. “I’m out of bandages.”
“Leland, not right now,” she said, turning away from him. “I’ve just had a bath.”
She quickly tried to close the door, but he caught it and held it open.
He squinted at something on the ground. I looked for myself but saw nothing.
“I had a dream about you last night,” he told her. “You washed my socks and hung ’em on the clothesline to dry. Ain’t that a strange dream to have, Fray?”
He always called her Fray. Like she was an unraveling thing.
“You ever dream of me, Fray?”
He offered her his cigarette. She took it with her head down.
“Fray?”
His voice was soft. Like the first beams of light in the morning.
She left the cigarette in her mouth for so long, she began to look older than her nineteen years.
“I once dreamed you had a million eyes and not one of ’em was lookin’ at me,” she said on an exhale of smoke. “I liked that dream.”
He looked at her before taking the cigarette from her mouth, only to squash it beneath the heel of his boot. When he grabbed her neck, the most she did was gasp.
“Why’d you follow me in the woods the other day, Fray?”
“I wanted to see what you were doin’?”
“Are you gonna tell anyone what you saw?”
She didn’t respond so he shook her, asking again if she was going to tell.
“Yes,” she said. “You’re sick. What you were doin’ to my eagle—”
He threw her back on the seat. Her diary fell on the floor of the truck as she kicked his hands, which were quickly undoing his pants.
“I’ll scream,” she said. “If you don’t leave right now, I swear to God, I will scream.”
“No, you won’t.” He laughed.
Her tears seemed to boil against her cheeks as she narrowed her eyes at him until I thought her face would split between the brows.
“I hate you.” She slapped him repeatedly. “I hate you.”
“And I hate you.”
He forced her right leg out to the side of him and her left to the other, pulling her closer as he lifted the layers of her full skirt. She fought back, so he hit her in the face before pressing his body down on top of hers. He grabbed a handful of her long hair and wrapped it around the driver’s side window crank until she couldn’t move her head.
“You have no idea how much I missed you on the road.” He licked his lips as he pushed his jeans down the rest of the way to fall around his boots. And then he was pushing, pushing while the muscles at the backs of his legs quivered.
“Please,” Fraya said, “stop.”
Her head bobbed forward while the hair at her crown stretched from the window crank it was tied to.
“Betty did it on purpose, Dad. I know it.” Flossie’s voice drifted into the barn.
Leland stopped and laid his hand over Fraya’s mouth.
“Don’t you dare make a sound,” he said to her in a whisper.
Flossie was speaking a mile a minute, her voice getting closer and closer.
“One day, you’ll find me dead,” Flossie said. “Betty’s gonna kill me out of jealousy.”
“It was only an accident, Flossie.” Dad’s voice trailed hers until they both ebbed into the distance.
I looked back at Leland and Fraya. Her eyes had never left his.
I opened my mouth and was about to yell for Dad to come back, but I remembered the story Mom had told me about the time she saw her brother in the attic. I knew my father was not like Grandpappy Lark. Yet, what if he did nothing to Leland but made Fraya eat the Bible, page by page? What if everyone would say it wasn’t Leland’s fault, but Fraya’s?
I became frightened by the overwhelming possibility that Leland would not be the one punished, even though Fraya had done nothing wrong. This fear silenced me.
Waiting a second longer to make sure Flossie nor Dad was returning, Leland removed his hand from Fraya’s mouth.
“I knew you wouldn’t have the nerve to scream,” he said with a grin.
She closed her eyes and lay still as he continued what he had started.
“No, ma’am, I ain’t got no place to go,” she softly sang, an expression of pain warping her face.
I dug my fingernails into my scalp and backed against the wall. I was too damn young. Only nine years old and I was floating over the world, seeing fathers ruin their daughters. Brothers ruin their sisters. I imagined that the story I’d buried in A Faraway Place of my mother’s rape was clawing itself up from its grave. Like the squeaking of the bed from M
om’s story, all I could hear was the squeaking of the truck’s seat. Needing to find a way to make it stop, I took my notepad out of my pocket with the pencil. I wrote as quickly as I could.
The brother leaves the barn. He leaves the sister alone. It stops. It all sto—
I pressed the pencil so hard, the lead broke before I could finish. I threw the pencil against the wall and watched it roll across the floor to the jar with the one bee still alive. The bee was trying to understand why she was trapped. I quickly crawled over and picked up the jar, removing its lid. Before the bee could fly away, I grabbed her and squeezed until all I felt was her sting.
21
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
—JOB 40:13
Fraya would make dandelion lotion. She’d spread it all over her body. The yellow on her skin, something I remember loving. I took this dandelion lotion and squeezed it out on top of my head. Yellow in my black hair. Yellow on my black eyebrows.
So this is being blonde, I thought as I stared in the mirror and did not like what I saw. It was the day after I had watched my brother rape my sister in the barn.
Dad was in the kitchen jarring plums. Whole, unsliced plums. Near to black plums. He always had a dreamy look in his eye when he jarred.
“My mother’s favorite fruit to jar were plums,” he said, keeping his eyes on his work. He pressed the plums firmly down into the jars, but not so hard that the skin broke. “Qua-nu-na-s-di.” He carefully spoke the Cherokee word for plum. “Qua-nu-na-s-di,” he sang it out a second time. “My mother taught me that,” he said with pride. “One day, Betty, these plums will return to you when you are old. Then you, too, will jar them and say ‘Qua-nu-na-s-di.’ ”
When I did not reply, he raised his eyes to me. The dreaminess left as he saw the yellow lotion dried into my strands.
“Why you have that on your hair?” he asked. “And why are your eyes so red? Have you been cryin’?”
“I’m blonde.” I twirled for him like I thought Flossie might. “Don’tcha like it?”
Betty Page 22
