Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “I didn’t.”

  “What if Dad believes you did?” He nodded toward the direction of Dad’s voice. “He’ll never look at you the same way. You’ll be filthy to him. You’ll bring such shame. Now stop cryin’.” He shook me. “I said stop it.”

  He pressed his thumbs into my eyes, wiping them.

  “You’re nothin’ but a stupid hussy.” He grabbed my hand and tugged me all the way back to the lane, where Dad and Trustin stood by the truck.

  “There you two are,” Dad said when he saw us. “Where were you?”

  “She threw rocks at my truck.” Leland pushed me forward.

  “Betty?” Dad turned to me. “Why did you throw rocks at his truck?” He dropped his eyes to my scuffed knees. “You fall? That why you cryin’ and all dirty?”

  “Had to chase her down,” Leland answered for me. “We both took quite a rollin’. Looks like you left scratches.” Leland pointed at the marks on the driver’s side door.

  “Betty,” Dad said, “apologize for throwin’ rocks at his truck.”

  “Apologize?” I shook my head. “I ain’t apologizin’ to him.”

  I grabbed another handful of gravel from the lane and threw it at Leland. He turned just in time for the rocks to bounce off his back.

  “Betty, stop.” Dad pointed his finger at me like I was a small child. “Now, that’s enough. Understand me?”

  Leland stood behind Dad and grinned at me. I tightened my fists until my fingernails were digging into my palms. When Dad turned to look at the scratches on the truck, I seized the opportunity and quickly reached into his pocket, pulling out his folded knife. With it, I ran toward Leland and jumped on his back. Opening the knife, I held its edge against the bridge of his nose, slicing into his flesh. The blood was warm as it ran over my fingers.

  “Betty, goddamn it.” Dad wrapped his arms around my waist.

  I managed to cut Leland deeper just before Dad succeeded in pulling me off.

  Leland cried out in pain as blood ran down his face.

  “What the hell were you thinkin’, Betty?” Dad yanked the knife out of my hand.

  He put the knife into his pocket before grabbing me by the arm. When he started striking my backside, I screamed.

  “Dad, stop it.” Trustin’s voice was somewhere behind us.

  “She has to learn a lesson,” Dad said over my cries. “She could have killed him.”

  “I wish I had.” I yanked myself free. “I hate him and I hate you.”

  I shoved past my father and didn’t stop running until I had made it all the way back to Ms. Pleasant’s.

  “Ms. Pleasant?” I pushed open her door. “You here?”

  She came out from the kitchen.

  “You forget somethin’, Carpenter?” she asked.

  I lunged at her and pulled the mask off. She cried out and hid her face behind her hands.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “Please, don’t look. I’m a monster.”

  I could see her face through the spaces between her fingers. I expected to see boils or scars. Something grotesque and painful. But there wasn’t so much as a pockmark.

  “There’s nothin’ wrong with you.” I jerked her hands away to reveal the beautiful face of a sixty-eight-year-old woman. “You’ve been lyin’ this whole time. Hidin’ behind these.” I shook the mask in her face.

  “I’m hideous.” She howled, pawing at her face. “Can’t you see?”

  “There’s nothin’ there.”

  “Feel.” She grabbed my hand and held it to her cheek. “Feel the pus. The ridges of the scars. Don’t you see my red eyes? My nose is gone. My lips are raw. There is everything wrong with me.”

  She threw her whole body into the nearby table, picking up the porcelain vase and throwing it against the wall. She tore the plastic covers off her furniture and knocked over shelves, sending the books crashing to the floor.

  She snatched the sheets off the walls, revealing the mirrors. Her eyes widened in horror at her reflection.

  “I’m a monster.” She smashed her fist into the glass.

  Bleeding, she continued to destroy her home. I tightened my hand on the mask and ran out the door. When I got to the end of the lane, Ms. Pleasant’s high-pitched cries were still echoing in my ears. I hurried to the patch of quicksand and threw the mask into it.

  At first it didn’t appear the mask would sink, then it slowly started to be devoured by the sand until it was as though I was not looking at a mask at all, but the face of a woman slowly disappearing.

  THE BREATHANIAN

  Ghost Said to Be Shooter

  A Mrs. Windcreep has come forward, saying she believes it is her dead mother who is responsible for the gunfire.

  “A mother’s hatred lives in the dust,” Mrs. Windcreep said. “It’s why there’s always so much dust.”

  Mrs. Windcreep points to what she says is evidence around her home that supports her theory, such as doors that close on their own and a bathtub that keeps filling up with water.

  “It’s my mother, sure enough. She never thought I took enough baths,” Mrs. Windcreep states. “I hoped my mother would be trapped in the ground after we buried her, but she’s risen. She always has been a lousy shot, though, so I’m not overly concerned. But I wouldn’t let any presidents come to town. They just might get assassinated as Mother was terribly fond of tragedy. Ain’t all women?”

  31

  For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.

  —ECCLESIASTES 7:20

  Sheriff Sands leaned in. He wore a cream vest over a white undershirt. His brown pants were partially tucked into his boots. He smelled of chewing tobacco.

  “She said you came into her home and attacked her, Betty. Ripped her mask right off her face. Why would you do a thing like that?”

  Sheriff Sands was originally from Arkansas and had the deep southern accent that was kin to, but not quite like, the southern Ohio drawl. He would be sheriff for many more years. Later, in 1984, he would be part of a mob that burned a black boy to death. But at that time, in 1965, he was just another man asking me why I was doing the things I was doing.

  We were standing out on the front porch. Mom and Dad were behind me.

  “Betty?” Dad asked. “Did you do what the sheriff is sayin’?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, Pleasant ain’t gonna press charges.” The sheriff spit over the porch rail. “But she wants you to keep your girl away from her.” He spoke to Mom and Dad. “That means if Betty is seen trespassin’, Pleasant has the law available to her.”

  “I wasn’t gonna hurt her,” I said. “I just wanted to see her face.”

  The sheriff pursed his lips, then drew them back, showing his small crooked teeth.

  “What’d she look like under that mask?” he asked.

  Even Mom and Dad held their breath for my answer.

  “She—I mean her face—”

  “Yes.” The sheriff rolled his hand in front of me. “C’mon. What’d it look like?”

  “It was terrible,” I finally said. “Her face is two different colors. Red and pink. The skin is peelin’ off her forehead.” I clawed at my own forehead. “It’s so raw lookin’, like it won’t ever scar over. It’ll always be a seepin’ wound. She don’t have a nose. That’s why she always breathes with her mouth open.” I mimicked the breathing. “She can’t smile. Her lips pull down like her cheeks are meltin’.” I pulled at my cheeks. “She don’t have no eyelashes or eyebrows. The hair at her crown is gone and there’s little boils that constantly ooze pus.”

  The sheriff leaned back.

  “Sounds like the worst thing you’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “Naw.” I looked over at the barn. “It’s not.”

  I never delivered oil to Ms. Pleasant again.
Anytime she would see me, she would quickly cross the street, making sure the string of her mask was tightly knotted.

  “Gosh, why’d you do it, Betty?” Flossie asked me one night in bed.

  “You mean why did I pull her mask off?”

  “Naw. I ain’t talkin’ about Ms. Pleasant. I’m askin’ why you attacked Leland?”

  “I was tryin’ to cut his soul out,” I said before closing my eyes.

  Leland decided to stay in town. He got a job at Ralph and Sparkie’s Oil and Gas. He lived in the back of the station. It smelled musty and centipedes lived in the groove between the cement floor and wall.

  I measured the time by watching how Leland’s cut healed. A few months later, in winter of 1966, I turned twelve while my brother’s wound turned into a scar that bridged the space between his eyes.

  As I stared at the scar, the icicles clung to the bare branches and my father built a steam cabinet in the garage. Folks, mostly women, would come, change out of their clothes into long gowns, and sit in the cabinet with only their heads sticking out. Dad still created his tonics, decoctions, and teas, but he had expanded his business. He had a table in the garage folks could lay on. He would slap their legs or massage their arms and hands. Lint had assisted Dad in building the table. Together, father and son even created a glove for pain that plugged in. The mechanics of it are lost to me, but when Dad would put the glove on someone’s hand, sparks would shoot from the fingers. I always remember the sparks as being purple or blue.

  Amidst this, Dad and Lint hung a small sign outside the garage door.

  LANDON’S.

  More people were gravitating toward my father, while I was gravitating away. Where was the man who had dropped seeds in my hand, telling me I was powerful? Could he be the same man who had raised his hand to me, making me feel powerless? If only I could tell him why I had attacked Leland.

  Dear Dad, I have to tell you something.

  I wrote this in letters to my father that I never gave him. I would sit in the chair he had made with wood from a crooked tree out back and—in violent recollections—I would write all the things I couldn’t say out loud to him. Once I finished a letter, I would immediately tear it up and start anew. Was I afraid Fraya really would kill herself if I told? Or was I afraid everyone would find me just as guilty as Leland said they would? He had been right. I had done nothing to stop him that day in the barn.

  The change in the air blew through the whole house. Trustin reflected it in paintings of images that seemed hidden away behind black swirls. Flossie, on the other hand, seemed pleased.

  “Looks like you’re not Dad’s favorite anymore, Betty.” She smiled. “Lint’s his favorite now. You shouldn’t feel bad about it. Fathers always like their sons best.”

  When spring arrived, I wasn’t sure if we would go to the Covered Bridge Festival. We went every year as a family. Maybe that, too, was over. But when Dad made his macaroni salad and coconut cream pie the evening before the festival, I knew we would be going.

  Several miles from the center of town, the covered bridge was a long wooden tunnel that had diamond-shaped openings overlooking a waterfall shelf in the river below. The festival was a time for ladies to show off their quilts and pies, while men judged a salt-rising bread contest.

  We drove to the festival in the used burgundy Wagonaire Dad had gotten to replace the Rambler, which had stopped running. Rather than sell the Rambler for spare parts and scrap metal, he parked it in the woods behind our house. He took the raccoon tail off the Rambler’s antenna to tie on the Wagonaire’s.

  The Wagonaire’s best feature was a retractable rear roof. Me and Flossie always rode in the tailgate area because when the roof was open, it was a clear shot of the sky.

  As Dad drove us to the festival, me and Flossie laid on our backs and called out shapes we saw in the fluffy clouds.

  “I sure hope no one’s taken our spot by the bridge,” Dad said, speeding up a little at the thought.

  Lint and Trustin sat in the second-row seat. Lint was showing Trustin a rock he’d picked up that morning.

  “Do you th-th-think you could paint eyes on my rocks for me, Trustin?” Lint asked him. “They need eyes to be able to see the demons.”

  Dad started to slow the car as we approached an old farmhouse. In the front yard, a black pony was tied to a large oak by a short rope. Propped against the oak was a piece of cardboard that had FREE PONY written on it.

  “Don’t you even think about it,” Mom said to Dad as if she was willing to put her own foot on the gas. “We already got enough asses. We don’t need to add a horse to the mix.”

  When we got to the festival, Leland and Fraya were already there.

  She came over to me and pulled my shirt collar open so she could dump a handful of goodnights down my back. She laughed before doing the same to Flossie, who threw her goodnights at Fraya like confetti.

  As the slips of paper fell, me and Leland locked eyes. I stared at the scar on the bridge of his nose. I hoped it would never fade.

  I helped Flossie spread the blanket on top of the grass in our usual spot. Dad always liked to be close to the bridge so he could hear the wind chimes. They hung on the outer edge of the roof.

  I sat in between Fraya and Flossie as Mom and Dad doled out the food. They had packed a basket of sandwiches and a covered bowl of Dad’s macaroni salad along with a jar of homemade pickles. For dessert, Dad cut the coconut pie in pieces that were too big to finish.

  “The music is here,” Fraya said, pointing toward Old Man Shoehorn playing his banjo.

  He was wearing the same bright purple suspenders I always saw him in. He was a fixture at the festival with his gray beard that hung to his stomach and his long yellow fingernails he’d use to pluck his strings.

  “Yee-haw.” He stomped his foot.

  Many of the picnic goers stood and started dancing. Older couples, like our parents, held one another in the waltzes of their youth. We watched the way our father dipped our mother as she threw her head back and laughed. A boy approached Flossie and asked if she wanted to dance. She accepted, her skirt fluttering like something flowering. Lint got up and went to explore booths. Trustin inched up the side of a nearby hill, where he could get a good view to sketch.

  I watched Leland stretch out on the blanket while Fraya ate her slice of pie. She leaned back into me and smiled. I wanted to fill the moment with roses and words, but Leland was watching.

  What if I cannot fend off the wolf? Souls ask these things.

  “Wanna dance, Betty?” Fraya asked.

  I stared out at the smiling faces of the festival. Laughter filled the air, until it was swirling all around me.

  “Yeah, why don’t you dance, Betty?” Leland’s laughter rose above all else.

  The smiling faces spun faster and faster around me. They all merged into the single smiling face of Leland. I stood up and screamed at the top of my lungs. At least in my mind I did.

  “I’m gonna go for a walk,” I said to Fraya as I stood.

  “Stay,” she said. “We can watch the quilt judgin’ soon.”

  “Ah, let her go.” Leland took a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. “She ain’t a little girl anymore. If she wants to walk, she’ll walk.”

  I stepped over his legs, kicking his knee on my way. With my parents still dancing, I crossed my arms until I was out on the main road. The sounds of the festival fell behind me. I enjoyed the quiet, but once it started to get dark, a parade of cars began. The festival was over and folks were going home. I held my thumb out, but none of them stopped, except for the burgundy Wagonaire.

  Nobody said anything as I got into the back with Flossie. I was happy for the loud sounds of the engine. They made it feel as if there was no room for anything else.

  When I felt the car slowing down, I saw we were approaching the
old farmhouse we’d passed on the way there. The pony was still tied to the tree. Dad parked in the grass and got out.

  “Takin’ a likin’ to her, have ya?” the man sitting in a rocker on the house porch called out to Dad.

  The man was all stomach. His thin arms and even thinner legs stuck out from him like toothpicks in a ball of dough.

  “ ’Bout time someone wantin’ the blind bitch.” The man stood from the rocker and wobbled out to Dad.

  “You say she’s blind?” Dad looked into the pony’s marbled eyes.

  “Yep.” The man nodded.

  He was holding a large slice of watermelon. As he took a bite, the juice dripped onto his white T-shirt, already soaked.

  “Blind as a dead woman,” the man added. “She used to be a pit pony.” He spit a watermelon seed on the pony’s back leg.

  “What’s a pit pony?” Trustin leaned out the window.

  “They work in the mines.” Dad patted the stiff hair of the pony’s mane. “Haulin’ coal on the underground railway. It was the coal made her blind.”

  “That’s right.” The man nodded in agreement. “You a coal man?”

  “I was.” Dad gently touched the pony’s scarred nose.

  “Yeah, me, too.” The man took another bite of his watermelon slice. “Retired now.”

  “How old?” Dad asked.

  “When I retired?” The man thought it over. “Oh, I’d say I was—”

  “How old is the pony?” Dad fanned gnats away from the pony’s eyes.

  “Oh.” The man cleared his throat. “She’s about nine years if I had to guess.”

  Dad stood back with his hands on his hips while looking over the pony.

  “We’ll take her,” he said.

  Mom sighed in the front seat as he untied the rope from the oak.

  “You wanna come back with a trailer to pick her up?” the man asked.

  “Naw. She’ll do all right in our car. But if you have somethin’ sturdy for her to walk on, I’d be mighty obliged.”