Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  The man tossed his watermelon and stepped inside his barn. He returned moments later with a flat board, which he and Dad set against the tailgate for the pony to step up on. Me and Flossie scooted back as far as we could against the seat.

  Before leaving, Dad shook the man’s hand, which seemed to surprise him. He laughed as we drove away.

  The pony’s head rose above the open roof as her mane whipped in the wind. I knew she must be thinking of running free through tall-grass fields, wild daisies slapping her shins, no one to hold her down.

  I slid my hand up her leg, feeling the raised ridges of whip scars. The tips of her ears had been cut. There were smaller scars across her nose. A knife had been used there, perhaps only to remind her who she belonged to. She had lived by the orders and commands of men. Her entire existence on earth and she had never once been allowed to be free. She had been imprisoned and owned, as if all of her value was wrapped up in how large a load she could carry on her back.

  She had lived her life to the point of being given away, her legs too weak to run, her eyes no longer able to see a world beyond the coal cave she was forced to spend her life in. And yet, now she could feel the wind in her mane. She was not too dead for this small kindness that delivered her from a past of hell to a moment she could believe she was free enough to gallop as she wished.

  Is this love? she must have been asking herself. Am I finally loved?

  I covered my face with my shirt. I was crying and didn’t want anyone to hear. Still they must have, because someone turned on the radio.

  Once we were home, Mom and the boys went into the house. Me and Flossie had to wait until the pony was unloaded. Dad used a piece of plywood from the garage for the pony to step down on.

  Flossie looked at me before scooting off the tailgate and disappearing into the house.

  As Dad led the pony into the backyard, I got out of the car. I walked around and stood on the back porch, watching Dad feed the pony a spring carrot from out of the garden.

  “C’mon over here, Betty,” he called to me.

  I didn’t go to him. I instead sat on the top porch step. Dad looked at me a moment, then raised his eyes to the sky before leading the pony through the field.

  “My, my, my.” Mom stepped out onto the porch, the kitchen door slamming behind her.

  She walked down into the yard. The flowering clovers stuck up between her bare toes.

  “The festival was a terrible way to spend the day when you think about it,” she said as she watched Dad and the pony. “Folks like to believe it’s a fun spring day spent listenin’ to banjo music. No one even mentions the wind chimes anymore. Everyone dances and forgets the truth.” She turned to me. “Do you know why wind chimes hang from the bridge, Betty?”

  “To keep birds away.”

  “That’s what folks say, but only because no one wants to talk about the truth. You see, the mothers of Breathed had hung those chimes in remembrance of their slain daughters. This was long before your time, but in the late eighteen hundreds, a man went around town, murderin’ girls. When he was caught, he said he cut their tongues out because he didn’t want to hear the girls say no to him. To give their daughters back their voices, the mothers put wind chimes on the bridge. These mothers called the wind chimes “soulchimes.” They believed whenever the chimes made a sound it was their children’s souls touchin’ ’em. No one has hung a chime on the bridge since the last mother did. No one but your father, who has hung a chime for each of his own dead children. I suppose that is why he wants to go to the festival every year and sit so close to the bridge, if only to hear the souls of Yarrow and Waconda speakin’ to ’im.

  “Whatever ills you have against Landon Carpenter, you cannot say he does not love his children. Why, on the night you were born, your father counted every star in the sky. It took him the whole damn night but he did it. Just like he counted the stars on the nights your siblings were born. If you ask him how many stars were in the sky on the night Leland was born he’d give you the exact number, adding in that it was five stars less than on the night Fraya was born. Trustin’s night had the most shootin’ stars, while Lint had more moon than anything else. Flossie, the girl who dreams to be a star, had the fewest of all. Do you know who had the most?”

  She stood in front of me and waited until I raised my eyes to hers.

  “You did, Betty.”

  I looked past her, at the stars just above our heads.

  “Some men know the exact amount of money in their bank accounts,” she continued. “Other men know how many miles are on their car and how many more miles it’ll handle. Other men know the batting average of their favorite baseball player and more other men know the exact sum Uncle Sam has screwed ’em. Your father knows no such figures. The only numbers Landon Carpenter has in his head are the numbers of stars in the sky on the days his children were born. I don’t know about you, but I would say that a man who has skies in his head full of the stars of his children, is a man who deserves his child’s love. Especially from the child with the most stars.”

  32

  He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found.

  —JOB 20:8

  When Dad would fill the metal cube trays with water, he’d always drop a small red currant into each hole. When the water froze, the currant froze, too. That was our summer treat. Never mind the ice cream man with his little bell dinging down the street. We had cubes of ice we’d suck on until we got to the bright red berry inside. This somehow made it nicer than going out to the currant bush and grabbing handfuls of the dangling berries, warm from the sun. Though we did that, too, until the little seeds got stuck in our teeth and we’d have to spend the rest of the afternoon fishing them out with our tongues.

  I popped one of these ice cubes into my mouth as I walked the pony in the field. I described to her the things her eyes could no longer see.

  “There’s a flower,” I told her. “It’s pale pink with a yellow center. And there’s a grasshopper. He’s lookin’ at your hoof.”

  I studied the pony’s scars in the sunlight and traced them like they were roads.

  “You know,” I said to her, “in ancient Cherokee society, the father’s blood didn’t mean anything to the child’s identity. Only a child with a Cherokee mother could be Cherokee.” I wrapped my arms around her neck and hugged her. “I’ll be your mother so you can be Cherokee. And you’ll never have to worry because I’ll never let anyone take you back to the coal mines ever again.”

  I walked the pony to the edge of the bright green garden.

  “Soon,” I said to her, “we’ll try to preserve everything that grows here in jars.”

  “That’s right,” Dad said as he stood up out of the garden, smiling.

  I smiled back. My mother’s story of the stars had taken possession of me and reminded me who my father was. A man who didn’t let me forget I was powerful. He hadn’t taken Leland’s side that day at the truck because he didn’t know there were sides to take.

  I wrote this in letters to myself.

  Dear Betty, Your father is your father, is the first woman, is the sun, is the light, is all that is kind.

  Dad once told me a Cherokee legend about two wolves. One wolf was named U-so-nv-i because it was evil, dishonest, and bent in spirit. The other wolf was named Uu-yu-go-dv because it was truthful, kind, and good.

  “The two wolves live inside all of us,” Dad had said. “They fight until one of them is killed.”

  When I asked him which wolf lives, he said, “The one you nourish and love.”

  I didn’t want the wolf inside me to be the one who fed on anger and hate, so I worked in the garden. It was the one place that gave me and my father the opportunity to come together. There, we worked side by side. In the way we spoke about the strength of the stems and leaves, we spoke about the strength of us.

  T
he garden itself seemed to respond, as the yields that year were bountiful. Never more so than when the berry harvest begun. Mounds of the garden’s crop on our kitchen counter, ready to be turned into jellies and jams. Raspberries washed and drying. Bright blueberries in a yellow bowl. Blackberries heaped in the green enamel colander. Little purple stains left on all the white cotton towels. Gooseberries rolling off the counter, a couple squashed beneath our heels as the jars boiled in a pot on the stovetop.

  My hands were no longer small enough to fit inside the small-mouthed jars, so I moved on to wash the medium-mouthed jars, the ones we’d can pickles and tomatoes in.

  Trustin’s hands were still little enough to reach the bottoms of the smallest jars without needing a bottle brush. He got extra money for art supplies by washing older neighbors’ jars, too. He’d go to their houses, which always seemed to have a barking dog and a little old woman with arthritis. He’d slip his small hand into their jars and they’d say how fine a boy he was to help ’em out. It didn’t hurt that he liked washing. He would hold the jar up and watch his hand through the glass as he cleaned, staring at the thin edges soap and water made as if that, too, was a painting in his eyes.

  In between berries and jars, that summer was hotter than normal. Nearly every night, me and Flossie met Fraya at Breathed water tower to swim in the cold water. Lint never went with us because he didn’t like the darkness inside the tower. Trustin would come, but he stayed on the ground. The fear of falling, like he had from that tree so long ago, was still too great.

  “I just like to go to the tower so I can imagine swimmin’ with you,” he said. “I can imagine divin’ from the ladder without any fear.”

  But imagining it wore off, so one night as me and Flossie headed out for yet another swim, Trustin fell back.

  “Ain’tcha comin’, Trust?” I asked him as Flossie kept walking, disappearing into the dark.

  “What’s the point in goin’?” He shrugged.

  The brown bats feeding overhead got his attention. He looked up at them and said it wasn’t fair that bats had wings.

  “Even they share more with the angels than we do,” he said. “Imagine havin’ wings, Betty. There wouldn’t be nothin’ too high. Nothin’ you wouldn’t be able to get to the top of. You can’t fall with wings. God wasted ’em on birds and bats. He should have given wings to us.”

  I turned to the old silver maple and remembered back to the Halloween I’d needed it to fly. As Trustin watched, I dug my feet into the maple’s trunk and grabbed the lowest branch, pulling myself up into the limbs.

  “What you doin’ up there?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer as I pinched off two leaves before dropping to the ground. I went into the dark garage and rummaged through several boxes until I found a roll of tape.

  “What you gonna do?” Trustin asked.

  “I’m gonna give you some wings.”

  I used the tape to stick the leaves by their stems to his bare back.

  “I thought it’d feel different,” he said as he stretched his neck, trying to see the leaves. “I thought havin’ wings would be so amazin’, it’d make my knees tremble.”

  He ran over to a nearby stump and jumped up on it. When he leapt off, he dropped to the ground.

  “They don’t work,” he said, standing up.

  “They ain’t wings yet, silly,” I said. “They’ll only turn into wings if you fall from high up. They’re safety wings. So you comin’ to the tower for a swim?”

  He watched the bats a second longer, before saying, “Betcha I get there before you.”

  He took off running. I dropped the tape, racing to catch up to him. We shared the lead to the tower.

  “It’s gonna be nice to get in that water,” I said, walking to the ladder.

  “I don’t think I can.” Trustin stopped behind me.

  “But you got wings now.”

  “I’m startin’ to think I shouldn’t be any higher off the ground than I already am, Betty.”

  I looked up at the night sky, feeling the vastness of the space above. I ached for some wonderment to come. A miracle straight from the heavens. Something to unfetter us all from our fears.

  “You know, they say bees shouldn’t be able to fly,” I said. “That it defies all laws of flight. Bees’ wings are smaller than their bodies, so them flyin’ don’t make sense, at least in the matter of science. But the bees don’t care if their wings are too small. They believe they can fly. It’s their belief that allows them to. Without havin’ the trust in themselves, they’d never get off the ground. You should know a thing about trustin’ oneself. Hell, trust is in your name.”

  “You sound like Dad.” He smiled.

  “I guess I do. So you comin’ up for a swim?”

  “You go on up. Maybe after a bit I’ll follow.”

  I started to climb the ladder, but stopped when Trustin called my name.

  “Yeah?” I looked down at him.

  “You’re a good sister for givin’ me wings, Betty.”

  “It’s what sisters are for.” I continued up the ladder to the barrel of water at the top. Surrounding it was a balcony with shaky loose boards and an even shakier iron railing. I looked over it at Trustin, who was staring up at me.

  “You look like an angel up there,” he said.

  “Everyone’s an angel up here,” I told him. “Don’t you know that inside the water tower is heaven?”

  “Is that why it’s so high off the ground?”

  “That’s why.”

  “Well.” He smiled. “I reckon it’s a good night to go to heaven.”

  “The hottest nights always are.”

  I turned and stepped on a slip of paper. More made a path to the tower’s door. I tiptoed around them as I went inside and jumped into the cool water, where I landed on Flossie. She cursed and splashed me.

  “You see my goodnights?” Fraya asked. “I made a path of ’em for ya.”

  “I saw ’em,” I said, reaching into my wet cutoffs for my goodnights to her. The paper was soaked so I had to squeeze the gob out in her hand.

  “There’s mine to you,” I said.

  She laughed while the three of us swam long enough for our fingers to prune.

  “I’m all swam out for tonight,” Fraya said, heading toward the ladder. “If I don’t get out now, I might sink to the bottom.”

  One by one, the three of us climbed out of the barrel. I was last, so all I heard was Fraya saying Trustin was lying on the ground weird. I shoved Flossie forward so I could get out to see better. Trustin was flat on his back on the ground below. His arms and legs were stretched out. I leaned as far as I could over the railing.

  “Hey, Trustin,” I said. “Stop foolin’.”

  His eyes were still.

  “I don’t think he’s foolin’.” Fraya started down the ladder. “He’s just layin’ so weird.”

  I was only halfway down the ladder by the time Fraya had her feet on the ground and was kneeling by Trustin. She touched the side of his mouth. Her fingers came away with blood on them.

  “Oh my God,” she said, her voice shaking. “I think he fell off the ladder.”

  I jumped down the last few rungs.

  “C’mon, Trustin. Get up.” I ran over to him just as Flossie nudged him with her toe. He didn’t respond.

  “Remember when he fell from that tree?” I asked my sisters. “He laid there just like this and he was fine. Only got the wind knocked out of ’im is all.”

  Fraya turned to Flossie and said, “Go to the diner. Under the stone dandelion by the door is the key to get in. Call Dad. Then Doc Lad. Understand?”

  Flossie ran off into the night, her wet feet slapping against the ground.

  “It’s going to be all right, Betty,” Fraya said when she saw my face. “It’s gonna be—”

/>   Trustin gasped. I fell to my knees by his head while Fraya dropped down on his other side.

  “See?” I said, smiling wide. “I told you he was fine.”

  Fraya squeezed his hand as she told him, “Flossie’s gone to get help. Anything feel broken?”

  He laid still.

  “Can you move at all, Trustin?” she asked.

  When he didn’t move so much as a pinkie, she said it was okay.

  “You shouldn’t get up anyway until Dad or Doc Lad is here,” she said to him.

  I could see Trustin was wanting to say something, but was struggling to speak. I lowered my ear to his lips.

  “What you sayin’?” I asked.

  “I did it, Betty. I touched heaven. I flew. I flew like the birds. I flew…” His voice faded away.

  I watched as his skin crinkled at the bridge of his nose.

  “Why’s his nose doin’ that?” Fraya asked.

  “His soul is leavin’,” I said.

  I knew it had when he exhaled for the last time. I fell back as Fraya started to shake him.

  “Trustin?” She yelled for him to answer her. He was limp in her hands.

  “He’s dead, Fraya,” I said. When she continued to shake him, I said it louder. “He’s dead.”

  “No. He can’t be.”

  “He’s dead,” I said it again. “He’s dead, dead, dead.”

  I started to scream it. Fraya wrapped her arms around me and together we cried.

  I want to describe my little brother in long songs, but there is no long song for a boy who only lived ten years. There is only the brevity. The short proof he had been alive. Lose a person. Gain a ghost. My ghost is a little boy sucking on ice cubes on the porch swing and using Flossie’s lipstick to draw pretty caves on our bedroom walls. He’s too young to do anything else. Too young to marry or father. Far too young to ever grow up. This boy who would walk into a wildflower field and come out with enough blooms to make me a necklace.

  As I stared at him, I felt compelled to write his name on everything. On every blade of grass, on each rung of the water tower ladder, on all of the leaves of the tree beside us. I wanted his name on all these things and more. I was so afraid no one would know he had even existed.