Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  Lint said he’d best stay near the garage in case there was anybody who came by in need of an herb or a tea. He was wiping the painted eyes on his rocks with a tissue. When I asked him why, he said, “Even rocks c-c-cry, Betty. They f-f-feel the loss of Fraya.”

  Dad turned the hose off and dropped it to the ground. It was time to go. I opened the tailgate, and climbed in with the urn. I slid open the Wagonaire’s roof as Dad got behind the wheel and started the engine.

  As he drove down Shady Lane, I decided to stand up, rising out of the open roof the way the pony had. I rested the urn in front of me on top of the car while my long hair whipped back. Already weary, I felt I carried a great burden against the wind. Then my father honked and I knew what I had to do. I removed the urn’s lid. It was up to me, Dad had said, to spread Fraya’s ashes far enough apart so God would not be able to find them in our lifetime or the next.

  I reached into my pocket and grabbed out the goodnights I had written earlier for Fraya. I dropped them into the urn, mixing them with her ashes. I scooped a handful out and, a little at a time, let my sister slip through my fingers. The pieces of paper separated from the ash as it floated in spirals in the wind. Whenever Dad honked, I released more. I felt the loss every time. The simple act of opening and closing my hand exhausted me. I was standing still, yet I was climbing a steep mountain.

  The dust of life, who will care? I will, Fraya. I will care that you are gone.

  Returning to the urn got harder. It felt as though I was dipping my hand through wet cement. Each time after I released her, I wanted to chase her back down and hoard every last piece of her in my soul.

  When we got on Main Lane, folks who were out turned to the sound of the horn.

  “What’s that stuff that Carpenter girl is releasin’?” they asked. “And why is she cryin’ so goddamn much?”

  As we passed Dandelion Dimes, I saw Hank in the window. He was looking out as if having been waiting for us. I would never set foot back in the diner. It had become a place of darkness to me, even with its yellow dandelion heads on every table. I would miss Hank, though, and how his fur smelled like Fraya.

  It seemed as if we drove through all the lanes of Breathed, me leaving a little of Fraya on each. By the time we reached Breathed’s Welcome sign, the urn was empty. Dad slowed the car to a stop by the sign.

  He got out and came around to sit on the tailgate. Hugging the urn against my chest, I sat beside him.

  “Have you heard from Leland?” I asked.

  “He gave a call on his way down to Alabama,” Dad said. “I wasn’t surprised he got out of town the way he did when he heard about Fraya. You have to remember, Little Indian, before all you kids, it was just the two of them. They had a great deal of growin’ up together. It’s probably why he’s takin’ it so hard. Why he went away.”

  We sat silent, both looking out at the lane like we’d find the answer there. I wanted to scream everything I knew about Leland, but something about how Dad was gripping the edge of the tailgate changed my mind.

  “When Leland was a boy,” he said, “he loved pickin’ blackberries. I remember how his hands would stain. He’d run up to me and grab my face in those little hands of his. He’d say, ‘Daddy, I vuve you.’ He had trouble with his l’s at the time and always mixed ’em up with his v’s. ‘Daddy, I vuve you,’ ” Dad repeated again. He waited a few more seconds before saying, “When Leland ran up to Fraya, he would grab her face and say, ‘Fraya, I vuve you,’ ” Dad’s voice shook and I looked away.

  “I once saw God caught on a barbed-wire fence,” I said.

  Dad sniffled and wiped his nose on his shirt like a little boy before asking, “What’d you do, Little Indian?”

  “Nothin’. I didn’t do a damn thing.”

  THE BREATHANIAN

  Woman Fears She’s Been Shot

  Around 4 a.m. last night, the sheriff was called to the residence of a Miss Kitty Bell, who made a frantic call saying she had been shot by the unknown shooter after several minutes of gunfire by her house.

  When the sheriff arrived at her home, they noted drops of blood leading from Miss Kitty Bell’s bedroom to her front door.

  After an examination of Miss Kitty Bell by Doc Lad it was determined she was not the victim of a gunshot.

  Doc Lad would comment no more on the situation out of respect to Miss Kitty Bell. But Miss Bell did release a detailed account of the night’s events.

  “The gunfire had startled me awake,” she said. “It sounded so near, I thought the shooter was inside my house. When the sounds finally stopped, I got out of bed and went to the front of my house to check on things. It was when I headed back to bed that I noticed drops of blood on the floor. At first, I thought I’d been shot, but after Doc’s checkup, I realized it was only the blood from my monthly falling. My daddy always said a woman ain’t no more than a leaky faucet. He was always a bit of a bastard.”

  40

  Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.

  —PROVERBS 7:27

  My father once said they call ’em the trumpet of death.

  “That’s why they grow so well in graveyards, ’cause of all the death. Maybe one day I’ll fry some for ya,” he told my mother before she was my mother.

  They’d already lost so much between the two of them. I sat at the kitchen table and watched Dad place a slice of butter in the pan to melt. One mushroom, two mushrooms added. That’s all the pan could hold. Two mushrooms and a slice of butter. Some days there is no room for rage.

  My parents looked at one another and smiled. Perhaps they were headed toward friendship. If only they could connect back at those places they last left each other when they were young enough to believe poems could be written for the two of them. Old angers are mostly faded now. Guilt still remains. That’s something that refuses to be shorter than eternity. I think part of eternity will be my father playing a mushroom trumpet while my mother watches him, the refrigerator door open until the milk sours. Perhaps somewhere my father is still playing that trumpet and my mother is still watching him. I think between the two of them they could have been pretty good at love. Too bad grief made myths of everything.

  I left my parents to cut their mushrooms and grief as I stepped out onto the back porch, where Lint was sitting on the swing. Lined up beside him on the seat were his rocks, their painted eyes looking out upon the backyard.

  “They like to s-s-see nice things,” he said.

  I watched a lizard climb up the post. The reptiles were little things that would cling to windows and doors. I remember the time one got its tail caught in the back door. Without a second thought, the lizard dropped its tail and ran off. The tail wiggled before it stopped, realizing the body had left it. The lizard would eventually regrow a tail as if losing part of oneself is no great burden after all. If only we could be like the lizards.

  “Wanna get on a bus?” I asked Lint. “Go for a ride?”

  “Where we gonna r-r-ride to?” He looked up at me.

  “How ’bout Joyjug?” I asked as I listened to the clank of forks against plates from inside the house. “We could stop in and see Mamaw Lark. Ain’t seen her since Grandpappy’s funeral.”

  “W-w-why see her now?”

  “Fraya’s dead,” I said as if Lint could understand why our sister’s death circled back around to the little white house in Joyjug.

  When we got to the bus stop, I paid for two tickets from money I had snuck out of Mom’s purse. The bus carried only a few passengers. Both Lint and me each wanted a window seat, so I sat in the row behind his.

  The farther away from town we got, the more the hills of Breathed started to change into the hills of everywhere else. It was autumn and all the edges of the world seemed to be colored in crimson and scarlet. The cool, crisp air churned through the open windows. The feeling was nice,
but felt separate from me. I had become all too aware of the way a dying light flickers. I thought only of Fraya most days. I would try to talk about her with Flossie, but the most Flossie ever said about Fraya was “I have her favorite barrette in the bottom of my purse,” as if she was merely holding it until Fraya asked for it back.

  “We’re h-h-here.” Lint pointed out the window at the Welcome to Joyjug sign, which was nothing more than an overturned fruit crate lettered with red paint.

  We headed on foot to Mamaw Lark’s house. When we got there, we stopped out on the road. Her yard was overgrown with not only weeds but small trees that had started to lean toward the house. The white paint had chipped away to gray boards beneath. One of the upstairs shutters fell halfway down onto the porch roof. In the end, it was a house merely existing, much like the woman sitting in the rocker on the porch.

  “Can you believe she’s s-s-still alive?” Lint asked. “She’s n-n-nothin’ but an old worn-out shoe.”

  We watched her crochet. Her eyes were different than the last time I’d seen them. They had become glazed until her irises and pupils were indistinguishable.

  I stared at her wrinkles, which all seemed to be vertical, as if she’d been downstream to something terrible her whole life.

  “She’s blind, Lint,” I said.

  “L-l-like our pony?” He turned to me.

  “Yeah. Like our pony.”

  I stepped into the overgrown yard of a woman I had never loved. I walked toward her porch, watching garter snakes slither in under the low pine bushes. I had to step around thistle, which was as tall as my hip. Parting the milkweed, I walked up the porch steps.

  I thought she might sense my presence, but she continued to crochet what I saw was a chain stitch seemingly as long as the river.

  I quietly picked up the broom that had been lying on the floor. As she continued to crochet, I smacked the bristles against the porch wall. She dropped the crochet hook to her lap. I smacked the wall again, close enough to her head to blow the thin strands of hair over her ears. She sat there, her blind eyes staring ahead. When I hit the porch floor, the bristles of the broom brushed her leg and she parted her lips. The dryness of them was something you could almost hear as she asked, “Alka? That you?”

  I dropped the broom and ran off the porch.

  “C’mon.” I grabbed Lint by the arm. “Let’s get outta here.”

  He didn’t say anything while we waited at the bus stop, nor did he say anything on the ride. Only once we were back in Breathed and walking home did he ask, “Why’d y-y-you hit Mamaw with the broom?”

  “I was just sweepin’ her porch for her,” I said.

  He took a rock out of his pocket and started passing it between his hands.

  “Why you like rocks so much, Lint?”

  “They’re b-b-bullets against the demons.” He looked up at me. “I know everyone th-th-thinks I’m silly. S-s-sometimes, I think it would have been better if I wasn’t born. Maybe everyone would have been h-h-happier. I’ve never had any f-f-friends. You and Flossie and F-f-fraya had each other. I tried to be f-f-friends with Trustin, but he had his drawin’s. I feel like what I’m n-n-named after. The fluff in a belly button. S-s-somethin’ you clean out and throw away.”

  “Hey.” I stopped him from walking farther. “Is that what you think? You’re not named after belly button fluff. You’re named because once upon a time, pants fell from the sky. Mom and Dad collected the fallen pairs and checked all the pockets.”

  I patted Lint’s pockets in between tickling him until he laughed.

  “What Mom and Dad found mixed with the pocket lint,” I said, “were small pieces of paper. Two legs, two hands, two ears. They found enough pieces to make a whole person. They taped the pieces together, creating a small boy made out of the paper. You.” I tousled his hair. “They loved you and fed you and held you until you became flesh and bone. They could have thrown that paper away. But they chose you to be their son. To be my little brother. They knew none of us would be better off without you. You know how a house has a foundation? Well, you bein’ the youngest child makes you the foundation of our family. You’re the most important part.”

  He smiled so wide, I had to ask him what he was smiling at.

  “I just feel l-l-lucky,” he said. “I get to be the brother of Betty C-c-carpenter. The strongest g-g-girl in the world.”

  Part Five

  Horn of Salvation

  1971–1973

  41

  The violence that is in their hands.

  —JONAH 3:8

  Hungered, I wrote. I came to dislike my bed and the sleep that kept me from pouring myself upon the page. Anguish was my subject, but so, too, was love. My dialogue became an insanity that then evolved into a metamorphosis of soul. Risen against the odds, if only to oppose and defy the suffering, I plotted tales that commanded myself to survive.

  I sent these stories and poems to literary magazines and journals. I received politely typed rejections back, but also the rare acceptance. To be a writer felt very real to me then. It was an identity that was igniting new inspirations within me if not a new sense of worth, altering what I thought about myself.

  I had spent the majority of my coming-of-age desiring to see a different reflection. I could either abandon the doubts I beheld and be free, or else dwell in the eye of the prejudiced, to be chained there. There are too many enemies in life to be one of yourself. So when I turned seventeen, an age that gives one permission to light the flame of new passions, I decided to refuse hate’s ambition.

  I pushed my bed over so I could tear up the magazine girl I had once prayed to be. I had almost been tamed by an image of beauty no more my own than a destiny I cannot claim. I gave myself permission to see the beauty of the girl I was and the young woman I was becoming.

  The more I thought of this, I couldn’t help but mourn the years that would not pass for Trustin or Fraya. The anniversaries of their deaths were the hardest. Fraya had died in spring. Trustin in summer. I found myself opening my books to the dried dandelion heads and slips of paper with Trustin’s drawings on them. They were my bookmarks, but more than that, they were a brother and sister hidden where only I knew. I kept remembrances for Waconda and Yarrow, too. A cotton ball I flattened between the pages of a book, like a pressed flower. And a buckeye I made into a bracelet.

  “Did you know the buckeye was named by Native Americans because they thought it looked like a deer’s eye?” Dad said when he saw my bracelet. “It’s a beautiful nut after all.”

  I made a buckeye bracelet for Flossie, too. She wore it the day she came to get me so I could go with her to take Nova trick-or-treating. I had put on bell-bottoms and clipped the sides of my waist-length hair halfway up. Before I left the mirror, I put on some burgundy lipstick and adjusted my suede vest so the fringe fell even. Though I had a bra in my drawer, I didn’t wear it. Mom said it was a statement. But I said it was simply a choice.

  It was Nova’s first trick-or-treat. Flossie had made his costume out of a cardboard box and silver glitter.

  “What is he supposed to be?” I asked her.

  “A star,” she said. “Can’t you tell? I should have added more glitter.”

  Nova had pushed his face so far through the head hole, even his ears were out.

  By that time, it’d been about a year since Cutlass and Flossie divorced. Flossie couldn’t afford a lawyer, but Cutlass had two at his disposal. They made a case that because Flossie had stopped having sex with him, it was akin to abandonment. His lawyers cited Diemer v. Diemer for their argument. Because they accused Flossie of abandoning the marriage, she didn’t have a claim in their marital house and Cutlass had the right to have the locks changed. Cutlass didn’t want custody of Nova. Flossie decided it was good for her to have him because the financial support from Cutlass, even though it was little, helped her out. />
  After her divorce was finalized, Flossie refused to move back home. She reckoned it was something Mom would lord over her for all the times Flossie had given her little money. Flossie decided that moving away was her best chance. She found a small house for rent that had concrete floors in a town only a few miles south of Breathed. She got a job at a diner called Mother’s Kitchen. Things seemed to be working out. She even started to do more with Nova, like take him into town and hold his hand. It was as if when it was just the two of them, she could love him more.

  That Halloween had been particularly kind to Nova. In his pillowcase he had collected everything a sweet tooth desires. As the light lowered, we walked along the train tracks.

  “A long time ago, me and your aunt Betty buried a dog somewhere along here,” Flossie told Nova as she picked him up.

  She carried him to the tracks and sat him on the sleepers. She rested the pillowcase of candy on top of his lap. I watched her as she used the bottom of her tattered shirt to wipe his nose. She puckered her lips toward him. He cradled her face in his small hands and kissed her.

  As she started to tie his tennis shoes, I turned to watch the wind blow the branches above me.

  “Mommy?”

  I turned toward Nova’s voice. Flossie had left him on the tracks. He tried to stand up and follow her, but he teetered back down.

  Flossie pretended not to notice as she scanned the ground with her eyes.

  “I can’t for the life of me,” she said, “remember the exact spot we buried Corncob.”

  Nova tried again to stand, but was unable to. He started tugging at his right shoelace. I realized it was tied to the track.

  “Why did you tie him down?” I asked Flossie.