Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  He looked at me a moment, before dusting off his sleeve as if dusting off a flame. He brushed off each of his shoulders and kicked his legs, laughing.

  “Oh, my, I’m burnin’ up good,” he said.

  Jumping, he started to pretend the flames were at his feet. But as he kept pretending, the more his smile faded until it was replaced by a look of fear.

  When he started to dust off his sleeves again, he did so violently as if there truly were flames licking up his arms.

  “Shit.” He slapped his chest as if the fire was consuming him from the inside.

  He started to scream and told me and Lint to put him out. But we only stood there and watched.

  “Please, help me.” Leland slapped the sides of his head and screamed that his hair was on fire.

  All over his body, he felt the flames. You could almost see them reflected in his eyes as he tried desperately to extinguish them with his hands, before taking his jacket off and using it to beat up and down his legs. He cried out, grabbing his eyes until he fell to his knees. Burying his head into the ground, he grabbed handfuls of the earth and threw it onto his back until his arms, tired of the fight, dropped like two things melting into puddles at his side.

  When he lifted his head, he looked around him. His skin was so red and glistening, it was as if he really had just walked through an inferno. Once his eyes met mine, his lips parted as if to say something, but as I looked down upon him, I raised my chin even higher. He remained as silent as he had ever been.

  He reached out to me, but I turned my back to him. Lint did the same. We listened to Leland cry and beg for us to help him. But I had no sympathy for his pleadings. Not after what he had done to my sister.

  I could hear him scratching something on the ground. Then I listened to him struggle to stand up. He stayed there a moment, staring at our backs, before walking to his truck. Only when there was the sound of him driving away, did I turn around. There, scratched into the dirt where he had stood, was Leland was here.

  With the toes of my foot, I erased his name.

  Left with only Lint by my side, I wrapped my arm around his shoulder as we watched the trees out on Shady Lane blow in the wind.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said to him.

  “You’re welcome, B-b-betty.”

  “You know, Dad made that for two people.” I pointed at the slingshot.

  “I kn-kn-know.”

  “Then how would you have used it by yourself?”

  “I wasn’t usin’ it b-b-by myself.” He looked up at me. “Trustin was here. His hand w-w-was on it, too. It is his s-s-slingshot.”

  We headed back toward the house. Just before we walked inside, Lint said, “I always knew.”

  “Knew what?” I asked.

  “I always knew Leland was a d-d-demon.”

  * * *

  —

  Staring at my reflection in my bedroom mirror, I felt I wore the black dress not only for the death of my father but for the death of my childhood. How could I lose Dad and not lose something of myself? The girl I had been belonged to the past. Womanhood had become my present. I noticed this in the way I turned my wrist to spray my skin with my mother’s perfume before going downstairs.

  Lint had already moved the furniture in the living room and set out foldable chairs. Folks had arrived and were collected in whispering groups around the room.

  I stepped over to a table where an envelope laid amongst the other mail Lint had brought in that morning. I recognized Flossie’s cursive on the outside of the envelope. I opened it to find a card with a black-and-white image of thrashing waves. Flossie had written on the back of the card, The Pacific is the deepest ocean in the world.

  She signed it with her initials. Scattered inside the bottom of the envelope were several goodnights. Amongst them was a single “goodbye.” I knew it was meant for Dad.

  I left them in place and set the envelope on the fireplace mantel along with the card. Lint walked up and stood staring at the waves. He was wearing the white shirt and black bow tie Mom had bought him. His long hair was slung over his shoulder in a braid.

  “What’s that you have?” I asked him, seeing something sticking out of the end of his closed hand.

  “It’s a p-p-piece of Mom’s bread,” he said.

  “Why do you have it?”

  “Dad once t-t-told me to make sure I bury him with a piece of Mom’s b-b-bread to feed the bird.”

  “What bird?”

  “The bird in his g-g-glass heart. Remember? You first told me about the b-b-bird, Betty. But Dad later told me I’d have to make sure to b-b-bury him with bread. So he’d have somethin’ to f-f-feed the bird on their journey to heaven.”

  “He never told me to bury bread with him,” I said.

  “You weren’t his only k-k-kid, ya know.” He stuck the bread inside Dad’s hand.

  A wind came through the open windows and everything seemed to move. The curtains, the paper napkins, men’s ties, and the hems of the women’s dresses, including my own as I stepped over to the coffin and looked at my father. While my own hair blew in front of my face, Dad’s lay stiff under a heavy spray. His face and neck were lost beneath a powder, too pale for his skin, and his cheeks were shaded far too pink. His lips had been pulled tight in an awkward smile. I could see the end of the thread that stitched them closed, slightly protruding from the corner of his mouth like a tiny worm.

  The Grinning Brothers had dressed my father in their cheapest option. A dark green blanket suit. They called it a blanket suit because everything was sewn together. The tie to the shirt. The shirt to the jacket. The jacket to the pants. The suit was draped and tucked around his body. If Dad had come alive at that very moment and stood, the suit would have fallen off. I was certain he’d only laugh and gather that blanket of a suit up, lay it on the grass, and call for a picnic.

  The Grinning Brothers had told us to pick out a tie to be sewn to the shirt. We chose the only tie Dad ever had, which was in the shape of a fish. He’d gotten it from a white-haired Gypsy woman when we were passing through Montana. She had been selling pies out of her van set up by the side of the road. Dad bought a fish pie from her. When he cut into it, there was no fish, only a tie in the shape of one. He thought the Gypsy had baked it in the pie by accident so he took it back to her, but she told him she had put a real fin-flapping bass in the pie.

  “I can’t help it,” she said, “if by the end of its bakin’, the fish had turned itself into nothin’ more than neckwear.”

  I still cannot remember if I know this to be true. If I saw the Gypsy’s white hair and watched the crust of the pie break away as Dad pulled the tie from it. Or if this is a story from Dad’s lap and is only in my head because he put it there like little moonlit stones.

  The only pair of shoes Dad ever owned were his work boots. Chairfool, being the same size shoe as Dad, offered a pair of well-worn but shined oxfords.

  “These are good shoes for a man to go to God in,” Chairfool had said. “They are good because they have been danced in. Shoes that have been danced in are of better character than those that have merely been stood in.”

  This suit, these shoes, the makeup on his face, it all covered my father up. It was only when I looked at his hands that I saw him in the earth crusted around his short fingernails and in the crooked lines of his bony knuckles. Strangers would look at his hands and see a man of no importance. They would think that because his hands were dirty, it meant he did not matter. But in life, you either live in someone else’s house or you build your own. A man with hands like my father’s was a man who had built his home out of star and sky. He had held on to the throb of life and abandoned comforts. You can’t do that sort of thing and not expect your hands to get dirty. That’s how you know you’re doing it right.

  I stared at the dried thyme and mugwort hanging from
the underside of his coffin. I thought my father, being older and having lived a longer life, would need more thyme and mugwort than he had given Trustin. Instead of hanging one bouquet of each, I hung enough to offer a man an infinity of safe travels and beautiful dreams.

  I turned from the coffin to look at my mother. She was sitting in the middle of the sofa with a folded quilt on her lap. She had asked me to do her makeup that morning. I think she thought if she held a red lipstick in her hand long enough she would ruin things. She wanted a full face of makeup. I gave her what she wanted.

  “You heard anything from Leland?” she had asked as I powdered her face.

  “He come by early this mornin’ while you were still asleep,” I said.

  “Well, where’s he at now?”

  “He left.”

  “Left?”

  I had to tell her to stop frowning so I could fill in her brows.

  “Left?” she repeated. “It’s his father’s funeral.”

  She met my stare, then quickly looked away.

  “Close your eyes, Mom,” I said. “I’ve got to apply the eye shadow.”

  “Go heavy on the color” was all she said.

  After I had drawn the eyeliner out to the corners of her eyes and applied the mascara, she put on her veil. It covered her whole face except for her red lips.

  “Look at that veil. Who does she think she’s foolin’?” I overheard one neighbor woman say to the other as they passed me.

  Each woman was holding a potted resurrection fern as if there was no other plant alive that could understand death as much. The women were headed to Mom. It was hard to tell behind the veil if Mom was looking at the ferns or at the women. She made no gesture toward either of them when they offered their condolences. She merely stood with the quilt in her hands.

  The room fell quiet as she walked to her chair in front of the coffin. It was time for Dad’s funeral to start and my mother was letting us know by taking her seat.

  Lint sat by Mom, leaving me the chair on the very end. So many people came, the room was packed and we didn’t have enough seating so folks spilled out into the other rooms and onto the front porch.

  It seemed everyone was waiting on someone else to start things off. When Mom elbowed Lint, he got up and nervously cleared his throat.

  “There’ll be no p-p-preachin’ here today.” His voice shook. “Dad didn’t want no preachin’. Only stories. Y’all got plenty of ’em, so ch-ch-choose the story that means the most to ya. In that way, it’ll mean the m-m-most to my daddy.”

  Lint rubbed his hands together quickly as if starting the spark for his own memory of Dad.

  “One time Dad carved some w-w-wooden cars and hooked ’em to fishin’ poles,” he said. “We’d cast the lines out on the r-r-river. The cars f-f-floated real nice like. ‘Let’s see who’s the fastest,’ Dad would say before makin’ a poppin’ sound with his mouth. We’d r-r-reel in the cars as fast as we could, racin’ on top of water.”

  Lint followed through with the motions like he was casting out. For a moment, we felt we were there on the river with him and Dad, anticipating who would win the race as Lint quickly reeled the line in.

  “He let me win every time,” Lint said, dropping his hands. “Just the t-t-type of daddy he was.”

  After Lint sat, folks began to stand one by one, telling stories about Dad. How he had walked all the electric lines in the county like a tightrope champion or how he once found insects made of gold.

  “Ol’ Landon painted them bugs so they’d look ordinary. So they wouldn’t be stolen for their gold and caged in some jewelry box.”

  These stories, like all the rest, had become down-home myths full of easily swallowed moons and deep-dug sorghum cane.

  When Cotton stood to speak, he straightened his tie as he spoke about how much he had loved his wife.

  “After what happened to Vickory,” he said, “I thought I would never be happy again. Then Landon gave me a bag of balloons and told me a letter a day keeps the tears away. He said that by my writin’ her, I’d be able to bring her back to life in a way. Though she wouldn’t be able to write me back, Landon said she would let me know she received my letters by puttin’ a rock in the hollow of the weepin’ willow at the beginnin’ of Shady Lane.”

  I looked at the rock Lint rolled back and forth in his hand. He slipped it back into his pocket.

  “Sure enough,” Cotton continued, “after I wrote that first letter and sent it up in a balloon, I found a rock in the hollow of the willow. I knew it was Landon who had put it there, but I allowed myself to believe it was Vickory. Landon allowed me to believe it was her, too. Outside of his absences from Breathed, Landon placed a rock in the hollow every day. I think even God would have tired of humorin’ me, but Landon never did and he never asked me to let go of her. He only gave me a way to keep holdin’ on.”

  Listening to Cotton and the others, I knew what my father did not know when he was alive. That he was more than a filler. He was a lifetime of wildflower fields. I feel like the grasses will always tell stories of him. Of his mushroom hunting and of his philosophy that no one really knows just how sweet honey is. Maybe that is his eternity. A man tipping his hat and walking on his way. It began to feel less like a funeral and more where a jug of Dad’s moonshine should have been passed from one hand to another. People smiled and laughed as they slapped each other on the back to say, “Oh, boy, that was old Landon, all right.”

  “That’s enough,” Mom said, standing. “All this laughter. Y’all need to quiet down and pay some damn respect.”

  Already standing, I guess she figured it was as good a time as any. She slowly approached the coffin as she unfolded the quilt in her hands.

  It was the quilt from her bed, the one with the tree stitched in its middle. The old bloodstains from the kittens were still there. What was new on the quilt were pieces of green felt cut into the shape of shagbark hickory leaves and sewn upon the tree’s branches. On the two largest, she had embroidered her own name along with Dad’s. My name and the name of each of my siblings, including Yarrow and Waconda, were embroidered on the smaller leaves. I had seen Mom the previous day pulling a needle through the quilt, but I thought she was merely patching a hole. I never would have thought she was stitching our family tree.

  Everyone watched as she laid the quilt upon Dad. She gently tucked it around him as if she were merely helping him to bed. After she finished, she leaned down to kiss him one last time. I still remember the way the black thread stitching his lips brushed against her mouth.

  The room was silent as Mom took her seat.

  I took a deep breath and stood. Walking to the side of my father’s coffin, I knew the weight of being the daughter of a god.

  “Growin’ up,” I said, “I felt like I had sheets of paper stuck to my skin. Written on these sheets were words I’d been called. Pow-wow Polly, Tomahawk Kid, Pocahontas, half-breed, Injun Squaw. I began to define myself and my existence by everything I was told I was, which was that I was nothing. Because of this, the road of my life narrowed into a path of darkness until the path itself flooded and became a swamp I struggled to walk through.

  “I would have spent my whole life walkin’ this swamp had it not been for my father. It was Dad who planted trees along the edge of the swamp. In the trees’ branches, he hung light for me to see through the darkness. Every word he spoke to me grew fruit in between this light. Fruit which ripened into sponges. When these sponges fell from the branches into the swamp, they drank in the water until I was standin’ in only the mud that was left. When I looked down, I saw my feet for the first time in years. Holdin’ my feet were hands, their fingers curled up around my soles. These hands were familiar to me. Garden dirt under the fingernails. How could I not know they were the hands of my father?

  “When I took a step forward, the hands took it with me. I realized
then that the whole time I thought I’d been walking alone, my father had been with me. Supportin’ me. Steadyin’ me. Protectin’ me, best he could. I knew I had to be strong enough to stand on my own two feet. I had to step out of my father’s hands and pull myself up out of the mud. I thought I would be scared to walk the rest of my life without him, but I know I’ll never really be without him because each step I take, I see his handprints in the footprints I leave behind.”

  I reached into my skirt pocket and took out the piece of deerskin Dad had shown me when I was a little girl.

  “I know who I am now, Dad,” I said to him, tucking the deerskin in beside him.

  Instead of returning to my seat, I went over to the record player that Teddy from Teddy’s Electrical Goods let me borrow. I lowered the needle on the record Fraya had made all those years ago when she put a coin in a machine. The record crackled before Fraya’s beautiful voice filled the room:

  Ravages and savages,

  of god and men,

  fallin’ from the ol’ cherry tree again.

  Myth is in and myth is out.

  Love is faithful on this route.

  To be afraid,

  poison from

  the old nightshade.

  Flicker my girl, flicker my boy.

  Take my heart, destroy, destroy.

  Flicker my girl, flicker my boy.

  Cold noise is what my father sang

  when myth was something for all to bring.

  It’s my father I would be,

  if I were made of milk and honey.

  It’s my father I will be

  when myth melts these chains off me.

  Demons and angels spell my name,

  in fire and halo it all feels the same.

  Flicker my girl, flicker my boy.