I can’t get much older than the Iroquois.
Flicker my girl, flicker my boy
in this toma-hawk myth,
this tom-o-john story.
THE BREATHANIAN
The Gunfire Has Ended
For over a decade, Breathed has been plagued by random gunfire. Through the years, we have seen our residents affected by this continued nuisance. It had become such a regular occurrence, some came to believe the sounds were not of gunfire at all, but of the hills eroding around us.
Although the shooter has never been identified, the sheriff announced today that his department considers the shootings officially over after having received no new reports of gunfire since November.
“I feel as though a cloud has been lifted,” one resident is quoted as saying.
We may never know the motives behind the shootings. There is some speculation that the shooter has died. That he lays now at rest.
While most residents are overjoyed at knowing the era of gunfire is over, there are some who express sadness.
“I’ll miss it,” a woman, wishing to remain anonymous, says. “You get used to hearin’ somethin’ so long, it starts to sound less like gunfire and more like words. This whole time, someone was tryin’ to tell us somethin’ in a language we simply couldn’t understand. I hope whoever was speakin’ all these years, finally got out what they wanted to say.”
46
The sorrows of death compassed me.
—PSALMS 18:4
Burying a father stays with you long after you’ve hung your black dress in the back of your closet. When you believe you’re done worrying about the worms that will gorge on his body, you think of them and only them until you remind yourself nature must not deny its duty.
That winter of 1973, I turned nineteen and stayed as cold as the snow. When May came, the spring tendered a precious thing to the bare branch. Flowers made the grief bearable. As did the green grass which had begun to grow over Dad’s grave. The signs were everywhere. In the pink peonies. The stripes of warm sun. The insects flaring their nostrils and flicking their wings. All of it saying the ripples of his death were weakening against new life.
The fresh spring brought nights that existed as small warm things. The windows open, the clouds like certain shreds across the sky. It was also a spring that brought with it a small black dog. He’d circle the house and sleep on the porch step. He was an occasional howler, but not yet sold to the wolves.
Lint swore this dog was Dad.
“Smell him, Betty.” He held the muddy creature beneath my nose, its wiry fur something that tickled my nostrils. “Smells like Dad’s t-t-tobacco, don’t he?”
I brought the dog into the house after that and let him sleep on my bed. I called him Du-yu-go-dv, a Cherokee name I thought represented him the most.
One afternoon, when the gray clouds were collecting in the sky, I fell asleep with Du-yu-go-dv in my room. I woke to thunder. It sounded everywhere, even inside of me.
I looked around for Du-yu-go-dv, but he was gone. I went out into the hall, where I could hear the rockers of Dad’s chair.
I stepped into what had been his and Mom’s bedroom and found Mom sitting in the rocker. The incoming wind was causing the cotton curtains to whip around her. The room had the same pieces of furniture it always had. There was the same amount of space around each item. There was even more of some things like the cosmetics on the vanity and the stack of newspapers by the bedside table, yet there was an emptiness there as if the one thing that had truly filled the room had gone with my father.
I knew Mom felt the emptiness, too. She was barefoot and sitting on one leg while using the foot of her other to rock. She had freshly bathed and her wet hair was darker for it, the ends dripping little drops upon her bare shoulders. She wore only a pale blue towel around her body. There was no makeup on her face. Lipstick, mascara, it all seemed to fry her. Make her something untouchable. But bare-faced she was cool, touchable, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I realized we did not look so different after all. She was my mother and I was her daughter. I suppose for too long that relationship had raged like a war.
“Do you think it’s him?” She nodded toward Du-yu-go-dv on the bed.
“Dad?” I asked. “No, I don’t think the dog is Dad.”
“Maybe we should ask him.”
Her ankles seemed shaky when she stood. As she moved toward the bed, she held her hands out with her palms down like she was brushing the spikelet tops of all those wild growings my father had taught me the names of.
When Mom was close enough to the bed, she walked up the mattress with her hands.
“Are you my husband?” she asked the dog.
His dark eyes stared back at her.
“Landon?” She said his name softly. “You son-of-a-bitch. You promised you’d never leave me.”
She reached her hand out. The dog immediately jumped up and ran out of the room. Weary, Mom sighed as she turned and sat on the edge of the bed. She folded her arms and rested her chin against her chest.
“Your father used to make the most beautiful wicker chairs,” she said. “He’d soak bark in water until he could strip it. We don’t have not one of those chairs in this house. When we needed money, his furniture was always the first to go. None of you kids, well, except for Leland, even knew those chairs ever existed. There’s so much you don’t know about your father. Did you know he helped build ships?” She raised her eyes to mine.
“You mean real ships?” I sat on the bed beside her.
“Yes. The big kind. The ones they take out on the ocean. I suppose that’s why everyone will always love him best. I’ve certainly never built any ships.”
She looked down at her hands as if suddenly feeling they’d done nothing important.
“You made somethin’ better than a ship,” I said. “You made a flyin’ quilt.”
“You remember that?” she asked.
“Of course, Mom. I remember all of it. I was just a kid and had been walkin’ ’round barefoot in the yard. You were outside, sittin’ in the grass on the quilt you buried with Dad. You were embroiderin’ somethin’. I can’t remember what and I didn’t really care because I had stepped on a thistle and started cryin’. You called me over to you and took my foot in your hand. You kissed my foot right where the thistle had stuck me. Then you sat me on your lap and told me we were going to fly.
“You cut a strand from the bright purple thread you were usin’ to embroider with and tied it ’round the body of a June bug. The bug flew, fettered by the thread. ‘We’re flyin’,’ you said as you pointed over the edge of the quilt as if we were high above everything.
“ ‘Can’t you see your sisters sittin’ on the roof of our house and your brothers playin’ under the trees?’ you asked. ‘And look. There’s your daddy sellin’ his mushrooms.’
“I looked and saw it all. And you smiled.
“ ‘We fly as long as the June bug flies,’ you said.
“I didn’t wish I was back on the ground.”
“Why, Betty?” she asked as if she didn’t know.
“Because I was with you, Mom.”
47
He said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.
—LUKE 7:50
Cinderblock John took the pony to his property. He let her live in a beautiful barn he painted red. He installed a wooden-rail fence around the prettiest acres he owned. For a while the pony happily galloped there, but as she ran up against the fence, she realized she was not yet truly free. I understood the need to go beyond the fence. No matter how beautiful the pasture, it is the freedom to choose that makes the difference between a life lived and a life had.
I knew Dad would be proud when, at the end of the school year, I collected my high school diploma. I became the only on
e in my family to graduate. Even Lint would drop out before his senior year.
When I found him outside in the garage, I told him I was going to be leaving and that I wanted him to come with me.
“I c-c-can’t,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked. “We could go anywhere together.”
“Before D-d-dad died, he told me I would have to t-t-take care of Mom. He said she would n-n-need me.”
“Mom don’t need you, Lint. She can take care of herself.”
He looked at his hands.
“I don’t w-w-wanna leave home, Betty,” he said. “This is the last place Mom and Dad will have ever l-l-lived together.” He looked at the sign hanging by the garage door. “Someone has to l-l-look after his plants. I watched him work. I kn-kn-know how to make teas like he did.”
“You really don’t wanna leave?” I asked him.
“I wanna sh-sh-show you somethin’.”
He led me outside. In the yard between the garage and the house, he had dug up the earth just enough to lay his rocks down in a path. Their painted eyes staring up at the sky.
“This is w-w-where the rocks have always been leadin’ me,” he said. “H-h-ome. Why would I ever wanna leave that?”
Lint would carry on our father’s business, never once changing the sign from LANDON’S to reflect his own name. And when folks would call him Landon by mistake, Lint would only smile with pride and say, “Yes, that’s me.”
Amongst the plants and his rocks, Lint would become an old man, smelling like the herbs he crushed and the teas he brewed.
“I’m gonna miss you, Lint.”
“I’ll always be here. All ya have to do is d-d-drop in and say hi.”
“Okay. I will.”
I could understand Lint’s need to stay, but the earth had touched my spirit and was beckoning me to its lands, waters, and skies. I had to discover the world myself. I started packing that night. The next morning, as I was taking the Three Sisters carving from off the wall, Mom leaned against my open doorway.
“Good day for travel, I reckon,” she said.
She played with the frilly collar of her blouse. For the first time in my life, I saw my mother in pants.
She watched me place the Three Sisters carving into the large carpetbag I was packing everything in. The bag had the image of a farmhouse on it with trees and flowers and a dog and a cat and a mouse. The image on the carpetbag reminded me of what Flossie once said to me.
“You’ll live in a farmhouse, Betty. You’ll have a dog and a cat and a mouse.”
I smiled at the thought.
“Where will you be goin’?” Mom asked.
“To a faraway place.” I looked out at the stage.
She walked to the open windows and stood in the rays of sunlight streaming through.
“I don’t wanna hold you up,” she said. “I’ve got to get off myself to work. Did I tell ya I got a job at Breathed Shoe Company? I’m in the stitchin’ department. After the patterns are cut, I’ll be one of the women who sews the whole shoe together.”
She lightly, and proudly, touched the sides of her hair, then she dipped into her bra and pulled out the Apache tear.
“You remember what I told you about this?” she asked. “In your hand it’s a black rock.” She held it in the sunlight until the rock became translucent. “But the light changes it. They say if you have a tear of the Apache—”
“You will never cry again,” I finished her sentence. “For the Apache women will cry for you.”
“Well, maybe it’ll do you better than it has ever done me.” She placed the tear in the palm of my hand before wrapping my fingers around it.
“A girl comes of age against the knife, Betty.” She softly tucked my hair behind my ears before kissing me on the forehead. “But the woman she becomes must decide if the blade will cut deep enough to rip her apart or if she will find the strength to leap with her arms out and dare herself to fly in a world that seems to break like glass around her. May you have the strength.”
As she turned to leave, her eyes found the shotgun on my bed.
“Looks to be the same make and model of the gun shootin’ Breathed.” She picked the shotgun up and aimed it at the wall. “Why were you shootin’ your own town up, Betty?”
“I wasn’t. Not in the beginnin’ at least. It was Fraya. The night she went outside to get the slippery elm bark, she had also gone into the woods, and I followed her. I watched her get the shotgun out of a hollowed stump she’d covered with leaves. I suppose she found the first shells wherever she had found the gun. Toward the end, she must have been goin’ out of town to buy more.
“I didn’t know why she was shootin’ at first. Not until she told me that we were all insects caught in a jar and that we needed more airholes to breathe. She was tryin’ to give us those airholes by shootin’ them out. When she died, I knew I’d have to take over. But now I think there’s enough air. We can breathe fine from here on out.”
Mom nodded and saluted, as if from one soldier to another, before leaving. I could hear her taking the gun into her room. She kept it close by her for the rest of her life. It was what she held on to once her blonde hair silvered and she became the old widow who sat on her falling porch with the shotgun across her lap as she yelled at nameless kids to keep off her damn yard. They would come to laugh at her, unable in their youth to believe she had ever been more than an old woman in a rocking chair.
The last time I would hear my mother walk in high heels was that day she walked out of her room, having laid the shotgun on the side of the bed Dad had slept on. She went down the hall, clickety-clack. Down the stairs, clickety-clack. Out through the front door on her way to a job she would have until she retired. Clickety-clack.
I took the Apache tear over to the window and held it in the sunlight. As the light once more made it translucent, I watched Mom drive down Shady Lane through it. When she was gone, I slipped the tear into my pocket.
On my pillow was Dad’s cane. I strapped it into the umbrella holder on the carpetbag, then locked the typewriter up in its case. I set everything by the front door with Du-yu-go-dv following me.
“Lint?”
“In h-h-here.”
I looked into the living room and found him watching TV.
“It’s hot today for spring, ain’t it?” I wiped the sweat from my cheeks.
He stood as if it was required.
“Well, g-g-goodbye then,” he said.
I grabbed him for a hug but he awkwardly kept his arms by his sides.
“When I find a rock I know you’ll like, I’ll keep it safe for you,” I told him, releasing him from my embrace.
“Aren’t you afraid?” he asked.
“Of what, Lint?”
“Of the c-c-curse Flossie always said was ours. Maybe it’s worse out in the w-w-world.”
“Ain’t never been a curse, Lint. There is no supernatural hardship to our life. Only our fear that there is. I’m tired of bein’ afraid I’m too cursed to live.”
He looked out the window at the car driving up to the garage.
“That’ll be Mr. and Mrs. C-c-clinker for their teas,” he said. “I b-b-better take care of ’em.”
He hurried to the door.
“I’ll see you later, Betty,” he said. “Don’t forget your balloon.”
I ran up the steps and went into my closet, where a red balloon, tied with my father’s bootlace, floated up against the ceiling. The day before, Cotton had filled the balloon with helium for me. I grabbed the bootlace and knotted it to my tank top strap so the balloon would be tethered to me. Before I left my bedroom for good, I looked around one last time. The ghosts of my past appeared before me. I saw Fraya, Flossie, and me sitting in a circle on the floor so we could braid each other’s hair as we so often did when we still believed our circ
le would never be broken. When the ghost of Fraya looked up at me, she asked, “Will you remember us, Betty?”
“I should hate to be forgotten,” Flossie added.
“Of course she’ll remember us,” said the ghost of my younger self. “Won’t you, Betty?”
“I’ll remember everything.” I promised them.
They returned to each other as I left the room. I could hear them giggle on my way down the stairs. I was glad for their ghosts to be in that house. I was glad because to be haunted is not always such a terrible thing.
With the screen door closing behind me, I stepped out into the bright sun. I looked over at Lint, who was leading the Clinkers into the garage. With Du-yu-go-dv by my side, I stepped off the porch. I stopped to glance back at the garden. Lint would be in charge of it now. He alone would burn the dry branches and till their ashes into the earth each new season.
Knowing it was time for me to put my memories of these years in a dear and safe place, I folded them up neatly inside me like a book. I faced forward, understanding the bulk of my journey would be had on my own two feet. I did not mind the walking.
As I stood on the lane that led out of Breathed, I took the map out of my pocket. I started to unfold it, before deciding it would be the unmapped journey that a girl born from Landon Carpenter would take to best. Putting the map away, I looked back at the car coming from out of Breathed. When it slowed to a stop, I leaned down to look through the open passenger window. There at the steering wheel was a kind-eyed man in a three-piece suit.
“Where you headed?” he asked.
Two small boys were in the backseat, fighting over a baseball.
“Can you take me as far as you can?” I asked, seeing the law book next to him on the front seat.
“That’ll be the next county over,” he said. “I’m takin’ my sons to a preseason baseball game. I can take you that far.”
“Can my friend ride, too?” I picked up Du-yu-go-dv.
Betty Page 46
