by Joan Chase
Grandad didn’t answer them. Sometimes he’d sprinkle white lime over the ground and the decaying flesh. The smell was a little like what came from the eggs Rossie took out of the nests of the broody hens and smashed up against the side of the barn, so he could show us the little chicks inside and the blood they fed on. When Grandad found out, that was the only time we saw him smash anybody; he just raised his hand and Rossie went flying up against the side of the barn and then lay there.
As we walked, the calcium dust blew up white onto our feet. The bones crunched and splintered and teeth rolled loose on the ground. We could have been walking in the valley of Gehenna. Rossie had disappeared. Then Katie jumped out; she came from behind one of the spindly locust trees that grew there in a single clump. “The Philistines are coming,” she yelled, jabbing a jawbone within inches of us, spiking around with a sawed-off horn.
“I’m Delilah,” Celia said, and went over to couch herself where the cornfield began. The rest of us sprang at each other with spears of bone. Teeth toppled from jaws as we kicked them. Celia fanned herself with a fern frond. Anne ran into the middle. She’d taken leaves and sticks and stuck them into her wild red hair. Content for once not to squabble with Celia over who would be the great beauty, she was a mighty Samson. She’d tied her tee-shirt around her chest, uncovering one shoulder. Twirling a cow tail, she snapped it on the air. “I have slain the lion with my bare hands,” she cried. “My strength is in my hair, lips that have never touched wine.” Sometimes we played to the end of the story, with Samson’s terrible blinding and God’s revenge. But this time, when we were jabbing around, Katie rushed right into Anne on purpose and rammed her leg, which brought a quick spurt of blood. “Her tittie’s showing,” Katie smirked, and we looked at the unsightly lump of white flesh plopped out over the tied shirt.
“That hurt,” Anne screamed, tears in her eyes, and she kicked Katie so that she fell backwards and then she shoved her down, smearing Katie’s black hair into the dust. Katie kicked and flailed like an overturned bug. Anne was crying and gasping and Katie was screaming. We yanked at Anne but she was strong and kept on pounding. Then Rossie was there; he’d probably been spying the whole time. He whacked Anne’s breath out of her with one powerful sock so that she fell on the ground, not moving except to double up her knees, gagging out of her mouth. Then Rossie kicked her chest, his brown boots falling like smashing rocks. “Filthy slut. Whore,” he said, looking down on her.
He went away. Anne cried for a long time, the tears rilling through the pale dust film on her face, which was ordinarily so pink and warm-looking. We helped her up. Straightened out her hair, unfastening twigs which broke off some of the ends.
“I’ll tell what he did,” Jenny said, and she would; at times she was like a mother, protecting us when no one else would.
When Anne could speak she sobbed out, “He kicked me, kicked and kicked. I’ll die. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted you to help but I couldn’t breathe.” Sorrow for her swept over us.
“Come on, we’ll wash your face,” Jenny said. We trudged through the bones, down the grassy hill beside the barn and then into the barnyard where the water ran. It was from a wellspring which came through an iron pipe under the barn and ran continually into a black and rusted caldron. We splashed our faces where the animals put their tender spongy faces and sucked. Like them we laid our lips across the surface of the water. When we had enough we took turns standing in the pot and soaked our jeans through, getting all of ourselves clean and cold. We waded barefoot, sloshing in manure up to our ankles, then washed again. The swamp of manure was warm and sucked around us as if in some way it could hold us safe in that time and place.
Under the corncrib a batch of kittens drank from their mother. When we tried to reach them the mother scratched out at us. The kittens were newborn, with tiny squinched-up eyes. “We’ll be back later,” we told them. “We’ll have to hide you.” Gram didn’t like so many cats hanging around; sometimes there were as many as thirty on the back porch. They were diseased, she told us. Distemper. When she couldn’t stand it anymore she had Grandad put all he could fit into a gunnysack and take them to the pond. “We’ll save you,” we promised, going out of the entrance shed into the bright morning. Over the tin barn roof the sun gleamed so that, wet and shivering from the cold water, we were irridescent too.
“I’m starved,” Anne said. We remembered—the house, mothers; up the gravel, our shoes in our hands, we raced over long morning shadows, after Anne, the biggest and fastest with the toughest feet, the most delirious, the wild hyena. She bragged all the time that she could whip any boy with one hand, sometimes doing it. She would shake out her storm of red hair, boast that she hadn’t combed it in a week, in a year, would never comb it, climbed all the way to the rafters to jump. Jenny tried to calm her down, warning in black-eyed seriousness, “Sometimes things happen. Be more careful.”
Before we got into the house there was the smell of coffee coming onto the porch. Grandad’s straw-and-manure-crusted boots were set beside the fir-board cupboards and the shelves that overflowed with so much junk nobody could find anything. So we knew that he’d come up for his coffee and that this morning there wouldn’t be a fight. It was a kind of signal that he hadn’t worn the boots inside, soiling the rugs. “You got up,” we cried to our mothers, Libby and Grace, who were at the table. “You got up early,” we raved, finding their unexpected appearance something marvelous. They were in their bright-colored robes, drinking the lovely strong coffee, their eyes dark and shiny just out of sleep. The printed oilcloth was in the sun, the myriad surface cracks interfacing.
“High time,” Gram said from the pantry, where she was peeling apples. “And you younguns ramming already. Dripping on my floor.”
“Gram’s baking pies,” we sang as we raced up the stairs to change, with still a full day ahead, a day holding everything we could ever want. Behind us she hollered, “Goddamn it, stop that running. You, Anne.” Because whenever there was noise and commotion she blamed Anne, knew without looking, she said, that Anne was in the thick of it.
“Up with the birds,” Aunt Grace said to Anne when we came back. They all thought Anne was the first to wake, woke the rest of us. “It’s no wonder your hair stands on end,” she said, and tried to smooth it with her long-boned and frail-looking hand, graceful motion like strumming a harp. Still she was smiling along with us, as if it were of no importance, this untidiness and flightiness of her first child, not when we were all together. So they laughed at our long feet, careless spelling, dancing fits, saw us as natural wonders.
“What have you been up to?” Aunt Libby asked, halfheartedly, as if she knew we wouldn’t tell.
“Just playing,” we said.
“Rossie kicked Anne,” Jenny said. “He kicked her over and over. Hard. For nothing.” We felt the prickling of fear, revenge. The two sisters exchanged a frown. “It’s not right,” Aunt Grace said, “beating on girls.” We were safe. We all began to accuse him.
“More’n likely she deserved it,” Gram said from the pantry, as if she’d like to kick something needing it.
“She couldn’t breathe,” Jenny insisted. Anne sat quietly knotting her shirt over and over.
“Quit your wrangling,” Gram said. “Ain’t nobody hurt. Now where in hell’s that Rachel. It’s time she’s up . . . we’ve got to be going.”
“You get her,” Aunt Grace told Anne. “You tell her what he did.”
Then Anne was racing up the back stairs. We could hear her crashing, like the wild Injun Gram said she was. “Why don’t she learn?” Gram asked nobody, said it like all the things she said, as though responding to a steady inner annoyance like heartburn.
It was quiet upstairs; already Aunt Rachel had lured Anne into her bed. We’d all been sent there by Gram with that same mission: Rachel was always having to be dragged out of bed in the mornings. She’d be late—for work, for church, for life. But Aunt Rachel with her siren charms adroitly seduced the one that had b
een sent to rouse her. And always we succumbed. In her bed it was soft and warm and she put her arms around us and snuggled up. Enclosed in her den of curves and billows, we were tempted to melt into sleep, to be absorbed into her dreams. But we were embarrassed too, too close, and we squiggled and tossed about. Then she would tickle us on the feet or under the arms, her hand moving lightly while the rest of her lay still, pretending sleep, her rosy cheek into the sheet with her dark hair in unrestrained spirals about her heart-shaped face. As we started to giggle and lurch about the bed she would begin to croon some childish song in her liquid and throaty alto. “Cat’s in the cream jar, what’ll I do?” tickling us out of the covers and onto the floor. It was hopeless. Anne would never get it told about Rossie; Aunt Rachel didn’t want to hear it because she didn’t know any more than anyone else what to do about her son.
She came into the kitchen through the back-stairway door, Anne behind her, bounding down the stairs. “Can’t that youngun walk?” Gram muttered. She was scooping lard from the five-gallon pail by the stove, taking it in her hands. Aunt Grace said to Anne as she came, “Come over here and sit. I want you to calm down.”
“I am calm, Mother,” Anne said. We all laughed in her face. Then she sat down. On her red face was the hard crystal glitter we’d seen when she was pounding Katie.
“Anne hit me,” Katie said then, trying for trouble in her own sly way. But this morning nobody listened to her. We were making toast, piece after piece, while Gram was whirling her way through four pies at once, asking Celia to light the oven, to hand her the plates. Gram liked Celia best, maybe because she was quieter than the rest of us, and didn’t mind doing errands—Gram always had one of us getting her glasses from the bureau or walking for the mail, one thing or another fifty times a day.
“We oughta leave soon,” Gram said to Aunt Rachel.
Aunt Rachel smiled lazily over her coffee cup, legs crossed. She lit up a cigarette, the only one of the five sisters who smoked. “And what’s the point of being early and sitting around in Cleveland all day? Doctors are never on time. It’s much nicer here.” She had drawn around her the raspberry silken robe and we could see the creamy fullness of her bosom, bare where it strained at the fabric. All of Aunt Rachel was swelling, white and soft. “Anyway, the trip’s not long when I’m driving.”
“I ain’t going if we’re flying,” Gram said.
“Of course you’re going.” Aunt Rachel looked around at us. “You’d go with me, wouldn’t you, girls?”
We’d go with her. Anywhere. Every Sunday it was Aunt Rachel who took us to Sunday school while the others slept. With her we were always late, eating toast in the car and helping her to zip her dress while she was driving, and laughing at the fun of it, of being nearly too late to bother going, the car rattling over the brick street, down Belden and Highland, over the iron bridge at Keeler. We’d see the speedometer go over eighty more than once on every trip. When she’d parked, the doors sprang open and we spilled onto the sidewalk, chattering and laughing at her because now she put her nose high into the air and walked stuck-up, whispering to us to be quiet and act right, because Mrs. Peabody had nominated her as president of the Ladies’ Aid. “You don’t want them to think I’m not fit,” she said. The very idea was absurd. She belonged only to us and she could never be a lady. And neither would we. We spread our legs to wrap around the chair legs.
“I need to stop downtown first,” Gram said.
“I never heard of such a thing. Can’t it wait?”
“No. It can’t.”
“Well, I’d like to know why not,” Aunt Rachel said, more seriously.
“I’ve got business.” Business. The three women at once looked concerned.
Aunt Libby sniffed. “It’s that Hank Browning. You’re selling him that field.”
“I am.” Gram looked stubborn enough to hang herself.
“Does Dad know?” Aunt Grace asked.
“I told him. Likely he’s heard one way or another by now. He don’t use it anyhow. Not for anything that counts. Piddling.”
“He won’t like it,” Aunt Grace said.
Gram stuck her neck out toward the other room, where Grandad slept in his chair, and she spoke as if to him, for him. “I’d like to know what he can do about it. It’s mine. The whole place is. He can count himself lucky if I don’t sell it all. One day I will too.” She marched across the kitchen with the rolling pin and splashed flour on the sideboard, her stuck-out lip giving her face the spouting look of a teakettle.
Aunt Grace went over close beside her and stood with her head pressed against the cupboards, but Gram elbowed her aside, moving the rolling pin sideways, then back and forth.
“Mama,” she said. “You don’t need the money. Not now. And Dad is looking after the place. It’s important to him.”
We could hear Gram, though her voice was now low, without anger or blame, just resignation. “And who do you think’s going to pay your bills, Grace? Not likely that husband of yours. Someone’s got to think of that.”
“Shut up, Momma,” Aunt Rachel snapped. “Just shut up.”
“That’s not your only reason,” Aunt Grace said to Gram. Tears were spilling down her face while her fingers automatically crimped the edges of the crust Gram had cut to fit the bottom of the pie tin. There was flour on both of them.
“No, it ain’t. Maybe I’ve got about a million. And you’ve dug yourself into the same hole, Grady.” Gram had used the name the little girls had called Aunt Grace when she was the oldest girl at home, the one taking care of them while Gram had been boiling herself into old age over a washtub and the canning baths. Just then it seemed that Gram and Aunt Grace might still be the ones taking care of all of us, seeing to the wash and meals a long time ago.
“Sometime in there I quit,” Aunt Grace said. “Just lost my fight, I guess.” She was looking down but not noticing what she was doing, for she was going over and over the same edge and Gram saw that and for the first time put her hand out and touched Aunt Grace. They smiled at each other. Then Aunt Grace threw back her head and her arms started flying out and she finished up another crust nearly as fast as Gram could do it. Aunt Rachel and Aunt Libby stared in pure amazement, which made Aunt Grace and Gram shrug and eyebrow each other. The respect between them was evident then, because each knew the other could be depended on, had been depended on in fact, to work from dawn until dark without a rest and without making a big to-do about it, all the while listening out for the kids and having supper on the table for a man when he came home. Gram said to Aunt Grace, smiling openly, “Them two was raised with silver spoons. What do they know?”
She whipped through the pies and put them into the oven and hung up her apron. She looked at Aunt Grace and decided to finish saying what she had on the tip of her tongue. “I seen more damned men than you would believe, drinking themselves crazy, killing each other over nothing. And their women dying with babies or something else unnecessary. But you can’t tell them. I’m through trying. You can’t tell a young gal nothing, nor an older one neither. Not anything she don’t want to hear.” First they had been talking about Grandad but now Gram was trying to talk about something more, though Aunt Grace wasn’t listening and instead put her finger to her lips and frowned in toward the room where we could hear Grandad snoring. “Don’t do anything to get him mad, Momma,” she said.
Gram sighed as if she’d worn out suddenly. Then she was rushed again. “I need to leave early, I’m telling you. Either that or I won’t go.” She flared up at Aunt Grace. “And when I need your advice, young lady, I’ll ask for it.”
“Is May coming?” Aunt Grace asked, and went to sit down. Her eyes were sunken in, looked darker than we’d ever seen them.
“She’s not sure yet that she can get away.”
“She shouldn’t,” Aunt Grace said. “It’s too much. I’ve got the rest of you with me. There’s always somebody who doesn’t show up and then May has to do either the cleaning or the laundry.” Aunt May
was the oldest sister. Her husband had died just after he quit his regular job to build and operate the hotel business, which now Aunt May was dependent on, the twenty rooms more than she could manage. It told on her, the muscles in her face and body often twitching, her slenderness already gaunt.
We sat and watched the horses in the orchard. Before the apples dropped, Grandad let his workhorses graze among the trees and they, in sublime goodwill, glided in and out of sight. Gram came down from dressing and put her apple and cherry pies on the sill to cool. Then she went to sit in the car. Every few minutes she would lean on the horn and yell for the others to come, getting the names all confused, the living and the dead.
Right before they were ready, Aunt Rachel still in her slip, the phone rang. It was Uncle Dan, asking to speak to Aunt Grace. We heard her saying, “I know you do. There isn’t anything else to say. I guess we’ll know this evening.” When she hung up the phone she stared out the window of the dining room. We were watching from the stairs. Then Gram snapped her out of her thoughts by drumming on the horn.
Aunt Rachel had been staring at Aunt Grace and the horn made her furious. She raised the window as if she would tear it from the sash and screamed out, “Momma, for God’s sake.” Tears were suddenly running down her face. She bent over and wiped her eyes with one finger, using the hem of her slip.
Then Aunt Grace was saying goodbye to Anne and Katie. “You two be good now and no fighting. Aunt May will call later.” To Anne: “Try to stop hopping up and down, and comb your hair, dear. Maybe you could read for a while. And be good to your sister. Remember, she’s the youngest.” Aunt Grace wore a dark blue linen dress with embroidered white silk birds flying up at the throat. Smiling tremulously, she opened the back door to the car and slid in. Aunt Rachel drove. The car started up the drive, all the sisters turning to wave their hands out the back, Gram bolt upright beside Aunt Rachel, face forward, her summer-white pocketbook upright on her lap. We ran behind the car, up the drive as fast as we could go, barefoot, running through the dust and cinders thrown up by the speeding car. The horses in the orchard began to trot toward the highway too.
