Sweeping Up Glass

by Carolyn Wall

  Once when Pap and I were delivering an animal to a Methodist preacher in Buelton, we’d driven up to find the doors standing wide and the preacher leading his congregation in prayer. Pap, with the hound across his arms, nodded off his hat and elbowed me to do the same. We stood on the bottom step till the preacher finished a prayer that was so soft it floated out to us like a whisper. No one even said amen. Then we sat on the porch and scratched the hound’s ears till the service was over.

  The Reverend Culpepper was nothing like that Methodist man. He cried out to God on behalf of those on the riverbank, and he cried out to me. So in love with the rise and fall of his voice was I that I missed the words. I peppered his prayer with my own amens.

  Then folks began to crowd into the stream, some with babies in their arms, and a man stepped up to help the Reverend while the rest went on singing, Shall we gather at the river … Sinners folded their arms. The Reverend pinched their noses and laid them back. When they came up, they were radiant, like the sun when it bursts through a cloud, like they’d been handed a fork and a strawberry pie.

  I wandered down to the sandy creek. The little ones who’d been in my lap were being submerged, folks crying, Praise be to God, and, Thank you, Jesus, the babies coming up with surprised looks on their faces. When one burst out howling they passed it around for wet-sounding kisses and let it suck on somebody’s thumb.

  “Junk,” I said, wading in, “how come these little’ns got to be baptized, when they aren’t old enough to have done any sinning?”

  “It gets ’em ready for life, Miss Livvy.”

  “How does it do that?”

  “I can’t rightly say, ’cause it sure don’t bring in no dollar bills.” He laughed at his own joke, the sound rolling from his belly.

  “Have you been baptized, Junk?”

  “Many times.”

  I could see they weren’t dunking folks far under, just enough so they could say they were river-wet. I could make out their faces below the surface. Another came up spitting, and the brothers and sisters laughed and patted him on the back and wrapped a towel around him. Offered coffee from a flask.

  “How do you know when it’s time to get baptized?” I said.

  “Oh—when things get too heavy.”

  “Well,” I said, “if you’ve got a worry as big as the world, is that a good time?”

  “I reckon so. ’Scuse me, Miss Livvy, I got to take my turn helping now.”

  The singing thinned. Folks were moving, gathering up plates.

  “Reverend Culpepper,” I called, the water to my waist. “I want to be baptized.”

  “Why, Olivia Harker,” he said. “You got your daddy’s permission?”

  “I do, sir,” I lied. Another thing for which I must ask forgiveness while under water.

  “All right,” he said. “Then we’ll ask Jesus to wash away your troubles.”

  I nodded.

  A man I did not know put his hand on my back.

  “Fold your arms,” said the Reverend. “Take a breath, and hold it in.”

  But as I felt myself going back, I had more thoughts than moments to put them in. What if they let go, and I drifted to the Capulet and on to the sea? What if I never saw Pap again? They laid me down, and water came in through my nose and mouth, thick with weed and the slickness of bodies. I swallowed and gagged and tried to open my eyes, but they were swimmy and burning. I kicked and flailed and struck the Reverend a blow that knocked his glasses away. If he blessed me, I never heard, but I felt Junk’s hands lift me out of the water.

  I came up streaming and wiping at my eyes and my hair, my face twisted with the probability of tears, and colder than cold. I was mortally embarrassed at my behavior, at spying on them and being here in their river, and when I had my feet under me, I wrenched free and waded ashore, making for the trees. But roots stuck up through the ground and tripped me, so that I went down on my face and lay there, humiliated. Mercifully, no one came to help me up. I would not cry. I lay there, with my fists clenched, willing them all to go home.

  “Miss Olivia?”

  “Go ’way, Reverend.”

  He sat down beside me, grunting, his knee bones cracking. “Miss Olivia, you all right here?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I see you got your ear to the earth.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You hear it talkin’, do you?”

  His saying that surprised me, for I did hear something, I always had—roots shifting and stems uncurling, the popping of seeds like things being born. It was only when the wind blew lightly over my wet self that I remembered where I was. “I hear it,” I said.

  “Well then, there’s your proof.”

  “Proof of what?” I did not want to look at him. I’d dealt him a mighty blow, and I wondered if he’d found his glasses, or if he’d have to go around squinting for the rest of his life.

  “Some folks are born of the water,” he said. “Olivia Harker was born of this earth.”

  “You can’t make me feel better, Reverend. I made a pure fool of myself, and everybody knows it.” I buried my face in my arm. There was a tender place on my cheekbone, and my knee was beginning to smart.

  “No, ma’am, they don’t,” he said, his hand on my head. He let loose a fistful of dirt. “In the name of this earth, I baptize thee Olivia Harker, renewed by the lovin’ Father, the blood of His Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

  I waited to see if I would feel any different.

  “Your sins have been forgiven, Miss Olivia.”

  I turned my head. “Reverend?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “What’s the Holy Ghost?”

  “Why, Miss Olivia,” he said, “when you put yo’ ear to the ground, that’s what you hear.”

  The Reverend drove Miss Dovey’s wagon, with all the children inside and me among them, hugging the backboard. Behind us, folks walked arm in arm, carrying folding chairs and empty baskets. They looked tired and happy and full of something I hadn’t found.

  They let me out at the crossing, and I walked the rest of the way. Pap was working in the cellar, the light slanting up the stairs and across the kitchen floor. There was a covered dish on the back of the stove, reminding me of the plate of fried chicken I’d left on Miz Hanley’s quilt.

  “That you, Olivia?” Pap called up.

  “Yessir.”

  “Light a lamp, and I’ll be there directly.”

  I went into the alcove and pulled the curtain, unbuckling my wet overalls, unknotting my laces. I hadn’t even thought to take off my shoes before I’d stepped into the creek, and I hoped they wouldn’t dry two sizes smaller. There was a time when I’d have run downstairs to tell Pap what I’d seen and heard, but this day was so private I couldn’t even think of it myself. I didn’t wait for him to come up, but pulled a clean nightgown over my head, crawled into bed, and turned my face to the wall. When he came to check on me, I pretended I was already asleep.

  8

  It was my secret hope that when Ma’am came home, she would decide she’d been happier in Buelton, thank you very much, and instruct Pap to hitch up the donkey and take her back. If things didn’t turn out that way, I would go live with Junk and Love Alice until Pap came to say that Ma’am had fallen in a bar ditch and drowned.

  In August, my birthday came. Pap and I went down to Dooby’s and sat at the counter, where we ate chicken sandwiches and vanilla ice cream from fluted dishes. I was still mad at Dooby, and would not look at him. Then Pap and I walked up to the Ridge and stood on the lip of the bluff, listening to Grandpap’s wolves call down the night.

  Pap was tall, with long arms and legs and a bony face. He was magic, could look a thing in the eye, and it’d settle right down. One time a half-grown bear ate out of his hand.

  “Listen, girl,” he’d say.

  I loved this story.

  “My pappy first saw ’em in the Alaska sun, stretched out, cleaning their paws, caring for their young. Then it came upon him that he ei
ther had to stay there or bring ’em home with him.”

  “Why didn’t he stay?” I asked on cue.

  “’Cause me and your grand were here, and he loved us more.” Pap looked at me. “The way I love you. So he built cages—and he covered them with brush. Put in meat and watched ’em all winter before he caught a male and a female.”

  “And he was careful to never look them in the eye,” I said.

  “That’s right. Hitched up mules, hung the cages on poles. Hired a half dozen fellas and lit out for the south. You won’t forget that story, will you, girl?”

  “Nosir.”

  “There never were any wolves in Kentucky before these, but they did all right. That first spring, there was a half dozen pups with silver snouts. Nothing can happen to ’em—you understand?”

  I did not. I knew only the things that had befallen me—chest colds, the pox, scarletina, and mumps. But in those days there were a number of things I didn’t understand—like how a soul separated from a body when it died. When old Mr. Sykes passed, I hung around the doorway of his bedroom, my pap sitting with his missus at the end. Thought I’d see God reach down, siphon off Mr. Sykes’ soul, like skimming grease from a stew. But all that happened was his jaw sagged open, and Pap reached over and ran a hand down his eyes so he’d quit staring at the ceiling.

  If I couldn’t fathom death, I was even more confounded over conception and birth. I found the colored girls to be a pure wonder—on Sunday playing hopscotch with me, and on Monday they had bellies round as melons and two babes sucking. I suspected, therefore, that they married secretly and early and took more than one husband. I wondered where they kept these, and what would happen if these gents met up at the dinner table one night. I inquired about that, and about other things, too. I learned that boys who took care of their own business would most certainly go blind. I also heard that if a full moon coincided with a girl’s monthly bleeding, she might burst into flame. It was spread around school that big bosoms were the mark of a hussy, and if a girl looked into a hand mirror six nights in a row, the young man of her choice would come calling. I knew for a fact that all the popular girls took up their mirrors five nights in a row and then giggled and whooped over whether or not they would carry it through, for fear there’d be a mistake and the ugliest boy around would show up. I heard that if a boy kissed a girl using his tongue, she would find herself in the family way, and I passed that news on, adding my personal but disjointed belief that the same would occur if a boy peed in a bottle and left the jar overnight under a young lady’s window. Finally, my teacher, Miss Reingold, sent a note home to Pap, saying I’d been giving out unsuitable instruction.

  Pap, she said, ought to ask a neighbor woman to advise me on what a young lady should and should not talk about—and to make sure my information was correct. It was her job, Miss Reingold said, to teach me to add a column of fractions and find England and Scotland on the map, to know the correct spelling of Mississippi, the capitals of New York, Virginia, and Vermont. She taught me to sing “America the Beautiful” and that young girls should at all times carry clean handkerchiefs in their pockets.

  In the end, I took the note, climbed the hill to Miss Dovey’s house where she instructed colored kids in her front room, and sat on her porch step until she let out school. Some of ’em, running out with their books, said, Hey, O-livia. Then Miss Dovey took me inside and read the note, and she told me about things like keeping clean rags for times of bleeding, and to say no if a boy wanted to take me behind the barn or raise my skirt or touch me in private places. I remembered what Love Alice had told me about her uncles, and I wondered how old Miss Dovey was when a man first lifted her skirt.

  She said, Lord, where was my mama when I needed her? I loved Miss Dovey’s voice, and under different circumstances I could have listened to it for hours, but today I wanted to crawl in a hole. I knew about the couplings of hounds and horses, and where baby rats came from. Thanks to Love Alice, I even had a name for it. I vowed that none of this nastiness would ever happen to me. I kept my eyes on my shoes and prayed for the heat to run out of my cheeks. I said, Yes, ma’am and No, ma’am, and sat hunched on the stool until she fetched me a sugar cookie, patted my head, and sent me home.

  9

  That same summer before Ma’am came home, a vague itching settled in my chest, which Love Alice said was a sure sign of growth, and with a piece of string I checked its measurement nightly—afraid my bosoms would sprout too early, or too late, or not at all. Love Alice’s bosoms were small and round and perfectly shaped, but I could never be that lucky. Although I loved heavy breasts on Junk’s mama, and on Mrs. Dooby and her fat widowed sister, I was afraid mine would come on too soon, and by winter I’d own a chest that would topple me over. It was one more thing to fret about.

  Meanwhile, working alongside Pap in the cellar was grand. At the bottom of the stairs, two lanterns hung on nails. His doctoring charts were tacked to the wall with big masonry nails. A pair of thick black books lay open on his bench. Day after day, I held rabbits and possums, raccoons scared spitless, while Pap splinted paws that were mangled in traps. It was then that I came to hate hunters—not the ones who took home a hare or a pair of squirrels for the table, but the ones that shot a thing and left it wounded.

  Pap tended animals that belonged to the Simpsons, Mr. French, the Daymens, and the Sylvesters. He fixed up Doc Pritchett’s cats and pulled Mrs. Nailhow’s calf. Up and down the valley he mixed pastes and poultices, ointments and powders. In exchange, he brought home poke salad and green peas for shelling, sweet corn, and once a leg of wild turkey.

  Pap and I ate almost no meat, for we couldn’t afford to buy it. But we did have chickens, and Pap was a master at wringing their necks. Aside from that—and a sampling of salt pork for working on somebody’s mule—we ate vegetables and fruit and yellow corn cakes. Mostly it was cabbage soup with onions, and flat bread for dunking. Potatoes roasted with sage and rosemary. Molasses that we spread on hotcakes like butter. We loved rhubarb boiled with white sugar and wild honey on our oats, and we drank milk fresh from nannies in the yard. When it came to eating, we were two of a kind. But in other things we had our differences.

  Pap was the quiet one—I was the talker. Folks often said, “Hush up, Olivia. Don’t yap so much.” But he listened. Some-times he’d put down what he was doing and look right at me till I was through. Like maybe he believed I had something to say.

  In preparation for Ma’am’s arrival, Pap began to whitewash the house—five gallons that he’d gotten for pulling a foal—and although the bare wood showed through in a dozen places, and our roof still sagged from years of snow, I could tell he felt grand.

  I, on the other hand, would not help. Pap could not make me. I argued and stomped. For the first time ever, he sent me to my bed to think things over. With the covers pulled to my chin and the sun not yet set, I thought it over, all right. Ma’am’s leaving us had been a mercy. And even if she had bosoms like Junk’s mama, I didn’t want her back.

  From my bed in the alcove, where I had drawn the curtain, I heard Pap in the kitchen, pouring water, stoking the stove. I smelled corn bread warming, heard the rattle of dishes. I listened to him eat his supper, his fork stabbing the plate, and I hurt all the more. After a time he pulled back the curtain and stood there with a square of corn bread and a cup of milk.

  I sat up. “Miss Dovey says Ma’am’s a loony bird.”

  “That’s foolish talk.”

  “She says that’s why you never went to visit her. And if you haven’t seen her, how do you know she’s getting better?”

  He came in and sat down beside me. “Her doctor says so.”

  “I don’t want her here, Pap. I like it being just you and me.”

  “I remember,” he said, “when she was young and pretty. Full of spunk. Olivia, why do you hate her so?”

  My shrug was the truth. I did not know.

  “Well, I need her to help out,” he said. “Keeping this house and t
he clinic and store and watching after you is one hell of a job.”

  I felt my face tighten. “I want more corn bread.”

  “She’ll be home in three weeks. I need you to be kind to her when she gets here. And there’s no more corn bread.”

  I licked crumbs from my palm. “Then can I have a dog?”

  “What?”

  “If I had a dog, I’d feed him every day.”

  “Olivia, please …”

  Across the kitchen, the window was now dark. I laid down in my bed, and turned to the wall. It was enough to study my face every day, making sure I looked like Pap and not one bit like her. I could not take her in the flesh.

  “If I had a dog, I’d call him Spot.” I pulled the quilt under my chin and closed my eyes. I pretended Pap had gone away, too, that I was alone and fixing to starve but nobody cared.

  Pap got up and I heard him pull the curtain behind him.

  I lay looking through hot tears at the cracks in the wall plaster and listening to Grandpap’s wolves call down another night.

  10

  It was September. School had commenced, and in two more weeks, Ma’am would be home.

  On Tuesday afternoon, as had been our custom all summer, Love Alice and her friend Mavis Brown came to call. We made tea from hot water and milk, them remarking that the house looked spanking new with its whitewash outside and double wax on the floor. I lifted the iron burner so we could toast bread over the fire, and we sat at the table with our cups raised and our fingers crooked.

  “Miss Harker,” Mavis Brown said to me, “I’ll have anudder spoon of sugar in my tea, uh-huh. This a nicer eatin’ joint than Mr. Ruse’s.”

  Love Alice hiccupped. “How you know that, girl? You ain’t ever been to Mr. Ruse’s place.”

  I said, “Everybody who’s anybody has been to Ruse’s.”

  I had not seen the back door open, nor Pap come in. He must have caught my words because he stood staring at me like I was somebody else’s child.