Sweeping Up Glass

by Carolyn Wall

  “Sweet Sonny Jesus,” said Ida. Then her hands flew to her face. “Look what you’ve gone and made me do—taking the Lord’s name in vain. This thing is an abomination.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Pap said, running his hand down the fender. “It’s just been rode hard.”

  “Well, I will not ride in it—do not ask me.”

  “I’ll ride,” I said, and I got in on the driver’s side.

  He ruffled my hair.

  “It’s the devil’s machine!” Ida shouted after us. “And the ugliest one I ever saw!”

  Pap loved the truck, and was prouder than anything when he drove to town, or out to a farm to pay a call. He was still selling firewood and again peddling moonshine on the sly. After that I grinned ear to ear when we rolled into a yard, the window wound down and my elbow stuck out like I was the Queen of Sheba.

  For a long time, Ida would not ride, but after a while she put on her coat and instructed Pap to back the truck out onto the road. Then she climbed in and sat up straight as a rake. The county had cleared the highway of snow, so with me in the middle, Pap drove us up north to Paramus and back. He was smiling so wide I thought his face would split. By then he’d lost two teeth on the right side, but it did not spoil his handsomeness, and after that we drove into town on Saturdays and parked in front of the cafe while Ida shopped. I sat in the truck and looked at the empty buildings up and down the street. Then Ida would come out, and Pap, who’d been watching, would trot up from the hardware on the corner, and we’d arrange ourselves on the seat and go home. We did this week after week while the icicles melted from our eaves and the grass came up thick and green in the yard.

  By early summer I was begging Pap to let me get behind the wheel of the truck. In the matter of driving, Ida was the opposite, and it created a constant argument between them. Then one morning, she tired of the fight, buttoned on her sweater, and took the truck out by herself. She came home in a fume.

  “Tate Harker!” she called from the top of the cellar stairs. “I nearly kilt myself, and it’s all the doing of that infernal vehicle!”

  Pap came upstairs wiping his hands on a rag. “God sake, Ida, I got a pair of sick piglets sleeping. What have you done?”

  “Your truck near did me in, is what!”

  Pap looked out the kitchen window. “Where’ve you parked it?”

  “I didn’t park it nowhere,” she snapped. “It parked its own self in the ditch over to French’s place.”

  “God sake,” Pap said again. He took his coat down and shrugged into it. “You get Henry French to bring you home?”

  “I did not. I don’t want folks knowing Tate Harker turns his wife out in a killin’ machine!”

  Pap swore loudly, words I’d never known to come out of his mouth. It was a four-mile walk to French’s. He never let her drive again.

  On one cold night, he and I went off to help deliver a litter of puppies at the old Sampson place. I’d heard that Mrs. Sampson was deaf and that she and her mister never spoke but made signs with their hands, which I was anxious to see. We drove with the windows down and the chill wind blowing the dust from our brains, as Pap said. He smelled wonderful, like horse liniment and starched cotton.

  The Sampsons’ was a shotgun house with a high, sloped roof. The front room led to the bedroom, and past that was a tiny kitchen with a covered slop bucket, a table, two chairs, and a round-bellied stove. Squatting on the floor, we brought eleven puppies into the world. Seven of them never even took a breath. Mrs. Sampson brought me a rag to wipe my hands, and while Pap cleaned up the bitch and set the newborns to suckle, I wandered out in the dark yard to watch Mr. Sampson dig a hole. He threw in the dead pups and covered them with dirt. Stomped the earth with his boot, then looked me square in the eye and said, “Too much is always a bad thing.”

  It was more than I’d heard him speak in the years I’d known him, so I figured his words were mine to keep. I followed him inside and wondered if God looked like Angus Sampson with his white hair and beard. Pap collected his hat.

  “Tate,” Angus murmured at the door, “you want one of these y’ere pups for the girl, you’re welcome to it.”

  I nearly fell over with joy. I looked to Pap with my heart in my throat.

  Breathless with the promise of a dog, I chattered on about nothing and everything. A dog of my own. I bounced on the truck seat, thinking up names, and asking how long I would have to wait.

  “Till it’s time, Olivia,” Pap said.

  “How long will that be?”

  “A while yet, when it’s weaned from its mother.”

  We were almost home when he laid a hand on my shoulder to settle me down. Neither of us saw James Arnold Phelps until we were on him. In the light of our headlamp, his eyes opened wide and his undershirt lit up. James Arnold put up both hands, and then he was gone. Tires plowed through the snow. We skidded toward the ditch, then rolled end over end, so that I slammed into the dashboard and the roof, then again, tangling with Pap. After what seemed a long time, I crashed through the windshield, and slid face-first out on the icy road. For months, the only sound I could conjure up was the shriek of Pap’s brakes—and Angus Sampson’s warning that too much was a bad thing.

  16

  I woke in a black tomb of a thing, with my head sticking out. I wondered, vaguely, what my body had done to be so incarcerated. Mostly I slept, occasionally sliding into consciousness. Wrapped in this contraption, I knew only the steady hum-suck of experimental machinery and the whisper of shoes on linoleum. Sometimes a voice. I recall opening my eyes, once, to a flurry of people shining lights in my eyes, beating fists on my chest.

  All I wanted was for Pap to come and tell me this was just a dream, and that he was now taking me home. But my only attendants were people in white coats. At the time, it worried me that I couldn’t call up Pap’s voice. Still, in that moment before sleep, I caught a glimpse of his face. But then came the headlight and James Arnold Phelps’ eyes. I wanted to ask what had happened to Pap, but I was afraid. So I struggled against sleep until I could no longer hold on, then staggered through the shattering of glass and bone and metal once again, and finally drifted off.

  I hurt in uncertain ways, but when it gathered in my legs or my chest, or I screamed in a sudden rush of pain, ladies in white dresses came running. They clucked their tongues, and laid their hands on the machine that tried to do my breathing for me. In my worst moments, they worked something into the corner of my mouth with a dropper, and I slept.

  Other times I lay looking at the ceiling. I was wired and taped, with tubes running in and out, and glass bottles suspended over my head. My throat was as dry as meal. Next to my bed was a straight-backed chair, and I often woke to find a nurse sitting there.

  Eventually I was moved to a bed where I lay between cold cotton sheets. My left hand and arm were bound to a board, but my right hand was free. As the days went by, I discovered that my head was bandaged, with slits cut for my eyes and more holes for the tubes in my nose and mouth. Thick gauze was wound about my jaw and mouth.

  In time, my fingers found the heavy metal halo that circled my head and seemed to be bolted through the bandages to my jaw. It was then I knew I’d been hurt bad. I could not open my mouth nor turn on my side. I was being fed through a rubber hose taped to the roof of my mouth. Later they brought me milk shakes with a straw, but I did not drink.

  Because I’d been so long in the iron box, my right leg had healed wrong, and, under anesthetic, had to be broken again before it could be set right. Now it was bent at the knee and trussed up on a rope like a butcher-shop turkey.

  Now and then, Ida came. She’d stand there in her coat, her handbag clutched to her chest. She said little or nothing, and neither did I as I drifted off, and when I opened my eyes, she was gone.

  Eventually, my leg was lowered and the cast cut away. It took two doctors, an orderly, and a flock of nurses to dismantle my head contraption, and at last I was free to turn stiffly at the neck while they stood
there clapping. I had a headache most of the time, but I seldom complained. There was, in fact, nothing I wanted to say, and no one I wanted to say it to. Then they cranked up the head of my bed, and I saw, through the slits in my gauze, that I was in a long narrow hall with twenty or thirty beds on each side. This was the Indigent Ward, someone told me, for people who could not afford to pay. I was too tired to stay awake and too slept-out to sleep. I was cold all the time.

  Two weeks later, they eased me into a straight-backed chair for a few minutes each day, then for a long half hour. I imagined I looked bad in my wrappings, but without them I was sure I would look worse.

  Then one day, a young man brought a wheeled cane chair. He lifted me into it, trundled me down the row, and set me in front of the window. When the nausea passed, I was surprised to see that winter had ended and forsythia bushes were a yellow blur. By now I knew that Pap was not coming.

  Doctors came. They spoke of jawbones, readjustments, and corrective operations. They took me to a small room with a soft light, and unwound the bandaging—first from my forehead and then around my eyes. I put up a hand and felt not the long, jagged gashes I’d expected but a raised line over one eyebrow and another at what would have been my hairline. While they stood there admiring their work and talking, I scratched my scalp where they’d shaved off my hair. They told me it would grow back.

  One day I heard Ida in the hall, shouting that we had no money for more operations, and the nurses murmuring soothingly. Afterward, Ida came and sat on the edge of my bed, which I took to be as loving a thing as she’d ever done. Around the tube and from between my teeth, I said awkwardly, “How long ha’ I been here?”

  “Months,” she said. “For God’s sake, Olivia, you’re skin and bone, and they won’t let you out of here until you eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, they won’t leave those tubes in there forever, missy. And then we’ll see who starves.”

  I drew a long breath, and without looking at her, said, “Pap.”

  She opened her pocketbook, dug around for something, and closed it with a snap. “Your pap is dead, Olivia, and don’t go making a scene or it’ll take that much longer to get you out of here.” Then she got up and walked out the door.

  A month later they removed my tubes. With a pair of canes, I was now expected to walk to the lavatory and sponge myself down each morning. They said I was lucky to be alive, that I’d cracked several ribs and compressed my breastbone, which had made it impossible for me to breathe on my own. My right leg had been fractured in three places, and I lost three back teeth and shattered my jaw.

  I went twice more to the operating room where the old bolts were removed, and I was fitted with new ones below and behind my ears. A new set of wires circled my face. It was summer when the doctors removed the rest of the wrappings—and left them off. My hair was about two inches long; my cheeks felt as if they had been pulled tight and pinned at the ears. My jaw hurt, like a perpetual toothache. Three back teeth were now porcelain, attached to a narrow bridge that fit the roof of my mouth. With my fingers I located more scars, a thick one along the left side of my jaw, and another at the corner of my mouth, turning my bottom lip slightly downward.

  Ida came with a mirror, held it up so I could see. She said, “That’s what the wages of sin look like.”

  The woman in the next bed slammed a fist into her pillow, and for a moment I thought she was going to rise up and beat Ida senseless. I never bothered to ask which sin—I knew what she meant. I had killed my pap.

  In late summer the doctors cranked my mouth open by loosening things one hair’s breadth at a time, straightening my teeth with wicked bits of hardware and making porcelain ones to fill the spaces. It was over in October, the last bolts taken out while I was under yet another anesthetic, and when I was able to eat rice pudding with a spoon, Ida came to get me in a different pickup truck. She wore a new winter coat and hat, and never said a word while she drove. I looked out at the countryside and realized I’d missed almost a year. To show for it, I had a wooden cane, a limp, and a new smile I never used.

  I was surprised at how grim our place looked, how empty the grocery. The floor and drainboard were crusted with food and filth, and there was not one clean dish in the cupboard. I wondered how Ida had paid for the truck and her clothes, so I asked.

  “That,” she said, “is none of your business. Don’t think you can give me trouble, girl, because I’ve kept this place going on my own. Lord knows I deserve some relief. And if you must know, your pap’s buried out there in the yard. Next to the outhouse.”

  “Folks came to the burying?”

  “Not a soul. Goes to show what kind of man he was.”

  “Is there a marker?”

  “There is not.”

  It was a long time before I learned that my chatter that night had also killed James Arnold Phelps. I discovered his grave in the Methodist cemetery. I hadn’t known the Phelpses were Methodist. In fact, I was hard-pressed to remember a single religious, or even Christian, thing about them.

  Next to our outhouse, Pap’s grave had long ago grown over, the grass now withered and brown. And the sky looked like snow. Then, too, came the promised dog—ten months old, the owners driving up in their Ford, and bringing him to me at the back door. I hid my wounded face in his fur. But Ida said we could not take it, could not afford another mouth to feed, and finally they got back in the car and drove away. I hated her, and I told her so.

  17

  I had lost most of the seventh grade, but my teacher thought I was bright enough to catch up. However, my jaw with its thick white scar and my turned-down mouth were a fright, and no amount of kindness could change that. I let my hair grow out, and it fell over my face. I seldom looked up.

  Even with my studies, working in the store, and keeping the house, I found time to sew. I cut squares from scraps of cloth and stitched them together. Evenings, Ida’s rantings gave out early, and when she went to bed I stole away to Junk’s house where his mama taught me to fill quilts with beaten batting and back them with muslin, to knot the corners with embroidery thread.

  After hand-me-downs had been passed through all her grandchildren, Miz Hanley gave them to me for scraps. I made a half dozen quilt tops, each a more complicated pattern than the last—overlapping circles, diamonds, and one-inch squares. When they were finished, they looked like something I’d wanted to say but hadn’t found words for.

  I cleaned out the chicken pen and shoveled goat leavings, but I could not stand the sound of Ida’s voice. I was careful not to look at her, either, for her unmarked face was more than I could bear.

  Sometimes she stomped and fumed and threw things—the kitchen spoon, the hairbrush, the milk bucket. I’d wake in the night, clutch my belly, and rush out to the yard to vomit up my anger. Still, Ida never touched me. I wondered if she was afraid of my put-together body, that if she back-handed me, some expensive piece might come loose and fly off. Then one stormy night when she’d had enough of my sass, she took me by the arm and dragged me to the cellar. She lit a kerosene lamp, went back upstairs, and closed and locked the door.

  “Best learn not to back talk, girl!” she called through the door. “Else you’ll rot down there!”

  At first it wasn’t so bad, being among the long dog pens and things Pap had held in his hands. I fancied I could smell him, and hear the way he crooned to a sick thing. But then I recalled how much he’d loved Ida and how bitter she’d been, from the time when I was no more than a seed.

  After a while the oil burned away, and the lamp went out. The damp settled in, and my empty stomach rumbled. I felt along the tabletop and found a wire door. Crawled inside and curled in the farthest corner of the pen. I woke sometime in the night, thinking spiders were crawling up my arms. I clawed till my hands were sticky and my arms burning where I’d torn away skin. I wanted my pap, and I cried till I was sick.

  In the hours I was down there, I had soiled my underpants and vomited
on my jumper. All I wanted was for Ida to look at the damage she’d done, and I think the sight of me frightened her. Or maybe it was the way I smelled. Over the weeks, my skin became crusty with rash. I stumbled through the days stinking of myself and my shame, my hair in braids as stiff as dried wax. For every night she dragged me to the cellar, I came up the next morning hating her ten times more.

  I woke one morning to a great racket overhead. Then doors slamming, and cars starting up.

  Ida came down. “Damn niggers,” she said and shoved me ahead of her up the stairs. She stripped me naked, and washed me down while I stood in the middle of the kitchen with my eyes closed against the light. She shoved a jar of melted lamb’s tallow at me, told me if I wanted to, I could spread it on my arms. After that, we never talked about the basement room. The cellar door stayed locked, and it was a long, long time before I spoke to her again.

  Grudgingly, Ida settled down to run the store, and I worked there after school. We closed at six o’clock, when one or the other of us would heat something on the stove. We ate in silence. In the evenings, I did my homework and sewed. On Saturdays, I ordered, stocked shelves, and manned the register while Ida took to her bed. On Sundays we were closed. It was a routine neither pleasant nor unpleasant, it simply was.

  Often on weeknights, men I didn’t know slipped in through our porch door and headed straight for Ida’s room. Occasionally Alton Phelps came back through, buttoning his trousers, but for the most part Ida’s gents left after I was asleep. On only one occasion did he ever speak to me.

  One Friday night I was frying onions and flour-dusting a bit of beef for the skillet when Phelps’ hard body pressed me to the stove. With him suddenly against me, I could feel his sharp heat and smell his breath.

  “Little girl, you got something I want,” he said.

  My hand closed over the skillet handle, but I could feel him grinning.