A move this bold required backup, so after school I found the Bettis twins and made them swear on spit not to tell what I was about to reveal. Then I told them about Mama’s sickness and how she wouldn’t take medicine because she didn’t want to lose her hair and how I needed to go out to Allie Rucker’s. Wiley, reliable as rain, agreed at once to help, but Will said, “Jeez, Tallie, I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to go,” I told him, but before we’d gone ten feet, he was right there with us, pedaling off to see the witch before we all got cold feet. It took us close to a half hour to reach the woods west of town out by the holler where Allie Rucker lived.
“Jeez,” Will said when we got there, like that was the only word he knew.
Allie’s shack made Martha Lee’s place look like Buckingham Palace. It was worn gray, like it had never held even passing acquaintance with a coat of paint. Out front there was no path, just hip-high grass that looked like it could be hiding anything and nearly stopped me in my tracks. “It’s for Mama,” I whispered to summon my courage. “Wait here,” I told the twins, and gave my Raleigh to Wiley, who immediately turned it facing out in case we needed a quick getaway. As I walked toward the shack, I felt them watching me. I hoped I could count on them.
I climbed the steps, my palms all sweaty on the tree branch Allie had fashioned into a railing. Before I could even raise my hand to knock, the door swung open. I expected Allie Rucker to be short, about my mama’s size, and all bent over like most old folk, but she was about ten feet tall, with this colored rag wrapped around her head that made her look even taller. She looked strong, too, like—old or not—she could swat you down like a flea if she had half a mind to.
“Hello,” I stammered. “I’m Tallie Brock.”
“I knows who you be,” she said, causing my insides to jump halfway to my mouth. She knew who I was? Like she’d been keeping an eye on me for years. I didn’t like the idea of that one bit. Part of me was saying, Get the hell out of here, and the other part was saying, Maybe this will work.
“You be the spittin’ image of your daddy,” she said. She knew my daddy, too? “What you be wantin’ here?”
“Mama’s sick,” I said, stammering out the whole story, how she had lung cancer and wouldn’t take chemo or have an operation. She motioned for me to come in. I looked back at the twins.
“Those be the Bettis boys?” she said, squinting out to where the twins sat on the bikes, ready to take off. “Twins, they got powers.”
Did she know about all of us? The idea was so creepy, I couldn’t think about it. I paused for a minute, trying to remember when I’d had my last tetanus shot. Then I remembered Mama and went on in. The door slammed shut behind me.
“How long your mama be sick?” she asked.
“Since spring.” Inside was one big room with these giant plants growing everywhere, like I’d fallen into a jungle. She didn’t ask me to sit, and I couldn’t have even if she had. Every chair was piled with junk. Broken things: cooking pots with no handles; magazines you wouldn’t want to even consider holding in your hands; stuff most people would throw away. It smelled of mildew and some other, slightly sweet, odor. I held my arms close to my sides to keep from touching anything. If the twins left me here, I was going to kill them.
“Last year,” Allie repeated to herself.
“That’s right,” I said. I wished I knew more about witch stuff. Should I have brought along something of my mama’s? Some of her hair? I wouldn’t have to cut it. Just take a few strands from her brush.
“Your mama, she be puffing up or turning to bones?”
I thought of Mama’s thin arms, the weightless heft of her Pick Up–stick hands. “She’s lost a lot of weight,” I said.
Allie crossed to a cupboard that, I swear to God, had cobwebs hanging from the top. Inside, the shelves were crammed with old jars and discolored plastic containers, each one filled with things that even from across the room I could see looked like nothing you’d ever want to be putting inside you in a million years. It made the idea of chemo look like a grammar school picnic.
She took down about ten of the jars and opened each one. Once, she put back one jar and selected another. She crossed to a chair and dug around until she came up with an old plastic bag, the kind store bread comes in, and started filling it with stuff from the jars.
Eye of newt, said this scratchy voice inside my head from this play in our English class text, and I had to bite my cheeks to hold back from laughing, the nervous kind of laughing I’d do when we still went to the Methodist Church and Mrs. Duval sang in that thin old crackly voice of hers. I used to get to giggling so that my mama’d have to squeeze my hand to make me stop.
“Here,” she said, holding out the bag.
I didn’t take it right away.
“For your mama,” she said.
“What is it?”
“This here be the Queen of Cures.”
“What’s that?”
“The Queen of Cures. That’s all you be needing to know.” Then she told me to dump the stuff in the bag into a big pot and stir in five cups of water. Boil it up good, she instructed, and after ten minutes, strain it off. Then I was supposed to boil it again with another five cups of water. “This time you be putting a lid on it and letting it cook for two hours,” she said. Then she told me to strain it again and put the two batches of liquid together. She made me repeat her directions twice. Eye of newt, sang the crazy voice inside my head.
“You be givin’ your mama a full cup,” she said. “Every night. Right before she be goin’ to sleep.”
Believe me, I didn’t even want to touch that bag, but I grabbed it and got out of there. I was so glad to escape, I didn’t even say thanks. I ran all the way to where the twins were waiting.
We rode like the devil himself was at our back. I gripped the plastic bag against the handlebar, and it swung back and forth madly like some creature inside was trying to break free.
We got so out of breath, we had to stop after we’d gone no more than a mile.
“What was she like?” Will asked.
“A witch,” I said. “And tall. And she knew who I was. And you, too. She knew who you were. She said twins have powers. ”
“Jesus Sweet Christ,” Wiley said.
I knew exactly what he meant.
Will was looking at the plastic bag. “What the hell is that?”
“Stuff I’m supposed to cook up and give to my mama.”
“I don’t know about that,” Wiley said.
“She said it’s the Queen of Cures,” I said.
“Jeez,” Will said. “That sounds like a curse.” He made his voice all spooky and thin like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. “The Queen of Cures, my pretty.”
“It’s probably poison,” Wiley said.
Well, poison was what Mama said they gave you to get rid of cancer. Maybe one poison was as good as another, though I hoped it wouldn’t make her hair fall out. I couldn’t picture Mama without her black hair curling round her face.
When I got home, Mama was sleeping, so I got right down to boiling up the cure, emptying the bag into the stew pot she used for making soup, measuring out the water, precisely as Allie Rucker had instructed. Mostly the stuff looked like dried grasses and some chunks that resembled wood or mushrooms, but I didn’t look too close. If there was something in there that had ever swum, walked, or flown, I didn’t want to know.
The stuff hadn’t even come to a full boil when it started to smell. A sour stink that clouded the kitchen. Eye of newt. I shut the door before it could escape to the rest of the house and opened the back door and the windows. It smelled like something that would do a lot worse than make a person’s hair fall out. It smelled evil. I grabbed the pot holders I’d made Mama when I was nine and snatched that kettle right off the stove. I carted it out some distance behind the house to a spot where the grass grew in patches and dumped it. Then I got Mama’s garden spade and buried the whole mess. When I got back to
the house, the kitchen still reeked, so I flipped a dish towel around in the air, then put a pot of water on with some cinnamon in it. By the time Mama woke up, the evil smell was almost gone.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, thinking about the stuff I’d buried in the backyard and wondering if it would have helped Mama. Wondering if it was just what she needed. Wondering if I had gotten rid of the very thing that would have healed my mama. Wondering if I really had thrown away the Queen of Cures.
Tallie’s Book
Twins have powers.
It’s hard to figure out what will kill you and what will cure you and how to know the difference.
People shrink when they get old.
six
At noon, the temperature hit one hundred on the First Federal thermometer, and by five, when we finished up with the last Seniors’ Day discount customer—not one of them tipping, like “discount” meant “permission to be cheap”—it only dropped to eighty. Raylene got real bossy and said it was too hot for me to be riding my bike. Even when I said I wasn’t a baby, she insisted on tying the Raleigh to her car bumper and driving me home.
There was a note on the table from Daddy saying he was taking a truckload of grain over to Redden with one of the Halley brothers and he’d be home after dark. Well, what else was new? I might as well have been living alone.
There was nothing on TV except reruns, so I got out my rule book and put in a couple of things I’d heard from the ladies at the Kurl, like what Hattie Jones’d said about nylon panties and Easter Davis’d said about raspberry tea. Stuff like that. Then I got myself a beer and went out and sat on the glider. It was too hot to eat or read or do much of anything and there was no telling when my daddy’d be coming home. Finally I finished up the beer, grabbed my bathing suit—which was way too small and probably doing damage to my woman parts—and rode over to Baldy, pumping easy and walking the uphill parts so I wouldn’t get a stroke. That time of day, it was quiet at the creek. No one was there but me. I left my bike leaning against a tree. It must have been the heat or the beer or something, because the next thing—without even thinking about it—I stripped to the skin, tossed my bathing suit on the ground, and dove right in the creek, inhaling sharp at the first touch of water on my belly, then stretching out and enjoying the absolute freedom of it. If Goody could have seen me she’d have said I was cheap, cheap, cheap. It was continually amazing to me that someone as fun loving as Mama had been birthed by Goody, who, before she moved to Florida and took up golf, was hard as dirt. Goody wouldn’t know a good time if it walked up and bit her. She maintained you were sinning if you so much as held a deck of cards. Not Mama, though. If Mama’d been there, she would have been skinny-dipping right along with me, shouting and laughing at the pure joy and freedom of it. Mama just loved swimming. She said she was in her element when she was in water. That was about the only way she differed from Natalie. For a while I swam laps (breaststroke and crawl), then I flipped over on my back and floated faceup, just staring at the sky, enjoying the slippery sensation of the water against my skin. It reminded me of how I felt nights when I’d sit on the porch glider and open my pajama top so the evening air could cool me down.
Off in the distance I heard the whistle of the six o’clock heading toward Roanoke. Train whistles always made me think of my granddaddy. He’d been a physician for the Southern Railroad. A railroad man head to toe, Mama said, even after he’d had to quit because he’d developed a weak heart. Granddaddy used to have a model train set up in his living room and he’d play this cassette recording of train sounds that about drove Goody mad. When I was little I’d sit on his knee and listen to him talk about the days when trains ruled. He had a whole head full of train stories and loved to tell them all. Especially the one about how once an entire train got buried in a tunnel cave-in under Richmond. That train was probably there to this day, he’d said, with everyone still in it, a piece of information that gave me nightmares for a week. Were the people still sitting in their seats or were they crowded against the windows, trying to get out? How long had it taken for them to die?
The other thing Granddaddy knew about was trees. He could tell a white oak from a red. He could look at a stump and tell you how old it’d been when it was chopped down, and its dry years from the wet ones. I thought everything in the world would be different if Granddaddy were still alive. Just like it would be different if Mama hadn’t gotten sick.
By October, Mama was spending most of her days watching the soaps and reruns of Roseanne and The Golden Girls. Martha Lee had arranged for County Health to bring over one of those mechanical beds with a button you could push to raise the head or the feet. Daddy hated it, but Mama called it her throne. Sometimes, I’d lie there with her. After a while, she’d send me to get the hairbrush off her dresser. I was a fool for Mama brushing my hair. She’d start with her fingers, lacing them through my hair, pulling it back from my face and lifting it off my neck. Then she’d take the brush and begin, nothing impatient or snappy—not even if there were snarls—just long, gentle strokes that calmed us both. Later, on nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d pretend she was making those even, slow strokes and just the thought could lull me off.
By then the house was a mess. I could imagine what Goody would say if she got a look, but Mama didn’t care. “Housekeeping’s an overrated occupation, sugar,” she’d say. “There’re more important things in the world than a clean floor.” Like what? I wanted to ask. Tell me, Mama, tell me all the things that are important. Tell me everything I need to know. I longed to turn off the TV and climb up on that narrow throne next to Mama, adjusting it so the foot part was high, and ask her everything I wanted to know. Things I needed to know then and things I’d need to know for the future.
First I’d ask her kitchen questions, like how long to cook butter beans and how to make cobbler so it doesn’t sit heavy after you eat it. And I’d ask how a person would know for certain when another person likes her, and then I’d start on love questions. How did you know when you were in love, and was sex love different from marrying love? Did you need to know exactly what to do when a boy kissed you, or did instincts take over? I’d ask her if you could trust instincts when it comes to love, or did they just land you in a hog pile of trouble. Should you really marry a man because his smile made you crazy?
Then I’d ask her to tell me everything about those months she spent in L.A. I’d ask her where she lived out there and what it was like to work at a real Hollywood studio. I’d listen with both ears so I’d have a head start when I landed out there. I’d start with the pile of postcards she’d sent home and I kept in a cigar box under my bed. There was one of the big Hollywood sign, which was not actually a real sign, but giant white block letters sitting on the side of a hill. On the back, Mama’d written that it used to spell Hollywoodland, and before the last four letters had rotted away a starlet had committed suicide by jumping off the final “D.” And back in the ’30s, another actress had jumped off the “H.” It gave me the chills just looking at that card. There was another postcard of the Walk of Fame, which was this sidewalk outside a theater in Hollywood where famous actors got to put their handprints and footprints in the cement. The card she sent had the prints of Jane Wyman and Henry Fonda and Jack Nicholson, and—believe it or not—Natalie Wood. The date 12-5-61 was etched in the concrete next to Natalie’s little handprints, along with the imprint of a pair of high heels, so small they looked like they belonged to a child. Course, now they have big stars outlined with brass and the actor’s name set in the middle. The person doesn’t even have to be real. It can be a cartoon. Like Mickey Mouse, which doesn’t seem right to me.
Mama sent me a picture card of the arched gates in front of Paramount—“my studio,” she wrote on the back. Another time I got a picture of Mann’s Chinese Theatre with a message that said she’d had lunch in the commissary the day before and Kelly McGillis had sat at the next table. As lonely as I’d been for her, it made me smile to think of
Mama in Hollywood having lunch with a real star. I’d asked her about the lunch with Kelly McGillis once, figuring I’d start there and work into what she’d been doing the entire time she was there, but all she said was, “Oh, sugar, that’s all water past the dam.” Maybe to Mama it was, but not to me. I had things I was needing to know. Another time I asked Mama for her foolproof cobbler recipe, but all she said was that it wasn’t always necessary to have precise directions. Often as not things turned out just as good without them, she said, and that was as true of life as it was of cooking.
I never got to ask Mama all the questions I had in mind. I’d just be getting started—warming up with the household things, like the secrets for making a good cake—when it seemed something always stopped me. She’d fall asleep. Someone would stop by. One day, we were sitting there and I was all set to begin, but before I could even ask my first question, the back door opened and Martha Lee came in. She looked at my mama with a steady, appraising gaze before she caught my eye. Then she smiled and switched from being a nurse back to being Mama’s friend.
“Hey, Cookie,” she said right off to Mama. “You up for a Dairy Queen?” Which meant I wasn’t invited. Going to the Dairy Queen was their special code for getting high. Before she’d given up on getting Mama well, Martha Lee would bring over weird stuff from the health store in Lynchburg, like an industrial type juicer that must have cost a fortune. She’d make these gross drinks with carrot juice and parsley and wheat grass and protein powder and other stuff that reminded me of Allie Rucker’s cure I’d buried in the backyard. Mama wouldn’t touch it. She’d just laugh and say she’d prefer a beer. Martha Lee had long ago let go of trying to talk Mama into what she should or shouldn’t be doing. And if Mama wanted to get high, Martha Lee’d bundle her up and carry her to her truck, which she’d outfitted with a quilt and so many pillows that there wouldn’t have been room for me even if they’d wanted me along. An hour or two later, they’d return, glassy-eyed, silly, and stinking of pot. Like I couldn’t figure it out.
Leaving Eden Page 8
