by Bev Marshall
“She’s a little wildcat, huh?” I looked over at Hugh and I didn’t like the curl of his mouth when he said that. Maybe he didn’t believe his little brother was more of a man than he’d ever be.
I leaned over and stared hard at his sneering puss. “You can’t imagine what that hump can do when the lights is out.”
Hugh’s eyes got big. He didn’t say nothing. Couldn’t think up anything ole Earlene had to top that. I stood up. “I best be getting back to her right now. Tell Daddy I think that baler is a piece of shit.”
“I’ll tell him you said that,” Hugh yelled after me. “I sure will.”
“Do it,” I hollered back at him.
When I got home, Sheila was back in the kitchen peeling Irish potatoes for our supper. I reached over her shoulder and grabbed the potato she held next to the knife. I took a bite and dropped it into the pan of water beside her. She jumped as drops splashed up her arms. “Stoney! Wait’ll I cook ’em.” She turned around with the knife still in her hand. I held her wrist tight and closed my hand over hers. I forced her hand up until the blade was close to her throat. “Stoney! Stop!” she hollered out.
“Take your clothes off right now,” I said making my voice tough like a gangster’s. “After I rape you, I’m gonna kill you.”
Sheila’s knees went to jelly and she slid right down to the floor. At first I thought she were pretending with me, but then I seen she was upset like she believed me. I knelt beside her. “It were just a joke,” I said in my regular voice. “You know I was teasing.”
She dropped her chin on her chest and wouldn’t look at me. She were crying, not making no noise, but drops fell and spotted her blue apron. “I’m sorry. You just, you was sounding so real.”
When I lifted her face, it was like I could near ’bout see bad memories going on in her head behind her eyes. Maybe her papa had held a knife to her before. Maybe he’d told her he’d kill her if she didn’t let him fuck her. I wondered if I was going to have to kill him someday. I knowed I wouldn’t be one bit sorry if I did.
Sheila was like that lizard that changes color when it moves from grass to dirt. By the time we went to bed that night, she was singing “Beautiful Dreamer” and pretending her nightdress were a evening gown, and she held it out and danced around the bedroom like she was Cinderella at that ball. I told her I was the prince, and she said no, that I was a king.
I felt like a king two weeks later when Mr. Cotton and me set out on our big trip. I don’t know how he come to change his mind and take me, but I was some glad to be going. Sheila was as happy as me. She took an hour ironing my two shirts, and she cooked up a whole ring of sausage for us to eat along the way. Of course, I had duties. It were my job to load the Ayrshires, the grain, water for them. They wasn’t much trouble though, and the man who had the bull admired them, said I was taking good care of Mr. Cotton’s stock for him.
Mr. Cotton drove straight up there on through the night, and when we got to the farm, he unloaded his gear and spent the night in the big house. I slept out in the barn on a horse blanket, but I didn’t mind much. It was warm and the sky seemed bigger overhead so that I got to wondering if there was more stars in this state of Louisiana than there was in Mississippi. On the way home, Mr. Cotton said we was gonna stay at a roadside cabin if we found one handy to us, and I was sure looking forward to that. But it didn’t turn out that way at all.
We ran into some trouble on the way home at this roadhouse. I had too much liquor in me and the red haze come back on me when these two fellows insulted a nice woman I think Mr. Cotton liked more’n he should. I don’t remember a whole lot about the fight, just the taste of blood and some little pain that didn’t amount to nothing much. I slept all the way home, and I remember just before I waked up, I was dreaming about a squalling baby crawling around out in the pasture. I was running after it because Franklin, Mr. Cotton’s bull, was headed right for it. I had it in my arms when the sun hit my eyes and waked me up.
I didn’t say nothing to Mr. Cotton, but I figured it was his coming baby in the dream. Sheila told me they was gonna have one, and you’d of thought it was her that was expecting it. I said, “Ain’t they kind of old to have another one? Annette’s gonna be twelve this year.”
“Shoot,” Sheila said. “My mama’s just had one a few months back and she’s way older than Miss Rowena.” She had this goo goo look in her eyes that warned me what she was gonna say next. “Stoney, maybe we’ll have a baby soon too. I used my magic cord on the baby bed they got, and it worked. If you’d let me tie it on you, we could…”
I interrupted her and said, “I told you I ain’t wearing no string on my peter. Never. You can go down there and rock the Cottons’ young’n or go out to your mama’s and get one of hers. She’s got more’n she can take care of, probably be glad to get rid of one of ’em.”
Sheila shut up then, and I was glad of it.
After we got back from Louisiana, I couldn’t quit thinking on Sheila’s papa. Wondering if’n he was the first one to have her. If he was, then that could be the reason he hated me so much. Sheila, she tried to pretend her papa would come around to us being a couple, but I seen how her eyes slid away to the floor when she said such.
There was what happened on this one Sunday afternoon. Me and Sheila was sitting on the porch between milking times when she seen her papa’s truck going real slow in front of our house. “That’s Papa,” she said, throwing down her bit of sewing and leaping outta her chair. “Maybe he’s coming to visit us, Stoney. Get up and go put your shirt on.”
“I ain’t wearing no shirt for him, and he ain’t coming here noways,” I said, watching him come to a dead stop in front of our drive.
“Lookit! He is too. He’s coming.” And she took off down the drive. I stood on the porch watching her running on the gravel on her bare feet like she were floating on a road of cotton bolls. When she stuck her head in the window where her papa sat, I could hear bits of their talking.
“Git in,” he yelled at her. “You needed at home.”
I saw Sheila shaking her head, pointing up to me, then I seen him wringing her arm till her knees buckled and she fell up against the truck door. I started running to her then, but Mr. Carruth had the door open and her thrown across him before I got halfway down the drive. He backed out onto Carterdale Road and was gone in less than a minute. I turned around and headed toward my truck, thinking I could overtake him easy, but the piece of shit I got to drive wouldn’t turn over. I figured it were the starter or maybe the battery, but it didn’t matter which it was since I wasn’t going nowhere right then.
I waited all afternoon for her to come back, but it got to be milking time and she still hadn’t showed up, and I went on down to the dairy barn in a real bad mood. Them cows got the worst of my feelings, but I took a swing at Shorty too when he said the reason Sheila was late was because she and me had had a fight and she couldn’t stand the sight of my ugly face. I told him to mind his own business, there weren’t no fight twixt us, and then he smirked like he does with his eyes kinda crossing, and I popped him with my fist in the gut. He doubled over and said, “Stoney, you’re crazy. I was pulling your leg, man.”
I knowed he were joking, but I needed to hit somebody. ’Course I couldn’t tell him that, so I said I were sorry, and we got on with the milking.
When I first started back to the house, I thought Sheila was still gone, but when I got as far as the garden patch, I seen her slumped over at the well. “You alright?” I hollered to her. She didn’t answer, and I run on towards her and seen the dark spots on the ground around her weren’t water. “Son-of-a-bitch! What’s he done to you?” I grabbed her arms and turned her around. Her lip was swelled up some, but I couldn’t see where all the blood around her was coming from. “Where you hurt?” I asked her.
Sheila pointed down toward her feet. I lifted her torn skirt and seen a deep cut shaped like a bolt of lightning on the back of her leg. “How’d he do it?”
She starte
d to cry. “Claw hammer. I was running. He throwed it and it caught me.”
“I’m gonna kill him,” I said. “He ain’t getting away with this no more.”
Sheila dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around my legs. “Stoney, he took off again. He ain’t home.”
I leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “Then I’ll wait till he gets back; I’ll wait, but I’m gonna kill him soon as I find him.”
I carried her into the house and got some rags and salve and helped her bandage herself up. She wanted me to lay down beside her in the bedroom, said she had to tell me what had happened. It was dark by then, and I couldn’t see nothing but the outline of her. “I’ll light the lamp,” I said, but she put her hand on my arm.
“No. Wait. What I got to tell you I want to say without no light on my face.”
This kind of rushing, whooshing sound started in my head, and I knowed I didn’t want to hear her words, but I was going to have to let her say what she needed to say.
Her voice was low, singsong like she were reading some psalm or poem. I hadn’t never heard her read of course, but I thought this would be how she would sound if’n she knew her letters. “Papa took me to the woods. He parked beside a big ole pine, eighty feet or more. He said he missed me.”
“I’ll just bet my ass he does,” I said.
Sheila put her hand over my mouth. “Shush. He said Mama ain’t been feeling good. I reckon she’s got another one a-coming. But I didn’t say nothin’ to him. He telled me he ain’t sleeping good since I been gone.” She got quiet then, and when she spoke again, the air in her went out between each word like a wind inside her was pushing them out into the room. “See Stoney, when I lived there, Papa would come to me. Come into us kids’ room and shake me awake. We’d go out. Out to the tool shed sometime. The turnip patch. Down to the creek. We’d go to those places. Once in the rain and it were cold.”
I knew what was going to come next. I tried to cover my ears, but Sheila pulled my hands down and held onto them. I could feel her little nails against my skin. “Stoney, you got to hear. It were always when Papa was drinking the corn. When he didn’t have none, he never came. He left me be all those nights.”
“I reckon he’d had a few today when he took you off.”
“Yeah. He got to crying, Stoney. He said he wanted me to come back home. ‘Leave that bastard you hitched up to like a mule pulling a plow’ is what he said. I telled him I love you, how it is with us. I said, ‘I’m happier than I ever been in my life.’”
I smiled at that. “I knowed you was. I told Mr. Cotton that on our trip.”
Sheila squeezed my hands. “Papa said he loved me too. Like you Stoney. He said he wouldn’t hurt me no more if’n I’d come home. I knowed that were a lie. He can’t keep hisself from it. We was still sitting in the truck then, and I eased over to the door, thinking to jump out if I had to. Papa grabbed my arm, said, ‘Sheila, you’re mine. You got to come home.’ I said, ‘No, Papa. It’s Stoney I love now.’ Then he hit me on my mouth, and I grabbed the door handle and fell out on the ground. I jumped up and ran, but he come after me with the hammer he keeps in the truck.”
I could near ’bout see her flying through the woods, barefoot, her hair a-flying around her, her quiet as a dead person, him in his work boots hollering over her head. “He caught you?”
“No. He seen I was too fast for him. Stoney, I jumped fallen logs like a deer and zigzagged through them trees like a squirrel being chased by a hawk. He didn’t have no chance of catching me.”
“But he threw the hammer?”
“Uh huh. He throwed it like a tomahawk, but it went low and I thanked the Lord for that. If’n it had caught my head, I reckon I’d be laying dead on them pine needles.”
“You think he meant to kill you?”
“I know it. He said so. He said if’n I wouldn’t come back to him, then I wasn’t gonna come back a’tall.” Sheila moved closer and wrapped herself around me like she were a snake and I was a rope. “Stoney, I come back. I’m home now.”
I pulled her off. “Sheila, we got to get this settled. Can’t be waiting around for him to show up here one day and kill you.”
She put her cheek on my back and kissed me between my shoulder blades. “He ain’t gonna do nothing of the sort. He’ll go off and get hisself sobered up and he’ll go home and things will be just like they was. I ain’t scared of him, Stoney. Really I ain’t.” She dug her fingers into my arms. “I want you to promise me you won’t go after him. He’d kill you, Stoney. Shoot you with his shotgun like you was a possum frozen in the light of his torch. Promise me you’ll stay away from him.”
“I can’t do that,” I said.
She started to crying then. Big old tears like hard raindrops fell on my neck. “Please. Promise me. I won’t ask you for nothing else. Not ever.”
“I said no.” I got up. I wanted to go out on the porch and roll a smoke, think on what she’d told me.
“Stoney,” she said. “If’n you don’t promise me, I’m gonna put a fairy spell on you and you won’t be able to do no loving. I done put one on my papa. That’s why I ain’t scared of him no more.”
I knowed there weren’t no such thing as a fairy spell, but I let her think she fooled me. “How’d you do it? You got a voodoo doll hid around here somewhere?” When I said that, I remembered seeing her messing with a little ole rag doll I thought must’ve come from Annette’s toy box, but maybe it weren’t Annette’s doll, and I reckon I was a little worried then.
“How I done it is a secret,” she said. “Don’t nobody know it but Mama and me and my grandmama who’s under the ground and can’t tell nothing now.”
So when I heard from Sheila’s mama at church the next Sunday that Mr. Carruth was back home, I didn’t go over and kill him. Didn’t go, but I should have. That’s another regret I’m gonna have weighing on me for the rest of my life.
Another thing changed after that Louisiana trip. I couldn’t understand it, but Mr. Cotton seemed different to me. I can’t say what it was, nor even how he was changed, but I felt uneasy when I went down to milk. It was like he were watching me, expecting me to steal from him or something. Then Mrs. Cotton started acting funny too, just the opposite of him. She smiled at me more, seemed happy when me and Sheila stopped by on our way to town. At first, I thought it was because of her being so het up about the baby, but this was more like it was us that was making her feel good.
I asked Sheila did she notice how Mrs. Cotton was grinning at me like I’d won the bull riding at the rodeo or something. Sheila put her hand over her mouth and pulled her lips out. “Maybe she knows a secret I know, but you don’t.”
“You and her got a secret?”
Sheila shook her head. “I ain’t telling. Not yet.”
I got to admit I starting guessing what it was. I sat on my milking stool pulling on teats thinking about that secret. I ran through all the possibilities I could imagine. A new truck, a better guitar, another trip to a better place than Louisiana. Then it come to me that maybe Mr. Cotton was going to give me a big raise with a piece of land to build a better house on. He had plenty; he could afford to show some generosity. That was probably why he was watching me so close like, to see if I was ready to step up to a better life. Well, I was ready. I’d show him that I could out-milk, out-shovel, out-drive, out-do anybody in anything. Sheila had said it. I was her king; all’s I needed was some land to rule over, and it looked to me like I just might get it.
CHAPTER 22
The day I found out Sheila’s secret marks the end of my life. Not eighteen years old yet and it’s all over or it might as well be. Who would have believed that Sheila Carruth Barnes, a plain girl with a hump on her back who couldn’t read nor write, would betray her husband. No one would have predicted it. No one could ever understand what I felt when she told me, and even if someone could, I don’t have no words to tell it.
On the morning of that day that was to turn out to be my last, Sheila
stopped at the Cottons’ house to borrow a catalog before she come home from cleaning up down at the barn. She were barefoot, left her boots at the dairy. She had on a yellow dress too pretty and nice for work, and she’d pulled her hair back with some twine and stuck a clover bouquet in the knot she made. I watched her coming back home. and when she saw me, I waved to her. I was hungry, hadn’t ate since the night before and she hadn’t left nothing on the wood stove.
When she came up the steps, I pointed to the book. “What you got that for? We ain’t got no money for ordering nothing outta there.”
She grinned. “I know. It’s my wish book though. I got things I want to look at and dream on some.” She rocked the book against her chest. “It’s about the secret.”
I sat at the kitchen table flipping through the book while Sheila fried up some ham Miss Cotton had gived her. There sure wasn’t no land in the catalog, and my spirits was lowering as I turned through the pages of fancy men doodied up in high-class suits. I turned on back to the home section and seen couches with roses on them, curtains, and dishes, and then hot water bottles, and torches and rubber tires.
When Sheila set the ham down, I grabbed a piece and burned my fingers. “Ow!”
Sheila sat on her chair. “Hot, silly. Use your fork.”
I had my elbow on top of the book while I ate and I tapped my hambone against the cover. “What you planning on getting me in there?”
Sheila chewed a while on a big bite of ham. “Tonight. I’m telling it all tonight.”
She wouldn’t say no more, and that left me studying on that catalog all day. If she was just wishing like she said, then it wasn’t nothing for me, but then she’d said the secret was in there, hadn’t she? I broke my record milking that night, and Mr. Cotton said he guessed I was in a hurry to get home. I said I was. I was planning on heating some water and taking a long bath in the tin tub while Sheila finished up at the barn, and I’d put on some of that sweet-smelling cologne she give me, to be ready for my surprise.
