The Day of Small Things

by Vicki Lane

  “Wimmen!” he exclaimed, just like Mama’s one-time boyfriend Bib had used to do. At least Aunt Dorothy was old—real old, seventy-something—and set in her ways. She’d not be taking up with some lowlife biker like Mama was bad to do.

  Bib. Rough as a cob, that feller’d been. Two years ago when Mama had gone into the hospital, Bib had stayed at the trailer to take care of Calven—that “taking care” had meant Bib lay around watching TV and drinking beer all day, leaving it to Calven to heat up a can of beans or make some macaroni and cheese out of a box.

  ’Bout all he was good for was to take me to the store and give me the money to buy food—I could of made it fine without him except for that. Course, I eat a world better now I’m living with Dor’thy. She may be old but she can sure cook—and she’s always making cakes or pies. Yeah, boy, I like it fine, living at her place—if there was just a little more going on. And I could get by without church twice a week.

  He stood thinking, not moving from the path, as memories of what had been gave way to thoughts of time to come. A cloud moved slowly to hide the sun and somewhere in the distance a rain crow croaked its warning, but Calven was lost in his vision, oblivious to the coming shower.

  When I turn sixteen and get me my driver’s license—now, son! that’ll change everything. Get me a job after school; not have to ride that dumb bus no more. Maybe give ol’ Heather a ride to school if she wanted to.

  Two years ago Heather had been a scrawny little tomboy who waited at the same clump of mailboxes as him for the lumbering yellow bus to emerge out of the morning mists. She had always been quick to take offense at any teasing and quick to pick up a rock and hurl it, accurately more often than not, at the offender. She wasn’t like other girls he knew—probably because she and her family were from away—New Hampshire, he’d heard her tell her seatmate on the bus one time, where there was a big white-painted house and where she spent every summer with her grandparents while her parents traveled on business.

  Last August, when the yellow buses began to roll again, he had trudged reluctantly to the mailboxes, resigned to the first day of seventh grade. He’d been surprised to see a strange kid there, waiting at the usual spot, and he’d looked for the familiar fellow inmate—the skinny little girl, always dressed in an outsize T-shirt and baggy jeans, her scrubbed face and boy-short black hair usually topped by a ball cap like his own—well, not exactly like his own; hers was red because, out of plain old backwardness as far as he could tell, Heather was for N.C. State instead of Chapel Hill.

  “Where’s ol’ Heather at?” he had said to the new girl who was standing by the mailboxes, staring down the road and tapping her running shoe in time to the music on her earphones. “She’s gone miss the bus if she don’t git her butt down here.”

  Shifting her fancy backpack from one shoulder to the other, the new girl had turned to stare at him with eyes that were somewhere between green and brown. Black hair curled softly to just below her chin and he could see the twinkle of gold in her earlobes.

  “My butt is right here, smartass. What’s the matter? Don’t you recognize me?”

  Now he could hardly remember when Heather hadn’t worn girlie clothes—tight jeans with sparkly stuff on them, tight tops in girl colors teasing him to look at the softly swelling boobies—boobies that seemed like such miracles to him that they were the first thing he looked for every morning when he went to the bus stop.

  The thought of being in a car with Heather, with her sitting maybe right up next to him like he saw the high school kids doing—hell, like some of the eighth graders did in the back of the bus—made him feel a little swimmie-headed and he sobered himself by looking for a rock to fling at the old barn.

  But I ain’t gone be sixteen, he reminded himself, till two years and … telling the months with his fingers … two years and three months and some days.

  Beneath a nearby dark green bush, he spotted an ideal throwing rock, shaped like a large flattish egg and so smooth it must have come from the river. He left the path—only a few steps, not to say leaving—and bent down to claim this perfect missile. In the dim cavelike space under the strong-smelling bush, he saw more of the smooth rocks laid close to one another to form an oval there beneath the pale, rough branches with their tight little leaves.

  Reckon how they come there? Got to be river rocks—but why’d someone want to …

  Noticing a worn horseshoe hanging from a nail at one end of the log barn, Calven dismissed the question in favor of throwing the perfect rock at the perfect target. He returned to the path, squinted, took aim, and hurled the rock.

  Clang! The thin curve of rusted metal shivered on its nail and fell to the ground. A crash of shattering glass followed even before the resounding ring of metal had quite died away. Calven frowned and went to investigate.

  The horseshoe had dropped straight into a patch of stinging nettles, and the boy looked around for a stick to retrieve it. A dead branch lying nearby caught his eye and with it he raked through the nettles in search of his prize. As he beat the tender, treacherous stems to one side, a glitter of glass came into view. The horseshoe was lying in the center of a pile of identical flat glass bottles. Some were half-buried in the black dirt; some still retained all or part of their labels; some were jagged shards.

  Reckon they’s whisky bottles some feller done hid from his old woman. Wonder how long they’ve been there? Some old bottles is worth lots of money. If it wasn’t for them nettles …

  Renewed efforts with the branch succeeded in scraping one of the labeled bottles toward him, through the nettles and within reach of his cautious fingers. After wiping the label against his jeans, he held up the bottle.

  Cordelia Ledbetter Herbal Mixture—shoot, that ain’t no whisky. Still, it’s an old bottle; might be worth something. Let me see—

  The first drops of rain caught him by surprise. He glanced at his watch and grimaced. I’ll come back, if this un’s any good. But if I don’t get moving, ol’ Dor’thy’s gone fuss like one thing.

  Shoving the bottle inside the light jacket he wore, Calven took off up the path at a trot.

  The uphill grade had slowed the trot to a walk by the time the rounded hump of the graveyard was in sight. Calven stopped in the shelter of a big poplar and leaned down, hands on his knees, to catch his breath.

  On the hogback ridge above him, the two women were weaving back and forth between the graves, moving with deliberate purpose, bending, straightening. Ignoring the light rain, they circled and stooped, returning again and again to a large black rounded shape, into which they dropped the bits and pieces they had been collecting.

  It was Aunt Dorothy and Miss Birdie—he knew that. And they were picking up trash and the old plastic flowers and putting them in a big garbage bag—he knew that too. So why did the sight of them make him think of that witch scene those high school kids had acted out for the seventh grade, back around Halloween?

  “Double, double toil and trouble,” the witches had chanted as they danced and swooped around the big black kettle, dropping in the awful ingredients for their spells.

  “Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” Calven whispered the words, again feeling the tingle of the hair lifting on his forearms.

  Chapter 36

  Morning Light

  Wednesday, May 2

  (Birdie)

  I’ll dance you down and when you lose

  I’ll take away your dancing shoes.

  But if you win, my dancing girl,

  I’ll send you free into the world.

  I wake from the old dream, my legs aching and just a-twitching to the sound of the fiddle tune ringing in my head. Rolling over slow—ain’t got no other speed these days—I pull up my knees, trying to make the jittering stop. For a minute I don’t move—just lay there quiet, eyes squinched shut, breathing hard as if I really had been dancing. Seems to me I can still hear the sounds of fiddle and banjo, the slap of shoes on a wooden floor—sounds that fill up the room, swelling loud
er and louder—till it’s like a scream building in my throat.

  My eyes are still closed when I stick out my arm, reaching for the bedside table and my salvation. My hand shakes as I feel around but at last I touch the soft leather, worn smooth by years of Luther’s touch, and I spread out my fingers and flatten them on the Bible.

  “Safe once more, Lord,” I whisper.

  I lay there like that a little longer and mouth the Lord’s Prayer. If the Bible is my refuge, then this prayer is my strength. The words won’t wear away, ever how many times I say them. In all these long years, how many nights has there been like this—the music and the dream and the memories? And ever time, they’re there—the Book and the Words—the Good Book and the magic words … though Luther’d not want me to name them such.

  Finally the wild fiddle music fades away and I breathe easier as the old familiar sounds of first light creep into the room—birds chirping kindly sleepy-like, the young rooster off in the chicken house just a-tuning up, and that rattle the Sims boy’s diesel truck makes as he heads into Asheville to work. I lay there listening and my breathing begins to slow down. Once again, them old night fears has been put to flight by the Book and the Words and the coming of the Light.

  I open my eyes.

  I take my time with dressing and making up my bed. They ain’t much reason for hurry, not like in the days when I had a cow to milk and Luther and Cletus to fix breakfast for. I can go my own pace now and that pace gets slower every year. I wonder … was I to gather some herbs and brew a tea for the aching of the arthritis, would Luther understand … making tea for medicine ain’t magic … I saw dog hobble yesterday but didn’t pick none. I could go back …

  In the kitchen I get a fire going in the cookstove and stir up some biscuits, then take Pup his breakfast, walking careful on the dew-wet grass. Time was I’d of run or skipped all the way to the doghouse but this old woman’s body I’m wearing slows me down and reminds me what a fall could do. I can hear Dorothy in my mind, clear as anything, “Now, Birdie, you take your stick—at your age it’s awful easy to break a hip and then where would you be?”

  At my age … no, I don’t want to think about that, nor a broken hip neither, but I take my stick and I take my time.

  The sun is rimming the mountaintop and I stand a minute to watch it shake loose from the trees and jump up into the clear blue sky. It puts me in mind of a young un, anxious to be up and doing, sure that the day will have some fine thing in store. And as the light floods the hills, just filling my heart and soul full of a joy I don’t deserve, I think of the old hymn and find myself singing the words in my mind. I’ve found the sweet haven of sunshine at last.…

  There’s so many hymns where the sun and the Son kindly run together. What’s that other one, where they sing of daylight a-dawning in your soul? And there’s yet another that calls Heaven “the morning land.”

  I quizzed Luther about this way back when we was courting; asked if the sun was Jesus and at first he said yes, but then when I told him about singing to the sunrise, he grew kindly puzzled. Finally he said that the sun was to remind us of Jesus and he didn’t see no harm in me singing to it, long as I was mindful that the sun was Jesus’s creature just like everything else—but that it weren’t Jesus Himself.

  Time was … time was whenever the preacher spoke of Jesus, I always pictured Him to look like Luther.

  The sun is climbing higher, losing color and growing smaller as he goes, and, as he goes, in my head I’m singing him on his way.

  When I come back to the house and look at the clock, it is most seven-thirty and breakfast not yet cooked, so I set in to roll out the biscuits and put them in the oven. Once the biscuits is beginning to brown and fill the house with their homey smell, I lift the old iron skillet onto the stove top, slide it to the back, and lay some nice thick slices of hog jowl bacon into it. When the bacon begins to sizzle and send out that rich smell, I open the firebox door and shove in a thick billet of dry poplar.

  Why is it that after all these years my mind is turning back to those very things I promised to forget—swore to put behind me? The dream … that dream always comes before some trial … the last time I had it was when Cletus—

  But Cletus is gone and I got nothing more to lose. If it’s me that dark fellow Death is coming after, well, let him. I’ve made it a good bit past my three score and ten, and was I to drop this minute, I’d not feel cheated.

  I take my fork and turn the pieces of bacon. Luther showed me the best way to fry bacon—slow and low and turning it over and over. In the green glass bowl I’ve just pulled out of the icebox, the eggs is pretty as a picture, all smooth and pinky-brown, with just a little bloom of dew coming on them in the heat.

  Looking at them eggs and smelling the coffee and bacon, feeling the friendly warmth of the woodstove and hearing the cheerful crackling of the fire, I find myself wondering if Heaven can be as nice a place as here. I remember something that my granny told me once about these misty mountains of ours they call the Smokies. Granny said God hung that haze on purpose, to hide these hills from the folks up in Heaven who was raised here, so they wouldn’t look down and be homesick.

  I turn back to the cookstove and fork the crisp bacon out of the skillet and onto a flattened-out paper poke. Even after I have some for breakfast, they’ll be plenty more to make a bacon biscuit for my dinner. I pour off most of the grease and take up an egg to crack against the side of the skillet when the sound of a vehicle rattling over the plank bridge in front of my house stops me short.

  Now, who in the world … ? I think, putting the egg back in the bowl and pulling the skillet to the side of the stove top away from the firebox.

  I start for the living room, wondering who would be stopping by so early in the morning. The meter reader was here not a week ago and them Witnesses don’t generally come except of a Saturday.

  Through the window I see Dorothy’s old blue Ford. She flings the door open, hops out, and hurries towards the front steps, leaving that car door wide open; run down the battery, like as not. I wonder what can it be has got her in such a state. She ain’t even put up her hair, neither, just pulled it back with a rubber band. That ain’t like Dorothy.

  I pull open the door and wait, dreading to hear what’s the matter. She has flung on her clothes any old how—shirt buttoned all crooked and she has put on one black sock and one brown. Her round face is kindly flushed like as if she’s been crying or fighting or maybe both and her mouth is set in a thin line. She marches up to the porch and through the door without a word, terrible as an army with banners, like it says in the Book, and when I can see her close to, the look of pure hatred on her face chills my heart.

  “Why, Dor’thy—” I reach out and lay a hand on her shoulder, feeling the muscles just a-quiver like a dog about to fight. “Whatever is the matter? Why, you—”

  Dorothy’s face begins to crumple up. “Prin’s took him, Birdie!” she cries and I know right off what has happened—Calven’s no-good mama has got him.

  “They come by this morning afore me and Calven was even up. There was all this knocking on the door and I pulled on a housecoat and run to see who it was.”

  Dorothy stops and goes over to my tissue box and grabs her a handful. The tears is leaking from her eyes and she jabs at them with a big wad of tissues before she takes up her tale.

  “Prin had two mean-looking fellers with her and she pushed right past me and went and woke Calven up and told him to come with her and off they went, not even waiting fer me to pack up his things.

  “Birdie, you got to help me!” She is squeezing my hand right hard but I look away. It don’t deter her none; she goes on squeezing and insisting. “Remember, I know about you, Birdie—I used to hear my mother whispering to her sisters about you and the stories that was told and how Luther turned you from all that—I know what you can do. It’s my best chance of getting the boy back. It ain’t like Cletus—it was too late for you to help him. But Calven … please, Bir
die, you got to!”

  Chapter 37

  Family Ties

  Wednesday, May 2

  (Dorothy)

  “… like a little wild thing Calven was, used to taking care of hisself. I know for certain sure he spent more time in that trailer without Prin than with her. She’d leave one of those worthless boyfriends of hers there to look after the boy while off she went to the Lord only knows where, doing the Devil probably knows what.”

  See how Birdie stares—reckon I sound like a crazy woman, Dorothy thought, suddenly aware of her friend’s puzzled gaze. And I’m purely trembling like a leaf. I got to calm down and make Birdie see that she must help me.

  But the words wouldn’t be contained. They were flying out of her mouth in a great buzzing babble: All the dark suspicions she had hoarded, all the accusations and finger-pointings that she had restrained for the boy’s sake poured out unhindered.

  Her voice was rising higher and higher and the words were swarming into a dark cloud and she knew she should stop but still she went on, clutching Birdie’s arm and gabbling and gibbering like a tongues-talking believer.

  “And why did she come back for him after all this time, answer me that? Prin’s got a use for him is why, and I dread to think what it might be. Do you know there was one time, and Calven not but seven years of age, Prin and one of her boyfriends took him and they checked into a tourist cabin so’s they could use the kitchenette to cook that old crystal meth. Calven told me about how something blew up and the feller got burned real bad—if it hadn’t been that Calven had gone outside to get Prin her cigarettes from out of the car, who knows what might have happened to him?”

  Dorothy collapsed onto the sofa, breathing heavily. Oh Lord, what can I say to make Birdie see that she must help me? And her just standing there like a carved statue while I yammered on. I’ll get down on my knees, if that’s what it takes.