Misty’s mother broke beans while her aunts shucked corn. Her mother held the beans four at a time in one hand, pulling their strings from top to bottom and back again, then breaking them into four pieces that fell into the bucket at her feet. Misty could time the sound of the beans hitting each other with her own heartbeat, until the two were entwined.
Dolly said, “Did I tell y’all Billy Ray Sizemore came by here the other evening? Right about suppertime and I hear that old Thunderbird of his come wheezing up the road. Handing out campaign flyers.”
Jem snorted. “The man can’t do his job but he sure likes to keep it.”
“He brought a load of gravel to us last summer,” Misty’s mother said.
“Well, it’s good to know he did something for somebody.” Jem pointed at her with a cob of corn, half-stripped, the yellow kernels glowing in the dim light of evening. “He’s been promising us he’d get somebody to mow the sides of the road since March. I about hit Dolly coming around the curve there at the mouth of the holler. I couldn’t see her coming.”
“Oh, come on, now,” Misty’s mother said. “Dolly drives this road like it’s a roller coaster. Always has.”
“She did wreck Daddy’s truck that one winter,” Jem said.
“And his hatchback the summer before,” Misty’s mother said.
“You know, now that I think about it, Dolly, you was probably the reason we was so poor.” Jem bopped Dolly’s knee with her ear of corn. “If you didn’t drive as sloppy as you put on lipstick, then we might have been able to afford a few things.”
“Like a harness for that mouth of yours,” Dolly said. “Y’all just making this mess up. It was Mom that wrecked the hatchback, and I didn’t so much as wreck that truck as be the one unfortunate enough to be driving it when the poor thing finally fell apart. The steering wheel was held together with rubber bands, for God’s sake.”
“We had to start it with a screwdriver. And it never did have a heater that worked,” Jem said.
“You didn’t need a heater when the suspension was broke. That thing bounced us up and down so hard driving to church that the friction kept us warm,” Misty’s mother said.
They all tipped their heads back and laughed. When they quieted, Dolly shook her head and said, “I still don’t remember wrecking that car.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” Jem said. “None of us belongs only to ourselves. We don’t always get to decide who we are, and you, sweet sister, are a menace.”
The chairs creaked as the women rocked back and forth. Misty pressed her foot against the porch railing to set herself swinging, crooked, side to side. She tucked her blanket under her chin and winked at her mother when her mother winked at her. The air was cool and the crickets were singing, the bullfrogs croaking down by the creek. There was no garden in sight except for the one growing corn and beans, not glittering, gleaming statues. There was no barn except Dolly’s, which was full of old tractor parts and a run-down Ford her husband kept promising to bring back to life. All the bugs were where they were supposed to be, all of them still living. Misty hadn’t meant to hurt them earlier. She’d only wanted some quiet. A little rest. But the garden said that joining names wasn’t normal. There would be consequences, like Misty’s skin growing too tight. Misty wondered what might happen to the crawdads if the garden didn’t release them soon. Somewhere, in the distance, a whippoorwill called three times in a row, paused, called again.
“Do y’all remember Caroline Lewis?” Misty’s mother asked.
Dolly laid her hands in her lap and frowned. “Earl’s wife?”
“Yeah, but before that. Do you remember anything else about her?”
“What’s got you thinking about her?” Dolly asked.
Misty’s mother shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve just had her on my mind lately. I keep trying to remember what she was like before.”
“Well, she was a little older than us,” Jem said. “I only saw her every now and then. She used to spend a lot of time down by the creek near y’all’s trailer, Beth. Long before Earl ever bought that land.”
“She always walked to school, too,” Dolly added. “Never would take a ride from anybody even when they offered, not that anybody offered that often.”
“And she used to sew those patterns on her clothes, remember?” Misty’s mother held her finger to the air and traced a circle round and round. “Little swirls. She’d sew them right there in class on the skirt she was wearing. Purple and red and green. I always thought she was brave for picking colors like that. They only made her stand out more.”
Misty thought of the dress she’d seen in the garden’s memories, the one with swirls sewn along the hem.
“And she sang a lot,” Dolly said. “Under her breath, all the time, singing. I had to stay after school once when I got caught skipping class and Caroline was there for something else. Singing to herself the whole time and never a whole song. She’d start with some Lynyrd Skynyrd and switch to ‘Prayer Bells of Heaven’ partway through and then finish with something else. It about drove me crazy so I finally asked her why she did that. She said, and I’ll never forget this part because I got chills all up and down my arms when she answered. She said, ‘It helps keep the noises out.’”
Jem nodded as though she understood. Misty’s mother ran her fingers back and forth over the thin strings she’d stripped from the beans, gathering them in the center of her lap and then casting them apart again.
“I had forgotten all about that until now.” Dolly shivered. “I guess I try not to think about her. I always end up feeling guilty.”
“Why?” Misty’s mother asked.
“I don’t know. I always think maybe I could have done something to help her. Befriend her. She seemed so lonely all the time. Always by herself. And then she ended up with Earl, and then she ended up gone.”
“He did it,” Jem said. “I don’t care what the sheriff could or couldn’t prove. No body don’t mean no crime. Especially in this county.”
The three women fell silent and Misty closed her eyes. The garden had told her that everyone hated Caroline, but that didn’t seem true. Her mother didn’t hate her, and neither did her aunts. They’d felt sorry for her and what happened.
Then why did the garden hate Caroline so much?
Misty had thought that the garden had seen what happened to Caroline, that maybe it had been there on the night she disappeared, but maybe Misty was wrong. Maybe there was something she was missing.
Dolly sighed. “Well, now I’m depressed.”
Jem leaned over and smacked Dolly’s knee. “I’ll cheer you up then. I got some good news this week. Jerry won his art contest at school. Got fifty dollars for it. I think he’s done spent the money on some kind of charcoals, but it was his own to spend. I told him: do what you want.”
Misty’s mother smiled. “That’s wonderful. He could light them crayons up in church, now. Made the prettiest little flowers.”
“What’d he draw?” Dolly asked.
“Y’all will laugh,” Jem said. “But he drew a picture of Great-Great-Granny Cora Beth. Your namesake, if you recall, Beth, even though you never did believe the stories.”
Misty’s mother rolled her eyes.
“Lord, Jem. Don’t tell me he drew her as a tree,” Dolly said.
“What else could he draw? He did a whole series. Illustrated the story we were told. He called it part of our cultural tradition or something, compared it to farming during the Depression, how we’ve always managed to find a way to survive.”
Dolly leaned back and sighed. “He got that much right. You know, if we had a team, that’d be our name. The Findaways.”
Misty’s mother smiled. “What would our mascot be?”
“Something pitiful,” Jem said. “A little rat or something. Starving, of course. Or a hammer.”
They laughed.
“What about Granny Cora Beth?” Misty asked.
Misty’s mother bent forward until her head was level with Misty’s. “Well, Little Bit. I thought you was finally sleeping.”
“On and off,” Misty said. “I’m on now.”
Dolly smiled. “Go on and tell her then, Jem. Give her a bedtime story.”
“Lord, y’all. There’s a reason I ain’t told her this myself,” Misty’s mother said. “I don’t like filling their heads all full of nonsense.”
Jem rubbed her palms across her skirt to clean them. “You’ll take them to church every week to learn about men walking on water and taming lions, but one woman becomes a tree and suddenly there’s a line to draw.”
“That’s different,” Misty’s mother said.
The sun was nearly gone by then and one half of Jem’s face glowed with sunset fire, the other side cast to shadow as she leaned forward. “How’s it different?”
“Because,” Misty’s mother said, “those are Bible stories. They’ve got morals. They teach them something.”
Jem scoffed. “They’re all stories, Beth. Every one of them. Except this one is part of us. Cora Beth is a part of us. Besides, you’ve got some awful funny-looking glass people growing in your yard to be telling somebody where to draw the line. You telling me this world ain’t strange? That strange things don’t happen every day of the week?”
“Those stories scare me more than the Bible ever did.” Misty’s mother worried the bean husks between her thumbs.
“Why?” Dolly asked.
“Because,” Misty’s mother said. “Sometimes it’s worse to think there’s another way when you’re stuck in an old one.”
Everyone fell quiet. A weight grew in the air between Misty’s mother and her sisters, a weight that Misty couldn’t quite understand. So much of growing up was that way. A feeling in a room that she’d just walked into. A feeling hanging between two people that she loved. A sense of something gone slightly wrong, but when she asked, no one would tell her the truth. And that was where childhood lay, in the shadow of knowing that something was wrong but not knowing what it was or why it was or how to fix it, so she was left standing in front of her mother, her mother tired and bleeding, her mother with a ragged hole chewed through her chest, her mother saying, “It’s fine. Everything is fine.”
“That’s why we tell the stories,” Jem said at last. “To remind us there’s another way. A better way. We tell stories so we can find it.”
Misty’s mother sniffed. “Tell your story then.”
Jem leaned back. “Will you stay and listen?”
Misty’s mother said, “If I had anywhere better to be on an evening as pretty as this, don’t you think I’d already be there?”
“And keep it short, Jem, will you? Some of us are about ready for bed,” Dolly said.
“Y’all are the sourest bunch of grapes I ever knew,” Jem said. “You listening, Misty, baby? All right. Well, the short version is that a long, long time ago, back before even Aunt Dolly roamed the earth, Cora Beth Combs come to this very same holler with her husband and their seven babies. They were trying to make a go of it farming, and he was working in the mines. Well, it wouldn’t long before he was killed. A tunnel collapsed on fourteen men and that was that. Cora Beth was on her own. She tried for a while to figure things out, but there was hail and then a drought. The crops was thin and the babies was thinner. She had to think of a way to keep them all from starving.
“So Cora Beth did what any mother would do, what any Combs woman has ever done: she found a way. Some of my aunts said she did it by eating apple seeds and drinking cold earth, but it started slow. Her growing little green apples right out of her hair. Her skin got tougher and her bones got stiffer, and before long she was rooted in place, right there in the front yard. But she bore apples like you wouldn’t believe. The biggest, fattest apples in the county, and she kept her babies fed. Mind you, just about every one of their teeth fell right out of their heads, but they survived.
“Now, this next part is my favorite part. See, a lot of people in the world have decided who gets to be special and who don’t. They act like special is in their blood, their birthright, but most magic don’t work that way. Some people have to make their own. Out of love or spite or need. It’s not always good. It’s not always safe. But it doesn’t belong to just one person. Cora Beth knew that, so when other women came to see her, she helped them. She taught them everything she knew, and the women took it away and made their own magic. All kinds of ways for all kinds of people. And Cora Beth wasn’t the first, neither. This kind of thing has been going on long before we came here. We ain’t the type to wait for someone else to save us. We take care of each other. Half the food on this porch is getting donated to people here in the community. That’s the only way we get by. Together.”
Jem leaned back and took a deep breath, then went on with her story.
“Now, Cora’s oldest daughter married a decent man in town, and he come and took over the farm and helped her raise her little brothers and sisters. They made it out of that year, and they kept that apple tree standing until a storm took it out in ’87. Split the trunk right in half. But we keep her alive by remembering her, don’t we, ladies?”
“Who could forget that story?” Misty’s mother asked.
“Now you can tell it to your babies one long, long day away,” Jem said. “Let them know they’re special. Just like you.”
In the morning after they packed to leave, the five of them stood on the same porch for an hour saying goodbye.
Their mother said, “Earl called this morning to give us notice about Revival. The whole church’ll be in my front yard this Sunday night. Are y’all coming?”
Dolly shook her head. “Char’s got some play she and her friends wrote together. They’re putting it on in the backyard, and we promised to take her to Applebee’s after.”
“And I feel a sickness coming on.” Jem rubbed her fingers across her throat. “You’re welcome to bring the girls by and eat dinner with us. We’ll find us a movie and forget all about them statues.”
“Maybe,” their mother said. “I’ll let you know.”
Aunt Jem pressed a covered plate of food into Misty’s hands. She knelt down before Misty and looked at her hard in the early morning light.
“Don’t you forget,” she said. “There’s magic in this little body of your’n. Don’t you never doubt it.”
She kissed Misty twice on the cheek and stood on the front porch to watch them leave. Misty waved at her aunts through the rear window of the car until the road curved away and the mountain swallowed them up.
Thirty-One
William took Misty to the barn three times the next week.
Every time she opened the door or looked out her window, every time she crept onto the back steps, he was there. She asked him to go down by the creek or to pick wild strawberries with her in the woods, but he didn’t want anything else. He didn’t seem to hear her at all as he shut the barn door behind them. And every time he closed the door, Misty felt cold all over and her bones tried to slip free from her body but she held on to them for a little while and promised that it wouldn’t be long.
Each time William gave Misty something to hold—an old toy car that he’d taken from his room, one of his mother’s gold earrings, a plastic Christmas ornament with a manger scene painted on it—and each time he took it from her afterward.
William talked to her in the barn. He said:
“Revival is soon.
“Mom said she would come to the service. She promised.
“She’s been packing up some of our things. I think she means to move in with Harold at the end of summer. I keep unpacking the boxes at night, but she won’t talk to me about it.
“You don’t have to scrunch your face up like that. This don’t hurt.
“I
keep thinking, maybe the garden could change other things. Maybe it could make other things better, too.”
Three new statues grew that week, and William said, “These are for you,” as he pointed to a silver ax with its blade stuck in the ground like it meant to cleave the whole world in two. He pointed to a bird with its wings spread wide, its clawed feet barely dug into the earth below so it was hard to imagine how the statue supported its own weight, how it stood there when it should be tipping, falling, flying. He pointed to the last statue and the largest of them all—a tree that grew in the very center of the garden. Its trunk was wider than Misty, and its branches spread over everything below and cast faint shadows on her upturned face.
The statues didn’t make as much sense this time. The bird had to have been from her memory of the first time William had taken her to the barn. She had called out to all the birds asleep in their nests and they’d come for her. They’d tried to help. She’d asked the trees for help before, too, so maybe that was why this one grew, but she wasn’t sure. And the ax must have come from William, something he thought or remembered or wanted.
It seemed like the statues had been saying something about her and William, but she couldn’t read them now. She couldn’t understand.
“Do you like them?” William asked.
The tree was made of bright, clear glass so Misty could see straight through it to the other side of the bottom, but the view was distorted. Twisted, turned, so the trees on the other side of the garden seemed to be growing upside down with the sky pooled at their feet. Misty was a thin slip of gray cloud inside the glass, her features blurred until they disappeared, and she couldn’t even see herself as she nodded and William smiled.
Thirty-Two
This time, when Misty shed her skin, she didn’t stop at the bridge.
Every Bone a Prayer Page 21
