Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  That redhead nurse reminds me of one of them angry wives from my younger days. The way she turns me over and jerks the sheet out from under, she’s going to break another rib. When I could speak, I charmed the hospice folks, told them I’ve always lived in this house my daddy built, told them about my garden brimming with tomatoes, my beautiful chickens laying blue-green eggs. I didn’t say how I killed raccoons who came after my laying hens, how I drowned the kittens that would suck my Mama Cat dry, how I chose my allies as best I could. I wasted so much time talking to all them. When I had a voice, I didn’t know how much I wanted to say to you, Sis, to explain that I lived my life the way I could, and that I couldn’t say no to some things.

  AND NOW YOU’RE here, going through my personal things, the gifts men gave me, the photos of my favorite horses, walking past me like I’m a wadded-up blanket. I wasn’t an affectionate mother, that much is true, but now I like it when you hold my hand—though each time you touch me I’m a little afraid you’re going to hit me. Maybe when I die you’ll toss me out for the crows. A casket seems like a waste. Better you and your brothers dig a hole, wrap me in a sheet, and bury me under my trees, trees I raised by letting them alone. Bury me beside the graves of my horses and old Daisy, the parts of her we couldn’t eat because of the cancer. Bury me with one of Mama Cat’s teeth and a write-up of the last Pap smear before my cervix dissolved in the radiation. Bury me at the crossroads so my spirit can travel, so even in death I won’t be forced to rest or grow mossy. Every one of you children was born at the crossroads, because every woman giving birth becomes a crossroads. Like they say in the song, a crossroads is a place that’s neither here nor there. With your critical comments, you’re hanging my corpse out on the hanging tree for folks to despise, but no daughter wants to leave her ma that way. I hated my poor mama’s weakness and foolishness, but now I long for her, to hear her out just one time. Someday, I hope, you’ll want to cut me down and gather me up in your arms, forgive me even if I can’t say I’m sorry.

  The most important thing is that you make my funeral a real bash. Promise you won’t spoil the fun. Let my own stories get told one more time before telling your stories, before letting your river of criticism flow around my corpse. Protect me, Sis, hide the photos of me as an old woman. We’ll need a dozen strong men there in attendance to roar with laughter. All the men who’ve loved me are gone, but maybe you can pay for some extra men, big strong ones, the way some folks in the old days paid for women to wail and moan and grieve. While they carry away this body that I have used all up, play the old song I used to sing while I washed dishes and made wine, the one about the golden bird who loves the sun so much that she forgets to eat or drink, forgets to protect her eggs or her nest. I have always loved that song about the bird, how she looks up to the sky from her thorny tree and sings her heart out every day, all day, that bird who sings herself to death.

  My Sister Is in Pain

  Unbearable pain when she gets up in the morning to go to work, pain when she goes to bed at night; when she sleeps, she sleeps in pain and wakes up again in pain and dresses in her stretch-waist pants and bright, complicated sweaters, heats up meals from packages, substitutes low-fat margarine for butter, sucralose for sugar, and smokes cigarettes in pain on her porch, while squirrels scramble like idiots up trees, and cars without mufflers vomit smoke and clatter through this neighborhood of potholes and broken windows, where kids steal anything to sell for money to buy meth. Her doctors shrug in their lab coats, send her to specialists who throw up their arms. Pain like airplanes with their airplane engine noise, flying over and messing up the sky. Pain like dishes in the sink—not just her own dishes, but dishes of strangers who’ve left them there for days, in cold, gray water. She is our mother’s daughter, but we don’t know who she is or what her pain could mean, her cicadas of pain on summer nights, the jolts in her spine like flashes of red-hot fireflies, pain that radiates from her intestines like the shocks of electric eels. Stabbing pain sixty hours a week as she bathes and medicates and feeds and tends to the needs and the pain of others for minimum wage, throbbing pain when she has a day off. She was born more beautiful than the rest of us and called out more loudly from her crib, cried in her bed, and outside in the woods she wailed—she never said what those boys did to her beside the creek. Imagine a long corridor with hundreds of rooms all closed against pain; she walks down the corridor and her pain does not diminish. Whether or not she stops and knocks on any door, whether or not anyone invites her in for a cool drink, whether or not one of the people who invites her in for a cool drink is myself, still her pain does not diminish. We rarely call her, are polite at Christmas, give tentative embraces, compliment her sweaters, her beads, her hair bows. We nod when she explains about her special shoes, her Copper Wear as seen on TV. The gifts she brings us are elaborately wrapped. We untie the ribbons in terror.

  A Multitude of Sins

  According to the abdominal CT scans, the tumor was the size and shape of a beef tongue, but perhaps the edges would be discrete, perhaps the surgeons could yank the cancer from Carl Betcher’s gut the way a cook pulled meat from a broiler. The surgical team opened him up, raised their eyebrows at the thousands of filaments spun around his organs, and then closed him quickly. In lighter moments, the doctors refer to this process as a cut and shut. They sent him home to die, not even bothering to remove his belly fat the way they sometimes did for a man.

  “Keep him comfortable,” the hospice nurse told the wife, who stationed her husband’s hospital bed in the living room in front of the TV and bought a case of Ensure high-calorie nutritional drink. She’d never lived alone, not for a single day. She’d married Carl at age sixteen, moved away from home, and had gradually lost touch with her family, had not even seen her sister Joan in decades, until Joan moved back from California four years ago; even then they’d mostly spoken on the phone because Carl didn’t like her coming to the house. They’d had a son, Carl Jr., but Carl Sr. had fought with the boy from the get-go and kicked him out for good when he was still a teenager. That was twenty years ago, and since then Mary Betcher called her son secretly every month. He was living in Florida now, staying in a big house with some people, and he swore never to come back to Michigan while his father was alive.

  “Give him something to drink if he wants it,” said the nurse, a tall, reassuring black man, after installing the morphine drip. “Don’t force him to eat, though. He’ll spend his last few days here with you, in the comfort of his own home.”

  Carl’s wife had been losing weight herself, and she figured she could take the rest of the Ensure if Carl died before it was gone.

  She would continue operating her husband’s upholstery and fabric repair business that they ran out of their attached garage and pole building. She learned through Carl’s caseworker that she and Carl had not paid into Social Security, so she would get no benefits after his death. She’d have to work harder than ever to make it alone. It felt strange at first to go out to the shop without her husband, beside whom she had worked, eaten, and slept for more than forty years, but it felt more natural with every day, and she enjoyed deciding for herself which project to work on from among the jobs she’d listed on the chalkboard. Each time she came back into the house, she opened a can of Ensure, put the straw to Carl’s lips, and watched him drink down the whole thing. Six cans a day he drank. Each of the half dozen visiting hospice nurses was surprised in turn. She didn’t tell the nurses what Carl said, how he cursed her from his bed, called her names, struck her sometimes when the can was empty, or while she changed his diaper or the sheets. He’d cursed her occasionally before the surgery, but since he’d been home, whenever they were alone, it was a constant stream. Not only did he not die like they said he would, but he didn’t seem to be growing weaker.

  “You dumb cunt,” he said one morning in his delirium. He never looked right at her—she wasn’t even sure he could actually see her—but spoke into the air, as though his words were for a larger
audience. She was bending close to him when his hand whipped out and stung her lips. He had hit her every day since he came home from the hospital, but this was the first time it hurt. She was tired from working from morning until night, and maybe that was why she smacked him hard without thinking. She’d never hit her husband, or anyone, and her heart rushed as her arm arced out in a motion like beginning to swim or fly, and it felt so good that she smacked him again, harder, and a third time. Carl’s eyes opened wide and he grasped at air with his open hand before slipping back into his morphine daze. That night when she bathed him, she noticed a bruise had formed above his wrist, and in the morning she tugged her husband’s pajama sleeve down over it, covering it as she had covered her own bruises over the years.

  “You’re doing a beautiful job of caring for your husband,” said a big white lady nurse a few days later. “He seems a little stronger than the last time I was here.”

  On Monday of the third week, Mrs. Betcher was administering the first Ensure of the day, still in her nightgown, and Carl grabbed her breast and squeezed. She begged him to let go and tried to pull away, but he held on. Finally she was able to grab a spoon, and she stabbed him in the leg with the handle, stabbed him again and again until he let loose. Then she stabbed him a final time, hard enough that she knew a welt would form on his thigh.

  “How does that feel?” she asked. Her voice quavered. “You should know how it feels, Carl.”

  “Whore. Bitch whore,” Carl Betcher said in a voice deeper than his voice had been in life.

  “You are going to hell,” she whispered, and her heart thrummed. She’d never dreamed she’d say this aloud to him, though she’d thought it plenty.

  “Nigger bitch,” Carl Betcher said to the air around him. He’d started calling her the n-word about ten years ago, when her sister sent a copy of an old portrait she found of their paternal grandfather and dark-skinned grandmother.

  “I’m not a whore, Carl. And your son, he’s not a bastard and he’s not stupid. You’re the one who’s stupid. And mean.” There, she’d said it, and her heart soared a little.

  The shaking in her hands went away after an hour or so, but it came back when she called her son that evening.

  “I miss you, Junior.”

  “I miss you, too, Ma.”

  “I should have helped you more when you were little,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let him do those things to you.” Mrs. Betcher wondered if her son still had marks to remind him of his father.

  “It’s okay, Ma. But I won’t come home until he’s dead.”

  “The nurses keep saying he won’t last much longer.”

  “Call me for the funeral, Ma, so I can come home and spit on his grave.”

  She felt a warmth in her chest as she hung up the phone, the warmth she’d always felt at hearing him criticize his father when she hadn’t been able to do it herself.

  Their lives had not been all bad, but Carl Jr. seemed not to remember his dad ever being funny or loving as he had sometimes been. Didn’t remember the pleasant dinners at the round kitchen table, or how fond his dad had been of him sometimes, when they’d played quietly together with a train set or with Legos. She didn’t blame Carl Jr. Nowadays the ugly things were what Mrs. Betcher remembered, too, and maybe that was why she didn’t regret hitting her husband.

  She microwaved a Salisbury steak from the freezer, forced herself to eat half of it, though it tasted like mud, and put the rest in the refrigerator in a little plastic container.

  She expected to feel bad for saying Carl was going to hell. She even sensed that her husband was waiting for an apology. But the most she could bring herself to do was try to warm his feet, which were cold because she had to turn down the furnace at night to save propane. She situated the electric space heater on a chair near the end of the hospital bed.

  In the morning, Carl Betcher said, “I’m hot.” His feet were uncovered, and he was rubbing them against each other. When she didn’t speak, he said, “Am I going to hell? My mama and the minister warned me. Woman? Who’s there?”

  She didn’t turn off the space heater right away, but stood a few yards away and watched his agitated rubbing. She felt invisible, like an old fairy-tale witch hidden inside a dark cloak. When she finally came close and felt the hot bottoms of his feet, he kicked at her. He hadn’t mentioned his mother in years, and he’d never mentioned a minister.

  “Where’s my nigger wife?” he asked, and still she said nothing.

  When a car pulled into the driveway, she finally turned the heater off. It was the big white lady nurse, and this time she had an assistant with her, a skinny child of a woman who nodded sympathetically at everything everybody said. Before leaving, the child-woman said in a squeaky voice, “You’re an incredible person, Mrs. Betcher, to care for your husband this way.”

  Though the girl sounded as phony as a greeting card, Mrs. Betcher let the words thrill her. Nobody had ever told her she was an incredible person. As a girl she’d tried to be a good person and a good Christian. After she got married, she’d tried to honor her vows to be a good wife and a hard worker in the business that sustained them, and she’d prayed for strength and wisdom, but she’d often felt slow and dumb, and she’d learned the best response to any of Carl’s fits of meanness had been to ride it out, to get through it in one piece and then hope it would be a while before the next one. She knew the importance of forgiveness, how it was as much for the giver as for the receiver, so even when he didn’t ask for forgiveness, she’d always said, “Carl, I forgive you.” That had made her feel better, and sometimes it had even silenced him. Mrs. Betcher had coped with life’s difficulties, had sometimes thought she was good enough, but she had never considered she might be incredible.

  That afternoon, she turned the space heater back on, put it a little closer to her husband’s bed, and uncovered his feet to give him another taste of fire. She returned to work in the shop with an alertness she hadn’t felt for a long time, maybe not since she’d swum in the gravel pit with her sister Joan as a kid, when she slipped into that clear, cool water on a burning-hot day. She opened the window curtains in the back to allow sunlight onto the sewing machines. Carl’s idea that opening the curtains would encourage break-ins never had made sense; more likely, when thieves saw how little of value there was inside, they wouldn’t bother.

  A Volvo station wagon pulled up in front of the shop door, and a slender man with pale skin and black hair got out. Mrs. Betcher greeted the new customer with a smile, as she had always done. She held open the door for the man and two teenage boys, the three of whom struggled to hold up a great swath of fabric.

  “This is a theater curtain,” said the man, who lugged one end of the thing onto the counter and explained he was from a community playhouse downtown. “It’s irreplaceable, but some actors were practicing with swords for a Shakespeare play and sliced it.” She saw the old thing had long been coming unstitched at the seams and that there were two gashes in the crimson fabric.

  “This isn’t the kind of thing we do here,” Mrs. Betcher said. She and Carl had always turned away such projects, which were guaranteed to require more hours of work than a customer would want to pay for.

  “You’re our only hope, Mrs. Betcher,” he said and grinned. All his body movements were fluid, and she wondered what kinds of things he did on the stage, what kinds of people he pretended to be. She stroked the velvet fabric on the counter, and she found she didn’t want to take her hand off it. She’d felt velvet before, but never anything like this, so heavy and plush. If she were ever onstage, she’d want to be behind such a curtain as this. Of course, her being on stage was a crazy thought.

  “If you can’t fix it, I don’t know what we’ll do.” The man grinned again, in a way that seemed at odds with his supposed helplessness.

  “Let me give it a try, then,” she said. She wanted to have this material in the shop. She didn’t even want to bargain for a reasonable price—bargaining would feel too much like
arguing. “It’s going to be a couple of weeks. My husband is sick, and the work has piled up.” She directed the three to carry the heap, which must’ve weighed a hundred pounds, onto a low table in the back of the big garage.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Betcher. If you can do this, you’ll be our savior. Our show opens in six weeks,” the man said before he left with the boys.

  Before they got in the station wagon, the man cuffed the head of one of the boys in a friendly way. Our savior, she thought. Incredible.

  “MY FEET ARE burning,” Betcher said at dinnertime. He sounded more delirious than before, but he drank an entire strawberry Ensure. She’d bought it because it was her own favorite flavor of ice cream, and she hadn’t had it for years.

  “Am I walking the devil’s path into hell fires?”

  “Take some water, Carl,” she said. The heater on low wasn’t going to hurt him.

  “Whore of Babylon,” he said.

  She gave him more water right before she went to bed. Then she stood back and studied her husband’s body, stretched out, looking smaller than before, almost harmless.

  She turned the heater to high.

  “I’m walking in Satan’s fires,” he said the next day at noon, between gulps of his drink. “Listen to me, whore!”

  “Am I a whore?” she asked. She pulled the straw away and let him suck at the air.

  “God shall permit Satan to fall upon the wicked and seize them as his own,” he said in a slow, thin voice. “A whore is a deep ditch.”

  “I want you to take it back once and for all, for all the times you’ve called me that.” She had never before argued with the word, figuring that any arguing would just draw out the ugliness.

  “God loves me,” he said, “despite my multitude of sins.”